The county is widely considered to be one of the most important battlegrounds within 2024’s most important battleground state as one of the last swing areas left in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to win Bucks County by less than 2,000 votes in 2016, when former President Donald Trump carried the state, and President Joe Biden won it by about 17,000 votes on his way to winning Pennsylvania and the general election in 2020.

With days to go until Election Day, Republicans and Democrats are doing their best to run through the tape and deliver the county — and the Keystone State writ large — for their respective parties. Both parties and aligned outside groups are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the presidential race, as well as down-ballot contests. 

By The Numbers

Bucks County also provides a cross-section of the state at large, containing urban, suburban, exurban and rural areas. The county’s composition and its demographic breakdown make it a decent indicator of how things may turn out statewide and a county to watch closely as returns start rolling in, a Trump campaign official told the DCNF.

Nearly every prominent pollster and pundit in the country is projecting that Pennsylvania will be as competitive as can be, with Bucks County right in the middle of the partisan tug-of-war. However, Barry Summers — a data engineering consultant by day who has meticulously analyzed Bucks County voting data in efforts to help elect Republicans — believes current early voting and vote-by-mail data suggests Trump will win the county by several percentage points, he told the DCNF.

Relative to the 2020 cycle, Republican mail-in votes are up by about 20,000 — or 60% — in Bucks County, while Democrats have so far managed to secure 98% of the approximately 79,000 mail-in ballots they did in the 2020 cycle, Summers told the DCNF. Meanwhile, Bucks County has seen a 21% increase in mail-in ballots from independent and unaffiliated voters in the 2024 cycle relative to the 2020 cycle, according to Summers.

Summers has also observed that the volume of GOP mail-in votes has accelerated since early October while the pace of Democrat early votes has decelerated since then, and that independent and unaffiliated voters are sending in their votes later “almost in the exact same pattern that the Republicans are,” said Summers. While the pattern alone does not prove anything about voters’ intentions, it suggests to Summers that these unaffiliated and independent voters may be breaking favorably enough for Republicans.

While some of these early votes could cannibalize the Election Day GOP vote, Summers has reason to believe that many of these early votes are coming from lower-propensity voters and that dependable Republican voters will mostly show up to vote on Nov. 5, he told the DCNF. Additionally, Summers sees what he believes to be clear indications that enthusiasm in some key Democratic constituencies, such as young people, is not robust.

“The Democrat propaganda says the youth are outraged and that they’re voting in droves. That is not happening in Bucks County. I looked at voting by age, for 18-year olds, for 19-year olds and so on, what percentage of the people who voted by mail-in ballot are Democrats by each age,” Summers told the DCNF. “The peak share of the Democrat voters are people in their 30s. So, in other words, people in their 30s have registered as mail-in ballot voting Democrats more than any other age of life, the college turnout is very comparable to the Democrat average for the whole county.”

“So what does that tell us?” Summers continued. “That tells us that college age Democrats in Bucks County were as motivated to turn into mail in ballot applications as the average Democrat was overall. There isn’t some surge in the youth vote where they’re all excited and everybody else can’t be bothered. That is just not happening. There’s no passion in the youth vote.”

Moreover, the unaffiliated and independent early vote has skewed toward males so far in Bucks County, a trend that benefits Trump if it holds given that Trump is polling better with men than women in the 2024 cycle, Summers said.

Just now: Voters are lined up around the block here in Doylestown, PA, to bank their votes. @DailyCaller News Foundation pic.twitter.com/bR73fQILMW

— Nick Pope (@realnickpope) October 29, 2024

‘We Feel Pretty Confident’

Other Republicans on the ground in Bucks County are also feeling confident to the extent they can, albeit with more anecdotal supporting evidence than the numbers Summers cites. Several Bucks County Republicans pointed out that Trump can theoretically lose Bucks County by a margin of about two percent or less and still be in good shape statewide, as occurred in the 2016 race.

“I am cautiously optimistic. What we’re seeing on the ground here in Bucks County, it’s a wave like we’ve never seen, even in 2020 and 2016,” Ed Sheppard, the communications chair for the Doylestown Republican Committee, told the DCNF. “We’re seeing people who’ve never voted before register to vote, to come out to vote for the Republicans. And I think in Bucks County, the top of the ticket is going to drive the down ballot.”

