Left-wing activists sue to change public policy where their candidates cannot win

EXCLUSIVE — Left-wing activist organizations are at the forefront of shaping public policy through lawsuits in places where their aligned political candidates are unlikely to win.

A new Alliance for Consumers report obtained by the Washington Examiner shows how groups such as the anti-gun Everytown for Gun Safety or climate change activist group EarthRights International sue companies to advance their policy preferences to circumvent the legislative process.

These organizations often represent local governments in “public nuisance” lawsuits, which are used to claim that the public is generally harmed by the existence of something, such as tobacco, in order to obtain favorable public policy outcomes and massive settlements.

“Public nuisance lawsuits have almost nothing to do with helping consumers, but a lot to do with pushing a left-wing agenda,” Alliance for Consumers executive director O.H. Skinner told the Washington Examiner. “There’s been growing attention to the political donations that these lawsuits help drive toward left-wing candidates.

“More attention needs to be paid to the public interest groups and shadowy nonprofit funding networks, like Arabella Advisors, who staff, finance, and promote these cases,” Skinner continued. “That is what we have done with this report, and we think it illustrates clearly what these lawsuits are really about and why they are a threat.”

The report, which Alliance for Consumers sent to every Republican governor in America on Wednesday, highlights several organizations involved with public nuisance claims that are aimed at altering or circumventing the policy decisions made by those elected to decide them.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a group founded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to limit gun rights, has been active in trying to change public policy on guns, including by using its Victory Fund to start a “Demand a Seat” initiative to get its trained activists to run for political office. This year, the group boasted that 17 of its candidates won elections in Virginia alone.

The group launched Everytown Law to focus on being “the largest and most experienced team of litigators in the country dedicated to advancing gun safety in the courts and through the civil and criminal justice systems.”

Everytown has been active in filing lawsuits against gun manufacturers for “contributing to the violent crime epidemic,” as it did when representing Kansas City, Missouri, in a public nuisance complaint in 2020 against the Nevada-based Jimenez Arms and other manufacturers and distributors.

It also represented the city of Chicago when it sued an Indiana gun store because its sales of firearms have “created, exacerbated, and sustained a public nuisance that causes harm to the health, safety, and well-being of Chicago residents.”

The legal wing of the activist organization also trains government lawyers on how to defend limitations to the Second Amendment, and it files direct challenges to laws protecting the right to own and use guns, such as Stand Your Ground laws, which offer some protection for the use of lethal force in self-defense.

“Public nuisance lawsuits have rightly attracted attention for being an avenue to shake down deep-pocketed companies,” according to the report. “But that valid criticism falls short in terms of grappling with the bigger peril. Public nuisance claims are about liberal control, not just money, and the list of targets is sweeping.”

Everytown for Gun Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

Activist groups have also pursued liberal priorities through courts instead of legislatures on the topic of climate change.

EarthRights International advances its political goals, such as divesting from fossil fuels, by taking “legal action against perpetrators of earth rights abuses, train[ing] activists, and work[ing] with communities to demand meaningful and lasting change,” according to its website.

The group represented the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, in 2018 litigation against Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy seeking damages for actions that “caused and contributed to the alteration of the climate by producing, promoting, refining, marketing and selling fossil fuels at levels that have caused and continue to cause climate change.”

ERI, which did not respond to a request for comment, also lobbies local governments to file similar lawsuits across the country, including in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Jacksonville, Florida, where it has pushed to sue any company involved with oil and gas in the energy sector by arguing that the use of fossil fuels will cost Floridians billions of dollars to respond to sea level rise.

“Progressives have found these cases to be particularly valuable in places where they have lost meaningful electoral influence, as trial lawyers can work alongside local governments and shadowy left-wing backers to try an end-run around state governments and push fundamental societal and economic changes in even the most conservative states,” Skinner wrote in a letter to the governors, citing the influence of left-wing dark money group Arabella Advisors in its financial support of public nuisance litigation.

The report found that Arabella-connected groups, including New Venture Fund and Collective Action Fund, sent millions of dollars in the past several years to activist law firms such as Sher Edling.

The San Francisco-based law firm, which did not respond to a request for comment, says it is involved in a wide variety of climate-based public nuisance litigation across the country “to hold fossil fuel industry defendants accountable for their decades-long campaigns of deception about the science of climate change and the role their products play in causing it.”

Sher Edling was among the beneficiaries of a $20 million grant from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to “support precedent-setting legal actions to hold major corporations in the fossil fuel industry liable,” according to the foundation.

“Sher Edling is emblematic of how the law firms pushing public nuisance lawsuits blend the lines between activism and traditional private law practice, and the importance that shadowy left-wing funders have in driving forward the overall public nuisance litigation campaign we are now seeing,” according to the Alliance for Consumers report.

Skinner is urging Republican governors to “take immediate action to halt the spread of public nuisance lawsuits in your state, rein in your local governments, and look into whether foreign money is improperly being used to influence your state’s policies.”

“Deploy every lever at your disposal to undermine this left-wing weapon and stop it from changing your state and our society, before it is too late,” Skinner’s letter concluded.