An Oil Giant Railroads Its SCOTUS Connection To Gut Environmental Law

A fossil fuel giant with deep ties to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, along with other powerful pro-business groups, are explicitly pressuring Gorsuch and his fellow justices to rule in favor of oil and gas interests in an upcoming Supreme Court case.

If the high court agrees, not only could it help authorize a controversial crude oil train running alongside a critical waterway, it could also invalidate the constitutionality of one of the country’s preeminent environmental laws. 

Petitioners in the case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colo., are challenging an environmental review process that’s holding up an 88-mile rail line project designed to transport crude oil just feet away from a fragile Colorado River tributary that 40 million people rely on — and where an oil spill could be catastrophic. 

The Anschutz Exploration Corporation — a Denver-based oil and gas company whose owner, Philip Anschutz, helped get Gorsuch appointed to a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals position in 2006 — is one of the largest oil producers in the region the proposed rail line would serve. If approved, the rail line would be a boon for Anschutz’s company. 

In addition to the case’s existential stakes for the megadrought-stricken American Southwest, the court’s ruling has the potential to be “very precedential,” said Kevin Minoli, former general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency and current partner at Alston & Bird, a Washington D.C.-based corporate law firm.

“I would expect it to be a fairly large, very significant decision coming out of this case,” Minoli told The Lever. “I don’t think the Supreme Court takes the case just to make a narrow ruling on the scope of agency authority. I think they’re going to make a decision and make a pronouncement about the scope of authority and responsibility underneath [agencies] generally when they issue their opinion.”

Gorsuch is now facing calls from multiple federal lawmakers and Accountable.US, a government watchdog group that first exposed Anschutz’s involvement in the case, to recuse himself from the matter due to his close ties to the oil tycoon. During his 11-year stint on the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch recused himself from dozens of cases related to Anschutz.

“Americans are sick and tired of repeatedly learning that our Supreme Court Justices, after being secretly wined and dined at luxury resorts by billionaires with monetary interests before the Court, refuse to recuse from cases involving the interests of those same billionaires,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts. “It will be particularly galling should Justice Gorsuch refuse to recuse when the same billionaire who wined and dined him as a Justice is also a former client of his.”

The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment on whether Gorsuch will recuse himself from the case.

The ties between Anschutz and Gorsuch span nearly three decades, starting when Gorsuch served as outside counsel to Anschutz’s businesses. Since his appointment to the Supreme Court, Gorsuch has given multiple speeches during Anschutz’s annual dove-hunting retreats in Colorado. 

According to a Sept. 4 amicus brief that the Anschutz Exploration Corporation filed in support of the petitioners in the Seven County Infrastructure case, the oil giant isn’t simply interested in getting the rail line approved; it wants the Supreme Court to overhaul the country’s environmental review process so the company can expand its operations.

“Because [the National Environmental Policy Act] applies to every major federal action — including the authorizations Anschutz needs to develop federal oil-and-gas reserves — far more is at stake in this case than the 88-mile rail line in rural Utah,” the Anschutz Exploration Corporation wrote in its brief.

Judging from the background of the other groups pushing to invalidate government regulations holding up the oil train, Anschutz isn’t alone in thinking the case could have implications far beyond a single rail line.

Several advocacy groups tied to the sprawling pro-business and anti-government political network founded by petrochemical magnates Charles and David Koch also filed briefs in the case, as did an anti-conservation organization funded in part by the billion-dollar conservative dark-money operation helmed by political operative Leonard Leo. 

Other briefs came from corporate lobbying groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; the Association of American Railroads, which has close ties to the oil and gas industry; and Energy Transfer LP, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access crude oil pipeline.

The Seven County Infrastructure case comes after a series of recent Supreme Court decisions that have dismantled environmental protections and government authority, to the boon of the fossil fuel industry. 

In March 2023, the high court rolled back provisions of the Clean Water Act and weakened the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over such matters. More recently, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in June that allows certain entities to challenge federal agencies’ rules in federal court, which could have detrimental effects on environmental protections. 

