As a fuel, coal is cheap. Sen. Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, is busy in Congress this week showing why. Fellow senators would be unwise environmentally or politically to support Sen. Byrd in his attempt to exempt his home-state fuel from the nation’s laws.

A U.S. District Judge in October shocked West Virginia’s coal industry when he ruled it was subject to federal law just like any other business. At issue was mountaintop removal, a mining practice by which the top of a mountain is blasted away, coal is exposed to be mined and the resulting rubble is bulldozed into whatever valley or stream is handy. The process is crude, terrible for the environment and, according to Chief Judge Charles H. Haden, illegal under the Clean Water Act of 1977.

This last point is not surprise to the industry; it has long known that it was flouting environmental rules. The surprise is that anyone would hold them accountable. Even Judge Haden stayed his own ruling pending appeal. Naturally, that’s not good enough for the industry.

Sen. Byrd’s rider to the Interior appropriations bill would carve out a special exemption for the mining industry to allow the bulldozing to continue unabated. Or maybe it isn’t so special — he has teamed up with Sen. Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, who has a rider to give metal mining a similar exemption to dump waste on federal and Indian land in the West. Together the bills represent an anti-environmental position that defies the will of voters nationwide, who have chosen through referendum again and again to protect natural resources.

West Virginians will argue that the Byrd rider is about protecting jobs, thousands of which they say will be lost if the coal industry has to follow the rules everyone does. It is a point worth consideration, but what sort of fuel is coal if it cannot exist without substantial subsidy in the form of rule exemptions? Already, an EPA suit against coal-burning power plants to bring them into compliance with the Clean Air Act has that industry shouting job loss. Imagine the nuclear-power or natural-gas industries petitioning for these sorts of exemptions. Instead, they have been forced to become more efficient or, in the case of some nuclear plants, shut down to make way for the more efficient sources.

Maine’s senators should reject an Interior bill with these harmful riders. They’re bad for the environment and set terrible precedents against the enormously beneficial Clean Air and Water acts.