Much more than a long memory is needed these days to recall the golden age of GOP environmentalism. A feat of imagination is required.
From the moment Republican leaders gaveled the 114th Congress into session, virtually every tenet of environmental law and policy, including the money to pay for it, has been under assault. Most of those tenets were established in bipartisan fashion during the decades between 1970 and 1996, when the conservative instinct to save and preserve the best of America still extended, sensibly, to the protection of cherished places, the stewardship of natural resources, and safeguards on the health of people and communities.
Today a Republican of Nixon’s environmental stripe, or perhaps even Reagan’s, would be lucky to survive a primary.
As a result, environmental champions on the Democratic side of the aisle spend most of their time playing defense, standing up for public health and the environment and fending off one destructive Republican attack after another on clean air, clean water and green everything.
So it was this past Tuesday, when the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee took up a toxic chemical control bill that originated in the very industry it purported to regulate. No one on the minority side would have written the proposal, which catered much more to chemical company profits than to public health. Then again, even worse legislation could have passed the committee on a party line Republican vote. Yet it didn’t.
Why? We can thank Senators Barbara Boxer, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Sheldon Whitehouse, Ben Cardin, Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and others.
They fought tirelessly and resourcefully—in public, behind the scenes and in the mark-up session via amendments—to make whatever improvements they could manage to the deeply flawed legislation that landed in their midst. As has been the case since the first, outrageously bad version of this bill was introduced in 2013, the pressure Democrats applied these past few weeks made a bad industry bill better.
They made the best of some very bad chemistry, and EWG applauds their efforts. What would it have taken to pass legislation truly protective of public health that the environmental community could support? A couple of Nixons, Reagans, Chaffees or Jeffords on the opposite side of the dais would have done the trick.
