Remember Armand Armendariz, the Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator who resigned after regaling an audience of Big Green activists with a history lesson to illustrate his agency’s approach to critics of the EPA’s harshest policies? When the Romans conquered a new province, he said, they would “… find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them …” to make the province “really easy to manage for the next few years.” The EPA, he continued, also makes “examples of people who are not complying with the law, you make examples out of them, use it as a deterrent method … Find people who are not complying with the law and you hit them as hard as you can and make examples of them.”
That Armendariz was not alone at the EPA in punishing those who disagree with its policies is seen in revelations last week by The Washington Examiner’s Michal Conger on the agency’s double standards in handling of Freedom of Information Act requests. Reproduction fee waiver requests from conservative nonprofits viewed as hostile by EPA officials were denied more than 90 percent of the time, while those from friendly liberal nonprofits were approved more than 90 percent. At least two congressional committees are now investigating the EPA’s ham-fisted approval process.
