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In April 2018, the right-leaning Turning Point USA posted a Facebook meme which attacked Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for once supporting a proposal to dump nuclear waste in a poor Latino community in Texas: The meme was re-posted by the Capitalism Facebook page: In 1997 and 1998, Sanders did indeed support a measure that gave Congressional approval to an arrangement that would have allowed the states of Maine and Vermont to transport and dispose of nuclear waste at a proposed site in the sparsely populated town of Sierra Blanca in Hudspeth County, close to the Mexican border in West Texas. As the meme suggests, Sierra Blanca was (and is) a predominantly Latino community. U.S. Census Bureau records show that in 2000, two years after the proposal, 73 percent of the town's 533 residents identified as Hispanic or Latino, and almost all of those as Mexican. In 2016, some 69 percent of Sierra Blanca's 557 residents identified as Hispanic or Latino. In 1999, the annual per capita income of Sierra Blanca residents was $10,768, which was 45 percent lower than that of Texans at large ($19,617). In 2016, the median household income in Sierra Blanca was estimated to be $41,875 as compared to $54,727 in the state of Texas. As an Independent member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Vermont, Sanders was one of 23 co-sponsors of House Resolution 629, which called for Congress to give its consent to the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact — an agreement between the states of Texas, Maine, and Vermont. Speaking on the floor of the house in October 1997, Sanders said he was in strong support of the resolution for environmental reasons, and stressed that he personally was opposed to the use of nuclear power, but that the waste it produces had to be disposed of as safely as possible. It is worth reading a relatively extensive excerpt from his remarks in order to get a good sense of Sanders' stated reasoning: A video clip of his comments can be viewed here. Congress passed the resolution comfortably by 305 votes to 117, as did the Senate, by 78 votes to 15. The proposal had much stronger support among Republicans than among Democrats. GOP members of the House voted 197-26 in favor, while Democrats were more evenly split, voting 107-91 in favor. In the Senate, not a single Republican opposed H.R. 629, while 51 of them voted for it. Fifteen Democratic Senators opposed the bill, while 27 of them voted in support. At that time, five out six Senators from Texas, Vermont, and Maine were Republicans. All five of them voted in favor of the proposal. Both of Maine's Representatives voted for the disposal site, as did 10 out of the 13 Republican Congress members from Texas. In the House, the proposal had 23 co-sponsors. Eleven were Republicans, eleven were Democrats, and one was Sanders himself, an Independent. The author of the resolution was Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas. Despite Congressional approval for the agreement, authorities in Texas ultimately rejected the proposal to establish a disposal site at Sierra Blanca. In October 1998, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission voted 3-0 against issuing a permit for the construction of a nuclear waste dump there. According to the Associated Press, commission chairman Barry McBee said the disposal site could have provided a much-needed economic boost to the area, but commission members were sufficiently concerned about safety issues to deny the permit. According to a September 1998 article in the Texas Observer, a group of activists opposed to the Sierra Blanca waste site approached Sanders at an anti-nuclear weapons rally in Vermont that year: We contacted Bill Addison, a leading opponent of the Sierra Blanca proposal, who was identified in the Texas Tribune article as having attended that Springfield rally. He confirmed that he was present and corroborated the article's account of the activists' interaction with Sanders. We asked a spokesperson for Sanders whether he agrees that this exchange took place, but we did not receive a response to that specific question. Instead, the spokesperson offered a broader explanation and defense of the Senator's support of H.R. 629: Sanders' spokesperson is right to point out that the text of H.R. 629 did not mention Sierra Blanca, but the town was widely known and discussed as the proposed location of the disposal site throughout the time that Sanders and others supported the bill. For example, in April 1998 (three months before Sanders and others in the House voted in favor of H.R. 629) the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone condemned the proposed Sierra Blanca site from the floor of the Senate: The Turning Point USA meme is accurate in claiming that Sanders supported and co-sponsored a proposal that would have seen nuclear waste from Maine, Vermont and (principally) Texas disposed of at a site in Sierra Blanca, and that Sierra Blanca was (and still is) a predominately Latino and relatively poor community. The meme leaves out important and relevant context by failing to mention the key role that Republicans played in crafting and passing that proposal; instead, it singles out Sanders and does not offer the reader any inkling of his environmentalist rationale. Sanders stood to gain politically from supporting a plan that would remove nuclear waste from his constituency, but this does not necessarily mean he wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to dispose of the waste in a manner and location that he genuinely believed to be safer. However, whether or not you believe his stated rationale was sincere, no proper analysis of a particular politician's policy position or Congressional vote should leave out the reasons put forward by that politician. Finally, we were not able to corroborate the Absolutely not quotation attributed to Sanders, and his spokesperson did not address our question about it.
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