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Kentucky Gov.-elect Matt Bevin made a promise when he campaigned for office that when the Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats came calling to interfere with Kentucky’s coal economy, he’d tell them to keep on going or face a fight.
Winning election Tuesday has not changed his plans one bit. On Friday, Bevin appeared on The Glenn Beck Radio Program.
“President Obama has said that he’s going to destroy the coal industry,” Beck said. “Kentucky is a coal state. What are you going to be doing, specifically, to push back on that?”
Bevin maintained Kentucky’s coal is a tremendous asset and not, as Obama would paint it, a liability.
“Why it is that we in Kentucky — that sit on two extraordinary basins, the Illinois basin and the Central basin, an abundance of this — how are we not participating in something that the world wants more of than they ever have?” he asked.
“We will tell the EPA and other unelected officials who have no legal authority over us as a state, to pound sand,” Bevin said.
Bevin said that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution is “one of the most powerful tools” at his disposal, because it states that power not expressly given to the federal government is reserved to states.
He contested EPA’s authority, and said its only recourse would be to take Kentucky to court.
“The EPA, for example, they don’t have an enforcement arm,” Bevin said. “They use federal dollars. They use our own money. They bribe us with our own money to stick it to ourselves. And we will not do that anymore in the state of Kentucky.”
As a candidate, Bevin vowed to fight Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which requires curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from Kentucky’s coal-rich energy sector. He promised to “not enforce” any federal rules that would hurt Kentucky’s economy.
In his campaign platform, Bevin also vowed to use his office’s “constitutional right to legal discretion when enforcing environmental laws. This may include instructing its regulatory enforcement agencies to ignore federal regulations that are unreasonable and excessive.”
h/t: IJ Review