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For Immediate Release
April, 02 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Jayson O’Neill, Director
Western Values Project
jayson@westernvaluesproject.org
(406) 200-8582
Senators Requesting Big Oil Bailouts Received Millions in Big Oil Donations
Letter To Oil and Gas Lobbyist-Turned Interior Secretary Bernhardt Requests Unilateral Royalty Reductions.
WASHINGTON
Early this week, a dozen Senators sent a letter to President Trump's Interior Secretary David Bernhardt asking the former oil and gas lobbyist to unilaterally lower already outdated and inadequate royalty rates for domestic oil leaseholders. New research compiled by Western Values Project, a Montana-based Accountable.US project focused on public lands conservation and accountability, found that these Senators have raked in over $14 million in oil and gas donations over their political careers.
"It's crystal clear that for these Senators, Big Oil and extractive corporations come first. This crisis revealed their true values and it's not the American people nor the communities that would get the short end of the stick at a time when they simply cannot afford to if Trump and Bernhardt acquiesce," said Jayson O'Neill, Director of Western Values Project. "Instead of focusing on the public health crisis that is being exacerbated by the Trump administration's failures, their pushing for another Big Oil bailout. Big Oil should get in line like everyone else."
The oil and gas industry consistently ranked as one of the top six donors for all 12 of the Senators that were signatories to the request. President Trump is scheduled to meet with several multinational oil corporations and CEOs on Friday, including Harold Hamm, the CEO and founder of Continental Resources, another major Trump donor, according to reporting by Politico.
Learn more about the Trump administration's efforts to carve-out more big oil and coal bailouts at WesternValuesProject.org.
The Oil And Gas Industry Has Given More Than $14 Million To The 12 Senators Who Asked Secretary Bernhardt To Suspend Federal Leasing Royalties
The Oil And Gas Industry Was Consistently A Top Six Contributor To Senators Who Signed The Letter
Twelve Senators Urged Interior Secretary David Bernhardt To Provide Relief To Extractive Companies By Suspending Or Reducing Federal Royalties.
On March 30th, 2020, Senators John Barrasso, John Cornyn, Mike Enzi, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Jim Inhofe, Bill Cassidy, Kevin Cramer, Mitt Romney, Dan Sullivan, John Hoeven, And Mike Lee Sent A Letter To Interior Secretary David Bernhardt Asking Him To Suspend Federal Leasing Royalties For Extractive Companies. "Given these considerations, we urge you to provide necessary relief in the form of a suspension or reduction in federal royalties paid to the U.S. Treasury, particularly for small and mid size producers. Without these measures, it is likely that many companies will cease production, which could cost thousands of jobs and threaten American energy security. These measures of relief will allow a stronger domestic energy industry to emerge and will help maintain America's role as a global energy leader." [Senatorial Letter To David Bernhardt, 03/30/20]
These Same 12 Senators Have Taken In More Than $14 Million In Campaign Donations From The Oil And Gas Industry.
Senators John Barrasso, John Cornyn, Mike Enzi, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Jim Inhofe, Bill Cassidy, Kevin Cramer, Mitt Romney, Dan Sullivan, John Hoeven, And Mike Lee Have Taken In $14,173,076 In Campaign Contributions From The Oil And Gas Industry.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has taken a total of $1,145,191 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. John A Barrasso - Wyoming, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator John Cornyn of Texas has taken a total of $4,067,906 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. John Cornyn - Texas, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming has taken a total of $530,583 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. Mike Enzi - Wyoming, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Steve Daines of Montana has taken a total of $857,079 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. Steven Daines - Montana, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana has taken a total of $893,247 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. John Kennedy - Louisiana, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma has taken a total of $2,139,220 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. James M Inhofe - Oklahoma, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has taken a total of $1,554,805 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. Bill Cassidy - Louisiana, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota has taken a total of $1,174,330 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. Kevin Cramer - North Dakota, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah has taken a total of $111,818 from the oil and gas industry in his Senate campaigns. [Sen. Mitt Romney - Utah, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska has taken a total of $658,524 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. Dan Sullivan - Alaska, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota has taken a total of $683,078 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. John Hoeven - North Dakota, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Senator Mike Lee of Utah has taken a total of $683,078 from the oil and gas industry. [Sen. Mike Lee - Utah, Opensecrets.org, accessed 04/01/20]
Western Values Project brings accountability to the national conversation about Western public lands and national parks conservation - a space too often dominated by industry lobbyists and their allies in government.
