Democrats' boycott fails to derail EPA nominee

WASHINGTON -- Republicans suspended Senate committee rules Thursday to push President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency toward confirmation after Democrats boycotted a vote.

Also Thursday, two Senate committees voted along party lines to send Trump's nominee to lead the White House budget office, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., to the full Senate for a vote.

But Trump's nomination of school-choice activist Betsy DeVos as education secretary is on thin ice after two Republican senators vowed to vote against her.

As the scheduled meeting to discuss EPA nominee Scott Pruitt was gaveled to order, the seats reserved for the 10 Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee were empty for the second consecutive day. Committee rules required that at least two members of the minority party be present for a vote to be held.

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The 11 Republicans voted unanimously to suspend those rules and then voted again to advance the nomination of Pruitt, Oklahoma's attorney general.

Committee Chairman John Barrasso, R-Wyo., accused the absent Democrats of engaging in delay and obstruction.

"It is unprecedented for the minority to delay an EPA administrator for an incoming president to this extent," Barrasso said. He then echoed President Barack Obama's 2009 statement to GOP leaders that "elections have consequences."

"The people spoke and now it is time to set up a functioning government," Barrasso said of the November election. "That includes a functioning EPA."

In boycotting Pruitt's confirmation, Democrats complained that he had failed to adequately answer their questions and address their concerns about how he would run the agency that is supposed to protect the nation's air, water and public health.

"The Committee Democrats are deeply concerned about the lack of thoroughness of Mr. Pruitt's responses to our questions for the record," wrote Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware, the environment panel's ranking Democrat, in a letter to Barrasso.

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"We believe these inquiries, and our questions for the record, elicit information from the nominee that he possesses and that he should be able to provide to the Committee," Carper wrote. "Failure on his part to do so is not only an affront; it also denies Democratic committee members, and all members of the Senate, information necessary to judge his fitness to assume the important role of leading the EPA."

Barrasso dismissed Democrats' complaints, saying, "Let's be clear, Attorney General Pruitt has answered more questions than any past EPA administrator nominee in recent memory." He added: "The complaints about Mr. Pruitt's answers to questions are simply a smoke screen. The minority wants a political theater, the nation needs an administrator of the EPA."

Democrats appeared to have borrowed directly from the Republicans' playbook.

In 2013, GOP members of the same committee boycotted a similar committee meeting on Gina McCarthy, Obama's then-nominee for EPA administrator. McCarthy was eventually approved by the Senate, serving in the post until Trump's inauguration last month.

Barrasso has said that is not an "apples-to-apples" comparison since Obama was not then a new, first-term president building out his team.

Democratic members of the committee said this week that the boycott was necessary because Pruitt has refused to fully respond to requests for more information.

"Democrats are just wasting time by pulling this stunt," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. "Eighty percent of life is showing up. Democrats are just wasting their lives."

Pruitt did provide written answers to more than 1,070 questions sent to him by committee Democrats in a 252-page file. In some cases, particularly in answer to 19 questions requesting official documents or emails, Pruitt referred lawmakers to the Oklahoma attorney general's office, saying they could secure the documents through the state's Freedom of Information Law.

Pruitt scrutinized

While Pruitt's nomination to lead the EPA has been praised by Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry, Democrats and environmental groups said his confirmation would be a disaster.

"During the campaign, President Trump pledged to dismantle the EPA," said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group. "In Scott Pruitt, he found just the man to carry out his vision."

In his current position as the Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt has led or taken part in 14 lawsuits aimed at blocking EPA regulations, including a multistate lawsuit opposing the Obama administration's plan to limit planet-warming carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt also sued over the EPA's recent expansion of water bodies regulated under the Clean Water Act. It has been opposed by industries that would be forced to clean up wastewater pollution.

"Pruitt's record gives us no reason to believe that he will vigorously hold polluters accountable or enforce the law," said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Pruitt may not have answered senators' questions, but everything we do know makes it clear that he can't and won't do the job."

