|
Their bipartisan friendship reflected the trust the senators also placed in one another. The subcommittee members—Democrats like Muskie and Thomas Eagleton, Republicans like Bob Dole and Howard Baker—didn’t let ego or partisanship get in the way of what they wanted to accomplish, Jorling said.
Work on the bill began just after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Vietnam War protesters crowded congressional corridors as the senators worked.
“There was a real sense of upheaval,” Jorling said. The lawmakers, he recalled, saw it as an indication that “the public is losing confidence in our ability to solve problems. And the Clean Air Act gave [them] a chance to demonstrate that they could craft a response to a serious issue.”
That issue was one Americans could see plainly. “The air was dirty,” Jorling said. “Your car would have a layer of dust and debris on it overnight, and you had to change your shirts once or twice a day because the collars would become grey and discolored.”
Such air is also a grave health threat—that was already clear then, and has become ever more so in the last half century. A vast body of scientific evidence now links air pollution to early death and to such health problems as heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia, premature birth, and diabetes.
Putting health first
The law created a partnership between Washington and the states, and required the EPA to set standards the nation’s air must meet. In determining those pollution limits, the agency could take only one factor into account—what the evidence said was best for Americans’ health. Considerations of cost and technological feasibility could come later, in figuring out how to achieve the standards, but putting human well-being above all else in setting them was a powerful reordering of priorities.
The act also introduced an unprecedented level of accountability, in part through a first-of-its-kind provision that has since been used in many environmental laws. Known as “citizen suit,” it gave Americans the right to take their government to court if it failed to do its job. That, said Carlson, has meant “there’s this outside pressure” to clean up.
Baker, a Tennessee Republican who went on to become Senate majority leader and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, insisted on requiring companies to cut pollution faster than existing technology allowed, forcing them to innovate.
| 
