Though just last week I got really pissed off at Tim Dickinson’s Rolling Stone piece on Proposition 8, this week he has a really good article about all of the last-minute regulations Bush is putting into place as he walks out the White House door. Of course, we know all about the anti-choice HHS rule . . . but there’s a lot more than that.
While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. “The administration is handing out final favors to its friends,” says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. “They couldn’t do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose.”
Some of the highlights:
Under a rule submitted in November, federal agencies would no longer be required to have government scientists assess the impact on imperiled species before giving the go-ahead to logging, mining, drilling, highway building or other development. The rule would also prohibit federal agencies from taking climate change into account in weighing the impact of projects that increase greenhouse emissions — effectively dooming polar bears to death-by-global-warming. According to Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, “They’ve taken the single biggest threat to wildlife and said, ‘We’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, for regulatory purposes.’”
In early December, the administration finalized a rule that allows the industry to dump waste from mountaintop mining into neighboring streams and valleys, a practice opposed by the governors of both Tennessee and Kentucky. “This makes it legal to use the most harmful coal-mining technology available,” says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Factory farms are getting two major Christmas presents from Bush this year. Circumventing the Clean Water Act, the administration has approved last-minute regulations that will allow animal waste from factory farms to seep, unmonitored, into America’s waterways. The regulation leaves it up to the farms themselves to decide whether their pollution is dangerous enough to require them to apply for a permit.
In October, two weeks after consulting with industry lobbyists, the White House exempted more than 100 major polluters from monitoring their emissions of lead, a deadly neurotoxin. Seemingly hellbent on a more toxic future, the administration will also allow industry to treat 3 billion pounds of hazardous waste as “recycling” each year, and to burn another 200 million pounds of hazardous waste reclassified as “fuel,” increasing cancer-causing air pollution. The rule change is a reward to unrepentant polluters: Nearly 90 percent of the factories that will be permitted to burn toxic waste have already been cited for violating existing environmental protections.
In another last-minute shift, the administration has rewritten rules to make it harder for workers to take time off for serious medical conditions under the Family and Medical Leave Act.
In a rule that went into effect on December 8th, the administration also limited vision and dental care for more than 50 million low-income Americans who rely on Medicaid. “This means the states are going to have to pick up the tab or cut the services at a time when a majority of states are in a deficit situation,” says Bass of OMB Watch. “It’s a horrible time to do this.” To make matters worse, the administration has also raised co-payments for Medicaid, forcing families on poverty wages to pay up to 10 percent of the cost for doctor visits and medicine. One study suggests that co-payments could cause Medicaid patients to skip nearly a fifth of all prescription-drug treatments.
Under midnight regulations, the administration is seeking to lock in the domestic spying it began even before 9/11. One rule under consideration would roll back Watergate-era prohibitions barring state and local law enforcement from spying on Americans and sharing that information with U.S. intelligence agencies.
And that’s not even the full story. Please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
The title of the article gets this exactly right: these regulations are a giant fuck you to the American people, and further ensure that which was already guaranteed: the Bush legacy will be that of putting governmental and corporate power over the basic health, labor, environmental and civil rights of U.S. residents. It’s disgusting, and though it’s tempting to shake our heads and firmly believe that Obama Will Fix It, there’s more bad news.
John Podesta, the transition chief for the Obama administration, has vowed that the new president will leverage his “executive authority” to fight Bush’s last-minute rule changes. But according to experts who study midnight regulations, there’s surprisingly little an incoming executive can do to overturn such rules. The Bush administration succeeded in repealing just three percent of the regulations finalized before Bill Clinton left office in 2001. “Midnight regulations under Bush are being executed early and with great intent,” says Bass of OMB Watch. “And that intent is to lock the next administration into these regulations, making it very difficult for Obama to undo what Bush just did.”
The article continues by going into Obama’s options for rolling back these rules, and there are a few, but I remain pessimistic and really fucking pissed off. And as the article further notes, even if Obama does take the time and effort necessary to overturning all of these dangerous and deadly regulations, it’s only going to distract him from the other tasks he has ahead. So while we finally have a president who tells us he’s committed to environmental sustainability and minimizing the effects of global warming, he’ll have his hands full with even more balls to juggle in just that single area. We want him to be able to do everything, but to some extent that’s just going to be impossible. So what does he choose? What do we even want him to choose?
As much as I want to remain hopeful for the future and that some sort of positive change is coming our way, this acts as a really sore and depressing reminder of what we all already knew deep down in our hearts. The effects of the Bush years aren’t going to be just disappearing anytime soon. Worse, some of those effects may just be beginning.
