The awful truth about Donald Trump’s scandal-plagued designee to deconstruct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), climate science denier and corporate errand boy Scott Pruitt, was expected to be confirmed on the following Tuesday. So McConnell and the Republican Senate leaders rushed on the Friday before the whistle was blown to confirm Pruitt as the nation’s new EPA administrator. In the lawless, shameless #AlternativeFacts universe that is Donald Trump’s Washington, this move stood out. It was the most reckless rejection of basic responsibilities in which the Senate would engage during the transition to Trumpism, and one of the most haunting abandonments of constitutional duty in the chamber’s history.
Senate Democrats tried on that Friday morning to restore a measure of order. They asked to extend deliberations on the Pruitt nomination, so that the Senate could have an informed debate. They had every reason to request the extension. On Thursday afternoon, as the Senate was beginning what would turn out to be the final (if woefully incomplete) review of the Pruitt nomination, Oklahoma County district judge Aletia Haynes Timmons found evidence of an “abject failure” on the part of Pruitt, in his role as state attorney general, to abide by the Oklahoma Open Records Act.
Timmons ordered Pruitt to release his communications with oil, gas and coal industry insiders. For two years, Pruitt had withheld more than twenty-five hundred emails with fossil fuel interests, which had been requested by an investigative-reporting group, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Judge Timmons gave Pruitt’s office until Tuesday, February 21, to release the emails. She also gave the office ten days to release related materials that might reveal controversial or inappropriate contacts between the hyper-
partisan attorney general and interests regulated by the EPA.
Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a former state attorney general, raced to the floor of the Senate as the clock ticked toward the February 17 confirmation vote and explained how the emails could help to shed light on Pruitt’s involvement with dark-money campaign groups that had sought to prevent open and honest debate about climate change and a host of other environmental issues overseen by the EPA. “Not only has dark money poisoned our conversation about climate change, this guy ran his own dark money operation,” said Whitehouse. “His ‘Rule of Law Defense Fund,’ a 501 C-4 organization that does not disclose its donors, has been linked to the Koch brothers, who run one of the biggest polluting operations in the country. But we don’t really know [the details of that link because] it’s been kept absolutely quiet.”
“There is a black hole of secrecy around this nominee’s dark money operation: who he raised money from, what the quid pro quo was, what he did with it,” the senator continued. “This is a question, Mr. President. This is a test of the Senate. Will this nominee ever tell us exactly what his relationship with the fossil fuel industry is? Will we get these emails in time to make an informed decision before this nomination is rammed through, one step ahead of the emails that the judge said had to be released?”
The Senate failed the test. The Pruitt nomination was rammed through in spite of repeated requests by Oregon senator Jeff Merkley and others for an extension of deliberations until after the release of the emails and an appropriate review by the chamber.
Merkley initially asked that the Pruitt vote be put off until after the release of all materials that had been withheld by Pruitt’s office. McConnell, who had not been present for most of the debate, suddenly appeared and grumbled: “I object.” Senator Merkley then made a more modest request that the Pruitt vote be moved until immediately after the Senate returned from its Presidents’ Day break. “I object,” declared McConnell.
Every effort by Senator Merkley to set aside enough time to review the nomination of Scott Pruitt to take charge of an agency with more than fifteen thousand employees and an $8 billion budget, and to abandon the historic mission of that agency, faced a McConnell objection.
The Republican-controlled Senate finally upheld the McConnell objection to engaging in full review of Pruitt’s record. A frustrated Delaware senator Tom Carper came to the floor of the chamber and declared: “We are preparing to vote here with incomplete information.” And so they did, approving the Pruitt nomination by a vote of 52–46. The majority leader got his way.
The Senate rejected its constitutional responsibility to review presidential nominations before providing the “advice and consent” that is required for cabinet picks to assume their posts. In its place, the majority embraced Mitch McConnell’s new standard. That standard says that, when it comes to doing Donald Trump’s bidding, the Senate will proceed without respect for the facts, and the truth that might be revealed by those facts.
On the following Tuesday, the Oklahoma attorney general’s office released more than seventy-five hundred pages of emails and other records it withheld to CMD. The group’s analysis revealed that Pruitt had maintained a secretive relationship as the nation’s most anti-environment state attorney general with fossil fuel companies, including fracking giant Devon Energy, as well as groups funded by the Koch brothers and other billionaire campaign funders.
