Gorsuch, Anne Burford

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When former Rep. Anne Gorsuch Burford (R-Colorado) — the late mother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — was heading the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, she drew a great deal of criticism from environmentalists and some Democrats in Congress for weakening air and water regulations.

Burford ended up resigning, much to the disappointment of her son (who was in his teens at the time).

In an article published by CNN on January 17, Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic stresses that Justice Gorsuch has followed in his mother's footsteps with "his own brand of defiance and anti-regulatory fervor."

"In recent years," Biskupic explains, "Justice Gorsuch has voted against regulations that protect the environment, student-debt forgiveness and COVID-19 precautions. During a COVID-19 spike in early 2022, Gorsuch was the lone justice who declined to wear a mask while sitting on the bench. He has led calls on the Court for reversal of a 1984 Supreme Court decision that gives federal agencies considerable regulatory latitude and that, coincidentally, traces to his mother's tenure."

On January 17, according to Biskupic, the High Court is scheduled to hear arguments in cases testing the Reagan-era 1984 ruling in Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

"The issue comes down to Congress' ability to write open-ended laws that delegate policy details to agency officials," the CNN journalist notes. "The Chevron principle dictates that when disputes arise over regulation of an ambiguous law, judges should defer to agency interpretations of the law if the interpretations are reasonable. The Chevron case has steered disputes over countless directives intended to protect the public, such as from air pollution, workplace hazards, risky drugs and medical fraud, or to guarantee certain benefits, such as people with disabilities and elderly."

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, according to Biskupic, will defend that 1984 ruling.

Prelogar, in a filing, told the Roberts Court, "Overruling Chevron would be a convulsive shock to the legal system. All three branches of government, regulated parties, and the public have arranged their affairs for decades with Chevron as the backdrop against which Congress legislates, agencies issue rules and orders, and courts resolve disputes about those agency actions."

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/09/scott-pruitt-trump-reagan-epa-gorsuch-burford-superfund-scandals

The Environmental Protection Agency's chief, a science skeptic with a taste for luxury goods, entered office hellbent on slashing government red tape — but slowly became embroiled in scandal over alleged mishandling of government funds amid extraordinary efforts to keep the activities of a public agency secret.

Not Scott Pruitt, the Trump administration's current EPA chief: Anne Gorsuch Burford, who ran the EPA under Reagan from 1981 to 1983, and resigned after being cited for contempt of Congress following a scandal involving document shredding, secrecy, and the Superfund.

A year into Pruitt's tenure at EPA, some of the parallels between the two are striking.

Burford (mother of Neil Gorsuch, the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice) came into office in the early 1980s a fierce critic of government regulation, openly antagonistic to environmental laws and the EPA's core mission, bragging that she'd slash clean water regulations down from a six-inch stack to one just a half-inch tall. During her time at EPA, its budget dropped nearly a quarter and, as The New York Times once wrote, she “caused a hemorrhage of its best professional staff.”

Pruitt similarly is known for his hostility to the EPA long before he took office. In January, he touted cutting EPA's staffing to “Reagan-era” levels and hung posters around EPA celebrating plans to scrap the Clean Power Plan (Mother Jones compiled a long list of Pruitt's regulatory rollbacks in areas including: pollution from the oil, gas, and chemical industries; greenhouse gases; pesticides; and smog).

They both slowed the EPA's efforts to enforce America's environmental laws. During Burford's first year, enforcement actions fell 60 percent. For his part, Pruitt has overseen a halving of civil penalties and fines for polluters during his first year, and once inflation is accounted for, penalties on Pruitt's watch have been up to 68 percent lower than under previous administrations.

While Pruitt's science skepticism extends to both climate change and evolution, Burford is best remembered for her rejection of the science on tobacco, once famously smoking Marlboro cigarettes during a meeting with environmentalists on carcinogens. Burford, who died of cancer at age 62, was a two-pack-a-day smoker when she ran Reagan's EPA.

Pruitt's climate skepticism took on a similar indifference to risks when he recently questioned whether climate change is “necessarily a bad thing.” In a February 6 television interview, he asked: “Do we know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100 or the year 2018? It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

(For the record, scientists predict that climate change will bring with it sea level rise that could leave cities and entire nations underwater, severe storms, drought, wildfires, wildlife extinctions, and a long list of other harms).

Burford's taste for luxury goods remains a memorable part of her public image — she's often described as favoring fur coats; for Pruitt, it's first-class travel (the difference being that Pruitt's airborne extravagances are on the taxpayers' dime).

Keeping the Public Out

Both Burford and Pruitt have made headlines for their approach to secrecy at the EPA. Burford famously refused to hand over Superfund records to Congress, at the direction of President Reagan. The agency later admitted it had shredded documents in a scandal that ultimately cost Burford her job.

She remained brazenly unrepentant. In 1982, immediately after being cited for contempt and facing the possibility of up to a year in jail, Burford told reporters: ''What happened tonight, if pursued to its conclusion, wouldn't do anything. It would not produce the documents, it would not decide the issue of separation of powers. It would only send me to jail for a much-needed rest.''

While Pruitt isn't accused of shredding documents or potentially criminal activity, his approach to government transparency ranges from simply hostile to downright bizarre.

Federal law requires EPA to allow the public to access many EPA records — but Pruitt's EPA has left 94 percent of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests still waiting for processing, an analysis by the Project on Government Oversight revealedlast month.

“The FOIA process isn’t optional,” Sen. Tom Carper wrote in an email to Politico, responding to those findings. “The American people are entitled to know what government officials, including Mr. Pruitt, are doing with their time and taxpayer money.”

A record number of lawsuits have been filed against Pruitt's EPA over its response (or non-response) to FOIA requests, with 46 lawsuits launched in 2017, more than double the previous record. While the EPA has blamed a backlog left by the Obama administration for delays, watchdogs say that Pruitt's EPA has refused to make public information that's normally readily available, like the Administrator's schedule and travel records, forcing journalists to file FOIA requests to access basic information.

Watchdog groups are also pursuing a lawsuit against Pruitt's EPA for failing to keep records required by law. In one case, EPAsaid it had kept no notes on its deliberations as it wrote a roughly 36-page report on recommendations for the Superfund program, which the groups argue violates public record-keeping laws.

Pruitt's personal secrecy and security measures are even more unusual. In September, the Washington Post reported that Pruitt spent $25,000 in taxpayer money on a “secure, soundproof communications booth.” He dropped another $15,780 on high-tech locks and alarms for his office (prior agency chiefs say they kept their doors unlocked). But it's his personal security detail and his first-class flights that have run up the costliest tab for American taxpayers.

