You have to admire how they assert mandates where none exist. Sure wish Dems would do more of that!
Senate Republicans are gearing up for a war against the Obama administration’s environmental rules, identifying them as a top target when they take control in January.
The GOP sees the midterm elections as a mandate to roll back rules from the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies, with Republicans citing regulatory costs they say cripple the economy and skepticism about the cause of climate change.
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) identified his top priority come January as “to try to do whatever I can to get the EPA reined in.”
McConnell made his defense of coal a major piece of Kentucky’s economy, a highlight of his reelection bid, which he won easily over Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.
He said he feels a “deep responsibility” to stop the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, as it proposed to do in January for newly built generators and in June for existing ones.
But those are far from the only rules the GOP wants to target.
Republican lawmakers are planning an all-out assault on Obama’s environmental agenda, including rules on mercury and other air toxics from power plants, limits on ground-level ozone that causes smog, mountaintop mining restrictions and the EPA’s attempt to redefine its jurisdiction over streams and ponds.
The Interior Department is also in the crosshairs, with rules due to come soon on hydraulic fracturing on public land and protecting streams from mining waste.
Many of the rules are part of the “war on coal” that Republicans have accused Obama of waging. They charge that Obama has tried to revive cap-and-trade rules for carbon emissions despite the 2009 failure of legislation when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.
A senior GOP aide didn’t take any of Obama’s major environmental rules off the table, saying they all could get scrutiny under Republican control of the Senate, depending on how the regulations develop.
The staffer said Republicans have a series of tools available to them to fight Obama with different degrees of severity.
“It’ll be a combined effort of using the appropriations process and the legislative process and the oversight process to put pressure on the administration prior to finalization,” the aide said.
The Republicans run lots of shit up the flagpole that the Democrats go along with. For example this country is going down a very dangerous path thanks to both Republicans and Democrats and the out of control NSA. Now it’s gotten to the local level. “The Orange County School Board in Florida has taken the first step toward creating its own intelligence gathering police force. The district has already hired 4 seasoned former law-enforcement officers to ‘monitor social media’; collaborate with existing resource officers and agencies; and work to prevent and response to crises. Two more officers are being hired. They would all be turned into police officers with weapons and arrest powers.” The Republicans are always coming up with new and inventive ways to improve our quality of life and they all seem to be connected to guns, arrests and incarcerations.
I hear that Mitch McTurtle is going to get a lump of coal in his stocking at Christmastime.
Now that Dems are off the hook, they’ll go along with any douchebagery that Rethugs can think up in the spirit of bipartisanship. As a headline I saw over the weekend proclaimed there’s a bloodbath in store for the environment. If you live along the coast, you better sell to the Koch brothers now for pennies on the dollar.