Several days ago, testvet6778 diaried about how a Federal Judge rules Bush admin Illegally Changed Forest Rules.
In a victory for environmentalists and the citizens of this nation, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that the Forest Service is to suspend its 2005 rule and subject it to a new round of analysis, taking into account environmental protections and public-participation requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.
While there was jubilation, there was also anticipation that the Bush administration would find another way to accomplish the same goals.
The other shoe is dropping. (more)
A big hat tip to Dave Niewert over at Orcinus. (And donations wouldn't hurt either) In a post March 31, Niewert picked up on this:
One of the sunnier outcomes of last November's elections was the defeat of Rep. Richard Pombo, the Republican chair of the House Resources Committee who was the leader of the faction of extremists hoping to gut the Endangered Species Act.
But environmentalists are discovering that the assault on the ESA is continuing apace, thanks to the Bush administration, which has announced that it intends to pick up where Pombo left off with a new set of Interior Department regulations intended to achieve the same effect as Pombo's now-dead legislative attempts:
If you follow the second link in the quote above, you'll find this:
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Interior Department is preparing a wide-ranging set of regulations which substantially weaken the federal Endangered Species Act, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Center for Biological Diversity.
"These draft regulations slash the Endangered Species Act from head to toe," said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "They undermine every aspect of law - recovery, listing, preventing extinction, critical habitat, federal oversight and habitat conservation plans - all of it is gutted."
—The draft regulations would -
—Remove recovery of a species or population as a protection standard;
—Allow projects to proceed that have been determined to threaten species with extinction;
—Permit destruction of all restored habitat within critical habitat areas;
—Prevent critical habitat areas from being used to protect against disturbance, pesticides, exotic species, and disease;
—Severely limit the listing of new endangered species; and
—Empower states to veto endangered species introductions as well as administer virtually all aspects of the Endangered Species Act within their borders.
None of this should come as a surprise. Some Presidents might have taken a lesson from the 2006 elections: Bush and the people he represents took it as a signal to go full speed ahead to cram as much of their agenda as they can into the next two years.
Even given a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House in 2008 if all goes as we hope, we're still going to have federal agencies that have been stuffed with Bush true believers, regulations that have been re-written to carry out the Bush political agenda, contracts and franchises that have been awarded to Bush supporters, judges that have been selected to defend and extend his agenda, and everything else they can squeeze into the time remaining.
It ain't over, and won't be for a long time to come. They're already preparing for a shift in power; they're going to do as much damage as they can, and they plan to return.