Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whose West is it anyway? Critics of the rebellious Westerners in Congress say they really represent longtime monied interests. Records of the Federal Election Commission show that many of them are heavily financed by campaign money from oil and gas companies, mining and logging interests, developers and growers. A proposed Senate version of the Endangered Species Act, sponsored by Slade Gorton of Washington, was written with the help of timber lobbyists. According to the Western States Center, a campaign-finance research enterprise, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana got more than a fourth of his campaign funding last year from such...
...western-led attack on environmental law proceeded quietly for much of this year, in part because, in a tactic that Democrats long ago raised to an art form, many of the changes were attached as riders to appropriations bills that fund federal activities, rather than stand-alone bills debated openly on the floor of Congress. And many more are tucked away in budget reconciliation bills that will whiz through Congress in the next several weeks. The riders include directives to the Environmental Protection Agency forbidding it to issue standards for measuring arsenic in tap water or to list new hazardous...
...case you didn't recognize it, that's the sound of the Western-state rebellion as it rumbles into the Beltway. With it comes the region's ancient resentment of Washington's rule, the same discontent that has gone national in recent years. It also brings to Capitol Hill the West's most abiding issue, the land: who owns it, how to use it and who decides. Translated into Washington terms, that means ever more heated politics of the environment, as Western lawmakers tear through two decades of regulations. They are doing it with such success that many moderate Republicans...
While Bill Clinton has threatened to veto some issues, last year's Republican sweep has put the Western lawmakers, many of whom are longtime members of Congress, into a position to make good on their agenda. In the Senate, for example, Alaska's Frank Murkowski heads the counterpart panel to Young's House committee on resources. Between them, the two ferociously prodevelopment Alaskans oversee most of the natural-resources legislation that comes before Congress. Alaska's other Republican Senator, Ted Stevens, runs the Governmental Affairs Committee. That gives him a line of fire on the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees...
...favors the law. Instead Young formed an endangered-species task force and turned it over to Representative Richard Pombo, a fourth-generation rancher from California's Central Valley who is at war with the Federal Government over land-use regulations. At Young's direction, Pombo scheduled hearings in rural Western counties. Environmentalists complained that speakers sympathetic to the law were squeezed out. What Pombo heard in abundance were stories of local landowners who didn't see why they should lose the right to develop their property because an endangered species like the San Joaquin kit fox had made itself...