Tag Archives: supreme

Here’s the Biggest Lie Sean Spicer Told Today

Mother Jones

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While chastising Democrats for threatening to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Thursday delivered one of his most egregious falsehoods yet. Republicans, he insisted, have historically been cooperative when it comes to giving up-or-down votes to Democratic presidents’ court appointments. Spicer specifically mentioned former President Barack Obama in making this assertion.

“Republicans in the past have allowed Democrat presidents to have their SCOTUS nominees voted on up or down,” Spicer said. “And for the most part, when you go back through President Obama or President Clinton…Republicans have joined with Democrats to allow people who are qualified to go onto the court.”

“It was Obama’s nominees that got through—all with Republican support,” he added. “It’s difficult to understand why, when you’ve got someone as eminently qualified as Gursuch, that this the stake that they want to drive. And I think it further sets a partisan divide in our country when we can’t allow people who are qualified, and universally so, to get on the bench.”

There’s one glaring problem with Spicer’s remarks: Merrick Garland. In 2016, Obama selected Garland to replace the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February. Arguing the nomination to fill the vacant seat should be left to the next president, Republicans staged an unprecedented blockade to the nomination process, refusing to even hold hearings on Garland’s nomination. That gamble paid off, and here we are with Trump and Gorsuch—and Spicer’s bald-faced lie.

Watch Spicer’s remarks, which start around the 1 hour and 49 minute mark:

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Here’s the Biggest Lie Sean Spicer Told Today

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Thanks to Trump, the Supreme Court Just Left Trans Kids Hanging in a Big Way

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court on Monday kicked a historic transgender rights case back to a lower court, after the Trump administration changed the federal government’s position on whether trans students can use bathrooms matching their gender identities.

The highly anticipated case, which had been scheduled for a Supreme Court hearing later this month, centers on a 17-year-old transgender boy named Gavin Grimm who is suing for access to the boys’ bathroom at his school in Virginia. Grimm’s case argues that the school’s decision to block him from that bathroom violates Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in public schools. Had the Supreme Court chosen to hear the case, it would have been the first time the justices had ever considered a question about trans rights.

Grimm, who was born a girl but identifies as a boy, started using the boys’ bathroom at school his sophomore year, after doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria and recommended that he be treated as a boy. But when parents at his school complained, his school board intervened, saying he’d either need to go back to the girls’ room or use a private bathroom near the nurse’s office. The school board said it was trying to protect the privacy of other students.

Last May, the Obama administration put out a directive warning that public schools could lose federal funding if they blocked trans kids from using the bathrooms of their choice. The directive said Title IX prohibited discrimination based on gender identity, not just based on sex. But in February, President Donald Trump’s administration changed the federal government’s position, saying that it wasn’t sure how to interpret Title IX and that schools could go back to blocking trans kids from bathrooms. Because the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had relied heavily on the Obama administration’s interpretation in its decision about Grimm’s case last year, the Supreme Court on Monday ordered the circuit court to reconsider the case. Now it’ll be up to that lower court to decide what Title IX means, and whether the law prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.

Over the past couple of years, the debate over transgender rights and bathrooms has heated up nationally. Only one state, North Carolina, has enacted legislation requiring trans people to use bathrooms matching their birth sex instead of their gender identity. But at least 11 other states have considered similar legislation already this year , and schools across the country have instituted similar policies. In an amicus brief filed last week, parents wrote about how their trans children have been humiliated and stigmatized as a result. Many others also submitted briefs in support of Grimm, including nearly 200 members of Congress, dozens of major corporations, 18 states and over 30 US cities, the NAACP, and the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).

The issue isn’t just about bathrooms. “It’s about the right of trans people to exist in public spaces,” Grimm told reporters on a press call on Monday. Without access to bathrooms, he says, it’s hard for trans people to sit through class, run errands, or hold jobs.

The case will not come before the Supreme Court again this term, Grimm’s attorneys say, and possibly not for another few years. “We will not have our day in the high court this term but we will continue to fight in the lower courts,” Chase Strangio, one of his lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote. “Today our momentum was sent on a detour,” he added in a tweet, “but nothing can stop it. We will fight. We will win.”

Grimm was sitting in class on Monday morning when text messages started flooding his phone with the Supreme Court’s announcement. He was disappointed but vowed to keep fighting. Whether it takes another year or 10, he says, “I’m in it for the long haul.”

