From the Charleston Post and Courier and Republicans for Environmental Protection:
By David Jenkins, REP vice president for government and political affairs, and Chester Sansbury, South Carolina REP coordinator, published November 20, 2009, in the Post and Courier in Charleston, SC
Sen. Lindsey Graham has been taking some heat since he stepped forward to seek a bipartisan compromise on critical climate change and energy security issues facing our country.
There have been expensive and misleading ad campaigns attacking Sen. Graham, such as that launched by the American Energy Alliance — a shadowy, oil industry-financed group.
Attacks from vested interests trying to protect the status quo are predictable and their motivations easily understood. Harder to understand is the flak that Graham is getting from a vocal faction of Republicans who have been led to believe that he has committed apostasy by setting aside partisanship in order to solve climate and energy problems that threaten America’s future.
One of the most egregious examples is the Charleston County GOP Executive Committee’s recent vote to censure Sen. Graham.
Their complete rejection of Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” with regard to Graham is an example of how radicalized some in the GOP have become.
To argue that Graham is not a conservative is absurd. Graham has a 90 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and an “A” from the National Rifle Association.
A fact lost on the radicals is that Graham’s constructive approach virtually ensures that Democrat-crafted climate bills, such as the one passed by the House in June, will be supplanted by more balanced legislation that includes greater incentives for nuclear energy and other types of domestic energy production.
Also escaping the radicals’ attention is that cap-and-trade is a Republican idea that has its roots in the Reagan administration.
Democrats once opposed establishing a marketplace to make it profitable for companies to limit emissions. They favored a regulatory approach with the strong arm of government dictating the outcome instead of leveraging the power of the business community. Fortunately, Reagan Republican free-market principles won out and were used to address the acid rain problem in the early 1990s, reducing sulfur-dioxide emissions faster and at a lower cost than originally projected.
Are we to believe that, simply because Democrats have finally accepted the idea, cap-and-trade is no longer conservative?
The radicals have forgotten that responsible environmental stewardship is a conservative value that has been championed by great conservatives and Republicans throughout history.
In fact, it was President Reagan who first took action to protect our climate from dangerous emissions.
When faced with mounting scientific concern about ozone depletion, Reagan ignored the rancor from radicals and special interests who wanted to ignore the problem. Instead, he listened carefully to the experts and took prudent action to safeguard our atmosphere. He pushed through the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that began phasing out the ozone-depleting chemicals used in aerosol sprays and refrigeration equipment.
Under the rigid scrutiny of today’s libertarian-inspired radicals who occupy the furthest reaches of the GOP’s right-wing, one has to question if even President Reagan could pass muster.
Reagan’s style of leadership was far removed from the radical ideology and rigid litmus tests we’re seeing too often in today’s GOP. Reagan shrewdly balanced bipartisanship with conservative principles in order to build support for his agenda.
Reagan knew and reminded his fellow Republicans often that stewardship is a conservative value.
In a 1984 speech, Reagan put it this way: “If we’ve learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it’s common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources.”
Those are wise words from a great conservative.
While Sen. Graham seems to have taken them to heart, the Charleston County GOP Executive Committee clearly has not.
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