Bucks County Trump voters who convened on Wednesday at the McDonald’s franchise in the county where the former president campaigned earlier in October also told the DCNF that they sense a level of enthusiasm and urgency from grassroots Republicans that they did not feel in 2020. Numerous local GOP officials and volunteers working to turn out voters also said they are feeling and seeing strong levels of enthusiasm for Trump on the ground in conversations with the DCNF.

Local Democrats, meanwhile, are putting stock in suburban women and the issue of abortion access to help carry Vice President Kamala Harris and down-ballot candidates to victory in the county.

“Women have been underestimated for a very long time, but we could be the reason that Bucks goes blue and we elect a President Harris,” Anna Payne, the local Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania State House, told The New Yorker in October. Nationally and in Pennsylvania, Democrats are betting that campaigning hard on access to abortion could be the key to winning over enough suburban female voters to secure electoral victories, TIME recently reported.

While some Bucks County Republicans are concerned about college-educated women showing up in force for Democrats, others, like Jim Worthington — a longtime Trump donor and ally who led Pennsylvania’s delegation at the Republican National Convention this summer — believe that abortion is not as salient of an issue for the Bucks County electorate as it may have been in the 2022 midterms, which occurred just months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“It’s the issue that cost Dr. Oz the election in the Senate race, as well as vote by mail. They were the two issues that cost him the election, and because they just came off the overturning of Roe,” Worthington told the DCNF. “The Democratic Party used that as a weapon, because people didn’t understand it. And as time went on, more people understood that the power has been put back to each state and the voters of each state. So I don’t think it is nearly the issue it was.”

Worthington’s small army of volunteers mobilizing voters has consistently heard from female voters about the pressures of inflation and higher living costs, he added.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, does not see a pressing need to tailor a specific message for suburban women in Bucks County beyond urging voters to consider whether they are better off today than they were four years ago, a campaign official told the DCNF.

“Our topline message is the same for whoever we’re talking to. That includes men or women, young or old, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, or whoever. And the message is, are you better off now than you were four years ago?” the Trump campaign official told the DCNF. “We’re bringing up kitchen table, bread-and-butter issues like inflation, cost of living, affordability. We’re talking about things like biological men playing in their or their daughters’ sports and sports leagues and using the same locker bathroom facilities. We’re talking about immigration and crime, especially in areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh … We’re not treating [suburban women] like an exotic other, but another group of voters who are affected by things like inflation, by crime, by these far-left pushes on things like biological men playing in women’s sports, and that sort of thing.”

“We’re not resting on our laurels or taking anything for granted, obviously, but overall, we feel pretty confident in Bucks County, and by extension, the rest of Pennsylvania.”

Featured Image: Screen Capture/CSPAN

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The plan, titled “A New Way Forward For The Middle Class,” proposes to build upon Biden initiatives like student loan debt cancellation, industrial policy, huge subsidies for green energy and going after corporations for alleged price gouging. Prior to quitting the presidential race under immense political pressure, voters were largely dissatisfied with Biden’s economy, which had come to be defined by 40-year high inflation.

“Harris isn’t going to stray very far from current Biden policies,” Ryan Young, a senior economist for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “She is trying to steer a middle course between carving out her own identity, but without implying that Biden has pushed bad policies, which she has been promoting for the last four years.”

Kamala Harris Economic Plan by Nick Pope on Scribd

Harris aims to “[make] corporations and the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share in taxes,” something she plans to do by essentially replicating the $5 trillion tax hike that Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget request called for. Some of Harris’ “common sense” reforms that would fuel this tax hike include a 25% unrealized capital gains tax for high-earning Americans and a top capital gains tax rate of 33%, an aggressive-but-less-ambitious alternative to the 44.6% rate that Biden has proposed.

“Americans should be deeply concerned about any political program attempting to brand a massive increase in taxes – in this case, including a tax on unrealized capital gains – as ‘new,’” Peter Earle, a senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “Increasing the reach of the confiscatory claws of the government while simultaneously amping up spending is how the US has accumulated $35 trillion in debt, over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and debased the dollar by 90 or more percent in fifty years … And to the extent that few specifics are given, there’s no reason not to assume that Harris’ policy goals are not simply a continuation of Bidenomics.”

Those tax increases may be necessary to pay for the litany of entitlements Harris is proposing.

“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting for a future with affordable, high-quality child care and pre-K, long-term care, and paid leave, while supporting care workers and family caregivers,” the economic plan reads, without attaching any price tag to the proposals. Biden either endorsed or pursued each of these policies during his term as president.

