It is the enemy within, made up of powerful Americans atop the federal government pretending to respect American principles even as they say “go away, Congress, leave us alone, courts, we are everything.” They make most of the rules, they judge them, they execute them and they’ve had it with all the whining about liberty, democratic fundamentals, legislative rights and constitutional safeguards.
Various names are given to this mushrooming, revolutionary phenomenon. It is called the administrative state, unilateral rule, the executive branch gone awry or the federal bureaucracy on amphetamines.
One way to describe it is a government relying ever more on barely inhibited regulatory overkill to make everything run right while actually causing everything to quit running. There is also a handy way to illustrate the worst of it with just three words or just three letters. The three words are Environmental Protection Agency, and the three letters are EPA.
It is a 1970s creation born of a growing awareness of ways in which our industrial society was doing battle with the glory of nature, sustainable resources and human health. Along with states and localities, it did enormous good, especially in cleaning up air and water. But it also came to assume a religiously dogmatic demeanor in which it was mostly answerable only to itself.
It figured its cause was so sacred it was allowed to cheat, connive, bully and play games with science.
Trump’s brilliant choice
Now there’s a solution. His name Scott Pruitt. He is Oklahoma’s attorney general, a brilliant lawyer and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the EPA. The greenie extremists are shaking like leaves in a hurricane because he is a states’ rights kind of guy and has fought powerfully against EPA overreaching. He put together a coalition of other state attorneys general and he got the Supreme Court to say nothing doing to pushing ahead with the controversial, Obama-backed Clean Power Plan until courts had reviewed it.
The plan will likely not stand. Based on obvious bureaucratic misinterpretations of existing law, it would unconstitutionally wipe out state laws, legal experts said. It would also spread EPA authority to nitpicking with private citizens and destroying jobs by the thousands. If by some mishap the courts do not act, Pruitt could.
The EPA itself once caused a toxic flash flood in Colorado, making you wonder if we need a higher EPA to regulate the EPA. The answer is no. We need Pruitt, and, for the global warming issue, we need ideas better than a Clean Power Plan that would do nothing. Trump actually has some. Let’s see what happens.
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune. Readers may send him email at speaktojay@aol.com.
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