Thread: Undoing The Bush Damage

Undoing the Damage Done

Published: January 24, 2009

Eight years is never enough. And in time-honored fashion, the Bush administration used its last two months in office to rush through a series of regulatory changes. In equally time-honored fashion, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, has ordered all agencies and departments to review these rules and, where possible, suspend or stop the ones they don’t like.

Any rules that were not completed by Jan. 20 can simply be withdrawn or rewritten. Those that have become law can be undone in three ways, all laborious.

One is to undertake a new rule-making process — preliminary proposals, public comment and hearings, a final proposal, etc. — which could take months or even years. The second is to ask Congress to revoke the rule under the rarely used Congressional Review Act. The third is to wait for an outside group to bring suit, then step aside and not defend the rule in court.

Here is a selection of last-minute rules that in our view are worth overturning one way or another.

Health care: One particularly objectionable rule took effect the day President Bush left town. It gives an increased number of medical institutions and a broad range of health care workers the right to refuse to provide abortion referrals, unbiased counseling or emergency contraception, even to rape victims — further restricting women’s rights to health care. The administration should suspend enforcement and craft a new rule.

Gun control: A new rule would end a 25-year ban on carrying loaded weapons in national parks, which are among the safest places in this country. Before that changes, the administration should overturn this rule.

Workers’ rights: Revisions to the federal guest worker program would weaken wage protections and housing standards for temporary agricultural workers, who already have far too few protections.

The environment: The Bush administration worked overtime in its waning days to weaken protections for the air, water and endangered species. Representative Nick Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia, plans to invoke the Congressional Review Act to overturn an Interior Department ruling that carved out significant exceptions to required scientific reviews of federal projects that could harm threatened or endangered species.

Interior’s last-minute rules also eased restrictions on mining companies that dump waste into rivers and streams; opened two million acres of Western lands to potentially harmful oil shale development; and revoked Congress’s authority to withdraw land from commercial development in emergencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, relaxed restrictions on water and air pollution from factory farms.

We suspect other agencies simply ran out of time. Even so, the new administration must try to undo all the damage that did get done.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/opini ... ef=opinion

Well thank goodness Obama is undoing all of the damage done by Bush within his first month! Unfortunately, Obama could bring world peace and there would still be people that hate him. Just looking at all the anti-Obama stories on this site alone makes my case. Republican good.....democrat bad. The truth is they are both bad, but too many blind people to realize it. Jesus could come back to Earth, and tell these people how wrong they are, but they would argue with Jesus. That is why we are doomed. They have been arguing with Jesus for 1000 years already. He will only take so much before he shows them the truth. I can't wait for that day!!

I have seen so many stupidities coming from especially state governments, like when Jeb Bush was gov. in Fla., the Dept. of Environmental Protection decided to issue a rule concerning streams and waterways: they decided to divide all state waterways into segments and if one segment was polluted, it really did not mean the rest of the creek was polluted, like there was no flow. And if a segment was determined polluted, it had to be polluted on a consistent basis for three quarters of the year. Hey, not polluted half of the year, it is not polluted. The only thing that kept me from throwing eggs at these officials was that did not know I would need them. And I was too shocked to think of throwing shoes, darn it.