It is a relatively minor part of the overall story. But one lingering question is just how the police got to the home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as quickly as they did. Was it a call to 911 or a triggered house alarm? According to this article from The San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Pelosi called 911 and then left the call open, allowing the dispatcher to hear at least part of what was transpiring in the home after David DePape had broken in.
State Courts Face Chaotic Onslaught Of Lawsuits As Election Day Looms
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
The run-up to Election Day is often a contentious time.
In recent years, it has also become a litigious time — parties increasingly turn to courts to resolve disputes about the rules for voting.
This year, our research shows a significant uptick of those lawsuits occurring in the state court system and challenging every step of the election process — from whether candidates or ballot initiatives qualify to appear on the ballot, to what address information must be completed in order to accept mailed ballots. It also extends to specific procedures for county clerks or poll watchers as voting occurs.
This surge in state litigation yields a mixed picture. As scholars of state courts and constitutions, we have studied the crucial role of state courts in safeguarding elections and democracy.
State courts have made important rulings — for example, protecting voting and rejecting extreme partisan gerrymandering — rooted in state constitutions’ distinctive democracy provisions.
But the current volume of state election litigation also has the potential to derail the safeguards that state courts can provide. When every aspect of an election becomes a lawsuit, negative effects may follow — including destabilizing elections, overwhelming already strained courts and imposing significant costs on states.
The numbers
In 2020, election litigation reached a new record high, with hundreds of lawsuits filed around the presidential election.
But experts like law professor Rick Hasen observed that it was too soon to know if the 2020 spike in lawsuits was a trend or an aberration. One potential explanation was that the pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s polarizing candidacy fueled the 2020 spike and that lawsuits would decrease in future years.
Two years later, a different picture is emerging.
The total volume of preelection litigation has dropped somewhat — a smaller drop than one might expect in a nonpandemic, nonpresidential election. Litigation in federal court has dropped precipitously, falling to less than half of its 2020 presence, our research shows.
But in state courts, rather than decreasing, preelection lawsuits have increased. Some of the rise is due to expected conflict surrounding the post-2020 redistricting process. Of greatest interest, we see a continuation or increase in conflict over “electoral mechanics” — lawsuits challenging the who, what, where and how of voting, even when there is no novel virus throwing an unforeseen wrench in those mechanics.
We emphasize that these numbers are provisional as of mid-October, and they are only estimates — and likely undercounts. State courts are notoriously difficult to research; there is no central clearinghouse of state lawsuits or decisions. Our tallies are based on searches in the legal database LexisNexis. Our full methodology and tallies are posted on our website.
State courts and their role in democracy
Rising interest in state courts does have potential upsides. State courts serve as a crucial line of defense for free and fair elections.
As one of us has explained elsewhere in work with legal scholar Jessica Bulman-Pozen, all 50 state constitutions include explicit pro-democracy provisions — a “democracy principle,” as a shorthand — including many clauses with no express federal counterpart.
Those resources make state courts more promising venues for protecting democracy than the U.S. Supreme Court has been of late. The court’s recent decisions have limited the avenues for protecting democracy, including by refusing to hear partisan gerrymandering claims and by limiting the reach of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
In contrast, recent state court decisions across the country have applied the democracy principle.
For example, state courts have upheld laws permitting voting by mail, imposed new remedies against extreme partisan gerrymandering and preserved the people’s ability to amend their state constitution.
A closer look at this year’s cases—so far
Yet these significant pro-democracy decisions are only part of the bigger litigation picture, the most salient feature of which is its sheer volume.
The largest number of lawsuits involve whether a candidate can properly appear on the ballot. Such “ballot access” lawsuits are long-standing and typically involve candidates sparring over whether they or an opponent have satisfied requirements for petition signatures, residency or other paperwork requirements.
The next-largest categories, and we think the most concerning, encompass election administration and absentee voting — often challenging mechanical, even picayune matters.
In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example, multiple suits contest whether mailed ballots can be counted if they omit part of the voter’s address or the date, as well as the permissibility of “ballot curing” — allowing clerks to contact voters to correct technical errors on their mailed ballot.
In Arizona, the Republican National Committee and state affiliate have filed two lawsuits against Maricopa County — and its Republican leadership — arguing that the county has failed to explain why it did not hire an equal number of Democratic and Republican election workers.
In Michigan, two cases filed by Republicans challenge rules governing poll watchers, including their ability to use cellphones. In Ohio, a secretary of state candidate argues election observers should be given access to the software and source code for voting machines.
Finally, another major slice of cases involves ballot initiatives, a means of direct lawmaking by voters. Some of these, like a prominent unsuccessful challenge to the formatting of Michigan’s abortion initiative, attempt to keep a measure off the ballot. Others debate burdens on the ballot initiative process.
