Patrick Leahy: “last Thursday I came to the floor to mark Earth Day, and I wanted to highlight the laser-like focus of the Bush…”

“last Thursday I came to the floor to mark Earth Day, and I wanted to highlight the laser-like focus of the Bush administration in rolling back 30 years of environmental protections. When one looks at their record, it is literally breathtaking. The reason I am concerned about this is that most of our environmental legislation was put together by bipartisan coalitions. In my State of Vermont we do not think of the environment as a Republican or a Democratic issue. We think of it as an issue of protecting what is best about our country and protecting it for not only ourselves but for our children and our grandchildren. Unfortunately, this administration tends to look at the environment as something where they should react to their largest contributors and take advantage of what it may do for them today and let our children and our grandchildren worry about it tomorrow. Why do I say this? Three years into office, the Bush administration has taken well over 300 actions to weaken and sometimes to gut environmental protections to clean the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. They have taken huge steps to hand over our public lands to timber, oil and gas companies for more drilling and logging. With this record, it is no wonder that the administration continues to use every page of its public playbook to downplay the effect of these rollbacks.”