Ask a farmer what their most important asset is and they will tell you it's their land. Without it, nothing happens.
Yet the Biden EPA has shown breathtaking hostility to American farmers, insinuating by regulation that not only do American farmers not care about their most important asset, they are systematically destroying it.
It makes no sense but neither does the method EPA is using to undermine American science; namely that they are doing no science at all. Instead, they have stuffed panels with epidemiologists who don't need evidence, they have correlation. Then they use correlation to invoke other regulations and claim it is the Constitution at war on American agriculture, not generational bureaucrats who only even touch grass in photo-ops.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan. He says he doesn't hate agriculture but there won't be many farmers voting for Biden due to him. Organic ones, sure, probably ethanol too, since Democrats have saddled us with that for 30 years so a whole generation of corn farmers love that mandate and subsidy.
They were right. Until last week, the Constitution had been weirdly contorted by a Supreme Court much farther to the left than this one is to the right. In 1984, they found that a White House-controlled agency could create regulations that act as laws - no Congress or public vote needed - if the regulation was in their mandate.(1)
That is now done. Fishermen who resented being told they had to allow government employees on their boat - and also pay for the government employee who was getting in the way - sued, and the Supreme Court agreed that Chevron Deference was "wolves guarding the chickens", because it let agencies and the Presidents who control them determine the limits of their own power.(2) The 1984 ruling's justifying presumption was a fiction but it still needed the Supreme Court to stop presidential fairy tales from being called science.
What now? No Biden agency has been more aggressive against the science community than his EPA. As soon as Biden lawyers tried to resurrect the twice-negated Waters of the United States expansion and declare that any man-made pond was a navigable water of the US military, it was EPA's Michael Regan using Gestapo tactics, with armed federal agents trespassing on private land. Despite the regulation they invoked having been found illegal twice.
Yet they no longer have Chevron Deference as an unlimited shield and Congress has had enough of the Biden administration engaging in "prerogative power" - like that a king does what he wants. Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, issued a blistering attack on EPA. In April, I watched Administrator Michael Regan repeatedly assure the agriculture community that he was not hostile to farming. I wasn't buying it but Congress at least pretended to believe him. Rep. Thomson notes that EPA behavior since then has gotten even worse.
Regan is dismantling the scientific registration and approval process and replacing it with a scheme that only needs a poorly-constructed epidemiology paper to deny approval. Two decades ago, activist Professor Tyrone Hayes manufactured claims that frogs were in danger due to a weedkiller and EPA convened a special SAP to investigate.(3) That level of deception by activists won't even be needed if EPA remains for another four years.
The fuzzy-wuzzy named Vulnerable Species Pilot Program, for example, won't save any critters, because none are at risk now. It is solely to use Chevron Deference to declare a product dangerous - which means environmental groups can then use 'government experts' for lawsuits. The same tool that allowed previous administrations hostile to science to create 70% of the Endangered Species listings - with no science metrics involved.
The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, they all have great names that sound positive, but the Biden Administration uses them to create an Anti-Science legacy.
NOTES:
(1) All presidents who opposed science needed to do was broaden the mandate. It is why environmentalists were able to sue a county in Virginia because the river had too much water. They prearranged the settlement with EPA. It is why the Biden EPA could legally go to court, ask the court to annul a previous science finding in order to replace it with epidemiology to create a level of an herbicide so low that any use was in excess of the new regulation they invented without any biology, toxicology, or chemistry needed.
(2) Defenders of this anti-science totem say it hadn't been invoked at the Supreme Court since 2016 anyway. Yet they defended it to the last. The reason was that lower courts were still bound to defer to it, and companies had to prepare to defend against it, and environmental lawyers were making a fortune suing and settling using it.
"By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission" by Charles Murray
(3) They found nothing. Professor Hayes refused to show his "data" and I later exposed in the Wall Street Journal that his paper had been hand-walked past peer review by a friend of his inside the organization that publishes PNAS.
