WASHINGTON – Spooked by a Republican campaign to rescue 1,000 workers in recession-battered Georgia, Ohio, West Virginia and Tennessee, House Democrats on Wednesday pulled down an anti-job environmental bill offered by U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Before being yanked from the lineup of legislation under consideration, the Illinois Democrat’s legislation seemed en route to easy passage by Democratic supporters on the panel.
 
In effect, backers had concluded that federal regulators who already tightly control the use of mercury cannot be trusted to protect public health around four plants that produce chlorine to purify drinking water and kill algae in swimming pools, plus a second chemical used to de-ice airliners and airport runways. Curiously, they proposed to ban the industrial process, but not the mercury, itself.

Opponents of the Schakowsky bill have noted that nearly half the globe’s mercury emissions come from China, where less-regulated coal-fired power plants have been constructed at a blistering pace. Rather than attack a vastly larger source of toxin that comes to American tables in Pacific Ocean seafood, however, the bill’s author opted to target American workers.

After it was announced that her bill had been pulled from the committee session Wednesday morning, Schakowsky said she wasn’t finished. “The importance of acting on this cannot be overstated,” the congresswoman told the committee. “I look forward to making sure that in a couple of weeks now we will be able to consider and pass that legislation.”

Her bill singles out four U.S. facilities that have invested to meet stringent federal regulations on mercury. Their owners say they will be forced to lay off an estimated 1,000 workers when the plants are closed by the Schakowsky bill.

Unemployment already exceeds 10 percent in three of the four places that the Chicago Democrat’s measure targets. Augusta, Ga., suffers a 10.2 percent jobless rate; in Charleston, Tenn., it’s 9.8 percent; Weltzer County, W.Va., has 12.7 percent unemployment; and in Ashtabula County, Ohio, 14.2 percent of local workers need jobs.

Republican proposals to revamp the bill were given to the Democratic side of the committee on Tuesday, but could not be offered when the legislation was removed from the schedule. They included the following:

•   An amendment requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to examine job loss from this Act. Should this bill’s provisions cause more than 500 jobs to be lost, the act would be permanently suspended to protect Americans holding those jobs.

•   An amendment requiring that China to take comparable steps to outlaw the use of the chlor-alkali process before the provisions of the Schakowsky bill take effect.

•   An amendment requiring the EPA administrator to conduct a study by January 2011, to determine if one or more plants will be forced to close as a result of the act. If so, the provisions of the act would be suspended to protect those jobs.

•   The process that produces chlorine also produces the chemical used in de-icing aircraft. An amendment would require the EPA administrator in consultation with the Federal Aviation Administration, to certify a report to Congress on the potential effects this bill could have on the supply and cost of the chemical necessary for de-icing aircraft. If the administrator determines it will adversely affect the supply, or raise the cost by 25 percent or more, the provisions of the act would be suspended.

•   An amendment to prevent the bill from making germ-killing chlorine difficult to obtain or too expensive to buy for cities and others which supply clean drinking water.