Circling back on the dust-up over the House GOP’s drive, led by Colorado members, to “prevent” the non-existent EPA regulation of farm dust, the Colorado Independent’s Troy Hooper reports:
“This entire session of Congress has felt to many of us like a trip into Alice’s Wonderland,” the eight-term Democrat from Colorado said Thursday. “While our nation struggles with a devastating economy … we do nothing about jobs or getting America back to work; instead we repeatedly fall down the rabbit hole of extreme legislation, and now with this so-called ‘Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act,’ it would seem we’re having tea with the Cheshire Cat. To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad … You must be mad or you wouldn’t have come here.'”
The fact that the Environmental Protection Agency maintains it has no plans to regulate farm dust is only partially what left DeGette challenging the sanity of her colleagues at a time when their approval rating lags behind both President Nixon during Watergate and Paris Hilton circa 2005. She was also tripping out that they refused to limit the scope of H.R. 1633 to agriculture, as its title implies.
U.S. Reps. Cory Gardner, Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn – Coloradans who co-sponsored the bill – and their Republican cohorts shot down several amendments that would have exempted farm dust from the Clean Air Act but would have ensured the EPA can regulate coarse particulate matter from the mining and extraction industries [Pols emphasis], or dust that contains arsenic or other heavy metals, or dust that substantially harms public health…
We noted back in November that Rep. Cory Gardner, a co-sponsor of this bill along with Reps. Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn, had specifically referred to the EPA being “willing to abandon” regulation of farm dust. The choice of words is especially curious, since it’s hard for the EPA to “abandon” a regulation they hadn’t made. But Gardner’s choice of words was consistent with the way that most Republicans were misrepresenting the issue at the time.
But as with so many surficially meaningless legislative campaigns these days, it seems now there might actually have been something “legitimate” these guys were working toward–keeping the energy industry safe from regulation too! Now, it’s true you don’t usually think of particulate pollution from, for example, a coal mine when you think “farm,” but at least this kind of dubious sleight-of-hand on behalf of big campaign donors makes a kind of sense. We don’t know how politically helpful it is, but it’s more believable than obsessing on nonexistent “problems.”
If you have to choose between looking evil or stupid, at least evil affords you a little respect.
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Now that Gardner is untouchable and Brandon Shaffer is considering a quickie move to Aurora, I thought smearing Cory had fallen completely off your radar.
Nice to see you wasting your time.
Brandon would just be the third Democrat carpetbagger in CD-6 now, wouldn’t he?
its a lot of work to represent the narrow interests of O&G and mining industries and then also pretend to represent a bunch of dupes at the same time. Just keeping your lies straight is a big part of that.
Proving that stupid and evil doesn’t need to be a choice.
He was born that way. Hate the sin, love the sinner.
but everyone agrees that stupid is funnier.
ArapaBOT is funny.
as you are BOT, but it would be better to be evil.