Whitehouse has sights set on EPA director
Source: Pawtucket Times
August 11, 2008
Freshman senators, the conventional wisdom teaches, should be seen and not heard. They should sit at their desks and watch until someone in leadership allows them to step forward.
Sheldon Whitehouse apparently never got that memo.
Still in just his second year in that august body (why do people call the U.S. Senate an august body when it is in recess for nearly the entire month of August every year?), Rhode Island's junior senator has already had a hand in the downfall of one Bush administration cabinet member, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and now has his sights on toppling another, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen Johnson.
In a speech delivered on the Senate floor late last month, Whitehouse noted that EPA is an independent agency whose only obligation is to protect the environment.
"During the tenure of Administrator Stephen Johnson," he intoned, "we have seen that clear mission darkened by the shadowy handiwork of the Bush White House, trampling on science, ignoring the facts, flouting the law, defying Congress and the courts while kneeling before industry polluters and all for rank and venal purposes."
But that's not all.
"Under Administrator Johnson, EPA is an agency in distress, in dishonor and in bad hands," Whitehouse told his colleagues.
On the same day that he delivered that diatribe, Whitehouse joined Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer and two other senators in writing a letter to new Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking him to investigate whether Johnson "made false and misleading statements before the EPW committee."
During an interview at his Providence office on Friday, Whitehouse asserted that Johnson sees it as his "highest duty to toady to the Bush administration rather than do his job the way he is supposed to.
"Almost entirely through this administrator himself," accused the former prosecutor (U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island and RI Attorney General), the EPA "has become a place where they ignore science and they throw the decision - and it is always in favor of industry. We saw it with lead standards, we saw it with ozone standards, mercury levels, California tailpipe emissions and in greenhouse gases and the Clean Air Act."
Responding to the call for his boss' resignation and an investigation into the truthfulness of his Senate testimony, Jonathan Shradar, Johnson's press secretary, told the Associated Press that the administrator would "continue to lead this agency undistracted by the Boxer and Whitehouse show."
EPA, the senator insists, has been "corrupted" under Johnson's stewardship.
By "corrupted" Whitehouse means swayed by political considerations rather than the merits of a particular subject, not the kind of corruption Rhode Islanders might expect of government officials.
"It would almost be more explainable if he were getting bribes in his pocket," the senator suggested. "The fact that he is doing it just to curry favor with the White House is really revolting."
But is it really corruption, or does Democrat Whitehouse just disagree with some of the things the GOP administration does?
"I think that when you have a mission and the people of the country have trusted you with that mission and it is an important one that involves public health and the quality of the environment, and you deliberately violate that mission and you do it for a rank political person, I think that's corruption."
The son and grandson of foreign service officers, Whitehouse says he grew up with the notion that "there is a calling to do your duty, to do what is best for the country, to do public service right. So I have a very strong feeling about integrity in public service and to me it is just as bad if you are corrupting your mission in order to curry favor with the president and don't want to tell him things he doesn't want to hear, as it is if you are putting money in your pockets. It's almost worse in some respects.
"It's not just a policy disagreement, that's the point," he insisted. "When scientists say ‘this is the range that is the safe range' and he says ‘O.K., we're going to decide outside the safe range,' that is not just a policy difference. When 60-plus percent of the scientists at EPA report that they have personally experienced political pressure to change their science in the last five years. That is not a policy disagreement."
Whitehouse is careful to say that the overwhelming majority of scientists and other EPA staffers are conscientious and want to do a good job, "but they are stymied by the man at the top."
So how does this all affect Rhode Island?
"Sometime this summer," Whitehouse answered, "and probably more than once, on a number of days this summer, one of the news announcements is going to be that infants, and the elderly and people with breathing difficulties should stay indoors and breathe only air conditioned air because the air in Rhode Island is not safe to breathe for them, that will be in part because of the ozone standards being set too high. That is a decision that has consequences that blow right into Rhode Island's summer air."
Whitehouse acknowledges that, at this late day, Johnson is unlikely to heed his call to resign.
"But even if nothing happens," he said, EPA has a long and proud tradition with many excellent administrators, "and I wouldn't want this guy to get away without someone having put a mark on him. So when history looks back, there is not only a call for his resignation but a lengthy description in the Congressional Record of exactly why that is, with a full supporting bill of particulars."
Both the Johnson case and the more successful hounding out of office of Attorney General Gonzales concerned the politicization of departments where Whitehouse believes politics should not be part of their activities.
Gonzales was accused of hiring and firing U.S. Attorneys on political grounds, and interference into cases involving public officials - going out of the way to prosecute Democrats while backing off on Republicans.
"It is fine to play politics out in the field where you are supposed to," Whitehouse said, "but these guys are running plays outside the sidelines and they are damaging the institutions of the United States of America to do it. And those things shouldn't be tolerated.
"There are places for politics and places where politics shouldn't go," he said. "In the Gonzales place, they put politics in places where it should never go - decisions to prosecute, decisions to bring cases and decisions about protecting the American people's public health are places where politics shouldn't go."
I asked Whitehouse about the contention made by former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan in his tell-some-but-not-all book, "What Happened," that the Bush White House is an example of the "permanent campaign," where an administration governs using the same tactics and strategies it used in an election campaign.
The senator said he hasn't read the book, but offered, "when you go from being a candidate running a campaign to being a president and having to govern, most presidents take their responsibility of having to govern as a very sacred trust. They are willing to do things to honor that trust even when it hurts their political supporters. That's part of what being president is. And that is where the Bush administration has failed. They turned that upside down and they put the well-being of their supporters before doing what is right for the American people even when it is something as simple as letting polluters emit pollution at a standard that scientists know isn't safe. We'll let them do it anyway because they are our polluters and we don't care about the science."