Our View - Thursday

More mousecapades

Feds keep dragging their furry little feet

Anyone out there remember the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, the on-again, off-again endangered species whose unsettled status has left huge swaths of Colorado and Wyoming in a regulatory limbo? If you’ve lost track of the story, and the mouse, we understand; it’s been a long, strange saga, involving competing scientific findings about the animal’s true identity, hanging on differing interpretations of the DNA, and an outrageously long pause while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decides whether a de-listing is warranted.

The agency originally promised to settle the issue by August 2006. It’s nearly a year later and still no decision. We suspect the agency may be dragging its feet, hoping to run out the clock on the Bush administration, in the hope that a Democrat in the White House will be less likely to raise questions if the de-listing petition is overruled. But maybe the agency is just being very, very meticulous — giving the science the scrutiny it should have had before the listing took place.

In an out-of-court settlement with the state of Wyoming, which petitioned for de-listing and more recently sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in an effort to force a decision, the agency on Friday agreed to meet an October deadline. In the meantime, property owners, developers and local governments are all living in uncertainty, having to act on the presumption that mouse-related regulations may remain in effect, even though the decision could go the other way. But what does Uncle Sam care? — he’s got all the time in the world and holds all the cards.

We appreciate Wyoming Attorney General Pat Crank’s efforts to hold USFWS’ furry little feet to the fire. But we don’t count as a “victory” any settlement that permits the agency to put off a decision until the end of October — which will be more than 2-1/2 years after the de-listing petition was filed and 14 months after its original deadline was to be met.

Wyoming decided to settle, according to one report, because the wheels of justice turn nearly as slowly as the wheels of regulation. “Crank said last week’s settlement could mean a speedier decision than if the lawsuit had gone before a judge,” according to the report. “Arguments in the case were set for August, and judges sometimes take weeks to reach a decision.”

Crank claims the settlement gave Wyoming “leverage” in response to any additional delays. “If (the Fish and Wildlife Service does) not honor this deadline, we can, through the court’s contempt powers, force them to comply with the agreement that they’ve made,” he said. But the agency should face a more serious sanction for leaving so many people in regulatory uncertainty for so long.

Wyoming has been arguing — and we agree — that any ruling should involve more than just a determination of whether DNA analysis proves the creature is a distinct subspecies — because the agency has clearly been laying the groundwork for finding that it is. It also should take into consideration whether this subspecies is as numerically rare as claimed. Agency insiders obviously want to side with the “splitters” over the “lumpers” on the question of how fine to parse DNA strands. But we shouldn’t let that distract from questions about whether the listing is justified on quantitative grounds.

Perhaps simply by chance, perhaps not, the agency’s new deadline is Oct. 31, which also happens to be Halloween. We are hoping for a treat, with the agency deciding to move ahead with de-listing, which would lift the regulatory cloud that’s been hanging over the region for years. But more tricks are likely, unfortunately, given the history of the mystery mouse.

The first 100 daze

The first 100 days of Nancy Pelosi’s reign of error as speaker of the House have come and gone. Several times over, actually. And what does Congress have to show for it? Little to nada, legislatively speaking, and even lower public approval ratings than the besieged President Bush.

Not that we’re complaining. Most of what Pelosi and congressional Democrats want to do for Americans — or is it to Americans? — sends shivers down the spines of those of us who still believe in limited government, low rates of taxation and a regulatory rollback. That the first 100 days has been a flop is a blessing, in our view. And it will be a double blessing if gridlock continues, given that neither party is inclined to reinin the leviathan, but instead seek to tame it for their own ends.

Pelosi marked her meaningless first six months as speaker recently, at a press event that felt more like a wake than a revival. Rather than shouldering the blame for diverting Congress from more mundane business into an excessively shrill effort to undermine the president and the war in Iraq, Pelosi chalked it up to “the obstructionism of the Republicans in the United States Senate.”

Senate Republicans have served as a major speed bump. But the techniques the new minority is using were pioneered by Democrats when they were the minority.

“The Democrats in their years in the minority made a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority — rather than a 51-vote simple majority — the threshold needed to pass any legislation in the Senate,” The San Francisco Chronicle noted in a recent piece. “Democrats routinely blocked all but the most noncontroversial bills. . . . Republicans complained at the time, but many of them are happy now.”

Added Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Boston University, “The Republicans are doing what the Democrats did. They’re using the power of the Senate filibuster, and the power in the House when you have narrow majorities, to make a donothing Congress — even when there’s a lot of issues on the table, even when there’s a lot of interest in accomplishing things.”

But accomplishing what, exactly? We’ll take a “do-nothing Congress” over a “do-everything-wrong Congress” any day.