In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best idea to confirm someone to head the EPA who was at that very moment a plaintiff in a baker’s dozen lawsuits against that very agency. In less than two years, Scott Pruitt has managed to combine institutional vandalism and personal trough-diving in a virtually unprecedented fashion.

Just in the past few days, he has rolled back mileage standards instituted by the previous administration, a move that is almost certainly going to get him and the EPA sued by the state of California, whose standards were the model for the new federal ones. From The Washington Post:

“This is a politically motivated effort to weaken clean vehicle standards with no documentation, evidence or law to back up that decision,” Mary Nichols, head of the California Air Resources Board, said in a statement. She argued that the move would “demolish” the nation’s shift toward cleaner cars and that “EPA’s action, if implemented, will worsen people’s health with degraded air quality and undermine regulatory certainty for automakers.”

Meanwhile, Pruitt seems to have missed few opportunities to live fat off the largesse of the federal government he purports to distrust. We've learned even more about Pruitt's travel preferences, and then there’s the sweetheart $50-per-night lodgings in D.C. that he got from the wife of a man who lobbies for the energy industries for whom Pruitt has been a career finger-puppet.

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In a magnificent coincidence of the kind common to the swamp this administration* was allegedly installed to drain, the lobbyist in question got a favorable ruling from EPA on a pipeline project near and dear to the heart-like organs of his clients. And what swell clients they are. From The New York Times:

“Entering into this arrangement causes a reasonable person to question the integrity of the E.P.A. decision,” said Don Fox, who served as general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics during parts of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. The March 2017 action by the E.P.A. on the pipeline project — in the form of a letter telling the State Department that the E.P.A. had no serious environmental objections — meant that the project, an expansion of the Alberta Clipper line, had cleared a significant hurdle. The expansion, a project of Enbridge Inc., a Calgary-based energy company, would allow hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil a day to flow through this pipeline to the United States from Canadian tar sands.

The signoff by the E.P.A. came even though the agency, at the end of the Obama administration, had moved to fine Enbridge $61 million in connection with a 2010 pipeline episode that sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and other waterways. The fine was the second-largest in the history of the Clean Water Act, behind the penalty imposed after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

On MSNBC on Sunday, Hugh Hewitt tried to run interference for his old pal, Pruitt, only to have Richard Painter blow him up in a vastly entertaining fashion.

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Of course, if my son was working for Pruitt, as Hewitt’s son does, then I might conclude that Pruitt is the very model of the modern major environmentalist.

The primary engine of Pruitt’s entire career—and, believe me, he’s got plans for the future, too—has been contempt: contempt for the government, contempt for the environment, contempt for science, and contempt for any concept of limits on any of the people to whom he has sold his favor.

In this, he is the most powerful example of the fact that what Republicans now deplore as “Trumpism” existed in their party long before the president* came along. There is nothing that Pruitt has done—both in office and out—that would not have been done under any Republican president since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. (Listening to Hewitt explain how “policy” was driving the resistance to Pruitt’s vandalism was to hear even further evidence of this proposition.) Trumpism is modern conservatism with dementia, but the policies were less than sane all along.

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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