Harris’ plan also calls for a $25,000 subsidy for qualifying first-time homebuyers. This would actually end up raising home prices, in large part because “the best way to reduce housing prices is to build more housing, not to subsidize existing housing,” according to Young.

Biden has previously proposed a similar $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and those selling their first homes.

A Harris-Walz administration “will invest in building the energy industries of the future here in the United States, keeping the well-paid union jobs of the future here at home” while building on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s massive climate law. Beyond hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the green energy industry, the IRA also features tax credits that Americans can claim to install things like heat pumps and rooftop solar in their homes.

Undecided voter in Georgia: “If you look at the statistics now, we’re far worse now than we were before. Everything is worse now with Biden and Harris.”pic.twitter.com/poBh0V6lN0

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 20, 2024

Harris touts these credits in her new plan, stating that they allowed “more than 3.4 million American families [to save] $8.4 billion in 2023.” Missing from the economic plan is the fact that more than half of those savings were claimed by people making more than $100,000, and that six-figure-plus earners were over three times more likely to claim the credits, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

Like Biden, Harris is also promising to be a strong ally of organized labor if elected.

“She will also prevent misclassification of employees, and override so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws that prevent workers from freely organizing,” Harris’ economic plan states. “She will also continue to fight for manufacturing and infrastructure projects that benefit from significant public support to be subject to strong prevailing wage requirements, as well as Project Labor Agreements for construction projects above appropriate minimal thresholds.”

Notably, “right-to-work” laws do not prevent workers from organizing; such laws simply give workers the choice as to whether or not they would like to join a union or pay union dues, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the subsidies Biden unleashed on the American economy include labor requirements that advantage labor unions.

Throughout his first term, Biden repeatedly alleged that corporate greed and price gouging has led to price spikes for goods like gasoline and groceries, for example, while many economists and observers have actually blamed his tax-and-spend agenda for driving inflation. Nevertheless, Harris seems keen to continue blaming companies for higher prices, at least rhetorically.

A prospective Harris-Walz administration “will go after nefarious price gouging on essential goods during emergencies or times of crisis,” the plan states. Harris had previously trotted out a broader version of this policy in August, but she and her team subsequently specified that de facto price controls would only take effect in the wake of emergencies, like natural disasters or a pandemic.

“If one were to undertake an exhaustive research program to determine an economic policy which, throughout history, has not only failed repeatedly but caused tremendous damage on the way to inevitable failure, it would be price controls,” Earle told the DCNF. “For 4,000 years political authorities have been trying to freeze prices without causing shortages and extensive economic ruination and [have] been unsuccessful.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Owen Klinsky contributed to this report.

Featured Image: Screen Capture/CSPAN

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The activist group initially held back its endorsement of Harris, appearing to condition its support on her acceptance of a list of demands that included a complete moratorium on new oil and gas projects and a ban on new fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and waters. After meeting with a top Harris adviser earlier in September, Climate Defiance — which once targeted Harris with one of its signature disruptive protests in 2023 — is now backing her candidacy because she “is the leader we can pressure and move” on key energy policies, the group announced in a Wednesday social media post.

“Climate Defiance is endorsing Kamala Harris for President of the United States,” the group wrote in a post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Harris is not the visionary we need, but she is the leader we can pressure and move. A Trump Presidency would be a full-fledged disaster for our climate & our water & our lands. Trump would gut the [Environmental Protection Agency], tearing down regulations on cars and power plants and farms. He would sell out our sacred public spaces to his billionaire cronies. This is a nonstarter.”

MAJOR UPDATE: Climate Defiance is endorsing Kamala Harris for President of the United States.

Harris is not the visionary we need, but she is the leader we can pressure and move. (1/12)

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) September 25, 2024

The disruptive activism outfit, which often interrupts speeches and prominent events to protest against fossil fuels, joins a list of hardline eco-activism groups that are lining up to support Harris despite her pivot away from unequivocally supporting a fracking ban. Climate Defiance figures that Harris is a “finger-to-the-wind politician” who can be pressured into taking stances she may not initially want to take.

Climate Defiance “vehemently” opposes Harris’ recent about-face on the issue of fracking, which she formerly wanted to ban, and also the Biden-Harris administration’s policy of continuing arms shipments to Israel as it fights against terrorist groups in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. However, the group is so strongly repulsed by former President Donald Trump — who it claims is “beholden to racists, rapists, fascists, and billionaires” — that it is throwing its weight behind Harris.

