Environmental groups have declared war against Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Don’t be surprised if Mr. Pruitt’s nomination hearing this week degenerates into a three-ring circus of obnoxious and disruptive Big Green antics, the new M.O. of the left these days.
Pruitt’s nomination and the case brought against him by the Sierra Club and others have little to do with Mr. Pruitt — whose qualifications for the job having served as two state attorney general in Oklahoma are virtually unchallengeable. What is going on here is the clashing of two opposite philosophies of left and right on how best to safeguard our air and water and our federal lands and what the greens now call “the climate.”
The green belief is that the future of the planet depends on halting all economic projects if they pose the slightest risk to the environment. This zero tolerance lunacy doesn’t balance the economy and ecology, but subjugates jobs and development to environmental purity. Read more here...
2. GOP Slams CBO's Grim Report on ObamaCare Repeal - via The Washington Examiner
The grim Congressional Budget Office report on the impact of repealing ObamaCare isn't accurate, according to healthcare experts and proponents of the plan to roll back the law.
The CBO Tuesday predicted premium increases of up to 25 percent and a loss of coverage for as many as 18 million people if the GOP successfully repeals the law. Democrats are now using the report as their chief talking point in the effort to block the repeal, arguing it will deeply hurt constituents who depend on the law for coverage now. Read more here... 3. Scott Pruitt Will Bring Needed Balance to EPA - by Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes via Business Wire
Before leaving private practice, I defended a large multi-national client against allegations of Clean Water Act violations brought by the U.S. Department of Justice on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA sought three remedies: (1) revocation of my client’s ability to do business in the US, which would end all North American operations, eliminating thousands of jobs and costing the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars; (2) conviction of two corporate employees at the lower management level, amounting to life imprisonment given their age; and (3) record fines of tens of millions of dollars.
Given the fervor with which the EPA pursued the case, one would imagine my clients had been guilty of heinous environmental atrocities. Instead, the thrust of the EPA lawsuit alleged my client was polluting local waterways, possibly affecting beaks and claws of waterfowl over time due to trace amounts of selenium (by some calculations, that amount was less than what the average person could ingest in a daily multi-vitamin).
After years of litigation in which the EPA spent millions of taxpayer dollars, my legal team proved in court that the agency was relying on an erroneous standard, improperly permitted, as the basis for its misguided persecution of this company. While we won, my client was not reimbursed millions of dollars for legal fees due to the EPA’s mistakes. There was no apology by the agency to families of two men who spent years wondering if they would go to prison. And, there was no remorse for blighting the good name of an upstanding corporation. Read more here... 4. Misleading New Republic Hit on EPA Nominee Pruitt Demonstrates Ignorance of Subject Matter - via Competitive Enterprise Institute
In The New Republic today, Abby Rabinowitz predicts that “you can expect to hear a lot about mercury” during upcoming confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. According to Rabinowitz, the mercury push is “part of a larger strategy by Senate Democrats to frame his nomination as the culmination of a cynical, years-long attack on science and reason whose purpose was to protect the interests of the fossil fuel industry—and his own.”
That’s a big charge to level! Surely the reporter didn’t merely regurgitate political talking points and instead vetted these accusations. After all, this is The New Republic, which at one point long ago was the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. But in the next paragraph, Rabinowitz demonstrates a profound ignorance of her subject: Read more here... 5. The Federal Regulatory State is Out of Control, Here's One Way Congress Can Get Power Back - via Reason
There were more than 90,000 pages added the Federal Register, that behemoth of a book that annually tracks the growth of the federal leviathan, during 2016, making last year's list of federal rules and regulations a full 10,000 pages longer than the previous record.
Including last year's record-breaker, 13 of the 15 longest registers in American history have been authored by the past two presidential administrations (Barack Obama owns seven of the top eight, with George W. Bush filling in most of the rest), according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market D.C. think tank that diligently tracks the pages of the registry each year.
If Donald Trump's incoming administration aims to reverse that worrying trend—something the president-elect has claimed to want to do—then it could use a helping hand from Congress. The growth of the regulatory state is inextricably linked to the expansion of the executive branch's powers in recent decades, but those powers have expanded in part because congress has willingly winnowed its own authority. Read more here...
Jason Pye
Communications Director, FreedomWorks
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