Pruitt took members of EPA's law enforcement team — formerly chasing criminal polluters — and turned them into his own personal round-the-clock security detail. He brings them with him on his travels both domestic and international. Other recent EPA chiefs have used security details when they traveled, but the 24-hour team is a first. Pruitt has argued that his first-class flights are for unspecified “security” reasons (Time headlined its coverage: “EPA Head Says He Needs to Fly First Class Because People Are Mean to Him in Coach”).

It's not just the airfare that's expensive for taxpayers. An E&E investigation found that Pruitt's security detail ran up a tab of $832,735.40 in salary and travel costs — in just three months.

His security expenses have also raised ethics concerns. On Tuesday, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Tom Carper (D-DE) wrote to the EPA, demanding documents related to a contractor hired to sweep Pruitt's office for electronic surveillance and describing their concern that the $3,000 contract may have breached federal conflict of interest rules.

Superfund

Government secrecy isn't only worrisome because, at least in theory, a democracy should be answerable to the people — the information that U.S. agencies hold can be extremely valuable.

In February, Ryan Zinke's Interior Department lost two senior U.S. Geological Survey officials after they resigned, citing a request by Zinke for confidential and commercially valuable oil and gas data before it was publicly available. “These assessments have the potential to move markets in a big way,” Kate Kelly, a former Interior Department official, toldMother Jones.

Which brings us back to the Superfund program, which is tasked with cleaning up America's most polluted sites and last year had a budget of $1.1 billion in appropriations. The program also has been hit with a series of scandals on Pruitt's watch.

In January, an Associated Press investigation found that Pruitt's EPA had been lauding cleanups at seven contaminated sites as Trump-era successes — but that the actual work at those sites had been “completed years before Pruitt was confirmed as the agency's chief.” The program is run by Albert “Kells” Kelly, a close friend of Pruitt and, as The Intercept reported in December, a banker who was banned for life from the banking industry. Kelly came under fire last month over his investments in fossil fuel companies, including Phillips 66, which is partly responsible for cleanup of Superfund sites in Oregon and Louisiana.

Under Burford, Superfund became one of EPA's most controversial programs for very different reasons. Democrats suspected that her EPA was only funding clean-up work in districts where Republicans were up for re-election. With Reagan's backing, Burford refused to hand over Superfund documents to Congress, claiming executive privilege and touching off a major battle between the branches of government.

A look back at history highlights the importance of the House of Representatives in preventing public corruption by agency heads. In late 1982, Burford became the first cabinet-level official ever cited for contempt of Congress, after she refused to turn over Superfund documents that the House had demanded. She resigned roughly three months later (an event followed by more scandal over whether Reagan's Justice Department had improperly refused to pursue jail time or a fine against its former EPA chief).

This week, an effort by House Democrats to bar Pruitt from flying first class was blocked by Congressional Republicans. But if control of the House shifts following mid-term elections, it's likely Pruitt would face a less friendly Congress as his second year at the EPA concludes.

Burford's legacy at EPA not only included a Colorado Superfund site that likely was prevented from receiving funding for cleanup due to political reasons, but alsoa mass resignation of roughly 20 EPA officials caught up in the scandals. One of her subordinates wound up serving a six month sentence for perjury.

It's still too early to know whether any parallels between Pruitt and Burford will continue — it's entirely possible that Pruitt could be cleared in the ongoing investigations and prevail in the lawsuits against his agency. The Trump administration also brings a level of unpredictability unmatched in the Reagan era.

But if Pruitt continues along the path Burford blazed, he may not like where that trail leads.

http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/how-his-mothers-downfall-as-reagans-epa-chief-affected-court-nominee-gorsuch/

How his mother’s downfall as Reagan’s EPA chief affected Court nominee Gorsuch

Originally published February 4, 2017 at 3:24 pm Updated February 4, 2017 at 4:38 pm

Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford, with husband, Robert, gestures at farewell news conference in Washington in 1983. (IRA SCHWARZ/AP)

Judge Neil Gorsuch is no stranger to political infighting. His mother was criticized for spending cuts and easing rules as head of the EPA, eventually resigning after Congress cited her for contempt for refusing to turn over documents related to a toxic-waste program.

By ADAM LIPTAK, PETER BAKER, NICHOLAS FANDOS and JULIE TURKEWITZ

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Judge Neil Gorsuch’s first taste of rough-and-tumble Washington, D.C., politics was bitter and lingering.

He was 15 and his mother was a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration caught in an ugly showdown with Congress. When she was forced to step down, her reputation in tatters, young Neil was furious.

“You should never have resigned,” he told his mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, by her later account. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

More than three decades later, Neil Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge in Denver, has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Trump and faces a political culture even more caustic than the one that destroyed his mother’s public career. Like her, he is a committed conservative and can expect strong opposition, but where she was bold and brash, he has advanced to the pinnacle of the judiciary with understatement and polish.

Now 49, he arrives at his own moment of testing as a child of the Reagan revolution who saw up close the promise and the perils. He inherited a frontier skepticism of government rooted in his home of Colorado and nurtured in Washington, D.C., during the 1980s. While studying at the liberal enclaves of Columbia and Harvard, he rebelled against the dominant thinking to develop a conservative philosophy that has propelled him to the threshold of the Supreme Court.

Despite the family ordeal, friends and relatives said, he emerged from his youth tempered about politics yet not soured on public service. He decided to pursue goals similar to his mother’s, but along a different path.

Burford, known as Anne Gorsuch until she remarried in 1983, was the first woman to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She argued that states were better custodians of resources and that market forces would bring more discipline to regulation. As she cut spending and pared back rules, critics called her an enemy of the environment. Her downfall came when, at White House direction, she refused to turn over documents related to a toxic-waste program. Congress cited her for contempt.

“It was an example to him of what the realpolitik of Washington could be like,” said Richard Segal, a Harvard Law School classmate who is a lawyer in San Diego. “He viewed his mother as an environmentalist, and his mother viewed herself as an environmentalist. And meanwhile she was made the poster child of the view that the Reagan administration was just out there to rape the environment.”

The teenager was his mother’s conscience. “Neil knew from the beginning the seriousness of my problems,” she wrote in a memoir before her death in 2004. He was “smart as a whip” and “had an unerring sense of fairness, as do many people his age.” When she resigned, “he was really upset.”

