U.S. taxpayers may have to end up paying $15 billion to the Canadian company behind the Keystone XL Pipeline. The company is seeking damages after Democrat President Joe Biden canceled the pipeline to pursue his far-left energy agenda.
TC Energy announced last month that they were scrapping the project because revoked the permit needed to complete the pipeline. Fox Business noted that a study from the State Department found that the pipeline would have created 26,100 indirect and direct jobs.
TC Energy announced last week that it had “filed a Notice of Intent to initiate a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement to recover economic damages resulting from the revocation of the Keystone XL Project’s Presidential Permit,” the company said in a statement. “TC Energy will be seeking to recover more than US$15 billion in damages that it has suffered as a result of the U.S. Government’s breach of its NAFTA obligations.”
The Notice of Intent was filed with the U.S. Department of State.
In May, nearly two dozen state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration for canceling the pipeline, saying that he exceeded his presidential authority.
The attorneys general argue that Biden exceeded his authority because “of a provision Congress tucked into tax legislation in 2011 that required then-President Barack Obama to either approve the pipeline within 60 days or issue a determination that it wasn’t in the national interest,” NBC News reported. “Obama then rejected TransCanada’s (now TC Energy Corp) application weeks later, saying Congress gave him insufficient time, but allowed the company to re-apply, which deferred the decision until after his re-election. Obama later rejected the application, President Donald Trump approved it, and Biden revoked the approval.”
The states that are suing Biden include Texas, Montana, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The lawsuit states in part:
Revocation of the Keystone XL pipeline permit is a regulation of interstate and international commerce, which can only be accomplished as any other statute can: through the process of bicameralism and presentment. The President lacks the power to enact his “ambitious plan” to reshape the economy in defiance of Congress’s unwillingness to do so. To the extent that Congress had delegated such authority, it would violate the non-delegation doctrine. But Congress has not delegated such authority: It set specific rules regarding what actions the President can take about Keystone XL and when. The President, together with various senior executive officials, violated those rules. The action should be set aside as inconsistent with the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. §§ 500, et seq.
Biden has even faced criticism from his own party for his far-left energy agenda as some Democrats have noted that pipelines are the safest way to transport oil while others have noted that Biden’s decision will their hurt their state.
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Source: Dailywire
