Pruitt, the EPA, and Asthma

Cory Booker (Sen-NJ), after laying out all the lawsuits that Scott Pruitt, now nominated to head the EPA, has participated in on behalf of polluters (against the EPA). Booker asked: Do you know how many kids in Oklahoma have asthma?

Pruitt: I do not Senator.

It turns out about 400,000. 10%. He’s never “represented” those kids, just the polluters. Pruitt says he can’t sue if there’s no injury or standing. Booker responds – clearly there’s an air pollution problem, but Pruitt hasn’t done anything about it.

Here’s the clip.

Booker might talk about this in the context of disability instead of disease, if he asked my advice, but it’s a good clip, and he didn’t.

Read this The Guardian op-ed: Environmental racism is going to get much worse.

Read this on the intensifying and unified Democratic resistance. In it, the author describes the Booker/Pruitt scene as follows:

Today, Cory Booker questioned Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee for E.P.A. administrator, who, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, not only joined a dozen industry lawsuits against the E.P.A. but at times directly copied the language of energy-company lawyers in doing so. Booker asked Pruitt if he knew how many children in Oklahoma had asthma. He didn’t, but the answer turned out be a hundred and eleven thousand, a tenth of the children in the state. “You’ve been writing letters on behalf of polluting industries,” Booker said. “I want to ask you, how many letters did you write to the E.P.A. about this health crisis?” Pruitt tried to explain that lawsuits require an injured party and that, in the case of the E.P.A. litigation, the injured parties were the energy corporations. “Injury?” Booker said, drawing out the word, and then he returned to the matter of all those asthmatic kids in Oklahoma.

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