Scott Brown has voted three times to freeze the EPA’s power to regulate industrial polluters. Brown votes make greens see red

Sen. Scott Brown’s floor votes to strip the EPA of its climate change powers have become a political jump ball in his 2012 reelection campaign.

Democrats think the Massachusetts freshman’s anti-environmental position can energize the party’s base and help attract a top-tier candidate to challenge the popular GOP incumbent.


But Republicans sense a political opening, too, and are trying to exploit the senator’s critics as partisan stand-ins with a history of turning off the very independent voters who helped carry him to a surprise special election win in January 2010.

Brown has so far voted three times to freeze EPA rules that clamp down on power plants, petroleum refiners and other major industrial sources.

Along with Brown’s occasionally equivocal stands on Planned Parenthood, unemployment and gays in the military, Democrats argue that his voting record on EPA doesn’t compute in a state whose lawmakers led on cap-and-trade legislation and in suing the George W. Bush administration all the way to the Supreme Court over its global warming policies.

“He sold himself as a centrist, essentially, and those kinds of positions will not help him,” Rep. John Olver (D-Mass.) told POLITICO.

The Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters and Environment Massachusetts went after Brown last week with a 60-second radio commercial airing in the Boston area dubbing the Republican’s anti-EPA stance “breathtaking” and claiming 130,000 Bay State children with asthma “would have an even harder time catching their breath if Scott Brown gets his way.”

Last month, the League of Women Voters launched its own television ad against Brown, depicting a young girl in her mother’s arms struggling to breathe.

“Scott Brown should protect the people, not the polluters,” the voice-over said.

Like his GOP colleagues, Brown argues that Congress — and not federal agencies — should decide whether to impose climate change policies with significant economic effects.

“Sen. Brown has worked with both parties on common-sense environmental policies, but this particular vote was a back-door way of implementing the cap-and-trade program that Congress rejected last year,” Brown spokesman Colin Reed said.

Brown has also turned to the Massachusetts Republican Party, which filed a complaint last week with the Federal Election Commission demanding an inquiry into whether the League of Women Voters violated campaign finance laws with the ad by failing to report independent expenditures greater than $10,000.

“We are calling on the league to immediately reveal their secret donors, as the law requires, and to live by the same standards of openness and transparency they have encouraged others to adopt,” said Massachusetts GOP Chairwoman Jennifer Nassour.

Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi wrote Sunday that Brown is actually in good shape to use the League’s advertisement to his advantage.

“It may thrill the liberal base, but it also threatens to chill the independent swing vote that both a Republican and a Democratic candidate need to win in Massachusetts,” she wrote. “Why is Brown drawing attention to the league’s ad a full 18 months before Election Day? Not because it hurts him but because it helps him. It reminds people of the unflattering ‘League of Women Vultures’ moniker that detractors like to use to describe the organization.”

Democrats have a better chance of exploiting Brown for other miscues, Vennochi argued, including his statement earlier this month that he’d seen pictures of a dead Osama bin Laden that later turned out to be fake, as well as confusing stands on social issues such as women’s health and gays in the military.

“The Democrat who wants to win will take the fight directly to Brown and not rely on sympathetic friends like the League of Women Voters,” she wrote.

Sensing an opening, Republicans argue that Brown’s EPA vote is actually on the correct side of the environmental issue. About 40 business groups, including the National Federation of Independent Business, Associated Industries of Massachusetts and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, want to stop the agency, too.

Republicans have also touted Brown’s work with Democrats on environmental issues. In a news release, the state GOP cited Brown’s co-sponsorship of legislation with Delaware Sen. Tom Carper to cap mercury, smog and soot-forming emissions from power plants. He also teamed up with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein on legislation requiring oil companies to test their oil-spill response plans before getting offshore leases and with New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman on a proposal to give tax credits and rebates for home energy efficiency.

Still, several Massachusetts politicos argue that Brown’s anti-EPA votes are unlikely to register with the public.

“The environment has never over the years had as much impact as I’d like to have hoped,” Democratic Rep. Barney Frank said. “The environment, from my standpoint, has not proven to be a potent issue.”

“There’s more attention paying to this outside of Massachusetts,” added Steve Crosby, a former adviser to GOP Govs. Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift.

Crosby, now dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said Brown remains in good standing back home despite complaints from Democrats.

“I think he hasn’t yet made the kind of mistake that’s really going to open a bleeding wound,” he said. “People talk about the EPA votes, and [he] said he saw the picture of Osama, but he’s very deft, and he’s a very appealing character. I think he has sort of the Ronald Reagan Teflon. Nothing is really sticking to him yet.”

Environmentalists push back that Massachusetts voters do care about green issues. Gov. Deval Patrick won a second term last November over a Republican opponent who wanted to pull the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

“It definitely exposes a vulnerability he has,” said Maurice Cunningham, a political scientist at UMass Boston. “I thought in the 2010 campaign, he got away with fudging his environmental positions. But it’s hard to fudge a vote. Once you take a vote, it’s fair game.”

Democrats have been struggling to find a top-tier candidate to challenge Brown. “You can’t beat somebody with nobody,” Olver said. Olver said the current crop of local officials lacks money and serious name recognition.

“They have no capacity,” he said.

But, Cunningham said, a Democrat who is not yet in the race may see in Brown’s anti-EPA votes an opening to enter the campaign despite the Republican’s daunting $8 million war chest. “There’s a little stirring on the other side, and this is going to help that,” he said.