Tag Archives: regulatory affairs

Why the GOP’s Attack on Obama’s Climate Plan Will Probably Fail

by TyNevilleeiph Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, several of the nation’s top environmental lawyers gathered at the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, for the first round of arguments in a pair of lawsuits challenging the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s climate plan.

One of the suits was brought by coal company Murray Energy, the other by a group of a dozen states (all with Republican governors, and all either large producers or consumers of coal); they both contend that the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t have the authority to set tough new standards for carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. The rules, first proposed last summer, are designed to cut the nation’s carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. The question before the court today was whether the lawsuits can go forward.

We probably won’t know the judges’ decision for a month or more. As my colleague Kevin Drum pointed out, it’s conceivable they could rule against the EPA. All three judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents (two by George W. Bush, and one by his dad), and at least two of them have a history of anti-environmental rulings. One of the judges, Brett Kavanaugh, filed a dissent on a separate case in 2012 arguing that greenhouse gases shouldn’t be regulated as air pollutants.

Still, many experts believe that it’s unlikely the judges will decide to hear the case—at least not yet. That’s because the climate rules won’t actually be finalized until later this year. According to Reuters, one of the W-appointed judges, Thomas Griffith, said in court this morning that he and his colleagues “could guess what the final rule looks like, but we’re not usually in the business of guessing.”

For as long as the Clean Air Act has been on the books (half a century and counting), there have been attempts by polluting industries to tear it apart. Every time the Obama administration puts forward new regulations based on it (for mercury emissions, for example, and carbon emissions from new power plants), lawsuits start to pile up as soon as the draft language is out of the gate. But courts have never, not once, taken up a challenge to any EPA rule before it was made final.

If they did, “it would create enormous mischief,” said Richard Revesz, a leading environmental law scholar who has testified to Congress in support of the proposed to rule and was in the courtroom this morning. “It would double the amount of litigation on every proposed rule.”

That’s because the final rule is almost certain to look quite different from what’s on the table now. The EPA is currently sifting through more than 4 million public comments on the rule, submitted by everyone from corporations and governors to environmentalists and your Grandpa Joe, and trying to amend the final rule accordingly. Once that rule is made public, it is inevitably going to face another round of legal challenges from the very same cast of characters. So it really doesn’t make sense for the court to listen to arguments about regulatory language that’s virtually guaranteed to change.

Once lawsuits on the final rule do get taken up, there are likely to be some really interesting debates. The meaning of some of the key Clean Air Act language being employed by the EPA is hotly contested, thanks in part to an apparent clerical error that led to potentially competing versions of the same passage both being signed into law. And there are constitutional issues at stake as well, such as whether the federal government has the right to tell states how to manage their energy supply (if past is any precedent, Revesz has repeatedly said, they do; that’s kind of the whole point of the Clean Air Act).

But for now, there’s a pretty good chance today’s hearing was just a warm-up round for a much more serious fight yet to come. At this point, says Sierra Club chief counsel Joanne Spalding, the EPA’s opponents “are trying to derail a train that’s still in the station.”

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Why the GOP’s Attack on Obama’s Climate Plan Will Probably Fail

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Elizabeth Warren Explains How Washington Corruption Protects the "Tender Fannies" of The Rich

by DebbiePemulwuy Posted on April 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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During a spot on the “Daily Show” Thursday night, Senator Elizabeth Warren broke down the ways in which big banks and large corporations have rigged Washington politicians in order to ensure “the tender fannies of the rich and the powerful are always carefully protected.”

“Powerful corporations, rich people, have figured out that if you can bend the government to help you just a little bit, it’s a tremendous payoff,” Warren told host Jon Stewart. “And if you can bend it to help you just a little bit more, and a little bit more, the playing field just gets more and more tilted, and the rich and the powerful just do better and better.”

The Massachusetts senator, whose appearance was tied to her book A Fighting Chance, went on to explain how both the steady circulation of money and the constant presence of lobbyists in Washington have worked together to create a culture in which such corruption is the norm. Watch below:

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Elizabeth Warren Explains How Washington Corruption Protects the "Tender Fannies" of The Rich

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Will Obama’s Ag Chief Wimpify the 2015 Dietary Guidelines to Please Big Meat?

by BenjamiBoren Posted on March 14, 2015

Mother Jones

Should the new Dietary Guidelines—the advice the federal government issues every five years on what constitutes a healthy diet—include recommendations about what makes for a healthy planet? The meat industry sure doesn’t think so.

