Political Quotes

“If I recall the facts of this correctly, not only did he shut down the environmental unit of the department of the attorney general, but in subsequent reporting you could not find a dollar allocated to environmental activities in the Oklahoma attorney general's budget. And he abandoned what his predecessor, Drew Edmondson, had been running, which was not just to have an environmental enforcement unit within the department of the attorney general, but also to have an environmental enforcement team that brought together Federal folks, State regulators, water officials, and put together the multiagency task force that prosecuted environmental cases--gone also. Finally, Drew Edmondson used to do an annual report, as I recall, on the successes of his environmental enforcement and his environmental task force, the multiagency group. That was gone too. In addition to all of those facts, what worries me a little bit--you know, one of the things we have to assess in this process is the credibility of the nominee. Are they going to tell you the truth in the nomination process? If they are not going to tell you the truth in the nomination process, you are probably going to get a lot of malarkey out of them down the road as well. He took the position that he actually had not gotten rid of the environmental unit. He said he had moved it into a new unit--the federalism unit--which, if you go to their own website and read about the federalism unit, it says it is an appellate.…”