Before he became a Cabinet official, Norman Mineta spent decades serving the people of California-- first as Mayor of San Jose, then as an eleven-term Congressman representing the surrounding area. The city's international airport was recently named in his honor. This is a region where public officials and the business community have been at the forefront of pushing for a clean energy revolution that cuts global warming pollution and serves as an engine for economic growth.
So it's quite disappointing to read this morning's Washington Post item on the industry-shilling letter that Mineta and DOT predecessor Rodney Slater recently sent to Congress, and learn that Slater wasn't alone in having an unstated conflict of interest:
Their view -- that the DOT and EPA should "work in concert" -- mirrors the auto industry's position, and why not? Mineta is vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton, a PR firm that has Mazda as a client, and Slater is chairman of Driving America's Future, a coalition that has General Motors as a leading member and has urged restraint on CAFE standards.
The letter, however, does not disclose these connections, an omission that riled environmentalists. The reason: Environmentalists say that carmakers want to have more influence over the car-friendly DOT and undercut the authority the Supreme Court gave the EPA earlier this year to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes.
Mineta's position, which would effectively preempt his home state's ground-breaking clean cars program, is profoundly flawed on grounds that go beyond the careful federalism embedded in the Clean Air Act and embraced by the Supreme Court. As Columbia law professor Michael C. Dorf writes, concerns about overlapping agency authority are unwarranted here. His comments on "agency capture" take on added relevance in wake of the Slater-Mineta intervention, and of the recent 9th Circuit ruling that declared CAFE standards enacted by Mineta to be arbitrarily biased toward the auto industry:
Given the overlapping authority conferred on the EPA and the DOT--as found by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA--the results in the Vermont and California cases seem right as a technical legal matter. Nonetheless, one may legitimately wonder whether this is a sensible regulatory scheme.
Why should Congress want to confer on the DOT authority to promulgate mileage standards that are completely superseded by EPA-approved carbon emissions standards? Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a single federal agency decide these issues? Indeed, given that the Constitution confers Executive authority on a single President, rather than dividing it among various ministries, is it even consistent with the Constitution for Congress to slice and dice Executive power this way?
Proponents of the theory of the so-called "unitary Executive" pose legitimate questions of the foregoing sort, but there are at least two answers to them. First, the President retains authority, through the appointment and firing power, to supervise the heads of agencies with different mandates.
[...]
Second, as a policy matter, Congress may have good reason to avoid concentrating regulatory authority in a single agency. Political scientists have long been aware of the phenomenon of "agency capture," in which, through campaign contributions and other forms of influence-peddling, the very targets of an agency's regulatory mandate come to control the agency's agenda. By parceling out authority to regulate fuel efficiency to multiple agencies--and effectively making the higher standards prevail--Congress makes it that much harder for industry to frustrate regulations that serve the public interest.
Mineta probably does think that he's acting as a wise "elder statesman" by throwing his home state under the bus, as his spokesman tells the Post. But claiming that his conclusions have nothing to do with his exposure to industry talking points, both past and present, simply flies in the face of the record and of common-sense political logic.
Comments