Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, the Republican senator-elect from West Virginia, says she doesn't appreciate President Barack Obama's "war on coal" and will fight vigorously in the Senate to overturn EPA regulations that have cost her state jobs.
"The president's policies are disenfranchising part of the country – my part of the country," she said on
"Fox News Sunday." "We've been picked as a loser. I'm not going to stand for it, and rolling back the EPA regulations is the way to do it."
West Virginia has lost more than 5,000 coal jobs over the last two years, with several thousand more workers under notice that they could be losing theirs, she said. And that doesn't count support jobs.
Capito said she hopes President Barack Obama is serious about working with the GOP-led Congress, but isn't sure he got the voters' message on Tuesday.
"When he says he hears the two-thirds of the people that are not voting, what kind of message could he possibly be getting?" she asked.
Capito was referring to Obama's comments at a press conference on Wednesday that he had heard the people who voted in a Republican majority to the Senate on Tuesday, but he also had heard the two-thirds who stayed home on Election Day.
Capito said she believes Congress can do the bipartisan work needed to get the country moving, and hopes Obama "gets on board a little bit more than he did in that first press conference."
She also would like to see voting on the nomination of Loretta Lynch as attorney general held off until the new Senate is sworn in in January.
"If we're going to have an era of good faith here we need to begin with the confirmation process for one of the most important jobs in the country, and that's attorney general," Capito said.
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