Libby Shaw did a great job bringing together the Rich Perry and the Texas part of the failure that lead to the death of so many in West, Texas. There is more to the story of that failure.
Over at MSNBC, there is coverage of the Bush administrations part in this failure to regulate. More precisely the son-in-law of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Phil Perry . He is not related to Governor Perry as far as I can tell, except in his willingness to do favors for corporate interests.
A key take out:
Bush and the West explosion: The untold story of deregulating chemical plants Basically, the Bush administration from above, pulled support for that bill because the chemical industry doesn’t want to be regulated by the EPA. Fast forward a few years, to 2007, and Phil Perry–again, Dick Cheney’s son-in-law–is now over at the Department of Homeland Security as the department’s general counsel. And what he manages to do, in an uncontroversial bill, in an appropriations rider, is slip in industry-friendly language into the bill that moves the task of regulating chemical plants from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Homeland Security. But DHS is given none of the tools it would need to actually do that. The Washington Monthly wrote this back in 2007:
“Perry reworked the language and helped to get it added to the spending bill in a conference committee. Under the new amendment, the DHS would have nominal authority to regulate the chemical industry but also have its hands tied where required.”