At Grist, David Roberts writes, The Republicans’ hollow threat: EPA and the Congressional Review Act:

Among the options congressional Republicans are said to be mulling in their war on the Environmental Protection Agency is the Congressional Review Act. Newly far-right Energy Committee Chair Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has been talking smack about it. Can it work? Almost certainly not. The CRA is a law Newt Gingrich got passed back in 1996. It says that within 60 days of a regulation being passed by the executive branch, a majority in both houses of Congress can vote to nullify it. (It can't be filibustered, so you only need a majority in the Senate, not the usual 60.) It's only been used once, when Bush got rid of some Clinton ergonomics rules just as he was entering office. Why is CRA the dog that never barks? Because once the Resolution of Disapproval passes Congress it goes to the president, who presumably will veto it immediately. Why wouldn't he? They are, after all, his regulations. Add to that the inconvenient fact that most of the key EPA rules on climate pollution are already more than 60 days old and this adds up to a real nothingburger. Even if Republicans are able to muster 51 votes in the Senate, it would be entirely symbolic, pure politics. And it's not clear if there are 51 votes. Lots of Democrats support Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-W.Va.) proposal for a two-year delay of EPA rules -- there may be 60 votes for that at some point -- but are more leery about permanently crippling the EPA, which despite Beltway conventional wisdom is quite popular with the public. The right knows the CRA can't actually block EPA. (Witness Sen. Lisa Murkowski's [R-Alaska] humiliating failure.) They're just trying to bully EPA into backing down. It's a purely political play. "The threat of the Congressional Review Act is likely to have some moderating impact on what EPA does on some of these things," says industry spokesflack Jeff Holmstead.

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^{Check out Patric Juillet's diary, Playing God with Food Distribution.}

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003:

Today’s Washington Post has a very revealing look at the White House attitude and strategy in pushing their class warfare plan, otherwise known as their version of a stimulus package. As we reported earlier in the week, it now appears that five GOP Senators, including most importantly Finance Committee chair Charles Grassley, think that the Bush package may not be viable at all. ... Just because Norquist and the rest of his K Street checkwriters think they can marshal a victory here doesn’t mean they can overcome Wall Street. Nor does it mean that the Senate, with so many in the middle already doubting the plan, will pay any attention to the crazy loons in the GOP House leadership. There is no doubt that DeLay will hammer a vote through quickly, but it will be essential for Nancy Pelosi and John Spratt to cut the legs off of this plan with their opposition, and to keep the Democratic caucus together as much as possible, so that they can show this to be as much a party-line vote as anything else. Yes, Norquist may already be talking about moving from any dividend tax elimination failure to a capital gains tax cut, but that only shows how shallow Rove’s plan from a policy perspective was in the first place.

Tonight's Quote:

"I'm not a hater, not one of the angry radio guys. I'm an entertainer with a conservative agenda who wouldn't have 20 million listeners if I spewed venom. Yet you liberals lump me in with all the others. ... I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for."

— Rush Hudson Limbaugh III
Time Magazine: June 24, 2001