True to form, Bush is leaving the new administration, and us, with a lot of dangerous new rules and regulations that trash civil rights and environmental laws. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley recently described George Bush’s intention to finalize about 100 last-minute federal regulations, many of them on particularly sensitive issues, as “akin to fouling a water-well … almost a sign of contempt for the results of the election.”
In an appearance last week on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Turley said, “This is the ultimate dead-hand control. … What a president can do is, by finalizing a regulation, he can force his successor to go through an entirely new regulatory process that can take years.”
As of January 20, President Obama will be unable to undo any new Bush regulations finalized by November 22. So George Bush is in a hurry to make sure his stain is impossible to remove by the Obama administration. (I guess that’s why we haven’t seen much of him lately). It is hoped that President Obama will find some way to overturn these Bush directives using his legal knowledge. I talked about some of these rules in my last podcast, #76, which you can find here. There is a good analysis of this story here at OMBWatch.org. In a related story from the Telegraph.co.uk, Bush is also planning how to pardon people who have been ordered to illegally torture people.
A former CIA officer familiar with the backstage lobbying for pardons, said: “These are the people President Bush asked to fight the war on terror for him. He gave them the green light to fight tough. The view of many in the intelligence community is that he should not leave them vulnerable to legal censure when he leaves.
“An effort is under way to get pre-emptive pardons. . . . “
OMBWatch’s story describes how Bush is getting away with all of this, and they published a sample of the laws Bush is trashing.
They include rules for the Dept. of Justice, with a rule expanding the power of state and local law enforcement and report the information to federal agencies. The rule broadens the scope of activies authorities could monitor to include organizations (like the Quakers, like peace groups) along with many non-criminal activities these goons deem “suspicious”. That could, of course, mean anything. It could include bloging or being a part of an online anti-war group.
Another new rule would allow truck drivers on American roads to drive up to 11 consecutive hours without rest. Regarding the environment, one new rule would outrageously allow mining companies to dump the rock and dirt from mountaintop removal into rivers and streams.
Another rule would alter implementation of the Endangered Species Act by allowing federal land-use managers to approve projects like infrastructure creation and logging. Currently, consultation is required, but that will change.
A new rule regarding the health of our oceans would transfer the responsibility for examining environmental impacts of ocean management decisions from federal employees to people in the fishing industry. Guess who their “oversight” will favor?
These rules are unchallengable and irreversable, unless President Obama comes up with some new legal method for challenging these executive orders and rules. It is unlikely he will even want to do that, since this would ultimately affect his presidential power. Historically, American presidents don’t like to remove power from themselves and usually don’t. These rules reflect the immense power that Bush and Cheney devised to give the himself in the executive branch. (That’s one reason why all this conservative fear about Obama is so ridiculous. Where were those scared people when Bush was trashing our Constitution and our other branches of government?)
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