Scott Pruitt is a much bigger threat than Al-Qaeda
Betsy DeVois may be the dumbest, but Scott Pruitt is the most lethal. His goal at the EPA is to kill it off. This is the “El Chapo to head the Drug Enforcement Administration” pick.
The Senate narrowly confirmed Scott Pruitt as the new Environmental Protection Agency chief on Friday, despite Democrats’ calls to delay the vote until the release of a new trove of documents detailing the Oklahoma attorney general’s relationship with oil and gas companies.
The 52-46 vote divided the Senate along party lines, with just two Democrats ― Sens. Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), who are up for re-election in states with big fossil fuel industries ― voting to confirm Pruitt. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) did not vote.
Pruitt won the Senate’s approval the day after Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons of the District Court of Oklahoma County ordered his office to turn over more than 2,500 emails and other documents by Tuesday.
The watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit against Pruitt earlier this month, alleging his office had violated Oklahoma’s open records law.
The lawsuit claims that Pruitt, who has served as Oklahoma’s top cop since 2011, failed to respond to nine open records requests seeking communications between his office and major fossil fuel players, including Koch Industries, Peabody Energy and the National Coal Council. The requests were filed as early as January 2015.
“Scott Pruitt is the worst pick ever confirmed to lead the EPA. He’s being sent there to hobble the agency we depend on to protect our health and environment,” Rhea Suh, president of the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “All the worse, Senate Republicans forced the confirmation vote before the public can know the truth about Pruitt’s ties to industrial polluters.”
Bigger threat than people who fly planes into our buildings? I’ll say it: you’re crazy.
Al-Qaeda got lucky. They were lucky that Bush was in office and lowered our guard prior to the attack. They were lucky that his reaction to the attack was so stupidly planned and mismanaged. So with all that luck, 3,000 Americans died here, and another 6,700 in the botched wars Bush launched.
9,700 is child’s play compared to what Scott Pruitt has in store.