Washington times 12.31.2012
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says no law empowers any judge to stop it from conducting illegal scientific experiments on seniors, children and the sick.
The American Tradition Institute contends in its lawsuit that the EPA has broken virtually every rule established to protect human subjects used in scientific experiments, including the Nuremberg Code, ethics principles for human experimentation adopted following the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II, and similar U.S. regulations known as “The Common Rule.”
Rather than defending itself against the serious allegations made by the institute, the EPA instead has said it is essentially above the law and the federal court has no business hearing those serious charges.
The EPA claims the court has no jurisdiction to hear the case under the Clean Air Act (CAA): “Nothing in the CAA provides a meaningful standard to evaluate what air pollution EPA chooses to study or how. To the contrary, the CAA gives EPA broad discretion in the subject matter of its research program. Congress broadly mandated that EPA study the health effects of air pollution.”
Of course, Congress most likely thought the EPA would conduct such research in a lawful manner.
The EPA also says because “no judicially manageable standards are available for judging how and when [EPA] should exercise its discretion in deciding what research to undertake, EPA’s decision to study the health effects of [particulate matter] using controlled human exposure studies was a decision committed to the EPA’s discretion and immune from review under the [Administrative Procedures Act],” the general law governing the conduct of federal agencies.
Story here