GOP Divided on Environmental Deregulation

From the time of Theodore Roosevelt to the Administration of Richard Nixon, environmentalism was an idea embraced by Republicans.

The first President to make conservation a national goal, Roosevelt gave legitimacy to the notion that America’s forests and wilderness belong to all citizens--not just to a few powerful interests. Seventy years later, the Nixon Administration took the philosophy further, extending federal protection to air, water and endangered plants and animals.

Now, however, as congressional Republicans wage an assault on environmental laws and on the federal agencies that enforce them, it is hard even for some Republicans to see much similarity between Roosevelt’s dedication to conservation and House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s enthusiasm for deregulation.

Republican leaders insist that they have not broken faith with Teddy Roosevelt--who believed you could love nature and still cut down trees and hunt buffalo--and are not out to gut environmental protection. Instead, they say they want to usher in a new environmental era in which people are rewarded for taking care of natural resources rather than being punished for violating burdensome regulations.

“We have a positive agenda. We have a philosophy of protection. But we’ve had a problem in getting that message across,” said Rep. David McIntosh, an Indiana Republican and a driving force behind his party’s campaign to reduce federal regulations.

Republicans have had difficulty persuading people of their environmental affinity since the era of James Watt, the acid-tongued former Interior Secretary who served under President Ronald Reagan and once likened environmentalism to Nazism.

Reagan’s own casual disdain for environmental icons--”when you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all”--didn’t help the party’s image among conservationists. And today, as ranking congressional Republicans such as Alaska’s Don Young refer to environmentalists as “waffle-stomping socialists out to destroy the Constitution,” the Reagan-era hostility appears to be back in full flower.

Until the Reagan Administration, the environmental movement had been strongly bipartisan. But as new regulations exacted a steep financial toll on business and as the GOP moved to the right on many issues, Republican views on the environment began to splinter.

Today, the party is split three ways on the issue, said Republican pollster Steven Wagner of the Luntz Research Co., a polling firm whose Republican clients include Gingrich.

At one end of the spectrum is a small group of Congress members from the Northeast--with more influence in the Senate than the House--who hold Teddy Roosevelt’s suspicion of unfettered free enterprise. They believe the federal government should have a strong hand in overseeing natural resources and defend Nixon-era laws that protect air and water.

Then there is the larger group of Republicans, Wagner said, who are interested mainly in “straightforward rollback of regulations.” Clearly in the ascendancy in the House, this is the group behind the drive to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency budget by one-third, remove protection for much of the nation’s remaining wetlands and throttle back government research into global warming and endangered species.

More toward the party’s center are those who believe in what McIntosh describes as a “new paradigm” of environmental protection based primarily on incentives. This group says that the federal government should act more as a broker than an enforcer, offering tax credits, land exchanges and pricing policies to encourage businesses and property owners to take care of the environment.

Geography exacerbates the Republican Party’s divisiveness on environmental issues. The spiritual descendants of Roosevelt are mostly from states east of the Mississippi River.

“Their voices may be drowned out in the caucuses and primaries, but lose them and you lose 20% to 25% of the vote,” said John Petrocik, a UCLA political scientist who specializes in Republican politics.

Well-educated and well-heeled, these Republicans may be fiscal conservatives, Petrocik said, but they oppose wholesale dismantling of anti-pollution laws. And many share Roosevelt’s belief that government must play a dominant role in managing natural resources.

But the party’s return to power in Congress after 40 years of Democratic domination is due, in no small part, to Republican strength in the fast-growing West. And for many western Republicans, environmentalism is a dirty word, conjuring up images of federal bureaucrats interfering with the right to make a living off the land.

Current efforts in Congress to open up wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and even national parks to mining, oil drilling and commercial development are being led by Republicans from Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and California.

Despite the different agendas, Republican leaders in Congress hope to unite the party around a set of ideas that came into vogue during the Administration of former President George Bush in the late 1980s.

Convinced that public emotion and political pressure was dictating too much environmental policy, members of the Bush Administration argued that science and private enterprise should play a greater role in setting priorities and finding market-based solutions.

At the heart of that thinking was a belief that rewards rather than regulations encourage people to take care of the environment.

“It’s just the common-sensical notion that, nine out of 10 times, people will do the right thing if they are given a reason to do it,” said McIntosh, who served in the Bush Administration and became one of its leading architects of environmental policy.

