Eight members of Congress from Washington, from both parties, have received a Friend of the National Parks award from the nonpartisan National Parks and Conservation Association.

Hm.  Next paragraph? …

One key lawmaker is visibly absent from the list — Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Washington, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee which has jurisdiction over the National Park Service.

The “bi-partisan make up” phrase is a bit of a misnomer.  The two Senators from Washington made the list, and the six Democrats in Congress.  And one Republican from the Seattle suburbs — Reichert.  So, it may not all that notable that Hastings didn’t make this “bi-partisan” list, except for the position he came into at the advent of the Republican Congressional take-over in 2011 — overseeing such things and all.

I suppose there’s an overlap here, but “Friend of Park” Reichert is also one of the Republican dissenters who threw his lot behind the Tyrannical Eco-Light Bulb:

Six of Washington’s nine U.S. House members on Tuesday voted not to roll back light bulb efficiency standards, in a test of the Tea Party’s clout in Congress’ lower chamber.
That’s the five Democrats and …
Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., was one of just 10 of 241 House Republicans to support the efficiency standards, which passed in 2007 with Republican sponsorship and were signed into law by President Bush.
And not Doc Hastings, as I guess you can expect.  Quick!  Someone find me the original light bulb vote!

Back to the Parks:

[Norman] Dicks is a notable “Friend,” having worked on the House Appropriations Committee to restore adequate funding to the Park Service.  Olympic National Park is in his district.

Differing definition on what it means to be a “friend” of the parks:

Doc Hastings has been active on park issues.  He cosponsored legislation that allows people to carry concealed weapons in national parks, reversing a 26-year Park Service policy.

See?  Friend of Parks!!!  Or at least Friend of some users of the park, the “most productive users” and all that…:

Can uranium mining on 1 million acres surrounding Grand Canyon National Park generate enough economic activity to offset any potential contamination of the watersheds that drain into the national park and the Colorado River? […]
“… With 2,200 uranium mining claims within 10 miles of the canyon, Congress can either choose mining interests or the generations of Americans who cherish this amazing place, the tourism industry and jobs that depend on it, and the millions of people who rely on the Colorado River as a clean source of drinking water,” he added.
Rep. Doc Hastings, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, sees the Interior bill as accomplishing “the difficult goal of ending runaway government spending while still providing funding to both protect and harness our nation’s natural resources.”
“… the bill prevents the Interior Department and EPA from carrying out several unilateral policy decisions that could lock-up American energy, harm our economies, and cost thousands of jobs throughout rural America,” the Washington state Republican said.

AND…

Today, the House Committee on Natural Resources plans to go over a suite of bills that the Department of Interior says would exempt it from complying with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)–“the cornerstone law guiding environmental protection and public involvement in Federal actions,” as the Bureau of Land Management’s deputy director, Mike Pool, put it to the committee last month. The House could also vote on a bill that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to override state-issued permits for coal companies, factories, wastewater treatment plants, and other enterprises that dispose of their waste in waterways, if the terms of the permit do not adequately protect streams and lakes.

These are just a few of the ways that House Republicans are going after environmental laws, and environmental groups are flipping out. David Goldston, the director of government affairs at the National Resources Defense Council, told reporters on Monday that Republicans are “actually going back and changing fundamental statutes of environmental and health protections in ways that haven’t been true in 40 years.”

House appropriations bills must pass through the Senate and across the president’s desk, of course. But in the last round of financial negotiations, centered on April’s continuing resolution that funded the government for the rest of the year, anti-environmental riders that made it through the House became law. Those riders presaged the policies the House is looking at now. Congress backed off protecting endangered species by allowing Idaho and Montana to delist wolves. It also undid the Obama administration’s efforts to use public lands temporarily for conservation by classifying them as wild lands. The bills under consideration now advocate the exact opposite approach to the use of public lands: They will allow these tracts to be used quickly for energy generation without requiring that companies follow long-established procedures that protect animals, plants, and human health.

Much of this policy originated in the national resources committee, led by Representative Doc Hastings of Washington state. Hastings is the type of Republican who thinks the government should do everything in its power to bring gas prices down. That includes extracting oil and gas resources from public lands, even if those fuels will provide only a short and partial respite from the pain of paying $4 per gallon for gas. Oil and gas interest have contributed more money than any other industry to his campaigns.

Last I checked, the Doc Hastings wikipedia team had the entry state that the majority of Hastings’s campaign funds come from in-state.  You prioritize whatever information you want to prioritize, I suppose.
It is arguably better to reference the “Doc hastings wikipedia team” as having a broader focus — their most important editings on wikipedia probably concerns Jay Inslee.  –  Since my last post covering what they’ve done on wikipedia, there’s only one change at the article — an editor exchanging the phrase “far left” in favor of “liberal leaning” in describing the congressional seat Inslee moved to and won in 1998, though the rest of that section remains as the Hastings-istas wrote it — which is to say, silly.

Here, to be fair, is the final sentence in the Seattle PI column mentioning Hastings’s bringing concealed guns into the national parks — “Friends of the Parks” and all that:

He has also sponsored legislation to rebuild the Stehekin River road, a key access route into the North Cascades National Park.  The road was washed out in a 2003 storm.

Hastings — one of the boring ones in the 435 seat House, and one of the ones who are never going to lose an election again.  But I insist someone cover him specifically as,  even having accrued some power from the Republican return to Congressional control, gets no press except deep into articles.  See here.:

As the Republicans in Congress continue to push President Obama to approve deep budget cuts as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, most of them refuse to repeal a program that seems like a clear case of wasteful spending. In response to a World Trade Organization ruling that American cotton subsidies were unfair, the U.S. responded by sending $147 million in subsidies to Brazilian cotton farmers, in addition to the $835 million American cotton farmers received in 2010. The House recently voted to repeal this policy, against the wishes of most Republican members
141 of the 242 GOP representatives voted to preserve the measure. Notably, several of the House GOP’s top leaders voted to continue subsidizing Brazilian cotton farmers. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA-7), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (CA-22), and Ways and Means Committee Chairman David Camp (MI-4) all voted down the repeal despite the fiscally conservative rhetoric they have all deployed extensively in recent months. […]
GOP opposition to repealing the subsidy is especially striking in light of how common it has become on the right to criticize Obama for subsidizing Brazilian oil companies while restricting domestic drilling. Rep. Doc Hastings (WA-4), who earlier criticized Obama for trying to “shift our foreign energy dependence from one part of the world to another” by subsidizing Brazilian oil drilling, voted to preserve the program. So did Rep. Ted Poe, who in April blasted the president for “[giving] money to Brazil, while at the same time stonewalling drilling in our gulf,” also voted to preserve the payments to foreign growers.

Hm.  Good to know.  Might be a sign of the feebleness of our government on the world stage as much as anything else, right?  Right?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Doc Hastings and the 4th Congressional District of Wash, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.