July 29, 2024 – When climate policy was on the chopping block with the new presidential administration in 2017, Clean Air Council sued the federal government to defend it. At the time, the decision felt bold, but not unsafe. Since then, the landscape has changed. A leading presidential candidate has declared, in allcaps, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” and has threatened to jail his opponents time and again. Criminal laws against things such as murder have put some modest bounds around what one could imagine the federal government doing to an advocate for a stable climate. Or, they used to.
In June, in what future historians may pinpoint as the moment American democracy went from being in a state of decline to one of sheer freefall, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that there are actually two classes of people in America: the king, on the one hand, and his subjects, on the other. How else to explain it? For the king’s subjects, all criminal laws apply at all times. For the king, however, as long as he is acting “officially,” the criminal laws simply do not apply. Of course, the majority of the Supreme Court used the term “president” rather than “king,” but that is a misnomer; in democracies, no one is above the law.
The talk of murder may strike you as overblown. Three Supreme Court justices did not think so. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent makes the scope of the president’s new powers clear: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon. Immune. Immune, immune, immune. … In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
We know what it looks like in countries where the leaders are not held accountable. It’s very dangerous to defend the land, the people, the climate. Over the last decade, killings of environmental advocates have risen year after year.
In 2013, indigenous land defender Berta Cáceres had been fending off the construction of a hydroelectric dam that threatened the land of the Lenca people. The Honduran military and the dam developers wanted her dead. She told the international press that “I want to live, there are many things I still want to do in this world but I have never once considered giving up fighting for our territory, for a life with dignity, because our fight is legitimate. I take lots of care but in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable… When they want to kill me, they will do it.” And, in 2016, they did.
It’s already a risky landscape for environmental advocates in Pennsylvania. I personally know of people here who have had their cars shot at, their houses vandalized, whom others have tried to run off the road, just for speaking up for their communities. This does not amount to murder. But it’s hard to see the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States as anything less than an invitation for the next president to go wild. Why, otherwise, would the Court find that the laws criminalizing rape, treason, theft, and—yes—murder no longer need constrain the president?
I am not singling out environmentalists as the sole potential target of a looming revenge agenda. We are all at risk when we all suddenly become part of this new underclass, the subjects of the king.
Berta Cáceres won her campaign in the end. A year after her murder, the backers of the project pulled out, preserving the Lenca’s land. Here in Pennsylvania, we will keep fighting for the clean air, pure water, and healthy climate enshrined in our state constitution, no matter what the federal government does and no matter what the new year brings. But the Supreme Court on Monday was loud and clear: we can’t rely on the law to protect us from an oppressive government. No one can protect us but ourselves. We need to do whatever it takes to keep our society from becoming one that allows presidents to get away with murder. That work starts now.
Alex Bomstein is an attorney and the Executive Director of Clean Air Council, an environmental advocacy nonprofit based in Philadelphia and working across Pennsylvania and beyond.
