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GOP Attack on Biodiversity, Climate 'Sticks Finger in the Eye of American People'
Critics of a House appropriations bill that guts environmental agencies warn it's a sign of what the Republicans will do if they retake the Senate and the presidency next year.
Jun 28, 2024
Democrats and watchdog groups reacted with outrage on Friday as a U.S. House environmental subcommittee led by Republicans approved an appropriations bill that would reduce funding for two federal agencies and limit their ability to protect the environment.
The House Appropriations Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee voted to advance a bill to weaken the regulatory capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), cutting funding for conservation, climate action, national parks, and environmental justice initiatives.
"This bill sticks a finger in the eye of the American people who care deeply about clean air, climate change, endangered species, and responsible use of public lands," said Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Project. "It's a nasty wishlist to defund the priorities of protecting a livable future."
The fiscal year 2025 bill proposes a 20% cut to the EPA's annual budget, from $9.2 billion to $7.4 billion, including a $749 million cut to state and tribal assistance grants. It also proposes reductions to many Interior agency budgets, including a $210 million cut to the National Park Service and a $144 million cut to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Taking aim at the government's ability to regulate industry, most of the Republicans' spending allocations are below fiscal year 2024 and almost all of them are below the amount requested by the Biden administration.
Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), the subcommittee's ranking Democrat, said in a statement that the proposed EPA cut was "irresponsible" and that she was "greatly disappointed and frustrated" by the bill, which "completely disregards the reality of a warming planet and ignores the need for us to do more, not less."
Pingree's Democratic colleague, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the full appropriations committee, agreed.
The bill "promotes dirty energy, taking the side of fossil fuel companies and those who deny the scientific reality rather than address the escalating risk to our economy and national security presented by the changing climate and growing number of extreme weather events," DeLauro said in the statement.
Critics of the bill also objected to the large number of "poison-pill" riders that seek to undo Biden administration rules and undermine the Endangered Species Act by naming specific animals for which listing can't be funded. Per a Trump-era Interior rule, the legislation also delists most gray wolf populations from the ESA.
"This proposal is a hatchet job of disastrous proportion that in an unprecedented scale, targets our nation's most imperiled species and the law saving them from extinction," Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement.
The Republicans' bill includes proposed reductions to funding for clean water infrastructure projects, which Food and Water Watch (FWW) said was a step in the wrong direction—water and sewer systems need huge infusions of money just to meet current water quality standards.
"The proposed cuts would leave many with unsafe water and exacerbate the nation’s water affordability crisis, adding more pressure on household water bills at a time when families are already grappling with soaring costs for essential services," Mary Grant, a FWW campaign director, said in a statement, calling safe water "non-negotiable."
Grant said that to safeguard Americans' clean water from "foolishly political annual appropriations battles," Congress should pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, And Reliability (WATER) Act—a call she also made last year, when the same subcommittee advanced a similar bill.
The full appropriations committee will consider the bill on July 9. If the bill passes through the committee and then the full chamber, as last year's version did, it's unlikely to make headway in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate. However, critics of the bill warned that it's a sign of what the Republicans will do if they retake the Senate and the presidency.
Earlier this month, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump said that he plans to gut federal agencies dealing with climate, such as the Interior Department. A union of EPA workers rebuked Trump for the remarks.
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What If Lawless GOP Lawmakers in the House Refuse to Certify the 2024 Election?
This is what it looks like if Trump loses at the ballot box, but Republicans do next time what enough of them refused to do last time.
Feb 02, 2024
I worry that those of us who are dedicated to democracy and therefore committed to playing by the rules are underestimating the willingness of House Republicans to break the rules to elect Trump.
Remember: Most current Republican members of the House, including Speaker Michael Johnson, refused to certify the outcome of the 2020 election. In fact, Johnson helped organize 138 Republican House members to dispute that outcome, despite state certifications and the nearly unanimous rulings from state and federal courts that it was an honest election.
If Johnson and his cronies had so few scruples then, why should we assume they’ll have more scruples in the weeks following November’s elections?
Long before we reach this constitutional crisis, Speaker Johnson and others in the Republican House leadership must pledge to certify the results of the November elections.
What happens if, in the wake of the elections, the House’s election-denying Republicans find that they can retain their majority in the next Congress only by denying certification of Democratic candidates who have won by close margins, and do so?
Then, on January 6, 2025, what if the new Republican majority refuses to certify as president any Electoral College results from states that went for Biden by close margins — thereby ensuring that no candidate receives an Electoral College majority?
