Quote:A lawsuit has pitted six landlocked states against Washington State over a simple question: Who owns the federal ports?

Washington State is denying the states the permits required to build a large coal export terminal along the Columbia River. The states have sued and Washington filed a motion for dismissal.

But U.S. District Court Judge Robert Bryan rejected Washington State’s motion, setting the stage for a legal showdown over who really gets final say over which products flow through the nation’s sea ports.

“We’re talking about the Constitution and the rule of law,” said Montana Attorney General Tim Fox, “One state can’t discriminate against another state’s commodities in this way.”

Montana and Wyoming are leading plaintiffs and two of the largest coal-producing states in the country. The Powder River Basin contains 2.5 billion tons of recoverable coal and currently supplies 40 percent of the coal used in the United States. But as many states wean themselves off of electricity from burning coal, coal companies are looking to boost exports, primarily to Asia. But they have a major problem: there are no ports along the West Coast currently set up to load coal onto ships.

Four other states, Kansas, Utah, South Dakota and Nebraska, have joined the lawsuit against Washington State.

The Millennium Bulk Terminal, proposed for the port in Longview, Wash., was supposed to solve that obstacle. It was designed to export 44 million metric tons of coal a year. Important allies and trading partners Japan and South Korea were eager to buy the coal. But after conducting an environmental impact study, the state of Washington denied the terminal a required water permit.

“I think we’re on sound ground,” said Washington’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, “because we’re enforcing our environmental rules for clean air and noise and some other issues.”

The Washington Ecology Department cited a slight increase in cancer risk to Longview residents due to increased diesel emissions from additional train traffic, significant vehicle traffic delays, noise, the destruction of 24 acres of wetlands and a 25 percent increase in ship traffic on the Columbia River. An Ecology spokesman denies rejecting the coal terminal because of any bias against coal or the environmental impacts caused by burning the coal in Asia.

“It is insulting to all Washington residents that proponents of this facility have chosen to minimize and ridicule the impact diesel emissions from the largest operation of the largest coal export facility in North America would have had on the people of Cowlitz County,” said Ecology’s spokesman Dave Bennett.

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Here's where Trump and Trudeau could work together and make history.

We could trade the states of Washington, Oregon, and California (and the liberals who live there) for the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, and boom, problem solved.

What the US would lose in immediate tax revenues from those states, would be more than offset by the pleasure of seeing the millions of whining liberals who inhabit them now having to travel to Ottawa to ask the pretty boy PM for their government handouts.....and think of the impression Maxine Waters would make in Ottawa. LOL

And, the natural resources of those two provinces along with now having Alaska joined contiguously with the rest of the United States would pay obvious benefits. I could just see Trump, after convincing Trudeau that he'd suddenly have millions of new adoring fans, getting the weenie to throw in the Yukon just to sweeten the deal.