A Northeast Progressive Cage Match

New Jersey on Friday sued the Biden Administration over its approval of New York’s congestion-pricing scheme, and it’s hard not to smile at the irony. Behold how one progressive state is weaponizing federal environmental law to block a tax by an avaricious progressive neighbor.

In 2019 New York enacted a law authorizing tolls on drivers traveling into Manhattan’s central business district. Because the plan excludes the city’s West Side Highway and FDR Drive, the tax will mainly hit Garden Staters and drivers living on Manhattan’s upper east and west sides.

A 1991 law requires the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to sign off on state and local tolls on highways that receive federal funds. According to Trenton, FHWA failed to conduct a thorough environmental analysis as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on the congestion tax’s potential impact.

The FHWA determined that New York’s tolling plan wouldn’t have a significant environmental impact, but New Jersey claims it will shift traffic flows and pollutants. This will allegedly burden low-income neighborhoods in New Jersey, even as Manhattan residents supposedly benefit from cleaner air from fewer cars driving in the city’s core.

“The Goethals Bridge and the Outerbridge Crossing in Union County—which connect New Jersey to Staten Island, New York—are likely to see an increase in traffic by vehicles avoiding the Manhattan [central business district],” the lawsuit claims, adding that “in Bergen County, there will be increases in every category of pollutant.”

New Jersey argues that NEPA requires agencies to consider an action’s “indirect effects,” and President Biden’s executive orders mandate that they “make achieving environmental justice part of [their] mission[s].” You have to chuckle at New Jersey invoking President Biden’s diktats that were intended to snag fossil-fuel projects so the Garden State can stop a tax grab.

What New Jersey really wants is a share of the tax spoils. The state lawsuit says New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has agreed to allocate revenue to the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, but nothing to New Jersey’s transit agencies. The MTA is also funding $130 million of “environmental mitigation” in the Bronx.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy wants the MTA to fund “mitigation” in his state too. Partisans often abuse NEPA for their own purposes, and here’s another case in point. Can both states lose this lawsuit?