Here’s a question: If you’re a legislator and you voted to strengthen a particular piece of legislation, and that piece of legislation later came under threat, wouldn’t you make an effort to protect it? The answer seems logical enough, but then again, as we all know, everyday logic doesn’t always apply to the world of politics.
How else would you explain Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski’s failure stand up to protect the Clean Air Act from the attacks that it’s recently come under from the likes of Lisa “Dirty Air” Murkowski? After all, as the Senate’s Legislation and Records site shows, Senator Mikulski voted for the 1990 amendments that strengthened the original 1970 Clean Air Act, ensuring that it had the teeth it needed to really bite into problems like acid rain. But now when opponents of climate action are trying to knock those same teeth out, Mikulski is standing on the sidelines.
And it’s not as if she hasn’t been given ample opportunity to defend the Clean Air Act against these assaults. As early as last August, Maryland climate activists started asking the Senator’s office if she would fight to make sure that the EPA’s Clean Air Act authority to regulate CO2 emissions was kept intact in the Senate Climate bill. The Senator’s staffers told us that was something she would likely support, but they’d have to get back to us with a definite answer. So naturally we kept asking the question. We asked at another constituent meeting a month later; we asked in follow up calls and emails. We asked again last October as soon as Senator Robert Menendez released his dear-colleague sign on letter to Harry Reid about the importance of preserving the EPA Clean-Air-Act authority. We asked when we put the letter in the hands of the Senator’s staffers. From October 2009 through last week, via hundreds of phone calls and emails, CCAN supporters asked again and again if the Senator would sign the Menendez letter.
Each time, the question couldn’t have been clearer. And each time the response couldn’t have been more equivocal: “We’re looking in to it.”
One would imagine that the Senator has a pretty good reason for her inaction regarding the fate of a bill that she once voted to strengthen
