One Arizona lawmaker is making a push for greater state sovereignty.
Last week, State Representative Lisa Fink, a Republican, wrote an op-ed, entitled, “Make Arizona Sovereign Again.” In this piece, the first-term legislator makes the case for three of her bills that “push back against federal overreach and empower our citizens to take back control of their lives by restoring transparency in our elections, unleashing economic prosperity with our natural resources, and safeguarding the health and safety of Arizonans, putting the people and economy of our state first.”
The first bill Fink highlights is HB 2059, which would “ensure Arizona and employees of its state agencies are no longer forced to uphold various federal regulations on critical natural resource industries, like mining, coal, oil, and gas, that violate the clear boundaries of the U.S. Constitution. Representative Fink states that Arizona “must have the freedom to prioritize its own economic prosperity and environmental stewardship without being bound by harmful federal mandates.”
The second bill the state lawmaker presents is HB 2060, which would “strictly adher[e] to established laws on voter registration, citizenship, residency, and proof of identification. Fink opined that “securing our polls, free from outside interference, is of the utmost importance to preserving trust in our processes.”
The final bill that Representative Fink addressed was HB 2056, which would “take a proactive stance against federal efforts to alter the environment, protecting our state’s autonomy.” The Republican legislator states that she introduced this legislation because of the “growing issue of environmental manipulation, specifically addressing concerns over weather modification techniques like geoengineering and solar radiation management perpetrated by the federal government and multinational organizations. Fink added that “Arizona’s environment and natural resources belong to the people of this state – not federal agencies and certainly not the global elite.”
As she ended her piece, Representative Fink wrote, “The message is clear: Arizona will not tolerate unconstitutional federal overreach. From energy independence and mineral dominance to election integrity to defending our environment, this series of bills reasserts Arizona’s Tenth Amendment rights over the federal government and puts Arizona first. This is about reclaiming the freedom that is rightfully ours.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
President-elect Donald Trump has a big job ahead of him in restoring common sense and sanity to federal energy policy when he takes office on January 20. The last four years in this realm can more accurately be characterized as a series of ill-considered, irrational scams than as any sort of coherent, productive set of policies. It has been four years of bad policies — largely based on crass crony capitalism principles — that has done severe damage to America’s level of energy security.
There is no doubt that cleaning up this mess left behind by President Joe Biden and his appointees will take the full four years of Trump’s second term. But the new president will be able to take some fast actions to jump-start the process as part of his first 100 days agenda.
With respect, here is a list of 10 quick common-sense actions Trump can take to begin to restore America’s energy security:
1 — Rescind Biden’s ridiculous permitting “pause” on LNG export infrastructure. Of all the Biden energy policy scams, this was perhaps the most heinous and unjustified of all. Terminate it immediately and get this American growth industry back on track.
2 — Terminate U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Agreement and in any future annual COP conferences sponsored by the United Nations. Halt the spending of federal dollars related to any and all goals and commitments related to either of these wasteful processes.
3 — Terminate the office of Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy, aka “the Climate Envoy,” currently occupied by John Podesta and eliminate its budget.
4 — Turnabout being fair play, Trump should invoke a “pause” of his own related to permits and subsidies going to Biden’s pet offshore wind boondoggle. The pause would be justified by the need to conduct a truly thorough study on the potential impacts of those massive developments on marine mammals, seabirds, and the commercial fishing industry. Invoke the “precautionary principle” that has been ignored by Biden regulators related to these costly and possibly deadly projects.
5 — Order the Interior Department to immediately and aggressively restart the moribund oil-and-gas leasing program on federal lands and waters. Direct the Interior Department Inspector General to investigate the Biden-era manipulations of these programs for potential criminal violations.
6 — Form an interagency task force to recommend ways the executive branch of government can act to streamline permitting processes for energy projects that do not require congressional action. Congress has proven several times now that it is incapable of passing legislation in this arena.
7 — Place an immediate hold on all green energy subsidies pending a full compliance review. This should include any and all subsidy programs that were part of the IRA or the 2021 Infrastructure law. This review should also include suggested reforms to qualification requirements for these subsidy programs in light of the high percentage of bankruptcy filings by unsustainable companies that have benefited from these subsidies.
8 — In light of the Supreme Court’s recent recission of the Chevron Deference, order the Environmental Protection Agency to review the rationale for regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide, aka “plant food,” as a pollutant under the provisions of the Clean Air Act.
