In the News

WASHINGTON — Morgan Griffith has high cholesterol, a problem he tries to combat with diet and exercise.

A conversation about federal spending can get the freshman congressman so agitated that you might wonder about his blood pressure, as well.

"Did you know that we have retirement homes for wild horses and burros — $69.3 million?" Griffith, R-Salem, said on a recent morning in his Capitol Hill office.

He was referring to a 40-year-old program that protects wild horses and burros on federal lands in the West. The Bureau of Land Management removes thousands of horses and burros from the range each year to control herd sizes. The agency keeps them in corrals and pastures and makes them available for adoption. The animals are sold if they reach 10 years of age or get passed over repeatedly for adoption.

"So now what we do is we take the wild horses and burros off the federal lands and we pay somebody else to let them graze on their land and they can't be harassed," Griffith said. "There ought to be a way to humanely euthanize [unwanted] wild horses and burros instead of having the taxpayers of the United States of America paying $69 million a year."

To Griffith, this represents just one example of federal spending gone amok. Don't get him started on the difficulty of reining in "mandatory" spending, another source of exasperation for the first-year congressman.

Griffith views Washington as a tangled web of bureaucracy, excessive regulation and out-of-control spending that is stifling economic growth and alienating taxpayers. The former state legislator won a surprising victory in Southwest Virginia's 9th Congressional District last year by tapping into voters' anger toward the federal government and vowing to take on the Environmental Protection Agency, which he considers hostile to the coal-producing region in his district. Griffith unseated Democrat Rick Boucher of Abingdon, who had represented the district for 28 years.

As the majority leader in the Virginia House of Delegates, Griffith was a heavy hitter in the state Capitol for more than a decade and the Republican Party's point man in many a floor fight. Now he's a newcomer in the U.S. Capitol trying to make a mark in the 435-member House of Representatives.

"I've got to figure out how to use my strengths," he said.

Taking on the EPA

Griffith made his first real splash recently as the lead sponsor of a bill that would require the EPA to rewrite new air pollution rules for mercury emissions from industrial boilers. The bill, dubbed the EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011, is part of a House Republican fall agenda dedicated to repealing regulations that the GOP calls "job killers."

Griffith's friend and mentor, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County, said the fact that Griffith was tapped to carry the bill is "a very good sign" for the new congressman.

"It's a sign that the leadership recognizes he is capable of handling all the debate and argumentation and marshaling support to defeat amendments that are harmful to the purpose of the legislation," Goodlatte said.

The House passed the bill Thursday, but the measure faces an uncertain future in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The White House has warned that President Barack Obama would veto the bill if it gets to his desk.

The bill would direct the EPA to develop "achievable" emissions limits for industrial boilers and give businesses and other facilities that use them at least five years to comply. An executive from Celanese Corp. told a House subcommittee last month that the company may have to scale back operations at its Giles County plant if existing EPA rules are left in place and allowed to take effect next year. Under current law, companies will have three years to comply with new boiler rules after they take effect next year.

The White House argues that Griffith's bill would delay meaningful pollution controls and have significant negative effects on public health. Democratic leaders have accused Republicans of trying to eviscerate Clean Air Act safeguards to serve corporate interests. Griffith said the EPA has failed to consider the economic impact of the boiler rules and a whole host of regulations.

"I think that they are just completely unconcerned about job losses," Griffith said of the EPA.

"They haven't knocked on doors in those neighborhoods," he said. "They haven't seen what happens when an entire county suddenly experiences double-digit unemployment."

A toll on family life

Griffith's workdays in Washington begin and end on the black leather couch — or sometimes the floor — of his modest office in the Longworth House Office Building.

Griffith sleeps in his office and the less-than-lavish accommodations suit him just fine. An efficiency apartment near Capitol Hill could cost him as much as $2,000 a month, he said. Since House business keeps him in Washington just three or four days a week, the expense seems excessive to him.

"You look at the calendar as it's set up, we're only here about nine to 10 nights a month," he said. "If I'm unable to sleep or if my body starts revolting, I may have to change that. But to me, $2,000 a month is a lot of money and that's money that I can send back home."

Griffith's duties don't end when he puts Washington in his rearview mirror. He also has obligations in his sprawling district, which extends from the coalfields of far Southwest Virginia to the Alleghany Highlands. Finding time to spend with his wife, Hilary, and their three children is harder than he had imagined when he decided to run for Congress last year.

"This has taken more of a toll on the family than either Hilary or I expected, but we're trying to work that out," he said.

In Washington, Griffith typically rises between 6:15 and 6:30 a.m. Taking the underground tunnels that connect the Capitol and nearby congressional office buildings, he heads to the Rayburn House Office Building, which has a sub-basement-level swimming pool, gym and locker room. Griffith, a longtime member of Salem's Stonegate swim team, puts in a half-mile to a mile in the pool before showering and returning to his office to start the work day.

