Leadership Quote by Sherwood Boehlert

Boehlert is doing the Washington two-step: offering reform without ceding the moral high ground of environmental protection. The sentence opens with "Let me start", a throat-clearing move that signals incoming pushback. He anticipates being cast as an obstacle to progress, so he preemptively claims the reasonable middle: yes, speed things up, but only when the story being told about urgency is actually true.

The key word is "true". It quietly indicts the political habit of declaring everything an emergency when permits or regulations slow a project down. By carving out "true emergencies", Boehlert validates the public's instinct that government should move fast when lives and critical systems are at risk, while refusing to let that instinct be weaponized for routine development or ideological deregulation.

The second hedge, "other clear cases", is equally strategic. "Clear" sounds objective, almost technocratic, but it's also a gatekeeping term: he is reserving the right to define what counts as obvious. Then comes the carefully chosen villain: not environmental law itself, but the subset of laws that are "needlessly burdensome". That phrase concedes frustration with process without endorsing the anti-regulation worldview. Subtext: reform is acceptable, rollback is not.

In context, this reads like a Republican (or at least a pro-business legislature) trying to defend NEPA-style review from being gutted under the banner of efficiency. It's a bid to keep environmental procedures legitimate by admitting they can be tightened, while denying opponents the rhetorical jackpot of painting him as absolutist.