If he had been the initial choice for Interior, who I wanted back in 2008, we might have avoided disasters with better oversight like the coal mining disaster, which is an industry RFK, Jr. was intimately involved with monitoring from the outside for wrongdoing like Mercury poisoning, etc. Perhaps we might have gotten the offshore oil drilling monitoring organizational flaws fixed in time before the Gulf Oil spill had happened, which might have prevented it as well. Salazar was worthless and I'm glad Obama is replacing him now. Grijalva would certainly be a good move in the right direction, and I'm sure he'd have RFK, Jr.'s ear on a lot of areas of what he does.
But I'm wondering if part of this move is to limit the Progressive caucus strength from getting too much power in 2014 midterms if you take someone like Grijalva out of the picture.
Two questions to ask:
1) How much is Grijalva interested in this position. If very interested, I cannot deny him that opportunity just to keep him in the House.
2) Do we have an identified (perhaps by Raul himself) a good person to step up to the bar to replace him and be another good progressive rep in the House. If we can then definitely this move is good, as it gets one more progressive voice more experience in government that we can build upon.
Right now, mostly what we are doing is building for 2014 in the House, so we should keep that in mind.
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