9 — Order an interagency review of the U.S. power grid and transmission infrastructure as they relate to national security concerns. Include a special focus on the current, growing trend of major tech firms locking up power generation assets for their own specific needs (AI, data centers, etc.) which might deny generation capacity that would otherwise be dedicated to the public grid.
10 — In light of recent reports of Biden regulators steering billions of dollars of IRA and other green energy funds to NGOs to provide funding for anti-fossil fuel propaganda, lawfare, and other abuses of the legal system, order an immediate freeze on all such spending pending a formal review.
In reality, this list could consist of hundreds of high priority items for the new administration to undertake. Such is the level of damage that has been wrought on American energy security by the outgoing administration.
But executing these ten items in the early days of his second term would represent a good start and place the country on a path to recovery. We wish Trump and his appointees the best of luck in restoring U.S. energy security.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
When Joe Biden assumed the presidency one year ago, America had finally achieved energy independence. Iran was in chaos, fearing that its nuclear ambitions had been dashed. A year later, it’s America’s interests that have been dashed.
Biden campaigned on a pledge to rejoin the Iran nuclear accord and work on its weaknesses later. He seemed to believe that reinstituting deference and tacit assurances of eventual nuclear power status to Shiite Muslims would win concessions from the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It didn’t work out.
Monitoring for compliance allowed under the treaty was notably lax. Still, at the end of 2020, the United Nations watchdog agency was investigating Iran for cheating on nuclear materials and production with a pending referral to the UN Security Council. Economic sanctions under the treaty had produced an economic crisis with mass protests throughout the country. Iran was reeling.
Biden came to the rescue. Instead of cracking down on Iran’s noncompliance with the treaty, he pressured America’s allies to pull back a censure resolution, sending a clear message to Iran that the US no longer minded that they were hiding nuclear sites and materials, in violation of the treaty and global nonproliferation agreements.
Iran immediately began investigating the new limits of America’s tolerance. The regime refused UN access to nuclear sites and increased uranium enrichment to 60%, far beyond the level required for peaceful nuclear power production.
Meanwhile, Iranians stepped up their violence in the region, including drone and rocket attacks on American forces. Biden not only refused to respond militarily to the terrorist attacks, but he ended support for a Saudi-led campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis and removed America’s defense missiles from Saudi Arabia.
As Iran accelerated its nuclear program and regional military aggression, Biden inexplicably helped avoid a financial crisis too. He suspended sanctions, giving Iran accessibility to frozen funds and to Chinese oil imports.
Iran is up and running. We better hope that the mullah are just kidding with their “Death to America” chants.
Biden’s response to America’s energy needs has been similarly woke and pathetic. At the conclusion of the Trump presidency, America had achieved energy independence for the first time in 50 years.
Trump encouraged the shale oil and gas revolution. He lifted restrictions on drilling, especially in remote areas. He permitted vitally needed pipelines. He blocked extreme environmental regulations that intentionally reduced our gas and oil supplies. As a result, America had surplus fuel supplies and no longer had to import oil from Arabs, Russians, Iranians, or Mexicans.
Biden promptly, inexplicably (simple Trump hatred?) reversed all the Trump policies when in office. We’re importing again. The economic cost of losing our energy independence is about $50 billion annually.
Now Biden has to grovel, unsuccessfully, with OPEC to increase production. Once again, we have to be mindful of our energy needs when dealing with foreign actors.
Moreover, even if you believe only massive carbon reduction mandates can keep the planet from burning, none of this affects climate change. The Biden reforms don’t affect which fuels we consume, only whether we buy them from our own producers or overseas, where power plants are often more polluting than ours.
America’s worst enemy could hardly have inflicted more damage than has our own president. In thrall to a tiny faction of far-left ideologues, Biden has suffered multiple other failures, too, including immigration, inflation, urban crime, and school closures.
Unfortunately, here’s where it gets partisan and divisive. The solemn duty of the Republican party is to remove this person and his ilk from office before they do more irreversible harm to the republic. That duty includes nominating the quality candidates most likely to win elections, which may not always be the ones most popular with Republicans.
In 2020, Trump lost an election to an exceptionally weak candidate who hardly campaigned and who was uninspiring even to his own supporters. Considering historical precedent and his record in office, Trump deserved to win in a landslide.
Instead he lost. Hard as it may be to accept, many voters wanted somebody, anybody who “wasn’t Trump.”
In service to their country and posterity, Republicans need to be more strategic, starting now. It’s important.
