Oversight panel gets tough, moves to slam brakes on Obama’s runaway EPA

In a scorching showdown letter dated May 10, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan demanded that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson surrender documents she doesn’t want made public. The seething but civil congressmen requested all the documentation that went into the EPA’s unprecedented and legally questionable attempt to preemptively block the permit of Alaska’s multi-billion dollar Pebble copper mine even before the permitting process begins. This novel, front-end attack on jobs and economic development hinges on the convoluted Clean Water Act (CWA) and clever gimmicks lurking in its litigation-prone Section 404(c). Water is the regulator’s perfect power grab target; nearly every development needs water. The proposed mine itself, with its massive copper deposit and smaller amount of gold, is just a convenient symbol to trigger anti-mine public emotion. Issa and Jordan evidently realized that the EPA was using the Pebble project as a test bed to inflate the agency’s total regulatory authority far beyond the clear intent of Congress. EPA’s weapon is what matters; it’s a supposedly scientific “watershed assessment” of the Bristol Bay locale surrounding the proposed mine, conducted before the scientists had any idea of what the mine would look like, with no input from the mine developers, and manipulated to show potentially horrible damage to a prized salmon run, something scary enough to justify withholding the permit. That’s the EPA’s clever new power grab gimmick: a preemptive veto. No permit, no mine. Now, hypothetically apply that power to every new development in America’s future: No permit, no anything. You can see where this is going...more