Friday, February 17, 2017

Scott Pruitt, longtime adversary of EPA, confirmed to lead the agency

Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma’s attorney general spent years suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its efforts to regulate various forms of pollution, was confirmed Friday as the agency’s next administrator. Pruitt cleared the Senate by a vote of 52-46, winning support from two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against him, saying he had “fundamentally different” views than she about the EPA’s role. The vote came after Democrats held the Senate floor for hours overnight and through the morning to criticize Pruitt as a pawn of the fossil-fuel industry and to push for a last-minute delay of his confirmation. Part of their argument was an Oklahoma judge’s ruling late Thursday that Pruitt’s office must turn over thousands of emails related to his communication with oil, gas and coal companies. The judge set a Tuesday deadline for the release of the emails, which a nonprofit group had been seeking for more than two years. Republicans pressed forward with the afternoon vote, saying Pruitt had been thoroughly vetted in recent months and calling on Democrats to end what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called “a historic level of obstruction” in holding up Trump administration nominees. Pruitt’s confirmation marked a serious defeat for environmental advocacy groups, which wrote letters, waged a furious social media campaign, lobbied members of Congress, paid for television ads and sponsored a series of public protests to keep the Oklahoman from taking the reins of EPA...more

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

FINALLY!! Kick all of them out so fast they will have to send for their shoes.

Anonymous said...

Scott Pruitt is just the beginning. Pre-battle. A lining up of our U.S.Constitutional chess pieces. The environmental-socialist are embedded in .gov since democrap President Carter open the doors to them in the late 1970's. Now we have thousands of bureaucrats that are anti-republican form of government with an agenda to keep their gains going till they can get rid of President Trump and all republicans for that matter. Backed up by the media, actors, controlling the schools, children, and young adults. I cannot imagine a time in history when any country faced so many enemies, domestic, foreign, on so many different fronts. We have our work cut out for us. We cannot back down. We cannot compromise.