Senate Democrats boycott vote on Trump's pick to head EPA

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The boycott in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee delayed the transition to a new administrator for the agency. Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat, said he could not support Pruitt, a Republican and the attorney general of Oklahoma, for a public health position because he "denies the sum of empirical science and the urgency to act on climate change."

At a confirmation hearing held by the panel earlier this month Pruitt, who has sued the agency he intends to run more than a dozen times on behalf of the oil-drilling state Oklahoma, expressed doubt about climate change science. But he said he would be would be obliged for now to uphold the agency's 2009 "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide emissions harm public health.

Republicans decried the move by the Democrats. "This is simply a senatorial temper tantrum," said Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican.

John Konkus, a spokesman for Pruitt's confirmation team, said Democrats and the former EPA administration had "put politics and rhetoric ahead of their core work and ahead of the welfare of the American public."

In 2013, Republican senators on the panel boycotted then-President Barack Obama's second term pick for the agency, Gina McCarthy, saying they were "completely unsatisfied" by her answers to more than 1,000 written questions they had asked her. She was eventually confirmed.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; editing by Bill Trott)

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