Fortunately, the Kinder Morgan pipeline project is dead — Kinder Morgan themselves admit it. But one aspect of the protests against the pipeline is very disturbing: the argument that the pipeline must not be built because the necessary land takings would violate Article 97 of the State Constitution, and the State Constitution trumps anything that FERC, the cognizant federal regulating agency, might do.
That argument is very similar to the arguments that a number of states, particularly in the South, have raised against federal efforts to overrule the legal measures that those states have taken to disqualify poor people, college students, and other potential Democratic voters from voting. Many of the same states have also invoked state law to negate gay rights and abortion rights. They too plead “states’ rights.” Many of the people who have raised the Article 97 issue to block the pipeline are also strongly opposed to the efforts to keep “undesirables” from voting.
You can’t have it both ways. If federal law supersedes state law, which it almost certainly does, then the Article 97 argument ought to lose.
Paul Abrahams
Deerfield