In a “You can’t make this up” moment, a CNN segment called “Congress rolls back environmental regulations” on Thursday afternoon’s The Lead featured footage from the disastrous 2015 Animas River spill in Colorado and New Mexico.
Thus, as CNN government regulation correspondent Rene Marsh regaled viewers about the dangers associated with the “repeal” of the regulatory euphemism known as the “Stream Protection Rule,” the program showed viewers video of a completely government-caused disaster.
Here is how the top CNN’s related video web page looked at 9:45 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, with the video at the 17-second mark of the one minute video (HT Twitchy):
Yes, that’s the polluted Animas River, and the footage comes from the extensive coverage when and after it happened at KRQE in Albuquerque.
Here’s that CNN video segment, where viewers will see Animas River footage present for about 20 seconds:
Transcript (bolds are mine throughout this post):
RENE MARSH, CNN: The whole idea behind this is to protect streams from any sort of pollution that could come from coal and the mining industry. Essentially it requires these companies to do checks, data checks, to see how many chemicals, what’s the level of chemicals within these streams that may be a by-product from the coal industry, the mining industry.
We do know that yesterday the House voted to repeal it, and the Senate, just a short time ago, also voted to repeal this regulation.
So environmentalists, obviously, very concerned. They’re saying, “Well, if you’re not collecting the data, you’re not monitoring the chemicals in the stream, how will you know what the environmental impact will be from mining and the coal industry?”
So that’s the concern there. But on the other side, you have the coal industry saying that this was too burdensome, it was a financial burden. It was, you know, killing jobs within the industry.
So really today, the repealing of this vote, Jake, is seen as a very big win for the coal industry.
The Animas River spill which CNN chose to show in the background is a textbook case of regulatory incompetence and hypocrisy, as succinctly described by Michelle Malkin in an August 2015 syndicated column:
Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s just the latest man-caused disaster from an out-of-control bureaucracy whose primary mission is not the Earth’s preservation, but self-preservation.
As always, the government cover-up compounds the crime — which is why the agency’s promise this week to investigate itself has residents across the Rocky Mountains in stitches. Or tears.
After the EPA and officials and their contract workers accidentally spilled three million gallons of pent-up toxic sludge on August 5 from a defunct mine in San Juan County that hadn’t operated since 1923, EPA apparatchiks delayed notifying residents for more than 24 hours. They vastly underestimated the volume and spill rate of gunk. Then, while refusing to release data, EPA head Gina McCarthy flew to the glowing river to fecklessly declare that the water “seems to be restoring itself.”
The cleanup costs for the Colorado spill alone are estimated at $30 billion.
Days before Barack Obama left office, the EPA refused to pay claims arising from the spill.
As to the regulatory matter at hand, the segment doesn’t show host Jake Tapper’s introduction of the issue. But as presented above and at CNN, it gives viewers the impression that the “regulations” have been in force for a long time (“Congress rolls back”), that it only concerns reporting requirements, and, by implication, that coal and other mining companies have been filing related reports with the government.
None of this is true. What’s really happening is that a single regulatory “final rule” known as the “Stream Protection Rule,” which was issued by the Obama administration on December 19, i.e., during the Trump transition period, is being eliminated.
The rule, as summarized by the U.S. Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, appeared to place extraordinary discretionary power in bureaucrats’ hands (italics are mine):
… The rule defines “material damage to the hydrologic balance outside the permit area” for the first time and clarifying that the statutory prohibition on the approval of proposed operations that would result in material damage to the hydrologic balance outside the permit area applies to both surface and underground mining operations. Under SMCRA, the regulatory authority may not approve a permit application unless the application demonstrates, and the regulatory authority finds, that the proposed operation would not result in material damage to the hydrologic balance outside the permit area.
The rule expands the baseline data requirements for permit applications for proposed coal mining operations to ensure that the permittee and the regulatory authority have a complete picture of premining conditions to which the impacts of mining can be compared.
The excerpt, with its “regulatory authority has the final say” language, appears to give Interior the leeway to decide on its own what the largely theoretical “material damage” might be. Permit applications would take even longer, and their approval would be subject to more regulatory whim than they are already.
The bolded sentence in the second excerpted paragraph demonstrates that the “expanded” data requirements are new. CNN’s Marsh gave viewers the opposite impression.
Because of its recency, the Stream Protection Rule came under the permitted jurisdiction of the Congressional Review Act (CRA), as Daren Bakst and James L. Gattuso at the Heritage Foundation explained in December:
Enacted over 20 years ago as part the “Contract with America” package of reforms, the Congressional Review Act (CRA) has sat largely unused in the congressional toolbox. This law sought to make it easier for Congress to repeal regulations, but only once has it been successfully used to do so. That is about to change.
… While Congress has always had the power to stop any regulation it disapproves of, the CRA provides a streamlined process for Congress to disapprove a final rule without threat of filibuster. Moreover, it bars agencies from re-imposing the same or similar rule afterward. Because of this, the CRA could in many cases provide a more effective way to address newly imposed final rules than even direct repeal of a final rule by federal agencies.
… The CRA process, which applies to both “major” and “non-major” rules begins with a notification to Congress from the agency of the adoption of a new regulation. This triggers a 60-day period in which Congress can introduce a “resolution of disapproval” of a rule.
Importantly, this 60-day period is calculated in terms of “legislative” days, not actual calendar days. Thus, as calculated by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), this means that rules adopted as far back as June 3, 2016, are still within this review period.
Congressmen and senators representing areas where what’s left of the coal industry is still present decried the rule as “one of the most onerous regulations that has come out of the Obama administration,” and characterized it as driven by “one thing: (to) kill coal.”
Naturally, since Donald Trump’s election victory, the press has portrayed Congress’s potential and now-current employment of CRA to rein in examples of regulatory overreach like the Stream Protection Rule as “dusting off a little-used congressional tool” (Bloomberg News); an “obscure tactic” (Boston Globe); “an obscure oversight tool” (Associated Press); and “an obscure law” (New York Times).
These reports have not mentioned the fact that President Bill Clinton signed the Congressional Review Act into law in 1996. In genuine historical context, the revival of the CRA is best seen as the revival of a noble bipartisan effort to rein in the horribly expensive, job-killing regulatory state.
It’s a pretty good bet that the establishment press won’t ever see things that way.