Looting the Baggage Train

Washington, DC - It has been a bad fortnight for the folks who call themselves "good Bushies." The White House Chief of Staff accuses the Attorney General of lying to Congress. New polls show that only 35% of the public identifies with the Republican party. Both houses of Congress vote to take control of the occupation of Iraq from the president. A federal court stops Bush's efforts to remake the US Forest Service in the timber industry's image, tossing out proposed rules that would undo forest protections first established under President Reagan, and arguing that public participation in such a decision was legally essential. The Supreme Court utterly rejects Bush's view that global warming pollution is not subject to federal regulation under the Clean Air Act just because the President would have it so.

Meanwhile, a New York Times editorial summarized the plight of beleaguered Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne this way:

Dirk Kempthorne must have wondered last week why he ever accepted President Bush's offer to become secretary of the interior. Seven former directors of the National Park Service lambasted a proposal that would allow more than 700 snowmobiles a day in Yellowstone National Park. A former senior auditor provided further evidence that the Minerals Management Service, another part of Mr. Kempthorne's empire, had for years failed to collect royalties from big oil companies. And Democrats in the House jumped all over one of his assistant secretaries in the wake of a report that the department was secretly rewriting important regulations governing the Endangered Species Act with an eye to weakening it.

As that last sentence suggests, even a desperate army can be dangerous. At the end of Shakespeare's Henry V, the French knights defeated at Agincourt descend upon the English baggage train, looting it and killing the children they find there. The Interior proposal to rewrite the ESA, bad as it is, is not the only sign that the Bushies are getting ready to loot America's baggage train as the clock runs out on their power. Last year the Senate rejected three key Bush public health nominees: William Wehrum to head air programs at EPA, Alex Beehler to be EPA Inspector General, and Susan Dudley as overall regulatory czar. Wehrum served the chemical and utility industries first as a private lawyer, and then at EPA where he inserted entire paragraphs written by his former law firm into EPA rules on mercury regulations. Beehler went from major polluter, Koch Industries, to the Defense Department, where he tried to prevent EPA from setting health-based standards on perchlorate -- a major military base pollutant. Dudley also benefited from Koch's munificence at the reactionary think tank Mercatus, where she argued that EPA should discount the value of the lives of older people when setting drinking water standards for arsenic.

All three of these nominations were shut down by the Republican Congress last year; now Bush has resubmitted the names, and according to industry lobbyists, if Congress refuses to confirm them, Bush will simply appoint the three to "recess" one-year appointments -- since, of course, he has only a year and a half left in his term anyway.

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