By most accounts, he did not dwell on it later in life, but it clearly echoed in his work. In preparing a moot court brief at Harvard on workplace safety, he tried to add material concerning the EPA that did not fit, recalled a classmate, Ellen Bublick, who is now a law professor at the University of Arizona. In his time as an appeals court judge in Denver, his most notable writings have concerned the power of government regulators.

“We talked about that prior history in relation to that,” Bublick said. “He definitely was proud of his mom and had a sense that in the Reagan era certain people took a fall for him in order to protect him. And I think that was really his view of what happened to his mom.”

Rugged individualism

Neil McGill Gorsuch’s earliest years were spent in the West, where at Rocky Mountain campsites and fishing streams he internalized a faith in rugged individualism.

He grew up in a three-bedroom ranch-style house in the east Denver neighborhood. of Hilltop. His parents, Anne and David Gorsuch, were lawyers who had three children: Neil in 1967, Stephanie in 1969 and J.J. in 1973. His mother raised them Roman Catholic; his father was not religious. (Neil Gorsuch is now Episcopalian, according to his brother, possibly inspired by his time studying at Oxford University.)

Studious but not standoffish, Neil shared a bedroom with his brother and attended Christ the King, a Roman Catholic school. Relatives and friends recalled him lugging stacks of books and once rounding the baseball diamond in well-worn cowboy boots after leaving his athletic shoes at home. “If anybody was going to be the president, it was going to be Neil Gorsuch,” said Gina Carbone, 49, a classmate.

In 1976, Anne Gorsuch was elected to the state Legislature, often aligning herself with a small but powerful group of conservatives, dubbed the “House Crazies,” who were determined to cut taxes and loosen regulations. Women’s groups supported her campaign, but in office she led a fight to kill the Colorado State Commission on Women. Fervently anti-abortion rights, she was, one politician told The Washington Post in 1983, “almost paranoid about any kind of abortion legislation.”

She rose quickly. “She was very prominent in the shaping of policy,” said Steve Durham, a leader of the House Crazies. She had a “knack and ability to get along with people and put them at ease.” She also was famously tough. The Rocky Mountain News wrote that she “could kick a bear to death with her bare feet.”

After two terms, Anne Gorsuch became one of three Coloradans to take prominent posts in the Reagan administration, along with James Watt, the interior secretary, and Robert Burford, director of the Bureau of Land Management. Dubbed the “Colorado mafia,” they managed the nation’s natural resources with a fierce belief that the government had gone too far in regulating private enterprise. It was widely believed that they had the backing of Joseph Coors, the conservative Colorado beer magnate.

By the time Anne Gorsuch moved to Washington, D.C., in 1981, she was headed for a divorce, and the children toggled between the capital and Colorado.

Acting the part

Neil Gorsuch soon had a stepfather when his mother married Robert Burford, whom his mother had met in the state Legislature.

Known for wearing furs and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, Anne Gorsuch Burford became a prominent face of the new administration as she cut back lawsuits against polluters and tried to relax parts of the Clean Air Act.

“There was obviously a lot of controversy regarding her work as she was carrying out the president’s program,” Ed Meese, a top Reagan adviser, recalled. “I’m sure that undoubtedly had an impact on her son.”

J.J. Gorsuch, 43, now a vice president of a Denver marketing-technology company, said his mother’s political life had shaped the family psyche but ultimately made his brother stronger. “If anything, it probably prepared him for the experience ahead in a great way,” he said. “He knows better than most how ugly the political process might get. So in that sense it’s hopefully prepared him for the nomination process.”

A dissenting voice

Gorsuch arrived at Columbia in 1985 as the historically liberal university was recovering from student protests the previous spring and beginning to divest from corporations operating in South Africa. In three years on campus — he graduated a year early — he emerged as the intellectual leader of a resurgent right. It was “a happy band of dissenters,” as Brian Domitrovic, a classmate and fellow conservative, put it.

His eloquence impressed many. That he was tall, clean cut and handsome only helped. He danced and drank Manhattans and martinis, Domitrovic said. He joined Phi Gamma Delta, a fraternity with a reputation for partying, and quietly attended religious services.

But principally, Gorsuch became known as a fierce and lucid writer in the Columbia Daily Spectator, where he published columns, and later The Federalist Paper, which he helped found. Part newspaper, part opinion journal, The Federalist Paper drew comparisons to the conservative Dartmouth Review.

In March 1987, as students debated the fraternity system’s treatment of women and minorities, Gorsuch co-wrote a piece defending all-male clubs. In a familiar rhetorical move, he reframed the issue as free speech. In their “heavy handed moralism,” he wrote, the system’s critics missed “the fact that Columbia is a pluralistic university, that its fraternity is equally pluralistic, with options available for everyone.”

That spring, as students boycotted Coors beer in a labor dispute, posters on campus alleged that The Federalist Paper, which accepted the company’s advertising, had received funding from the conservative Heritage Foundation, financed by the Coors family. Gorsuch mocked the “professional protesters” who had created the posters, and he threatened a libel suit.

“He had a real regal way of writing about this stuff that made us look small,” said Tom Kamber, a leader of the liberals. “His role was really to write these screeds that would try to take the winds out of our sails.”

An optimistic time

The battle continued at Harvard Law School, where Gorsuch arrived in 1988 along with a young man from Chicago named Barack Obama. The two did not intersect much — Obama was six years older — but they mirrored each other as intellectual leaders who managed to disagree without being disagreeable. “Neil was not quite as public a person as Barack was, but at the same time, for the people who knew him, he was very well-respected,” said classmate Segal.

Gorsuch befriended liberals, including Norm Eisen, later a White House aide and ambassador under Obama. “He stood out among the conservative group in not being loud,” Eisen said. “He managed to stay above that while making his conservative positions clear. I thought it was impressive.”

Through all of this, Gorsuch made little mention of his famous mother. Indeed, one friend who stayed close after law school said he had realized the relationship only years later. Once when a fellow student said something disparaging about her on the assumption that he was not related, he brushed it off.

“He deflected it in a very classy way that made me think it was not the first time somebody had said something like that,” Eisen said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/03/03/denver-allies-became-keepers-of-the-rules-they-had-attacked/109df6dc-81a4-4a08-b478-e1853a7cee5d/

Denver Allies Became Keepers of the Rules They Had

Attacked

By Dale Russakoff March 3, 1983

n theColorado Legislature they were known as the "House Crazies," a band of militant conservatives who rose to

power in 1979 and made war on government regulation.