Climate Defiance is one of numerous similarly-styled environmental protest groups that receives funding from the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), a U.S.-based nonprofit that receives funds from many prominent and wealthy American liberals. CEF donors include Hollywood writer Adam McKay and actor Jeremy Strong, according to the organization’s 2023 annual report.

Neither the Harris campaign nor Climate Defiance responded immediately to requests for comment.

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The Supreme Court’s emergency docket, which is made up of expedited cases from applicants seeking immediate action, currently features 18 applications, with 11 of them pertaining to the agency’s aggressive power plant regulations finalized in April. The flood of emergency applications seeking immediate relief from landmark EPA rules is a sign of things to come in the wake of the court’s June ruling that overturned Chevron deference, a precedent that formerly gave federal agencies broad power to essentially interpret the law themselves in instances of statutory ambiguity, former high-ranking EPA officials told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“I do think we’re going to see more of this in a post-Chevron world, particularly when an agency tries to go beyond the congressional intent or the longstanding regulatory practices of the agency,” Andrew Wheeler, who served as EPA administrator for former President Donald Trump, told the DCNF. “This power plant rule is supposed to be fuel switching, and this section of the Clean Air Act has not done that in the past. I think when you deviate from standard practices, you’re going to see more post-Chevron challenges.”

‘Entirely Unachievable’: Biden EPA Locks In Stringent Emissions Rule For Heavy-Duty Vehicles To Fight Climate Change https://t.co/hTI7251lp1

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 30, 2024

Each of the 17 cases pending against the EPA were filed in the weeks that followed the court’s decision to overturn Chevron deference, according to SCOTUSblog. Beyond the 11 applications that pertain directly to the EPA’s power plant regulations, there are also six taking aim at the agency’s May 7 action establishing new National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, and one application does not have to do with the EPA.

If enforced, the EPA’s power plant rules will require existing coal plants to control 90% of their emissions by 2032 if they want to run after 2039, and the regulations will also mandate new natural gas-fired plants to do the same in order to stay open past 2039, according to the agency. Critics of the EPA’s power plant rules have characterized the regulations as a de facto attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which overturned the Obama EPA’s so-called “Clean Power Plan.”

Plaintiffs in the various applications sitting on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket — sometimes referred to as the “shadow docket” — include states, such as Oklahoma and North Dakota, and industry stakeholders like Continental Resources and America’s Power. While it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will take up all or even many of these cases, it has the opportunity to seize on at least one of the opportunities in the emergency docket to take on one of the most aggressive regulations promulgated during President Joe Biden’s term in office.

“To me, it’s very exciting, because it is an available legal tool that I think will be really important to push back against this administration’s continued disregard for clear lines of the law,” Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff for the Trump EPA, told the DCNF regarding the post-Chevron deference legal landscape.

Dems’ Climate Bill Overrules Supreme Court, Expands EPA’s Control Over Energy Industryhttps://t.co/mhG3FJvxoz

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 25, 2022

Gunasekara likened the Biden EPA’s approach to major regulations as “a little bit of the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach,” but also gave the agency some credit for generally being strategic in pursuit of its agenda. However, the agency may have made a miscalculation by rushing to finalize major rules quickly in hopes of avoiding possible Congressional Review Act (CRA) actions if a second Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress came into power in November, according to Gunasekara and Wheeler.

“They are giving the Supreme Court numerous opportunities to take a shot at fundamental legal problems with this administration’s regulatory activity,” Gunasekara said of the EPA.

Wheeler agreed that the EPA may have blundered in rushing out major rules to beat CRA deadlines at the expense of being able to hedge their work against a post-Chevron deference future.

“I think the Biden administration made a strategic error in trying to push these regulations out prior to the artificial deadline of the Congressional Review Act,” Wheeler told the DCNF. “I said this at the time, they should have waited for the Loper decision so that they could incorporate the Supreme Court’s decision into their cases to make their regulations stronger. They made a conscious decision to try to get as many of these regulations through the process before the artificial Congressional Review Act deadline, knowing that the Loper decision was coming. And I think they should have waited.”

