Long before he became our president, Ronald Reagan was widely known for a line he delivered often: “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.” What he didn’t emphasize was GE’s other important product: pollution. The huge company is fully or partly responsible for dozens of Superfund sites. One example: GE dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of a carcinogen, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River north of Albany from 1947 to 1977.

GE is dredging the Hudson, to remove PCBs from its sediment, so the chemicals can no longer contaminate the fish and endanger the humans who eat them. But this dredging is not an act of corporate altruism. The company had to be pushed, by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Without the EPA, it’s a safe bet that GE’s solution, leaving the PCBs in the sediment, would have prevailed.

All this is to point out that the EPA does a vital job, protecting us from environment-killing polluters. But current Republican orthodoxy labels the EPA a “job-killing” pariah.

That expression was polished to a high shine in the GOP phrase factory.

Republican candidates at every level use it a lot, usually to describe taxes and regulation. One presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has used that epithet often, usually when she promises to do away with the EPA if she becomes our president.

But we don’t have to wait for the 2012 election to know what lies in store for the EPA ― and for the core legislation that it enforces, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act ― if that sort of anti-regulation ideology carries the day.

Last month, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed something called the “Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011.” It sounds innocuous enough. But what it basically means is this: The federal government, through the EPA, will no longer be able to protect the public from water pollution when the states don’t do an adequate job.

“This was the first time in 40 years where a house of Congress voted to essentially overturn a base environmental statute,” said Scott Slesinger, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

So, the EPA couldn’t protect one state from what’s dumped in the water of another. We have an example right here. The EPA used the Superfund law in the GE situation, but it uses the Clean Water Act to protect Long Island Sound from pollution, by New York, Connecticut or any other state.

For the incurably nostalgic, the death of the EPA can bring back vignettes from days gone by. One that leaps to mind is the day in 1969 when Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. It wasn’t the first fiery day on the Cuyahoga. But it was the one that helped lead to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.

For those more interested in health than nostalgia, this bill is pernicious in a bipartisan way. Most of those who voted for it are Republicans, but a handful of Democrats went along. That includes its co-sponsor, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia. He’s upset about the obstacles standing in the way of a coal-mining method called mountaintop removal. Where does the debris end up? In the rivers. And which evil agency is standing in the way? Of course, the EPA.

Happily, it’s not likely to pass in this Senate. And the White House has made crystal clear that President Barack Obama would veto it. But if there’s a Republican Senate and a Republican president, get ready for dirtier water. Overnight, the guiding principle will change from “the polluter pays” to “polluting pays.”

By Bob Keeler, Newsday

Bob Keeler is a member of the Newsday editorial board. ― Ed.

(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)