Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced outrage Monday over a leading Kentucky newspaper equating his support for the coal industry to the South’s support of slavery.
“The Herald-Leader’s recent attempt to equate those who work in the Kentucky coal fields — along with those of us who support and defend their way of life — with the Southern plantation owners who once enriched themselves off the backs of slaves is a depressing new low,” the Kentucky Republican said in an op-ed published Monday by the Lexington Herald Leader newspaper.
“It’s no secret that liberal progressives have a hard time moderating their passions or prioritizing outrage. But drawing a moral equivalence between America’s original sin of slavery and the fight for Kentucky coal reveals a profound lack of moral seriousness — not to mention a troubling indifference to an industry that keeps this commonwealth and this country running,” McConnell wrote.
The newspaper published an editorial April 13 that said McConnell’s attempts “to obstruct climate protections will be regarded one day in the same way we think of 19th-century apologists for human slavery,” asking, “How could economic interests blind them to the immorality of their position?”
But McConnell argues that economic arguments are not at the root of his recent appeals to states not to comply with the Obama administration’s stringent power plant rules for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. He says his opposition is driven by concerns that the rules are an affront to the Constitution.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on power plant emissions last week were challenged by the coal industry and more than a dozen states in oral arguments before a federal appeals court.
McConnell’s op-ed latches onto the legal arguments made in the case, which say that EPA exceeded its legal authority in developing the emission rules by requiring the states to cut emissions, not power plants themselves, and thus runs afoul of the Constitution.
McConnell cites Laurence Tribe, a noted legal scholar who once mentored President Obama, in the op-ed.
“On the constitutional question, no less a liberal luminary than President Barack Obama’s Harvard law professor … agrees with me,” McConnell wrote. “As Tribe put it in recent testimony before Congress: ‘… burning the Constitution is one thing we should not do as part of our national energy policy.'”
Tribe represented states and coal companies in oral arguments held at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
Nevertheless, federal judges suggest the lawsuit is not yet ripe because the EPA climate regulations are still in their proposal phase. The standard for the court to intercede is that the rule in question must be final. The EPA plans to finish the rule this summer, moving it from a proposed rule to a final regulation.
