FREDERICK ANDERSON: Addressing my remarks to those who advocate a significant shift of power towards the states, are you not offering to return authority to institutions that we long ago rejected as a place in which to lodge major environmental protection authority?

My recollection of the history of the Clean Water and Air Acts is that over a long and fairly painful period, the statutes were revised and tightened up, based on a record supported indirectly by the state people themselves that the states just could not handle the authority.