A congressional investigation of Vice President Dick Cheney that got under way this week is good news to scientists who want to put science first, says Congressman Mike Thompson.
“Tuesday”s hearing is a loud message to everyone in public service that they are there to do a job based on their expertise. If the vice president calls, he doesn”t have the authority to change science,” Thompson told KZYX&Z public radio.
The House Committee on Natural Resources began hearings Tuesday on how interference by Cheney may have led to the deaths of 70,000 salmon on the Klamath River. A group of 36 House Democrats, led by Thompson, most from California and Oregon, asked committee chairman Nick Rahall to hold the oversight hearing following publication of an investigative news story by The Washington Post. The article documented how Cheney allegedly contacted mid-level bureaucrats to do his political bidding. Some of them have resigned and others have been promoted.
Cheney was invited but didn”t attend the hearing, and his office declined to comment when contacted by the national media.
“To no one”s surprise, he didn”t show up,” Thompson said. “More important is that these issues were aired. We found out new things today. We found specially that the administration violated the process which requires coordination with biologists and scientific opinions. They just neglected to do that — The person who engineered this has been promoted to a position where he has authority over all the endangered species. That gives us all reason for great concern,” Thompson added.
A 2004 report by the Inspector General of the Interior Department found no basis for a claim by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry that White House political advisers interfered in developing water policy in the Klamath River Basin in California and Oregon.
But the committee learned that investigators did not ask about Cheney — and no Interior Department employee volunteered information about him, the Associated Press reported. Kerry and other Democrats were so sure White House adviser Karl Rove was responsible they never asked about Cheney, Mary Kendall, Deputy Interior Inspector General said at Tuesday”s hearing.
Thompson said even more interesting testimony could come from a former high-ranking Interior official, Sue Ellen Wooldridge. She told The Washington Post that Cheney called her about the Klamath River shortly after inauguration.
“She thought it was a crank call at first,” Thompson said on KZYX&Z.
The calls allegedly continued, and Wooldridge oversaw changes in Klamath policy.
Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-West Virginia, said he was concerned that Wooldridge did not reveal her contacts with Cheney to the inspector general”s office. Wooldridge resigned in January amid news reports she purchased a pricey vacation home in partnership with former Interior Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles and Don Duncan, a ConocoPhillips lobbyist. Wooldridge recently married Griles, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal.
Michael Kelly, a biologist who worked on Klamath issues for the National Marine Fisheries Service, told the committee on Tuesday that “someone at a higher level” instructed his team of scientists to endorse a plan to divert water to Klamath farmers, regardless of the consequences to fish.
Tuesday”s hearing comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would review a small number of Endangered Species Act decisions that were made with “inappropriate influence” by former Interior Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Wildlife and Parks Julie MacDonald.
The two events prompted a statement by Francesca Grifo, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists:
“Fixing this problem requires genuine leadership. Tough political decisions should be made with honesty and integrity. These appear to have been made with neither,” Grifo said.
During the Bush/Cheney administration, the listing of endangered and threatened species has slowed to a fraction of the number that George Bush Sr. made in only four years (58 new listings compared with 231), and most of those were court-ordered, the Christian Science Monitor reported.
New funding has been cut as well, and only 278 candidate species are waiting to join the list of 1,352. Seven of 10 biologists believe the sixth great extinction currently under way is a greater threat to life on Earth than even global climate change, according to Mother Jones magazine.
Republican Reps. Wally Herger and John Doolittle of California and Greg Walden of Oregon say the hearing could reopen wounds even as farmers, fishermen, Indian tribes and environmentalists near solutions to the regional water woes, the Associated Press reported.
Herger, whose district includes California agricultural areas irrigated by the Klamath project, said it was only proper for Cheney and administration officials to be involved in developing a 10-year water plan for the Klamath River. Courts later called the plan arbitrary and a violation of the Endangered Species Act.
Meanwhile, commercial fishermen in Oregon and California held a conference call Monday to tell personal stories of economic hardship, which several said was connected to Cheney”s 2002 actions. Commercial fishing in the two states was cut by more than 90 percent last year — the largest commercial fishing closure in the country”s history — resulting in more than $60 million in damage to coastal economies.
“In all my years, I”ve never seen it so tough as it has been these last couple of years,” fisherman Larry Collins of San Francisco told the Associated Press.
The 2002 fish kill on the Klamath, believed to have been caused by water diversions to farms, triggered Endangered Species Act protections for threatened Chinook salmon and endangered short-nosed sucker fish in the river. That led to the most severe restrictions ever on commercial fishing in the Pacific Ocean, which spelled disaster for the West Coast fishing fleet.
“There is a working group on the Klamath Basin now trying to solve this problem. We need to be sure they are allowed to do that without the velvet glove of the administration coming in to change the science,” said Thompson.
He said the problem was allowed to get out of hand because the Republican-controlled Congress held no oversight hearings for six years.
“This administration has tried to manipulate science on everything from water flows on the Klamath Basin to stem cell research,” Thompson said. “We need to make sure we have a Congress that will provide oversight to make sure this doesn”t continue to happen.”
Using Republican Christine Todd Whitman as a primary source, The Washington Post documented Cheney”s efforts to ease pollution restrictions and write scientifically questionable rules defeated even President Bush”s “Clear Skies” plan, the story showed.
Whitman left her post as head of the EPA in 2003 over Cheney”s manipulations to roll back air pollution restrictions.
A federal appeals court has since found that a rule change to allow for more pollution violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world.”
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected two other policies closely associated with Cheney. It rebuffed the effort, ongoing since Whitman”s resignation, to loosen some rules under the Clean Air Act. The court also rebuked the administration for not regulating greenhouse gases associated with global warming, issuing its ruling less than two months after Cheney declared that “conflicting viewpoints” remain about the extent of the human contribution to the problem.
While Cheney was mum on the salmon kill, he has been having a big week with the media, admitting Monday on “Larry King Live” that he was wrong four years ago to say the Iraqi insurgency was “in its death throes,” but ardently defending the way the war has been pursued. On Tuesday, Cheney was back on broadcast outlets, defending his convicted former chief of staff Scooter Libby, fighting closure of Guantanamo Bay prison and calling bi-partisan efforts to oust Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez a “witch hunt.”
“I don”t think it is news to anyone that he doesn”t believe he answers to anyone,” Thompson said. “He always knows what”s right, and he will pursue what he wants to pursue no matter what. Congress needs to keep the pressure on so this nonsense doesn”t continue.”
