Maryland District 8: Representative Connie Morella
Newt, Take Note: A Real GOP Leader
Every election season, anti-environmental Republicans complain that the Sierra
Club is nothing more than a servant of the Democratic Party. In Maryland,
however, it's Democratic candidate Ralph Neas who's complaining about the Club's
endorsement of the Republican incumbent, Connie Morella. Neas (perhaps best known
as the Washington, D.C., attorney who led the opposition to Robert Bork's
nomination to the Supreme Court) calls himself "a very strong environmentalist," but he has never held political office and has no environmental record.
Even if he did, it would be hard to match Morella's. The six-term representative
from the heavily Democratic D.C. suburb of Montgomery County boasts a League of
Conservation Voters score of 94 percent, the highest in her state. But Morella
does far more than just vote our way; she is a leader on environmental issues. An
early opponent of the Contract With America, she has consistently stood up to the
leadership of her party to oppose its anti-
environmental course.
For example, she rallied her colleagues to ask House
Speaker Newt Gingrich to help lift the moratorium on listing new species under
the Endangered Species Act. She is the lead cosponsor, along with George Miller
(D-Calif.), of the Endangered Species Recovery Act, the sound alternative to the
bogus ESA reauthorization championed in the Senate by Dirk Kempthorne (R-Idaho).
Morella's environmental stands, in fact, are often better than those of the
Clinton administration, as when she and Elizabeth Furse (D-Ore.) tried to
overturn the destructive "logging without laws" salvage-logging rider that
President Clinton signed in 1995. She has also taken the lead in trying to get
the United States to meet its obligations under the Montreal accord on ozone
reduction.
And she joins the Sierra Club in campaigning for sanctions against the
government of Nigeria, in large part because of its harsh repression of
environmental activists like the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the
government in 1995. A staunch supporter of family planning, both domestically and
internationally, Morella represented the United States at the 1994 United Nations
Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.
Morella has been very popular with the voters of her
district, but Neas is well funded and well connected-Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and
Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) are campaigning for him. Although Morella is favored to
win, this promises to be her toughest race in a decade.
