Exxon Sues California for Violating Its Free Speech Rights

Exxon is trying to claim that California’s climate laws infringe on its freedom of speech.

The oil company filed a lawsuit against the state Friday over two laws, passed in 2023, that require companies doing business in California to disclose carbon emissions and climate-related financial risks, with penalties if they don’t comply. Exxon claims that the laws, known as the California Climate Accountability Package, would force the company to “serve as a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees.”

A spokesperson for California Governor Gavin Newsom, Tara Gallegos, told The New York Times, seemingly tongue in cheek, that it was “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”

The laws, which will be enforced beginning next year, “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them,” Gallegos added.

Exxon said in the lawsuit that it already reports its carbon emissions and climate risks voluntarily but that the state laws would force it to change its framework to one it finds “misleading and counterproductive.”

Right now, Exxon uses a methodology to calculate its emissions developed by an oil and gas industry group, but would have to change to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, developed by the research group World Resources Institute and business network World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

The company claims this framework would send “the counterproductive message that large companies are uniquely responsible for climate change no matter how efficiently they satisfy societal demand for energy, goods, and services.” Exxon additionally argues that the legal requirement to report its global emissions should only be focused on the company’s emissions in the state.

Exxon is also fighting against a provision in one law that requires companies to disclose how climate change threatens their business operations and what they plan to do about it. Exxon claims the law requires speculation “about unknowable future developments” and conflicts with securities laws.

There is another pending lawsuit against the laws from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the California Chamber of Commerce, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, with a trial expected next year.

The oil company is trying to dodge transparency about its operations, perhaps concerned about how bad these disclosures would make it look. It may also be hoping for the law to be struck down by conservative judges, or even the Supreme Court. President Trump is loudly dismissive of climate change and the threats it poses, and may take further action against California on his own.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford thinks that the Ronald Reagan anti-tariff commercial that set President Trump off was “the best ad I ever ran.” 

The TV ad featured an edited 1987 radio address from President Reagan, in which he stated that tariffs only serve to “hurt every American.” Trump was so bothered by the ad using someone he likes to compare himself to against him that he started another trade war with Canada, announcing an additional 10 percent tariff on its products over the weekend.

“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” Trump posted to Truth Social to justify the tariff hike. “The Reagan Foundation said that they, ‘created an ad campaign using selective audio and video of President Ronald Reagan. The ad misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address,’ and ‘did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute is reviewing its legal options in this matter.’”

But the premier of Ontario, which produced the ad in the first place, isn’t bothered.

“You know why President Trump is so upset right now? It was because it was effective,” Ford said on Monday. “The only people that win in a tariff war are the people around the world that don’t necessarily see eye to eye with us and with the United States.”  

Ford says the ad has received over “a billion impressions around the world.” 

This shared animosity underscores the schisms that Trump’s retaliatory tariffs have caused with some of America’s closest allies. 

“We can’t control the trade policy of the United States. We recognize that that policy has fundamentally changed from the policy in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and it’s a situation where the United States has tariffs against every one of their trading partners,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters last Friday, when Trump first began fuming about the ad. “What we can control, absolutely, is how we build here at home.… What we can also control, or at least heavily influence, is developing new partnerships and opportunities, including with the economic giants of Asia, which is the focus of this trip.”

Health care access could soon become a pipe dream for some Wisconsinites if Congress doesn’t muster up a budget.

The government shut down 27 days ago, in large part over a debate on the merits of the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits, which assist individuals making upward of 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Still, neither national political party appears willing to shatter Congress’s stalemate on how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.

Open enrollment for the subsidized coverage is just days away, but failing to extend the premium tax credits could raise premiums by thousands of dollars a year for people within the affected income bracket all over the country. In Wisconsin, those hardest hit could see their premiums rise by more than $30,000 per year, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers warned Monday.

Age and residency also factor into eligibility for the credits. In Barron County, a 60-year-old couple making $85,000 could see their premiums rise by 800 percent to an annual increase of more than $33,000. Roughly 32 percent of Barron County is above the age of 60, while 73 percent of the population makes less than $100,000 per year, according to 2020 census data.