The EPA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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The vice president reiterated on the debate stage that she no longer backs a fracking ban, stated that she favored energy independence and took credit for specific oil and gas-related provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate bill that passed the Senate with Harris’ tie-breaking vote in 2022. While Harris tried to depict herself as a champion of energy independence and diversifying supply, her record as vice president and as a senator is full of actions that restricted American fossil fuel production.

ABC’s Linsey Davis, one of the debate’s moderators, asked Harris to explain her reversals on a number of topics, ranging from her past support for a fracking ban to her purportedly discarded view that illegal border crossings should be decriminalized.

“So my values have not changed. And I’m going to discuss every one — at least every point that you’ve made. But in particular, let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States,” Harris said in response. “And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”

As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris said there is “no question” that fracking should be banned, and she did not disown that position in the 2020 vice presidential debate against former Vice President Mike Pence as she suggested on Tuesday night. In the debate against Pence, Harris only went so far as to say that President Joe Biden would not ban fracking.

In the first weeks of the Biden-Harris administration in 2021, Biden signed a since-overturned executive order that effectively prohibited future oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters.

Meanwhile, the IRA mandated the federal government to hold 60 million acres worth of offshore oil and gas leases in order to hold more offshore wind lease sales. Ultimately, the Biden administration finalized the bare minimum 60 million acres for offshore oil and gas lease sales in its five-year leasing schedule in December 2023.

The IRA also allowed for the creation of a new tax on methane emissions that has been described by opponents as a de facto natural gas tax that would likely increase costs for consumers.

Onshore, the Biden-Harris administration has taken huge swaths of the federal estate off the table for oil and gas development. The administration has moved to block future oil and gas activity on tens of millions of acres of Alaskan land and canceled previously-awarded leases.

Moreover, federal data analyzed by the Western Energy Alliance shows that the number of onshore acres available for lease sales, the number of leases issued, and the number of acres issued through those leases all trended down under the Biden-Harris administration.

“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris continued in her response. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”

Nominally, it is true that U.S. oil production reached record highs while Biden was in office. However, as energy sector experts previously explained to the DCNF, this may be an achievement that happened in spite of the administration rather than because of it: fossil fuel production, especially on federal lands, takes years to come to fruition, meaning that some of the output happening today is the product of work done under the Trump administration.

The U.S. is still a net exporter of crude oil as of 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration, but the administration may be more sensitive to global price swings than they let on. Officials have loosely enforced sanctions against Iranian and Russian oil to keep prices stable ahead of the pivotal 2024 election.

The Harris campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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Patrick Moore, who was listed on Greenpeace’s website as one of the original founders as recently as 2007 before the organization attempted to distance itself from him, would like Greenpeace USA to lose the massive lawsuit filed against the group by a company called Energy Transfer, he told the DCNF. The company is seeking $300 million in damages from Greenpeace USA in a North Dakota lawsuit that alleges the group or its entities incited major protests against Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline, funded various attacks meant to damage the project and orchestrated a smear campaign against the company and its development.

“They’ve got to embrace what is really true science…. They ignore massively important facts, and then make lies up to replace them. So yes, I hope they are going to learn a lesson from this,” Moore told the DCNF regarding his old group and the lawsuit it faces. “Science is about truth, and then you decide your policy. These guys, they personally decide the policy, and then they lie about the underlying scientific aspects. It just completely bastardized science in much of the world, especially in the Western world … they have become sort of spoiled brats, I would say, and they don’t have good science.”

‘They’re Gonna Pay For It’: A Single Texas Billionaire May Be About To Force Greenpeace USA Into Bankruptcyhttps://t.co/2laZEUZ1Jv

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 10, 2024

Greenpeace USA “would certainly deserve” to lose the lawsuit, Moore told the DCNF. “They are basically attempting to destroy the means of transportation and so many other things. There’s no doubt about it that pipelines are the safest way to move liquids, especially flammable ones. There’s simply no question.”

Moore went on to play “a significant role” in Greenpeace’s Canadian arm, according to Greenpeace, but he left the organization in 1986 because he felt it had become too radical. Despite listing him as an original founder as recently as 2007, Greenpeace now has an entire website dedicated to explaining that Moore does not represent the organization and that he is not an original founder.

Energy Transfer’s billionaire executive chairman Kelcy Warren is behind the company’s lawsuit, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Warren, who once said that green activists ought to be “removed from the gene pool,” views climate activists as a significant threat to the energy industry and has stated that he is unafraid to go after them for the problems they caused for the company and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Meanwhile, some of Greenpeace USA’s top leaders have fought internally about what kind of settlement may be acceptable to reach with the company, according to the WSJ. However, even if Energy Transfer wins the lawsuit, it may be difficult to enforce penalties against Greenpeace’s central coordinating body in the Netherlands because that entity does not hold assets in the U.S.

