Youts Sue Federal Government Over Hotcoldwetdry

Obviously, it’s all about Trump in this astroturfed suit, which, sad to say, I missed earlier in the year

The Youth Activists Suing Trump Are Fighting Climate Change and Authoritarianism

Does the United States Constitution guard against executive abuses of power that deprive children and youth of their fundamental rights to life and liberty?

That was the fundamental question Julia Olson, an attorney and the founder of Our Children’s Trust, posed to Judge Dana Christensen this week during a two-day hearing in a federal courthouse in Missoula, Montana.

The case, Lighthiser v. Trump, began in May when 22 young climate activists, aged 7 to 25, filed a lawsuit in the District of Montana asking the court to declare three Trump administration executive orders unconstitutional and prevent their implementation. The plaintiffs say the orders show the Trump administration’s intention to increase fossil fuel development, block renewable energy, and terminate congressionally mandated climate change science and research—all “under the false claim of an energy emergency, while the true emergency is that our fossil fuel-based energy system is polluting the air, water, lands, and climate on which Plaintiffs’ lives, liberties, and personal security depend.”

In some ways, Lighthiser v. Trump is the logical next step for OCT and the U.S. climate litigation movement, which aims to compel the government to take meaningful action to address the climate crisis—or prohibit it from making the crisis worse—through the judiciary. The lawsuit follows two of OCT’s recent wins, Held v. Montana and Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation, and “further builds American constitutional jurisprudence on fossil fuel activities infringing the fundamental rights of youth,” according to the nonprofit law firm.

Sadly, the government lawyers never asked “have you youts given up your own use of fossil fuels and made your lives carbon neutral?” But, in fact, the Chief Executive does have the authority to put out those EOs, in the same way Biden apparently had authority to go the other way.

In other ways, Lighthiser is unlike anything that has come before. For one, this week’s hearing marked the first time a U.S. federal court heard live testimony in a constitutional climate change case. And, as Mat dos Santos, one of the OCT attorneys representing the plaintiffs, told me, “Lighthiser goes beyond the traditional climate cases that Our Children’s Trust is famous for, because it’s really a case about our democracy and whether this president has the power to act on his own initiative without any regard for how that power was supposed to be divided up amongst the other branches of government.”

Yeah, and it is all about force every American to comply with the insane, doomsday beliefs of the cult, while very few actually practice what they preach. They couldn’t really convince people to act in practice via 35 years of scaremongering. They couldn’t get as much legislation passed as they wanted. So, now they sue. If this makes it to the Supreme Court the cult will lose.