The EPA went rogue and Trump's pick will rein it in

Any parent who has ever disciplined children knows that no matter how hard it might be, it's for their own good. The Environmental Protection Agency could use some discipline right about now. During the Obama administration, the EPA became a lawless organ of federal power, divorced from the Congressional statutes that were meant to constrain it. If it is to be reformed, it will need the steady hand of someone who understands just how thoroughly it has gone astray. Enter Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a man who has spent the last six years pushing back on the EPA's most egregious overreaches. Given Pruitt's recent role as EPA antagonizer-in-chief, it's little wonder that some on the left have responded with howling rage to his nomination. How, they ask, can a man who has repeatedly sued the EPA now be tapped to lead it? But even a cursory review of some of the EPA's actions over the last few years shows that only someone who thoroughly understands why the EPA is broken can hope to fix it. Consider the EPA's Waters of the United States rule, a power grab that would have allowed the EPA to regulate nearly every stream and dry river bed in the country. The rule was so expansive that the EPA felt it necessary to specifically exclude from its jurisdiction the puddles that form in your front yard after a rainstorm. Subpoenaed internal documents revealed the Army Corps of Engineers warned the EPA that the rule had "serious flaws" that rendered it "legally vulnerable, difficult to defend in court, difficult for the Corps to explain or justify, and challenging for the Corps to implement." Not only did the EPA promulgate the rule despite these warnings, it spent taxpayer dollars on what the Government Accountability Office would later call an illegal "covert propaganda" effort to sell the rule to the public. But the EPA's water rule was small potatoes compared to the regulation that was to be the Obama administration's crowning environmental achievement — the Clean Power Plan. When President Obama ran for office in 2008, he vowed to implement a cap-and-trade system that would bankrupt anyone who dared to build a coal-fired power plant in the United States, a move that would lead inexorably to the end of the coal industry as a whole...Given the weak case against him, it is imperative that Republicans in the Senate rally to Pruitt's cause. They cannot allow his nomination to be scuttled because of his adherence to the rule of law and his assertion that free people in a free country should be able to challenge climate change dogma without fear of prosecution...more