The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t just another bureaucracy. With an $8 billion-dollar budget and 15,000 employees, the massive administrative agency has the regulatory power to protect nature and destroy business unilaterally.
Leading that agency is a big responsibility, not one to be taken lightly. That is, unless you’re Hillary Clinton. She never had a candidate in mind, it turns out, just “likely an African-American,” as reported in Mike Allen’s newsletter today.
The revelation lays bare how Clinton cared more about her politics than the nation’s policy. Expecting victory in November, she wasn’t thinking about who’d do the best job. The old white lady who would be president just didn’t want to look out of touch.
Again, she didn’t pick a few qualified candidates who were African-American. She had no names on her list. Simply that she saw this slot as a place to meet quotas.
Of course, Clinton might let on about global warming to placate environmentalists in her base. On the stump, she’d describe it as “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time.” Investing in clean energy infrastructure and aggressively cutting pollution made nice messaging points.
But behind closed doors, it seems Clinton saw the EPA as simply an opportunity for identity-politics box-checking.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
