Why This Attack On The Environment?

What is it about Republicans and the environment?

The last time national politics was dominated by a Republican figure - Ronald Reagan - he announced that trees are the big polluters.

This can be so only if you suppose a satisfied God rested on the seventh day after creating a world covered with cars and utility companies, and that trees horned in while he was lollygagging around.

Now comes the next big-dog Republican, Newt Gingrich, to declare that species just naturally die off, so why the big deal about trying to save some? Would we really want to be dodging dinosaurs anyway?

An astonishingly large part of the House Republicans’ Contract With America is in fact a Contract On America. It means to off most of our environmental protection.

It is a weird position for a supposedly populist politics. Survey after survey has found a large, hearty majority of Americans in fundamental agreement with the environmental policies that have been, for the most part, worked into place.

Oh, there are always the noisy yahoos - ignorant pop-offs like Rush Limbaugh who find in every ecological caution the lurking lunacy of supposed environmental wackos.

Most folks are smarter than that, but here we are anyway, working though a GOP agenda, at least the one pushed in the House by the party’s radicals, that takes a swipe at the environment at just about every turn.

Much of the agenda is being sneaked into play in legislative disguises.

The emphasis on cost-benefit analysis is intended to snare every environmental rule in a thick gum of federal rigamarole, in study after study and thus in dispute after dispute and finally in court case after court case.

This from the members of Congress who otherwise swear they want less bureaucracy and fewer lawsuits.

The legislation against unfunded mandates was in some major part a gimmick for making the federal costs of national environmental enforcement insupportably large.

So-called “takings” legislation would burden every environmental reservation placed on land use with a public price tag that is designed to make protection too costly to be sustainable.

Congressional Republicans killed legislation last year to fix the admittedly troubled Superfund cleanup of toxic waste and now, with a straight face, cite its continuing troubles as a reason to consider ending the effort altogether.

What is going on with this party?

Republican Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, and the Republican Congress after it, just about invented racial inclusion. But now the party slams affirmative action.

The GOP created the Equal Rights Amendment for women, then turned on it fatally.Republican President Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated environmental preservation, and Republican President Richard Nixon championed the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now the GOP’s totemistic personality kisses off whole species as just so much ecological froufrou,

Maybe he can sic the trees on them.

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