So Much To Fix

I've got a good first task for Henry Waxman in his new perch at the House Energy and Commerce Committee; deal with the lawlessness at the EPA. First they have steadfastly refused to regulate global warming pollution despite a Supreme Court order to do so. More recently, they are set hazardous new air quality rules:

The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing new air-quality rules that would make it easier to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas, even though half of the EPA's 10 regional administrators formally dissented from the decision and four others criticized the move in writing [...]

The proposal would change the practice of measuring pollution levels near national parks, which is currently done over three-hour and 24-hour increments to capture emission spikes during periods of peak energy demand; instead, the levels would be averaged over a year. Under this system, spikes in pollution would no longer violate the law.

While Waxman is at it, he can reform the Department of the Interior, which is trying to gut the Endangered Species Act:

The Bush administration is "close" to finalizing a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be harmed by agency projects, according to the Interior Department [...]

For more than 30 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service have reviewed any federal plans that could potentially protect endangered animals or plants. Under the administration's proposed rule, these independent scientific reviews would no longer be required if the agency in question determined that its activities would not hurt the imperiled species.

I know that the out-of-control federal agencies are going to be Barack Obama's purview, but Waxman can fix up some legislation to deal with this crap, particularly on the EPA issues (Interior may be a separate jurisdiction).

He's going to be busy.

More Laying Of Landmines

Yesterday I mentioned all the internal challenges that President-elect Obama will be facing. Today's Washington Post reveals how Bush is trying to institutionalize those challenges.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Interior Department's top lawyer has shifted half a dozen key deputies -- including two former political appointees who have been involved in controversial environmental decisions -- into senior civil service posts.

The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called "burrowing" by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.

I hope nobody thinks that this is about stopping Obama appointments. This is about getting civil service protections for hardcore conservative loyalists. In past transitions, this has been done to protect new rules or regulations that the outgoing President would like to see maintained, and that's true here as well. Recent rule changes in the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service will be harder to reverse with a champion inside the agency. But I hardly think it ends there. The same with all those career Justice Department officials whose political ideology was a factor in their hiring. And burrowing all of these officials at once will ultimately make it harder to root out the partisan career personnel who were hired into the civil service in the first place.

In a few years, we'll see some whistleblower on Hardball, talking gravely about corruption in the Obama Administration, and she'll be feted by the gasbags and made into a media darling. And nobody will notice the fact that she was hired by Monica Goodling.

Here We Go Again - Executive Branch As Campaign Outreach Arm

During elections as far back as 2002, Karl Rove made sure that all political resources at his disposal were employed to help elect Republicans. Federal agencies you would think had scant ability to impact an electoral debate suddenly had deputies all over swing districts, making official announcements and giving federal largesse in areas with threatened Republican members of Congress. This is of course illegal, but it didn't stop Rove from holding meetings with agency heads and briefing them on which Republicans needed help and how they could deploy that help. Here's an article that lays this out.

Thirteen months before President Bush was reelected, chief strategist Karl Rove summoned political appointees from around the government to the Old Executive Office Building. The subject of the Oct. 1, 2003, meeting was "asset deployment," and the message was clear:

The staging of official announcements, high-visibility trips and declarations of federal grants had to be carefully coordinated with the White House political affairs office to ensure the maximum promotion of Bush's reelection agenda and the Republicans in Congress who supported him, according to documents and some of those involved in the effort.

"The White House determines which members need visits," said an internal e-mail about the previously undisclosed Rove "deployment" team, "and where we need to be strategically placing our assets." [...]

Under Rove's direction, this highly coordinated effort to leverage the government for political marketing started as soon as Bush took office in 2001 and continued through last year's congressional elections, when it played out in its most quintessential form in the coastal Connecticut district of Rep. Christopher Shays, an endangered Republican incumbent. Seven times, senior administration officials visited Shays's district in the six months before the election -- once for an announcement as minor as a single $23 government weather alert radio presented to an elementary school. On Election Day, Shays was the only Republican House member in New England to survive the Democratic victory.

"He didn't do these things half-baked. It was total commitment," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), who in 2002 ran the House Republicans' successful reelection campaign in close coordination with Rove. "We knew history was against us, and he helped coordinate all of the accoutrements of the executive branch to help with the campaign, within the legal limits."

Rove may be gone, but this practice continues.

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was in Minnesota on Tuesday to announce a proposed pilot project for the federal No Child Left Behind law that would give 10 states more flexibility in addressing struggling schools' specific needs....

However, Minnesota doesn't yet have enough of those schools to participate in the pilot project, prompting some to question why Spellings made the announcement here and whether it was an effort to help Sen. Norm Coleman in his reelection campaign.

Spellings appeared at the state Department of Revenue and the State Capitol alongside Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Coleman.

"It certainly smells that no Democrats were invited to this event, when we already know that this administration has politicized Cabinet agencies," said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "It looks like a stunt to help Norm Coleman's campaign."

It more than "looks like" a stunt, that's exactly what it is.

I'm growing a little tired of these things seen as "Rovian" machinations. They're just Republican ones. Rove is a cog in the wheel and focusing on him is a distraction. He learned these techniques over many decades in the conservative incubator, and the idea that they'd stop just because he's moved over to Fox News is not realistic.

This is one of those dastardly deeds that is very easy to spot but harder to counter.