Let The Games Begin

With the start today of the new (112th) Congress, we apparently also are seeing the beginning of the fight between the Republican-led House and the Obama administration's regulators. (A New York Times story details the coming war.)

We don't know about lawmakers on Capitol Hill, but the National Pork Producers Council already has begun taking on the bureaucrats. In late 2009, it filed suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a rule requiring livestock farms to obtain Clean Water Act permits -- oral arguments were held in the fall -- and this year, it sued EPA over the agency's decision to grant a partial waiver of the Clean Air Act to allow gasoline to be blended with 15 percent ethanol, up from 10 percent.

With the White House's expected legislating-by-regulating approach, it's likely that quite a few organizations, including ones representing agriculture, will be spending more time in the federal courts than in the federal legislature.