Innovations included strategies to reduce air pollution that give companies a financial stake in reducing emissions. In California, under an experimental conservation strategy, the Wilson Administration agreed to relax land use regulations for property owners who set aside wetlands and other wildlife sanctuaries.

Today, the emphasis on incentives is most apparent in a pending bill to reform the Endangered Species Act. The legislation, co-sponsored by California Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy), would give the federal government new tools to reward property owners who take care of imperiled plants and animals living on their land.

At the same time, it would restrict the government’s ability to prevent development of property harboring such species and require compensation for owners whose land is devalued because of limits placed on its use.

The legislation is based on the view, widely shared by environmental moderates in both parties, that the existing law, with its threats of financial penalties and even criminal prosecution, has led people to destroy or conceal evidence of rare birds and animals on their property.

It’s hard to find any Republicans who disagree in principle with the idea of incentive-based policies. Where party consensus tends to break down is over how much to curtail the regulatory powers of the federal government.

But high-minded attempts to fashion new policy in Congress often take a back seat to the demands of powerful constituencies. And that’s what has happened to the Republicans in their pursuit of reforms in this Congress, critics argue.

“They’re protecting subsidies and getting rid of regulations without giving a thought to the consequences,” said Karl Hess Jr., a fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute and a New Mexico-based proponent of market-based solutions to environmental problems.

A maverick among western Republicans, Hess has emerged as one of his party’s strongest critics of pending legislation that would strengthen the hold of ranchers, loggers and miners on federal lands while limiting the rights of others to use the land or prevent its misuse.

Dissent within the party reached a crescendo this summer when 51 House Republicans, the vast majority from the East, voted against legislation that would slash the Environmental Protection Agency budget by one-third and eliminate funding for a host of EPA programs, including regulation of sewage spills and toxic air pollution at oil refineries.

“If people think that what we’re up to will lead to tainted meat at the grocery store or contaminated drinking water, they’ll desert us in a heartbeat,” said one Republican House staffer.

Recalling that it was the Bush Administration that sought to emphasize the role of science in environmental policy-making, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) said he was dismayed when fellow Republicans sought to avoid any mention of a new National Academy of Sciences study on wetlands before a House vote on that issue last summer.

The National Academy definition of wetlands conflicted sharply with criteria in a House-passed bill, which, said Gilchrest, would wipe out 70% of the nation’s wetlands. “The idea that we ignore the NAS report was ludicrous,” said Gilchrest. “It was like the Pope who ordered Galileo to say that the Earth was the center of the universe.”

Even big business has questioned the wisdom of some Republican proposals.

While the chemical industry has supported much of the effort to relax environmental regulations, the Monsanto Co. recently lobbied against a piece of legislation that would curtail the EPA’s power to evaluate new products when they come on the market.

“EPA’s stamp of approval tells the American public that our products are safe to use, and that’s fine with us,” said Linda Fisher, Monsanto’s vice president for federal government affairs and a former EPA official in the Bush Administration.

Moderate Republicans are hoping that the Senate will adopt a more restrained approach to environmental deregulation when it takes up much of the House-passed legislation.

This month, the Senate Appropriations Committee restored some of the EPA’s budget cuts proposed by the House. The action paves the way for a confrontation between Republican moderates in the Senate and hard-liners over environmental policy.

Concerned about sending the wrong message on the environment, House Speaker Gingrich recently called for a task force to re-evaluate the party’s strategy on environmental issues.

“The Speaker used to teach environmental studies, and he wants to make sure the public understands that even though Republicans have a different slant on the environment, they care about it as much as anyone,” said Gingrich aide Tony Blankley.

Meanwhile, Republican pollsters disagree over the impact, so far, of the party’s environmental proposals on voters.

“The issue isn’t really showing up on our radar screen,” said a spokesman for Tarrance Group. “I think there has been a major switch from the 1980s, when public anxiety about the environment was an overriding concern.”

On the other hand, Steven Wagner at the Luntz Co. cautioned party leaders that there were signs that a Republican hard-line could backfire at the polls.

“If the argument is we can have a higher level of protection with less injury to the economy, we will have the voters behind us,” Wagner said. “But the party won’t get voter support if they think we’re out trying to cripple the EPA. There’s no mandate for that.”