Posted on 09/10/2003 9:58:26 PM PDT by lewislynn
HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Business
Sept. 10, 2003, 11:21PM
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has requested the Supreme Court's help in a fight over allowing Mexican trucks and buses on U.S. roadways for the first time in two decades.
The administration wants to drop a court-ordered environmental study that has delayed the border opening. The $1.8 million study is expected to take a year or more.
President Bush ordered U.S. highways open to Mexican trucks last fall, despite long-standing opposition from U.S. labor, consumer and environmental organizations.
The consumer group Public Citizen, the Teamsters and others sued on safety and environmental grounds, and a federal appeals court ruled earlier this year that the government must perform the lengthy study.
The Bush administration has said it will comply with that order but also filed an appeal with the Supreme Court.
"The court of appeals misapplied the nation's environmental laws and constrained the president's discretion to conduct foreign affairs," Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote.
The ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals "prevents the president's action from taking effect and thereby hampers commerce," Olson wrote in the appeal filed this week.
The ruling also needlessly prolongs a trade dispute with Mexico over the requirements of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Olson wrote.
Public Citizen plans to tell the court not to waste its time, its president, Joan Claybrook, said.
"They're beating a dead horse," she said of the Bush administration. "They didn't do an environmental impact study, and they should have. There are significant environmental issues here, and if they'd done it right the first time they wouldn't have to be in court."
The study will analyze short- and long-term environmental effects of opening U.S. roads to Mexican trucks. It will not stop Mexican trucks from operating in the long run but should lessen potentially harmful effects, Claybrook said.
Since 1982, trucks from Mexico have been allowed only in approximately 20-mile-wide commercial border zones, where Mexican rigs must transfer their cargo to U.S. trucks for deliveries within the United States.
Mexican trucks make about 4.5 million border crossings every year, and it is cumbersome and expensive to offload cargo to U.S. trucks, the administration filing said.
"Passengers using scheduled bus services must follow similarly inefficient procedures," Olson wrote.
Mexico claims the moratorium has cost it more than $2 billion.
Public Citizen says Mexican trucks are typically older and more polluting than American trucks.
After Bush's order, the Transportation Department received scores of applications from Mexican carriers and bus companies, but none is yet operating in the United States.
Under NAFTA, Mexican trucks were to have gained full access to U.S. roads beginning in 2000. But the Clinton administration, under pressure from labor and consumer groups, refused to grant them entry. Mexico successfully challenged the moratorium through a free-trade tribunal.
Anybody know why?
Do you think those guys will be keeping log books and pulling over to get enough sleep to drive. Nope. They'll be worse than U.S. drivers that fudge to make more money. At least U.S. drivers overall do a pretty good job of being safe. Why would we want to open the interior of the U.S. to drivers and truck/buses from Mexico. It's just going to end up taking more jobs and making the U.S. smell like PEMEX gas. I ain't no tree hugger, but that crap is nasty!
I don't much care if it's costing Mexico as it now stands, what will it cost us if it's allowed? Something is wrong with this open borders mentality!
I am very much afraid that Bush is going to loose a lot of his core supporters if he continues to take steps that dissolve our southern border.
Along with President Dean....
C-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s
Pigs will fly first.
Could it be that it's profitable for business to hire Mexicans at lower wages? That means more profit. It's all short term gains, anyway.
None of these people really seem to care that, like slavery in America, it's going to blow up in our faces in 100 years.
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