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After 17 ethics investigations, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, like former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt before him, was brought down by his own bad behavior. Although both were ousted, we still face with the painful and lasting damage they inflicted on our environment, our communities and our public lands.
Investigations into Pruitt and Zinke’s ethics violations — even the odd stuff — are necessary and prudent. Americans deserve to know how their tax money was shamelessly abused to fund lavish lifestyles and trips around the world. Any public official who abuses their position as grossly as Pruitt and Zinke did deserves to be excoriated for their actions.
We must not lose sight of the incredible damage these two cabinet members inflicted on communities across this country. Rolling back essential environmental and safety protections, handing over our public lands and waters to fossil fuel corporations and placating the agrichemical industry at the expense of public health are the real crises here — not soundproof phone booths or ridiculously expensive office doors.
The good news is that we can stop the worst of these actions and prevent any further damage. Now in the majority, Democrats in the House must use their mandate to investigate, expose and end the worst of Pruitt and Zinke’s policies.
Instead of protecting our environment and public health, Pruitt’s Environmental Protection Agency reversed a number of regulations meant to protect our clean air and water, curb the worst pollution from the fossil fuel industry and safeguard America’s waterways. Perhaps most alarming, Pruitt ignored scientists at the EPA and refused to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is known to cause brain damage in children.
Zinke took a similar track at DOI. He stripped nearly 2 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments over the objections of tribes on whose ancestral lands the monuments sit. We know from unredacted emails accidentally released by DOI that they did so to benefit the oil and coal industries. This is just the latest affront to communities that have suffered centuries of exploitation, oppression and violence at the hands of our government.
The rape of America continues, though more subtle, in the EPA with Pruitt’s replacements. No doubt that will happen in the DOI as well until the Democratic House uses their authority to stop this and the same in other cabinets in Trump’s administration.
". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast
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