In a strangely timed late night
article, Politico, building off a
blog post by the liberal site Media Matters, called out
The Daily Caller and others who Media Matters doesn't like, for including that line in a story about the far reaching implications of the Obama-EPA's global warming regulations.
Politico writes:
"The hated Environmental Protection Agency is looking to spend $21 billion per year to hire an additional 230,000 people to enforce greenhouse gas regulations. One problem: It's not true. Patient zero for this story is The Daily Caller, which on Monday wrote that the EPA is ‘asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats - at a cost of $21 billion - to attempt to implement the rules.'
Our take: It's actually worse - EPA never
asked the American taxpayers. EPA is already well on its way to imposing these regulations and the financial burdens that come with them. Never mind the fact that Congress has repeatedly rejected this cap-and-trade approach over the past decade.
All sides agree that the debate boils down to something called the tailoring rule. While EPA moves forward imposing its greenhouse gas regime, which the Agency readily admits will be even more devastating to our economy than cap-and-trade, it claims that these regulations will only hit the largest sources, because smaller sources, such as farms, churches, schools, hospitals and small businesses, would be exempt through the tailoring rule-but this is not the case.
The problem is that the tailoring rule doesn't comply with the plain language of the Clean Air Act - and while the Obama-EPA doesn't much care for the rule of law, the courts do. So EPA may be able to get away with telling Congress and the press that it has no plans to regulate small sources, but the Agency has to tell the courts the truth.
And the truth is that no one is exempt. As EPA states in a recent brief to the court, while "the administrative burdens may still be so great that compliance at the 100/250 tpy level [a level that would reach small sources] may still be absurd or impossible to administer at that time, that does not mean that the Agency is not moving toward the statutory thresholds." In fact, through this regulatory process "EPA intends to require full compliance with the CAA applicability provisions... at threshold levels that are as close to the statutory levels as possible, and do so as quickly as possible." (Brief for the Respondents (EPA), Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. U.S. EPA, Sep. 16, 2011, p. 83).
So in their own words, EPA will, in fact, regulate even the smallest sources and the nightmare scenario that Congressman John Dingell once called a "glorious mess" will ensue. That could come as soon as 2016. Yet all this is completely missing from Politico's fact check-and the results are indeed absurd.