They voted to kill measures to control toxic waste dumps, force reductions in car pollution, require immunization of

school children against mumps and measles, regulate development of nature areas, provide bilingual education for

minorities and teach skiing to the handicapped with state funds.

"People called us 'crazies' because when we started out everybody said we were crazy to think we could change the

government," said Steven J. Durham, a former Young Americans for Freedom activist who captained the rise of the

conservative caucus in the Colorado House. "They were wrong."

Today, Colorado's "crazies" are President Reagan's top environmental officers, enforcers of the same federal

regulations they attacked under the golddomed state capitol a few years ago. Their Denver histories, well known

here, are only now receiving scrutiny in Washington as one element of the controversy over the Environmental

Protection Agency.

Colorado Rep. Anne M. Gorsuch, who in 1980 voted to kill major hazardous waste regulation bills, is today the

administrator of the EPA, Anne M. Burford.

Rep. Durham, who opposed state waste dumping laws and pushed to relax Colorado Health Department controls

over quality of drinking water, is today regional administrator of the EPA, in charge of regulating air and water

pollution and the dumping of toxic waste in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Considered the master strategist of the House, Durham, 36, led Gorsuch/Burford and other conservative

compatriots in a 1979 uprising that ousted the moderate Republican leadership, installing rancher Robert F. Burford

as the new speaker of the House. He and Gorsuch were recently married, and she has changed her name to his.

Robert Burford is now director of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, responsible for federal

programs to develop or protect more than 300 million acres of western public lands. (He has promised to take no

part in BLM decisions affecting his relatives, who hold permits to graze sheep and cattle on thousands of acres of

federal land.)

After winning the speaker's seat by one vote, Burford appointed Durham, Gorsuch and others to chair key House

committees. From these berths, they caught the attention of presidential advisers after Ronald Reagan's election in

the national conservative tide of 1980.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, the Burford appointed education committee chairman who sought cuts in state poverty

programs because "too much government in the realm of social services takes away the individual's responsibility," is

now Denver regional director of the Department of Education.

Rep. Frank DeFilippo, a Burfordappointed committee vice chairman who is sponsoring a state bill to reopen a toxic

waste dump shut down by health authorities, served on Reagan's transition team.

Speaker Burford assigned several major regulatory bills to Gorsuch's State Affairs Committee, where they often

died, according to several panel members. As a result, other legislators nicknamed the committee "the killing

ground." It was through this procedure that the hazardous waste bill reached Gorsuch's panel in 1980, over the

protests of legislators who said it belonged in committees that specialize in health, the environment, water or land

use.

At the time, Gorsuch said she moved to kill the billthe product of a monthslong study to create state rules on the

location and operation of hazardous dumpsbecause federal rules were too unsettled for the state to move ahead

with its own controls.

A state health official who monitored the committee hearings said that Gorsuch and other opponents "seemed less

concerned about public health than the burden on industry." The official noted that the views of the conservative

caucus were not ususual here in the prodevelopment atmosphere of the Rockies.

"I don't think they were in anyone's pocket. They obviously had very deep personal convictions about the problems

of overregulation," the official said. "It's just that this led them to do exactly what industry wanted."

One of the chief lobbyists against the 1980 bill was Thornton Field of the Adolph CoorsCo., the brewery and

manufacturing complex run by Reagan intimate Joseph Coors. Gorsuch hired Field as her special assistant on toxic

wastes at the EPA. He is now in the agency's enforcement division.

In all, the militant conservative caucus numbered about a dozen, and rarely broke ranks on budget or social policy

issues. They retained James G. Watt, then head of the Mountain States Legal Foundation here, to sue the EPA in

1979 in an attempt to block the federal agency from forcing Colorado to monitor and control air pollution from

automobiles. Watt is now secretary of the Interior Department.

Gorsuch was not among the 27 legislators who filed the suit. A reporter quoted her as saying she had intended to join

the plaintiffs but was out of town at the time. The next year, Gorsuch was the House sponsor of a proenvironment

car pollution inspection program, but a weaker one than many advocates favored.

Assisting Watt in the antiEPA suit was another conservative Denver attorney, James W. Sanderson.

Sanderson, who was chosen by Gorsuch for the No. 3 post at the EPA, worked for more than a year as her close

consultant, helping to staff and reorganize the agency. He withdrew from consideration for a permanent top EPA job

last year, after the Justice Department began investigating him for possible conflicts of interest for allegedly taking

part in agency decisions that could have affected his clients. The probe remains "active," according to the Justice

Department.

Congressional critics and environmentalists have insisted since the dawn of the Reagan administration that the

appointments of Watt, Gorsuch and others were tantamount to dismantling environmental protections. The White

House and senior officials at the EPA and the Interior Department have asserted repeatedly that they seek only a

"reasoned" approach to regulations on business.

Still, Colorado Democrats insist that the lineup at the EPA and Interior bears the imprint of Coors, one of the chief

political patrons of the Burfords, Durham and others who share their political views.

Coors was a member of the "kitchen cabinet" that advised Reagan on setting up the administration, and his

objections to many environmental regulations are welldocumented. He created the Mountain States Legal

Foundation, which filed dozens of lawsuits against EPA and Interior actions during the Carter administration, and

hired Watt to head it.

Coors declines to discuss his influence on federal environmental policy. "He considers his politics to be his personal

business," said Whit Sibley, a company spokesman.

While the furor over the Reagan administration's environmental policies has kept Gorsuch/Burford and Watt under

close national scrutiny, Durham, the architect of the conservative revolution here, has so far escaped the

Washington spotlight.

But in Denver, Durham has a profile as high as the Rockies. He recently decried the congressional probes of the

EPA's toxic waste program as "hysteria," saying that no toxic dumps pose serious dangers to human health. In a

speech, he dared critics to "give me a list of one person who has died as a result of a hazardous waste site."

Aides to Democratic Gov. Richard D. Lamm promptly pointed reporters to the deaths of two Denver Water Board

crewmen from a methane gas explosion at the site of an abandoned dump in Sand Creek.

Lamm said Durham's remarks show that he "misunderstands the whole last century of public health development.

You don't have to wait for bodies to show" before acting.

"They Democrats have no chance of gaining sympathy on the economic issues, so they're trying to make hay on EPA,"

Durham said in a recent interview. "There's no greater political issue than convincing people they're going to die."

Hazardous wastes, Durham said, are "like any other potentially dangerous substance. Take a hazardous waste known

as gasoline. We all handle it every day."

