Supreme Court justice will not take part in Uinta Basin Railway case

Anschutz Exploration Corp., an oil and gas company involved in production in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, has filed an amicus brief in support of the Utah group seeking a decision limiting the scope of environmental reviews.

The case, scheduled to be argued Tuesday, is an appeal by the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition — the government body supporting construction of the 88-mile railway in eastern Utah. The coalition is appealing a lower-court decision that blocked Surface Transportation Board approval of the project. Citing conflicting lower-court decisions, it asks the Supreme Court to determine whether regulatory agencies must consider environmental impacts beyond actions within the agency that has jurisdiction. The STB approval was blocked because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that the rail regulators failed to consider all downstream environmental effects of the rail project, including potential harm from oil drilling in the Uinta Basin and from the refining of that oil.

U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., who wrote a November letter to Gorsuch in which he and 12 other members of Congress sought the justice’s recusal, said in a statement on Wednesday that he applauds Gorsuch for “doing the right and honorable thing.” Johnson also called for passage of a bill he has authored creating an “enforceable ethics code with a mechanism for deciding ethics issues,” saying the system should not have to rely on justices choosing to do the right thing. That bill has been stalled in committee since it was introduced in February 2023.