Environmental regulations: It's bad when...

The border patrol has decided that the a whole bunch of laws (that the rest of us have to comply with) make their life too difficult. 

The laws that they'd like to ignore are the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act and 32 other federal laws, including various wetland regulations. 

They'd like to be able to ignore all of those laws within 100 miles of the border. 

If the goverment can't even respect its own set of laws, why is it a reasonable expecation that the rest of us do so? 

My favorite comment on this post: 

"The same government that put those environmental laws in place now finds them too inconvenient to allow them to do what they think is necessary.

Of course everyone else already knew the environmental regulations were too burdensome, but they were stuck following them, wasting piles of money going through review after environmental review before being able to do even small things.

The government doesn't want to follow its own rules. They just make an exception for one agency to ignore some other agency, and they go about their business without a care in the world.

I say that if these environmental regulations aren't necessary for the Border Patrol, they should be scrapped. If they are necessary, then the Border Patrol must follow them. More realisitcally, recognize the pain points of existing environmetnal law and amend it, not just for the Border Patrol, for everyone. But none of this insider favoritism crap.

October 25, 2011 at 11:20 PM
Sandy C. "

Here, here!
You'll find the story that inspired this post here.