Earlier this month, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), joined by 16 Republican colleagues, announced that they were launching an investigation into 19 nonprofit environmental groups.
Referred to alternatively as “radical” and “extremist” environmental organizations in a news release issued Sept. 4, Westerman’s office claims that the groups under investigation use “unscrupulous tactics to profit from taxpayer dollars.”
The environmental groups in question largely operate in the western U.S. — many in the Pacific Northwest. They include groups like the Sierra Club, the more-than-130-year-old grassroots organization founded by John Muir. The club boasts 3.8 million members nationwide, significantly more than the population of Arkansas.
“The committee is particularly concerned with (the organizations’) coordinated capitalization on misleading and emotive messaging to build powerful and profitable litigation machines funded by taxpayer dollars through the exploitation of statutory fee-shifting provisions,” a portion of the letters issued to each group reads. “In order to ensure compliance with Congress’ legislative intent for statutes with fee-shifting provisions and inform legislative reforms to prevent abuse by radical environmental groups, Congressional oversight of (the organizations’) lawfare campaigns and subsequent fee awards is imperative.”
Only ‘radical environmental groups’
“You have to understand that, in the MAGA parlance, there are no environmental groups; there are only ‘radical environmental groups,’” U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), the ranking Democratic member of the Natural Resources Committee, told the Times-Standard.
Reached by phone last week, Huffman said that the substance of the investigation’s complaint — the assertion that environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, Oregon Wild, and more than a dozen others — misuse taxpayer funds by recouping attorney fees when they win cases in which the U.S. has been found to violate the law is nonsensical.
Huffman noted that litigants in many types of federal cases are subject to “fee-shifting” terms, recouping attorney fees when the federal government is determined to have violated the law.
“This is not the only context in which these awards happen against the government,” Huffman noted. “It happens in all kinds of other cases, too, but the Republican majority really wants to single out environmental cases because these cases are seen as a nuisance to their big oil and oligarch friends.
“It’s a specious narrative that they have been regurgitating for years while failing to acknowledge that plaintiffs in these cases only recover attorneys’ fees when they win, which means in cases where the law was broken, and the court agreed with them, after the presentation of evidence and through the litigation process, that these environmental laws needed to be vindicated and enforced.”
17 Republican committee members contend that “prominent environmental nonprofits already flush with cash exploit (provisions of the Endangered Species Act, Equal Access to Justice Act and National Environmental Policy Act) to demand the U.S. taxpayer foot the bill for their radical lawfare campaigns.”
Huffman reiterated that he believes “the entire premise of the investigation is absurd.”
“So anyone who brings a meritorious lawsuit and wins, if there is a fee-shifting statute on the books, can recover fees. That’s the law,” Huffman said. “So by complying with the law and using the legal system to vindicate a public interest, they’re not doing a bad thing. They’re doing what the law was intended to do. And if Republicans are mad about that, they should maybe focus on why the law was broken in the first place and (figure out) how to stop breaking the law.”
Huffman added, “This is not a serious investigation, in my opinion. This is a Republican Congress that has been unable to legislate. They can’t get the votes within their own party to pass any serious legislation, and they send Congress home for weeks at a time, which apparently leaves them nothing to do. And so they come up with press releases.”
The Times-Standard reached out to the House Natural Resources Committee for a response to Huffman’s comments, but a spokesperson was unable to respond before the paper’s print deadline. We also reached out to several of the nonprofit organizations included in the investigation that were unavailable for comment.
Robert Schaulis can be reached at 707-441-0585.