Bush bumbles one last time on environment

Adding one final insult to nearly eight years of injury, the Bush administration continued to defy the Supreme Court today by issuing a request for additional comments--an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking—on global warming regulations, rather than the so-called "endangerment determination" that the Court's ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA compelled and senior Environmental Protection Agency officials had argued for. A front-page report in the Washington Post today details the tireless efforts of senior political appointees in the administration to prevent global warming regulations from being in put in place under President Bush.

"Today's action caps off eight years of catastrophic negligence on the part of an increasingly irrelevant administration, and removes whatever shadow of a doubt that may have existed about whether it was going to fail to live up to its obligations to the American public, the law, and the Supreme Court to do something real on global warming. The American public, Congress, world leaders, and even career government officials are counting down the days until this administration leaves town and a new president undoes the damage done by President Bush and makes up for nearly a decade of lost time--time we didn't have to waste in the first place. And the first thing the next administration will do is toss the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking into the circular file.

"Stephen Johnson should have left his post long ago, but today's action underscores his complete and utter lack of credibility. Johnson will be remembered not for his decades of public service, but rather for his unswerving fealty to the misguided policies of a failed administration.

"This global warming melodrama has all the set pieces of classic Bush administration political theater: politics coming before science, outright deception of the American public and Congressional investigators, willful disregard for the law and courts, and political meddling at the highest levels to protect favored special interests--with the dark hand of the Vice President visible throughout. Thankfully this drama is near the end of its final act."