Neil Gorsuch’s mother once ran the EPA. It didn’t go well.
By Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney February 1 at 7:33 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/01/neil-gorsuchs-mother-once-ran-the-epa-it-was-a-disaster
A portrait of Anne Gorsuch, the EPA’s first female administrator, hangs in a hallway inside the agency’s headquarters in Washington. (Brady Dennis/The Washington Post)Neil Gorsuch is the first member of his family chosen for a seat on the Supreme Court, but he isn’t the only Gorsuch nominated by a U.S. president to a key government post.
His mother, Anne Gorsuch, served as President Ronald Reagan’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator and the first female leader in the agency’s history. But her short, tumultuous tenure was marked by sharp budget cuts, rifts with career EPA employees, a steep decline in cases filed against polluters and a scandal over the mismanagement of the Superfund cleanup program that ultimately led to her resignation in 1983.
Anne Gorsuch — like Reagan then and President Trump today — was a firm believer that the federal government was too big, too powerful and too eager to issue regulations that restricted businesses.
As a result, she slashed the EPA’s budget by nearly a quarter and, according to a Washington Post story at the time, boasted that she had reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half inch. She filled various departments at EPA with subordinates recruited from the very industries the agency was supposed to be regulating.
She also made quick enemies.
“The big mistake Anne Gorsuch made when she first came in was she sort of bought into the rhetoric of the campaign,” William Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s first administrator under President Richard Nixon and the man who eventually returned to restore morale after Gorsuch’s resignation, said in a recent interview. “She treated a lot of people in the agency as the enemy, and they weren’t. But within a week, they were. … It was not a pleasant place.” (A
Doonesbury comic strip story line from 1982 depicts an EPA employee out on a ledge, threatening to jump.)
A Doonesbury cartoon from Jan. 27, 1982, underscores Anne Gorsuch’s stormy tenure at EPA....
However, there’s one opinion in a non-environmental case,
Hugo Rosario Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Loretta E. Lynch, that is pretty sure to draw fire and alarm environmentalists. In this case, which turned on a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, Gorsuch questioned the legal doctrine often known as “Chevron deference,” in reference to the 1984 Supreme Court case
Chevron v. NRDC, in which the court ruled that in situations of statutory ambiguity, courts should allow expert government agencies to fill gaps and interpret what Congress meant in fulfilling their legal mandates, provided they do so in a defensible way. This ruling is crucial for the defense of many actions by the EPA, and in fact the Chevron case turned on one of them.
But Gorsuch suggested of Chevron that it might be a good thing if this “Goliath of modern administrative law were to fall.” “We managed to live with the administrative state before Chevron,” he concluded. “We could do it again. Put simply, it seems to me that in a world without Chevron very little would change — except perhaps the most important things.”
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Excerpt. Read more at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/01/neil-gorsuchs-mother-once-ran-the-epa-it-was-a-disasterNote, there's a lot of good information in the story.
