Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s takeover of defending the state Treasurer in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s anti-ESG law has led to some pointed claims by the Democratic lawyer who filed the suit in the first place.
In a filing last week, attorney Colin Walke responded to the attorney general’s argument that state retiree Don Keenan had no legal standing to file the suit last December in Oklahoma County District Court. He also accused the Attorney General of manufacturing statements allegedly made by the Treasurer.
It was Keenan who contended the 2022 Energy Discrimination Elimination Act is not only vague but violated a host of constitutional provisions. A District Judge granted a temporary suspension of Treasurer Todd Russ’s enforcement of the act which banned certain financial firms from doing business with the state if they discriminated against the oil and gas industry.
Now Keenan, through his attorney, former Democratic legislator Colin Walke, is asking for a permanent injunction of the enforcement of the Act. His legal response contended that the Attorney General’s argument that groups such as the Oklahoma Public Employment Retirement System had the legal ability of requesting an exemption from the Act was a work of “fiction.”
“The Act is so poorly written that the very boogey-men sought to be blacklisted—ESG investing companies like Vanguard, Fidelity, and BlackRock, all of whom have ESG specific funds, and therefore literally make money by not investing in oil and gas—are incapable of being blacklisted under the Act,” claimed Walke in his response filed on Friday.
He further claimed that, “Citizens are entitled to laws of sufficient clarity that they leave no room for capricious enforcement by officials.”
Walke wasn’t finished with his charges about the vagueness in the Act.
“The awesome unilateral power granted to the Defendant by the Act—to blacklist companies from doing business with the State of Oklahoma—coupled with the litany of ambiguities ranging from the syntactically impossible definition of “Boycott energy company” to the plethora of exemption provisions, which are meaningless under Defendant’s easy-peazy solution, warrants a stringent vagueness analysis.”
He further accused the Attorney General of creating a statement by State Treasurer Ross when he made no such statement. Walke called them a “manufactured quote.”
‘In his Response, Defendant argues that, “In the words of Treasurer Ross, ‘the law’s purpose is twofold,” and then cites to an OCPA article, which contains no quote whatsoever from Defendant regarding the law’s purpose.”