Environmental lawmaking polarized completely along party lines by the 1990s.

Evidence

During the 1990s, the partisan divide was made complete. The two political parties were in virtual opposition, even before the formal emergence of the 104th Congress and the Contract with America in 1995. At the very outset of the decade, during the final years of the Bush administration, a partisan split erupted, with the Democrats and Republicans staking out polarized positions on environmental issues. By the end of the decade, party scores in the Senate were more than seventy points apart. The Democrats appeared to have cast their political lot largely with those favoring more environmental protection, while the Republicans had done the same with the regulated community. Any vestige of 1970s bipartisanship was gone. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 685

Categorization

• XREF: Directly quantifies the institutional change claimed in ch22 — party voting moving apart — and supports the reader’s cross-course interest in how institutions structurally fail. — connects to: Federalist Society federalism opposes the deliberately national structure of pollution statutes — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 538; Party voting on environmental bills moved together in the 1970s but not the 1990s. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 680; By the mid-1990s consensus environmental legislation had become politically impossible. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 677
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source