Conservative Bishop, liberal Grijalva lead polarized energy fight

One is a conservative Republican from Utah who calls President Obama “the most anti-energy extremist president” in the nation’s history and has an A rating from the National Rifle Association.

{mosads}The other is a progressive Democrat from Arizona who has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president and believes healthcare is a right to which every American is entitled.

The political gulf that separates Reps. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is indicative of why the House Natural Resources Committee has become one of the most polarized panels in the House.

While Bishop, the panel’s chairman, is on friendly terms with Grijalva, the ranking Democrat, the two men couldn’t be further apart on the question of how federal land should be used.

Republicans broadly argue that the government should encourage economic activity on federal land and permit oil and natural gas drilling, coal mining, forestry and grazing. Democrats disagree, viewing the land as a public trust that should be passed, unspoiled, to the next generation.

That fundamental difference of opinion colors nearly all of the committee’s work and had been doing so long before Bishop and Grijalva assumed the top spots on the panel at the beginning of 2015.

For years, the committee has had a large bloc of Republicans from big, Western states, where the government owns and manages huge sections of land, much to the dismay of farmers and ranchers nearby.

The committee’s Democratic members, on the other hand, traditionally come from coastal states that have had a vastly different experience with agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.

“What I think my side wants to do is make sure that those people who live in the areas where the lands are have a greater say in what happens to the lands surrounding them,” Bishop said.

“Many of the Democrats on there are from states that do not have public lands,” he said. “That is a significant difference.”

Grijalva acknowledged the divide, saying Democrats “have come to the realization that finding middle ground on some issues has been very difficult, if not impossible, and we’re going to see a replay of certain themes over and over again.”

He ticked off several areas where Democrats simply will not go along with the Republicans, including efforts to scale back endangered species rules, increase oil and natural gas drilling and limit the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The intense polarization is something that Bishop had hoped to avoid last year, when he talked of wanting a fresh start for the committee as chairman.

“What we did is go into this trying to do things differently than we have done in the past,” Bishop said.

“Our premise is: If you always approach the same issues with the same solutions that we have in the past, we’re not going to solve anything. So in everything we have done, we’ve tried to tweak it so it is something different.”

The attempt to break the mold, Bishop said, has been apparent in several areas, including the GOP’s push to reduce wildfires in national forests by encouraging logging; the effort to change the federal government’s main conservation fund to ensure more money goes to the states; and the attempt to pull Puerto Rico out of its debt crisis.

Yet almost all of the legislation that has emerged from the panel under Bishop has drawn a veto threat from President Obama, including bills on national forest management, the California drought and energy extraction on American Indian land. Those bills have also gotten little traction outside of the House.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), chairman of the federal land subcommittee, said the challenge for the GOP is to reverse decades of policies that were supposed to protect the environment but didn’t.

“We’re going through a period of very significant policy transition,” McClintock said. “We’ve had policies in place for the last 40 years that placed enormous restrictions on the use of our natural resources, all with the promise that those changes would improve our environment. And after 40 years of those policies, we’re entitled to ask, ‘How is the environment doing?’ And the answer is absolutely damning.”

Democrats say the GOP’s talk of turning over a new leaf is just that: talk.

“We continue to clash over the same rhetoric and the same ideology,” Grijalva said.

“If there were, on the chairman’s part, a gesture to come forward with a middle ground discussion on some of these issues, we could get something done,” he said, pointing to wilderness, American Indian tribes and National Park Service legislation as opportunities for collaboration.

“It’s already been filed; we just don’t have hearings on these things.”

Grijalva said Bishop and his colleagues have been wasting the committee’s time. A prime example, he said, is the panel’s approach to investigating the disastrous mine waste spill the EPA caused in Colorado last August.

“They found a smoking gun with no smoke,” he said. “To look for some sinister plot or some conspiracy
in order to do this purposefully is a waste of time.”

A better use of energy, Grijalva said, would be legislation to address the thousands of abandoned mines in the West that slowly leak toxic metals into waterways. Republicans have proposed legislation to encourage cleanups of those mines but have rejected Democratic calls to spend billions of dollars on it.

Bishop defended his probe into the mine waste spill and said the EPA hasn’t told the whole story of how it happened.

“It’s very clear that what they said was not accurate,” he said. At a recent hearing, he declared that there was “nothing unintentional” about the incident on the EPA’s part.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said being on the committee has been an “eye-opener” for him.

“Certainly, on the Democratic side, nobody would view that committee as a place where you go to represent industry interests or anything like that,” he said.

“I think our friends on the other side of the aisle are coming from an opposite perspective. It is all about carrying the agenda of various industries, often at the expense of environmental standards and public land management values. So, that creates some pretty bright lines in our perspectives.”

A refining industry official who closely follows the panel’s work said it is “just a viper’s nest of partisanship, and it has been forever. It doesn’t matter really who has the gavel, Republican or Democrat.”

But the official gave Bishop credit, saying the chairman is “doing the best that he can, given the diametrically opposed forces that are on the committee.”