With the nation challenged by two grinding wars, a struggling economy and mounting debt, House Republicans used their new majority status this week to go on a reckless rampage against essential health and environmental safeguards Americans everywhere both depend on and expect.
Under the guise of deficit reduction, the GOP launched an unprecedented assault on public health, clean air, fresh water, open space and wildlife. This attack on our environment won't take a nibble out of our deficit, but it will take the teeth out of needed protections.
The winners, instead, are corporate polluters like Big Oil, cement makers and coal companies that blow the tops off of mountains and leave the landscape in ruins. The losers are Americans everywhere who expect responsible leadership from the Congress and a decent modicum of corporate stewardship from industry. What's happened here makes a mockery of both. It's a national disgrace.
The ambush began with the continuing resolution, or CR, House Republicans put forward last week. Needed to fund government operations after March 4, the CR is serious business. Rather than treat it as such, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, allowed his new tea party flank to hijack the resolution and lard it up with irresponsible measures driven by a witches' brew of special interest handouts and ideology gone blind.
The bill would cut funding by about a third for the Environmental Protection Agency. The savings -- roughly $3 billion -- amount to one-tenth of 1 percent of federal spending. That's penny wise and pound foolish. If enacted, the cuts would prevent the EPA from doing its job enforcing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other foundational statutes. Polluters would be allowed to spew mercury into the air we breathe, arsenic into the water we drink and municipal and agricultural waste into the watersheds that nourish our land.
Making a bad start worse, tea party allies then peppered the CR with scores of special interest amendments that have nothing to do with spending and were so extreme they even lost some Republican votes. Most were voted on without hearings, expert testimony, committee discussion or the beneficial judgments, information and perspective that vital process provides. Instead, they received as little as five minutes on the House floor before the final vote, in a "just throw it up there and see what sticks" legislative style that turned the sober business of budget making into a political rodeo.
When the dust settled in the pre-dawn darkness Saturday, the House passed a CR that is less a spending guide than a policy manifesto to gut, dismember, defund or derail protections we've relied upon for years, if not decades.
The CR would prevent the EPA from enforcing needed safeguards on industries ranging from offshore drillers in the Arctic to Gulf coast refineries and petrochemical plants. Here's a sampling of the damage done by Republican amendments that passed:
His district has one of the largest concentrations of refineries and petrochemical plants anywhere in the world and some of the most polluted air anywhere in the country. The Texas Commission for Environmental Quality has put parts of Poe's district on an air pollutant watch list for high levels of benzene, which causes cancer; styrene, a neurotoxin; and sulfur dioxide, which attacks the respiratory system. House Republicans voted to let the rest of the country go the way of Poe's district.
No thanks. We need to call this CR for what it is: a blatant broadside on public health and environmental quality that puts every American everywhere at increased risk of being poisoned by the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. It sacrifices the open spaces we cherish. And it puts polluters for profit ahead of American values and the common good.
This shameful mandate for public menace now heads to the Senate, which must stave off the damage from the dirty business House Republicans have done. Otherwise they'll leave President Obama no choice but to protect the country from this reckless Republican rampage by vetoing this pernicious bill.
This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog.
Christopher Brauchli: Texas Censors Science
That way we don't have to live in pollution and have a (two?) 2 party system.
What is all the more amazing- is then when climate change begins to ravage these regions in years to come- who will they look to then for help?- The Government, or John Boehner, Eric Cantor or Michelle Bachmann?
Looked up a list of Superfund sites relatively few in FLY OVER COUNTRY compared to the North East, Chicago area, and California!
If the south has notoriously bad environmental policies then the North East must have been practicing plan genocide on it's own people. That would explain Love Canal!
You know I was checking for Superfund sites and most of them are in the North East. If people in FLYOVER COUNTRY may have bad environmental policies but the governments in the North East were allowing mass murder by cancer!
I suggest you see the governmental policies regarding clean air, climate change,
Forbes ranks the Greenest states- 6 in the northeast corridor make the top 10.
see the list at- flyover country does not make out so well.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/16/environment-energy-vermont-biz-beltway-cx_bw_mm_1017greenstates_2.html
1 Vermont 43.6
2 Oregon 43.6
3 Washington 43.4
4 Hawaii 41.3
5 Maryland 40.4
6 Connecticut 39.8
7 New Jersey 39.5
8 Rhode Island 38.7
9 New York 38.1
10 Arizona 37.9
11 Massachusetts 37.8
12 Idaho 37.2
13 Colorado 37.2
14 California 37.1
15 Minnesota
The good news...................................... it will make Social Security solvent..... forever.
The bad news............. very few will live long enough to collect it.
The Republicans have convinced many people the problem is our regulations that have cause large corporations to off-shore their manufacturing! They are Right! Now it was the Republicans and Bill Clinton who gave large corporations that almost mandated option!
We were arrogant we believed we were so much smarter than everyone else in the world that we would simply invent new stuff to be made here! We forgot our World History about two points!
The first lesson involved the Industrial Revolution; the world always had cheap labor they were called slaves! But the Industrial Revolution had to wait for the invention of the Steam Engine and cheap reliable energy. Interesting enough the Industrial Revolution caused the end of Slavery!
The second point of World History most of us forget is Free Trade an old British Empire Economic Theory that requires the winners to treat their environment and citizens worse than its competitors. Didn't you people read Charles Dickens?
China remembers these lessons. In 2009 they burnt over 45% of all the coal burnt on the planet! Now that can't be explained - per capitol! Germans are complaining that large Solar Panel installations happening in Germany are using Cheap Dirty Coal energy manufactured Chinese solar cells!
Democrats need to Change the terms of the fight!
Make Republicans defend Free Trade to Tea Party members!
I've often wondered, it was clear Bill Clinton won the battle but who won the war?
Just a thought.
Many Legislators did not appreciate this action, so now they have restricted the funding that the EPA would need to implement these regulation(s).
Link: http://blog.heritage.org/2009/12/07/epa-formally-declares-co2-a-dangerous-pollutant/
R/ PRONESE
Now it might be for a good cause but what happens when precedence is set and it's not for a good cause?
Just a thought.
After all President Nixon did sign the Clean Air Act and created the EPA.
More Coffee... (My morning food for thought) Grin!
R/ PRONESE
But let's not forget that the American people, in their infinite wisdom and guided by the hand of God, elected Republicans to do this job!