We have to imagine it’s not about ethanol or schmoozing the farm vote at all – we think it's the lunch
special at Trade Winds.
Why else would the Administrator of the
EPA – the Big Cheese, the Top Brass, The Big Kahuna – want to tour an ethanol
plant in Eastern Kansas and meet with its principals and investors, when he’s spent a good
portion of the last year acting against his boss (President Trump)’s directives
and shooting holes in the law that supports the ethanol industry and the
farmers who play such a core role in it?
Pruitt’s been under fire almost since
he first mashed his bare toes into the deep pile of the EPA’s head office carpet.
The former Oklahoma Attorney General, jointed at the hip with his state’s oil
industry, was one of a flurry of picks when President Trump’s surprise election
pressed him into finding cabinet members ASAP. Pruitt, who Iowa Senator Joni
Ernst once referred to as being “as swampy as you can get” washed in through
the drainage ditches of political favor to the detriment of tax payers,
Midwestern farmers and the Trump Administration itself.
Allegations against Pruitt of largesse
on the tax payer dime are Tudor–esque; that he had a $43,000 sound proof phone
booth built for his office in order to have private phone calls; that he
plugged some $105,000 into first-class airfares because some of the rabble in
coach were once rude to him; that his 20-person security detail (c’mon, you’re
the EPA guy, not one of the Getty children) burns millions; that a Washington
lobbyist buddy got him a sweetheart deal on an expensive DC condo; that he’s
cozied up to industry big-wigs he’s supposed to be regulating – and that he even
hurried EPA office staff off to buy him a discounted mattress from the Trump
International Hotel. That list, unfortunately, goes on.
But his biggest sin – and the one that
will probably be his undoing – is his back door attacks against farmers and the
Renewable Fuel Standard. The RFS is the portion of the 2005 law that requires
oil refineries to blend ethanol into their gasoline. Pruitt’s friends in the
oil business aren’t fond of ethanol, so to a handful of them the EPA chief has
been handing out “hardship waivers” exempting them from the blending
requirements – which means they save money by not having to buy ethanol and mix
it into their gasoline like other refiners do.
If the cronyism and fiscal abuse in his
office isn’t enough, it’s Pruitt’s stance against ethanol – contrary to the
federal law he’s supposed to be administering as head of the EPA – that has him
in the crosshairs of influential Republicans who want to keep the Midwest farm
vote for the president in 2020. For that, Pruitt’s recent shenanigans in
alienating the farm vote just won’t do.
Our bet is Pruitt’s new affinity for
agriculture states and ethanol plants has to do with trying to save his skin –
or at least an attempt to assuage farmers’ fears and remind them that President
Trump is, despite the actions of his EPA head, still behind them. Maybe, after
torpedoing the ethanol industry, Pruitt’s Come-to-Jesus with ethanol at EKAE this Tuesday can make everything all right.
Then again, maybe not.
Either way, the flight from KCI to DC
is a little more than two hours – long enough for a nap after Trade Winds
chicken & noodles. Pruitt may need those extra carbs when he gets home – to
pack up his office.
–Dane Hicks is president of Garnett Publishing, Inc., and publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.