Sharp partisan divides partly drive the rise in litigation and yield some rough patterns. As legal scholar Derek Muller has noted, the overall rise in election litigation “is emphatically bipartisan.” Both parties have been active in redistricting and ballot access cases.
But when it comes to the administration of elections, the parties have tended to press different claims. Democrats and their allies have tended to challenge new voting restrictions. A network of litigants on the right has focused more on whether certain votes can be counted. Steve Bannon has vowed to “adjudicate every battle” in an effort to “take over the election apparatus.”
Pitfalls of so many lawsuits
This hyperlitigation has downsides.
First, an election litigation deluge may undermine voter confidence in the electoral system. Litigation over every detail of the election process lays the groundwork for false narratives or subsequent challenges to the validity of an election.
And while courts that serve as a backstop on key elections questions may enhance voters’ trust in elections, some scholars fear that a barrage of lawsuits alleging impropriety in elections may undermine that trust. Moreover, by inserting courts into election administration, hyperlitigation can dovetail with efforts to sow doubt in the courts’ legitimacy.
These challenges to the logistical aspects of elections align with a broader strategy to subvert the electoral system by overwhelming it — including through “sham audits,” mass challenges to voter eligibility and frivolous election-related open records requests.
The chaos may be the point.
The flood of election litigation also results in hefty financial costs to state governments. Pennsylvania spent over $3.3 million in 2020, a presidential election year, litigating election-related cases. It expects to spend at least as much or more this year.
Similarly, Montana’s secretary of state has spent more than 10 times its budget on election litigation in 2022.
Finally, hyperlitigation burdens the state court system, which hears over 90% of all cases filed each year and is already straining from pandemic-induced backlogs. Fulton County, Georgia, for example, has accumulated approximately 200,000 cases during the pandemic, and states including North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are also navigating substantial backlogs. High volumes of election litigation impede courts already overstretched in performing their critical public functions.
Although scholars have proposed ways to reduce election litigation, the trend is likely to persist, at least in the short term. State courts do have a necessary role to play in safeguarding democracy. But at current levels, election litigation presents serious problems as well as solutions.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Rubio Claims Supporter Rejected Extremism As Supporter Rallies with Proud Boys
There’s more with the Rubio canvasser attack story.
Sunday night two men assaulted Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon. Rubio went on Twitter the next day claiming it was a politically motivated attack. But Monzon did not say anything like that in the police report of the incident and only began making the claim after Rubio did. Attention has also focused on the fact that Monzon has a long history with racist and antisemitic extremist groups, including being one of the alt-righters at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally in 2017.
Today Rubio angrily attacked the press for “smearing” Monzon’s past, claiming that Monzon had “rejected” his past extremism. But today he was the guest of honor at a Proud Boys rally organized to support him.
“I’m going to clear my name,” Monzon told The Miami Herald in a brief impromptu interview at the rally.
Sacheen Littlefeather And Ethnic Fraud: Why The Truth Is Crucial, Even If It Means Losing An American Indian Hero
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
When Sacheen Littlefeather died on Oct. 2, 2022, obituaries reflecting on the actress and activist’s life held her up as a Native American trailblazer.
Continue reading “Sacheen Littlefeather And Ethnic Fraud: Why The Truth Is Crucial, Even If It Means Losing An American Indian Hero”Big Oil Companies Are Selling Their Wells. Some Worry Taxpayers Will Pay to Clean Them Up.
This article first appeared at ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times.
The price of oil produced in California this year reached its highest level in a decade. President Joe Biden is releasing millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep prices in check. And fossil fuel companies’ earnings are so high that Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a windfall tax on their profits.
It might seem like a lucrative time to drill for oil in the Golden State. Yet, some of the world’s largest oil companies, several of which have done business in the state for more than a century, are selling assets and beginning to pull out of California.
Even with strong cash flow in the short term, producers have more to gain from offloading wells and the associated liability — chiefly expensive environmental cleanup — than from pumping more oil and gas, experts say.
“This is the kind of deal you see when an industry is in its twilight,” said Andrew Logan, senior director for oil and gas at Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in companies and markets.
Some industry experts, lawmakers and environmentalists are concerned about the recent deals, noting that the sales shift environmental liability from corporate powerhouses to less-capitalized firms, increasing the risk that aging wells will be left orphaned, unplugged and leaking oil, brine and climate-warming methane. They see a threat that the state’s oil industry could repeat a pattern seen in other extractive industries like coal mining and lead to taxpayers bearing cleanup costs.
California Assemblymember Steve Bennett, a Democrat who has long worked on oil policy, has seen oil companies in his Ventura district walk away from environmental liability. “It gets passed on to a smaller company and to a smaller company until someone declares bankruptcy and the public is stuck with the cleanup bill,” he said.