Among the documents CMD immediately discovered were those revealing the following:
• As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruit used template language provided by lobbyists to help advance the agendas of those lobbyists. According to the watchdog group: “The oil and gas lobby group American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) coordinated opposition in 2013 to both the Renewable Fuel Standard Program (RFS) and ozone limits with Pruitt’s office. While AFPM was making its own case against the RFS with the American Petroleum Institute, it provided Pruitt with a template language for an Oklahoma petition, noting “this argument is more credible coming from a State.” Later that year, Pruitt did file opposition to both the RFS and ozone limits.”
• An energy corporation drafted letters and language for Pruitt to circulate under his own name. “In a groundbreaking New York Times Pulitzer–winning series in 2014, Eric Lipton exposed the close relationship between Devon Energy and Scott Pruitt, and highlighted examples where Devon Energy drafted letters that were sent by Pruitt under his own name,” explained CMD. “These new emails reveal more of the same close relationship with Devon Energy. In one email, Devon Energy helped draft language that was later sent by Pruitt to the EPA about the limiting of methane from oil and gas fracking.”
• Pruitt plotted with corporate representatives to influence his fellow state attorneys general. “In 2013,” noted CMD, “Devon Energy organized a meeting between Scott Pruitt, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and coal industry lawyer Paul Seby to plan the creation of a ‘clearinghouse’ that would ‘assist AGs in addressing federalism issues.’ Melissa Houston, then Pruitt’s chief of staff, emailed Devon Energy saying, ‘This will be an amazing resource for the AGs and for industry.’”
Headlines spelled out the truth about Pruitt:
New York Times: “The Pruitt Emails: E.P.A. Chief Was Arm in Arm with Industry”
Washington Post: “Thousands of emails detail EPA head’s close ties to fossil fuel industry”
CNN: “Emails reveal Pruitt’s behind-the-scenes collaboration with oil and natural gas giant”
What was revealed was scandalous. It outlined relationships that defined Pruitt as a dramatically conflicted appointee and that set the stage for Pruitt’s wrecking-crew tenure at the head of an agency that he began dismantling almost immediately. Within weeks of Pruitt’s confirmation, the White House (which eventually announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accord) proposed a budget blueprint that included a 31 percent cut to EPA funding that “slashed funding for the Clean Power Plan, international climate change programs and climate change research and partnership programs.”
“Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward. We’re not spending money on that anymore,” announced Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney. “We consider that to be a wast
e of your money to go out and do that.” For his part, Pruitt was busy announcing that he did not believe that carbon dioxide was a major cause of global warming and suggesting that “there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” of climate change.
Those statements were completely at odds with the overwhelming body of scientific evidence on the issues. They were also, notably, at odds with Pruitt’s written testimony to the Senate in which he claimed that “I also believe the Administrator has an important role when it comes to the regulation of carbon dioxide.”
“Scott Pruitt shocked the world [on March 9, 2017] when he declared that carbon pollution was not the primary driver of the climate crisis,” declared Liz Perera, the Sierra Club’s climate policy director. “But what was even more shocking was that he clearly and repeatedly misled Congress about his intentions on this critical issue during his confirmation process to serve as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
The Senate failed to consider the whole of Scott Pruitt’s record, even though revelations about that record arrived, as had been anticipated, within days of his confirmation. “What happened [in the Senate on Friday, February 17, 2017] was an egregious cover-up, and a total abdication of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to vet nominees before voting,” Senator Merkley said after the vote.
Jeff Merkley was on the losing side of that vote. But he upheld his oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Mitch McConnell was on the winning side of that vote. But in order to prevail he abandoned that oath and shamed both himself and the Senate by establishing the Scott Pruitt rule: #TheTruthBeDamned.
— 34 —
PRISTINE WILDERNESS FOR SALE, LEASE OR HIRE
Ryan Zinke
Secretary of the Interior
It was a Republican president who planted the conservation ethic in the American psyche and nurtured it by using the power of government to protect the nation’s most cherished spaces from private exploitation. Theodore Roosevelt decried the ruination by robber barons of human potential, but he added: “It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening.”
As president, Teddy Roosevelt fostered and encouraged that awakening, borrowing on the wisdom of the naturalist John Muir, and framing out intellectual and spiritual arguments for establishing national forests and parks, and for protecting rivers and mountains from the despoilers who would rob a nation of its natural beauty. “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune,” observed the twenty-sixth president of the United States, who looked to the southwest and preached that “in the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
To that end, Roosevelt used the power of his presidency in the opening years of the twentieth century to establish 4 national game preserves, 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 24 major reclamation projects, 51 federal bird reservations and 150 national forests. “In seven years and sixty-nine days [as president],” observed presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in his book Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Roosevelt “saved more than 240 million acres of American wilderness.”
