Anti-environmental Republicans rose to congressional leadership only in the 1990s as veterans.

Evidence

During the 1990s, however, the political dynamic in Congress changed. In the early 1990s, the Republicans in Congress mirrored the Bush administration’s change of heart on environmental matters. They now openly questioned the wisdom, fairness, effectiveness, scientific grounding, and economic cost of strict environmental laws. Because, moreover, the skeptics in the Republican Congress were no longer newly elected, but veteran legislators by the 1990s, they began to rise to leadership positions both within the party and within Congress. It was therefore not surprising that environmental laws became a disproportionate target for reform in the Contract with America when the Republicans took charge of both chambers of Congress following the November 1994 elections. With the notable exception of an isolated few such as Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, whose seniority entitled him to become chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, those Republicans who ascended to the relevant leadership positions in the House and the Senate were no longer party moderates who supported the existing laws. They were instead skeptics who supported fundamental change. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 674

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete institutional mechanism (seniority pushing skeptics into leadership) that connects the 1995 Contract with America (ch19) to the causal story of polarization. — connects to: By the mid-1990s consensus environmental legislation had become politically impossible. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 677