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Defenders Magazine
Defenders View: The True State of the Union
If it’s late January, it must be time to prepare for one of our annual televised spectacles full of pomp, tradition and controversy. No, not the Super Bowl. I refer to the president’s State of the Union address.
As I write this, George Bush’s aides are undoubtedly hard at work on this crucial speech to the Congress and the nation. I wonder if they’ll include something about the environment—for example, an accounting of the administration’s extensive actions harming endangered wildlife would be nice.
Fearing the president’s speech might leave this out, we’ve done the job for him. Working with the Vermont Law School, Defenders of Wildlife’s Judicial Accountability Project has just released a comprehensive evaluation of the Bush administration’s implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The results should remove any lingering doubt whether this administration is trying to destroy our most important law protecting living nature.
The project’s findings show that the Bush administration—especially the Department of the Interior under Secretary Gale Norton—has willfully and knowingly on at least 76 occasions taken actions that nearly three decades of ESA court rulings told them were all but certain to be illegal. Not surprisingly, the administration was found guilty of breaking the law in 90 percent of those cases—a huge percentage given the high degree of deference the courts give to federal agency decisions.
Stated another way, the findings strongly indicate that more than twice per month, from January 2001 through October 2003, administration officials knowingly took actions that they had every reason to believe were in violation of one of our most important environmental laws.
In some cases, they purposefully violated direct court orders. Said one federal judge, when ruling against the Interior Department after it disobeyed a court order to protect an endangered species: The administration’s position is “just ludicrous and preposterous … The Federal Government is not above the law.” Said another in a separate case: “Litigants may not defy court orders because their commands are not to the litigants’ liking.” A third federal judge went directly to the politics behind his case: “I think this has something to do with the change of administrations. I think that is all that’s going on here and that’s not the way government should be working.”
Obviously that’s not how government should work. So why would the administration repeatedly and knowingly break one of our most important environmental laws? Follow the money. The overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of the administration’s lawbreaking were corporations or other interests that have been campaign contributors and supporters of the Bush presidential campaign.
But aren’t they being severely penalized for repeatedly and flagrantly breaking the law? Nope. There is no meaningful penalty. And absent such, the Bush administration is free to adopt the strategy I believe its pattern of violations makes clear it is pursuing: (1) When special interests seek help to get around the ESA, give it to them, although often it is illegal. (2) If someone brings a lawsuit, stall the court proceedings; appeal any adverse ruling; and, even, if the political stakes are sufficiently high, ignore the court’s ruling. (3) When finally—and predictably—found guilty of breaking the law, use taxpayer money to pay the minuscule penalty (usually just the winning plaintiff’s legal costs). (4) Use the fact of having spent that money as an excuse for not implementing or enforcing the ESA elsewhere … possibly benefitting yet another special interest supporter.
What a racket. There oughta be a law.
Wait a minute. There IS a law. Only this administration is violating it—knowingly, deliberately and calculatingly. Time and time again.
Can it get worse? You bet. Last summer, the Judicial Accountability Project examined the administration’s behavior under the National Forest Management Act. In that case, it found that the Bush administration had probably knowingly violated the law 28 times in only 24 months. Any guess whether examination of the rest of the nation’s major environmental protection laws will reveal the same thing?
Something tells me this shameful story will not make it into the president’s speech. But Defenders will do its best to make sure the public knows it nonetheless.