“He was the only politician we had in the White House in that period who had a biological sense of the world, who understood the need for species survival and did something about it,” explains Brinkley. “When you open up a Rand McNally map and look at all the green on the United States, you’re looking at TR’s America.”
The national parks that Roosevelt called into being were managed by the secretary of the interior, who now oversees a sprawling federal agency with authority over seventy thousand employees, hundreds of thousands of volunteers and a $12 billion annual budget for managing roughly one-fifth of the surface land of the United States. Seventy-five percent of America’s federal public land is managed by the department that is home to the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Bureau of Reclamation (and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement), the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the century-old National Park Service.
Roosevelt’s handful of parks has grown to a vast system of “national parks, monuments, battlefields, military parks, historical parks, historic sites, lakeshores, seashores, recreation areas, scenic rivers and trails, and the White House.” On 84 million acres of public land, the park service maintains everything from Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone to the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York, established in 2016 as the 414th unit of the National Park Service. And that’s nothing compared to the roughly 250 million acres, one-eighth of the landmass of the United States, that is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management that former president Harry S. Truman cobbled together when he combined the old General Land Office and the Grazing Service in 1946.
Teddy Roosevelt, who said after leaving the presidency that “there can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country,” fretted throughout his last years about the prospect that powerful interests might attempt to claw back public lands.
But how would they do that?
Perhaps by following the platform of the Republican Party that has not just abandoned the legacy of Abraham Lincoln but also the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt. The current Republican platform, the one on which President Trump and congressional Republicans were elected, announces that “the environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists.” Like, presumably, Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon (creator of the Environmental Protection Agency, signer of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act). The GOP platform rejects “the illusion of an environmental crisis” and dismisses many of the most serious warnings about climate change as “politicized science.” It complains that the Bureau of Land Management is too slow when it comes to leasing public lands for private use and too restrictive when it comes to allowing hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of those lands. And it declares that federal ownership or management of land “places an economic burden on counties and local communities in terms of lost revenue to pay for things such as schools, police, and emergency services.”
So is the Republican Party proposing to make it possible for communities across the country to lease off, or perhaps barter off, public lands? Yes, indeed. “It is absurd to think that all that acreage must remain under the absentee ownership or management of official Washington,” reads the official policy of Roosevelt’s Grand Old Party regarding public lands. “Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation providing for a timely and orderly mechanism requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to states. We call upon all national and state leaders and representatives to exert their utmost power and influence to urge the transfer of those lands, identified in the review process, to all willing states for the benefit of the states and the nation as a whole.” But wait, there’s more. The GOP also supports “amending the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish Congress’ right to approve the designation of national monuments and to further require the approval of the state where a national monume
nt is designated or a national park is proposed.”
Who was the radical environmentalist who signed the Antiquities Act of 1906 into law and established the model for its use? None other than Teddy Roosevelt.
Who might undo Roosevelt’s legacy? Meet Ryan Zinke, Donald Trump’s idea of an environmentalist.
A congressman from Montana, Zinke is a former Navy SEAL who earned some attention for calling Hillary Clinton “the real enemy” and the “anti-Christ” during the course of the 2016 campaign. He was one of the few people who openly campaigned for a place on Trump’s ticket. Asked about vice presidential speculation, Zinke told the Breitbart News site—yes, Breitbart—that “I know my name has been thrown around, and I would be honored to [do] the duty in whatever capacity that is. I would be honored to do my duty. You know why? It’s about making America great again.” To his credit, Zinke complained before the Republican National Convention about some of the most extreme language in a party platform that he characterized as “more divisive than uniting.” But his speech to the convention was a dramatically divisive address in which he declared that “together Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton brought us ISIS and brought down Benghazi. I shudder to think how many times our flag will fly at half-mast if Hillary Clinton is in the Oval Office.” Trump, the congressman told the crowd, would “make America safe again.”
When he stood in the national spotlight, Zinke made no effort to address environmental policy or public lands. Even when he did so at home in Montana, where he could not avoid the issues, the congressman tried to peddle a politically palatable, everything for everyone line, dismissing discussions of selling off national parks and striking the most absurd balance possible on climate change, telling a debate crowd: “It’s not a hoax, but it’s not proven science either.”