Racing the clock for evil

By Weekly Archive On Dec 10, 2008

The
election’s over. In a matter of weeks, Barack Obama will be our next
president. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks. But
that doesn’t mean he’s fading away harmlessly.

Oh,
no. Just the opposite. Bush is racing the clock to see how much more
damage he can do before Jan. 20. In a way, Bush is borrowing a page
from Bill Clinton’s book — except he’s turning it upside down.

Having
ignored the environment for much of his eight years in office,
Clinton devoted the last months of his presidency to issuing a whole
slew — 26,000 pages — of executive orders and regulations that put
in place strong, new environmental protections. Bush, by contrast, is
using his last months in office to push new rules and regulations
that gut environmental and public-safety programs.

High
on Bush’s list, for example, is a rule published this week by the
Environmental Protection Agency (!) allowing mountaintop mining
companies to dump their waste alongside or in nearby rivers and
streams. Since 1983, mining operations have been banned by law from
dumping their massive piles of debris within 100 feet of any stream.
The new rule overturns that law.

EPA
Administrator Stephen Johnson argued that filling waterways with
mountaintops was no big deal, because those streams thus destroyed
were not major rivers. Obviously, he’s never been to the headwaters
of any river, or he would realize that big rivers are formed from the
flow of hundreds of just such small streams.

Maybe
I’m old-fashioned, but I remember when the job of the EPA was to
protect the environment, not destroy it. Indeed, the more fundamental
question for Johnson (and Bush) is: Why are we allowing mining
companies to cut off the tops of mountains in the first place?

Another
"midnight regulation" proposed by Bush would relax
protection for workers exposed to toxic substances on the job. The
new Bush plan, strongly backed by big business groups, would replace
strict national safety standards with industry-by-industry standards
— allowing more asbestos in the factory, for example, than in the
office.

In
this case, Bush is acting in direct defiance of President-elect
Barack Obama. In September, Obama and four other senators introduced
legislation that would prohibit the Department of Labor from issuing
the very rule it is now rushing to complete. Obama also sent a letter
to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao urging her to scrap the proposal
because it would "create serious obstacles to protecting workers
from health hazards on the job." Yet DOL flunkies are proceeding
with their plan, even though President Bush himself promised to
cooperate with Obama in making the transition "as smooth as
possible."

The
new mining and worker-safety proposals are only two of some 20 highly
controversial rules the Bush administration is rushing to get in
place before Jan. 20. Others include: allowing states to charge
higher co-payments for hospital care and prescription drugs provided
to low-income people under Medicaid; speeding up oil shale
development alongside three national parks in the West; exempting
family farms from air-pollution regulations; easing restrictions on
lead emissions from factories near residential areas; and allowing
tourists to carry loaded guns in national parks. The investigative
journalist group ProPublica has published the full list of Bush’s
last-minute regulations on its website: propublica.org.

President
Obama, of course, will have the last word. But it won’t be easy for
him to undo all the damage Bush is doing. A new president can
unilaterally reverse executive orders signed by his predecessor, as
both Bush and Clinton have done, but rules and regulations, which
Bush is pursuing, are different. Once they’re embedded in the Code of
Federal Regulations, they have the force of law and can only be
changed after the new administration goes through a lengthy process
of public comment and review.

Knowing
that everything he does can eventually be undone, why is George Bush
pushing such harmful rules and regulation? Because it completes his
destructive agenda and make things as difficult as possible for
Barack Obama — as though two wars and the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression weren’t damage enough.

Bill
Press is host of a nationally syndicated radio show and author of a
new book,
"Train Wreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a
Moment Too Soon)." You
can hear "The Bill Press Show" at his Web site:
billpressshow.com. His email address is: bill@billpress.com.