Our Endangered Moderates

We are finalizing this issue of The Green Elephant a full month before the general election, and right now it’s tough to guess how things will turn out. Will our guys retake the Senate? Will we hold the House? We’ll all know the answers before this issue reaches you, Dear Reader, but not before we put it to bed, so the big questions are hanging out there as we write this.

However, there is one issue that is hardly in doubt: the fact that moderate Republicans in Congress may be the most endangered species in America. What makes this doubly distressing is that the assault is coming at them from both sides...from the GOP’s own right wing and from the other party.

You can hardly pick up a newspaper this fall without reading about the re-election difficulties of many of the GOP Members of Congress whom REP has long considered its heroes.

In GOP primaries this year, environmental leaders like Representatives Sherwood Boehlert (NY) and Wayne Gilchrest (MD) and Senator Bob Smith (NH) were under attack by Republican challengers, some of them sponsored by aggressive, far-right-wing groups like the Club for Growth. Boehlert and Gilchrest survived the onslaught, but Smith did not. Another REP hero, Marge Roukema (NJ) apparently decided to retire rather than endure a second attack in two years by the same Club for Growth opponent, who won the open-seat primary this year.

Connie Morella (MD), Jim Leach (IA) and Nancy Johnson (CT) are now under pressure from Democratic challengers. As of this writing, we don’t know how they will fare.

We would like to think the environmental community would support its proven friends, so we were dismayed by the Sierra Club’s decision to turn its back on courageous Jim Leach, whose League of Conservation Voters scores—76% in ‘97-’98; 67% in ‘99-’00; and 71% in 2001—make him a leader among GOP representatives.

By endorsing Leach’s Democratic opponent, a physician with no voting record, the Sierra Club gave ammo to the anti-environmental wing of the GOP. “Why in #@^% should you pay any attention to the Sierra Club,” the anti-environmental Republicans will argue to our moderates in the future. “Don’t you know that when push comes to shove, no matter how you vote, the Sierra Club is going to endorse your Democratic opponent?”

If these attacks on our moderates succeed, the environmental picture in Congress is going to be a lot bleaker.

Another Dreadful Appointment

“New wildfire plan watchdog has unorthodox views” was how AP put it. That’s putting it mildly.

Libertarian writer and pundit Allan Fitzsimmons—the new Interior Department head of wildfire prevention—wrote in his book The Illusion of Ecosystem Management that “ecosystems exist only in the human imagination.”

In another opus, Ecological Confusion among the Clergy, Fitzsimmons criticized religious leaders who urge the faithful to worship God by protecting the environment. He singled out for special criticism Catholic bishops who in 1997 published a paper advocating protection and restoration of the Columbia River watershed. Fitzsimmons wrote: “By urging the public to make changes in their lives to accommodate nonexistent ecosystem needs, one wonders if the bishops are beginning inadvertently to make an idol out of their own creation, what they call the Columbia Basin ecosystem.”

His appointment is especially worrisome, given President Bush’s curious approach to “fire-protection.” In September, Senator Larry Craig (R, ID) introduced a bill to write into law Bush’s plan to allow logging companies to remove the fire-resistant ancient trees that are the biological hearts of our national forests in exchange for taking out less commercially-desirable trees near human settlements. The Bush/Craig plan would suspend federal environmental rules, making it even harder for the public to know what is happening or sue to stop bad logging projects in the national forests.

Like most other environmental groups, Republicans for Environmental Protection understands the need to thin fire-prone forests around homes and communities. However, we would much prefer to see the Interior Department pay a fair price for that work, instead of turning logging companies loose to cut the last large, ancient trees they have for so long been salivating to “harvest.”

Let’s hear it for Lamar!

The Green Elephant doesn’t usually report on state political races, but this news is too good to pass up. Lamar Alexander (R) and Bob Clement (D), candidates for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, got some tough questions about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in a televised debate.

Responding to one question about a proposed federal road through the Park, which REP fervently opposes, Alexander said, “That road would be a disaster. I will do everything in my power to stop it.”

Clement, on the other hand, waffled on the issue, saying that the proposed federal road should be looked at “very carefully” to gauge its impact because “all of us know the significance of the Smoky Mountains.”

Bully for Lamar Alexander!