The latest issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis features remarks from William Perry Pendley, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Pendley documents what he labels a federal government “war on the West.”
It is difficult to exaggerate the quasi-religious zeal with which the War on the West is waged. Two years ago, a video surfaced of a training lecture on regulatory enforcement by the head of the EPA’s Region Six office, which oversees Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. This senior administrator, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009, cited the Roman Empire as the inspiration for his mode of operation: “The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.” The same year he gave this talk, his office charged in an emergency order that a Fort Worth-based drilling company had contaminated groundwater in Texas’s Parker County through hydraulic fracturing. A year-and-a-half later the emergency order was withdrawn and the case was dismissed in a federal court, but only after a judge criticized the agency for seeking penalties without first investigating the truth of the charges. A commissioner on the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas drilling in the state, accused EPA’s Region Six office of “fear mongering [and] gross negligence.”
The remarks offer another reminder of the importance of fighting overregulation.