Like Trump, Pruitt, 48, has previously cast doubt on scientific evidence showing that the planet is warming and that man-made carbon emissions are to blame. Pressed by Democrats during his Senate confirmation hearing, however, Pruitt said he disagreed with Trump's earlier claims that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese to harm the economic competitiveness of the U.S.

"I do not believe climate change is a hoax," Pruitt said.

Democrats also have criticized Pruitt's close ties to the oil and gas industry. Though Pruitt ran unopposed for a second term in 2014, campaign-finance reports show he raised more than $700,000, much of it from people in the energy and utility industries.

"Republicans rewrote the rules so that Pruitt can seize control of the EPA and throw critical clean air and water rules out," said Liz Perera, the climate policy director for the Sierra Club.

DeVos margin thin

In the Capitol, Democrats did attend meetings of the Senate budget and homeland security committees Thursday as Republicans voted to approve Mulvaney, Trump's nominee to lead the White House budget office, for a vote by the full Senate. The move came over the opposition of Democrats who warn of his support for increasing the age for claiming Social Security benefits and slowing the growth of Medicare.

Mulvaney was among tea party lawmakers who backed a government shutdown in 2013 in an attempt to block the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from taking place. In 2011, he was among those against increasing the government's borrowing cap.

Mulvaney easily sidestepped a controversy in which he failed to pay payroll taxes on a nanny he employed from 2000-2004.

For the Education Department, DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor who spent more than two decades promoting charter schools, faces fierce opposition from Democrats, teachers unions and civil-rights activists.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced their opposition; if DeVos loses the support of one more Republican and all Democrats vote against her, her nomination will be rejected.

Murkowski said she believed DeVos has much to learn about public education.

"I have serious concerns about a nominee to be secretary of education who has been so involved on one side of the equation, so immersed in the push for vouchers that she may be unaware of what actually is successful within the public schools and also what is broken and how to fix them," Murkowski said.

If all other GOP senators support DeVos, and all Democrats oppose her, she would end up with a 50-50 vote in the Senate and Vice President Mike Pence would have to break the tie to confirm her. A vote is expected in the coming days.

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, praised DeVos and expressed confidence that she would be confirmed.

"Mrs. DeVos believes in our children, their teachers and parents -- she believes in the local school board instead of the national school board," Alexander said in a statement. "She's committed to public education, and there's no better example of that than her work on the most important reform of public schools in the last 30 years -- public charter schools."

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said he wasn't concerned about the opposition by Collins and Murkowski.

"I have 100 percent confidence she will be the next secretary of education. She is an unbelievably qualified educator and advocate for students, teachers, parents," he said.

In addition to the statements of opposition by the two Republican senators, a billionaire philanthropist and public education backer came out against her.

Eli Broad sent a letter to senators urging her defeat, saying DeVos is "unprepared and unqualified for the position." He also said that if she were confirmed, "much of the good work that has been accomplished to improve public education for all of America's children could be undone."

Democrats have vigorously opposed DeVos, questioning her commitment to public education, her overall qualifications to lead the Education Department and her views on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, the needs of students with disabilities and potential conflicts of interest arising from her business holdings.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, expressed hope Wednesday that other Republicans would reconsider their support for DeVos.

"The more people get to know how ill-equipped Betsy DeVos is to strengthen public schools, how disconnected she is from public schools, and how her record is focused on pursuing for-profit charters and vouchers and not on helping children, the more the people who believe in the importance of public education are joining to oppose her," Weingarten said.

DeVos, 59, is the wife of Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway marketing fortune. She has spent more than two decades advocating for charter schools in her home state of Michigan, as well as promoting conservative religious values.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael Biesecker, Andrew Taylor, Maria Danilova, Erica Werner, Jennifer C. Kerr and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press and by Coral Davenport of The New York Times.

A Section on 02/03/2017