Booker says he has had “some luck” working with Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama on environmental issues. Duckworth’s ambitions for the caucus are certainly not modest.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate will soon have an Environmental Justice Caucus, to be chaired by three Democrats: Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Tom Carper of Delaware and Cory Booker of New Jersey, who is also competing for the 2020 presidential nomination.
But in another Chicago suburb, Waukegan, “they’re not getting the same type of attention,” Duckworth says, because that town’s residents are predominantly nonwhite. She also points to Chicago’s majority-Hispanic 10th Ward, which the Chicago Sun-Times has called a “dumping ground” for heavy industry. Manganese dust, which can be especially detrimental to children, has been known to blow through parts of the area.
The Senate’s glossary defines a caucus as an “informal organization ... that exists to discuss issues of mutual concern and possibly to perform legislative research and policy planning for its members.” According to Sarah J. Eckman of the Congressional Research Service, there were 854 caucuses in the last Congress. Some, like the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish Affairs, have only a few members.
Booker, who was mayor of Newark, N.J., before becoming a U.S. senator from the optimistically named Garden State, certainly knows about environmental injustice. While his city, and surrounding communities, have for decades been plagued by heavy industry and toxic dumps, the residents of nearby Bergen and Morris counties continue to enjoy pristine suburbs and idyllic rural scenes.
“Let’s not make this all about one person,” he says. “These are trends that have been allowed to go on in our country for years and years and years.” It was, after all, under President Bill Clinton that industry was no longer required to pay a tax that would go to cleaning up the most polluted industrial sites in the nation, which were on the National Priorities List, better known as Superfund.
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