EPA Political Implications

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EPA Political Implications The EPA has both critics and supporter in the political arena. Most Republican Presidential Candidates and many leading congressional Republicans have bitterly condemned the EPA as creating too much regulation. Although the Republican primary season has passed, speeches by former candidates exhibit the hostility to perceived over regulation by the EPA. The rest of the 2012 Republican presidential field is broadly in agreement with Michèle Bachmann's opinions. Throughout her campaign, Representative Bachmann explained even further than an implicit threat to abolish the EPA by making the somewhat self-contradictory promise to a crowd on August 8, 2011: "I guarantee you the EPA will have doors locked and lights turned…show more content…
The National Association of Manufacturers are troubled by the [EPA's] aggressive agenda that would add new afflictions and restrictions, rise costs, abolish jobs and weaken U.S. manufacturers' ability to compete in the global marketplace." "The American Farm Bureau Federation warns of a "slippery slope" of EPA "regulatory creep" and claims the history of the [CWA] since its enactment in 1972 is replete with instances in which federal agencies interpreted the law to narrow the exemption for normal farming activities." Writers sympathetic to industry have created works with self-explanatory titles such as "Don't Forget the Job Killing EPA, Mr .Obama 22 and "How the EPA's Green Tyranny is Stifling America. A principal right-of-center legislative association is in agreement with elected Republican officials. The American Legislation Exchange Council (ALEC) claims to be the "nation's largest nonpartisan, individual membership organization of state legislators with approximately 2,000 members. Although technically "nonpartisan," it is indeed a right-leaning organization that endorses "free markets, limited movement, federalism, and individual liberty."25 In 2011, ALEC produced a white paper entitled "EPA's Regulatory Train…show more content…
ALEC decries "breathtaking and hostile regulatory assaults" and "a slew of overreaching and inefficient air and water rules" representing "big govemment market interventions" and an EPA "regulatory onslaught without regard to economic realities or democratic accountability."2^ ALEC asserts the EPA "operates far more like an activist for whom no standard is too high, no impact too onerous, no risk too low and no science too speculative."28 ALEC claims "[n]owhere is EPA's regulatory overreach more apparent than in its misguided effort to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act."2^Chapters of the white paper bear titles such as "The Glorious Mess of EPA Regulation," "Leaving the Station: Elements of a Train Wreck,"and "Off the Rails: Nine Reasons to Oppose EPA's Overreach," although it includes a chapter that surprisingly concedes the effectiveness of some environmental initiatives.-^" ALEC has produced an anti-EPA model resolution, introduced in at least two state legislatures in 2010, which, among other things, asserts as fact that "EPA over-regulation is driving jobs and industry out of
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