Posted on 09/06/2001 10:10:09 AM PDT by RonDog
Thursday, September 06, 2001
Meet the Wests Multiple Land Use Sheriffs
By: Hugh Hewitt, TCS Corespondant
California and its neighbors to the north are closing in on the status of ward of the federal government. With every new listing of a species as endangered, and with every administrative ruling of the Army Corps of Engineers as to what is a "jurisdictional water" of the United States, the federal overlay on the West Coast grows larger and thicker. Other agencies have joined the assault on state sovereignty, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Private litigants have figured out how to use the federal courts to add their names to the unelected authorities wielding enormous power over the lands and people of the West.
Some West Coast folk applaud these developments. The city-dwellers are, in large numbers, believers in the danger of "sprawl" and boosters of "open space." Environmental activists long ago recognized the limits to influence with elected officials who must, ultimately, answer to voters. These activists would much rather petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate "critical habitat" for the San Bernadino Kangaroo Rat or the Quino Checkerspot Butterfly than seek even simple majorities in Sacramento. The zero-growth movement requires like-minded allies within federal bureaucracies. The Clinton-Gore years was the golden age of bureaucratic co-option. At every level, from GS-2 to SES level 6, the feds are full to the brim with ideologues whose claim to expertise is quite simply laughable.
Bureaucratic power does not require expertise because it comes without accountability. The West is full of stories -- real, live dramas -- of landowners ruined because some federal official said, "Make it so." The cost of delay is so huge that landowner after landowner is shaken down without objection. Klamath Basin is just the best known of a long list of land use coups executed in the name of exotic species. Is there anyone who really believes that the sucker fish will perish from the Earth if the farmers are allowed to irrigate their fields? Some no-name biologists speculated that could happen and the bureaucratic bulldozer kicked in. We have seen it before with fairy shrimp and Delhi-sands loving flies. We will see it again. There is no will among Congress to demand change -- no upside to defending property rights.
Nor outside of the Fox News Network does any media outlet seem to care. Fox's William La Jeunesse owns the beat and has scooped all the other networks time and time again on these stories. If he doesn't win an Emmy it will be because of environmentalist criticism of the stories selection but not of the accuracy of the accounts. The other nets just aren't interested, even when the news value of, say, the loss of firefighters' lives to species concerns is obvious.
Here's a big "for example" of an unreported story involving bureaucratic abuse. Under the Clean Water Act the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is supposed to decide when applicants are given permission to work in or around the "navigable waters" of the United States. Set aside the fact that this definition has grown to absurd proportions or that the agency is resisting the clear command of the U.S. Supreme Court that it stop and reverse this appetite for power.
The Corps eventually does get around to issuing some permits, and evidently a different branch of the feds thinks it does so too often. The EPA has a limited authority to intervene in these permit decisions. If the EPA sees a permit on its way to being issued that involves "an aquatic resource of national importance," it may object and so inform the Corps, causing lengthy delays in the permitting process. Not surprisingly, the EPA has abused this authority, and routinely labels even a few hundred feet of dry streambed an "aquatic resource of national importance." The EPA staff then parlays the delay it triggers into more concessions from the applicant. Occasionally, the Corps will stand up for the law and reject an EPA demand for more mitigation. The local EPA staff simply waits until the matter threatens to end up back in D.C. only to fold at the last minute. No harm in trying, right?
Except that it is an abuse of power by individuals unqualified to wield such authority. More and more applicants are finding that bureaucrats are dropping even the pretense of environmental concern. Its just about the power.
The Bush Administration will find it hard to restore a respect for the rule of law at the lower levels of these agencies. It will need to demand wholesale transfers in order to break up existing rings of regulatory zealots. But there is one thing it can do, and should do. Now. Tomorrow.
Many senior jobs are empty within the agencies. The head job of the powerful Region 9 office of the EPA is and has been vacant for months. Other senior positions can be filled at the other key agencies. The Bush folks have followed a top-down model which makes sense when lower levels of an organization will take cues and guidance from senior management headquartered far away. It makes no sense when the lower levels are daily issuing rulings that, if they were publicized, would be repudiated from the top.
White House personnel needs to get off the dime and begin to staff the senior level of the field bureaucracies. Wise appointments could quickly tame the worst abuses of law and regulation and at the same time could begin the effort to reclaim some key constituencies in the West. The political geography does not favor the President out here. But it is a political dynamic that only gets worse when the Administration does not bother to fix what it could even as it plans longer term relief where its hands are presently tied.
Hugh Hewitt is a syndicated radio talk show host and environmental lawyer. He can be reached at www.hughhewitt.com.