“Now we have yet another case backed by yet another fossil fuel billionaire to undermine another court protection for our environment, our health, and our safety, and yet another MAGA Justice with financial ties to big oil,” said Doug Lindner, a senior director at the environmental nonprofit, League Of Conservation Voters, during an Accountable.US press conference on the matter. “This case threatens not just core environmental protections, but also the people’s right to have a say in major decisions about their communities.”

The Man Behind The Curtain

Anschutz, 84, has a sprawling empire that extends far beyond oil and gas. The billionaire is the majority owner of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, owns the company that puts on the popular Coachella music festival in California, has a partial stake in the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team, owns the Washington Examiner news outlet, and has business interests in railroads, real estate, and other industries. 

Anschutz has been called the “Wizard of Oz” of Los Angeles, given his reputation for settling business disputes behind closed doors with cash payments, his famed reclusiveness, and his influence across the city’s enterprises. 

Anschutz’s relationship with Gorsuch dates back to 1995 when Gorsuch worked at a Washington-D.C.-based law firm that represented Anschutz’s oil and gas company. In 2006, a lawyer representing Anschutz wrote a letter to George W. Bush’s administration recommending that the White House appoint Gorsuch — then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department — to a vacant 10th Circuit Court of Appeals position. 

Just a few months later, Gorsuch was confirmed to the court system that oversees cases in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming — bypassing three other individuals who were reportedly being considered for the job. 

In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Gorsuch to the Supreme Court amid scrutiny over Gorsuch’s rulings that favored business interests and dark money in politics. 

Since then, Gorsuch has faced multiple questions regarding his financial dealings, including his ties to Anschutz.

Just one month after he was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Gorsuch, along with other co-owners, sold a vacation home to a lawyer employed at a firm that routinely argues cases before the high court. When Gorsuch reported the sale in a 2017 Supreme Court financial disclosure, he left the buyer’s name blank, and it wasn’t until 2023 that the buyer’s identity became known. 

Earlier this year, Gorsuch ignored calls to recuse himself from another Supreme Court case due to his ties to Anschutz. That case, called Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, overturned a long-standing precedent — called the Chevron Deference — that allowed federal agencies to interpret laws and issue rules based on them. 

Multiple legal groups that have received funding from Anschutz’s foundations filed amicus briefs urging the court to overturn the Chevron Deference, including the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

“Not only would overturning Chevron deference strip power from federal agencies, harming their ability to serve everyday Americans — but now, we know billionaire oil baron Philip Anschutz would score big from a favorable ruling by his friend on the high court,” Ciccone, with Accountable.US, said at the time.

Laying The Tracks For An Environmental Disaster

The proposed 88-mile rail line at the heart of the Seven County Infrastructure case has faced heated pushback from environmental groups and local residents — and if approved, would quintuple oil production in Utah’s Uinta basin. 

The rail project, helmed by an inexperienced financial firm staffed by former government officials, would allow trains full of waxy crude oil to run along the banks of the Colorado River through steep canyons that are prone to mud and rock slides. 

Critics of the rail line say those hazards could trigger derailments, which could in turn contaminate water for millions of people downstream. 

“The project could result in as many as five two-mile-long crude-oil trains running over 100 miles directly alongside the headwaters of the Colorado River each day,” wrote three Democratic Colorado lawmakers — Sen. Michael Bennet, Sen. John Hickenlooper, and Rep. Joe Neguse — in a March 2023 letter to the Transportation Department.

The project has been put on hold pending an agency environmental review and court challenges. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that railroad regulators violated federal law by failing to analyze the rail line’s potential impact on wildlife, the Colorado River, local residents, and other communities downstream all the way to the Gulf Coast.

That D.C. Circuit decision stripped the rail line’s construction permit, leading an alliance of oil-producing Utah counties pushing the project called the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition to challenge the lower court ruling at the Supreme Court.