Griffith and a staff of eight work in a cramped, three-room suite and make the most of limited space. Kelly Lungren McCollum, the congressman's chief of staff, works in a space that once was a bathroom.

On the first Wednesday morning in October, Griffith sat for a brief interview before dashing to a meeting of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The panel was conducting a hearing on the Obama administration's efforts to implement a "line-by-line" review of the federal budget. To the consternation of some Republican panel members, no one from the administration came to testify.

Griffith ducked out of the meeting long enough to meet with representatives of American Wood Fibers, which has a plant in Marion, and a Pennsylvania company that makes biomass-fueled boilers. In a conference room just outside the subcommittee hearing, the executives made a quick pitch for government incentives that would put wood pellets on a level playing field with other renewable energy sources.

"We're not asking for a lot, we're just looking for parity," said Stephen Faehner, a vice president for American Wood Fibers. "We're trying to be equal."

Griffith listened attentively, asked a few question and hurried back to the subcommittee hearing. He said later that his visitors made a compelling case about fairness, though he questioned the effectiveness of government subsidies for the renewable energy.

"If you want to encourage the use of renewable sources, there are ways to do that without doing subsidies," he said.

After the hearing, Griffith huddled in his office with Lungren McCollum and legislative director Will Hupman to strategize for Thursday's floor debate on his boiler regulations bill. As they talked, Griffith ate a no-frills lunch - chicken breast meat from a can and saltine crackers.

Hupman reviewed amendments that Democrats planned to offer Thursday. Similar amendments would be debated Wednesday afternoon for a companion bill delaying EPA rules for cement plants.

"Are most of these the same: 'Why do you want to kill small children?'" Griffith asked Hupman.

The remark was tongue-in-cheek. But earlier in the week, the Office of Management and Budget had issued a "statement of administration policy" outlining objections to the boiler and cement plant bills and warning of consequences for public health.

The Obama administration argued that delays in implementing pollution controls "would result in significant public health impacts that the rules would otherwise prevent, including tens of thousands of premature deaths; tens of thousands of cases of respiratory and cardiovascular problems, including heart attacks and acute bronchitis; and over a hundred thousand asthma attacks."

Griffith said he isn't cavalier about health concerns. His 5-year-old son Davis has asthma, he said.

"If I truly thought that that was going to be the result — that more people were going to have asthma — I wouldn't have introduced the bill," he said.

No apologies

Griffith took the House floor on Oct. 6 to make the case for his bill.

"Excessive regulations are threatening jobs across the nation," he began. "We all recognize the need for reasonable regulations to protect the public. There are good regulations that ensure public safety and protect the environment. But there are also unnecessary and unreasonable regulations that hurt jobs in some of our nation's most critical industries."

Griffith said the EPA's rules for industrial boilers would impose steep capital costs on businesses, hospitals and universities. The Council of Industrial Boiler Owners estimated that the regulations would put 10,000 Virginia jobs at risk, he said. His bill would give companies such as Celanese more time to comply with revised regulations and direct the EPA to ensure that rules "are achievable by real-world boilers, process heaters and incinerators."

He read from a letter to the editor that a Giles County factory worker penned to the Virginia Leader newspaper decrying federal agencies "who have nothing better to do except sit in their Washington offices and draw up rules and regulations to kill American jobs."

A succession of Democrats said the Republican bill would allow toxic pollution to go unchecked and pose health risks, especially to young children and pregnant women.

"Boilers and incinerators are one of the largest sources of airborne mercury pollution in the United States," said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif. "For far too long they have been allowed to pollute without installing modern technology to reduce their emissions."

Roybal-Allard said babies born to women who are exposed to mercury pollution during pregnancy "can suffer from a range of developmental and neurological problems."

She argued for an amendment that would allow the EPA to force cleanup of facilities emitting toxic pollution "that are damaging to babies' brains." That amendment and other changes proposed by Democrats were defeated.

Seven days later, on Thursday, the House passed the bill.

Goodlatte said Griffith is doing what voters expected when they elected him.

"I think more people respect that he is looking out for their interests in terms of seeing that, as you protect the environment, you also have to take into account the impact that it has on people's lives with respect to doing their jobs, and the economic health and viability of the communities that they live in," Goodlatte said. "So he's done that."

Griffith said the proposed EPA regulations would result in a slight reduction of mercury emissions at a cost that he considers excessive.

"If we were going to rid the world of mercury, maybe this would be worth it," he said.

Instead, he said, "what you have to look at is the cost in number of jobs, where we are and what we can afford."

And Griffith makes no apologies for getting worked up about it.

"These are real-world consequences of policies that are not good long term for Southwest Virginia," he said.

"So, yes, if I get a little excited, it's because what we're doing here today will have consequences not just tomorrow and next week, but it will have consequences on the ability of everybody else's kids to stay in Southwest Virginia ... to find a good job and to have a good quality of life that I have been blessed with."

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