Presto! The decision about who’s to be the next president is made on a state-by-state delegation vote — almost surely delivering it to Trump.
Is this scenario really so far-fetched? Two astute Washington veterans conclude in a recent article in The Washington Spectator that it’s not at all far-fetched, because “good faith can no longer be assumed.”
Long before we reach this constitutional crisis, Speaker Johnson and others in the Republican House leadership must pledge to certify the results of the November elections.
They should be asked by the media to make this commitment. If they won’t, Americans need to know — and know why.
It’s worth noting in this regard that Rep. Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, recently refused to commit to certifying the results of next November’s elections, saying “we will see if this is a legal and valid election.”
She then claimed that the 2020 presidential race “was not a fair election” despite multiple legal reviews sought by Trump and his allies confirming that it was.
Why hasn’t this been more widely reported?
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Biden Must Not Treat the Right to Asylum Like a Bargaining Chip
What risks being lost in this high-stakes game is a recognition that fundamental human rights are not negotiable.
Jan 04, 2024
On the eve of a U.S. presidential election year and under the shadow of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, asylum seekers and refugees have become chips on the Capitol Hill bargaining table.
What risks being lost in this high-stakes game is a recognition that fundamental human rights are not negotiable, including “the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Republican leaders are demanding drastic changes in decades-old U.S. immigration law that, in effect, would end the right to seek asylum on U.S. territory and mandate detention for any asylum seekers who manage to lodge claims. Their big bargaining chip is the $110 billion emergency aid bill for Ukraine and Israel, which includes an additional $5.3 billion for Customs and Border Protection and $2.3 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among other increased funding for Department of Homeland Security operations.
Seeing the Ukraine and Israel funding as essential, and desperate to cut a deal before Congress goes into recess, the Biden administration has reportedly agreed to “a new border authority to expel migrants without asylum screenings, as well as a dramatic expansion of immigration detention and deportations.”
Many of the border enforcement and immigration control policies the Republican leaders are seeking to codify are already being practiced by the Biden administration. But they are currently either undertaken with the flexibility to make case-by-case exceptions, or legally bound by other due process guardrails that lawmakers are trying to eliminate.
For example, Republican negotiators would require asylum seekers transiting through another country to file claims in that country before reaching the U.S. The Immigration and Nationality Act has a “safe third country” provision, but it requires such countries to meet standards, such as providing access to full and fair asylum procedures.
Similarly, Republican leadership is demanding, and the White House appears open to, mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Yet the Immigration Act already makes detention mandatory for new arrivals awaiting interviews under expedited removal provisions, to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country and might qualify for a full asylum interview. Detention already continues even after an asylum officer has determined the applicant has a credible fear, unless Homeland Security exercises discretion.
Stripping that last shred of discretion would predictably increase the likelihood of harm, especially to asylum seekers who have experienced violence and abuse, because of disgraceful conditions of immigration detention, inadequate medical care, separation of families, impeded access to legal representation, sexual abuse, and discriminatory treatment.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees detention guidelines caution that detaining asylum seekers is “inherently undesirable” and “in many instances, contrary to the norms and principles of international law.” Alternatives to detention have been shown to be less expensive, less harmful, and just as effective in ensuring that asylum seekers and migrants will show up for their immigration proceedings.
The impact of mandatory detention on asylum seekers will be even greater if the White House and Senate Democrats accept another reported Republican demand: the nationwide expansion of expedited removal for the first two years after arrival, which is currently limited to recent arrivals at or near the border. Expedited removal puts new arrivals apprehended at or near the border on a fast-track for deportation if they are not able to show a “credible fear” of being persecuted in their home countries. This would open the prospect of country-wide racial profiling and short-cutting due process for immigrants facing deportation.
But perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching demand on the table is to ratchet up the standard in credible-fear screenings. Republican negotiators are demanding that the current “significant possibility” of having well-founded fear of persecution should be changed to a “more likely than not” probability. The change would have serious implications for the standard needed to establish an asylum claim and thus access an asylum hearing before an immigration judge.
In the landmark 1987 case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected a “more likely than not” asylum standard, saying that even “a 10 percent chance of being shot, tortured, or otherwise persecuted” should be enough to be granted asylum.
It’s unfortunate that domestic immigration policy ever got mixed up in emergency foreign policy funding. Biden and members of Congress who will be voting on the supplemental aid package should think hard about what is and isn’t fair game for negotiation.
Negotiating over how much to fund the Department of Homeland Security is perfectly fine. But erecting barriers to right to seek asylum, or raising to unreasonable and unreachable heights the standard a person with legitimate fears must establish, is not all right.
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