NRDC - Search & Destroy: The Republican (Anti-)Environmental Agenda

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By: Scott Slesinger

If you want to get a sense of what Republican Congressional leaders think about environmental policy, there's no better place to start than the spending bill for environmental agencies that the House passed, largely along party lines, right before leaving town for the conventions and the rest of the summer. Maybe "think" is too strong a word; the bill exemplifies a kind of visceral, reflexive opposition to any kind of environmental progress. The bill is based on a simple strategy -- identify each and every initiative to protect air, water, lands or species, and then block it. "Just say no" barely begins to describe the breadth and depth of the hostility toward environmental protection made evident by the bill.

Not surprisingly, the White House has said the president would veto the bill. And the bill, likely shorn of all the anti-environmental provisions, is destined to be part of the kind of huge, omnibus spending package that Republicans decry and then make inevitable with bills like this one. But what the House just did is still relevant because it signifies what the position of Republican leaders is. And the attitudes embodied in the bill are a barrier to getting any positive environmental action through Congress.

The anti-environment provisions in the bill are known as riders because the provisions don't affect the amount of overall spending at all, but ride along on the bill that is supposed to be about appropriations. Riders are a way to play a game of "chicken" with the White House -- daring the president to veto must-pass spending bills over unrelated environmental provisions. That's bad fiscal policy as well as bad environmental policy.

The Senate counterpart bill was already laden with anti-environmental riders, as I recently blogged. But the Senate still has some interest in legislating, and so restrained itself. The House bill gives the full sense of Republican environmental policy.

Too few inside the beltway, the House easily surpassed the Senate in acceding to a radical anti-environmental, anti-science agenda that is completely out of step with the American people, according to numerous polls.

According to polls, most citizens who identify as Republicans believe climate change is real. Most Republicans in the House do not. Most Republicans in the House, over 90% -- voted for the anti-environmental side in the amendments listed below -- some of the 130 environmentally related votes in a busy week of July 10. In each of these cases, 90% of the Democrats voted for the pro-environmental position.

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