Hill Heat

Originally posted at the Think Progress Wonk Room.

In his Senate Environment and Public Works nomination hearing today, David Hill, the Bush nominee for the General Counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was asked by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) what the EPA Administrator should do “if the President of the United States tells him to do something illegal.”

I believe that the courts have held, Senator, that within the unitary executive the administrator and the EPA, just as with all executive agencies, work for the President and are responsible to the President of the United States.

The “unitary executive” theory is a formerly obscure legal argument that asserts “all executive authority must be in the President’s hands, without exception.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is a champion of the doctrine, as is Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington.

Boxer’s question was not purely hypothetical. The current administrator of the EPA, Stephen L. Johnson, has overruled his staff’s scientific recommendations on global warming regulations and ozone limits – both apparently at the behest of the White House.

Yesterday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) issued a subpoena to compel the EPA to turn over documents involving communications with the White House.

Hearing transcript:

• Jonathan Patz, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Environmental Studies & Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin- Madison
• Kristie Ebi, Ph.D, M.P.H.., President, ESS LLC
• John Balbus, M.D, M.P.H.., Chief Scientist and Program Director, Environmental Defense Fund
• Ambassador John W. McDonald, Chairman and CEO, Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy

Panel I:

• Honorable Richard E. Stickler, Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, United States Department of Labor
• John Howard, Director, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, U. S. Department of Health and Human Services

Panel II:

• J. Davitt McAteer, Esq., Vice President of Sponsored Programs, Wheeling Jesuit University
• Cecil Roberts, International President, United Mine Workers of America
• Bruce Watzman, Vice President, Safety and Health, National Mining Association

Witness

• David R. Hill (Nominated to be Assistant Administrator (General Counsel) for the Environmental Protection Agency)

Please join the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming for a Staff Briefing on distributing emission credits under a carbon cap-and-trade system. This briefing is open to all staff and the public.

Speakers

• Jason Furman—Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of the Hamilton Project
• James Barrett—Executive Director, Redefining Progress
• Stephen Smith—Executive Director, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy

Coal gasification can provide an efficient, clean, and versatile way to generate electricity and other energy products from coal as an alternative to traditional generation methods. The process allows for the removal of pollutants such as sulfur and nitrogen compounds that contribute to smog and acid rain, and the capability to capture carbon dioxide without releasing it into the atmosphere. The Subcommittee will examine coal gasification technologies, including the challenges and advantages over traditional technologies, and the need for large scale integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) demonstration projects that feature carbon capture and sequestration.

Witnesses

• John Marburger III, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
• James Childress, Executive Director, Gasification Technologies Council
• Joseph P. Strakey Jr., Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory
• Michael J. Mudd, Chief Executive Officer, FutureGen Alliance, Inc.
• David Hawkins, Director, Climate Center, Natural Resources Defense Council
• Mr. John Novak, Executive Director, Federal and Industry Activities, Environment and Generation, The Electric Power Research Institute

The WSJ’s Dana Mattioli reported yesterday afternoon on the latest development in congressional oversight of the EPA’s California waiver decision:

In a letter today, two senior Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform asked the panel’s chairman, Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), to investigate whether top EPA staffers either violated federal rules that restrict regulators from lobbying, or “misused their positions to surreptitiously influence” EPA’s decision on whether to allow California to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles.

Reps. Tom Davis (R-VA) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) are mad at Margo Oge and Christopher Grundler, the senior EPA officials tasked with evaluating California’s waiver request and (unsuccessfully) telling Administrator Stephen Johnson that he had no choice but to grant it. Congressional oversight of that decision revealed that the pair subsequently provided former EPA Administrator William Reilly—at Reilly’s request—talking points with which to argue the waiver’s merits to Johnson.

Davis and Issa argue that this deserves the same level of scrutiny that Waxman devoted to a surreptitious plan to lobby Congress and governors against the waiver—Johnson may have also been a target, but he could not recall whether that was the case—deployed last summer by Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters, White House officials, and industry lobbyists.

This actually isn’t the first time that congressional Republicans have gone after Oge and Grundler. During a hearing that followed the revelation of the Reilly memo and other EPA documents, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) asked Administrator Johnson whether his employees had violated the Hatch Act. Johnson defended their actions, saying that he has "always encouraged my staff to give me candid and open advice" (he just reserves the right to ignore it, even when phrased as a clear mandate and not simply advice, and the resulting fallout severely alienates staff unions).

Rep. Waxman responded to the letter by pledging to give it "careful consideration," while noting that the Committee had "found no evidence that EPA career staff lobbied members of Congress with respect to [California’s request]" (translation: the Davis-Issa analogy to his previous investigation is bunk). For his part, Reilly, who ran EPA under the first President Bush and granted California several waivers, has said that his communications with career staff who served under him were not unprecedented, let alone improper or illegal.

Witnesses

• Carol M. Browner, Principal, The Albright Group, LLC, Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• Alexander B. Grannis, Commissioner, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
• Joan Card, Water Quality Division Director, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality
• David P. Brand P.E., P.S., Sanitary Engineer, Madison County, State of Ohio
• Randall P. Smith, Smith 6-S Livestock

This Wednesday, April 9, Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will take a look at the health of our warming planet, and how climate change affects the health of her citizens. During a week where major public health bodies are calling attention to the links between an unhealthy planet and an unhealthy people, the hearing’s panel of scientists, practicing doctors, and public health professionals will describe the various ways climate change poses a serious public health threat.

Despite the international and national scientific consensus that climate change impacts public health, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has refused to state that heat-trapping carbon dioxide is a threat to public health.

The witnesses will also address whether the United States has an unlimited capacity to adapt to this growing public health concern, or whether the only true preventative medicine is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and stop global warming.

According to the World Health Organization, climate change is a significant and emerging threat to public health. The WHO estimates that changes in the Earth’s climate may have caused at least five million cases of illness and more than 150,000 deaths in 2000, and predict these impacts are likely to increase in the future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that climate change contributes to the global burden of disease, premature death and other adverse health impacts due to extreme weather events, changes in infectious disease patterns, air quality, quality and quantity of water and food. Adverse health impacts of climate change also include increases in heat stress, asthma, allergies and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

• Howard Frumkin, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., Center for Disease Control, Director of National Center for Environmental Health, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
• Jonathan Patz, M.D., M.P.H., Professor and Director of Global Environmental Health, University of Wisconsin at Madison
• Georges Benjamin, M.D., F.A.C.P., F.A.C.E.P. (Emeritus), Executive Director, American Public Health Association
• Mark Jacobson, Ph.D., Director, Atmosphere and Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University
• Dana Best, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.A.P., American Academy of Pediatrics