Bill Straub: Kentucky GOP delegation, often at odds, singing same tune on environment

Kentucky Republicans aren’t exactly kissing cousins these days.

The U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Louisville, and the man who was supposed to be his new BFF, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, of Bowling Green, recently conducted a knock-down-drag-out over a provision in the Patriot Act that turned nasty even by Washington standards.

McConnell isn’t real pleased with the selection of Louisville businessman Matt Bevin – who opposed him in the 2014 primary and then displayed little enthusiasm for his re-election – as the GOP gubernatorial candidate. And every once in a while Paul, not known for his tact, gets into it with Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, over federal spending.

But there’s at least one issue, one thing, that gathers all these disparate characters around the old campfire to strum on their guitars and sing a couple stanzas of “Kumbaya’’ — the environment and their utter disgust with and loathing of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The fact is members of Kentucky’s Republican delegation have come across few environmental issues they wouldn’t want to sully further. They protest, usually in high dudgeon, that they love the earth, the air and the streams as much as anyone. Then they proceed to prove themselves wrong.

That proof is in their votes. The League of Conservation Voters, hardly a radical environmental outfit, maintains a scorecard on key green issues. Thus far this year the group has cited 20 Senate tallies critical to the earth’s upkeep. The league said the cited votes “presented senators with a clear choice: stand with polluters and double down on dirty energy at the expense of our environment, our health, and our climate, or promote a clean energy future.’’

You probably know where this is headed.

Thus far in the 114th Congress, McConnell and Paul have distinguished themselves by matching John Blutarsky’s grade point average at the time he was expelled from Faber College – 0.00.

Not once this session has either of the commonwealth’s two representatives to the upper chamber seen fit to support an environmental cause. And that’s not an aberration. McConnell’s lifetime score (now get this) is 7 percent, which means he takes the green side seven out of every 100 times an issue is presented. Paul, the celebrated libertarian, is much better. He’s at 9 percent, providing some grand insight into what can be expected should he be elected president, as he so desperately hopes.

The sad note is they’re not the worst. U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Lexington, has voted the environmental line 5 percent of the time during his undistinguished tenure. Then there’s U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie, also of Bowling Green, at 8 percent and Rogers at 9 percent. The only member of the delegation to hit above the Mendoza line is the lone Democrat, John Yarmuth, of Louisville, at 94 percent, which, of course, skews the state’s results.

Yet these folks will quickly tell you they consider themselves environmentalists, all in favor of clean air and water. It’s rather like Al Capone passing out business cards that said he was a used furniture dealer and saying he detested violence.

Their tut-tuts would be hilarious, a Jon Stewart routine, if their votes weren’t, in a very real sense, endangering people’s lives. Before the environmental movement seriously got underway in the 1960s, people in Los Angeles couldn’t see the San Gabriel Mountains through the haze that engulfed the city. The Hudson River, and many estuaries, were open sewers. Old-timers in Pittsburgh remember businessmen had to go home to change their starched white shirts at lunch time because the ones they were wearing had turned gray because of the filth in the air.

Pollution’s impact on health is devastating. Ground-level ozone, one of six principal air pollutants, certainly affects people with impaired respiratory systems like asthma. But it’s also accurate to say normally healthy people suffer the consequences. Exposure to ozone for six to seven hours, even at relatively low concentrations, significantly reduces lung function and induces respiratory inflammation, resulting in chest pain, coughing, nausea and pulmonary congestion.

And if you think discharging untreated waste, industrial effluent and run-off from agricultural fields performs a service to the nation’s drinking water, you undoubtedly flunked seventh grade health class.

But it isn’t enough that the commonwealth’s congressional delegation is consistently voting to impair the health of their constituents. They’re leading the charge.

McConnell, from his perch as majority leader, and Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Hopkinsville, he with a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters and the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power (Brer Fox, meet henhouse) are leading the campaign to neuter the Environmental Protection Agency, which in the past 40 years has done more to clean up America’s soiled nest than any other entity.

McConnell makes no bones about the fact that he detests the EPA and will do everything in his power to destroy it because of what he inanely refers to as the agency’s “War on Coal,’’ coal being the economic sector that helps bankroll his campaigns.

It seems the EPA had the audacity to promulgate a rule requiring existing coal-fired power plants to reduce the poisons they are constantly emitting into the atmosphere. Under the rule, states will be required to submit compliance plans to EPA next year and begin to meet interim goals in 2020, completing the process by 2030. States that do not submit a satisfactory plan will be subject to a federal plan.

As a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, McConnell has championed a provision that would prohibit federal enforcement of the EPA rules. He also is publicly beseeching the nation’s governors to, basically, ignore the agency’s offer to let the states write their own rules.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, the subcommittee’s ranking member, called the effort “nothing less than a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Clean Air Act.’’

Whitfield, meanwhile, is carrying water on the House side. His Ratepayer Protection Act, which passed his committee, provides that states won’t have to implement any plan – state or federal – if the governor determines it would have a significant adverse effect on retail, commercial or industrial ratepayers or affect the reliability of the state’s electricity system. 

That’s not the only environmental regulation McConnell and his cronies are kicking around like a soccer ball. The EPA, attempting to clarify U.S. Supreme Court rulings, is seeking to expand its authority under the Clean Water Act to include navigable waterways and their tributaries and offer protections to bodies of water located next to rivers and lakes. It does not involve most ditches, groundwater, shallow subsurface flows or tile drains.

Of course McConnell doesn’t like that either. He co-sponsored legislation offered by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, prohibiting the federal government from implementing the rule. The provision is contained in the same appropriations measure that impedes the Clean Air Act.

“By expanding the definition of a wetland, the EPA aims to subject vast new areas in Kentucky to its will,’’ McConnell said, without noting it would also address obviously contaminated areas.

All this and we haven’t even mentioned global climate change. Some other time.

It is one of life’s enduring ironies that Kentuckians, understandably proud of the natural wonders and beautiful vistas of their home state, continue to send people to Washington, D.C., who wouldn’t blink twice if it turned into a vast wasteland.

So it goes.

Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. He currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.