After a good last week for liberals at the Supreme Court, Jon Stewart turned on Tuesday to the conservative wins on energy and lethal injection.
After seeing reports that the Supreme Court had upheld the practice of carrying out lethal injections with a problematic drug and tossing out EPA rules to cut mercury and other air pollutants, the host of “The Daily Show” congratulated conservatives on their “victory.”
“So yes, gay people have the right to marry and poor people have the right to insurance. But on the bright side, Americans can still kill prisoners painfully and everyone else slowly,” he said.
“Yay,” he groaned.
Stewart was less than enthusiastic at the court’s decision to affirm the practice of poisoning prisoners by lethal injection, and poisoning everyone else by pollution.
Fox News hosts, on the whole, had a predictably different reaction, one of them celebrating the EPA defeat at as a “victory for business.”
“You seem really giddy about that victory! You know the losing team in that game was — lungs,” he said. “You know that, right?”
Watch the clip, courtesy of Comedy Central:
In these cases, I guess it was okay for unelected, college-educated lawyers to decide things, eh?
Given that industry were required to comply with the EPA regs, even while waiting for their lawsuits to work through the courts, we might be a little less reactionary about the decision. In a classic pyrrhic victory, industry have largely complied with the rules. And it is unlikely they would roll back the clock.
If the EPA had done a cost/benefit analysis prior to issuing the rules there would have been no case. I believe they found (later) that the public health benefit outweigh the cost of compliance nine times over. This is more of a technical loss than a “real” policy loss. There will be some repercussions in the future for the EPA in the machinations they use for issuing new rules, but perhaps we should take this loss like intelligent liberals and not whine too much.
It’s amazing with the track record of how almost every, if not every, environmental or safety regulation helped not only people but businesses, that there is still a fight over every change. Look at how many car ads emphasis the safety features or gas mileage. And I like when I see an old classic car being driven on the road today but get behind one and the stench and fumes coming out of the tail pipe makes me damn glad for the changes.