Time to End the Cheney/Halliburton Loophole

Time to End the Cheney/Halliburton Loophole

"Let me explain: Back in 2005. President - excuse me Vice President - Cheney was hard at work doing what he did best: using his power as the second most powerful man in the country to protect his cronies in the oil business.

His former employer, Halliburton, wanted to get more involved in the emerging American fracking industry, but it faced a potential major roadblock in the form of a 1974 law called the Safe Water Drinking Act.

That act, signed into law by Republican President Gerald Ford, requires the Environmental Protection Agency to keep toxic chemicals from getting into Americans’ drinking water.

Cheney didn’t care about public safety but he did care about Halliburton’s bottom-line - after all, he was a big Halliburton stockholder when he became vice president - and so he joined the lobbying efforts to get Congress to carve out an exemption for fracking in the Safe Water Drinking Act.

Thanks to that carve-out - let’s call it the “Halliburton loophole” - the EPA can’t regulate fracking poisons even when they get into our water supply."