IKAV Enters the Fray
Supermajors Shell and ExxonMobil recently agreed to sell more than 23,000 wells in California, which they owned through a joint venture called Aera Energy, to German asset management group IKAV for an estimated $4 billion. Aera accounts for about a quarter of California’s oil and gas production, largely from pumping in Kern and Ventura counties.
Shell and ExxonMobil say the deal will strengthen their businesses.
But Greg Rogers, an attorney and accountant who researches the oil and gas industry, said the deal allows the sellers to shed decommissioning costs. “You got bad assets with big liabilities, and you can get rid of both at the same time. That’s a win for Exxon and Shell,” he said.
IKAV will inherit a portfolio littered with wells past their prime. Nearly 9,000 Aera wells were idle as of early October, meaning about 38% of the company’s unplugged inventory isn’t producing oil or gas, according to state data.
“With oil being over $100 a barrel, any well that would’ve come back has likely come back,” Logan said, adding that long-idled wells are simply “orphan wells in waiting.”
In an email, Aera spokesperson Kimberly Ellis-Thompson said the company is capable of managing its large portfolio of idle wells. “Since 2019, when new idle well management program regulations were published, we have met or exceeded the requirements for retiring idle wells,” she said. The company has decommissioned and plugged nearly 1,000 wells on average every year since then, she said.
IKAV, Aera’s soon-to-be new owner, manages about $2.5 billion in energy-focused assets. News releases on the Aera sale quoted Constantin von Wasserschleben, IKAV’s chairman, saying, “We advocate a co-existence between renewable and conventional energy for decades to come.”
As the world increasingly shifts to cheaper renewable energy to address climate change, IKAV has been snapping up oil and gas wells from supermajors exiting the market. The firm, which once focused exclusively on renewable energy, began expanding into oil and gas in 2020 when it purchased BP’s gas assets in the San Juan Basin, spanning New Mexico and Colorado. The deal was part of BP’s push to divest $10 billion in assets, including aging American gas fields.
BP declined to comment.
If it’s not profitable to return wells to production, they need to be plugged. But if a company doesn’t plug its wells before walking away, wells are orphaned and the cleanup costs ultimately fall to taxpayers and current operators through fees.
This has happened with thousands of wells in California and hundreds of thousands, or more, across the country.
For example, the Greka group of companies left more than 750 wells for California to plug when its wealthy owner began pushing his businesses into bankruptcy in 2016 and retired to his Santa Maria winery. And a subsidiary of one of the country’s largest mining companies, Freeport-McMoRan, left dozens of likely orphaned wells, state records show, even though the company brought in nearly $23 billion in revenue last year.
Greka’s CEO didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Freeport spokesperson said the company is working with the state to verify details about its orphaned wells.
To minimize the government’s exposure if wells are orphaned, producers must put up a bond, typically held as cash or a surety policy. The bonds act like a security deposit: The company gets its bond back if it cleans up its mess, but the government keeps the money if the company orphans its wells.
Newsom has called for an end to all oil extraction in the state by 2045, but his administration has yet to use another tool to hold producers responsible for cleanup.
California has the authority to ask for an additional $30 million in financial security from a single operator but only requires Aera to hold a $3 million bond. As a result, Aera’s bonds cover less than half a percent of the $1.1 billion that ProPublica estimates it would cost the state to plug the wells based on the average cost to California for past well plugging. (That estimate does not include the additional cost of full surface remediation.)
California Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk said in a statement that his agency reviews bonds for all oil companies in the state but did not say whether the amount of Aera’s financial security would be increased through the sale.
Aera, Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to a question about the gap between their bonds and the estimated cost to plug their wells. IKAV did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, ExxonMobil spokesperson Meghan Macdonald said that “when we make divestments, we always try to work with partners like Aera and IKAV who are also committed to a lower-emissions future.”
Costs vary widely, but states have paid $100,000 or more to plug wells — and the same to clean up surface pollution — meaning there’s a significant gap between what’s needed and what California has available in bonds.
“If they don’t have the financial resources when it comes time to plug those wells, there’s a possibility that the public will be left holding the bag and paying those costs even though it’s the company that made the profit from selling the oil,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Who Will Be Liable?
More than 240,000 wells have pierced the state since the late 1800s, when Southern California’s first producing well spouted oil near where Dodger Stadium now stands. Of those, more than 5,300 are “orphan, deserted, and potentially deserted wells,” according to data the California Geologic Energy Management Division published in September.
Many on that list belong to individuals who died long ago or companies that dissolved in the shuffling of corporate paperwork. However, some responsible parties are still around but no longer legally liable after offloading their wells through sales and bankruptcies.
