The “resistance” is at it again.
President Joe Biden’s allies are getting antsy about his administration’s pileup of unfinished environmental rules — especially with the threat that a second Trump presidency could undo them all.
Biden’s agencies are facing a deadline this spring to finish some of their most important regulations to ensure that a Republican Congress and White House can’t erase them next year, including a crackdown on power plants’ climate pollution, protections for endangered species and a bid to protect federal employees from politically motivated firings.
That last one is an understandable priority for federal bureaucrats and appointees worried that they’ll be fired.
This obviously raises the question of who actually runs the federal government, but if you still don’t know the answer to that, try running for office and actually passing a law. The folks who actually run things are busy insulating themselves from being subjected to the rigors of democratic change in the name of protecting democracy from the people who vote for things that they shouldn’t.
The scramble to finish the regulations is crucial to determining how much of Biden’s ambitious legacy may survive past the November election, as the two likely nominees promote sharply contrasting views on climate change, green energy and the power of federal agencies.
The Biden administration has promised action on a lot of fronts, and how soon it rolls those rules out could determine how easy they are for a future administration to unravel. Policy insiders and Biden administration allies are urging agencies’ rule writers to keep their eye on the clock.
The polite fiction is that the feds are supposed to write rules objectively and impartially. This is a press release stating that the opposite is true and that the rules are being rushed out for purely partisan reasons.
Considering that this was the exact claim used to undermine the Trump administration’s executive orders and other decisions in court, including those that involved setting aside executive orders and other debris from the Obama administration which had somehow acquired the force of law by the mere fact that Obama wanted them done, it ought to be an important argument used when challenging some of these same rules in court.
On the table is Biden’s car ban.
EPA rule writers are hustling behind the scenes to wrap up work on a suite of big Biden regulations on climate, water and chemicals this year…
Closely watched climate rules, such as revamped tailpipe pollution limits for cars and trucks, are expected in March as well. Those rules, under review at the White House, could lead to electric vehicles making up two-thirds of car and light truck sales as soon as 2032, the EPA has estimated.
Nah, they won’t. It’ll just mean that the majority of Americans won’t be able to afford to buy new cars.
But the real meat of it is the bureaucratic resistance protecting itself from the consequences of its coup.
Last year, the Office of Personnel Management proposed stronger guardrails for the civil service. The regulation says career employees keep their civil service protections unless they voluntarily accept a political appointee job and adds requirements when reclassifying career positions as political appointments.
The rule could serve as a vital defense for federal employees if Trump wins in November.
That allows Dems to protect the activists they’ve embedded into the federal government and allow them to continue undermining America from within.