Alabama’s attorney general Steve Marshall has joined 20 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to block President Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
The multistate lawsuit is led by Montana and Texas and was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
The lawsuit claims that only Congress has the legal authority to approve or cancel the pipeline permit. The legal action asks the court to declare the section of Executive Order 13990 cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline’s cross-border permit unconstitutional and unlawful and seeks to prevent the Biden administration from taking any action to enforce the permit revocation.
The Keystone XL pipeline would cross into the United States in northern Montana, run through South Dakota and end in Nebraska where it would meet with other pipelines to refining centers. Many of these are along the Gulf Coast.
In addition to Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming have joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs.