Fascinating insights into the modus operandi of bushco, particularly as regards the court ruling last week involving the EPA and the Clean Air Act. These guys are worse than Clinton in trying to redefine terms to get their way.
This is an editorial from today's Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032202056_pf.html
"New Source Rebuke
Thursday, March 23, 2006; A22
ONE MIGHT HOPE that after its rebuke last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Bush administration would reconsider its efforts to rewrite the rules governing power plant emissions. The three-judge panel included two of the court's more liberal judges and one of President Bush's most controversial recent conservative appointees, Janice Rogers Brown.
The panel threw out the Environmental Protection Agency's rule on what is called New Source Review as flatly at odds with the Clean Air Act. Unfortunately, there is no particular reason to expect the administration to come to its senses in response. It is still trying to curtail enforcement against old coal-fired plants that fail to install new pollution-control technologies.
Legally, New Source Review does not pose a hard question. The clean-air law, the relevant part of which was passed in 1977, did not require every plant to immediately retrofit with pollution-control technologies. But it did require that plants install new pollution-fighting equipment when they made "any physical change" that increased pollution output. This law went largely unenforced until the Clinton administration, which filed a number of actions against companies that had not complied. On taking office, the Bush administration -- while not dropping the lawsuits -- tried a different approach: rewriting the rules.
Under the new rule, which has been blocked by the court since its release in 2003, "any physical change" does not really mean any physical change, only a change that exceeds 20 percent of the replacement value of the plant or changes its basic design somehow. Anything short of that gets excluded as "routine maintenance." The court, quite rightly, was having none of it. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world," wrote Judge Judith W. Rogers, could the government ignore Congress's use of a word such as "any." In other words, the Clean Air Act, including the provisions the administration doesn't like, means what it says.
Yet the administration may not have finished trying to read this law out of existence -- or, at least, into a more timid existence. It is still trying to redefine the other essential feature of a plant modification that triggers New Source Review: that the modification "increases" the amount of pollution the plant emits. Again, this seems like a straightforward matter. It increases it if the amount after the change exceeds the amount before it, right? Wrong -- at least according to the administration, which wants to define "increase" in terms of the emissions a plant is potentially capable of spewing rather than the actual amount of spewing it does. The D.C. Circuit -- the court whose interpretations bind the agency -- already rejected this interpretation in another case last year, making the proposed EPA policy seem simply lawless. The court's common-sense ruling last week is a promising sign that its judges won't sit still for further efforts to ignore the law."