Durham has come under congressional scrutiny as part of the Sanderson investigation. The Denver EPA chief was

accused of holding up for months Colorado's strict state water quality standards, which would increase costs for

Sanderson's client, the Denver Water Board. Durham said he did not talk with Sanderson about the matter.

Durham observed, however, that Sanderson was only a consultant to the EPA at the time, not a fulltime official. "He

was a private citizen. Under the law, he can do whatever he damned well pleases. He can talk to me or anyone else."

Asked if this freed Sanderson to influence EPA decisions affecting his clients, Durham said, "That could be a

problem, I suppose."

Durham said he had little interest in environmental issues before taking the EPA job. "Why did I want the job?" he

said in response to a question. "Anne recruited me, and I was looking for an opportunity to try and change

government. This was one of them.

Tune: ''The Girl That I Marry'' Sung by: an actor portraying Robert Burford. The girl that I married the other day Was keeping our secrets at E.P.A. Her neat and skillful style Has brought lawsuits, subpoenas and writs by the pile. And when those committees began to dredge We claimed executive privilege. Til she wedded, we all shredded And poor Rita Lavelle got beheaded. Now here's our solution: There is no pollution - on file. 3/83 gridiron club sketch

son: see sep node

or maybe no hope

neil McGill Gorsuch is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by George W. Bush on May 10, 2006, and confirmed by the Senate on July 20, 2006. He is the son of Anne Burford, the first female head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Judge Gorsuch, a native of Denver, is a graduate of Harvard Law School (cum laude) and holds a Doctorate in Legal Philosophy from Oxford University. After clerking for a U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, he was chosen to be a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. After gaining extensive experience in litigating complex cases in federal court while in private practice, Mr. Gorsuch was named Principal Deputy to the Associate Attorney General of the United States. He is the son of former Environmental Protection Agency Director Anne Gorsuch.

Education

Columbia University, B.A., 1988
Harvard Law School, J.D., 1991
Oxford University, D.Phil., 2004

The Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues. The people listed as Experts have spoken or otherwise participated in Federalist Society events, publications, or multimedia presentations. A person's appearance on this list does not imply any other endorsement or relationship between the person and the Federalist Society. All expressions of opinion by an expert are those of the expert.

Publications and Multimedia

13th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture - Event Audio/Video

2013 National Lawyers Convention

November 22, 2013 on discovery?

Dodd-Frank: Act Two and What's Next in Financial Services Laws and Regulations? - Event Audio/Video

2012 National Lawyers Convention

November 19, 2012

hope: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/07/14/3680340/colorado-renewable-energy-decision/

Colorado’s ambitious renewable energy standard will remain in place thanks to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Monday shielded the law from a legal attack by a right-wing litigation group.

Writing for a three-judge panel,U.S. Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch affirmed that the clean energy law does not violate the U.S. Constitution, as the plaintiff Energy and Environment Legal Institute had argued. E&E Legal, formerly called the American Tradition Institute, is a nonprofit that advocates a “free-market approach” to environmentalism. It is the same entity that launched a high-profile lawsuit against climate scientist Michael Mann seeking to view his email communications, an effort which ultimately failed.

The case over Colorado’s renewable energy law was E&E Legal’s second most high-profile case. The group launched the lawsuit back in 2011, arguing that the clean energy standard — which requires utilities to get 30 percent of the electricity they sell to Colorado customers from renewable sources — violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

More specifically, the group said that the law unfairly harmed out-of-state businesses. Colorado relies on other states to get a good portion of its electricity, the group argued, and therefore out-of-state coal producers would be disproportionately harmed.

Judge Gorsuch disagreed, saying that while out-of-state coal producers would likely be hurt, it wasn’t disproportionate. Indeed, financial harm to fossil fuel companies would likely be equal across the board.

“To be sure, fossil fuel producers like [E&E Legal]’s member will be hurt,” Judge Gorsuch wrote. “But as far as we know, all fossil fuel producers in the area served by the grid will be hurt equally and all renewable energy producers in the area will be helped equally. If there’s any disproportionate adverse effect felt by out-of-state producers or any disproportionate advantage enjoyed by in-state producers, it hasn’t been explained to this court.”

Gorsuch also noted that if the mandate raises electricity prices for Colorado residents, that didn’t matter either — because Colorado voters had approved the law in 2004 with “overwhelming support.”

“That’s a cost they are apparently happy to bear,” he wrote.

Colorado is a national leader in clean energy, in part due to the state’s ambitious renewable energy standard. The state is home to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is the federal government’s primary research facility for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch

Neil McGill Gorsuch (born August 29, 1967 in Denver, Colorado) is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.^[1] He is the son of Anne Burford, the first female head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Background

Gorsuch graduated from the Georgetown Preparatory School and received a B.A. from Columbia University (where he was co-founder and first chief editor of the alternative newspaper The Fed and won a Truman Scholarship). He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School and Doctorate of Legal Philosophy from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar at University College.

Gorsuch clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1991–1992, and then for United States Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy from 1993-1994.

From 1995-2005, Judge Gorsuch was in private practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel. He was a Deputy Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2005 until 2006.

His first book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, was published by Princeton University Press in July 2006.

Tenth Circuit nomination and confirmation

Gorsuch was nominated by President George W. Bush on May 10, 2006 to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit vacated by Judge David M. Ebel (also a former clerk of Supreme CourtJustice Byron R. White) who took Senior status in 2006. Gorsuch was confirmed just over two months later on July 20, 2006 by voice vote in the U.S. Senate.^[2] Gorsuch was President Bush's fifth appointment to the Tenth Circuit.

Since he took office, Gorsuch has sent many of his law clerks on to become Supreme Court clerks, and he is regarded as a "feeder judge."^[3]

References

External links

Last week, an investiture ceremony was held for Judge Neil Gorsuch, recently confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. And it was a star-studded affair. From the Denver Post:

Seven-year-old Emma and 5-year-old Belinda helped their father, Neil Gorsuch, into his judge’s robes Monday after the newly appointed 10th Circuit Court judge was sworn in.

Munching on cookies after the formal ceremony, Emma said she thought it “was nice.”

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was in Denver to administer the oath, spoke directly to the little girls before Gorsuch raised his right hand. “He’s doing it to remind all of us that the first obligation any American has is to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States,” he said.

Justice Kennedy’s pedagogical impulse is admirable. We suspect, however, that Emma and Belinda were thinking more about cookies than the Constitution.

