Split Panel Sends Renominated anti-environ. Candidate to Full Senate

[papau]

March 18, 2005
Split Panel Sends Renominated Candidate to Full Senate
By NEIL A. LEWIS

ASHINGTON, March 17 - Voting along strict party lines, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the first of President Bush's appeals court nominees on Thursday, hastening the Senate's march to a large-scale partisan breakdown.<snip>

But before that vote, the committee's Democrats pointedly declined to heed Mr. Specter's plea for brevity, if not silence. Instead, they criticized at length the Myers nomination, which they characterized as part of an effort by President Bush to pack the nation's courts with right-wing ideologues.

Mr. Myers, who spent much of his career lobbying for mining and ranching industries, has a long record of pungent criticism of the environmental movement and especially federal environmental laws. He was a leading voice in the "sagebrush rebellion" in which large Western landowners deplored federal regulators. He once said that federal environmental regulations were akin to George III's tyranny over the American colonies.

"This is the most antienvironmental judicial nominee I have ever seen in my years in the Senate," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking Democrat.

Besides using Mr. Myers's own comments to pummel him, Democrats noted that some of his decisions as chief lawyer in the Interior Department in Mr. Bush's first term were heavily tilted to the mining interests that once employed him.

At the Interior Department, he once drafted a ruling allowing a foreign-owned gold mine to be established on Indian land in California. A federal judge later ruled that Mr. Myers's opinion misconstrued the "clear mandate" of a federal law that, the judge said, was intended to prevent degradation of land.

The regulations that Mr. Myers upheld, the judge wrote, typically "prioritize the interests of miners, who seek to conduct these mining operations over the interests of persons such as plaintiffs," who as environmentalists "seek to conserve and protect the public lands."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/politics/18judge.html