Representatives for Greenpeace USA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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Kelcy Warren’s company, Energy Transfer, is seeking legal recourse against Greenpeace’s American arm in court, alleging that several Greenpeace USA entities paid for attacks against the company’s Dakota Access Pipeline and proliferated misinformation about the firm and its project in 2016, according to the WSJ. At the time, the project was a flashpoint in the environmental movement’s crusade against major fossil fuel infrastructure developments, and it was ultimately completed in 2017.

“Everybody is afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people,” Warren said in a televised interview in 2017, according to the WSJ. “But what they did to us is wrong, and they’re gonna pay for it.”

Eco-activists flocked to the construction site of the pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 to try to stop the $3.8 billion project from being built, and clashes between the protesters and law enforcement occasionally turned violent, according to the WSJ. The lawsuit, which seeks $300 million in damages, would probably crush Greenpeace USA, though it does not pose such a threat to Greenpeace’s international operations because the organization’s main organizing body based in the Netherlands does not own assets in the U.S.

The company tried to sue in federal court first, and refiled the suit in a state court after a federal judge threw out the original litigation, according to the WSJ. Energy Transfer is pursuing the lawsuit under a law that was originally created to go after the mafia.

As Warren — who once said that climate activists should be “removed from the gene pool” — sees it, Greenpeace USA was principally responsible for delaying the project’s construction and imposing millions of dollars of added costs on Energy Transfer, according to the WSJ. Greenpeace, meanwhile, maintains that the lawsuit could stifle free speech and that it only ever played a supporting role in the protests against the pipeline.

Moreover, Greenpeace USA is also preparing for a range of possible outcomes, including bankruptcy, while some of its leaders and members of the board have fought over what kind of settlement could be palatable, according to the WSJ.

“You’re not going to wear Kelcy Warren out, I can promise you that,” Matthew Ramsey, a director on Energy Transfer’s board, told the WSJ. “He will fight to the bitter end.”

Greenpeace USA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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Roger Pielke Jr., a former environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, requested that NOAA correct its billion dollar disasters (BDD) dataset in January, alleging that the dataset’s sourcing and methodology are not sufficiently transparent for the metric to inform policy. NOAA responded to Pielke’s correction request on Aug. 21, admitting that the dataset has not undergone external peer review since 2015 and committing to improving its “documentation and transparency” of the dataset’s component parts going forward.

BDD data keeps track of natural disasters that caused $1 billion or more in inflation-adjusted damages going back to 1980, with NOAA and the Biden White House contending that the increasing frequency of BDD events evidences worsening climate change. However, BDD is an economic statistic rather than an indicator of changing meteorological conditions; the same exact hurricane could hit the same exact city 100 years apart, but the damage totals for each storm would be vastly different given that there are more assets to be destroyed in harm’s way now than there were a century ago.

NOAA BDD RFC Response by Nick Pope on Scribd:

In response to Pielke’s request, NOAA said it would start disclosing more of the publicly available sources that it uses to craft its data, formalize and disclose the steps the agency takes to ensure the BDD data’s “robustness” and set up a peer-review system that is consistent with NOAA’s own policies.

“NOAA made some difficult admissions here about the fact that the BDD tabulation has failed to meet their standards for scientific integrity and information quality,” Pielke, who believes climate change is a serious problem, told the DCNF. “The BDD tabulation is clever marketing and the media love it. However, no one should mistake it as science.”

Pielke addressed NOAA’s response to his request in an Aug. 21 post to his Substack page, writing that “these responses and admissions clearly indicate that the NOAA tabulation is not suitable for research.” He added that NOAA’s response to his correction request concedes that “historical versions of the tabulation (and thus new entries and changes to it) are only available since 2020,” meaning “that 40 of (almost) 44 years of the tabulation lack basic information on the loss estimates and how they were originally compiled.”

While BDD’s critics contend it is a flawed metric to use as a proxy for the intensity of climate change, the statistic was used in a landmark climate report published by the Biden administration in 2023 and cited as evidence to support the administration’s freeze on approvals for new liquified natural gas export terminals by Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk in written testimony submitted to Congress in February.

