BUSH, REPUBLICANS A LITTLE SNEAKY

It was a classic stealth maneuver - and it worked. Two days after
Christmas, with President Bush at his Texas ranch and most of official
Washington on vacation, the White House announced the rejection of
regulations that would have barred companies that repeatedly violate
environmental...

It was a classic stealth maneuver - and it worked. Two days after
Christmas, with President Bush at his Texas ranch and most of official
Washington on vacation, the White House announced the rejection of
regulations that would have barred companies that repeatedly violate
environmental and workplace standards from receiving government contracts.

Few in the press noticed, and those papers that printed anything about
the decision buried the stories on inside pages. But this was no
trivial matter. A congressional report had found that in one recent
year, the federal government had awarded $38 billion in contracts to
at least 261 corporations operating unsafe or unhealthy work sites.
The regulations Bush killed were designed to stop that.

This is a classic example of the difference between the parties. These
particular rules were issued at the very end of the Clinton
administration, after being published in draft form 18 months earlier.
Former Vice President Al Gore had publicly promised organized labor he
would see that they were finished before he left that office.

Business opposed them, and Bush suspended them barely two months after
he moved in, finally killing them last week. The move was a companion
to the earlier 2001 action by the House and Senate, both then
controlled by the Republicans, in setting aside Clinton administration
regulations on ergonomics, designed to protect workers from repetitive
motion injuries.

The Chamber of Commerce and similar groups led the fight to spike
them, too.

When I wrote about that action in March, I erred in saying Congress
could have rewritten the rules that business found objectionable,
instead of killing the whole package.

Business lawyers later convinced me that would have been virtually
impossible.

But when the ergonomics rules were killed, the administration promised
that new, "more reasonable" regulations would be forthcoming. A phone
call to the Labor Department last week elicited the information that
no new regulations have been issued and no one could say when they
will be.

That is the game: Kill the rules you don't like quickly and quietly,
then take your sweet time writing new ones. Don't worry about how many
strained backs or stiff wrists people suffer in the meantime. And now,
don't worry if the companies that tolerate unsafe conditions are
getting fat government contracts at the same time.

Here's another example of why it makes a difference who is deciding
how the massive power of the executive branch is wielded. On Oct. 25,
30 Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the Los Angeles
Cannabis Resource Center and shut down its operations. The center had
opened five years earlier, after California voters approved a medical
marijuana initiative. It served patients with doctors' prescriptions
to use marijuana to alleviate the pain and nausea associated with
AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

The raid was perfectly legal; the Supreme Court has affirmed that
federal anti-drug laws, which cover marijuana, pre-empt more
permissive state laws or initiatives.

But no one has stepped forward to explain how busting up a center
operating with the full approval of the Los Angeles County sheriff and
local officials became a law enforcement priority for the federal
government barely six weeks after the terrorist attacks on this country.

Two months after the raid, no one has yet been charged with any crime
by the U.S. attorney's office. But the center remains inoperative, its
former patients forced to seek relief in the black market.

Elections do make a difference.