Connelly: Jayapal backs a seriously needed caucus in often silly Congress

New EPA regulations would have had a profound impact on the Houston Ship Channel's oil refineries and chemical plants, until rolled back by President Trump. New EPA regulations would have had a profound impact on the Houston Ship Channel's oil refineries and chemical plants, until rolled back by President Trump. Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Staff Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Staff Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Connelly: Jayapal backs a seriously needed caucus in often silly Congress 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

The U.S. House of Representatives has, of late, put it all together: The snail's pace of legislating, ideological posturing and a proliferation of "caucuses" whose main purpose is to spawn tortured justifications.

The House has a Congressional Tennis Caucus, a Congressional Refinery Caucus, a Congressional Chicken Caucus, a Congressional Electromagnetics Pulse Caucus, as well as a Congressional Bangladesh Caucus, the latter courtesy of former Seattle Rep. Jim McDermott.

Newly elected Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., is, however, organizing and co-chairing one caucus that is urgently needed -- the United for Climate and Environmental Justice Task Force.

If you want to see that need, look around ... to "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, where minority residents have lived with toxic landfills and incinerators ... to the Houston Ship Canal in Texas ... and to our own Duwamish River in Seattle, a Superfund cleanup site.

Poor people, and people of color, breathe air that is dirtier than the rest of us. Immigrants fish in "working waterways" turned toxic by industry. Native American reservations house coal plants and coal mines.

The Obama administration in the "other" Washington, and the Murray administration in Seattle, have pushed cleanup. Attorney General Bob Ferguson is suing Monsanto over PCBs. The impressive Duwamish Valley Youth Corps has worked to bring the local community aboard the push for cleanup.

What limited progress we've seen may quickly be ground into toxic dust -- which we must breathe -- as Jayapal pointed out Thursday at the House Triangle.

She referenced new EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic; President Trump pushing for fossil fuel projects on tribal lands (e.g. the Dakota Access pipeline); and efforts to roll back a new national monument in Utah championed by Native Americans.

Said Jayapal, in a mouthful:

"This disregard for native land and for the people who live on it, the neglect of proven science and the stories of those who have seen our environment's changes for generations, the withdrawal from global protections and the false promises of prosperity made to coal miners whose jobs will not return -- this is a dangerous place for us as a country and as a world."

The new caucus, appropriately, is the work of minority House members: Reps. Donald McEachin, D-Va.; Nanette Diaz Barrigan, D-Calif.; and Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

The caucus will need to take its case to the public, since the Natural Resources Committee is home to some of Congress' craziest, most extreme, nature-hating, national-monument loathing Republicans.

They may be minorities, and part of a minority Democratic party in the House, but the caucus is speaking to a wish shared by all Americans.

"The task force was created to protect a single fundamental right that all Americans need clean air, clean water and clean communities. All of us have an interest in building a cleaner economy," said McEachin.

Major national environmental lobbies (e.g. the Sierra Club) and local groups (Washington Conservation Voters) have embraced environmental-justice themes. A bevy of national groups is set to embrace May Day and workers' rights at a press conference on Friday.

The mating of green and red has produced press conference rhetoric -- and a very funny scene in which the Sierra Club embraced Occupy Seattle -- but not much coordination.

The national environmental lobby once known as "Big Green" for its effectiveness is a shadow of what it was in the days of battling the Reagan administration's anti-environmental Interior Secretary James Watt.

The United for Climate and Environmental Justice Task Force brings new blood to the resistance. It is directed at conditions that make the blood boil.