Healthcare

Some rules have been pending for more than a year at the White House.

Several of President Obama’s political appointees are using secret government email accounts, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

Lawmakers and environmental and public health groups lauded Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s (D-N.J.) work on toxic chemicals and pollution issues after learning of his death Monday.

Lautenberg was a staunch advocate of strengthening national toxic substances regulations and a vocal backer of the federal Superfund program, which is charged with cleaning up uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.

Obama assured former Sen. Snowe that GOP opposition to the law would be short-lived.

Republicans hammered Democrats for allegedly seeking to carve themselves out of a requirement in the healthcare law.

“ObamaCare,” a rallying cry for Republicans for the last two elections, is now becoming a headache for the GOP.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Friday finalized a set of long-planned rules that put limits on emissions of harmful air pollutants from industrial boilers and incinerators.

Known as boiler MACT rules, the standards impose the first-ever limits on emissions for mercury, acid gases and fine particulate matter, or soot, for boilers and incinerators. 

The agency said the rules would affect about 1 percent of the nation's boilers. It added the rules would yield public health benefits, preventing 8,100 premature deaths and 5,100 heart attacks per year beginning in 2015.

Republicans and industry had fought the rules, saying they represented regulatory overreach and would impose burdensome economic costs. That pressure led to several revisions to bake in more flexibility for industry.

A federal appeals court on Thursday declined to revisit a decision that allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia voted 6-2 to reject a request for the full court to reconsider a June ruling that upheld EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act.

The court’s action could set up a Supreme Court challenge by industry, energy firms and the state of Alaska, which were pushing for the rehearing.

The mental-health community has begun a major lobbying effort for federal action in response to last Friday’s school shooting in Newtown, Conn. 

Democrats say this is neither a case of posturing by Pelosi nor a good-cop, bad-cop routine with President Obama.