Some supplementary coverage, from an ATL tipster:

The entire en banc 10th Circuit was present. Justice Kennedy administered the oath. Attorney General Gonzales read the commission. Both Colorado Senators made remarks, as did Mark Hansen of Kellogg Huber (the insanely prestigious appellate shop from which Gorsuch rose). Half of the Justice Department was there: Rachel Brand, Elisebeth Collins Cook, Brett Gerry, Wan Kim, Gregory Katsas, among others.

The Gorsuch clerks showed everyone around Denver and got trashed on consecutive nights. Good times were had by all.

Article III groupies, Judge Neil Gorsuch is one to watch. He’s brilliant, he’s young, and he’s incredibly well-connected. Look for him to rise through the ranks of Supreme Court feeder judges in the years to come — and, perhaps, to be nominated to the Court himself someday.

(Judge Gorsuch is taking the seat of Judge David Ebel, who has been the Tenth Circuit’s resident feeder judge for quite some time now. Guess that’s the 10th Circuit’s designated “feeder seat.”)

Update: Would someone be able to locate and/or send us a good photo of Judge Gorsuch for our files? Our quick Googling didn’t produce anything useful.

10th Circuit judge’s oath a family affair [Denver Post]

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4696868 11/06

Seven-year-old Emma and 5-year-old Belinda helped their father, Neil Gorsuch, into his judge's robes Monday after the newly appointed 10th Circuit Court judge was sworn in.

Munching on cookies after the formal ceremony, Emma said she thought it "was nice."

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was in Denver to administer the oath, spoke directly to the little girls before Gorsuch raised his right hand.

"He's doing it to remind all of us that the first obligation any American has is to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States," he said.

Dozens of members of Gorsuch's family, friends, Colorado's U.S. senators and the U.S. Attorney General packed the federal courthouse. A television monitor showed the proceeding in an overfill room.

Gorsuch's uncle and a friend, who both spoke, described a man with a sense of humor and a commitment to law. A juror once called Gorsuch - 39 years old with a full head of gray hair - Perry Mason after a moving closing argument, said Mark Hansen, a Washington attorney.

"If adversity shows the true character of a person, then Neil showed his resilience, his strength and steadfastness," Hansen said of how Gorsuch handled a difficult case.

Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on July 20 and was officially sworn in this summer. The ceremony Monday publicly commemorated his appointment.

Born in Denver, Gorsuch moved to Washington, D.C.

, as a teenager when President Ronald Reagan appointed Gorsuch's mother, Anne M. Gorsuch, to be the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Gorsuch attended Columbia University, Harvard Law School and Oxford. Most recently he served as principal associate attorney general at the Department of Justice.

"As a judge, I hope to emulate the respect for the rule of law, for the decisions and judgments of the elected branches of government, and for the equality and dignity of all persons that shines through in the work of two of my former bosses, Byron White and Justice Kennedy," Gorsuch said.

The 10th Circuit covers 560,625 square miles, nearly 20 percent of the U.S. land mass, and raises some of the most important legal issues of the time, said U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar.

"Deciding cases involving life and death, the reach of government power, the scope of our freedoms and liberties is the daily task of a federal judge. It is a task that requires intellect, compassion, and a dedication to fairness and impartiality," he said. "He has a sense of fairness and impartiality that is a keystone of being a judge."

Washington attorney, speaking of how Gorsuch handled a difficult case

rfk2

1980 coors etc spearheaded Sagebrush Rebellion (corp and rw) turned ctt

into pol power 25 RR: I am a S rebel" Hertiage shadow cabinet, 2k pp

Mandate for Change became blueprint (Coors in kitchen cab). Coors picked

assoc Anne Gorsuch for epa; hubby cattle baron to head BLM, tho had

declared to shut it 25

Watt dominion theology, "subdue" nature is duty; sold off public assets at

fore sale prices : GAO 26 "I do not know how many generations we can

count on till the Lord returns" greens are plot to delay energy

development and "weaken Americ" , a "left-wing cult which seeks to bring

down the type of gov't i believe in" 26 PROTO AGENDA 21

Gorsch cut budget 30% so no new laws or enforcement; killed Superfund at

start, became a welfare pgm of corp lawyers 26 appt lobbyist to run depts

CoS timber lawyer, enforecenmt chief ex-exxon

by 1981 1.1 mil signatures on petition to get rid of watt; after out, 25

counts felony, perjury, concealment and obstr of justice. Gorsuch and 23

others forced to resign, sweetheart deal w/ coors (her #2 Rita LaVelle

jailed perj and obstr. 26

blow to sagebrush but regrouped at aug '88 nugget hotel reno and rename

Wise Use

**washingtonpost.com**

Anne Gorsuch Burford, 62, Dies; Reagan EPA Director

By Patricia Sullivan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, July 22, 2004; Page B06

Anne M. Gorsuch Burford, 62, the Environmental Protection Agency director who resigned under fire in 1983 during ascandal over mismanagement of a $1.6 billion program to clean up hazardous waste dumps,died of cancer July 18 at Aurora Medical Center in Colorado.

Her 22-month tenure was one of the most controversial of the early Reagan administration. A firm believer that the federal government, and specifically the EPA, was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, Ms. Burford cut her agency's budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.

Republicans and Democrats alike accused Ms. Burford of dismantling her agency rather than directing it to aggressively protect the environment. They pointed to budgets cuts for research and enforcement, to steep declines in the number of cases filed against polluters, to efforts to relax portions of the Clean Air Act, to an acceleration of federal approvals for the spraying of restricted pesticides and more. Her agency tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would burn toxic wastes at 1,200 degrees centigrade.

Ms. Burford was forced to resign after she was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over Superfund records, arguing that they were protected by executive privilege. Ms. Burford acted under President Ronald Reagan's orders, with the advice of the Justice Department and against her own recommendation, her colleagues told the press at the time. A few months later, in what one of her aides called a "cold-blooded, treacherous act of political callousness," the Justice Department announced it would no longer represent her because it was involved in investigations into corruption at the EPA.

In her 1986 book, "Are You Tough Enough?" Ms. Burford called the episode her "expensive mid-life education."

"When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only 'crime' was loyal service, following orders. I was not the first to receive his special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work," she wrote.

A striking woman with jet-black hair, she was described as having television-star looks and perfect manicures. She wore fur coats and smoked two packs of Marlboros a day; her government-issued car got about 15 miles per gallon of gasoline.

She could charm opponents, but she also did not shy away from political combat. Denver's Rocky Mountain News once said,"She could kick a bear to death with her bare feet."