It is unconscionable that our own government would place endangered species over the livelihood of human beings!
If it went the way of the Dodo bird, that would be fine with me.
Thanks for the flag, RD.
Thank you for the link. It is now indexed on BOTH lists.
I tend to agree with the message behind DoughtyOne's golf analogy. Great approach shot by Hugh, but I think he choked a bit when he arrived at the edge of the green. Even if we can't eliminate ALL of these agencies, let's work to do away with at least SOME of the bureaucracy instead of maintaining the status quo.
Still love ya, Hugh!
Thanks for the info, Spunky! That is a GREAT thread!
quote. "Within a Riperian habitat conservation area,( that is a stream,) AN EXEMPTION MUST BE GRANTED BY A RESOURCE ADVISOR, (thats a biologist,) with the advoidence of adverse effects to listed species as a primary goal."
Hannity said: "So they needed the approval, so my point is correct.
then scroll to
#111 to see the four firefighters who perished:
The four fighterfighters had names and faces. Click on the names for a larger photo and a bio.
Tom Craven, 30 | Jessica Johnson, 19 | Devin Weaver,21 | Karen Fitzpatrick, 18 |
Hi, DL - Would that be FUTURE GOVERNOR of ARIZONA J.D. Hayworth?
Did you hear USC professor John Eastman (and the better half of Hugh Hewitt's Friday morning "Smart Guys" segment) on this morning's show?
Hugh asked him what the U.S. Supreme Court might do about a case decided by the ULTRA-left Ninth Circuit, and he said that if they take it, they have a special [ALT-9] macro to automatically insert at the end of any opinion involving a case from the Ninth Circuit the following conclusion: "The opinion of the Ninth Circuit is reversed; the decision of the Court is unanimous." - since those black-robed Left Coast bozos are reversed so often by the REAL Supremes.
(Thank God for Chief Justice-to-be Scalia.)
Whoops! Make that: "Hugh Hewitt's THURSDAY morning "Smart Guys" segment"
Here is a link to the EXCELLENT on-going summary of events at Klamath Falls, created (and frequently updated) by FReeper Jeff Head, who called into Hugh's show last Friday, when Mark Larson was guest host:
Thanks, farmfriend! (You have FReep-mail.)
I will be away from FR until tomorrow morning. Can YOU do the honors, and BUMP the folks on your list to this thread?
Thank you!
The big picture short term though is these agencies need to be scrapped, completely, the employees and appointees fired, and then the needs that first required these agencies to be re debated and rebuilt to what they were supposed to be. How to do that is open for debate, but the need is apparent. I'm frankly just plain tired of 8 million people being on the tax payers pay roll at huge expense, destroying peoples lives, and receiving pensions and credit cards and vacations. Government in general is just out of control huge, a lumbering mostly incompetent monstrosity, a golem of gluttony, a goliath of greed. Hands fulla gimme and a mouth fulla *&*^%^k you civvie! Do what we say or be killed! I honestly don't see how people in those positions can cash their checks and not be full of shame, just plain old vanilla old fashioned shame. Did ja see that article today, half a MILLION dollars to house those fed agents at the headgates at the motel? Like WHAT FOR? I hope the townspeople keep up the shunning and they include local quisling businesses as well. Collaborators is more like it.
You can't and shouldn't negotiate with terrorists. Waste of time. Opens you up to the stockholm syndrome, too, which is a *true occurence* that effects victims sometimes. They wind up making excuses for the terrorists who are victimising them. "Oh, the terrorist is just doing his job", and etc. "mustn't upset the terrorist" "the terroists told us the proper way to think and act and they are so smart and kind, let's just do what they say".
No easy answers here other than realise that the land, the water, the money, the born-with freedoms up and down the list- all hijacked by a consortium of big government, big corporations and big non governmental organizations. They are terrorists in suits. They don't necessarily look like osama bin laden, but there's really no difference. Some have badges, some have briefcases, some sit in front of benches, but the results are "terrorism" so that makes them "terrorists". Until enough people realise that these terrorists will continue their outrages. Every day it seems there's a new one, not only out west, all over, for years now, usually it's a lone family, or a very small area, never gets any press or media coverage, people destroyed, and partly destroyed by realising they are totally alone, abandoned by their neighbors and attacked by the Big 3 terrorist cartel. No redress, no hope, they bleed you to death, or stomp you flat, that's the two choices of legal suicide they give you once a royal edict is spewed.
HA!!
Curt, aren't they? {g}
For crying out loud, Ron...are we that old?
They used to call that *procedure*, "getting rubber-stamped."
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