The petitioners argued that the requested environmental impact study would be outside of regulators’ authority and contrary to a previous Supreme Court ruling. If the Supreme Court agrees, its decision could narrow the scope of federal agencies’ ability to review the environmental impacts of certain “major federal actions” as delineated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — a 54-year law that’s been called the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental laws.

“If you’re a supporter of the NEPA analysis process, you should be very concerned about where the Supreme Court is likely to go in this case,” said Minoli, the former Environmental Protection Agency lawyer. “If the Supreme Court rules for the petitioners, it will likely narrow the scope of environmental effects that have to be considered under a NEPA view.”

In its amicus brief, Anschutz’s company is urging the Supreme Court to use its authority to strip environmental protections in order to expand domestic oil and gas production. 

The company claims that environmental regulations are endangering national security and “risk eroding the country’s competitive advantage in the global marketplace for energy, and can alter global geopolitics: reducing the energy security of the U.S. and its allies by forcing dependence on foreign — and often politically and economically unfavorable — sources.”

A Sprawling Conservative Legal Network

The petitioners in the Seven County Infrastructure case are also backed by a bevy of amicus briefs from organizations known for working to gut government protections, expand corporate freedoms, and dismantle campaign finance laws designed to prevent regulatory capture. 

That includes the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which filed a joint brief urging the Supreme Court to rein in federal agencies that “overstep their authority by substituting their policy preferences for those mandated by Congress in the law.”

These groups also want the high court to narrow the scope of key environmental protection laws, such as NEPA, and roll back the authority of government agencies. 

“The problem is that [the Council on Environmental Quality] does not have, and never has had, any authority to issue binding NEPA regulations,” the groups wrote. “Instead, its charge is to serve a purely advisory function and make policy recommendations.”

In 2023, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and other Koch-backed groups helped derail federal railroad legislation that was introduced in the wake of a disastrous derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

Another amicus brief came from the Property and Environmental Research Center, a think tank that has advocated for privatizing federal lands and rolling back endangered-species protections under the guise of “free market environmentalism.” In 2022, the think tank received $200,000 from a dark-money organization tied to Leo, the conservative political operative who helped orchestrate the Supreme Court’s current far-right majority. 

The Property and Environmental Research Center’s amicus brief in the Seven County Infrastructure case claims that more stringent environmental reviews are “not an unqualified good but can come at a significant environmental cost.”

The National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group representing 14,000 companies in a wide range of sectors, also filed an amicus brief in the case claiming that environmental reviews and “unchecked litigation” are threatening the U.S. economy and hurting “Americans’ ability to afford homes.” The American Petroleum Institute — another Koch-backed group — and other pro-business organizations also signed on to the trade group’s brief.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business trade group that spends more on lobbying than any other organization in the country, issued a similar brief. 

“Put simply, America will struggle to meet its energy and infrastructure goals if each [environmental review] must be expanded to assess every potential environmental impact from every potential actor that might be averted if the government simply refused to act,” the Chamber and others wrote.

The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have worked together for more than 50 years to gut campaign finance laws and allow more corporate control of the government.

According to a study by the Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank focused on combating special interests, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Chamber of Commerce’s interests 70 percent of the time since the mid-2000s. 

Project 2025, the far-right anti-government plan for a second Trump presidency funded by corporate interests including Leo- and Koch-back groups, calls for “Streamlining National Environmental Policy Reviews” and “Establishing Discipline and Accountability in the Environmental Review and Permitting Process for Infrastructure Projects.”

With so much at stake in the Seven County Infrastructure case and other recent rulings, watchdogs say the connections between Supreme Court Justices and those who stand to gain from these decisions can’t be overlooked. 

“When justices have personal and financial ties to billionaires who stand to gain from the decisions they make, the impartiality of the Court is called into question,” said Ciccone with Accountable.US. “The American people deserve a legal system that isn’t influenced by billionaires and corporate actors with special access.”