Politics & Power Quote by Ike Skelton

Skelton is doing the politician's tightrope walk: reassuring rural America without handing industry a blank check. The phrase "common animal waste" is the tell. It's not a scientific category so much as a rhetorical one, designed to make manure sound like an everyday inconvenience rather than a pollutant with real downstream costs. By framing liability under "Superfund" as an overreach, he taps a long-running conservative critique of environmental law as a lawsuit machine that punishes producers for simply doing business.

The subtext is coalition management. Skelton, a Missouri Democrat with deep ties to agricultural constituencies, signals he's on the side of farmers who fear being swept into the orbit of CERCLA - the federal law built to chase money for toxic cleanups. At the same time, he inserts a guardrail: "while ensuring continued action to clean up legitimate hazardous waste sites". "Legitimate" is doing heavy work here, implying there are real villains elsewhere - chemical dumps, industrial contamination - and that manure disputes are a distraction from the proper targets.

Context matters because the early 2000s saw intensifying fights over whether large concentrated animal feeding operations should be treated as industrial polluters. Rural communities worried about bankrupting litigation; environmental advocates worried about letting major nutrient pollution sources off the hook. Skelton's sentence is crafted to sound like common sense, but it's also an attempt to define the moral boundary of environmental enforcement: protect the archetypal farmer, preserve the federal government's credibility by keeping Superfund trained on the unmistakably "toxic."