Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,737
This is the grave of Anne Gorsuch Burford, a horrible human. Ugh.
Born in 1942 in Casper, Wyoming, Anne McGill grew up in Denver. She went to the University of Colorado early, graduating at the age of 19. Then she stayed in Boulder for law school, finishing in 1964, only 22 years old. She became the youngest woman ever admitted to the bar in Colorado. Oh, she was smart all right, but she was also deeply evil. She did a Fulbright in India with her new husband Dave Gorsuch. Soon they had a son. His name is Neil. He is one of the worst people to ever pollute this nation. She’s not much better.
Gorsuch started as a bank lawyer, but she soon moved to corporate law, working as a corporate attorney for Mountain Bell Telephone. But she also was engaged in conservative politics at a time when the nation’s politics were generally moving left (there’s something I evidently never will experience), and those who were conservative were furious about what was going on. That included Gorsuch. She decided to run for the Colorado legislature in 1975 and won her race. Remember that Colorado was a quite conservative state at the time, not much different than any other innermountain state. She and some fellow far-right people became known as the House Crazies due to their extremism.
Gorsuch connected with the Sagebrush Rebellion, the first real astroturf movement in the modern conservative movement. This was about ranchers, loggers, miners, and farmers furious with the government for the rise of environmental regulations. The media portrayed these as working class guys because they dressed in jeans and boots and rode tractors, but these were mostly big landowners and quite wealthy men, funded by even more wealthy men. One of the people who rode this train was Ronald Reagan, who also liked jeans and boots, and also horses. So when Reagan got elected, he named the biggest possible hacks, mostly totally unqualified, to regulatory agencies. One of them was Anne Gorsuch, who got named head of the Environmental Protection Agency despite having no experience in this world at all. But why would someone need experience to just not enforce the law?
And not enforce the law is exactly what Gorsuch did. Section 211 of the Clean Air Act regulated the amount of lead in gasoline, moving toward getting rid of it entirely. In 1981, a small company in New Mexico called Thriftway asked for a meeting with Gorsuch to complain of the financial cost to the company of reducing the lead. She agreed and just told them to forget about it, she wouldn’t be enforcing any of this nonsense. This was a daily type of thing for her. She headed EPA for almost two years. In that time, the total staff at the agency fell by 22 percent. Most of the people who did get hired came straight from the industries they were supposed to regulate. Agencies such as the EPA or OSHA (an example I know pretty well) had started under Nixon, but really had only gotten up and running effectively in the Carter administration. Business completely flipped out about this and supercharged their attempts to take back the government from the hippies and the Naderites that seemed to be changing power in this nation. These agencies have never recovered. Democrats don’t make them a very high priority even when they do have power. Republicans hate their existence, as we are seeing from the Supreme Court with the overturning of the Chevron principle in the last session. Biden has been a little better about regulatory agencies, in part because his roots are in the 1970s regulatory era, and we see how the corporate communities loathes Lina Khan at the FTC.
Well, Gorsuch was a key figure in this transformation. She totally gutted the EPA. A lot of permanent staff at the agency left to find other jobs in less horrible workplaces. Every top position in the agency was staffed by total ideological hacks. But there was opposition to her actions from Congress. In 1982, Gorsuch told other Reagan administration officials that she was going to withhold $6 million of Superfund money to clean up the Stringfellow Acid Pits in order to hurt Jerry Brown’s campaign for the Senate, which he lost to the odious Pete Wilson. Word of this got out. She denied any wrongdoing. Congress demanded she hand over documents. She refused. Congress held in contempt. Meanwhile, whistleblowers inside the agency leaked documents about it. Then other Reagan officials told on her. In February 1983, Richard Hauser, the White House deputy counsel, told Congress he had personally heard her say this was her plan. Gorsuch was forced to resign.
Reagan was pissed that his favorite westerner was forced out of EPA, so he named her chair of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, which did not require Senate confirmation. Still, both the House and Senate were furious with Reagan for this and passed non-binding resolutions in protest, demanding he withdraw the nomination. Meanwhile, she knew this position really would do nothing to advance her goal of destroying the regulatory capacity of the government, so she withdrew her name.
In the aftermath, Gorsuch mostly worked in private practice for the rest of her life, representing the worst corporations imaginable. She also wrote a book, published in 1986, called Are You Tough Enough?, which I am sure is a real great piece of literature….She also raised her boy Neil, teaching him the values that he spews across America today, like the time as a circuit court judge when he decided that a company was justified in firing a trucker who had abandoned his truck during a snowstorm so he wouldn’t freeze to death. He later joked about that decision in front of right-wing crowds. In fact, Neil wasn’t really that little at the time. He was a teenager. And he was mad at his mom for backing down to the evil environmentalists and anti-corruption people and vile no good bastard Democrats. He later claimed he told her, “You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?” Well ol’Neil never quit, nope, not while democracy still exists in this nation.
Somewhat amusingly, since she was such a hard-core right wing Catholic, Anne Gorsuch had herself a divorce. She committed this great sin, which I am sure she got some right wing Catholic bishop to just declare an annulment or something, in 1982 and then remarried, to Robert Burford, Reagan’s oh so lovely Bureau of Land Management Director. I assume they were probably having an affair, given their close proximity destroying environmental regulations (that’s fun talk in bed!) and quick marriage. She became Anne Burford, but the marriage wasn’t great and she was in the process of divorcing him too, but then he died, in 1993.
She died in 2004, from cancer. She was 62 years old.
Anne Gorsuch is buried in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado.
If you would like this series to visit other Reagan appointees, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Clark, who replace James Watt at Interior, is in San Luis Obispo, California. Bud McFarlane, who replaced Clark as National Security Director when the latter moved to Interior and who then became notorious for his role in Iran-Contra, is in Annapolis. Surprising number of high level Reagan appointees still live, starting with Ed Meese somehow. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.