Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a news report on how the Obama administration, after more than two years of pursuing damn‐the‐costs government control over the private sector, is finally developing more internal debate about whether and when zealous regulations are worth the cost. In particular, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs chief Cass Sunstein, known as skeptical about some costly rules, has now acquired an important sometime ally in White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who played a role in getting EPA to table some very expensive new air‐quality standards the other day.
All well and good, but I was stopped short by a paragraph that shouldn’t pass without comment:
The same day, Mr. Daley met with industry groups, who gave the White House a map showing counties that would be out of compliance with the Clean Air Act if the stricter standards were put in place. The map showed that the rule would affect areas in the politically important 2012 election states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio.
Even by Washington standards, isn’t it appallingly cynical to evaluate environmental rules that could (critics have argued) cripple wide sectors of the economy according to whether the worst damage falls on politically vital states like Florida and Ohio, or just ho‐hum non‐swing states like Oklahoma, North Dakota and Tennessee? True, the article doesn’t say who was cynical enough to draw the connection here — the business groups giving the presentation? The White House listeners? Some third party whose viewpoint this is all being filtered through? But whoever’s being the cynic here, one of the costs is to feed the alienation of citizens of Texas in particular, whose officials and businesses have been complaining for more than a year of being singled out for hostile attention by the Obama EPA. For everyone’s good, I hope someone in the White House at this moment is writing a sharp letter disclaiming any special intent to help Pennsylvania, Virginia et al. And I hope after drafting that letter they will be cleared to send it off for publication in the Journal, not just keep it in the desk to show outraged delegations of Texans.