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ICE 'Not Welcome,' Maine Officials Say as Reports Point to State as Trump's Next Target
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Maine Gov. Janet Mills was among the leaders in the state who addressed reports late Wednesday that the Trump administration plans to send federal agents including those with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to cities such as Portland and Lewiston, and said unequivocally that the violence masked officers have unleashed on Minneapolis in recent days would not be welcome by residents and officials.
Mills said ICE had refused to confirm the reports that its agents would be in the state and what the basis for the operations would be, but MS Now reported Wednesday that the administration is considering sending federal officers to Maine.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump mentioned Maine's Somali community in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club; Somali people in Minnesota have been a top target of ICE's activities there.
Maine's Democratic governor said her administration was "taking proactive steps to prepare."
My statement on speculation that the Federal government may conduct Federal law enforcement operations in Maine in the coming days pic.twitter.com/aNriEQv7aI
— Governor Janet Mills (@GovJanetMills) January 14, 2026
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Mills said state police had been directed to work closely with local law enforcement in cities including Lewiston and Portland, where the police departments do not cooperate with ICE.
Reports of the potential deployment—which Portland Mayor Mark Dion denounced as a "paramilitary approach"—come days after a bill, LD 1971, became law and prohibited all state and local law enforcement from engaging in federal immigration enforcement activities.
“This new law will ensure Maine towns and cities are not complicit in or liable for federal abuses of power, and will improve public safety by building trust between local law enforcement and the communities they are supposed to serve," said ACLU of Maine policy director Michael Kebede on Tuesday.
The bill passed into law without the signature of Mills, a Democrat who is running in the US Senate primary in hopes of unseating Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The governor has been trailing Graham Platner, a progressive who has called for the "dismantling" of ICE, in recent polls.
“One of the reasons I want to go to the Senate is that when we have power again, I want to haul all of these people and the ones that made them do it in front of a Senate subcommittee, make them take their masks off,” Platner said in October.
Dion and Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline, also a Democrat, urged residents and businesses to know their rights in case they are approached by federal immigration agents.
Dion emphasized in a statement Wednesday that "there is no evidence of unchecked criminal activity in our community requiring a disproportionate presence of federal agents."
"In that view, Portland rejects the need for the deployment of ICE agents into our neighborhoods," said the mayor, a Democrat.
President Donald Trump's recent escalation of federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has led to an ICE agent's killing of 37-year-old Renee Good, who had been observing the agents as people across Chicago, Charlotte, and other cities have over the past several months. A federal agent also shot and wounded a man during a traffic stop there on Wednesday.
Trump has largely been targeting the Somali population in Minnesota amid a social services fraud scandal in the state in which some Somali people have been charged and convicted. He has called for all Somali immigrants to leave the US. On Tuesday, Trump said that “Somali scams” had happened “in Maine, too.”
Maine has a significant Somali community including many people who have become US citizens; the population is largely centered in Lewiston and Portland.
MS Now reported that according to people familiar with the administration's plan, immigration operations in Maine were "being designed to arrest and detain Somali refugees for reviews that could last around 30 days."
The Maine Monitor reported that immigration authorities visited Lewiston last month and visited Gateway Community Services, a healthcare provider for immigrants that the state suspended payments to after it alleged more than $1 million in interpreter fraud.
Mills said Wednesday that she fully supported the right of Maine residents to protest a federal immigration enforcement operation and urged them to do so peacefully and "to meet any hostility with reserve and resolve."
"I know there are more unanswered than answered questions right now," she said. "We will continue seeking out answers and continue to communicate our information and plans with you in the coming days. But know this: Maine will not be intimidated, and we will not betray the values that make us who we are."
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Protests against the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis intensified late Wednesday after a federal officer shot and wounded a man during a traffic stop.
"Get ICE out of the city!" one resident told Status Coup News as federal agents responded forcefully to demonstrations against their abuses, firing flash bang grenades and chemical munitions at protesters.
🚨BREAKING: ICE unleashes ONSLAUGHT of flash bang grenades and chemical ammunition at unarmed Minneapolis protesters in WAR-LIKE attack. Several protesters struck. Our reporter @zdroberts struck in the head.
"I got hit in the head really bad." LIVE NOW ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/4hlyNeci7s
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The agent shot the man in the leg, and both were later taken to the hospital.
Minneapolis officials responded with outrage to the shooting, which came a week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good.
