Earlier this year Republicans found what they saw as the the ideal talking point to illustrate a federal bureaucracy gone batty.

The Environmental Protection Agency, they warned, was trying to regulate something only God could control: the dust in the wind.

“Now, here comes my favorite of the crazy regulatory acts. The EPA is now proposing rules to regulate dust,” Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.) said on the House floor. He said Texas was full of dusty roads: “The EPA is now saying you can be fined for driving home every night on your gravel road.”

There was just one flaw in this argument. It was not true.

The EPA’s new dust rule did not exist. It never did.

Still, the specter of this rule has spurred three bills to prevent it , one of which will be voted on Thursday in a House subcommittee. It sparked a late-night battle on the Senate floor. GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain cited it in a debate as a reason to eliminate the EPA.

The hubbub over this phantom rule — surely one of the most controversial regulations that never was — involved a slow-moving federal agency, and a Republican Party with EPA in its crosshairs.

“I do believe that the EPA does have the ability to change its mind,” said Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), the sponsor of the bill to be voted on Thursday. The EPA has now confirmed that it does not intend to strengthen standards on farm dust. But Noem is still pushing a bill to go further and weaken the EPA’s power to set these rules in the future.

“This EPA has been very hard on business in this country, and this EPA has been very hard on agriculture,” Noem said. “I think it’s time we pushed back.”

Farm dust — the stuff at the center of this story — contains things like windblown dirt, bits of last year’s cornstalks, and manure dried down to powder. It is an ancient fact of farm life.

By the EPA’s rules, it is also pollution.

The EPA lumps it in with soot from power plants, as “coarse particle pollution.” The agency limits how much of this can be in the air, since these particles can cause heart and lung damage.

Just two states, Arizona and California, require some farmers to take dust-control measures: Together, their rules affect more than 7,800 farms. But last fall, an EPA advisory panel raised worries that more farmers could be affected. It recommended that the EPA make the current standards more strict, potentially bringing crackdowns elsewhere.

And so the dust fight began.

To actually change the rules for dust on farms, the EPA would have to formally propose a new rule. And, in March, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said she was not likely to do that.

“We have no plans to do so,” Jackson said. But she couldn’t guarantee it. Jackson said she was still required to spend several more months in a formal review, before offering ironclad assurances that farmers would not face new rules.

That wasn’t enough. In April, Noem introduced her bill, and gathered 112 co-sponsors, including a handful of farm-state Democrats. A Senate bill gathered 26 co-sponsors, including two Democrats facing tough reelection fights in 2012.

Read More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-panel-to-vote-on-phantom-epa-dust-rule/2011/10/26/gIQAFNJ0MM_story.html