Quote:If EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt survives the onslaught of accusations of mismanagement and excessive spending with his job still safe, he has his biggest benefactors to thank. The #StandWithScottPruitt campaign has flooded the White House with pleas from Trump donors and conservative and industry-aligned groups to defend Pruitt, chalking up the revelations about his ethics scandals to a “smear campaign” from the “radical left.” Pruitt, technically, can be easily replaced because the fossil fuel industry now has an ally in the EPA’s number two spot. Andrew Wheeler, a recent coal lobbyist who used to work for the Senate’s biggest climate change denier, would take over as acting administrator should Pruitt leave. So, why is Pruitt still so valuable to Trump donors like Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma oilman who chaired Pruitt’s attorney general reelection campaign and called Trump last week?Here’s Why Scott Pruitt Still Has a Job – Mother Jones
The answer doesn’t appear to be that Pruitt is a legal genius who has rapidly and effectively gutted regulations in a way that satisfies the courts. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, told the New York Times. Six of his regulatory rollbacks have already been struck down, the NYT adds. Natural Resources Defense Council’s David Doniger has also argued that many of Pruitt’s regulatory rollbacks are still “years away from being done” But the right wing doesn’t just think Pruitt is efficiently reversing regulations to reduce the EPA to “little tidbits”; they’re happy with his all-out assault to hollow out environmental oversight and enforcement.
“Pruitt is the most conservative member of the cabinet, both in temperament and action,” Republican strategist Mike McKenna told Bloomberg. Indeed, he’s always been seen as a “conservative icebreaker” by Oklahomans in his home state. Pruitt isn’t just valuable to his base—the industries he regulates—for the formal actions he’s taken on the regulatory front, even if they are likely to get tied up in litigation. Former EPA attorney Joseph Goffman, Harvard Environmental Law’s executive director, has been tracking the dozens of air, water, and climate regulations Pruitt has taken aim at so far. And Goffman has a counterargument: Pruitt has undermined environmental protection in ways that are not so easy or straightforward to untangle with a lawsuit. “He certainly sent the signal that in any given instance his policy preference is achieving lower levels of pollution reduction and achieving pollution reduction on a slower schedule,” Goffman says.
A thoroughly corrupt guy (Scott Pruitt), involved in multiple scandals (see numerous posts in Drain the Swamp threat, like this one), but the right rallies around him:
- Argues it's all smears by the radical left (demonstrable nonsense)
- They are "happy with an all-out assault to hollow out environmental oversight and enforcement"