December 16, 2011 12:11 AM UTC

It's Better To Be Evil Than Stupid

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• by: Colorado Pols

Circling back on the dust-up over the House GOP’s drive, led by Colorado members, to “prevent” the non-existent EPA regulation of farm dust, the Colorado Independent’s Troy Hooper reports:

“This entire session of Congress has felt to many of us like a trip into Alice’s Wonderland,” the eight-term Democrat from Colorado said Thursday. “While our nation struggles with a devastating economy … we do nothing about jobs or getting America back to work; instead we repeatedly fall down the rabbit hole of extreme legislation, and now with this so-called ‘Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act,’ it would seem we’re having tea with the Cheshire Cat. To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad … You must be mad or you wouldn’t have come here.'”

The fact that the Environmental Protection Agency maintains it has no plans to regulate farm dust is only partially what left DeGette challenging the sanity of her colleagues at a time when their approval rating lags behind both President Nixon during Watergate and Paris Hilton circa 2005. She was also tripping out that they refused to limit the scope of H.R. 1633 to agriculture, as its title implies.

U.S. Reps. Cory Gardner, Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn – Coloradans who co-sponsored the bill – and their Republican cohorts shot down several amendments that would have exempted farm dust from the Clean Air Act but would have ensured the EPA can regulate coarse particulate matter from the mining and extraction industries [Pols emphasis], or dust that contains arsenic or other heavy metals, or dust that substantially harms public health…

We noted back in November that Rep. Cory Gardner, a co-sponsor of this bill along with Reps. Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn, had specifically referred to the EPA being “willing to abandon” regulation of farm dust. The choice of words is especially curious, since it’s hard for the EPA to “abandon” a regulation they hadn’t made. But Gardner’s choice of words was consistent with the way that most Republicans were misrepresenting the issue at the time.

But as with so many surficially meaningless legislative campaigns these days, it seems now there might actually have been something “legitimate” these guys were working toward–keeping the energy industry safe from regulation too! Now, it’s true you don’t usually think of particulate pollution from, for example, a coal mine when you think “farm,” but at least this kind of dubious sleight-of-hand on behalf of big campaign donors makes a kind of sense. We don’t know how politically helpful it is, but it’s more believable than obsessing on nonexistent “problems.”

If you have to choose between looking evil or stupid, at least evil affords you a little respect.