A massive pipeline fire broke out last week outside of Houston, generating billowing black clouds of smoke that hovered over the industrialized suburb of Deer Park for multiple days. That fire began after an SUV hit a 20-inch-wide natural gas pipeline owned by Energy Transfer. The resulting explosion and fire killed the SUV driver, forced evacuations, and left hundreds of homes without power for nearly two days during a week of near-constant 90-degree heat.
Energy Transfer, a corporate energy infrastructure giant, delayed issuing a response, including waiting more than three hours before confirming that it owned the exploded valve, misstating the amount of people injured by the fire, and seemingly refusing to answer questions from the public and the press. Unfortunately, this is par for the course for the company, also behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, and its infamous Executive Chairman (and ex-CEO) Kelcy Warren.
Energy Transfer is one of the Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas, and Warren is its extremely politically connected co-founder. Warren is also one of the most generous donors in the Texas (and national) conservative political scene, and has funneled huge donations to politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. Warren’s investments, unfortunately, seem to have paid off. In 2021, Energy Transfer and its execs profiteered $2.4 billion off of the February collapse of Texas’ electric grid, which resulted in the deaths of at least 246 Texans. Governor Abbott subsequently, and successfully, steered scrutiny away from Energy Transfer and other energy companies who were either responsible for or profited from the crash. Mere months later, Warren sent Abbott’s campaign a million-dollar check.
Warren and other Energy Transfer leaders and lawyers now seem poised to manipulate the system in favor of the pipeline company once again, this time in the federal courts.
Prior to the recent raging pipeline fire in Texas, Energy Transfer was behind a very different disaster unfolding at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that often acts as a watchdog for labor unions and regularly fields and reviews complaints from union members nationwide. In 2022, an unidentified employee of Energy Transfer’s subsidiary La Grange Acquisition filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, alleging that it had retaliated against him for complaining about unsafe working conditions, including “radioactive material and hazardous dust in work areas.” The NLRB opened an administrative case, investigating those claims and the subsequent allegation that he was fired in part for filing the complaint.
In 2024, Energy Transfer sued the NLRB, seeking to halt the administrative proceedings and joining SpaceX, Amazon, and other corporations in basically arguing that the board’s foundational structure is unconstitutional. That argument threatens the basic function of the NLRB (and other agencies like it) and could have sweeping consequences for its ability to conduct investigations or engage in basic enforcement actions for violations of labor rules and regulations.
That suit ultimately landed in front of Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown of the Southern District of Texas—a Trump appointee—who issued a preliminary injunction against the NLRB’s investigation into Energy Transfer in order to allow the company’s suit against the NLRB to proceed.
Though the NLRB has nearly 90 years of case law supporting its structure and administrative court reviews, Brown’s ruling cited instead a recent Fifth Circuit ruling, Jarkesy v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which held that the SEC’s structure and enforcement procedures were unconstitutional. In July of this year, the Supreme Court partially affirmed Jarkesy, but remained silent on the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the (un)constitutionality of the SEC’s administrative law judges, a structure that the commission shares with the NLRB—and many other federal agencies.
When the Supreme Court does not affirm nor reject an aspect of a ruling issued by a lower court, the lower court’s ruling is functionally left in place, which now poses a serious threat to the basic functionality of the SEC and other federal regulatory agencies that are mandated to act as watchdogs over unscrupulous corporations and in defense of the public interest. Contradictory rulings on the issue from other federal judges have highlighted the conflicting precedents that have allowed the Fifth Circuit to activate an issue that had been deemed settled for decades.
The crux of SCOTUS’s Jarkesy ruling doesn’t clearly apply to the NLRB’s powers or proceedings—the case addresses an entirely different agency with different powers and authorities. Even so, Brown was the second Texas-based federal judge to cite the Fifth Circuit’s Jarkesy decision in a ruling against the NLRB, thereby playing his part in right-wing attempts to render the agency—along with the rest of the federal regulatory administration—nonexistent. Brown’s judicial overreach is unsurprising for a lifetime appointee who has been described by civil rights leaders as a right-wing “ideological extremist.”
Of course, Brown’s apparently eager weaponization of his court to aid Energy Transfer’s corporate interests may also be contextualized, or perhaps motivated, by the prior relationships Brown has to Energy Transfer, its proxies, and its execs.
Before becoming a federal judge in 2019, Brown served as an elected member of the Supreme Court of Texas.
During Brown’s 2018 reelection bid, Kelcy Warren gave Brown’s campaign $6,250, making Warren Brown’s third largest individual contributor overall, according to information compiled by TransparencyUSA.org. In 2014, during his first successful campaign for the seat, Brown’s campaign received $25,000 from the Texas Oil & Gas Association (TXOGA). The company’s Vice President of Government Affairs currently serves on TXOGA’s Board of Directors.
Energy Transfer was represented before Brown’s court by Amber Michelle Rogers, a partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth, LLP. Hunton Andrews Kurth’s PAC donated a whopping $43,000 to Brown’s various judicial campaigns, making the firm’s PAC one of Brown’s top five biggest donors, per FollowTheMoney.org.
When the company filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court supporting the court’s affirmation of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Jarkesy, it was represented by attorneys for Vinson & Elkins LLP. Vinson & Elkins’s PAC appears to be the third all-time biggest donor to Brown’s campaigns, contributing $63,500 over the course of his state judicial campaigns, according to data posted on FollowTheMoney.org.
Warren is also a member of the Horatio Alger Association, which has lavished gifts on Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the New York Times.
The significant financial interconnections between Energy Transfer, the lawyers representing the pipeline company, and Brown’s past campaigns are incredibly concerning. 28 U.S. Code § 455(a) establishes that a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” That same statute later dictates that, “He shall also disqualify himself” if he knows that he “has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”
At minimum, the prior connections between Energy Transfer, its lawyers, and Judge Brown raise questions about Brown’s impartiality in this case.
Yet, judicial ethics are largely predicated on self-reporting and enforcement standards, and Brown does not seem particularly concerned with the strictures of such a practice. An NPR investigation just this year found that he, along with two other Southern District of Texas judges, had failed to file a required form disclosing his attendance of a privately funded seminar.
The case is far from settled, and it will now be heard by the Fifth Circuit with the NLRB’s appeal of Brown’s earlier ruling. What happens next is yet to be seen, but with the foundation of the government agency that historically has protected labor union members’ rights in the hands of a notoriously partisan court that previously attacked it, the outlook is not promising.
