Post
The Most Frequent Excuse I Hear for Not Wanting to Change the Clean Air Act
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Probably the most frequent excuse I hear for not wanting to try to improve the Clean Air Act is if we give this thing to Congress you never know what they will do with it. I imagine George Washington was thinking the same thing when he thought about keeping his powers to himself after the war of independence. His first thought had to have been to look over at Congress and think to himself, “Look at all these yahoos”. Fortunately Washington replied, “I didn¹t fight George III to become George I.”
Democracy is a messy business. Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others”. The fact is the Clean Air Act is changing right now. And it’s being changed by people with just as many side-agendas and who are just as imperfect as those in Congress (e.g. attorneys like me, judges, industry groups, non-profits, agency personnel, consultants, etc.).
We can have all kinds of excuses for not improving the Clean Air Act, but the one excuse we cannot have is that we don’t trust Congress. To say that we are saying that we do not trust an elected form of government. Not an option.
For more information on the SIP transformation effort, see www.sipreform.com and blog at www.sipreform.wordpress.com.
Licensed CC-BY-4.0 .
Original source: https://sipreform.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/the-most-frequent-excuse-i-hear-for-not-wanting-to-change-the-clean-air-act/ (May 7, 2013)
Markdown source: https://jedanderson.org/posts/the-most-frequent-excuse-i-hear-for-not-wanting-to-change-the-clean-air-act.md
Source on GitHub: /src/content/posts/the-most-frequent-excuse-i-hear-for-not-wanting-to-change-the-clean-air-act.md
Cite this
@misc{anderson_2026_the_most_frequent_excuse_i_hear_for_not_wanting_to_change_the_clean_air_act,
author = {Jed Anderson},
title = {The Most Frequent Excuse I Hear for Not Wanting to Change the Clean Air Act},
year = {2026},
url = {https://jedanderson.org/posts/the-most-frequent-excuse-i-hear-for-not-wanting-to-change-the-clean-air-act},
note = {Accessed: 2026-05-13}
} Anderson, J. (2026). The Most Frequent Excuse I Hear for Not Wanting to Change the Clean Air Act. Retrieved from https://jedanderson.org/posts/the-most-frequent-excuse-i-hear-for-not-wanting-to-change-the-clean-air-act
Anderson, Jed. "The Most Frequent Excuse I Hear for Not Wanting to Change the Clean Air Act." Jed Anderson, May 12, 2026, https://jedanderson.org/posts/the-most-frequent-excuse-i-hear-for-not-wanting-to-change-the-clean-air-act.