Vermont law: Oil companies liable for climate change; The plan to kill democracy

The AP reports:

Vermont becomes 1st state to enact law requiring oil companies 

to pay for damage from climate change

Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is very concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on “Big Oil” alone in what will likely be a grueling legal fight. But he acknowledged that he understands something has to be done to address the toll of climate change.

“I understand the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways,” Scott, a moderate Republican in the largely blue state of Vermont, wrote in a letter to lawmakers.

“For too long, giant fossil fuel companies have knowingly lit the match of climate disruption without being required to do a thing to put out the fire,” Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said in a statement. “Finally, maybe for the first time anywhere, Vermont is going to hold the companies most responsible for climate-driven floods, fires and heat waves financially accountable for a fair share of the damages they’ve caused.”

Maryland, Massachusetts and New York are considering similar measures.

The American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, has said it’s extremely concerned the legislation “retroactively imposes costs and liability on prior activities that were legal, violates equal protection and due process rights by holding companies responsible for the actions of society at large; and is preempted by federal law.” 

It is about time someone started getting serious about who is going to pay for the human and environmental costs of oil companies taking profits for decades without any social conscience or accountability. No doubt the oil cos. will immediately haul this law into court and attack it until it is either dead and gone, or it is vindicated. Dead and gone is probably the most likely outcome. But, hope still springs eternal.

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John Yoo -- he wants to unleash the dogs of

legal war against Democrats

(Yay! Bring on the lawyers!!)

NY Mag writes about the GOP's plan for any criminal lawsuit against DJT: 

Republicans have long been predicting that criminal charges against Donald Trump would lead to Republicans ginning up charges against Democrats out of pure revenge. The prediction, of course, was designed to legitimate it. And now, inevitably, members of the Republican legal Establishment have moved from predicting this turn of events to advocating for it.

John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer (who himself escaped prosecution for his role in constructing legal justifications to torture detainees, many of whom turned out to be held wrongfully in the first place), has an essay in National Review arguing for revenge prosecutions. The imprimatur of Yoo, a Berkeley law professor and fellow at two of the conservative movement’s least-insane think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution), underscores the progression of “lock her up” from wild seriously-not-literally Trump-campaign demagoguery in 2016 to party doctrine in 2024.

“Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you,” urges Yoo. “In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents.”   

The deepest conceptual flaw in Yoo’s demands for legal revenge is his belief that Trump is an innocent victim. “Democrats have crossed a constitutional Rubicon,” he argues. Before now, he claims, opportunities to prosecute presidents abounded but were never taken, out of principle:

Gerald Ford, in a great act of statesmanship, pardoned Richard Nixon even though it doomed his chances in the close 1976 election. Bush did not prosecute Bill Clinton for lying to the Whitewater special counsel, even though Clinton’s Justice Department had conceded that he would become legally liable once he left office. Obama did not attempt to relitigate the difficult policy decisions made during the War on Terror by prosecuting Bush and his aides (of which I was one). Trump did not order the investigation of Hillary Clinton, even though her intentional, illegal diversion of thousands of classified emails to her home computer network was a central theme during his campaign. Nor had local or state prosecutors dared to interfere with the workings of the presidency before.

It is pretty clear where this unwarranted partisan malice is going. Just like Hitler could not be appeased, it is clear that DJT and the authoritarian GOP cannot be appeased. Sometimes history rhymes. It is rhyming right now. 

A silver lining?

But maybe there is a silver lining here. If both main political parties shift to focus on finding lawbreaking in each other, maybe the rule of law will benefit. Maybe it would be a little like legalizing same-sex marriage -- legalization strengthened the institution of marriage. It seems to me that the law is too often not vindicated, especially against elite white collar criminals like DJT. Why not make more use of existing laws?

For example, a gun law that Hunter Biden broke is being (or has been) used to prosecute him, but prosecutions of that gun law are rare. If memory serves, less than ~0.2% (about 1 in 500) of violations of that gun law are prosecuted. Although Hunter's gun law infraction was minor, lasting for just 11 days, Republicans had to find some way to prosecute him for something. That is what they could find, apparently also along with some tax cheating. NBC News reported last year about the gun and tax laws that Hunter broke:

The federal gun charge, which makes it unlawful for a drug addict to possess a weapon, is a rarely used statute that is facing legal challenges and has recently been used as a catch-all charge against white supremacists.

Like the gun charge, the tax charges are rarely brought against first-time offenders and even more rarely result in jail time, Andrew Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel and NBC News contributor, tweeted Tuesday. “This is if anything harsh, not lenient,” he wrote.  

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor and an NBC News legal analyst, said on MSNBC on Tuesday that the deal Hunter Biden reached was a decent outcome for the president's son, but not the “sweetheart deal” that Trump and his allies have made it out to be.

If a person is serious about vindicating the rule of law, prosecution for violation of unenforced gun and tax laws should be the norm, not a rare exception. What some pro-Trump commentators and political blowhards, e.g., the liar-hypocrite Mitch McConnell, are saying about the felony convictions of DJT in NY state court is that the misdemeanor book-keeping errors that DJT knowingly committed were minor and should never have been prosecuted in the first place. 

Just because a crime is minor, does that morally justify not prosecuting it? In my moral mindset, two wrongs = two wrongs, not a right. Committing the crime is one wrong, not prosecuting it is another. 

As far as I am concerned, I hope that the elite Dems and Repubs bring a tidal wave of prosecutions against each other, including prosecutions by one side for all unfounded prosecutions by the opposing side. It is fair, rational and pro-democracy to actually seriously believe in the rule of law, especially for rich and/or powerful elites. They are the ones who can afford to endlessly game the system to escape justice, just like DJT had successfully done for decades and is still doing in the remaining three criminal lawsuits against him.

Qs: Why are the tax and gun charges are rarely brought against first-time offenders and even more rarely result in jail time? What is the point of having laws if they are rarely enforced, e.g., do they give prosecutors leverage against defendants? Or is Germaine, once again, off his rocker, out to lunch, over the top or otherwise an over-agitated, handsome, young nincompoop?