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Thanks to Trump, the Supreme Court Just Left Trans Kids Hanging in a Big Way

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Reports Suggest Trump Won’t Take Travel Ban to Supreme Court

Mother Jones

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Update, 6:20 p.m.: The White House has apparently changed its mind again and may appeal to the Supreme Court after all.

NBC News and The Hill are both reporting that a White House official has said Trump won’t be appealing to the Supreme Court the 9th Circuit decision not to reinstate his “Muslim ban.”

This doesn’t mean, however, that the ban is dead—it only means the stay against enforcement of the ban will continue until the constitutionality of the executive order itself is ultimately decided in court on the merits.

Earlier Friday, CNN reported that Trump is considering a revised executive order.

This is a developing story. We’ll update when more news is available.

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Reports Suggest Trump Won’t Take Travel Ban to Supreme Court

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Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

Mother Jones

President Trump lost his appeal today to keep his immigration ban in place:

A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reinstate President Trump’s targeted travel ban, delivering the latest and most stinging judicial rebuke to his effort to make good on a campaign promise and tighten the standards for entry into the United States.

….The decision is likely to be quickly appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court remains short-handed and could deadlock. A 4-to-4 tie in the Supreme Court would leave the appeals court’s ruling in place.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t a ruling on whether Trump’s immigration order is legal. It’s not even a ruling on whether it should be blocked pending the result of other lawsuits. It’s a ruling on an emergency stay of the temporary restraining order issued last week by a district court in Seattle. For now, the TRO remains in place unless the Supreme Court overturns the cicuit court and grants the emergency stay. Later we’ll get a full hearing on the TRO, and following that we’ll get trials on the various lawsuits challenging the legality of the immigration order.

UPDATE: This has been rewritten to more accurately explain what happened here.

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Trump Loses Immigration Appeal

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Chart of the Day: The Supreme Court Over the Past 70 Years

Mother Jones

Christopher Ingraham at Wonkblog pointed me to an interesting bit of data yesterday. It’s the Martin-Quinn measure of how the Supreme Court tilts over time, and apparently it’s widely accepted as reasonably accurate. Here it is for the entire postwar period:

There are two fascinating nuggets here:

Despite conservative kvetching, the Court has leaned conservative for all but seven years from 1946 to 2013. The seven years of the Warren Court are literally the only period in recent history during which the Court has been consistently liberal.
The Martin-Quinn measure depends on the votes of the median judge, which is Anthony Kennedy right now. This is what accounts for the Court’s recent shift to the left. According to his Martin-Quinn score, Kennedy has been getting steadily less conservative ever since he joined the Court, and over the past three years he’s become positively liberal:

I suppose this is old news to veteran court watchers, but it’s new to me. Has Kennedy really shifted that much over his career? And is he now generally left of center? If so, does this have anything to do with the effect of Sotomayor and Kagan joining the Court in 2009-10? It sure looks like it.

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Chart of the Day: The Supreme Court Over the Past 70 Years

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The Post-Trump Wave of Anti-Abortion Proposals Just Hit Florida

Mother Jones

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Over the last few weeks, the election of Donald Trump and new Republican control over several states have inspired a wave of anti-abortion proposals. Among the most pervasive have been 20-week abortion bans: Ohio and Kentucky have both passed these in the last month, and they have been proposed in Virginia and now Florida.

On Tuesday, Florida state Rep. Joe Gruters—the former co-chair of Trump’s Florida campaign who began his first term in the Florida House this month—filed the proposed ban, along with sponsor Rep. Don Hahnfeldt.

“Proud to stand up for life in the first bill that I file as a member of the State House,” Gruters wrote on his Facebook page.

Titled the “Florida Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” the bill would make it a third-degree felony to perform an abortion after 20 weeks, unless there is a “serious health risk” for the mother. The bill would also require doctors to file a report about every abortion they perform to the state’s health department and would allow the fathers of the unborn, as well as mothers, to sue their abortion providers for actual or punitive damages.

The bill’s text argues that the ban is necessary because at 20 weeks, fetuses can feel pain. This point is contested by pro-choice advocates and refuted by the vast majority of scientific research.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade ruled that a state can only ban abortions after a fetus is viable outside the womb, which is typically considered to be at 24 weeks. The 20-week bans have been one of the anti-abortion movement’s primary strategies for challenging Roe, by calling into question its viability standard. Only about 1.3 percent of abortions take place after 20 weeks, and they usually occur because of an unforeseen medical complication—a risk to the mother’s health, for instance, or the discovery of a severe fetal anomaly in the later stages of pregnancy. They might be necessary for women experiencing major difficulties in their lives, such as domestic violence or the inability to access abortion for financial and other reasons. “Such bans will disproportionately affect young women and women with limited financial resources,” wrote the authors of a 2013 study on women who get later abortions.

