When W. gave the nod to New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman for the top EPA spot in his administration, the tone-deaf national press corps praised the appointment of a “moderate” (largely on the basis of Whitman’s inconstant pro-choice positions). A little digging would have revealed that Whitman has been an unmitigated disaster for New Jersey’s environmental protection. Under her governance, fines of air and water polluters have plummeted 70 percent. Indeed, after her nomination the head of the Chemical Industry Council of New Jersey praised her to the Newark Star-Ledger for having restored “balance” to the state’s enviro policies after the aggressively antipolluter measures taken by her Democratic predecessor, Jim Florio.

Thanks to Whitman’s evisceration of state enviro regs as well as a raft of subsidies and tax cuts to developers, suburban sprawl gobbled up more open space and verdant land during her tenure than at any other period in New Jersey’s history. Moreover, she decapitated the state Department of Environmental Protection staff by 738 employees in her first three years in office, cut the remaining staff’s workweek by five hours, eliminated fines of polluters as a source of DEP revenue and made large cuts in the DEP’s budget. That’s why the New Jersey Sierra Club’s Bill Wolfe has warned that Whitman might “dismantle [federal] EPA and take it out of the enforcement business. I believe that this is precisely the policy Whitman has presided over and legitimized in New Jersey.” One mechanism was the Office of Dispute Resolution, which she established to mediate conflicts over environmental issues (usually resolved in favor of business). She also installed an Office of Business Ombudsman under the Secretary of State (the Star-Ledger labeled it “essentially a business lobby”) to further grease the wheels of the bureaucracy for polluters and developers, and to act as a counterweight to the DEP.

If Senate Democrats want to take a serious look at Whitman’s record in the Garden State, they should start with “Open for Business,” a three-part exposé by the Bergen County Record in 1996. After a ten-month investigation, The Record detailed dozens of cases in which Whitman’s corporate-coddling policies had circumvented laws designed to protect the environment. Often, those getting favored treatment were big campaign contributors, like Finn Caspersen, then chairman of Beneficial, at the time the nation’s largest independent consumer-loan company. The firm got more than $182 million in taxpayer subsidies in the form of road construction designed to ease traffic around its lavish office complex in Peapack–improvements that increased the value of an open 700-acre tract that Beneficial owned nearby. While all this was going on, Caspersen, his family and their political action committee gave the state GOP $143,250.

A more recent example: For the past three years, Roche Vitamin, a manufacturing plant in Belvidere, has been “belching out 300 tons of methanol annually–at least 10 times the rate state permits allow,” according to the Star-Ledger. And Clinton’s EPA has been fighting Whitman’s proposals to further dilute state regs controlling water pollution and coastal development, which would sanction gigantic increases in pollution and hand over environmentally sensitive lands to rapacious developers. No wonder The Weekly Standard‘s David Brooks praised Whitman’s nomination (and that of her anti-enviro counterpart proposed for Interior, Gale Norton) as reflecting the Bush Administration’s “corporate mentality.”

Whether the Dems have the stomach for a real fight against Whitman is an open question–her nomination has already been endorsed by her state’s influential senior Democratic senator, Robert Torricelli. (Says a knowledgeable state Dem: “This is The Torch’s way of paying back [Woodbridge mayor] Jim McGreevey,” whose aggressive politicking in the gubernatorial race caused Torricelli to abort his plans to run this fall. “With Christie at EPA, McGreevey’s GOP opponent, State Senate president Donald DiFrancesco, becomes acting governor and gets a big advantage.”) Whitman and The Torch also get campaign cash from many of the same corporate polluters, and such bipartisan influence-buyers are likely to go all out in lobbying Senate Dems on Whitman’s behalf.