The industry started flipping out when it saw some of the language in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s February report: “Consistent evidence indicates that, in general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods…and lower in animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with a lesser environmental impact (GHG emissions and energy, land, and water use) than is the current average US diet.”

Big Meat takes issue with two main things:

1) That the committee’s scientists dared to comment on environmental sustainability issues in a nutrition report.

2) That the report said (elsewhere) that a healthy diet should be lower in red and processed meats.

The North American Meat Institute, a massive trade association, retaliated this week with a “Hands Off My Hot Dog” petition on Change.org, a flurry of tweets about saving the Ruben sandwich, and this short film, starring plastic-wrapped packages of raw beef:

The film focuses on the health merits of meat, arguing that it trumps other foods because, unlike plants, “animal proteins are considered complete proteins, or ideal proteins.” Never mind that plenty of other accessible and cheap vegetarian foods, including rice and beans, or buckwheat, also provide complete proteins.

But the video does not try to refute the notion that meat’s environmental footprint is cause for concern—the UN argues, for instance, that livestock produce 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Dietary Guidelines’ committee points out that producing one calorie of beef requires 18 times as much fuel as producing one calorie of grain.

It’s no coincidence that the committee chose to flag the carbon footprint of our food: The guidelines are ultimately about people’s relationship with food, and the deterioration of the environment’s health is a blow to our food security. “Meeting current and future food needs,” the committee notes, will depend on changing the way people eat and developing agricultural and production practices “that reduce environmental impacts and conserve resources.”

So will the Dietary Guidelines retain this responsible language when they are officially published this fall by the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture? On Wednesday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that he could not rule out the chance that the final version will mention sustainability, but he implied that he would steer clear of doling out environmental advice. He told the Wall Street Journal:

“Our job ultimately is to formulate dietary and nutrition guidelines. And I emphasize dietary and nutrition because that’s what the law says. I think it’s my responsibility to follow the law.”

The law or the money? The AP has reported that meat processing and livestock industries spent $7 million on lobbying and donated $5 million to members of Congress during the last election cycle.

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Will Obama’s Ag Chief Wimpify the 2015 Dietary Guidelines to Please Big Meat?

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This Congressman Doesn’t Want a Federal Science Board to Be Allowed to Consider Science

by JanellSibley Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last year, the House of Representatives passed two absurd anti-science bills, the Secret Science Reform Act and the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act. It will come as no surprise that both bills, under the guise of “reform,” would have the practical effect of crippling the EPA’s efforts to assess science in a fair and timely way. I don’t have the heart to get into it — follow the links above for the details.

The bills are back; the House considered them both again yesterday. Emily Atkin has the gory details if you’re interested. They might get a little further this time—the Democratic Senate didn’t take them up last year, obviously, but the GOP-controlled Senate might this year—though it won’t matter in the end, as Obama has threatened to veto both. So it’s mainly yet another act of reactionary symbolism from the right.

All that is by way of background so I can draw your attention to a hilarious amendment attached to the Science Advisory Board bill. It comes by way of the bill’s sponsor, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), a far-right, coal-country, climate-denying conservative of the old school.

Here’s the amendment. Its sole purpose is to prohibit the EPA’s Science Advisory Board from taking into consideration, for any purpose, the following reports:

the US Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment

the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order No. 12866 (which I wrote about here)
the July 2014 Pathways to Deep Decarbonization Report, from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (which I wrote about here)

So. When considering what to do about carbon pollution, EPA may not consider what America’s best scientists have concluded about it, what an international panel of scientists has concluded about it, how the federal government has officially recommended calculating its value, or the most comprehensive solutions for it. Oh, and it can’t consider Agenda 21 either. Otherwise the EPA can go nuts.

