Trump And American Disunity

Blue skies, nothing but blue skies

If you were shocked to hear polling that indicated that a majority or plurality of Americans approved of how Trump was handling the pandemic, keep in mind that whenever there's a national calamity, Americans tend to rally round the flag. Sometimes that is short-lived though-- and in this case it was very short-lived. A new poll from Navigator shows most Americans have now regained their senses and see Trump as part of the problem, not part of the solution. When asked about Trump's erratic and self-serving handling of the pandemic, we see a 13-point swing in his net approval on this from 52% to 42% (+10) to 47% to 50% (-3). "Trump is wildly out of step with Americans with his new push to relax social distancing," concluded the pollster. "Only 5% say we should roll back precautions, even at the expense of economic losses, while 74% say we should wait however long it takes for public health experts to say it’s safe, including 70% of Republicans... Trump didn’t cause coronavirus, but his actions have made it worse-- and Americans are looking to others, from governors to health experts, to lead us out of this... Lives have been put at risk by Trump’s senseless delay on invoking his authority to produce more needed supplies like masks and ventilators."

One of my sisters is tucked away in self-imposed isolation at her home in Brooklyn, venturing out only rarely and only with her N-99 mask and latex gloves. The other-- who is married to a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpist-- has been incredibly hostile to the idea of precautions... until yesterday when her fearless leader announced he was considering some kind of a enforceable travel quarantine against New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, whatever that means. If Trump says it's real, in her mind, it's real.

Some of Trump's political allies-- the reactionary governors of Florida and Texas for example-- had already put up barriers against New Yorkers. And now the truly repulsive conservative governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, a pretend-Democrat, who has adamantly refused to issue shelter-in-place orders, announced Friday that "members of the National Guard, along with local law enforcement, would be going door-to-door in shore communities to look for people who have come here from New York. The troops will collect their contact information and work to enforce the 14-day quarantine. They will do their best to target homes where the state believes people may have come from New York, Raimondo said. People who violate quarantine orders would be subject to a fine at first, and prison time on subsequent offenses, Raimondo said." Her troops have been ordered to pull over cars with New York license plates... respectfully. Cuomo said he would sue her if she didn't roll back her diktat immediately. [Instead she just announced that the restriction apply to any non-Rhode Islander-- so she's giving the finger to the rest of the country. No comment.]

Raimondo is widely considered one of the most disgusting, puke-worthy governors of any state regardless of party. She told the media that "This is an emergency. What is constitutional in one scenario is different than in another. This is pinpointed, this is targeted, this is a state of emergency, this is limited in time, and it’s going to be enforced in a respectful way. And it’s a public health necessity." She said "Right now we have a pinpointed risk. That risk is called New York City."

He backed off today

Janet Mills, Maine's lame (Democratic) governor hasn't had the brains or spine to order Mainers to shelter in place either. Officials on the island of North Haven, Maine issued an order banning all visitors to the island-- even ones who own homes there.




Vox's Ian Millhiser noted the same thing and wondered how much this is going to weaken the union, "testing the very notion that the United States are united."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed an executive order on Thursday that would require travelers from some coronavirus hotspots to self-quarantine: It provides that “every person” who flies into Texas from “New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or the City of New Orleans, or in any other state or city as may be proclaimed hereafter, shall be subject to mandatory self-quarantine for a period of 14 days from the time of entry into Texas or the duration of the person’s presence in Texas, whichever is shorter.”

Other states have imposed similar orders. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) imposed an order on Tuesday that requires anyone flying from New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut to self-isolate for 14 days. Alaska and Hawaii also imposed self-quarantine orders on people traveling from other states.

These orders implicate one of the fundamental premises of the union among the 50 states: the right of American citizens to travel among them freely.

As the Supreme Court recognized more than 170 years ago, “we are one people with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own states.” The right of all US citizens to travel freely among the states, the Court later explained in United States v. Guest (1966), “was conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger union the Constitution created.”

If states can decide that some US citizens are not welcome within their borders, it may cease to be a union at all. This right to travel is implicit in the notion that citizens are Americans, and not simply Texans or New Yorkers.

But should that principle hold during a pandemic? Does the Constitution forbid states from taking drastic actions to slow the spread of a potentially deadly disease within their own borders?

Gov. Abbott’s order, at the very least, is probably carefully drafted enough to survive constitutional scrutiny. That order applies to “every person” who flies into Texas from the designated areas, regardless of whether that person is a resident of Texas or some other state. Read in that light, it does not discriminate against non-Texans.

But orders like Gov. Abbott’s do raise troubling constitutional questions. And they cut against the concept of a union of states that has prevailed in this country, especially since the New Deal.

