Environmentalists stand up to Obama, win big

Under intense pressure from green groups and their members, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) announced Friday that Republican proposals to gut the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were off the table in budget negotiations. "Neither the White House nor Senate Leaders is going to accept any EPA riders," Reid said. Reid's pledge follows 48 hours of intense pressure on the White House from major green groups, marking the first time many large environmental organizations have so openly and loudly targeted Obama and Reid -- and it produced extraordinarily rapid results. Indeed, as recently as Wednesday, the Associated Press had reported that Obama was insisting that congressional Democrats swallow rollbacks to EPA's authority to crack down on climate emissions, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and Chesapeake Bay pollution as the price for passing a budget deal. When asked about the report, the White House refused to issue a veto threat against the rollbacks, and last Tuesday, Reid told reporters, "We're happy to look at the policy riders. There aren't many of them that excite me. But we're willing to look at them. In fact, we've already started looking at some of the policy riders." That attitude began to change when environmentalists decided they'd gone too far...more