Jacob Frey, the city's Democratic mayor, said that "no matter what led up to this incident, the situation we are seeing in our city is not sustainable."
"This is already the second shooting that we've had in a week," Frey said during a press conference late Wednesday. "People are scared. The atmosphere is tense. But again, there is another option. We can stop going down this route together."
The Trump administration has only added fuel to the fire, further expanding the presence of federal agents in Minnesota and attacking the state's officials and residents with increasingly belligerent rhetoric. President Donald Trump wrote on social media earlier this week that "reckoning and retribution is coming" to Minnesota.
Wednesday's shooting came as ICE agents, often heavily armed and wearing combat gear, continued terrorizing communities in Minneapolis and across the United States, with many incidents captured on video. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday that "armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live."
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Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne said Wednesday that he was assaulted by ICE officers while lawfully observing them. Payne noted in an interview with the New York Times that ICE agents frequently brandish their weapons to threaten residents.
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"The continuing effort led by Washington Republicans to unfairly rig the midterm elections with an unprecedented series of mid-decade gerrymanders must be met head-on," said a former US attorney general.
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Democratic officials and voters battling President Donald Trump's attempt to bully Republican state lawmakers to rig congressional maps for the GOP ahead of the November midterm elections recorded two key wins on Wednesday.
In California, two members of a three-judge panel upheld Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's new map, which was approved by the state's voters late last year and then challenged by the California Republican Party and the US Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Democratic majority in the state's House of Delegates advanced a proposed constitutional amendment that would let lawmakers to redraw the congressional map in the middle of the decade—an authority that would expire in 2030.
As the Virginia Mercury detailed:
Democrats argue the amendment is necessary to counter aggressive Republican gerrymanders elsewhere that could tilt control of Congress, while Republicans call it a blatant power grab that undermines Virginia voters' 2020 decision to create an independent redistricting commission.
"This amendment creates essentially a narrow, temporary exception," said Del. Rodney Willett (D-58), the measure's sponsor. He emphasized repeatedly that the proposal does not automatically redraw any lines and does not eliminate the Virginia Redistricting Commission.
"We are not expanding the authority to change the state district lines," Willett said. "We're just talking about congressional lines. And more importantly, it does not change any of the lines as they exist today—this just creates the process to consider doing that."
The proposal now heads to the Virginia Senate, where Democrats also have a majority. If it advances, as expected, then the measure would be voted on by state residents in April.
According to the Hill, "Democratic leaders in Old Dominion are eying either a 10-1 or 9-2 map in a state where Democrats currently have a 6-5 edge in the congressional delegation."
Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, now chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a Wednesday statement that "the continuing effort led by Washington Republicans to unfairly rig the midterm elections with an unprecedented series of mid-decade gerrymanders must be met head-on."
"The threat created by the Trump administration to our democracy is grave. Protecting our system requires taking extraordinary and responsive action, like the proposed referendum in Virginia," he continued. "The decision by Virginia lawmakers to pursue a process that allows voters to weigh in stands in stark contrast to the illegitimate power grab engineered by Republicans in Texas and anti-democracy efforts now underway by politicians in Florida."
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In the court battle over the California map, Judges Josephine Staton and Wesley Hsu—appointees of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, respectively—allowed the new districts to stand, while a Trump appointee, Judge Kenneth Lee, dissented.
Welcoming Wednesday's court ruling, Newsom said that "Republicans' weak attempt to silence voters failed. California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 50—to respond to Trump's rigging in Texas—and that is exactly what this court concluded."
Although the case could move to the US Supreme Court—which has a right-wing supermajority that includes three Trump appointees—the justices in December gave Texas Republicans a green light to use their recently redrawn map.
As the New York Times reported: "The Supreme Court previously determined that courts could not rule on claims of partisan gerrymandering. So Republicans who oppose the California maps face the same challenge as Democrats who opposed the maps in Texas: to prove that race, not partisanship, was the predominant factor in crafting the new district lines."
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee intervened in the lawsuit, represented by Elias Law Group. Firm partner Abha Khanna called Wednesday's decision "a vindication of California voters and a decisive rebuke of the Republican Party's attempt to use the courts to overturn an election."
"The court correctly recognized that Proposition 50 was an unambiguously partisan response to Texas' unprecedented mid-decade redistricting," Khanna added. "The accusations of racial gerrymandering, especially coming from Republicans and Trump's Department of Justice, were nothing more than a cynical attempt to prevent California voters from having their voice heard in response to Texas."
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