The modern notion that every US citizen has the same rights, no matter where they travel within the nation, is rooted in a notion of nationwide solidarity that depends on a strong and competent federal government. And the Trump administration is not holding up its end of that bargain.

...But even if such travel bans are legal, they are still indicative of a greater rot within our constitutional system. The premise of our Constitution is that the states gave up some of their sovereign authority to the federal government, in return for mutual benefits such as collective national defense and free trade among the states. The premise of the post-New Deal order is that the federal government must take on additional obligations, including providing a basic social safety net.

And the evolution of the right to travel played a significant role in establishing this new order. The right to travel is fundamentally tied to our conception of what it means to be a citizen of a nation. We’ve spent most of the last century fleshing out our understanding of what obligations our nation owes to its citizens.

...The United States was one collective community, not 50 insular communities.

But Trump is slashing the safety net that holds this national community together. He spent much of the first three years of his presidency dismantling the federal government’s permanent infrastructure, that his predecessors set up to deal with a pandemic-- including ordering the White House National Security Council’s (NSC) entire global health security arm shut down. He’s repeatedly proposed budgets making sharp cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump abdicates his role as the custodian of a nationwide safety net. Indeed, he recently told a group of governors who needed ventilators to deal with the rise of coronavirus cases to “try getting it yourselves.”

Thursday night, after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) requested tens of thousands of ventilators to protect the lives of infected New Yorkers, Trump dismissed this request in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” Trump claimed. “You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

Nor is Cuomo the only governor frustrated by the federal government’s inaction. After Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) sought much needed medical gear and equipment to protect the people in his state, the federal government provided only a fraction of what his state needed.

Moreover, as Pritzker wrote on Twitter, Trump’s inaction forces governors to compete with each other-- potentially even pushing them into a bidding war. “I have medical professionals and first responders begging for the things they need to keep them safe-- but so does” Cuomo. So does Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R). So does Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D).

Trump, meanwhile, was extraordinarily slow to use the Defense Production Act, a federal law that would allow the federal government to coordinate a national response among state and private industry. As Pritzker writes, “it’s the federal government’s job to make sure that a nurse being properly equipped in Illinois doesn’t come at the cost of a doctor being ready for work in California.”

If the Trump administration is unwilling or unable to uphold its end of the post-New Deal bargain, the implications are staggering. Trump’s inaction does not simply threaten to exacerbate a pandemic. It threatens the very concept of what it means to be the United States of America.

Could Putin have foreseen all this when he invested a measly few million dollars towards getting Trump elected in 2016? What an absolutely brilliant investment-- at least from a Russian perspective! Shrewdest foreign policy move in Russian history!

Scott Pruitt’s Doublespeak Clarifies Him

by Skip Kaltenheuser

Allow me to introduce a friend, Elliott Negin, who writes for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS, marshals volunteers and a network of twenty-thousand scientists for a variety of objectives including fighting misinformation and attacks on science, on matters from global warming to pollution to nuclear weapons.

Elliott just wrote an essay considering a speech by Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, before CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, The analysis underscores Pruitt’s startling hypocrisy, most recently on display in Congressional hearings exploring some of the many oddities of Pruitt.

Tough competition, but Pruitt is a contender for the most glaring example of Trump Administration venality, and of the easy willingness of the Administration to plant time bombs in the environment and in the public health in the service of puppeteers like the Koch brothers. A menace like Pruitt is best exposed when he preaches to the choir. Eight minutes into his CPAC presentation Pruitt sits down with interviewer Gina Loudon who asks for a show of hands of “those of you that kind of hoped that Administrator Pruitt will just sort of make the EPA go away.” Big cheer. Now, that’s a choir.

Getting a major appointment from Donald Trump is like sitting in the barber chair of Sweeney Todd. Bets are now placed on whether the President will find it expedient to give Pruitt the Trump Heave-Ho or keep him to placate Pruitt supporters like Senator Rand Paul. “@EPAScottPruitt is likely the bravest and most conservative member of Trump’s cabinet,” tweeted Paul on April 5. “We need him to help @realDonaldTrump drain the regulatory swamp.” Pruitt’s so brave he seeks to hide in his forty-three grand cone of silence. Paul’s tweet reminds us how prescient George Orwell was. Note that draining the swamp has morphed into draining the regulatory swamp.

If you can persevere or jump to the last two minutes of the CPAC speech, about twenty-one minutes in, Loudon and Pruitt are rolling out doublespeak that would leave Orwell in awe.

It’s instructive to examine the realities behind three points of emphasis in Pruitt’s CPAC speech: attention to process, rule of law and federalism. However this game of White House Chutes and Ladders plays out, those realities are still the bedrock of Trump’s environment and energy agendas, no matter who is in charge at EPA.

