There is no use pandering to the left with this nomination. They will never be happy with the right on this issue. That's what Bush learned with Cristie Whitman.
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washingtonpost.com
EPA Nominee Questioned by Senate Panel
Leavitt Says He Would Seek 'Productive Middle'
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page A04
President Bush's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency calmly fielded three hours of often hostile questions about the administration's environmental record yesterday and told senators he would pursue balanced and moderate policies.
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (R) told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that he would be a "problem solver" operating from the "productive middle" to resolve disputes among industry, environmentalists and other stakeholders.
"I passionately believe that this nation deserves to have a clean and safe and healthy environment," Leavitt said. "I also believe that the United States can increase the velocity of our environmental progress, and that we can do it without compromising our competitive position economically in the world."
Leavitt, 52, a three-term governor, has a mixed environmental record, advocates say. He brokered a multistate agreement to reduce regional haze that has darkened the skies over the Grand Canyon. But he also frequently sided with industry in disputes and secretly negotiated an agreement with the Interior Department last April that removes millions of acres in Utah from protected status, a move environmental groups opposed.
Although his nomination could stall in the Senate over presidential politics and other matters, Democrats were generally friendly and careful not to directly attack his record or his character.
"I believe that too many of our country's environmental policies are being cooked by political chefs in the White House" that serve powerful anti-environmental interests, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "And what we have today is a situation where into this political cauldron comes a good man -- somebody that I have known as straightforward and decent and bipartisan."
Leavitt sidestepped most of the Democrats' questions about the administration's environmental record -- including a recent decision to relax air pollution standards for aging coal-fired power plants, the sharp drop in Superfund toxic site cleanups since Bush took office, the reversal of his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and criticism of the EPA's handling of the cleanup around the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has said she will put a hold on the nomination on the Senate floor to force the administration to respond to the EPA inspector general's findings that the White House instructed the agency to soften its publicized assessment of dangers posed by dust and debris from the skyscrapers' collapse.
"I just cannot accept that there seems to have been a deliberate effort at the direction of the White House to provide unwarranted reassurances to New Yorkers about whether their air was safe to breathe," she said.
But mostly, Democrats questioned why Leavitt would give up a governorship to head the embattled EPA. Many voiced skepticism that he would have any more success than did former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman in shaping environmental policy that frequently has been dictated by White House political advisers.
"You may be in charge of managing, but you're not in charge of policy -- somebody else is," Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) told Leavitt. "There's a reason why Christie Todd Whitman left. She was not in charge."
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said, "You've got a lot of guts taking this job, because you're in a big hole to start with."
Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the committee, called Leavitt "supremely qualified" to head the EPA, and criticized Democrats for using the hearing as a proxy fight over Bush's environmental record.
"I'm confident we'll hear the drumbeat of denunciations that began the day President Bush took office," he said.
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