Day: March 1, 2015

The DHS funding disaster

By Cathy Keim

This week in DC was the disaster that we all saw coming last December with the passing of the CROmnibus bill. The GOP promised that if only they passed the massive budget that gave Obama everything he wanted, they would hold the line on the illegal immigrant executive overreach when funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). So they gave up the momentum of the huge election win to allow the lame duck congress to vote for CROmnibus. In the outrage that followed this betrayal, conservatives begged for Boehner to not be returned as House Speaker. Despite 25 brave Congressmen voting against Boehner, the rest voted for him and the status quo.

Now the final betrayal that was set in place last December is coming to fruition. The proposition that the GOP would stand firm in a budget battle where the main leverage was a government shutdown of the DHS was already unlikely at best – then the Charlie Hebdo massacre happened in Paris and unlikely became impossible. The GOP is terrified that if the DHS were shut down, they would be blamed if a terrorist attack occurred. Never mind that of the 230,000 DHS employees, 200,000 are deemed essential and would be required to show up to work during the shutdown. (As in many of these instances, the so-called “shutdown” is more like a slowdown, and it’s almost certain they’ll be paid in the end.)

The House Republicans passed a DHS bill with a full year of funding but with amendments that addressed the illegal immigrant amnesty dictated by President Obama. The Senate has had the bill for several weeks but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was unable to get the bill passed, so he stripped the House amendments out and sent it back to them on Friday. This is where it got somewhat confusing, because When the two bodies pass different bills they have to be reconciled.

The House voted at 2:43 pm on Friday to go to reconciliation with the Senate. All the Democrats voted against reconciliation. The Senate will vote on this on Monday and it is expected that all Democrats in the Senate will vote against it. The Democrats only want a clean bill passed, so they are not willing to try and reconcile the House bill with the Senate bill.

As the deadline drew near, there was a flurry of votes, which I found difficult to follow from the press coverage. However, Congressman Thomas Massie (KY – 4th Congressional District) posted an explanation on his Facebook page.

The entire post is worth reading to understand exactly what happened on Friday, but the bottom line is:

In summary, using the power of the purse to keep the executive branch in check is a legitimate and constitutional strategy, but our republican leadership chose poorly last December when selecting security funding as a point of leverage. Having backed themselves into a corner, last night House republican leadership abandoned their own plan and struck a deal with minority leader Pelosi that gave the President what he wanted for at least another week. In my estimation, the long-term prospect of using the power of the purse to stop the President’s unilateral action is bleak now that House leadership has signaled a temporary retreat without gaining a single concession from the Senate.

Our current Republican leadership is unable and/or unwilling to stop the tide of the President’s executive overreach. The citizens that voted last November for the opposition party to use the power of the purse to stop the President are left with nothing to show for their votes. It would appear that we are in for a painful two years as an uncontrollable President is left to execute his whims on a defenseless populace.

MCAC and CBF to Hogan: drop dead

As I suspected, the slight bend toward agricultural interests that Governor Hogan made with the revised Phosphorus Management Tool regulations – now re-dubbed the Agriculture Phosphorus Initiative – was met with hostility from the environmental community. On Friday the Maryland Clean Agriculture Coalition and Chesapeake Bay Foundation released this joint statement:

We commend the Hogan Administration for taking the problem of phosphorus pollution seriously and are pleased that the Administration embraces the scientific evidence showing we must implement the Phosphorus Management Tool to better manage manure on oversaturated farm fields.

The environmental community was not involved in the drafting of Governor Hogan’s proposed regulations that were released on Tuesday, and we have gone over them carefully since. Unfortunately, the regulations do not provide the adequate protection or assurance we need, and as such, we must oppose them. Our concerns are detailed in the attached analysis.

The regulations include a significant loophole, referred to by the agricultural industry as a “safety net,” that makes it unclear if they would ever result in full implementation of this much-needed tool. We adamantly oppose this lack of a clear, enforceable end date for putting the Phosphorus Management Tool into place.

It is also unclear whether the proposed ban on phosphorus on fields with FIV over 500 would actually reduce the amount of manure being applied to farm fields or protect Maryland water quality. The Maryland Department of Agriculture has been unable to clarify this.

Additionally, the regulations add one more year of delay, and they include troublesome secrecy provisions.

We continue to whole-heartedly support legislation sponsored by Senator Pinsky and Delegate Lafferty (SB 257 / HB 381) to implement the Phosphorus Management Tool with a six-year phase-in. Given the difficulties we’ve had with the regulatory process over the past three years, we prefer having a strong statute in place.

Their statement is an expanded version of a statement I posted on Wednesday from the Maryland Clean Agriculture Coalition. The MCAC is an interesting group in that none of the 21 groups involved has a thing to do with farming; instead many of these are “riverkeeper” groups from around the state. These groups blame farmers for a disproportionate share of the problems with Chesapeake Bay, imagining they are just wantonly dumping manure into streams and creeks.

While the groups have done a comparison sheet (or “detailed analysis”) between the O’Malley and Hogan proposals, their chief complaint can be summed up in this paragraph:

The Hogan PMT provisions for an “evaluation” for assessing manure markets and transportation programs, available land acreage, etc., allow for this “evaluation” to stall movement of PMT implementation for a year while MDA conducts a re-evaluation. The result is the possibility of an endless year by year postponement and re-evaluation possibility. (Emphasis in original.)

The way I read this is that, whether the infrastructure is in place or not – and, to be honest, I’m dubious of whether it can be in place – the CBF wants to move ahead on the PMT issue. Even the large-scale concession of immediately stopping the application of manure to certain fields, which is a provision allegedly affecting 1 of every 5 farmers on the Lower Shore, isn’t satisfying to the environmental coalition. They demand the data on how this would affect farmers, but pooh-pooh the need for data on how these regulations might affect the rural Maryland economy through the actual on-site studies sought by the Hogan administration.

In short, the contempt for the agricultural community by these groups is palpable.

So Larry Hogan tried to walk the middle ground. In backing off his original dead-set opposition to the PMT as “mandating how (farmers) use their property” to implementing a slightly less onerous version he still alienated the environmental community as well as discouraging some of the farmers who will be most adversely affected.

This whole episode will hopefully be a lesson to the new administration: you won’t get the friendship or the votes of those who would just as soon see the Eastern Shore collapse economically thanks to the demise of the agricultural industry regardless of what you do. So stick to those issues you ran on: improving Maryland’s economy and lowering the tax and regulatory burden on its citizens. Remember, no amount of regulation is enough for liberals, so why cater to them in the first place?