During the eight long years of the Obama administration, American business was shackled by the regulatory agencies, such as the EPA, from functioning at full capacity. But now that the Punahou Kid is in the rear-view mirror, look out below:
The document carried the title “A Roadmap to Repeal,” a concise list of Obama administration environmental regulations that a Koch brothers-backed group was pressing President Trump and Congress to quickly reverse after Inauguration Day.
It was a tally of rules that energy industry executives and lobbyists had waged a futile fight against for eight years, donating millions of dollars to lawmakers who vowed to help block them, filing lawsuits to try to overturn them and hiring experts to generate reports that questioned the need for them.
But in a flurry of activity this past week, Congress did what Charles G. and David H. Koch — who own a conglomerate that sells hundreds of products, including gasoline, jet fuel and coal — and other industry leaders had been asking for.
Using a rarely invoked law, the Republican-controlled Congress nullified a measure intended to curb the venting of gas wells on federal lands, and began the process of rolling back other regulations, including one enacted to limit damage that coal mines cause to streams — each items on the “Roadmap to Repeal.”
About time. There never was any good reason for hamstringing the country, except that’s long been one of the goals of the inimical Left. Using Americans’ best instincts — who doesn’t want a healthy, clean environment? — the watermelons (green out the outside, red on the inside) went about their Marxist mission of crippling capitalism wherever and whenever they could, in the name of fighting “climate change.”
On Friday, with his own executive orders, Mr. Trump took up two more items on the list, including a call to rewrite major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, legislation crafted by the Obama administration and passed by Congress in response to the 2008 financial meltdown.
Not since the Reagan administration has Washington moved so quickly to roll back or nullify so many federal regulations, one of the clearest signs of an abrupt shift of power in a government now under one-party control that has flipped the script of winners and losers. “It is a big, fat victory, after all this time,” said Luke Popovich, a vice president at the National Mining Association, an industry trade group.
Let’s hope there are many more to come. Nobody ever gets tired of winning.
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