Year 2, Month 8, Day 15: Lord Of The Flies

The July 30 New York Times reports on further criminality from those crazy House Republicans, this time in the form of “riders” on other bills. Read it and weep:

While almost no one was looking, House Republicans embarked last week on a broad assault on the nation’s environmental laws, using as their weapon the 2012 spending bill for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. When debate began Monday, the bill included an astonishing 39 anti-environmental riders — so called because they ride along on appropriations bills even though they have nothing to do with spending and are designed to change policy, in this case disastrously.

Riders generally are not subjected to hearings or extensive debate, and many would not survive on their own. They are often written in such a way that most people, even many Capitol Hill insiders, need a guide to understand them. They are, in short, bad policy pushed forward through a bad legislative process.

A rider can be removed from the bill only with a vote to strike it. The Democrats managed one big victory on Wednesday when, by a vote of 224 to 202, the House struck one that would have gutted the Endangered Species Act by blocking the federal government from listing any new species as threatened or endangered and barring it from protecting vital habitat — a provision so extreme that even some Republicans could not countenance it.

These people are not going to be satisfied until there is nothing living in the wild, anywhere on Earth. Sent July 30:

Inserting anti-environment riders on unrelated bills is a flagrant corruption of the mechanisms of our government, but as we have seen time and time again, there is no abuse of the legislative process too egregious for the current Congress. Many of these attachments seem completely senseless until we recognize that they were written for our politicians by specialists from industries affected by environmental regulations. Since weakening of EPA or other regulatory authority translates into higher profits, industry-friendly riders are worth a lot of money.

There are some essential questions which all Americans need to ask when we learn about this practice: Should our laws be written by corporations for their own benefit? Is it possible to instill an ethic of collective responsibility in multinational corporations? Is a fixation on short-term profits the best guide for the business sector’s approach to environmental issues? The obvious answers: no, no and no.

Warren Senders