In a statement, Evers argued that the ongoing congressional failure will make “healthcare coverage costs skyrocket.”

“Republicans’ reckless decisions are causing prices on everything to go up, from groceries to gas—Wisconsinites cannot afford to pay even more for healthcare, too,” Evers said. “Republicans need to end this chaos and stop working to make healthcare more expensive. It’s that simple.”

But Wisconsin is far from the only state expected to suffer. As of last week, more than a dozen states had opened up their Obamacare marketplace for a window-shopping period, including California, Georgia, Kentucky, Nevada, Maryland, and Maine. Individuals in those states could similarly see prices rise by thousands of dollars annually.

Idaho, which has roughly 135,000 enrollees on the marketplace, opened its Affordable Care Act marketplace portal Thursday with a slew of new price tags, offering the nation a glimpse into federal health care services sans federal support. More than 6 percent of the state population, roughly 13,000 people, stand to lose the premium tax credits.

The mystery donor who wrote President Donald Trump a $130 million check for the military is believed to be 83-year-old conservative billionaire Tim Mellon.

Two people familiar with the conversations identified Mellon to The New York Times, which published the development Saturday. Mellon inherited his fortune from his grandfather, banking magnate and former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and he has become a major player in conservative politics in his own right over the past decade.

Mellon donated a whopping $150 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, surpassed only by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to Open Secrets. The day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges that same year, Mellon donated $50 million to Trump’s super PAC, one of the single largest disclosed contributions ever.

With this latest donation, it’s clearer than ever that Trump’s White House has been bought and paid for by the billionaire class. But this particular payment will hardly make a dent. Split among the military’s 1.3 million service members, the donation will come out to about $100 per person.

Last week, Trump announced that his administration had received a $130 million donation, and the Department of Defense confirmed that the government had accepted the money in order to “offset the cost of Service members’ salaries and benefits” under the “general gift acceptance authority.”

On Friday, Trump declined to say who the donor was, only saying he was “a great American citizen” and a “substantial man” who would “prefer that his name not be mentioned.”

Budget experts argued that the donation violated the Antideficiency Act, which puts barriers on the use of funds and personnel during an appropriations lapse, prohibiting the use of funds not allocated by Congress. Legal experts pointed out that Trump was already going out on a limb legally by repurposing other DOD funding to keep service members paid.

A federal agent blatantly violated a court order against using excessive force against journalists and protesters last Thursday by pointing a gun in a veteran’s face, saying “Bang, bang” and “You’re dead, liberal.”

The Chicago Headline Club, a nonprofit representing journalists in the Chicago area, filed a complaint in federal court after the incident, which took place in the city’s Little Village neighborhood. Local residents had gathered to observe and protest a large presence of federal agents in the area, and Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino did not respond well or care to take the earlier court order into consideration.

According to the complaint, combat veteran Chris Gentry was “lawfully standing on the side of the road voicing his opposition as agents were driving by in their vehicles.” That’s when an agent pointed a gun at him and threatened to kill him.

That was just one of many shocking incidents that day. Bovino also allegedly threw a tear gas canister into a crowd of protesters, who, according to the complaint, were not violent or committing any crimes. Some of the protesters attempted to talk to Bovino and other federal agents there and were rebuffed. Bovino and his colleagues instead shoved several people and threw more tear gas canisters at them, according to the complaint.

The Department of Homeland Security claimed in a social media post that protesters “shot at agents with commercial artillery shell fireworks” and that they attacked federal agents first, which the complaint calls a lie. Further, the complaint quotes protesters who say that the crowd in Little Village was peaceful. Bovino claimed to a reporter at the scene Thursday that he was hit with a rock, but did not appear to be injured.

Federal Judge Sara Ellis has ordered Bovino to appear in court Tuesday to testify about Thursday’s incidents, as well as sit for a five-hour deposition on November 5.

Judging by Bovino and his fellow federal agents’ actions on Thursday, court orders and legal action don’t appear to be a deterrent. Other federal agents nationwide, particularly those working for ICE, have made violent arrests and lied about them, even dragging a four-foot-six blind man outside of a Portland detention facility and dropping him on his head earlier this month.