Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Moments before a scheduled vote on Thursday on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee announced a boycott. One result was to delay her confirmation, which still seems virtually certain in the long run since Democrats control the committee as well as the full Senate. The other result was to make the Republicans look not only vindictive but supremely childish.

Their stated reason for the boycott was that Ms. McCarthy, who had already been bombarded in earlier hearings with 1,079 questions, spoken and written, had not sufficiently answered what Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican and ringleader of the group, called 5 important “transparency requests.” What was really transparent was the Republicans’ true motive. They detest E.P.A. and the regulatory authority it possesses (authority granted to it, by the way, by Congress) to clean up the air and water and, in general, take steps to safeguard public health. The transparency issue was merely cover for deep-seated ideological objections to the agency’s basic mission.



A case in point was the request that the agency undertake “whole economy” cost-benefits analysis of its rules and regulations. Ms. McCarthy had earlier replied that the agency already conducts detailed, peer-reviewed analyses of those rules. So what more do Mr. Vitter and his colleagues expect? They want the agency to superimpose on its own reviews an industry-friendly cost-benefit model that — in addition to adding new layers of bureaucratic red tape — could also lead to weaker regulation. Their other requests would impose similarly time-consuming and non-essential burdens.

Few people saw this boycott coming, In fact, the questioning of Ms. McCarthy when she recently appeared before the committee was gentle, even pro-forma. What happened? One line of reasoning is that a couple of true Tea Partiers — Marco Rubio and Rand Paul — have lately been raising loud objections to Ms. McCarthy’s aggressive (and thoroughly proper) use of Clean Air Act to impose tough new regulations on mercury and other emissions from power plants — and that Republicans on the committee have felt obliged to knuckle under.

In any case, the Senate Republicans are now beginning to act and sound just like the House Republicans who have spent the last two years trying to undermine the E.P.A. at every turn. What’s truly dumb about this charade is that Ms. McCarthy is not an ideologue. She is tough, she believes deeply in the country’s basic environmental statutes. But she is also known as a good listener and negotiator, has served with distinction in key environmental posts in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and, more to the point, has broad backing among mainstream Republicans — the sort of Republicans who no longer exist in the House and, it appears, are headed swiftly for extinction in the Senate.