I’m still digging out from two long weeks in Washington DC teaching two concentrated summer school courses, so I’m slow catching up with everything going on at the Republican convention. John and I mulled over the idea of attending the convention with press credentials, but decided against it.
But maybe we should have turned up. PoliticoPro (subscription only) reported this yesterday:
GOP platform aims to turn EPA into commission
By Alex Guillén
The party platform issues a new call to turn EPA into a commission made up of bipartisan members, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science,” the platform says.
Such a proposal was not included in the party’s 2012 platform, though the idea has been floated before, including in 2013 by Steven F. Hayward, a Pepperdine University professor of public policy and conservative blogger.
The new platform also takes more typical Republican shots at EPA, including seeking a prohibition on carbon dioxide regulations. It also calls for an end to the so-called “sue and settle” practice in which outside groups sue EPA and reach a deal in court, and it says Congress, not EPA, should set national air quality standards.
“The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists,” the platform says. “The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party.”
I”ve been using the line “The environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists; they just screw everything up” for a long time in speeches mostly as a way of getting under the thin skin of environmentalists (works, too), and urging Republican office holders to adopt this attitude. Nice to see someone has paid attention.
Memo to GOP: I have thoughts on other parts of the platform, too.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.