Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took to social media Monday to attack President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt.
“My Republican colleague here is all about states’ rights – except the right to clean air & save lives from pollution,” he tweeted.
He later added: “I hope my friends in Congress won’t let him get away with this junk logic. But CA has won this battle before and we will again if necessary.”
California relies on a federal waiver in order to apply more stringent emissions standards than in the rest of the nation, through the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
As former Assemblyman Tim Donnelly writes at Breitbart News, Pruitt said during his confirmation hearing in the Senate last week that he could not commit to keeping the waiver in place.
Critics contend that CARB is too powerful and air standards too stringent, choking economic growth in the Golden State.
Donnelly argues: “CARB is notorious for changing the rules without warning, and crafting policy based on junk science or no science at all. Mission creep led CARB to decimate the once-thriving small, independent trucking industry by arbitrarily making legal, compliant trucks obsolete years before their time. Farmers and small contractors are next on CARB’s hit list.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.