As I’ve said many, many times, most Americans have no idea how batshit crazy the House GOP has gone. They serve the base, and only the base (and Politico obsessives) pay close attention. But imagine, if you will, a GOP House and Senate paired with President Jeb Bush. A bill like this might pass. Politicians might be picking and choosing, based on ideological criteria, which scientific reports administrative agencies are allowed to consider. It’s amusing in its own dark way, but it’s not a sitcom or a satire. It’s real life.

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This Congressman Doesn’t Want a Federal Science Board to Be Allowed to Consider Science

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Brian Williams Mess Pulls Government’s Media Mogul Back to NBC News

by RussRenner Posted on March 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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On January 21, Andrew Lack, the media titan who at different times has headed Bloomberg, Sony, and NBC News, was sworn in as CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the troubled federal agency that oversees the five official US government-supported broadcasters, including the Voice of America. But, according to watchdog website BBG Watch and the entertainment trade magazine Variety, Lack will be leaving the struggling agency after only 42 days on the job. He is reportedly in negotiations to return to NBC, spurred by the network’s own recent challenges, including the suspension of Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. BBG chairman Jeff Shell will fly to Washington on Wednesday to discuss Lack’s departure with employees, says BBG Watch.

As I reported last month, the BBG has suffered heavy criticism from former employees, government officials, and oversight agencies alike:

In 2013, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, testified before Congress that the BBG was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to be able to tell its message around the world.” That year, the State Department Inspector General, charged with evaluating the BBG, interviewed board members, senior staffers, and outside observers, subsequently reporting that “the word most commonly used to describe the BBG was ‘dysfunctional.'” The agency’s “record of poor management of taxpayer-funded resources—financial, physical, and human—has undermined the confidence that Congress and the American public have in these efforts,” Dan Robinson, a former Voice of America Chief White House correspondent, wrote in an op-ed last March.

Lack, chosen after a year of deliberations at the BBG, was seen as the person with the media experience and visibility who could rejuvenate the organization and lead it out of its troubled state. He told Mother Jones in February, “I am lucky to join a great group of journalists and news professionals spread across the globe who care so deeply about our critical role in the…global war on information.”

Former employees, like Ted Lipien, who once worked at the Voice of America and has been an outspoken critic since he left and started BBG Watch, lauded Lack’s appointment. “There were high hopes attached to Andy Lack,” said Lipien, who told me that he met Lack just weeks ago at a BBG board meeting. He said Lack was “very engaging…talking about his plans,” giving no indication that he was anything but committed to his new job.

The news does not bode well for the terrible morale at the BBG: One employee told BBG Watch that hearing the news was “like a bomb had dropped.” Without a CEO, the BBG will continue to suffer from a lack of desperately needed leadership, giving critics an opening to pass legislation that has already been crafted. This includes a bipartisan bill proposed by Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Ed Royce (R-Calif.) that would alter the entire structure of the BBG, turning the Voice of America into more of an explicit propaganda arm for US policy.

The BBG did not respond to request for comment.

“We all hoped that with his journalistic and managerial experience, Mr. Lack would be able to reform the BBG,” Lipien told me. “His sudden departure is deeply disappointing.”

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Brian Williams Mess Pulls Government’s Media Mogul Back to NBC News

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The FCC Did a Lot More Than Just Approve Net Neutrality Today

by VOLKarlpzuqg Posted on February 26, 2015

Mother Jones

The FCC voted today in favor of strong net neutrality rules, but this is something that’s been expected for weeks—and something I’ve written about before at length. So instead of commenting on that yet again, I want to highlight something else that might be nearly as important:

The Federal Communications Commission will allow some cities and towns to set up and expand municipal Internet services, overruling state laws that had been put in place to block such efforts.

The commission granted petitions by Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C., to overturn laws that restricted the ability of communities in those states to offer broadband service. In all about 20 states have passed such laws. The vote was 3-2 and along party lines. The decisions don’t affect the other states, but they do set a precedent for consideration of similar petitions in the future.

This is a step in the direction of creating more competition for broadband internet, which I think is at least as important as net neutrality regulations. So hooray for this ruling, which is a step in the right direction. And while we’re on the subject, it’s also worth noting that the FCC’s net neutrality decision could end up stimulating more broadband competition too. Why? Because net neutrality depends on regulating broadband providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and this means that companies like Google, which are trying to set up their own high-speed networks, will be able to do it more cheaply. This is from a couple of months ago:

In a letter Tuesday to the FCC, Google’s director of communications law Austin Schlick highlighted a potential positive for the company if Title II kicks in. As a regulated telecom service, Google Fiber would get access to utility poles and other essential infrastructure owned by utilities. The FCC should make sure this happens because it would promote competition and spur more investment and deployment of broadband internet service, Schlick argued.

