On Wednesday, across the street from the Trump International Hotel in Washington—also d/b/a Emolument Arms—and on the front lawn in front of the Environmental Protection Agency, a small group of government employees and environmental activists gathered to hear speeches critical of Scott Pruitt, the energy industry finger-puppet currently running the EPA, when he’s not flying first-class on the public dime or outfitting his office like CONTROL HQ.

One of the speakers was Dan Kildee, the Michigan congressman who represents Flint, where people are still drinking water that is not necessarily good for them. Kildee had a good run four years ago this month, when Flint was the national crisis of the moment. Since then, of course, the government has changed hands and is now under the control of people for whom Flint is, at best, an afterthought.

“You know, it’s our worst nightmare,” Kildee said. “This philosophy that caused Flint in the first place could be the embraced philosophy of the federal government, it’s almost unthinkable. You have the Trumpist nationalist philosophy, but what [Pruitt] is doing is essentially enabling this pent-up approach that says the federal government has literally no role in the quality of communities or the health of societies. That’s been embraced for a long time by some members of Congress, but he’s ramped it up.”

It was Pruitt’s day before Congress on Thursday. It went pretty much the way you’d expect it would. Pruitt’s deregulatory frenzy, coupled to his luxurious approach to the trappings of his job, had the Democrats dying to get a piece of him. For his part, Pruitt adopted the now-popular approach of being the victim of liberals, the media, endangered species, or some combination of all three.



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Pruitt went before two House committees on Thursday—the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the morning, and the House Appropriations Committee in the afternoon. His story never changed.

I want to correct that and ensure that it does not happen again. Ultimately, the responsibility for identifying and making changes necessary rests with me and no one else. With that being said, facts are facts and fiction is fiction, and a lie doesn't become truth just because it appears on the front page of the newspaper. Much of what has been targeted towards me and my team has been half-truths or, at best, stories that have been so twisted they did not resemble reality and I'm here and I welcome the chance to be here to set the record straight in these areas. But let's have no illusions about what is really going on here. Those who attack the E.P.A. are doing so because they want to attack and derail the president's agenda and undermine this administration's priorities. I'm simply not going to let that happen.

Pruitt ran his rap with the glossy sheen of quasi-religious certitude that marks his every public pronouncement, but that whole “a lie is a lie” business looked a little shabby when he admitted lying in an interview with Fox News’s Ed Henry when he told Henry that he wasn’t involved in handing out some sweet raises to members of his staff—over the objections of this White House, if you can believe that.

(You have to wonder how grotesque these raises were when even the grifters at Camp Runamuck choked on them.)

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Pruitt copped to having authorized the raises, but told the committee that he didn’t know how much money got doled out. This prompted an exchange with Congressman Peter Tonko, Democrat from New York, that caused Pruitt to lapse almost entirely into gibberish, culminating in this almost crystalline piece of grifterspeak.

There was delegation given in my authority.

There were a number of calls for Pruitt to resign, most of them having to do with the elasticity of his ethics regarding the perks and requirements of his position. Diana DeGette, Democrat from Colorado, took the lead in asking Pruitt about his now infamous $43,000 soundproof phone booth that was installed for him at EPA headquarters. Pruitt insisted that he didn’t know how much his cone of silence cost.

I was not aware of the approval of the $43,000, and if I had known about it, congressman, I would not have approved it.

To which Congressman Tony Cardenas, Democrat of California, replied, with no little logic:

If someone was spending $43,000 in my office, I would know about it.

All of this, while undoubtedly serious and certainly cause for Pruitt’s being cast back to Oklahoma, still strikes me as being somewhat beside the point. The real concern is what Pruitt is doing in the job in which he’s chosen to featherbed so comfortably. He defended the administration*’s decision to repeal the Obama Clean Power Plan by barbering the truth. (Pruitt said the plan had been struck down by the Supreme Court. The Court suspended the plan and then Pruitt’s boss got elected.) And he hilariously tried to defend his recent decision to eliminate all that actual pesky science from the EPA’s decision-making.

The real concern is what Pruitt is doing in the job in which he’s chosen to featherbed so comfortably.

He’s floundering. He may well be in his last days. But there’s no question that whoever replaces him will be just as much of a vandal as Pruitt is. As Kildee said, this is a philosophy shared generally at every level of the conservative movement—from its collegiate auxiliaries, through the think-tanks, to the politicians that movement ultimately produces. As for the rest of us, Kildee was right when he told that corporal’s guard gathered on Wednesday outside the offices that Scott Pruitt may not grace for much longer what the real problem is, his words echoing off the walls of the president*’s luxury hotel.

“We all live in Flint now,” he said.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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