Cross-posted at DailyKos. “Dead by Sunset” is the name of a lurid true crime book by Ann Rule about a sociopathic killer in Portland, Oregon. Brad Cunningham bludgeoned his estranged wife to death and then pushed “her van onto the Sunset Freeway in Oregon hoping cars will pile into the vehicle and the murder will look like a traffic accident.”
Kill it, and make it look like an accident. That’s the modus operandi of a provision of the new budget approved by Congress.
Buried deep in the reams of the new budget is a “sunset” provision that will permit a small commission — it will be a commission comprised of lobbyists and corporate executives — to kill the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, even the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The arch-assassin is Bush’s longtime friend Clay Johnson, “the most influential member of Bush’s inner circle whom you’ve never heard of,” and the Director of the obscure Office of Management and Budget. More below:
Writes PR Watch:
In “Bush’s Most Radical Plan Yet, a May 2005 article in Rolling Stone, writer Osha Gray Davidson digs into the facets of the sunset provision and concludes that, “[w]Ith a vote of hand-picked lobbyists, the president could terminate any federal agency he dislikes”:
Note that the president is given the power to appoint the eight-member panel, which means the Sunset provision commission would “violate the constitutional separation of power between Congress and the executive branch, enabling the president to dismantle programs created by lawmakers.”
However, Republicans already have a work-around for that little constitutional problem:
Wouldn’t the courts pose a problem? Oh, the Republicans have that figured out too, reports Rolling Stone:
Clay Johnson is an old hand at seizing power from bureaucratic government entities:
He is also partial to giving corporate lobbyists a direct role in gutting regulatory protections.
One of his first acts in Texas was to remove all three members of the state environmental-protection commission and replace them with a former Monsanto executive, an official with the Texas Beef Council and a lawyer for the oil industry.
Overnight, a commission widely respected for its impartiality became a “revolving door between the industry lobby and government,” says Jim Marston, the senior attorney in Texas for the nonprofit organization Environmental Defense.
[NOTE: The photo and pullquote are from the PBS Frontline profile of Clay Johnson.]
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Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay
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Even if such regulations remain on the books, eliminating entire agencies would leave no one to enforce them. “And if there’s no cop on the beat, who’s going to follow the law?” says J. Robert Shull, senior policy analyst at OMB Watch.
The first hint of Bush’s plan to create a commission surfaced only weeks after he won re-election last November. At an economic conference convened by Treasury Secretary John Snow, one panel member made the case for inserting a sunset provision into existing regulations. Such a move would “shift the burden of proof onto the regulations and require us to demonstrate that they’re still needed,” said Susan Dudley, director of regulatory studies at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The Sunset provision has long been in the plans, harking back to the Reagan presidency:
But, “the provision goes beyond anything attempted by conservatives in the past.”
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Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way.
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Once again, it’s Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) speaking up. Sometimes I wonder how Waxman can handle being the canary in the coalmine so often:
[……..]
“The end result,” says Waxman, “would be a field day for corporate lobbyists.”
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Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Besides raging — which we do all too often and with often insufficient effect — what else can we do?
Especially since this is a measure that will be massaged and modified — slipped in this bill and that bill — by the Republicans over the span of a few years until the commission is in place, set to do maximum damage, and inviolable from legislation or judicial defense?
Emphases mine.
Poetic touches courtesy of Dylan Thomas.