“The 20-week ban was nationally designed to be the vehicle to end abortion in America,” Ohio Right to Life President Michael Gonidakis told the Columbus Dispatch in December, following the state’s passage of its own 20-week ban.

Lawsuits challenging these bans have made it all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 2014, the Supreme Court declined to review a case challenging Arizona’s 20-week ban, cementing a lower court’s decision that the law was unconstitutional. Reproductive rights advocates have also mounted lawsuits opposing 20-week bans passed in several other states, including North Carolina and Georgia.

Perhaps in anticipation of similar lawsuits to come, Florida’s proposed 20-week ban would also establish a legal defense fund, financed with taxpayer dollars and private donations, which would be managed by Florida’s legal affairs department and would pay for the state attorney general’s legal defense against challenges to the bill.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has not said publicly whether he would support a 20-week abortion ban. But he identifies as pro-life and in the past has supported other restrictions on later abortions. In 2014, Scott signed a bill into law redefining fetal viability to when a fetus can survive outside the womb “through standard medical measures,” further limiting when some later abortions would be permitted.

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The Post-Trump Wave of Anti-Abortion Proposals Just Hit Florida

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This Bible Belt Abortion Provider Is Looking Beyond Trump

Mother Jones

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Abortion providers have had a rollercoaster year. On the one hand, a landmark abortion rights case in Texas saw an affirmative ruling from the Supreme Court, overturning restrictions that aimed to put clinics out of business across the United States. At the same time, conservative statehouses pushed through legislation that aimed to decrease abortion access and defund Planned Parenthood, the largest women’s health provider in the country. Months after the Supreme Court ruled in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt that the restrictions in Texas qualified as undue burdens and were therefore unconstitutional, Donald Trump was elected president, assuring voters of his staunch support for anti-choice legislation and deflecting allegations of sexual assault.

The week after the election, we called Dr. Willie Parker—a Harvard-educated OB-GYN from Alabama in his 50s who has been providing abortions full time since 2009. He practices in clinics in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, has confronted demonstrators blocking his access, and sued the state of Mississippi to keep the sole clinic in that state open. We wanted to hear how abortion providers are preparing for the next chapter of the battle against reproductive rights. As board chair for Physicians for Reproductive Health, Parker has been at the forefront of the national fight to preserve a woman’s right to choose. Here’s what he had to say about the likely new realities in women’s health during the future Trump administration.

What’s the conversation like among providers right now?
Most people can’t even talk. We’re still figuring it out. But I think people are trying to think beyond and say, “OK, given the inability to overturn the election, and given our ability to prognosticate based on how he’s operated politically, most of us have to think worst-case scenario.” But there’s also really no way of knowing what he’s going to do—he’s been sufficiently vague in his policy positions. We can take some prognostic indication from some of the things that he’s said, like in his 60 Minutes interview where he talked about his intention to appoint a pro-life justice to align the court to overturn Roe. I think of it as a low-hanging fruit. He has every intention to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as much because it’s known as Obamacare as because he wants to try and deconstruct the legacy of President Obama. But that has implications that mean women who were accessing family planning and contraception as a preventative service with no co-pay will lose access to that coverage. We will only see an exacerbation of the things we were engaged in trying to prevent—like unplanned pregnancy and the need for abortion, which creates a societal dilemma. If you’re making abortion illegal and undermining the various things that will allow the prevention of that need, it can only be a situation that goes from bad to worse.

There are a lot of misconceptions around contraception and abortion care, not only in the general public, but also among our lawmakers. Do you think there will be an uptick in anti-science attitudes?
There’s a saying that you can’t awaken somebody who’s pretending to be asleep. I’m full of clichés—I was raised by a Southern black woman, and they had a saying for everything.

I get you, I’m from Tennessee and Mississippi, I grew up on those sayings too.
Oh, so you’re my homegirl! laughs

There’s a willful ignorance. We indulge people who are willfully misrepresenting the facts. I don’t think those anti-choice congress people are as much benignly misguided as they are intentionally and willfully ignorant of the facts of reproduction. That lends itself very well to them being ideologically driven and carrying out agendas that, if they were to be really be honest about the facts, would be a tougher sell. But I think anti-intellectualism can be rewarded by the outcome of the election that’s going to result in people being appointed who can reinforce that agenda. We’re going to see more of that willful ignorance if we don’t push back and fight. The worst thing we can do is to assume that the electoral college votes resulting in the election of Donald Trump represents a mandate. It does not. He did not get the majority of the popular vote; that went to Hillary Clinton. That means those votes represent the consciousness of the nation, which is that abortion should be legal, that contraception and family planning are health issues and prevention, that a woman’s right to reproductive privacy is the law of the land and should remain such.

