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It doesn’t matter if it’s clean water, clear skies, healthy forests, or saving endangered species, “there has been no worse administration than the Bush administration,” a distinguished political scientist says. 

“While Bush talked about being a good (environmental) steward, if you look at his particular policies and programs, it’s not consistent with being a good steward,” asserts Byron Daynes, professor of political science at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, and author of numerous scholarly books and articles.

At a conference on the American presidency on April 27^th at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, Daynes detailed how the Bush administration had failed the public in a number of key environmental areas: 

 -Clear Skies ---“This particular program to do away with air pollution had no uniform national standards, and power plants were still able to buy and sell pollution credits.”

-Clean Water --- Bush “allowed coal mines to still put mining waste in the streams themselves.” 

- Healthy Forest --- Bush “allowed logging and timber sales of old growth, and the fear was that this would threaten the Giant Sequoia National Monument and endangered species.”

- Endangered species ---  Where President H.W. Bush put 231 plants and animals on the Endangered Species List and President Bill Clinton added 521, George W. Bush added 59, “so you can tell what he thought about that,” Daynes said. 

- Auto Emissions --- “He (GWB) does believe in developing mixed fuels and fuel efficiencies for automobiles (but gives) no particulars of course and no money to car industries to do this.”

- Carbon Emissions --- “Bush has called for the United States to end the growth in U.S. carbon emissions by 2025 but again, he gave no particulars in terms of how this was going to come about.” 

- Kyoto Treaty – “Here we had 170-nations that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had helped bring together in terms of the Kyoto Protocol. George Bush stripped the signature of Clinton from the protocol, making the United States, Australia, and four of their little teeny nations against the 170 nations with regard to Kyoto, because he said it was fatally flawed.”

- Post-Kyoto – Bush wants the 17 nations guilty of producing most of the greenhouse gases “to sit down and come up with future aspirational goals, whatever they are. Again, no details whatsoever on this but it’s sort of a feel-good time where nations can decide what they really want to do.”

- Appointments --- “There was no environmentalist brought into the (Bush) administration itself.  People (were hired) who were devoted to oil, industry defenders, or anti-environmentalists, and the list is long…but the very worst was clearly (Vice President) Dick Cheney, who wielded the most authority, undercutting, for example, Christie Todd Whitman, who was as near an environmentalist as you could get at EPA, and that wasn’t terribly near.” 

Daynes noted that James Connaughton, the chair on the Council on Environmental Quality, was representing General Electric’s interest in protecting toxic waste sites against what the EPA had suggested.

All three remaining White House candidates, Daynes said, “are probably certainly greener than George W. Bush” but “any candidate looks greener when compared with George W. Bush.” 

Daynes is co-author with Glen Sussman of “The American Presidency and the Social Agenda”(Prentice Hall).  The Massachusetts School of Law is 30 minutes North of Boston.  Daynes and Sussman recently appeared at the Massachusetts School of Law as part of a conference titled “Chasing Success or Courting Failure: The Attributes an American President Must Possess for Success.”

President Bush’s usurpation of power since 9/11 is “rapacious,” “predatory,” and “extra-Constitutional,” presidential scholar Michael Genovese, director of the Institute for Leadership Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said.

Bush’s “Unitary Theory” of the executive “is a very strange and ahistorical notion that says, ‘In a crisis all power gravitates to the president. No one, not the courts, not the Congress can interfere with the president and in effect, the president is the state,’” Genovese observed.

“That ahistorical view runs contrary to everything that we find in the Framers,” Genovese said. “For the president to say that he has all the authority he needs to do all he had to do without Congress, without the courts, is simply dead wrong. He may be the decider but he’s not the only decider.” He urged the candidates for the White House discuss their views on the nature of the presidency.

Genovese made his comments in a keynote address to a conference on “Presidential Powers in America” at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover April 26th.

He said the Framers’ intention “was to get away from the rule of one man that they just fought a revolution to overthrow, and so the Framers invented a rule of law system, under a separation of powers, with checks and balances, under a constitution, and they invented an office, the president, who was to preside, not to govern, but to preside.”

The system they created was primarily concerned “about protecting freedom and liberty,” Genovese said, “not about the efficient use of power. That left very little room for the heroic leadership so many of us today yearn for and expect of our presidents.”

“A powerful presidency can solve some of our problems but just as easily, a powerful presidency can become the chief problem we need to solve,” he warned.

Genovese called for “a national conversation about what we want the presidency to be than simply by default to take whomever is in the White House and hand them a blank check and say ‘take care of it.’ That way lies madness.”

The presidential scholar said this type of conversation is something “we’re not getting in this presidential race…a national debate on the future of presidential power so that we can choose the kind of presidency we want and not have an imperial presidency thrust into our laps without any real reflection or choice.”

Genovese said that external circumstances can impact the nature of the presidency. “In normal times, the separation of powers looms large. In crises or emergency times, the separation of power is small, diminished, and recedes.” On September 10^th, 2001, he said, “who would have thought that George Bush and Dick Cheney would be so incredibly powerful?”

“There was nothing in the cards that predicted it except the 9/11 attack and then they just drove the tank through the Constitution,” Genovese said.

Genovese, a fellow of Queens College, Oxford, is the author of 16 books, including “The Power of the American Presidency: 1798-2000”(Oxford University Press). He is a past president of the Presidency Research Group of the American Political Science Assn.