Cable and telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T have long had the right to access utility poles and other important infrastructure, such as ducts, conduits and rights of way, he noted. Google Fiber, which competes against these companies, has not had this right and the service has had trouble getting access to some poles as it builds out its fiber-optic network to homes.

….Hooking up homes using poles is about a tenth of the price of digging trenches across streets and sidewalks, according to Reed Hundt, who was FCC chairman in the 1990s. “Pole access is fundamental and Google will never be able to make the case for Google Fiber without pole access,” he said. “If Title II gives Google pole access, then it might really rock the world with broadband access.”

If Google gains pole access, and cities and towns are free to set up their own high-speed networks, then local cable companies will finally start getting real competition in the high-speed internet market. Net neutrality is a big win for consumers, but real competition might be an even bigger win. This is far from a done deal, but things are starting to head in the right direction.

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The FCC Did a Lot More Than Just Approve Net Neutrality Today

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New Retirement Regs Might Pose a Campaign Problem for Republicans

by KeiraPhifer Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Congress is now controlled by Republicans, and it’s unlikely they’re going to pass any of the items on President Obama’s agenda. But what about executive actions? Are there any more of those left in Obama’s toolkit?

Jared Bernstein says yes. Forty years ago, when rules were set regarding retirement programs, most retirement funds were managed by corporations or unions, and it was assumed that the fund managers were financially sophisticated. This meant the rules could be fairly light. But that’s obviously changed: most pensions these days are IRA and 401(k) accounts that are managed by individuals who often have a hard time telling good advice from bad:

The result was a lot of people without a lot of investment acumen trying to wade through thickets of annuities, bonds, securities, and index funds, often guided by advisors and brokers who they assumed were wholly on their side.

Many were — but research shows that many were, and are — not always acting in their clients’ best interest, generating unnecessary fees and charges that erode retirement savings. The newly proposed rule, which does not require Congressional approval, meaning it could actually come to fruition, realigns incentives in the interest of individual investors by requiring retirement financial advisers to follow an established standard (a “fudiciary standard”) to act in their clients’ interest.

….The new fiduciary standard should block what honest brokers call “over-managing:” unnecessary rollovers, churning (over-active buying and selling that generates brokers’ fees at the expense of returns), and the pushing of expensive and risky products like variable annuities.

All of which turns out to be extremely costly to retirees….Conflicted advice reduces returns by about 1 percent per year, such that a poorly advised saver might end up with a 5 percent vs. a 6 percent return. They multiply that 1 percent by the $1.7 trillion of IRA assets “invested in products that generally provide payments that generate conflicts of interest” and conclude that the “the aggregate annual cost of conflicted advice is about $17 billion each year.”

According to Bernstein, a White House study suggests that this difference between 5 and 6 percent returns can amount to five years of retirement savings under plausible assumptions. That’s a lot.

Needless to say, the financial industry is strongly opposed to this rule change, and I think we can safely assume that this means Fox News will be raising the alarums too. Their argument, apparently, is that if they’re prohibited from giving small clients bad advice, it just won’t be worth it to bother with small clients at all. Maybe so. But as Bernstein says, if that’s really the case then “maybe there’s a hitch in your business model.”

This has the potential to be an interesting campaign issue. Most Democrats, even those with close ties to the financial industry (*cough* Hillary *cough*) should have no trouble supporting this rule change. That’s a slam dunk winner with retirees and most of the middle class. Republicans will have a harder time. After all, this represents regulation, and Republicans oppose regulation. They especially oppose financial regulation, as they’ve proven by their relentless efforts to roll back even the modest Dodd-Frank regulation adopted after the financial crash.

So what will they do? Stick to their principles and oppose the new regs? That will sure provide Democrats with an easy sound bite. Jeb Bush opposes a rule that prevents brokers from deliberately giving you bad retirement advice. I don’t think I’d like to be the candidate who has to answer for that.

