Who's Afraid of the EPA? Not Voters

Republicans trying to handcuff the EPA are mistaken if they think painting the agency as a big government bogeyman will win them votes.

The scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill is that Senate Republicans are planning to use a markup of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual spending bill to try to block the agency from implementing regulations to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have both been pushing measures that would hamstring EPA from using its Clean Air Act authority to control GHG emissions. Because the Murkowski resolution was rejected by the full Senate earlier this year and the president has threatened to veto any such efforts, one would be hard pressed to see how such measures could become law.

Despite the long odds of success, Republicans seem determined to press the matter. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that making EPA out to be the bogeyman has a political upside in the era of the Tea Party and its radical libertarian animosity towards government.

This would be a mistake. Public opinion polling through the years has consistently shown broad voter support for strong pollution limits, typically around 85 percent nationally. The numbers for Republican voters vary only slightly, with roughly 75 percent supporting strong pollution limits.

A Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP) poll earlier this year, conducted by Bellwether Research and Consulting, showed that more than half of Republicans specifically support limits on carbon dioxide emissions, as do 43 percent of Tea Party supporters. That poll also found that 86 percent of self-identified conservatives believe that conservation and environmental stewardship are conservative values.

Beating up on EPA, an agency President Nixon created, and undermining the ability of popular laws like the Clean Air Act to help address new pollution concerns is not a way to win the hearts of voters—especially not those on the young side of 35.

Some of the Senators who support limiting EPA authority have framed it as an effort to place responsibility for addressing GHG emissions in the hands of Congress “where it belongs.”

They would have a perfectly valid point if they were trying to adjust EPA’s role within the context of a specific legislative approach for limiting GHG emissions. That would be reasonable in order to prevent regulatory overlap.

However, since Congress has thus far proved to be incapable of addressing the issue—and future prospects for it doing so are murky at best—the current effort to tie EPA’s hands can only be viewed as nothing more than opposition to pollution limits.

The great conservative thinker and writer Russell Kirk put it well in his 1972 op-ed to the Baltimore Sun where he wrote "...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside."

If Republicans don’t want to be viewed as unscrupulous or shortsighted by the voters, they should really think twice before taking aim at EPA.