Meridian

Category: Politics

  • FERC opens emergency review of three interconnection queues

    FERC opens emergency review of three interconnection queues

    The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order on Tuesday opening an expedited review of interconnection study timelines at PJM, MISO and ERCOT, giving each operator ninety days to justify processes that now average close to four years from request to executed agreement.

    The order is unusual in its framing. Rather than proposing a rule, the Commission has asked the three operators to demonstrate that their current timelines are consistent with the obligation to provide interconnection service on terms that are not unduly discriminatory — an obligation that has been in statute since 1935 and rarely invoked against processing delay.

    Two commissioners wrote separately. The concurrence argued the review should extend to all regional operators rather than the three with the largest queues. The dissent argued that the Commission’s own 2023 reform order has not been fully implemented and that a second proceeding will divert staff from the first.

    Grid operators have consistently attributed the backlog to volume rather than process, noting that request volume has increased roughly sevenfold since 2018 while study staff has roughly doubled. That defence is factually correct and, in the Commission’s framing, beside the point.

    Comments are due in ninety days. Whatever the Commission decides, no project currently in a queue will connect sooner because of it.

  • Federal AI preemption bill stalls as nineteen states file suit

    Federal AI preemption bill stalls as nineteen states file suit

    The Uniform Artificial Intelligence Standards Act was written to do one thing: replace the growing patchwork of state AI statutes with a single federal floor, and void everything below it. As drafted, it would have preempted eleven state laws outright and left another nine in partial force.

    Two Republican votes moved this week. Senator Kavanagh of Arizona, who had been a co-sponsor, withdrew after her state’s attorney general joined the multistate suit. Senator Reyes of Nevada followed within a day. The bill now sits two votes short of cloture with no obvious path to finding them before the recess.

    The suit itself is the more interesting document. Nineteen state attorneys general — fourteen Democratic, five Republican — argue that the preemption clause reaches beyond the Commerce Clause because it voids state consumer-protection law in transactions that never cross state lines. That is a narrow argument, and narrow arguments are the ones that survive appellate review.

    Industry groups had treated the bill as close to inevitable as recently as March. The Chamber of Progress spent an estimated $14 million on the campaign. What changed was not lobbying pressure but the arithmetic of the map: as more states passed their own statutes, more state officials acquired something concrete to lose.

    The bill’s sponsors say they will reintroduce a narrowed version in the autumn, limited to model training disclosures. Whether the coalition that killed the broad version cares about the narrow one is the question nobody in the caucus wants to answer on the record.

  • The redistricting fight nobody is watching yet

    The redistricting fight nobody is watching yet

    There are four state supreme court elections this November that will determine the shape of eleven congressional districts, and none of them has drawn national coverage.

    The mechanism is straightforward. In each of the four states — Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and Montana — the state constitution contains a clause governing districting standards, and in each the operative interpretation of that clause was set by a decision reached on a bare majority. A single seat changing hands changes the majority. A changed majority invites a new challenge to maps that were litigated to exhaustion two years ago.

    This is not a hypothetical sequence. It has already happened twice: in Wisconsin in 2023, where a new majority struck legislative maps it had previously upheld, and in North Carolina in 2022 and again in 2023, in opposite directions.

    What is unusual about this cycle is the money. Judicial races that cost under $2 million a decade ago are now clearing $30 million, and the disclosure regime governing them is substantially weaker than the one governing congressional campaigns. Roughly 60 per cent of outside spending in the 2024 Wisconsin race came through entities that do not disclose donors.

    State bar associations in three of the four states have proposed recusal rules that would require judges to step aside from cases involving major campaign donors. None has been adopted. The objection, offered candidly by one state chief justice, is that a strict rule would disqualify most of the court from most of the significant cases.