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New Retirement Regs Might Pose a Campaign Problem for Republicans

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The House Is Set to Pass a GOP Bill Wiping Out Wall Street Reforms

by OnitaBledsoe Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

The Republican-dominated House is poised to approve legislation this week that would obliterate a slew of important Wall Street reforms. The legislation arrives just weeks after Congress and the Obama administration gave Wall Street two big handouts, and serves as an opening salvo in what will be a sustained Republican assault on financial reform over the next two years.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), is called the Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act, but its name obscures what it would actually do. The legislation is a compilation of deregulatory bills that failed to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate in the last Congress. It would alter nearly a dozen provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, loosening regulation of Wall Street banks. Here’s a look at the details of what the bill would do.

Delay the Volcker rule. The Volcker rule—one of the most important bits of Dodd-Frank—generally forbids the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. One high-risk product banks are supposed to stop trading are collateralized loan obligations, which are bundles of loans that are broken into pieces and sold to investors. In December, the Federal Reserve extended banks’ deadline to stop trading CLOs from 2015 to 2017. The Fitzpatrick bill would extend that deadline to 2019.

Water down rules on private equity firms. Private equity firms are required to register as brokers with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if they get paid for providing investment banking services such as merger advice. Brokers are subject to additional rules and more regulatory oversight. The bill would exempt some private equity firms from having to register as brokers.

Loosen regs on derivatives. Derivatives are financial instruments with values based on underlying numbers, such as crop prices or interest rates. The Fitzpatrick bill would allow Wall Street firms that own commercial businesses such as oil or gas operations to trade derivatives privately instead of in central clearinghouses, which are subject to more oversight. The bill would also forbid regulators from requiring that banks take collateral from companies that buy derivatives. Collateral can help offset losses if one of the parties involved in the transaction defaults.

Weaken transparency rules. The bill exempts about 60 percent of publicly traded companies from certain rules regarding how those companies must file financial statements with the SEC. The measure would also allow certain smaller companies to omit historical financial data in their financial statements. “This allows firms to choose a convenient history as they promote their securities,” the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen noted last week.

Last week, House Republicans tried to force Fitzpatrick’s bill through the House using a procedure typically used for uncontroversial bills or technical fixes. This process, known as fast-tracking, requires the bill to receive a yes vote from two-thirds of the chamber, or at least 290 members. But on Friday, just 276 of the 435 members of the House voted for the measure—well short of the two-thirds majority required. Now GOP leaders have resurrected the bill, and will push it through under the normal rules, which require just a simple majority. The bill is expected to pass the House easily, although it’s unclear whether the Senate would approve it. President Barack Obama would likely veto it. But GOPers could force the legislation into law by attaching bits of it to must-pass bills—such as spending legislation—later this year.

Fitzpatrick is a member of the House financial services committee. Between 2013 and 2014, he received more than $310,000 in donations from the finance and banking sector, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Fitzpatrick legislation signals the beginning of a sustained assault on Dodd-Frank by the new GOP Congress. Up next: the consumer protection bureau that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) helped create. (More about that here.) “We’re going to see repeated attempts to go in with seemingly technical changes that intimidate regulators and keep them from putting teeth in regulations,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform told the New York Times this weekend. “If we return to the pre-crisis business as usual, where it’s routine for people to accommodate Wall Street on these technical changes, they’re just going to unravel the post-crisis regulation piece by piece. Then, we’ll be right back where we started.”

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The House Is Set to Pass a GOP Bill Wiping Out Wall Street Reforms

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Governor-Elect Laments the Californication of Texas

by IPALarazkd Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Local fracking bans. Laws outlawing plastic bags. Strict tree-cutting ordinances. Another day in California? Nope. Welcome to life in urban Texas, where Democratic-controlled city councils are enacting powerful consumer and environmental protections—much to the chagrin of the state’s leading conservatives. “Texas is being California-ized, and you might not even be noticing it,” Gov.-elect Greg Abbott complained last week at a meeting of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

This, he added, is a nasty “form of collectivism” that could “turn the Texas miracle into the California nightmare.”

