Protecting the Environment Is Not “A Proud GOP Legacy”

Tea Party Backlash Has Roots in Nixon Administration

Alan Steinberg, former Bush Administration EPA Region 2 Administrator, wrote an Op-Ed, urging he fellow Teabagger dominated Republicans to stop bashing EPA. (See: Republicans must stop their senseless EPA bashing

Steingberg laments current Republican politics, expressing nostalgia for what he sees as the good old days of Republican support for protecting the environment, the EPA, and environmental regulation of business and industry:

You would think that my party, the Republican Party, would point to EPA’s establishment and its subsequent environmental triumphs as a proud GOP legacy. Instead, bashing and trashing the EPA has become a major Washington Republican sport.

Invoking the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, Steinberg repeats the conventional political wisdom on bi-partisanism, and in so doing, himself engages in senseless historical revisionism.

First of all, while EPA was formed in 1970 during the Nixon Administration via Nixon’s July 9, 1970 Executive Order, we must recall that it was widespread public outrage over environmental assaults, political organizing, and huge nationwide protests on the first Earth Day in April 1970 that forced Nixon’s hand.

Yes, the formation of the environmental movement was led by 1960’s hippies, activists, and a counter-cultural intellectual tradition, not the old school blue blooded elite conservationists of the Teddy Roosevelt tradition.

(and Mr. Steinberg, in borrowing words from EPA’s website, obviously doesn’t realize that the Google can document plagiarism is milliseconds. Let’s hope he expects more original work and higher ethical standards of his students at Monmouth University).

And even that initial tepid Republican support rapidly vanished – the backlash was organized just one year later, in 1971 by a close Nixon associate.

This backlash has led to our current state of affairs, where Republicans view their role in the history of environmental legislation of the 1970’s similar to civil rights and Lincoln.

Today’s Republican Party is ashamed of those accomplishments and treats them like the insane grandma in the attic.

When Republicans deny and defile this history, how can it be considered a “proud legacy”?

And what Steinberg calls “bashing and trashing” of EPA and environmental regulations are not limited to Washington DC.

Steinberg should open his eyes and start looking in his own backyard (Trenton, NJ), where current Republican Governor Chris Christie has done lots of “bashing and trashing”  of NJ DEP, environmental regulations, and other “job killing red tape”.

Despite these distortions, I thought I’d send Mr. Steinberg a note of thanks and sympathy:

Dear Mr. Steinberg:

I feel your pain – it must be awful being a Republican with a brain and a conscience. Good old TR Republicanism is long dead and forgotten –

Guess you can either lie with your tea-bagging friends now – or leave the Republican party.

But, although I appreciate the support of EPA and regulations, I must disagree with several aspects of your revisionism – protecting the environment has never really been as bi-partisan as you suggest, Republicans being far too pro-business, anti-government, free market ideologues than even the corporate Democrats (since at least FDR and the New Deal).

Just because current politics have shifted so radically to the far right does not support a conclusion that EPA and environmental protection are a “proud GOP legacy”.

Please remember that Richard Nixon VETOED the Clean Water Act – Congress had to over-ride that veto.

The rise of an organized corporate backlash against environmental regulation was first articulated in an extraordinary 1971 strategy memo to the US Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System“. The memo was written by then corporate lawyer and future Nixon Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.

And you lose all intellectual credibility with that load of crap in support of Bachmann. This praise is so over the top it doesn’t even deserve rebuttal:

“I have written very favorably about her campaign, her successful leadership of the Tea Party caucus, her self-discipline while undergoing venomous liberal media attack, and her first-rate policy insight. I have taken note of her academic success and her vast knowledge of economic theory. I continue to believe that she has the political skills, policy insight, and judgment to be an impressive President of the United States.”

“First rate policy insight”? “Academic success and vast knowledge of economic theory”? Is that some kind of sick inside joke?

What were you thinking?

Bill Wolfe