Bush is still on track to be the first president in nearly 180 years to serve a full term or more without vetoing a single bill. He has, however, been rather cavalier about making the occasional veto threat (the highway bill, stem-cell funding, McCain-Feingold, etc.). The latest, however, has to be among the worst.
The White House on Monday defended its anti-pollution policies and threatened to veto a Senate proposal to negate new Environmental Protection Agency rules on limiting mercury emissions from power plants.
Senate Democrats, joined by several Republicans, claim that the EPA rules favor the utility industry while slowing action on a serious public health hazard.
As a factual matter, this one’s not even close. We learned earlier this year that the Bush gang took coal industry language — word for word — and used it for new EPA regulations on mercury emissions not once, not twice, but three times. Shortly thereafter, adding insult to injury, we learned that the EPA’s inspector general concluded that the Bush gang “ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols in order to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration’s free-market approaches to power plant pollution.” The EPA was told to set modest limits on mercury pollution, and then work backwards from the predetermined goal to justify the pollution-friendly proposal.
Making matters even worse, the GAO found that Bush’s EPA distorted the analysis of its mercury pollution report to make it appear, incorrectly, that the administration’s plan was superior to a competing plan supported by environmentalists.
To their enormous credit, several senators, including a few Republicans, plan to take advantage of a little-used law to reverse the administration’s pollution rules.
The bill’s sponsors, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, turned to a little-used 1996 law that allows Congress to challenge agency rules with a guaranteed floor vote. The law has been successfully invoked only once, when Congress in 2001 repealed Clinton administration workplace ergonomics regulations.
By repealing the EPA rules finalized last March, the Senate would force the agency to return to the tougher Clean Air Act rules imposed during the Clinton administration that requires the nation’s 600 coal-burning power plants to use the best available technology to reduce mercury emissions.
The Senate vote is scheduled for this afternoon. At least three Republicans have said they will join the Dems on this one. After that, it gets a little trickier in the House.
But if it can get through both chambers, Bush has vowed to veto the measure. Is he bluffing? Would he really use the veto pen for the first time to defend toxic pollution?