The basic outlines of bipartisan agreement on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) legislation were already apparent when the United States signed the Stockholm Convention back in 2001. Industry and environmental representatives agreed to focus on the narrow changes needed to implement these international chemicals agreements — and to defer addressing longstanding problems with the larger universe of regulated chemicals. This pragmatic beginning could have yielded an easy victory for a White House that had just abandoned the Kyoto climate accord. Unfortunately, U.S. ratification of the POPs treaty was ultimately a victim of overreaching by House Republicans who saw this as another vehicle for advancing a profoundly anti-environmental agenda.