If you need more evidence that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out-of-control, consider the comments of EPA senior counsel Bob Sussman as reported by Energy & Environmental Daily last week.
But Bob Sussman, who was EPA’s deputy administrator under President Clinton and returned to the agency to be Jackson’s senior counsel, said the agency has no choice but to carry additional weight these days because of inaction in Congress.
“After two decades of very active legislative activity on the environment, we’ve had 15-plus years in which the consensus and political will to overhaul our environmental statutes has been lacking,” Sussman said.
“It’s a situation which is going to continue because I think Congress is fundamentally divided on the future direction of environmental protection. The statutes that we have, imperfect as they may be, are the statutes that we’re going to have to continue to live with.”
Hello… America-to-Bob-Sussman… under our Constitution, the legislative branch makes the laws and the executive branch executes them. EPA has no constitutional authority to take any action that has not been not previously authorized by Congress. Contrary to Sussman-think, the EPA cannot take action that, in effect, “overhauls our environmental statutes” and it cannot “carry additional weight” on its own initiative.
One of the highest priority items for the 112th Congress will be to get a grip on the outlaw EPA.