Democrats’ opposition to Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is looking a lot like how they went after former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, a senior environmentalist remarked Tuesday.
“I think it is absolutely fair to say that Brett Kavanaugh is the new Scott Pruitt,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters.
[Opinion: Is Brett Kavanaugh ‘one of us?’]
Sittenfeld joined with top Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday in officially launching their effort to block Kavanaugh.
“All Americans should be very worried about what Justice Brett Kavanaugh would mean for our air, our water, our land, our health, and our climate,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate climate change task force.
“We know Judge Kavanaugh’s track record on the environment, and it is a climate catastrophe,” said Markey.
[Related: Brett Kavanaugh is skeptical of climate change regulations but not ‘dogmatic,’ experts say]
Sittenfeld remarked that Senate Democrats on the environment committee did so well in fighting Pruitt day-to-day that she sees them doing something similar when it comes to Kavanaugh.
Democrats led by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the environment committee, had attempted to block Pruitt’s nomination last year, even going as far as to boycott a vote to move the nomination to the floor.
Later, Carper led Democrats in urging the EPA inspector general to launch investigations into a number of scandals over Pruitt’s expensive travel and security arrangements. Pruitt resigned on July 5.
On opposing Kavanaugh, Carper said the “silver lining here is that the American people overwhelmingly rejected Scott Pruitt and his agenda.”
Markey said Kavanaugh’s record on environmental decisions is “nonsensical.” He cited a 2012 case where Judge Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals argued “unsuccessfully” that the Clean Air Act covers some air pollutants and not man-made greenhouse gases blamed for causing climate change.
Such a “nonsensical” interpretation of the Clean Air Act “would endanger the Clean Power Plan,” the climate plan implemented under former President Barack Obama, Markey said.
The Democrats fear that this interpretation of law places EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at risk.
Markey said that “polluters” and fossil fuel companies may have a chance at “chipping away” a pivotal case on climate change, Massachusetts v. EPA, if Kavanaugh is confirmed.
In the landmark ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed that carbon dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuels are a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
It is the “most important decision ever to regulate climate change emissions,” Markey said. “It is settled law.”