“NOAA notes that the RFC [request for correction] did not identify specific data points that need correcting. In conducting its review of the RFC, NOAA has not identified any data inaccuracies in the Billion Dollar Disaster data set,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “NOAA has determined the U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters data set meets the threshold for influential scientific information (ISI) under NOAA’s Information Quality Guidelines. As a result, NOAA will review and update its management practices for the data set.”

The actions NOAA will take to improve its BDD data include “disclosing and facilitating access to several publicly available input sources; disclosing and facilitating access to methodologically relevant factors, such as insurance penetration rates and underlying economic data; formalizing procedures currently used to check the robustness of NOAA’s analyses, and stating these on the Billion Dollar Disaster website; and, instituting a peer-review cycle consistent with the data set’s ISI determination,” NOAA added in its statement.

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During an Aug. 16 speech in North Carolina laying out some of her economic ideas, Harris proposed to impose a federal ban on “price gouging” to bring down prices of food and groceries, an idea that critics from across the political spectrum derided as collectivist price controls, extreme and unlikely to work. In the week since Harris announced her idea, numerous Democrats and some prominent media personalities and outlets have mobilized to redefine or explain away Harris’ proposal as more nuanced and less radical than the GOP is making it out to be.

After Harris’ proposal received sharp criticisms from economists and pundits, unnamed sources familiar with the vice president’s thinking told The New York Times that the “price gouging” ban would likely only take effect in emergencies, such as a pandemic or in the wake of a natural disaster. However, since America is currently not facing such circumstances, those unnamed sources implied that it “might actually not do anything to bring down grocery prices right now” if enacted.

‘Most Terrifying Proposal I’ve Ever Seen’: Former Trump Economic Advisor Reacts To Kamala Harris ‘Price Gouging’ Planhttps://t.co/hhJgw3BhV7

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 17, 2024

Nevertheless, Democrats and some in the media have attempted essentially to defend the proposal by suggesting it isn’t so simple.

Axios ran a Tuesday story under the headline “How price gouging bans really work.” The article states that policies like the one Harris proposed are “oft-hated by economists, but they’ve been around for a long time” and that “most Americans intuitively understand the rationale behind them, and Harris is trying to appeal to voters — not academics or newspaper columnists.”

The Axios story cites Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School, for color; Teachout wrote her own Thursday piece for The Atlantic with the headline “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.” In her column, Teachout writes that “Kamala Harris’s proposed price-gouging ban might irritate academics, but it makes sense to everyone else,” simultaneously defending the policy as neither radical nor novel while conceding that its exact parameters are unclear.

Paul Krugman, an economist and columnist for The New York Times, described Harris’ economic ideas, including the price gouging ban, as “a solid center-left agenda” in a Monday column.

“I’ve been amazed at how many credulous commentators, and not just on the right, have asserted that Harris is calling for price controls, making her out to be the second coming of Richard Nixon if not the next Nicolas Maduro,” Krugman wrote in his column. “What she has actually called for is legislation banning price gouging on groceries. Obviously, this is a populist political gesture — a way to offer something to voters upset about high food prices. But just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.”

The Trump campaign’s assertion that Harris has embraced communist-style price controls is simply “a new line of false attack” against the vice president, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday. CBS also brought Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear onto the program to discuss why Harris’ proposal is more nuanced than outright socialist price controls.

Gretchen Whitmer Says Critics Of Harris’ Price Gouging Plan Are ‘Reading Too Much’ Into Ithttps://t.co/h8GWuL2xvB

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 20, 2024

“It’s definitely clear that at least a few corporate journalists are trying to defend Kamala’s proposal. But it’s a very unenviable task,” Bill Da’Agostino, a senior research analyst for the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog organization, told the DCNF. “She proposed price controls, so now they’re going to bat for price controls. Moments like these are when the real hacks expose themselves.”

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who recently said that she does not believe a new government report showing that 818,000 jobs purportedly created under the Biden administration never actually existed, also stepped in to deflect criticism of Harris’ plan. She described the notion that Harris’ proposal amounts to price controls as “a Republican talking point,” during a Wednesday appearance on CNBC.

Democratic Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan have also attempted to downplay or contextualize Harris’ proposal as more nuanced than outright price controls, according to The Washington Post. Some of the criticisms of Harris’ “price gouging” ban have been made in good faith by some observers, but there are other criticisms of the policy that are “just malicious attacks from the other side trying to characterize her as a socialist,” Ben Harris, a former senior official at the Biden Treasury Department, told the outlet.

