How the left sees the EPA economy killing regulations--it's really Bush's fault

Not only is it Bush's fault, but also Gingrich's--just in case he's the candidate Obama needs to run against.

What’s happened under Obama is that green drift has become a green sprint; his [Environmental Protection Agency] EPA’s schedule is, comparatively speaking, incredibly aggressive. This isn’t because Obama is a government-loving socialist; it’s because of two factors that played out before he even took office.

First, the Bush administration spent eight years slowwalking scientific review and cranking out rules too weak or ill-formed to withstand judicial scrutiny. In cases where the Bush EPA’s rules were challenged in federal court, the agency’s decisions were rejected in whole or in part eighteen out of twenty-seven times. That left an enormous backlog of court-mandated work for the EPA under Obama—more than any sane president would want, given the choice.

Second, there was a turning point in 2007: the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide, as long as it can be shown to “endanger public health or welfare,” qualifies as a pollutant within the EPA’s purview. The agency then conducted an “endangerment finding,” consulting the latest science, and determined that, yes, climate change is a threat. It e-mailed the results to the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget, which promptly … refused to open the e-mail. (Really.) That left the task of developing the first-ever regulations on CO2 to Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson.

The pace of rule making combined with the extension of the rules to greenhouse gases has given conservatives the “regulatory overreach” story they need to declare war, not only on the individual rules coming out of the EPA, but on the agency’s ability to implement rules at all.

This is not the first time a Congress full of hotheaded freshmen has gone after the EPA. When Newt Gingrich rode to power in the Republican Revolution of 1994, he made the agency one of his first targets. However, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein recounted in a recent column, Gingrich’s efforts quickly died out as more and more moderate Republicans turned against him. Back then, it was seen as politically dangerous to be pro-pollution.

Washington Monthly