Though California has long been a conservative bête noire, Abbott’s comments highlight a rising fear among Texas Republicans. More than half of all Texans now live in 10 large urban counties that are growing much faster than the state as a whole. Their voters tend to be more liberal than other Texans, a trend that’s accelerating as minorities, young people, and out-of-staters settle there, lured by cosmopolitan neighborhoods and good jobs. According to a 2012 analysis by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, 70 percent of Democratic gains in Texas since 2000 have come from the four counties that encompass Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. All of them voted for Barack Obama in 2012.

In a state known for caring more about hot-button social issues than consumer or environmental protections, it should come as no surprise that urbanites would turn to their city councils to tackle quality-of-life issues the state prefers to ignore. The fracking ban enacted this November in Denton, a college town near Dallas in the gas-rich Barnett Shale formation, is a case in point: It might have never passed had residents felt the state was doing enough to protect them. “It says the industry can’t come in and do whatever they want to do to people,” Cathy McMullen, the head of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group, told the Washington Post. “They can’t drill a well 300 feet from a park anymore. They can’t flare 200 feet from a child’s bedroom anymore.”

Last week, the governor-elect went on to suggest that the Legislature should crush such liberal local regulations. “My vision,” Abbot said, “is one where individual liberties are not bound by city limit signs.”

But critics quickly accused him of hypocrisy. “It’s disappointing to hear the governor-elect wants to overrule the will of city voters on a range of issues,” Bennett Sandlin, the executive director of the Texas Municipal League, which represents city governments, said in a press release. “It amounts to the same kind of governmental overreach at the state level that he opposes when it comes from Washington.”

That the new governor has so quickly backed himself into a rhetorical corner may reflect his party’s increasingly cramped political circumstances. Demographic trends strongly suggest that Texas will turn blue. The state GOP, sandwiched in between the big federal government and a lot of pesky little local ones, almost seems to be defending the political equivalent of the Alamo.

Almost, but not quite: The Alamo is in San Antonio, now a stronghold of Democrats.

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Governor-Elect Laments the Californication of Texas

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Cuomo and Christie Veto Port Authority Reform Bill. But Is It Permanent?

by BrookeV16j Posted on December 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m as distant from the politics of New York and New Jersey as it’s possible to get, but I’m puzzled about today’s news that the governors of both states have vetoed legislation that would have reformed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Here’s a typical piece from the New York Daily News:

Rather than sign the bill supporters say would have opened the bi-state agency to much needed transparency and accountability, the two governors crossed party lines to announce they would push a reform package recommended Saturday by a panel they had created earlier this year.

….The bill’s Assembly sponsor James Brennan (D-Brooklyn) and other critics argued there was no justification for the veto of legislation passed unanimously by the legislatures in both states.

Some, like former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who in 2009 sponsored a public authorities reform bill that did not cover the Port Authority, suggested Cuomo, a Democrat, and Christie, a Republican, were more interested in protecting their own power than actually reforming the agency. “It’s shameful,” Brodsky said. “They ripped the heart out of real reform in order to maintain their control and power.”

….New Jersey Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto said the vetoes were a slap in the face to commuters who “rightly expected more from the governors after the revelations at the Port Authority over the last year.”…Cuomo and Christie say the reforms they are recommending embrace “the spirit and intent” of the legislation….But critics suggest the recommendations were meant as a smokescreen to distract from the vetoes. “Power trumped good government,” Brodsky said.

Wait a second. The bills were passed unanimously in both legislatures. It should be a snap to override the vetoes, right? And yet, none of the stories I read so much as mentioned the possibility. The best I could find was the last sentence of an AP dispatch:

New Jersey Sen. Loretta Weinberg said the decision was a “cop-out,” and Assemblyman John Wisniewski said he’s disappointed the bill didn’t become law…..Both Weinberg and Wisniewski predicted that overturning a veto would be difficult.

Can someone fill me in on the inner workings of New York and New Jersey politics? Do legislators’ loyalties to their governors really carry that much weight? I mean, everyone knew Cuomo and Christie were opposed to the bill from the start. So if the legislatures passed it unanimously to begin with, why can’t they now muster a two-thirds vote to override? What am I missing here?

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Cuomo and Christie Veto Port Authority Reform Bill. But Is It Permanent?

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