When: February 15, 2018
Where: Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Title: “The Costs of Denying Border Patrol Access: Our Environment and Security”
What Happened: Republicans not only demanded we build a tremendously expensive, unpopular and ineffective wall across our border with Mexico — they used the hearing to try to convince the public that we desperately need more waivers of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and many more crucial environmental and public health laws to get it done.
How did they make such an unusual argument? Simple — by claiming, without any evidence, that these laws are getting in the way of effective law enforcement. Never mind that they’ve previously made the same demands by claiming these laws are bad for the economy (which isn’t true and hasn’t worked) — they thought they’d take “national security” out for a spin.
What makes this entire exercise so peculiar is the fact that not even law enforcement agencies are making these demands. The Secretary of Homeland Security already has unprecedented, sweeping, and possibly unconstitutional authority to waive “all legal requirements” in order to construct barriers (e.g. fences and walls) and roads along the border, including on federal lands. In fact, the Secretary has exercised this authority since 2005, and has waived a total of 48 different legal requirements. A Memorandum of Understanding between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of the Interior (DOI) already allows Customs and Border Patrol agents to take any action necessary in pursuit of unauthorized border crossings on federal lands.
Locals don’t agree with Republicans on this — a fact they tend to ignore. Scott Nicol, the Democratic witness at the hearing who serves as co-chair of the Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign, spoke for border communities around the country when he called Republicans’ bluff in response to a question from Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.):
I live in a border community. I live in McAllen, Texas, just a few miles north of the border. And the general feeling among people who are aware of the waiver of laws that is in place currently for the wall is a sense of offense that we don’t have the same level of legal protections that the rest of the country has — that someone in the interior of the nation has the protection of the Safe Drinking Water Act, but the Safe Drinking Water Act was waived to build the border wall. All of my drinking water has to come through that [waiver area] to get to my home because all of my drinking water comes from the Rio Grande.
You know, we live in safe communities. McAllen is one of the safest communities in Texas. El Paso is one of the safest communities in the United States. Border communities are not overrun, horrifying, dangerous war zones.
If you’ve followed border issues for any length of time, you know Mr. Nicol was correct, as Politifact pointed out in May 2017:
Studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the native-born population, though the Trump administration often backs its tough stance against illegal immigration with claims that immigrants bring a wave of crime and threaten public safety. [. . .]
FBI data shows they have lower violent crime rates than other places (though the FBI has cautioned against making safety comparisons), and some local crime statistics show drops in crime in recent years.
To be clear, that “drop in crime in recent years” doesn’t refer to any part of the Trump administration — it refers to the latter part of President Obama’s tenure. Republicans like to play fast and loose with these numbers to paint a picture of a border region in perpetual crisis and Democratic leaders as soft-on-crime dangers to their own communities. There is simply no evidence to support any of these characterizations.
This didn’t go unnoticed at the hearing. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the vice ranking member of the full Committee, questioned Republicans’ commitment to hearing local voices, which they insist is what drives their anti-environment agenda:
Unfortunately, although I’ve heard my colleagues across the aisle say many times that local voices are the most important, it seems that it’s only certain voices that matter. There’s some selective listening going on. They seem to hear only the local voices that they agree with when it comes to things like national monuments, and certainly with this rhetoric around border security we’re hearing today.
Republicans weren’t content to blame environmental laws for all the imagined horrors of the border region. Here’s Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) claiming Arizona is getting “tons of illegals” suffering from tuberculosis because of the state’s ability to treat the disease — a variation on the same basic, casually dehumanizing Republican claims about immigrants that have been debunked on a regular basis for years now.
The hearing, in other words, was not a serious investigation of the environmental impacts of a potential border wall. Republicans on the Committee spent almost two hours making unsubstantiated claims about immigrants and our nation’s environmental laws instead of trying to learn anything new, much less solve real problems.
Our border regions have serious issues that a hearing like this could have addressed — regional climate change impacts on human quality of life and wildlife habitats, the increasing severity of drought in the West, a chronic lack of infrastructure in the region’s Native American communities, future projections for water availability. . .
We didn’t get to those issues, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Nor does it mean Republicans are finished using the “national security” excuse to weaken our environmental laws. Indeed, environmental laws are already being waived along our southern border in the name of building a wall that President Trump still has yet to get Mexico to pay for.
On Feb. 10, the New York Times reported on the potential costs to the country of President Trump’s infrastructure plan, whose authors decided to pretend climate change doesn’t exist. As the paper reported, “Engineers and researchers say that construction plans should consider these design constraints at the outset. Their concern is that a plan led by a White House that has both discounted climate science and weakened climate change regulations could mean that costly projects may be vulnerable to damage or, in a worst-case scenario, quickly rendered obsolete by the changing environment.”
The Bureau of Reclamation, among other agencies in the Committee’s jurisdiction, would be heavily involved in any national infrastructure project of this magnitude. But the Republican attitude on this Committee has remained consistent: What climate regulations? What changing environment? What rising sea levels? What heat waves? What?
On Feb. 14, the Associated Press reported that Ranking Member Grijalva and Rep. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) were seeking more information from Secretary Zinke about his radical transformation of DOI and its agencies — an overhaul expected to extend down to rank-and-file staffers’ ability to do their jobs and enforce the laws they were hired to uphold. Republicans decided not to invite any administration witnesses to the one hearing the Committee held on the reorganization — an issue we’ll revisit in a future Wasted Resources update.
A Feb. 15 analysis showed how heavily the Trump administration’s budget proposal tilted federal spending in favor of wealthy oil and gas companies and against environmental quality. When we did hold a hearing on the budget proposal on March 15, the biggest headline wasn’t these discrepancies — it was Secretary Zinke addressing Rep. Colleen Hanabusa (D-Hawaii) by saying “konnichiwa,” which wasn’t even the appropriate greeting for the occasion.
As usual, Democrats were busy that week.
On Feb. 12, Ranking Member Grijalva called for a public airing of who influenced the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to environmental budgets across the federal government. “We need to know whose idea it was to release a budget that throws the entire country under the bus, including the Pentagon,” Grijalva said at the time. “Secretary Zinke and his deputies have put lobbyists in charge of environmental policy and produced nothing but financial scandals and ugly conflicts of interest after their first year in office. Until he explains who wrote the environmental portion of this budget, what conflicts of interest they may have, and whose idea it was to slash everything but oil, gas and coal funding, nobody can take this document seriously.”
That same day, Grijalva highlighted the addition of the 219th cosponsor of his bill permanently reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund, giving the bill enough cosponsors to pass the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis. Republican leadership never brought the bill up for a vote, and the program’s fate — as of this publication — is in doubt while Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) holds out for a “package” that holds LWCF hostage to his unrelated priorities.
On Feb. 13, Grijalva blasted the Trump administration’s decision to do away with an Obama rule limiting companies’ ability to waste natural gas drilled on public lands by venting or flaring it. The Obama rule made it more advantageous for companies to minimize such waste and capture as much natural gas as possible because it’s a valuable public resource. The administration’s proposal was so unpopular that the Republican-controlled Senate rejected it in 2017, which didn’t stop Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke from moving forward anyway.
On Feb. 16, Grijalva questioned DOI’s apparent (or feigned) ignorance of the enormous conflicts of interest presented by Mike Noel, the Utah state legislator who helped mastermind the destruction of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Noel owns property in the area.
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