The EPA plans to end due process

Good day all. I saw this Tuesday but didn’t have time to talk about it. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing new rules where they can summarily garnish the wages of anyone they claim is in violation of EPA regulations.

People that have their wages garnished will have almost no recourse to fight the attachment, which is pretty much what the EPA wants. Here are the details from the Washington Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly floated a rule claiming authority to bypass the courts and unilaterally garnish paychecks of those accused of violating its rules, a power currently used by agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service. The EPA has been flexing its regulatory muscle under President Obama, collecting more fines each year and hitting individuals with costly penalties for violating environmental rules, including recently slapping a $75,000 fine on Wyoming homeowner Andy Johnson for building a pond on his rural property.

For those of you who may not recall, Andy Johnson wanted to build and stock pond on his property. The EPA decided they didn’t like that and went after him. You can read the details from Fox News. I haven’t been able to find anything more recent then March 2014. Under the rules the EPA wants to be able to basically take every dime that the Johnsons have and leave him bankrupt with no way to stop them. Fortunately members of Congress are noticing what the EPA is attempting.

“The EPA has a history of overreaching its authority. It seems like once again the EPA is trying to take power it doesn’t have away from American citizens,” Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican, said when he learned of the EPA’s wage garnishment scheme.

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD94dVu8lqQ’]

Gee, you’re just now noticing this? People, including myself, have been saying the EPA is an out of control agency and that Congress needs to literally break them. Now the EPA is using a law that was passed in 1996 as their excuse to claim this authority.

The agency cited authority under the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996 that centralized federal collection operations under the Treasury Department, which oversees garnishments of wages or tax refund checks. Under the law, every federal agency has the authority to conduct administrative wage garnishment, provided the agency adopts approved rules for conducting hearings where debtors can challenge the amount of debt or terms of repayment schedule, a Treasury official said.

Usually, this is for something like skipping out on a bad debt. This is what the IRS does with regards to taxes owed, but they have a means for people to appeal that. The EPA? They won’t even bother. The EPA intends for itself to be judge, jury and executioner with no appeals permitted. This latest scheme is their way of getting around the Sackett vs the EPA case where the Supreme Court found in favor of the Sacketts ((Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency)). The short version of that case, the EPA tried to basically seize the property of a couple using the clean water act. The Sacketts were told to basically pay up and that they had no rights as far as the EPA was concerned.

Still, the rule would give the EPA sweeping authority to dictate how and whether Americans could dispute fines and penalties, even as the amount of EPA fines collected from individuals, businesses and local governments steadily increase.

Can you see the problem here? Under the EPA’s plan, a citizen has absolutely no constitutional rights at all. Considering that the people running the EPA are environmentalist fanatics, in many cases just as bad as the Earth First terrorists, you can expect them to start attacking people as soon as possible. This is one reason, if not what they publicly claim, that they are fast tracking this rule.

Putting the collection powers on a fast track, the agency announced it in the Federal Register as a “direct final rule” that would take effect automatically Sept. 2, unless the EPA receives adverse public comments by Aug. 1.

Oh they started getting that “Adverse public comment” almost immediately.

The negative reactions began almost immediately. In a comment letter submitted to the EPA, the conservative Heritage Foundation faulted the rule for giving the government “unbridled discretion” in controlling the process for challenging fines and wage garnishment, such as dictating the site of a hearing without consideration of the time and travel expense placed on the accused debtor.

In other words, you might live in Oregon and the EPA will decide that you have to appear at 10am Eastern time in Boston Massachusetts and they let you know about the hearing at 10pm Pacific time they day before.

The rule allows the EPA to decide whether a debtor gets a chance to present a defense and then picks whomever it chooses to serve as a hearing officer, even someone not trained as an administrative law judge, wrote David S. Addington, group vice president for research at The Heritage Foundation. It also puts the burden of proof on the debtor, not the EPA, he said.

So much for your constitutional rights to a fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, etc. I seem to recall we had a little revolution regarding a number of these issues. This will be nothing more then a star chamber proceeding with the verdict already determined. I have little doubt that whoever is selected to “hear the case” will be some tree hugging left-wing Marxist who pretty much hates all people who aren’t like him, or her as the case may be.

This rule needs to be stopped cold and for one very good reason. The EPA will use it to destroy property owners, especially those in the western states as well as businesses they don’t like. I think it’s also safe to say that if they start going after people like this, someone is going to snap and you are going to end up with a lot of dead EPA bureaucrats. (Probably why they want their own secret police goon squads SWAT team) These Washington pinheads simply will not pay attention to the rising anger across the nation. Is it any wonder that the majority of Americans now consider the United States Federal Government to be a threat to the people ((Record High in U.S. Say Big Government Greatest Threat))? Not to me.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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