Republican hypocrisy on mining

To the editor:

Are you wondering what the difference is between President Barack Obama stopping the Canadian pipeline and Gov. Bob McDonnell and our local Republicans legislators working against lifting the moratorium on uranium mining?

That is the question raised by William Levitan, director of the Office of Environmental Compliance for the U.S. Energy Department, in a letter to the editor of The Washington Post recently. Levitan asked that question of Gov. McDonnell after Virginia’s chief executive appeared on a national news program and blasted President Obama for placing a moratorium on the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would have brought the United States thousands of desperately needed jobs.

The hypocrisy that Levitan was pointing out in the governor’s attack on Obama was that McDonnell himself had only recently asked for a delay in the uranium mining project that would bring Southside Virginia hundreds of also desperately needed new jobs. Many of our state’s Republican legislators also fit this same mold, attempting to portray themselves as fighting the job-killing activities of the environmental elitists and supporting job creation while, at the same time, trying to unnecessarily delay or kill the mining project.

In fact, five of Southside’s own Republican state legislators — Dels. Danny Marshall, Don Merricks, James Edmunds and Tom Wright along with Sen. Frank Ruff — have swallowed the enviros’ propaganda entirely and have asked the entire General Assembly to delay the project for at least a year. Job creators? Pro-business? Anti-environmentalists? Pro-economic development? I don’t think so. Not these five.

We do get another chance next year to let these five know what we think of their desertion of our conservative principles. I won’t forget and I’m sure you won’t either.

Meanwhile, to at least give credit where credit is due, at the same time Gov. McDonnell asked for a delay in lifting the moratorium, he made a strong move in the right direction by ordering his agencies to begin drafting regulations for uranium mining. That, at least, is a very positive step forward in getting the Coles Hill project started.