From the Wonk Room.
After over a
year of
battles
with the White House and other federal agencies, the Environmental
Protection Agency has published its response to the April 2007 Supreme
Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which mandated that the agency
determine whether greenhouse gases pose a threat to our health and
welfare and take action in response. With today’s publication of an
“Advance Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking,”
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson ignores the
threat and attacks the rule of law.
Johnson published his staff’s
document
– after extensive cuts from the White House – with complaints attached
from the White House Office of Management and Budget, the White House
Council on Environmental Quality, the White House Council of Economic
Advisers, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the
Department of Transportation, the U.S. Small Business Administration,
the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, and the
Department of Energy.
In one voice, the other agencies attack the use of the Clean Air Act to
regulate greenhouse gases as “deeply flawed and unsuitable,”
“fundamentally ill-suited,” “extraordinarily intrusive and burdensome,”
“unilateral and extraordinarily burdensome,” “drastic,” “dramatic,”
“excessive,” “extremely expensive,” and “costly and burdensome.” The
clear
and
present
threat
of global warming is dismissed as a “complex” issue that hinges on
“interpretation of statutory terms.”
Sadly, Johnson decided to join them, attacking the immense work done by
his staff to address the catastrophic threat of climate change:
I believe the ANPR demonstrates the Clean Air Act, an outdated law
originally enacted to control regional pollutants that cause direct
health effects, is ill-suited for the task of regulating global
greenhouse gases.
In his press conference announcing the release of today’s decision,
Johnson reiterated his opinion that the Clean Air Act is the “wrong
tool” for the task, “trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”
This is yet another case where Johnson is following the
example
of the likes of disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who
made similar statements about the Geneva Conventions’ ban on
torture
as White House Counsel:
As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The
nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as
the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and
their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American
civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete
Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and
renders quaint some of its provisions.
Similarly, the White House’s arguments in defense of ignoring the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s ban on warrantless
wiretapping:
Reverting to the outdated FISA statute risks our national
security. FISA’s outdated provisions created dangerous intelligence
gaps, which is why Congress passed the Protect America Act in the
first place.
George W. Bush, Stephen Johnson, and the other officers of the executive
branch swore an oath to “faithfully
execute”
their office and defend the Constitution. They have evidently decided to
break that vow, time and again. In the
Alice-in-Wonderland
world of the Bush administration, it’s always the “quaint,” “outdated,”
“burdensome,” and “ill-suited” laws that are the problem—never their
reckless abandonment of principle and duty.
Last fall, as the Environmental
Protection Agency worked to satisfy its Supreme Court mandate to protect
the American public from the threat of greenhouse gases, White House
officials took steps to prevent such action. In a 
House Oversight and Government
Reform Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has today released