Have any of your patients expressed any fear since the election?
I’ve seen patients once since the election, and then, it was only abortion patients. But certainly, my friends and the common narrative is people are trying to shore up their own lives with regards to family planning and reproduction. I know people who were previously considering IUDs are considering them again. I know the requests for those kind of visits are up. People are concerned about how much control over their reproductive lives they’re going to lose as a result of this election outcome.

Do you think this puts states that are down to one clinic, such as Mississippi, in even more danger?
The fight in Mississippi will be more protracted. I’m the physician plaintiff in the lawsuit that keeps the Mississippi clinic open, and we prevailed twice in the Fifth Circuit—once with just the three-judge panel and once with the full Fifth Circuit panel. Despite that, the state tried to push it up to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court did not take that in lieu of the Texas case. So the definitive nature of the Texas case should have made things OK in Mississippi, but the state of Mississippi has decided to go forward. Now, I think their hope will be rekindled and renewed around the fact that potentially there will be an overturning of Roe, and there will be the appointment of a conservative justice who alters the balance of the court. There now will be a political hope based on the change in the presidential administration—hope that maybe wasn’t there before the election. But I don’t think anything will change immediately. President Obama, in his first remarks since the election, in order to reassure people and help them understand how government works, said the US government is like an ocean liner, not like a speed boat. It’s harder to turn around than people might think. Hopefully, many of the decisions have been structured in a way to make them resilient, so they’re not as vulnerable to the capricious whim of political administrations.

So what would you say to women who are worried about what a Trump administration could do to their reproductive health?

I just want to remind people that the task of those who support reproductive rights and reproductive justice didn’t change based on who is in the White House. We have leadership that is not supportive of what we’re trying to do, but the demand for justice shouldn’t be modulated. We can take that as a notion that we don’t know exactly what President-elect Trump is going to do, but we can’t afford to take a position of waiting around to see. We have to work under the assumption that the things that we fought hard for to protect women will be under assault, and we have to bring all our creativity and our energy to bear to preserve those things. No matter who is in the White House.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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This Bible Belt Abortion Provider Is Looking Beyond Trump

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Police Departments Find Yet New Ways to Steal People’s Money

Mother Jones

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Adam Liptak tells us that the Supreme Court is pondering whether to hear a case from Ramsey County, Minnesota, which confiscates money from people it arrests. That’s what happened to Corey Statham, who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, and then released:

But the county kept $25 of Mr. Statham’s money as a “booking fee.” It returned the remaining $21 on a debit card subject to an array of fees. In the end, it cost Mr. Statham $7.25 to withdraw what was left of his money.

….Kentucky bills people held in its jails for the costs of incarcerating them, even if all charges are later dismissed. In Colorado, five towns raise more than 30 percent of their revenue from traffic tickets and fines. In Ferguson, Mo., “city officials have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity,” a Justice Department report found last year.

….Through his lawyers, Mr. Statham declined a request for an interview. He lost in the lower courts, which said his right to due process had not been violated by the $25 booking charge or the debit card fees, which were both, the trial judge said, “relatively modest.”

Lovely. It’s OK to confiscate money as long as you don’t confiscate too much. Unless, of course, you’re engaged in civil asset forfeiture, in which case the sky’s the limit. All you have to do is attend one of the many classes that teach your police officers how best to steal people’s money under the pretense that they “just know” it’s drug money.

I continue to be gobsmacked by all of this. I’ve heard all the arguments about due process and civil vs. criminal and so forth, and not a single word of it strikes me as anything but an obvious sham. And yet courts—all the way to the Supreme Court—and judicial agencies—all the way to the Department of Justice—accept them without blinking. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I’m stuck in some kind of Kafka-based virtual reality. How can something so obviously wrong be approved with a shrug by so many people?