So who will be responsible for cleanup?
California is unique because state law allows regulators to call on former operators such as Shell and ExxonMobil to help pay for plugging onshore oil wells if they are later orphaned, even by a different owner. But companies have escaped responsibility under this stronger legal standard by exploiting loopholes such as a porous bankruptcy code.
Some experts question whether Shell and ExxonMobil would be required to pay if the wells they are selling to IKAV are ultimately orphaned, saying their ownership of the wells through a separate company, Aera, might shield them from liability.
“Exxon and Shell do not directly operate those wells. There’s corporate structuring going on in between,” Rogers said. And IKAV now adds another layer of corporate paperwork, holding the wells it acquired in New Mexico, Colorado and California through companies that were registered in Delaware shortly before the sales.
Alongside Aera, two other companies — California Resources Corp. and Chevron — account for the vast majority of California’s oil and gas production, and they too are shrinking their positions in the state. California Resources, which has been in and out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in recent years, sold most of its Ventura Basin operations in November 2021. Chevron recently sold its California headquarters and plans to consolidate some of its unused Bakersfield office space as it shifts employees to Texas. Reuters reported in early October that Berry Corp., another large oil company that for many years has operated in California and Utah, was considering selling.
Berry did not respond to a request for comment.
Shell acknowledged its California wells were overvalued, suggesting the wells are even nearer to the end of their economic life than previously predicted. The company is wiping as much as $400 million off its books through the sale via an impairment charge.
Shell has been shedding assets in part to hand off associated greenhouse gas emissions. A 2021 Dutch court ruling ordered it to significantly reduce emissions, although the company has appealed the ruling. Zoe Yujnovich, the company’s upstream director, said in a news release about the sale of Aera that Shell will instead be “focusing on positions with high growth potential.”
For its part, ExxonMobil plans to focus on oil and natural gas that costs less to extract, Liam Mallon, president of ExxonMobil Upstream Co., said in a news release announcing the sale to IKAV.
Large public companies are handing off oil and gas assets around the country. Between 2017 and 2021, more than a quarter of oil and gas mergers and acquisitions took public companies private, with private equity often involved, according to a study conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. The report voiced concern that private companies are less transparent and have less incentive to protect the environment.
California Is Just the Beginning
With more than 2 million unplugged oil wells believed to be scattered across the U.S., California is the tip of the iceberg.
A massive boom in American oil and gas production over the past 15 years spurred by technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked previously inaccessible geologic formations. But the shale revolution and current market highs buoyed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine won’t last forever.
Longtime petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis laid out the reality at a recent conference. This shale revolution revitalized only some oil fields, and more than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells are either idle or minimally producing and unlikely to make a major comeback, according to his research.
“The bulk of the wells are producing from plays where there is no hope of another deus ex machina,” Purvis said, referencing nearly depleted oil fields.
The oil industry also faces an impending decline in demand from the shift to renewable energy and the trend toward banning the sale of new internal-combustion engine cars, as well as plans to phase out drilling in metro areas.
“The overall industry is being assaulted right now through policy changes at the state and federal level. That’s the story writ large,” Rogers said. “The industry is dying.”
Pelosi Attack Update
As we go into the weekend, a few updates on the overnight attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco.
Continue reading “Pelosi Attack Update”Federal Judge Allows Conservative Group To Continue Surveilling Drop Boxes In Arizona
U.S. District Court Judge Michael Liburdi refused to issue a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction against Clean Elections USA, the right-wing organization that has organized an effort to monitor ballot drop boxes across Arizona, inspired by the conspiracy theory film 2000 mules. The group is behind various complaints of voter intimidation in Arizona this past week.
Continue reading “Federal Judge Allows Conservative Group To Continue Surveilling Drop Boxes In Arizona”Youngkin Turns Pelosi Attack Into Political Punchline At Campaign Stop
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) appeared to make light of the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D) husband at a Friday campaign stop.
Continue reading “Youngkin Turns Pelosi Attack Into Political Punchline At Campaign Stop”Pelosi Targeted
Just to bring us all up to speed, rapidly emerging details appear to show that the overnight attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was politically motivated and targeted Speaker Pelosi herself, who was not at home at the time of the attack. According to reporters briefed on the investigation, the hammer-wielding intruder shouted “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”
We will take this story one step at a time and update you as we learn more. But the general outlines of what did happen and could have happened look more and more clear.
Continue reading “Pelosi Targeted”Eastman Begs Judge To Reconsider Crime-Fraud Ruling
John Eastman asked a federal judge on Thursday to please take back his finding that the Trump lawyer likely misled a federal judge during the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Continue reading “Eastman Begs Judge To Reconsider Crime-Fraud Ruling”