Secession Depression

Via JM Ashby over at Bob Cesca's place comes yet another example of Democratic madness here in Kentucky.  Remember, a Kentucky Democrat in any other state is a Republican.

There’s some states rights talk floating around Frankfort, aimed at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.


"Secession is an option," Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, who has long been the Democrat’s top guy on the environment in the Kentucky House of Representatives, told me recently as I interviewed him for a story previewing what the Kentucky General Assembly might do on the environment this winter.

Now he wasn’t predicting that the General Assembly was going to vote to leave the Union. But the committee chairman of many years who expects to be returned to his natural resources committee post this week, was making the case for a strongly worded resolution against the EPA. Such a resolution would not have any force of law but it could perhaps embolden federal legislators to trim the sails of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Gooch wanted me to know how frustrated some of his constituents are with the EPA, which has mounted a crackdown on pollution from mining across Appalachia and has tried to shrink the footprint of mountaintop removal mining.

Lawsuits like the ones filed last year against the EPA by the pro-coal Beshear administration and the Kentucky Coal Association are a first step, he told me. They object to tighter permit conditions to protect water quality in a region where many stretches of rivers and streams fail to meet federal water quality standards for fishing and swimming. The science, says environmental lawyer Tom FitzGerald, has now linked mining with polluted waterways, and the EPA, he says, is doing its job enforcing the Clean Water Act.

Gooch, who is a vice president of a western Kentucky steel company that does business with coal companies, and has taken provocative positions on the environment before, said he wanted Kentucky residents to know that secession was "an option," even as he described that as sounding "radical."

"If you keep pushing us, we are not going to let you totally destroy us," Gooch said of the federal government.

Right.  But maybe we should take up an armed insurrection against the federal government for the tyranny of...making energy companies regulate their carbon emissions.  Secede.  Really.

If you're willing to take up arms and die for a coal company to pollute your air, then there's no hope for you.  Of course Rep. Gooch here doesn't mean it, he's just trying to pull the normal Tea Party bull.  It doesn't mean it's in any way responsible.

My state is full of buffoons.