l****z 发帖数: 29846 | 1 Politics Trumped Policy, Truth for Obama's Reelect
Story documents how the White House slow-walked regulations despite denials.
The Obama White House put politics before governing in 2012, lied about it,
and still won't own up to it. That's the bottom line of a Washington Post
story that shows how far President Obama has devolved since promising five
years ago to change Washington.
Juliet Eilperin opens her story with a bang.
The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the
environment, worker safety, and health care to prevent them from becoming
points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and
interviews with current and former administration officials.
Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to
the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued
before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said.
Then she describes the impact:
The delays meant that rules were postponed or never issued. The stalled
regulations included crucial elements of the Affordable Care Act, what
bodies of water deserve federal protection, pollution controls for
industrial boilers and limits on dangerous silica exposure in the workplace.
Eilperin's story quickly reminds readers that the Obama White House is no
better than past administrations about shading the truth. It's called "
spinning" in Washington, but to voters it's just another reason to doubt the
credibility of their government and its leaders. After being caught several
times this year misleading the public, Obama's ratings on trustworthiness,
once a key to his popularity, are declining.
The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the
election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard
to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The
Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly
political, as Obama's top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his
reelection.
Obama's apologists will say that every president plays politics with policy
in elections years. Two problems with that. First, Obama promised to be
better than the status quo. Second, he's worse.
The number and scope of delays under Obama went well beyond those of his
predecessors, who helped shape rules but did not have the same formalized
controls, said current and former officials who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
And yet, even as Eilperin scatters the house of cards, Team Obama keeps
spinning.
Administration officials noted that they issued a number of controversial
rules during Obama's first term, including limits on mercury emissions for
power plants and Medicaid eligibility criteria under the Affordable Care Act.
"OMB works as expeditiously as possible to review rules, but when it comes
to complex rules with significant potential impact, we take the time needed
to get them right," Cain said.
Eilperin calls them out.
But Ronald White, who directs regulatory policy at the advocacy group Center
for Effective Government, said the "overt manipulation of the regulatory
review process by a small White House office" raises questions about how the
government writes regulations. He said the amount of time it took the White
House to review proposed rules was "particularly egregious over the past
two years."
Previous White House operations have weighed in on major rules before they
were officially submitted for review. But Jeffrey Holmstead, who headed the
EPA's Office of Air and Radiation in the George W. Bush administration, said
the effort was not as extensive as the Obama administration's approach. |
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