U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Tucson, may take over the House Natural Resources Committee in a couple of weeks, and his potential presence as chairman is already being felt.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, long a target of Grijalva’s, recently said he will resign before Democrats take control of the House — when Grijalva will likely take control of the committee overseeing Interior.

It was not the only factor — Zinke had reportedly fallen out of favor with the White House — but the abrupt resignation came just two weeks after Zinke’s blistering Twitter response to a Grijalva editorial that called on the secretary to resign.

Grijalva said in a statement afterward that the resignation was “no kind of victory,” but that he hoped it would bring a change in direction for Interior. And he promised that Zinke’s resignation would not mean the end of aggressive oversight of the department by a Democrat-led committee.

“He’s gone, but his decisions and how he reached those decisions, I still believe are open for public review and public scrutiny,” Grijalva said in an interview on CNN.

“Those decisions were made, we’re going to be seeking some balance, bringing conservation and science back into the equation … and that’s going to require, on occasion, that we dig a lot deeper than just the surface material that we get from Interior,” he said.

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Source: Cronkite News – Dec 24, 2018
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