Wall Street Journal, October 30,2000
Copyright © 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

OK, OK. We promise not to bring up the internal combustion engine, the memorable villain in Al Gore's apocalyptic "Earth in the Balance." And we don't think Mr. Gore is going to be bringing it up either, especially with all those auto workers in Michigan now leaning toward Dubya and with Ralph Nader attacking his green flank.

But the Vice President's views here are worth revisiting, because they have clear implications in a critical area of executive power: regulation. Now we've all heard Mr. Gore contrasting his own abstract projections of a cleaner, greener America against what he paints as the scarred and uncaring landscape of Governor Bush's Texas. All the more reason to look at what it would mean if Mr. Gore's brand of caring ever made it out of his books and town hall meetings and into government. For in the past month the Administration has given us a good taste of the bitter medicine he has in mind.

The first comes from the Department of Agriculture. Pretty humdrum department, right? Well, in the space of a few weeks, Agriculture has managed to bankrupt a family meat business as well as reach a settlement with a group of animal-rights activists that has the nation's research labs reeling.

That may be better than the Environmental Protection Agency, which hasn't even told us what it plans to do in a mad scurry to drop a host of regulations on America before the swearing in of the next President, the urgency here being, of course, that this next President might be George W. Bush.

Let's start with Agriculture and the meat business. When meat inspection started up nearly a century ago, the threat was animal diseases. But today the threat comes from bacteria. So a few years back Agriculture put in new regulations and testing to address the bacteria threat.

The problem is that the tests are no good. So when the USDA tried to shut down Supreme Beef's plant in Texas on the grounds it was unsanitary, the company sued. And it won, with the head of the USDA's inspection service admitting in court that the tests for salmonella were not a reliable guide to the real sanitary conditions of the plant.

Instead of moving in good faith to consult with scientists to come up with accurate tests, the USDA responded by retaliating, ordering an unprecedented recall of meat supplied to the school lunch program by Supreme Beef, in effect robbing the company of one of its biggest contracts. The upshot is that a family owned meat company that hadn't had one case of poisoning attributed to it, just a few weeks ago filed for Chapter 11, after what its president called "a campaign of harassment, intimidation and disinformation" by the USDA.

That's not all the USDA was up to. As we reported in these columns earlier, the department recently reached settlement on a lawsuit aimed at the use of mice, rats and birds -- which constitute 95% of animal research -- in laboratory experiments. The suit was launched by the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, which, it should be noted, is related to the American Anti-Vivisectionist Society and thus in principle opposed to all uses of animals in experiments. If left to stand, say scientists, it would effectively regulate animal testing out of existence by raising the price and creating intolerable paperwork to document every single rat,
mouse or bird used.

But as troubling as the result is the means. A U.S. district court judge ruled that one of the plaintiffs in the suit -- a Beaver College student who says she was upset by what she saw in a lab -- be allowed her standing on the grounds that her "aesthetic interest" had been offended. This was followed by secret negotiations between the USDA and the plaintiffs, to the point where the research community didn't even know the terms of the settlement until well after it had been reached. Never mind the incongruity of an Administration that can at once be gung ho about fetal-tissue research on the one hand while putting rats and mice before research on the other.

Other departments are learning the game. An August page one story in the Washington Post began as: "Mindful that Republicans could occupy the White House in less than six months, the Clinton administration is working feverishly to issue a host of new regulations supported by environmentalists and other liberal-leaning groups." The article cited 67 initiatives at the EPA alone. Reading this, the Landmark Legal Foundation filed a Freedom of Information suit seeking to learn just which groups the EPA was talking with and what about, but it has yet to get an answer.

We shouldn't be surprised. This is part of the same Administration that came in using secret meetings to try to nationalize the health-care industry, that ignored a court order (and the Fourth Amendment) to send a SWAT team into a Florida home and has used executive orders on everything from tobacco advertising to nursing homes.

Given his own more "populist" and antibusiness agenda, we can expect Mr. Gore to take this practice to the next level. On the TV circuit, of course, Mr. Gore's views on everything from health care to the environment have become a regular staple of late-night monologues. As executive orders, they won't be so funny.