“Her idea flopped badly. They can’t just withdraw it, so they have to ‘contextualize’ it, hence the references to a pandemic or national emergency,” J.D. Foster, the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and a former vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It was a dumb idea and they are stuck with it as an example of Harris’ extreme ignorance about how the economy works.”

Ryan Young, senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agreed that Harris’ proposed federal “price gouging” ban is effectively an endorsement of price controls.

“Most voters are too young to remember Richard Nixon’s price and wage controls, but they still have the right intuition—you don’t want politicians setting prices,” Young told the DCNF. “That is why Harris’s price gouging proposals have gotten a cold reception. That is also why her partisans are trying to claim that price gouging bans aren’t really price controls. Which they are, just under a different name.”

The Harris campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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The plea deals would have allowed the three Guantanamo Bay prisoners — including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — to skirt the death penalty in exchange for pleading guilty to all charges, a development that multiple family members of 9/11 victims objected to strongly in interviews with the Daily Caller News Foundation before Austin reversed course. Austin said that “responsibility for such a decision should rest with [him]” rather than subordinate entities given the significance of the government taking the death penalty off the table for terrorists who allegedly facilitated the murders of nearly 3,000 innocent people.

“For me and a lot of the families, this is a very welcomed change in their position. The biggest fear that I had, and a lot of family members had, was what could happen with these three individuals without a death penalty,” Terry Strada, whose husband died on Sept. 11 just days after the birth of their third child, told the DCNF following Austin’s order. “Wherever they would be held for a life sentence, any administration going forward could possibly use them in a prisoner trade deal. The death penalty is the right thing for them to face because of the crime that they committed. So, I’m very happy to hear that the Pentagon has stepped in and is doing the right thing.”

Prior to Austin’s decision to effectively revoke the plea deals, Strada told the DCNF that the pretrial agreements felt to her like a “betrayal.”

Austin 9-11 Plea Deals Order by Nick Pope on Scribd

In addition to effectively walking back the plea deals, Austin also relieved the Guantanamo Bay court overseer in his order, according to The New York Times.

“We remain hopeful that these animals get the death penalty. I can’t understand why we would ever be negotiating with terrorists,” Brinley Maloney, whose husband was killed on 9/11, told the DCNF in response to Austin’s decision to intervene. “Hopefully, politicians aren’t making this decision because it’s election season. All Americans should stand united in calling for accountability and justice.”

Before Austin stepped in, Maloney told the DCNF that the pretrial deals were a “disappointment to my family and all of the 9/11 families.” Maloney’s daughter, who was a toddler when her father died, told the DCNF that the agreements were “disgusting and incredibly disappointing” before Austin walked them back.

The Biden White House distanced itself from the plea deals before Austin stepped in to revoke them, with a National Security Council spokesperson telling the DCNF on Thursday that it learned of the plea deals after they had been reached and that “the president and the White House played no role in this process.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also told reporters that the White House did not play a role in the plea deal process during a Thursday press briefing.

Republican lawmakers and many in the media lambasted the plea deals as a disgrace prior to Austin’s move to rescind the agreements.

Frank Siller, the founder of the Tunnel to Towers Foundation whose brother — a firefighter — died on 9/11, likened the deals to a “slap in the face” in a statement shared with the DCNF prior to Austin’s decision to effectively put the death penalty back on the table.

“After 9/11, we all said, ‘Never forget.’ Well, we forgot. And not only did we forget, we don’t give a damn anymore,” Don Arias, a retired Air Force lieutenant whose brother was killed on Sept. 11, told The New York Times before Austin stepped in. “A lot of people just want this over with.”

Joe Connor, who lost a cousin on 9/11 decades after his father was killed by Puerto Rican terrorists, also ripped the plea deals before they were revoked.

“You know, after seeing this, like, I’m so afraid we’re not going to get justice for my cousin and all the thousands killed that day and their families. My dad’s terrorists, the FALN, they were released. They were given clemency by the Clintons and Obama,” Connor told Fox News. “It’s all politics, and it concerned me then that we were going to have these guys somehow end up in a U.S. prison. It concerns me that someone’s going to use politics to release these guys.”

The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment, and the Department of Defense referred the DCNF to Austin’s order when contacted for comment.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/ABC 7 News)

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.