32
votes
Scott Pruitt resigns as US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator
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- Title
- E.P.A. Chief Scott Pruitt Resigns Under a Cloud of Ethics Scandals
- Published
- Jul 5 2018
- Word count
- 1744 words
I got elated for a second before I remember how much of a swamp-thing Andrew Wheeler is.
Oh dear. That can’t be good.
We'll just have to drive Wheeler out, too. And so on and so forth until the line of succession runs out or we get somebody running the EPA who isn't a complete waste of oxygen.
I don't think that's happening until after the republicans are out of office.
Well, we can start by purging the House and 33 Senate seats this November. Not to mention the state gubernatorial races, state legislature, and the various local elections.
Sadly most of the seats up for grabs in the senate are already held by Democrats, so we can't achieve a big enough majority to unilaterally impeach. But retaking both houses should be doable and by god it's a start. If we get the right candidate, 2020 could make 2008 look like nothing.
Maybe we can't unilaterally impeach, but with Anthony Kennedy stepping down this year we're going to need every Senate seat we can get unless we want yet another right-wing judge who only values the letter of the law on the SCOTUS.
Kennedy's conveniently stepping down well before the election, just three weeks from now in fact. So unless the republicans decide they don't want that supreme court seat after all, that ship has sailed.
I was hoping that Il Donald wouldn't have a replacement in mind, but I'm sure Mike Pence has a whole stable of candidates in case the current admin decides to try a bit of FDR-style court packing.
They dug up Gorsuch in less than three months and it's going to be another 6 before a hypothetical democratic senate takes charge. I'm not hopeful.
I suspect they had longer to dig up Gorsuch. Remember that in 2016, Mitch McConnell refused to even allow the senate to vote on whether to allow Merrick Garland to knock the rest of the SCOTUS down despite his conservative credentials? His bullshit excuse was that since Obama was leaving office, he somehow didn't have the authority to appoint a replacement.
I'm no expert on Constitutional law, but I didn't see anything in the articles defining the powers of the executive branch that specified that lame-duck Presidents couldn't do anything.
Fair. I forgot it was February that Scalia died in, that's just absolutely insane that McConnell delayed it that long. I still think it's unlikely they won't have anyone picked by January though, so we need to be ready to make unorthodox moves. Justices can be impeached in the same way as presidents, so if we manage to get 67 democrats in the senate (2020 or 2022), Gorsuch could be removed due to his being appointed illegitimately, tilting the balance back to 5-4 liberal even if Kennedy's replacement is allowed to remain.
Unfortunately, the damage is already done. The deregulation pushed through by Pruitt and the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement were major blows to the EPA and its mission. He's done his job.
I understood what you meant but I think we should say that he executed the strategy of the Republican party. He certainly did not do his job (the one he swore an oath to do).
Could we tweak that to the strategy of his corporate overlords? To frame this as about partisan politics rather than greed, pure and simple, seems to distort the true injustice of Pruitt's actions.
That's obfuscating the point though, this is partisan politics. The republicans are unambiguously the party of climate change denial. There's many places where you could make an argument that the republicans and the democrats are too close for comfort, but this definitely isn't one of them.
What's the difference?