The GOP's Race to Repeal
This June marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the great sea battle that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific. The American victory over the Japanese at Midway, a tiny atoll literally midway between California and Japan, ended the period of expansion of Japanese-held territory in the Pacific. And so began the long, bloody march that led to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and that eventually led American bombers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Last week, we all witnessed another turning point that 75 years from now could well be understood to have had similar importance. President Trump’s executive order abandoning the Clean Power Plan and practically every other federal regulatory initiative to address climate change marks a grim turning point in the global effort to combat the most serious environmental challenge in the history of human life on the planet.
So naturally, this sorry milestone was the lead story in newspapers and on television programs across the land, right? Yes, if you happen to read the New York Times, but if you’re a Washington Post subscriber, your story was buried on page 6. The top story on the regulatory front for Post readers …
CPR Member Scholars published another bumper crop of op-eds this past month. We maintain a running list on our op-eds page, but to save CPRBlog readers a click or two, here's a quick rundown:
On March 3, David Driesen had a piece in The Hill – that's a Washington, D.C., outlet aimed at the policy community – headlined, "Ruling by Decree." Driesen takes the president to task for issuing a series of executive orders aimed at undercutting duly enacted laws. "No president," he writes, "has devoted the first month of his presidency to promulgating a collection of executive orders that so blatantly ignores our constitutional system's fundamental tenets."
On March 9, Tom McGarity published a piece in the Corpus Christi Caller Times, headlined, "EPA Just Adopted a See-No-Evil Policy." McGarity focuses on a little-covered gift from EPA chief Scott Pruitt to the oil and gas …
This op-ed originally ran in the Raleigh News & Observer.
President Trump's new "energy" executive order is an attempt to roll back Obama regulations on climate change, and even make considerations of climate change disappear from much of the policymaking process altogether.
That's quite a lot to accomplish by executive order, and despite all the media attention he got for it, the president is eventually going to discover that he can't eradicate climate realities from federal consideration with the stroke of a pen.
Among other things, Trump's order directs the EPA to take steps to get rid of the Clean Power Plan as currently constituted and begin rolling back an Obama era rule restricting methane emissions. These rules went through a full and complete rulemaking process; in order to undo them, the administration will have to undertake its own rulemaking.
That will take …
