Note: This article was originally published in the Martinsburg Journal on September 22, 2022. Jefferson County is not in coal country, but it is nevertheless influenced, as all of West Virginia is, by the politics of coal.
The Republican manipulation of our democratic institutions and safeguards is not so much intended to completely displace our healthy institutions, as it is to disrupt them. They are digging a trench line, fortified with barbed wire, mines, and barriers to repel any Democratic counter attacks to follow. They are fully expecting that the policies and the court stuffing they can manage during the Trump administration will be labor intensive and expensive to overturn. And they are right. The Democrats have so many fronts to engage that it will be politically and socially exhausting and their voters will quickly weary. The Republicans, however, can engage these battles relying on their moneyed interests and so spare their voters the day-to-day trench fighting.
Take as an example the protracted battles West Virginia communities have to wage when they wake up to the down-side of the oil, gas, and coal extractive industries operating in their locales. The fouled water, the poisoned land, the depleted soils, the ravaged ecology, the injuries, disease, and deaths. Compensation, reclamation, restoration can take decades, if and when it comes, because the perpetrators have put in place the legislative and judiciary means to stall action and lengthen appeals. Buying a friendly legislature and courts can go a long way to making things stick. The public has been tricked too many times with reclamation bonds that don’t pack in nearly enough dollars to do the cleanup required to restore community and lives. Too often corporate bankruptcies leave the taxpayers to do the dirty work and assume the cost.
I remember after the Bush II years, there was a Democratic bumper sticker during the 2008 election season saying that it would take Hillary two terms to clean up the mess. Granted, she never got the chance, but Obama, as inclined as he was to take charge of the cleanup, came right up against the Republican trench line, and found that his broom was nowhere near good enough for the job.
Communities in West Virginia still recovering from coal have to contend not just with the scars left by mining, but with the legislators and judges who were elected with the big bucks of the perpetrators. It is still the case that these public officials bow and scrape officially and symbolically to Big Coal and use the false argument that destructive projects are justified because they create or maintain jobs. This includes elected representatives on both the Republican and Democratic sides, notably our two current senators, Shelly Moore Capito (S) and Joseph Manchin (D). The jobs they’re promoting are, of course, the same kind of jobs that impoverished the state to begin with. It’s time to get real and honest and end the sanctimony about coal providing a prosperous past and a prosperous future. It never did and it never will.