Quote:PRESIDENT-elect Donald Trump plans to name Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. That announcement led to immediate high-decibel shrieking from environmental activists.

But the reason for those activists' distress is cause for cheer among the broad public: Pruitt respects the law, defers to constitutional limits and will champion common sense in regulatory deliberations. That will be in marked contrast to the past eight years.

Pruitt has been a fierce opponent of federal overreach and has fought many Obama-era EPA programs in court. Writing at the Environmental Defense Fund's blog, Keith Gaby complained that Pruitt “has apparently never seen an EPA rule that didn't prompt him to run to court to have it blocked.”

Yet Pruitt's opposition has been based on constitutional issues and the fact that many EPA programs ignore huge logistical problems in pursuit of largely hypothetical gains.

Read all the recent editorials from The Oklahoman.
The Clean Power Plan, for example, seeks to reduce national power production emissions to 1985 levels by 2030 even as the U.S. population is expected to increase 53 percent. It effectively forces closure of numerous existing power plants, which experts estimate could increase Oklahoma's electric rates by as much as 40 percent by 2020. And the plan's mandates would mostly take effect before sufficient transmission lines could be installed to new power plants, reducing electric grid reliability.

Or consider the EPA's “regional haze” regulations, designed only to improve air visibility to a degree that cannot be discerned with the naked eye. When that plan was challenged in court, Justice Paul Kelly of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver noted in a dissent that, in order to reject an Oklahoma state-based plan for compliance, the EPA “assumed OG&E would burn coal they are not burning and have no plans to burn” and assumed power plants could use “scrubbers that do not fit and are not technically feasible.”

Or consider the preposterous claims made by the EPA to fabricate health benefits from new mercury and air toxics standards for power plants. Brian Potts, then a partner at the international law firm Foley & Lardner LLP, noted in The Wall Street Journal that the EPA assumed “a whopping 15 percent of all pregnant women in Wisconsin subsist primarily by catching and eating as much as six pounds of lake fish a week” (as well as 21 percent of pregnant Minnesota women).

In reality, the average person eats only about 5 ounces of fish from oceans and lakes each week.

Pruitt hasn't been afraid to call foul when federal regulators have engaged in such flagrant abuse of power, particularly when their plans will exact a huge toll on working families and when purported “benefits” require full suspension of disbelief.

Environmental activists are dismayed that Pruitt has said the debate over global warming is “far from settled” and that “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.” Yet this is only a statement of fact. Heaven forbid an EPA head acknowledge reality.

Pruitt's nomination is a feather in Oklahoma's cap, and should come as welcome news to those who care about the rule of law, and to industries across the country that have been buffeted by EPA practices during the Obama administration.

http://Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt's nomina...nge at EPA

One big problem with EPA and other executive administrative agencies is that if you get into a dispute with them, it gets resolved by an administrative law judge (ALJ) who ultimately reports to guess whom? The executive director of the agency.

In fact, administrative agencies violate the constitutional separation of powers because legislative (rule-making), executive (enforcement), and judicial (ALJ's) powers are all concentrated in one place. What we need to do to protect the rights of citizens would be the following:

1) Enact a provision whereby congress must automatically review any proposed rule making having a projected impact greater than some threshold, and at the request of a certain number of members can review any rule making, and in the event of such review the rule may not take effect until ratified by congress.
2) Implement sunset review by congress of all administrative agencies once every ten years, beginning at the end of each decade of the agency's existence.
3) Replace the captive ALJs with either an independent executive office of hearings (like Texas or Oregon) or by Article III administrative law courts in each federal judicial district (like much of Europe).

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/a...rogue-epa/

Another good article-Will Trump stop the rogue EPA? Goes into a bunch of their excesses.