Looking Back – 7-8-09

Nearly every morning I start my computer time by looking at information from Google about what happened in my blog in the previous 24 hours. Google, and blogspot.com is a Google service, provides interesting pieces of analytical data about my blog readership. One item of particular interest is the top ten blog posts each day. As you would expect, most of those posts were from the last couple of days, but with 16 years of publishing this blog, every once-in-a-while, a blog post from ancient history rises into that list.

Today a blog post from July 2009, ‘Good Intentions – A Reply’, popped up on the top-ten-list. It looks at discussions about a chemical security bill, HR 2868, just one of many bills introduced in the early years of the CFATS program that would have moved the program out of the year-to-year spending approval process and into codification into the Homeland Security Act. This one passed in the House, but was never taken up by the full Senate, a common legislative history.

Looking back at these legislative attempts at codifying the then existing CFATS program points out how hard it would be to stand the program back up after it failed Congressional renewal two years ago. Too many different factions saw the program as a vehicle for chemical reform rather than a chemical security program. That problem would be exacerbated by the regulatory divide in Congress today.

NOTE: If you go back and search the blog history for HR 2868, you will find a large number of posts. Most of them will be difficult to read because of the lack of paragraph formatting. This was a byproduct of the switch of this blog from AOL.com to Blogspot, much of the formatting did not make the transition. When I go back and look at an individual post, I try to correct that problem, as I did with the post discussed here today.