In the ongoing saga of Jim Inhofe's 25 year-run in the senate, we've done our best to let you know when he says or does something boneheaded, ignorant, or irresponsible.
It's been a few months since we last updated you on Ol' Snowball's shenanigans. Most recently, he has tried to slip through a pork barrel-esque provision through the annual National Defense Authorization Act. This is a yearly bill that has passed with bi-partisan support throughout the last 57 years. So it seemed like a good time for him to slip in protections for the $1 million Grand Lake property owned by his wife's shell company. Local media has appeared to turn a blind eye, but the bed bug-infested offices of the New York Times made the effort to cover this story:
MIAMI, Okla. — On the shimmering waters of Grand Lake, a popular vacation spot in northeastern Oklahoma, families have spent the summer splashing around in boats, fishing for the lake’s famous bass and enjoying weekend getaways at upscale waterfront homes.
But drive just a few dozen miles north, and the festivity dissolves into fear over flooding in Miami (pronounced My-am-uh), a city of 13,000 where one in four people live in poverty. For years, the town has fought a losing battle against the wealthy community at the lake, where high water makes for better boating but leaves little room for overflow when it rains. With heavy rains this year, the city of Miami and local Native American tribes say they were again left to pay the price when floodwater clogged upstream, damaging their homes, businesses and ceremonial grounds.
Now, this backyard battle has escalated to the halls of Congress, after one of the lake’s residents, Senator James M. Inhofe, got involved. After decades of debate, local leaders had pinned their hopes on a rare chance to ask a federal agency to help stop the flooding. But Mr. Inhofe — a top Republican who is known to swim and fly planes around the lake, where his family owns a vacation home — quietly introduced legislation in June that would hamstring that agency.
He added the protections in an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, a military funding bill that is up for consideration before Congress. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Inhofe has wide latitude over provisions included in the 1,700-page bill.
For as much as Inhofe has been on-record as a disbeliever to climate change, he is surely an opportunist with the issue. Who gives a fuck if the world is flooding when his lake house preserves its value?
The NYT article continues:
Since the early 1990s, Miami has flooded more than two dozen times, Mr. Schultz said. About 150 houses have been torn down, and many more abandoned.
As recently as May, when storms slammed the Midwest, the water did more than just seep into homes. It swallowed up entire roads and lay like a heavy blanket over town, leaving only rooftops visible.
Nearby, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe said its ceremonial grounds flooded in three feet of water. The tribe evacuated 30 families and had to navigate dangerous roads that stayed impassable for weeks, Chief Glenna Wallace said. “We have mold everywhere,” she said. “We have insects everywhere.”
[...] “If you keep the lake levels high,” Neil Grigg, a civil engineering professor at Colorado State University, said, speaking generally, “you don’t have as much storage space available when a flood comes, so that is going to make the flooding upstream worse.”
In the back of Inhofe's cold and wet lizard brain is the pulsing thought of, "Who gives a damn about them? God has a plan, one that involves manmade lakes, and it's not my fault they're on the wrong side."
I recommend reading the article in full for all the details, but clearly this ancient white man who miraculously gets re-elected every time is trying to leverage his own personal property into a bill that gets passed every year so we can have missiles and drones and other expensive tools of death. The current version of the National Defense Authorization Act involves establishing the Space Force, hypersonic research, and a whole lot of other fucked up stuff, so why not gut the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's abilities to control lakes?
