GOP senators move EPA pick ahead as Dems boycott vote

Senate suspends committee rules to advance nominee.

WASHINGTON — Republicans suspended Senate committee rules Thursday to muscle President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency toward confirmation after Democrats boycotted a vote.

It was the latest sign of political hostilities on Capitol Hill as Senate Democrats sought to use parliamentary procedure to delay votes on some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees and Republicans employed their slim Senate majority to overcome such tactics.

Also Thursday, two Senate committees voted along party lines to send Trump’s nominee to lead the White House budget office, South Carolina GOP Rep. Mick Mulvaney, to the full Senate for a vote.

As the scheduled meeting to discuss EPA nominee Scott Pruitt was gaveled to order, the seats reserved for the 10 Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee were empty for the second consecutive day.

Committee rules require that at least two members of the minority party be present for a vote to be held, but the 11 Republicans voted unanimously to temporarily suspend the rules and then voted again to advance the nomination of Pruitt, the state attorney general of Oklahoma.

Committee chairman John Barrasso accused the absent Democrats of engaging in delay and obstruction.

“It is unprecedented for the minority to delay an EPA administrator for an incoming president to this extent,” Barrasso said. The Wyoming Republican echoed President Barack Obama’s famous 2009 statement to GOP leaders that “elections have consequences.”

“The people spoke and now it is time to set up a functioning government,” Barrasso said. “That includes a functioning EPA.”

The Democrats appeared to have borrowed directly from their opponents’ playbook. In 2013, GOP members of the same committee boycotted a similar meeting on Gina McCarthy, Obama’s then-nominee for EPA administrator. McCarthy was eventually approved by the Senate, serving in the post until Trump’s inauguration last month.

Barrasso has said the two situations are bit comparable because Obama was not a new, first-term president assembling his initial team.

Democratic members of the committee said this week the boycott was necessary because Pruitt has refused to fully respond to requests for additional information.

Democrats did attend meetings of the Senate budget and homeland security committees Thursday as Republicans voted to approve Mulvaney,

Trump’s nominee to lead the White House Budget Office.

The move came over the opposition of Democrats who warn of his support for cutting rising costs of Medicare and increasing the age for claiming Social Security benefits.

Mulvaney was among tea party lawmakers who backed a government shutdown in 2013 in an attempt to block the Affordable Care Act from taking effect. In 2011, he was among those against increasing the government’s borrowing cap.