More toxic mercury pollution please

Well then they should have the decency to rename it the Environmental Destruction Agency.

Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma’s attorney general spent years suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its efforts to regulate various forms of pollution, was confirmed Friday as the agency’s next administrator.

Pruitt cleared the Senate by a vote of 52-46, winning support from two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against him, saying he had “fundamentally different” views than she about the EPA’s role.

She probably thinks the P stands for protection, while he thinks it stands for…passivity? Poisoning? Polluting?

Pruitt has sued the EPA more than a dozen times during the Obama administration, challenging the agency’s authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants and the quality of wetlands and other waters. In Oklahoma, he dismantled a specialized environmental protection unit that had existed under his Democratic predecessor and established a “federalism unit” to combat what he called “unwarranted regulation and systematic overreach” by Washington.

And as the one-time leader of the Republican Attorneys General Association and the privately funded Rule of Law Defense Fund, he spearheaded a group of attorneys general that fought the Obama administration on such issues as the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reforms and efforts to extend overtime pay to more workers.

And that is how you drain the swamp – you make sure poor people can’t get health insurance, you make sure bankers and hedge fund managers can destroy bankrupt millions of people, you make sure workers don’t get paid for working overtime. In short you make poor people poorer and sicker, and you make rich people richer. That’s the Republican political philosophy on a postage stamp.

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