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Police Departments Find Yet New Ways to Steal People’s Money

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Reproductive Rights Activists Are Mad as Hell Over This Creepy New Abortion Rule

Mother Jones

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The Center for Reproductive Rights, a reproductive rights legal advocacy organization, has filed a lawsuit to stop a regulation in Texas that would require fetal remains to be buried or cremated from taking effect. The state’s Heath and Human Service Commission quietly proposed the rule last July, days after the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt struck down two requirements of HB2, a Texas law designed to drastically reduce access to abortion. The Texas law had already led to the closure of half the abortion clinics in the state. Pro-choice advocates say the new rule regarding fetal remains is meant to further limit women’s control over their reproductive lives.

“These insidious regulations are a new low in Texas’ long history of denying women the respect that they deserve to make their own decisions about their lives and their healthcare,” said Nancy Northup, the president of CRR, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. The rule is set to go into effect December 19, but opponents argue the requirement will add burdensome costs and logistical challenges to reproductive health care services, likely adding an additional $2,000 to the cost of an abortion, according to the Funeral Consumers’ Alliance of Texas. This would make accessing reproductive services prohibitively expensive for low-income women, many of whom have lost access to affordable birth control thanks to Texas cutting public funds from Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.

â&#128;&#139;The parts of HB2 that had been struck down by the Supreme Court—the requirement that doctors have admitting privileges to local hospitals and that abortions be performed in surgical centers rather than clinics—were framed as efforts to protect women’s health. Proponents of the new measure have a different argument to justify the regulation. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has argued fetal remains shouldn’t be treated like medical waste and, according to a report by the Texas Tribune, has used this stance to raise campaign funds. â&#128;&#139;”I believe it is imperative to establish higher standards that reflect our respect for the sanctity of life,” he wrote in the fundraising email. “This is why Texas will require clinics and hospitals to bury or cremate human and fetal remains.”

Texas lawmakers are expected to codify the regulation into law when they meet in January 2017. Northup argues the Supreme Court already ruled medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion unconstitutional. “The Center for Reproductive Rights will continue to fight for Texas women, and women across the nation, to ensure their rights are protected,” she promised.

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Reproductive Rights Activists Are Mad as Hell Over This Creepy New Abortion Rule

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The Standing Rock Sioux will be ready to take a Trump challenge to courts

In the wake of the Obama administration’s surprise decision to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, company reps seem confident they need only wait for President-elect Trump to keep building. But the lawyer who represents the Standing Rock Sioux says it won’t be so easy to overcome the legal hurdles.

“If an agency decides that a full environmental review is necessary, it can’t just change its mind with a stroke of a pen a few weeks later,” EarthJustice attorney Jan Hasselman told Grist. “That would be violation of the law, and it’s the kind of thing that a court would be called upon to review. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to try.”

Trump could force the pipeline through along the dispute route at Lake Oahe. He technically could ignore the Corps’ decision to fulfill a public Environmental Impact Statement with his newfound executive powers, but that might not be wise.

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“He could in the sense that you can rob a bank, but you’d get in trouble,” Hasselman said.

If that were the case, Standing Rock would be prepared to take the matter to courts again, their lawyer told Grist.

“Circumventing the environmental assessment now that the agency has determined it’s the right course of action shouldn’t pass muster under legal standards,” he added.

For example, the Ninth Circuit has ruled that federal agencies can’t just flip on a dime on settled rulemaking that is based on facts because a new administration has taken over. The Supreme Court this year declined to take up the case, leaving the Circuit’s decision standing that the Bush administration couldn’t exempt the Tongass rainforest in Alaska from a conservation rule, when the agency’s fact-finding found otherwise.

Unless a conservative Supreme Court reverses course, then Standing Rock still has that advantage in a Trump era.

Going further to weaken environmental regulations overall would require a more robust change to the law with congressional action. With the law on their side for now, environmental justice advocates could challenge administration decisions just as they did in the Bush administration. (Talk about government interference: Trump is reportedly also considering privatizing oil-rich Native American land to boost oil companies.)

Energy Transfer Partners has its share of options, too — even if Trump didn’t reverse the decision, it could still sue to maintain the current route.

One of the surer bets on what’s next is that the company is going to have to wait longer to build its pipeline than it originally intended. Energy Transfer Partners wanted it to be operational by the end of the year. If the Corps decision holds, it could potentially be tied up as long as a year or two. It would have to undergo a full environmental assessment of route alternatives, which is the traditional way government agencies solicit input from the public and weigh the pros and cons of environmentally risky projects.

The pipeline is far from dead. But it’s also far from a sure thing.

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The Standing Rock Sioux will be ready to take a Trump challenge to courts

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