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Bush’s last rule-making hurrah....Very Good ones! Kudos' to W With just 60 days left in his tenure, you might think that W.'s lame duck administration was sitting around relieved that another guy was taking over, counting the minutes until the flight leaves for Crawford. Not quite. In what has become a kind of presidential right-of-passage, the president (or really, the federal agencies that answer to him) has been pushing through a series of last-minute regulations that have the force of law. Everything from pollution controls to family-leave standards can be set by these rules. And you thought your high school government teacher said that Congress made all the laws. These de-facto laws are called "midnight rules" or "midnight regulations" because they happen at the end -- or midnight period -- of an administration. If the rules are published in the Federal Register by Friday, Nov. 21, they'll be very hard for President-elect Obama to reverse when he gets into office. And that's the point. Sure, the administration had eight years to get a lot of this stuff accomplished. But according senior research fellow at George Mason University Veronique de Rugy, most midnight regulations "cater to special interests," and "that is why they are hurried into effect without the usual checks and balances." George Bush isn't the first president to push through rules before the next guy can get in. Jimmy Carter gets that award. In fact, the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert says Cater's whirlwind of last-minute activity before Ronald Reagan took office is when the practice got named. "They became known as 'midnight regulations,' after the 'midnight judges' appointed by John Adams in the final hours of his Presidency." George Bush doesn't get the award for the most rules shoved through after the two-minute warning, either. That goes to Bill Clinton who, according to de Rugy, set the record for number of pages published in the Federal Register at "more than 26,000." So, what rules are the White House and all its federal agencies trying to get through this season? The Wall Street Journal reports that the new rules, "open the way for commercial development of oil shale on federal land, allow truckers to drive for longer periods, and add certain restrictions on employee time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act." Those run the gamut, but the ones getting the most ink are environmentally focused. The Los Angeles Times says environmentalists are angry by a host of loosened safeguards: In recent days, the Bush administration announced new rules to speed oil shale development across 2 million rocky acres in the West. It scheduled an auction for drilling rights alongside three national parks. It has also set in motion processes to finalize major changes in endangered species protection, allow more mining waste to flow into rivers and streams, and exempt factory farms from air pollution reporting. The Chicago Tribune did a special report saying the administration undercut a clean-air rule aimed at curbing childhood lead poisoning: ...the EPA had planned to require lead monitors next to any factory emitting at least a half-ton of lead a year. But after the White House intervened, the agency raised the threshold to a ton of lead or more, according to e-mails and other documents exchanged between the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget. In an Oct. 31 press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto was asked about environmental groups saying the White House was easing limits on pollution. First Fratto responded that the White House is "constrained" about discussing regulations under review, but then said, "I would be highly doubtful that there's any specific increase in environmental-related regulations." Navigating the rule-making process can be laborious for the non-wonk type, but the non-profit, investigative journalism group ProPublica has tried to make it easy for people who want to investigate for themselves. ProPublica has a master list of Bush's midnight regulations here and they have posted a guide on "How to Ferret Out Midnight Regs Yourself." If you've got the time and inclination, a lot of this process is public record and online. |
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I don't see the good in these. If you do please explain your stance to me.
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We have a great rescource in oil. The reason gas prices have went down is because it was passed here to drill for our own oil. Its simple. This is great for America. He also has saved millions of jobs in the industrial field from the ignorance of carbon footprints. Humans, despite all the use of cars and planes and industry make less than 2% of the carbon footprints on the earth. In the Bush administration, America has been cleaner than any time in the last 50 years. Obama is a complete idiot. The cap and trade that he plans to sign would destroy indusry in America and move those jobs elsewhere. President Bush just saved America down the road.
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I heard that gas went down because the value of commodities has dropped significantly with the markets. And also that people haves cut back their consumption. So what makes all the carbon footprints?? If Bush changes those environmental laws it won't be that clean anymore.
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No they started foing down because of OPEC fears. We depend on them now because of laws the dems put into place in the 80's. We use 12% more than we can produce ourselves. Not because we do not have it, we just have not used it. Consumption is not down that much. The earth itself produces nassive carbon footprints. do a google on Fred Singer and thats a great place to start understanding real science instead of the junk Science of the global warming religion which is not real.
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