Moderate Republican committee chairs blocked Reagan’s environmental rollbacks in the 1980s.
Evidence
Congress during the 1980s similarly resisted the identification of strong environmental protection policy with a single political party, in spite of the fact that a new class of young “Reagan Republicans” was elected to both chambers over the course of that decade. Unlike such Republican predecessors as California’s Pete McCloskey, Kentucky’s John Sherman Cooper, Illinois’s Everett Dirksen, or Massachusetts’s Edward W. Brooke III, who had joined bipartisan efforts in support of tough environmental protection laws during the 1970s, these new Republicans were more socially conservative, more skeptical of government regulation, and less pragmatic and willing to compromise. Yet the Republican leadership positions were then still dominated by moderates such as Howard Baker of Tennessee, Robert Stafford of Vermont, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, John Chafee and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, and Charles Percy of Illinois, who continued to support demanding environmental laws. As chair of the powerful Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works when the Republicans claimed the Senate in 1980, Senator Stafford may well have been the most influential because he and his staff were willing to work closely with their Democratic counterparts in the minority in opposition to the Reagan administration’s environmental policies. The committee held frequent hearings that criticized administration policy, Senator Stafford and his staff repeatedly blocked administration efforts to pass laws that would relax existing requirements, and they secured passage of extensive amendments that both increased the EPA’s regulatory responsibilities and limited the Reagan administration’s discretion to reduce existing controls. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 672
Categorization
- XREF: Pays off the ch18 story of career-staff leaks and oversight forcing out Reagan’s anti-environment appointees with the institutional leadership side. — connects to: Environmental protection stayed bipartisan across presidents of both parties through the 1980s. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 671; Career-staff leaks and congressional oversight forced Reagan’s anti-environment appointees to resign — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 535