Similar Posts:
- Bush Poised To Implement Dangerous New DHHS Rule by Cara November 14, 2008
- Seven States Sue Government Over Anti-Choice DHHS Rule by Cara January 17, 2009
- Leave the morals at the border by Jill April 4, 2007
- Obama getting it wrong on birth control by Jill January 27, 2009
- Bush Administration Promotes Discriminatory Practices Related To Birth Control by Marcella Chester July 19, 2008
Oh my fucking god… Yeah, the more I learn about this, the more frightening it becomes.
Wow… this is so fucked up. And I thought I couldn’t hate Bush more than I already did… There’s nothing Congress can do? Or did Bush completely fuck over the whole checks and balances thing?
Eleniel . . . as various articles explain, they have 60 days to review and attempt to block regulations. But they require a vote by both houses (and a signature by the president!), each regulation has to be voted on separately which makes it really time consuming, and the votes can’t be attached to any other bills, meaning lawmakers would have to go on issue for each of the regulations where a vote comes up. In other words, they might try, but new legislation like what Clinton was trying for the anti-choice regulation restricting access to birth control/abortion might be the better way to go.
Oh wait, I forgot. They’re supposed to get 60 days, but RS explains that there’s a loophole where the Bush administration gets to arbitrarily decide that some regulations are only “minor” and therefore Congress gets only 30 days. Also, several have already been enacted. And with the economic issues going on, Congress is not paying as much attention to this stuff as they should be.
Oh, sorry. Thanks for the explanation. It’s just so frustrating.
Wow, in case the world didn’t hate Dubya enough he goes and does something like this. There are things I think are better in the American democratic system than the Canadian democratic system, but all of these loop-holes to give the Prez god-like powers are just no good. In Canada I think of our P.M. as more of the PR guy for his political party with a few leadership tasks thrown in. I’ve heard of Bush’s government has giving the President and Vice-President more powers, but would anyone care to be kind and give me a few examples?
Bush needs to be put in a locked psychiatric ward so doctors can try to find a way to treat sociopathy and pathological narcissism.
^^For research purposes, that is. If treatments for mostly untreatable disorders were found through research on Bush, he’ll get to do something good for humanity. He’d just hate that.
Look, I find this as loathsome and upsetting as anyone, but can we refrain from using forced institutionalization and experimenting on unwilling people’s brains as a threat, here? I know way too many people who’ve been through that in really fucked up ways who really don’t need to be further stigmatized by association with the moral black hole that is the Bush presidency.
Thanks little light. Yeah.
Obama is Batman, and Bush is the Joker, and the Joker is just causing as much chaos as he possibly can so that Batman can’t fix everything at once and won’t be a hero anymore. Harvey Dent is drowning in chicken poop-tainted water, Rachel Dawes has been raped and can’t get emergency contraception, the folks on the ferries are about to capsize into a river swollen with iceberg runoff, and Obama simply can’t save everyone. And the Joker knew exactly what he was doing when he set the whole thing up.
Who the hell votes for the Joker? Twice?
ACG: Your comparison is brilliant. And yeah…Who the hell votes for the Joker? Twice?
Answer: Americans.
ACG, that’s a fantastic analogy.
Perhaps the best solution would be an amendment to your constitution cutting down on the two-month lame duck period? If it takes too long to count votes, use electronic voting with open-source (it must be open source) software to make it go fast. Move Congress’s swearing in to between the election date and the presidential swearing-in so Congress can do their constitutionally required task of selecting the executive if the electoral college can’t. And while you’re at it, ban gerrymandering.
“In Canada I think of our P.M. as more of the PR guy for his political party with a few leadership tasks thrown in.”
E.M. Russell:
Even though he recently suspended your legislative body?
Well, forced institutionalisation or jail, given that he’s a war criminal and all. It happens often to people who are a danger to themselves or others, and Bush is certainly the latter. And I was thinking more along the lines of medication and therapy than sadistic experimentation.
^^Talk therapy, that is, and in attempt to find some combination of talk and therapy to treat his particular personality disorders. I’m not talking about torture, lobotomy, aversive therapy or whatever. Punitive, sadistic shit is his thing, not mine.
I was also not particularly serious. It’s not as if he’s ever going to be held accountable or anything.
it’s Bush and his crew that have actually made me WANT to believe in the fundy christian view of heaven and hell. because then he WOULD be accountable for it.
sigh
[...] to to the jobs they were hired to do? Well, there’s more. Cara at Feministe has a whole round-up of other on-the-table changes, including gutting the endangered species act, allowing coal mines to [...]
“In Canada I think of our P.M. as more of the PR guy for his political party with a few leadership tasks thrown in.”
E.M. Russell:
Even though he recently suspended your legislative body?
Kristin: EM didnt say he wasnt a fucker, or that he doesnt represent a party of evilness ;). He is adding 18 people to the senate to do his bidding, who will get paid 130K a year until they are 75. Great.
[...] thanks to Feministe for alerting me to the Dickinson [...]