Born Anne McGill in Casper, Wyo., she graduated from the University of Colorado in 1961 and the University of Colorado Law School in 1964. She married David Gorsuch after law school, and they traveled together to India after she won a Fulbright Scholarship. Upon her return to Colorado, she was a deputy district attorney and a lawyer for the regional Bell telephone company. She was elected to the Colorado legislature in 1976 and became known as one of the "House Crazies," conservative lawmakers intent on permanently changing government. She and Gorsuch divorced in 1979.

Reagan was her political hero, and she was thrilled to win an appointment in his administration. She said she considered the EPA director's job the "second-toughest" in government, after the directorship of the Office of Management and Budget.

More than half of the federal regulations targeted for an early review by the Reagan administration's regulatory reform team were EPA rules. Virtually all of her subordinates at the EPA came from the ranks of the industries they were charged with overseeing. Her tenure enraged environmentalists, who tied her to the equally controversial policies of her friend and fellow Coloradan, then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Ms. Burford was known as Anne Gorsuch until she married Robert Burford, director of the Bureau of Land Management, just a month before she resigned in March 1983.

Her resignation did not end the political fight. Reagan, seeking to reward a loyalist, appointed her a year later to the chairmanship of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and the Atmosphere. The Republican-controlled Senate, by a vote of 74 to 19, called on him to withdraw the appointment.

She told a meeting of Colorado woolgrowers that the panel was a "nothingburger" and a "joke" that met three times a year. "They don't do anything," she said. The nation's capital, she added, was "too small to be a state but too large to be an asylum for the mentally deranged."

Those remarks further inflamed her opponents, so she withdrew from the advisory panel before she was sworn in.

She focused on her private law practice in Colorado, specializing in child advocacy law. Her son, Neil Gorsuch, said that as a young district attorney, she had pursued "deadbeat dads" long before that cause was popular, and she returned to those kinds of issues in her later work. She was still working at the time of her death.

Her marriage to Robert Burford also ended in divorce.

Survivors include three children from her first marriage, Neil Gorsuch of Washington and Stephanie Gorsuch and J.J. Gorsuch of Denver; her mother, Dorothy O'Grady McGill of Denver; a brother; and five sisters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3418-2004Jul21?language=printer

===

Anne M. Gorsuch Burford

(May 20, 1981 to March 9, 1983)

In May of 1981, Anne Gorsuch Burford became Administrator of EPA. By this time public and Congressional interests were well focused on the major problems of toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes.

In the absence of new authorization bills, the noise control program underwent a gradual phase-down during 1981-1982. The Reagan Administration did not object, as it believed noise control is more properly a matter to be regulated by State and local governments.

Congress finally rescinded $1.7 billion Clean Water Act (CWA) construction grants funds previously appropriated over President Nixon's and Russell Train's objections, but never obligated.

The CWA was amended to allow the EPA Administrator to modify rigid BOD and pH requirements for ocean dumping by certain industrial mills. (BOD, or biological oxygen demand, measures the potential of an effluent to degrade a stream, and pH measures the acidity or alkalinity of a material, either liquid or solid.) Although this provision had been in effect for municipal discharges, its application to industrial pollution reversed five years of previous litigation.

In response to criticism of the Industrial Cost Exclusion (ICE) in the Municipal Wastewater Treatment Construction Grants amendments of 1981, Congress repealed them because they would "create financial, environmental, and social problems and cause delay in achieving water quality goals"

In 1982, EPA proposed standards, and drafted an Environmental Impact Statement for licensing and operation of mill tailings repositories.

Also in 1982, EPA announced that under RCRA, 34 states and Puerto Rico had received interim authority to oversee generation, transportation, and manifest requirements; 5 states held interim authority to issue permits for storage tanks, containers, waste piles, and incinerators.

The Reagan Administrationhad been elected on a platform that called for checking and reversing the growth of centralized Government and for providing regulatory relief. Believing that EPA was grossly overstaffed, Ms. Burford submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, a budget reflecting this view and calling for reduction from $1,355 million to $975 million. OMB's counterproposal demanded even greater cuts to which the Administrator would not agree. After protests to the Director of OMB and appeals to the White House Budget Review Board and the President, Ms. Burford prevailed. The reorganization of EPA necessitated by the reduction resulted in 4,365 fewer employees (4,129 by attrition and 236 by reduction-in-force procedures.) The remaining staff were thoroughly demoralized.

Shortly after Ms. Burford came on duty, on July 10, 1981, a fire and explosion destroyed the General Disposal Company's hazardous waste dump in Santa Fe Springs, California. Debris showered a nearby residential area and contaminated water ran through the neighborhood and onto a beach. The spill killed fish and the beach was closed. Santa Fe Springs became a test of the recently passed "Superfund" law. EPA, having authority to pay for the emergency response and then to sue responsible parties to recover the costs, began the emergency cleanup. The Inmont Corporation, one of the responsible parties, was willing to complete the cleanup voluntarily if EPA would free them from further liability. The settlement gave Inmont a blanket exemption from future Federal action related to the dump. This exemption became the target of widespread criticism, as a poor precedent.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) had been written to overcome deficiencies in RCRA and the CWA which had made no provisions for emergency and remedial cleanup responses. CERCLA called for a Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry, assessment of liability and financial responsibility, and continuous monitoring after sites are closed down. After several redraftings, EPA finally issued a revised National Contingency Plan (NCP) mandated by the CWA, to reflect provisions of CERCLA, including a National Priorities List (NPL) in which were ranked the worst 418 abandoned hazardous waste sites, making them eligible for Superfund cleanup. The NCP was issued over a year late and the NPL was a year and a half overdue. Critics charged EPA with implementing the law much too slowly. Further, in several instances, settlements with companies liable for cleanup were said to have been made below cleanup cost. House subcommittees demanded to see the internal documents dealing with enforcement of CERCLA at 160 different sites. The White House considered this to be a "fishing expedition" and invoked the principle of "Executive Privilege," instructing Ms. Burford to decline to turn over the papers, calling them "enforcement-sensitive." The House promptly found Ms. Burford in contempt of Congress, but the Justice Department refused to prosecute and instead asked the District Court to bar Congress from taking further action. The Court dismissed the case. Ms. Burford resigned March 9, 1983 because, she said, she "had become an issue in the intense Congressional controversy about Administration policies."

