Covering the Issues That Others Don't; Amy M. Ridenour's free-market think tank embraces issues such as environmental justice that many in the conservative movement consider too risky to touch

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 27, 2003

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Amy M. Ridenour is president and chairwoman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Washington-based conservative think tank that advocates free-market economics and traditional American values.

Ridenour has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and Politically Incorrect. She has guest-hosted the Michael Reagan Talk Show and appeared on other talk-radio formats. Insight spoke with Ridenour at her home in Maryland where she works amidst what has to be the best of all possible sources for public policy, a family of three spirited children, 3-year-old Katie and 2-year-old twin boys, Jonathan and Christopher.

The National Center for Public Policy Research was founded in 1982 and, during the last two decades, has dealt with such issues as environmental policy and regulatory reform. It's also taken up government accountability, national sovereignty and issues of legal reform, always from a conservative point of view.

The center's Project 21 provides a voice for leading conservative and moderate voices among the nation's black community. In 2002 the National Center for Public Policy Research garnered 1,526 media interviews and citations, excluding op eds. Opinion pieces by center staff were published more than 1,270 times last year. The vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research is Amy Ridenour's husband, David. The center Website is www.nationalcenter.org.

Insight: What does the National Center for Public Policy Research do?

Amy M. Ridenour: We're a conservative free-market think tank. Our purpose is to work on what we call "fast-breaking emergencies." By that we mean the issues that are undercovered by the rest of the conservative movement. We look at the things everyone else isn't covering, and we're always working on emergencies!

Q: What are the issues you regard as undercovered and therefore in need of emergency attention?

A: In the beginning, when the National Center for Public Policy started out in 1982, it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The fact is that back in those days corporations and foundations were funding most of the conservative movement and there was a tremendous bias in favor of concentrating on domestic policy tax issues, for example. It happened that mainstream foreign-policy issues were underfunded, so we took up foreign policy.

Q: And then the U.S. won the Cold War and the Soviet Union, which had made itself our enemy of many decades, ceased to exist.

A: After the Cold War was won, our two biggest long-term issues were, first, Project 21, which is an African-American leadership group. Minority outreach is talked about a great deal by conservatives, but it is underdone, so we took that up, advancing outreach to conservative blacks and minorities.

And then, second, we took up the environmental area. There are a lot of conservative foundations that won't touch work that resists radical environmentalism. If they have even one "green" member on their board that changes everything. The greens can be very intimidating.

It's interesting, when it comes to environmental issues the corporations are always accused by the left of being dominated by the conservatives. But the fact is that corporations are more likely to give in to the [left-wing] Sierra Club on the issue of the environment than they are to conservatives.

Q: Among the issues your center now is working on, about which are you most enthusiastic?

A: I'd have to say environmental justice. It is an area that lies in the nexus between the environmental movement and minority outreach. The liberals will say, for example, that environmental justice is the assurance that people in poor communities don't have to put up with industrial plants that pollute in their districts. The liberals will say that the poor must have assurances that they aren't underserved by environmental regulations.

But in fact what really happens is that the environmental left focuses on big-government solutions that cost a lot of money. The left talks as though it is deeply concerned about the common man, but when projects cost a lot of money who gets hurt the worst? It is the people who have the least money and that means disproportionately the minorities.

Q: What kind of research does the center do?

A: We've just put together a study of the impact of so-called "smart-growth" regulations that have been developed as a means to deal with urban sprawl. We've examined these regulations where they confront minority home-ownership rights. What happens is that the environmental left has lots of expensive big-government solutions that often create severe injustice. We found that over the decade if the so-called "gold-standard" antisprawl regulations the ones that the greens love the most were put into gear, a million minority homeowners would not have been able to afford their homes.

Q: A million minority homeowners is a lot of people.

A: Indeed. Concern for a million American homeowners and their families should have produced a significant public-policy debate, but you never hear those involved in the environmental movement talk about it. Sen. John Kerry [D-Mass.] just gave a big speech about how he is for environmental justice, yet he never mentioned that what he advocates would keep a million Americans from being homeowners and deprive the families of those minority people of their part of the American Dream.