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Paxton Sends Letter to U.S. Senate Demanding Rejection of a Bill that Would
Undermine States’ Authority and American Energy
AUSTIN – Attorney General Paxton has joined a Louisiana-led coalition in strongly opposing the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022 and sending a letter to Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Mitch McConnell expressing the reasons for such opposition.
The Act would allow the Biden Administration, largely through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to run roughshod over states’ rights by advancing a radically impractical energy agenda, all while forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. This would be done in three fundamental and extremely dangerous ways.
First, it would grant unprecedented authority to both private companies and FERC to use eminent domain to take over large swaths of state and private land to promote energy projects hand-chosen by the Biden Administration. Second, it would likely give FERC the ability to command private companies to construct new and extremely expensive transmission facilities wherever and whenever FERC determines, so long as the Biden Administration deems that it’s in the “national interest.” Finally, it would grant FERC the authority to inflict new costs on taxpayers to pay for expensive transmission facilities that advance the Biden Administration’s radical climate agenda, even if the taxpayer is across the country and would have no access to whatever limited energy may be created.
Congress is rushing forward with this bill without giving the American people or their elected officials the proper time needed to fully consider such radical changes. It is clear that a complete rejection of this bill is necessary to promote states’ rights and American energy.
“If enacted, these ill-advised policies will in effect create substantially the same policies as the illegal and long-rejected Clean Power Plan,” the letter reads. “Certain states and companies favored by the current Administration and the current FERC majority will be empowered to distort other states’ resource and energy policy, take state and private land to construct infrastructure in furtherance of these schemes, and force the citizens who did not adopt these policies in their states to foot the bill for it all.”
To read the full letter, click here.
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