Washington Monthly / Jan, 1986

Mutually assured corruption; the Justice Department and Anne Burford's EPA - includes articles on Anne Burford and Rita Lavelle

by Daniel Benjamin

MUTUALLY ASSURED CORRUPTION

During Ronald Reagan's first administration, few developments attracted as much attention as the scandal over the management of the environment. At the center of the controversy were the goings on at EPA in 1982-83, when allegations of sweetheart deals with industry, political manipulation of funds, and gutted regulatory procedures flew wildly. A strange but dramatic constitutional confrontation over a pile of documents and the doctrine of executive privilege brought the affair to its climax, and a rapid denouement followed. Or so it seemed.

It all ended with nearly surgical neatness. On March 9, 1983, the documents were turned over by the executive branch to the congressional committees that wanted them, and Anne Gorsuch Burford, administrator of EPA, resigned from office. In the popular mind, the two events were linked. Burford, like her fellow Coloradan, James Watt, had antagonized many with her undeviating adherence to the Reaganite program of easing the regulatory burden on industry and getting government out of the business of protecting the environment. Her tough, unsympathetic character did not win her many friends, either. In the course of the crisis, she became the subject of the first contempt citation ever issued by Congress to a presidential appointee at that level of government.It was easy to imagine her the culprit, and the bad odor of a Watergate-like cover-up surrounding the affair was widely ascribed to her. Given the stream of bad press she brought cascading down upon the administration, few inside the government or out were sorry to see her go. And, with the subsequent resurrection of William Ruckelshaus, first administrator of EPA and shining martyr of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, the White House turned a debacle into a modest public relations victory.

The story, however, is far from over. The House Judiciary Committee has just released a 1,300-page report that promises to upset the common understanding of what actually happened during the EPA scandal. It details the fascinating but hitherto unknown machinations of the Department of Justice in the executive privilege confrontation. The evidence presented implicates many top Reagan law enforcement officials and White House staff members in a conspiracy to deceive Congress and obstruct justice. Complementing this summa is Anne Burford's recently released memoir of her years in the administration, Are You Tough Enough?*, which intimates and conjectures about many of the topics of the House Judiciary report. The appearance of these two publications has renewed press interest in the EPA scandal; the Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, has recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor.

* Are You Tough Enough? An Insider's View of Washington Politics. Anne Burford with John Greenya. McGraw-Hill,

To be sure, the wrongdoing that's been uncovered deserves plenty of attention. But because of the complexity of the scandal, because there are too many villains pursuing their own plots, and because the final picture largely contradicts our notions of how government is corrupted, it may end up earning less than its fill of coverage. For these reasons, it's worth reviewing the affair and presenting, however inconclusive it must now be, a guide for the perplexed.

Fall of the Dragon Lady

First, some history. In the fall of 1982, several House committees began investigating the Superfund program for toxic waste cleanups in response to charges that EPA was not implementing the program in accordance with the law. In October the investigations came to a halt after EPA refused to turn over certain documents that it claimed were "enforcement-sensitive'--that is, their release would have upset legal cases EPA was pressing against polluters. Congressional appeals for the documents were rejected, and acting on the advice of Justice Department attorneys, the president asserted the right of executive privilege over the documents on November 30.

Few things guarantee the suspicion of Congress as much as a claim of executive privilege. With Watergate looming in the background as the paradigmatic battle over the ill-defined doctrine, many legislators and journalists immediately sensed a cover-up. Since Congress routinely examines far more sensitive materials than anti-pollution enforcement documents, lines were quickly drawn, and the hostilities began. On December 16, in the dying days of the 97th Congress, the House voted 259-105 to hold Burford in contempt of Congress. (At the time her last name was Gorsuch. She married Robert Burford, director of the Bureau of Land Management, several months later.)

Burford, however, was as true a believer as Ronald Reagan could find--a fact that determined the great irony of her fall--and she continued to withhold the documents despite the threat of prosecution. The clamor grew. Congressional ire was further aroused by irregularities in the accounting of the documents that were being held; the total seemed to vary each time the executive branch communicated with the legislative. What's more, apparently everyone but Congress had access to the documents, including EPA office help and, strikingly, some companies that were the subjects of enforcement proceedings. It was also unclear who at EPA actually knew what was in the documents or who had made the decision to withhold them.

Drama attracts spectators, and the contempt citation and administration stonewalling brought the press to EPA's doorstep en masse. The focus of attention was Burford, whose thorniness had in the past earned her such sobriquets as the "Ice Queen' and the "Dragon Lady.' At the height of the crisis, reporters practically invaded Burford's home in what one commentator aptly called a "feeding frenzy' of publicity. The requisite Reagan egg didn't help matters either: the president announced, "I can no longer insist on executive privilege if there is a suspicion in the minds of the American people that it is being used to cover up wrongdoing.' The next day brought the inevitable correction, and the documents were not released.

In the next five weeks, the storm intensified. In mid-February Reagan fired Rita Lavelle, then assistant administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response and one of the key figures in Superfund implementation. Materials indicating criminal wrongdoing on her part, including committing perjury before Congress, were sent to the Justice Department, which was beginning its own investigation of EPA.

A few weeks later, Burford resigned, and the documents were released.At least rhetorically, President Reagan defendant her to the end and beyond. During a press conference two days after her resignation, he said the people impugning the former administrator were interested in partisan attacks and not real wrongdoing or environmental concerns. He added, "And, frankly, I wonder how they manage to look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.'

Punch and Judy

To many of those closest to the fray, it was evident that the popular understanding of the controversy--that Burford and her minions were the villains in this morality play--was incomplete. There were hints along the way that indicated as much. Significantly, Burford had made several remarks in the last few months of the scandal indicating that she opposed the withholding of the documents.

The behavior of the Justice Department throughout the affair raised a number of questions. The counsel given to Burford and EPA aroused much curiosity, as did the department's unwillingness to fulfill its constitutional duty to prosecute the contempt citation. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, the released documents did indicate wrongdoing at EPA-- exactly what the Justice Department, White House, and EPA had strenuously denied all along. Many of the documents were simply trivial; none pertained to criminal enforcement of the Superfund program. Several of them, however, gave evidence that Superfund money was being granted or held up for political purposes. If a Republican incumbent was running for reelection, a cleanup might begin with remarkable speed. If a Democrat stood to benefit from the allocation of funds, the process suddenly became arthritic. Since the Justice Department had taken an active part in the frustrating of Congress and should have known about the contents of the papers, an account of its role in the affair was clearly needed. Requests for an investigation from several congressmen to the House Judiciary Committee began the process almost three years ago.

Richard H. Gorsuch Generating Station is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by American Municipal Power - Ohio (AMP) near Marietta, Ohio.