President Obama and his bureaucrats laughed at the citizens of West Virginia and our representatives for eight years as they waged their wicked war on coal (on behalf of other energy interests, foreign and domestic), but who's laughing now?
We are, and so is U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins.
“Make no mistake: The Obama administration and his EPA have declared a war on West Virginia coal and West Virginia coal jobs, and Logan County’s Spruce No. 1 mine is just one target,” Jenkins said two years ago when he cosponsored Rep. David McKinley's thrice-introduced bill to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from retroactively vetoing valid permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“This week we will join together with the House to send President Obama and the EPA a strong message: No more attacks on coal. No more attacks on domestic energy. No more attacks on the people who produce energy.”
That's what Jenkins proclaimed later that year on the eve of two bipartisan votes to repeal the EPA's limits on emissions from existing plants and block its rules on emissions from new plants.
“Coal jobs provide a true, living wage that support a family,” Jenkins told EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy last year at a House Subcommittee hearing on the EPA budget. “Coal jobs also come with really good benefits. . . . But not anymore. The bankruptcies of our country’s largest coal companies have left pensioners and widows desperate for help. And because of your actions, West Virginia now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the entire country.”
That was then, and this is now.
“This budget supports the EPA’s core functions without furthering the radical environmental agenda we saw under the Obama administration,” Jenkins said just recently about the bill he helped write on the Interior Subcommittee, a bill that cuts EPA's 2018 funding by more than half a billion dollars.
He who laughs last, laughs best.