After months of a Trump presidency, there are no more doubts of what their intentions with the government are. One of the agencies that is getting hit pretty hard by the administration is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for which Trump picked a man to lead it who has sued the agency 13 times. This was certainly to assure that he would be effective in making the agency ineffective and in the several months as EPA director, he has already proven himself to be a direct threat to it.
This parallels the President's promise that he would roll back two regulations for every one regulation.
Pruitt and Trump carry out their revenge
The reasons for this -- according to the administration and Scott Pruitt -- are because they believe that regulations kill job growth. Because the EPA has regulated the fossil fuel industry for being mass polluters, it makes perfect sense to him that he should cripple the EPA and in a sense as a way to get back at them. It would appear that Scott Pruitt hit a wall with the U.S. court of appeals last Monday when he was unable to delay the implementation of a rule that would reduce methane leaks by those mass polluters.
It should be pointed out that President Trump's effort to roll back regulation seems to be more because of his personal anger towards former President Obama, as Trump has made it a goal to dismantle everything that the former President had done. In the same sense, as Trump has signed executive orders to erase Obama's legacy, he's allowed Pruitt to start taking down those rules from the inside out with an executive order he signed earlier this year.
Up against the Senate, the people and the court
It's no secret that the Trump administration -- which includes Scott Pruitt -- have expressed hardcore skepticism of climate change to the point where they have erased any mention of it from the White House and EPA websites.
In May, it was reported that some Republicans themselves -- who generally have embraced that skepticism -- came up against a wall of disagreement when the Senate could not get votes to kill the methane emissions rule. At the time, three Republican senators reportedly joined Democrats to block the effort to kill those restrictions. Republicans tend to see themselves as heroes to rural communities who voted for Trump.
But it's been reported that many of those people rose up against the effort because many people in Western states took issue with killing the Obama-era rule as they have been exposed to toxic compounds from drilling sites that leak with methane. Those Republican senators who sided with Democrats are Susan Collins (Maine), John McCain (Arizona) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), senators who were very critical of President Obama during his full two terms in office.
The groups that came up against Pruitt's effort to delay the implementation of the rule that filed a lawsuit in June are the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club to name a few.
The issue was that Pruitt seemed to believe that, despite the rule of law, he could freeze the rules he wants to get rid of and be done with it. The court, however, saw that he approached the rule as if he were revoking or amending it. They said that he violated the Clean Air Act of 1970 and dismissed his bid. Pruitt said they would look at the court's opinion and review their options.