The Swamp Revisited, One Year Later by Nancy Ohanian

EPA Chief Pruitt Even Violates His Own Principles

by Elliott Negin

With Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s job now hanging in the balance, it is a good time to recall that, just after his Senate confirmation, he gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that emphasized the three principles he said would stand at “the heart of how we do business at the EPA”: process, rule of law, and federalism.

A little more than a year into his tenure, he has violated all of them.

Subverting Process

“Number one,” Pruitt told his CPAC audience, “we’re going to pay attention to process.”

In fact, as we now know, Pruitt has a long track record-- going back to his days in Oklahoma-- of flouting official procedures when it suits him.

Most troubling is Pruitt’s disdain for EPA policy procedures, which have a considerable impact on public health. Just this week, Pruitt undercut the EPA’s long-established process for drafting strong, protective regulations by proposing that the agency no longer accept studies if all of their data isn’t publicly available. That would mean the agency would have to ignore most epidemiological studies, which rely on private medical information that cannot and should not be shared.

Polluter-funded members of Congress have tried to pass bills instituting this restriction for years, despite the fact that it would violate the EPA’s obligation to use the best available science to protect public health. Sure enough, emails obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists show that political appointees, not career staff or scientists, were behind the proposal, and they only considered its potential impact on industry. In response, nearly 1,000 scientists sent a letter to Pruitt asking him to back off.

Pruitt also packed the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) with industry scientists, overturning four decades of precedent by banning scientists who have received EPA grants from serving on the SAB or any other agency advisory panel. Why? Pruitt claims they have a conflict of interest. Pruitt did not renew terms for a number of respected members and dismissed several independent scientists before their terms were up, shrinking the SAB from 47 to 42 participants and more than doubling the number of its polluter-friendly members.

Likewise, Pruitt clearly has little use for standard EPA administrative procedures. The Government Accountability Office, for example, recently found that he violated federal law by ordering a $43,000 soundproof phone booth. Political appointees, it turns out, have to clear office improvement purchases over $5,000 with Congress. Unlike his predecessors, he has routinely flown first class, and so far it has cost taxpayers more than $150,000. He tripled the size of the administrator’s security team to 19 agents, and according to CNN their annual salaries alone cost at least $2 million. He has a 24-hour-a-day bodyguard. He rented a condo for $50 a night—well below market value—from the wife of an energy lobbyist who met with Pruitt last July and lobbies EPA on behalf of his clients. The list of Pruitt’s ethical infractions goes on and on.

Breaking the Rule of Law

“When rule of law is applied it provides certainty to those that are regulated,” Pruitt explained during that CPAC speech. “Those in industry should know what is expected of them. Those in industry should know how to allocate their resources to comply with the regulations passed by the EPA.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Of course industrial facility owners should be clear about their responsibility to curb emissions. Under Pruitt, however, polluters can be certain about at least one thing: There’s a good chance they won’t be prosecuted. For Pruitt, the rule of law is made to be broken.

In its first year in office, the Trump administration resolved only 48 environmental civil cases, about a third fewer than under President Barack Obama’s first EPA director and less than half under President George W. Bush’s over the same time period, according to a February report by the Environmental Integrity Project. The Trump administration recovered just $30 million in penalties from these cases, nearly 60 percent less than the $71 million the Obama administration recovered in its first year.

A December analysis by the New York Times comparing the first nine months of the Trump regime with previous administrations, also found a marked decline in enforcement. It determined that the EPA under Pruitt initiated about 1,900 enforcement cases, about a third fewer than during the Obama administration and about a quarter fewer than the Bush administration over the same time frame.

Meanwhile, Pruitt-- who sued the EPA 14 times to block stronger air, water and climate safeguards during his tenure as Oklahoma attorney general-- is now trying to roll back environmental protections from the inside. Since taking office, he has moved quickly to delay or weaken a range of Obama-era regulations, including ones that protect the public from toxic pesticides, lead paint and vehicle emissions.

Ironically, Pruitt’s cavalier attitude about following procedures has thus far blunted his wrecking-ball campaign. “In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their ‘I’s and cross their ‘T’s, and they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, told the New York Times. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”

Federalism for all but California

“So process matters, rule of law matters, but let me tell you this: What really matters is federalism,” Pruitt told the CPAC faithful. “We are going to once again pay attention to the states across the country. I believe people in Oklahoma, in Texas, in Indiana, in Ohio, and New York and California, and in all the states across the country, they care about the air they breathe, and they care about the water they drink, and we are going to be partners with these individuals [sic], not adversaries.”

California? He must have forgotten that when he lashed out at the state for embracing stronger vehicle fuel economy standards than what he and the auto industry would prefer. “California is not the arbiter of these issues,” Pruitt said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in mid-March. California sets state limits on carbon emissions, he said, but “that shouldn’t and can’t dictate to the rest of the country what these levels are going to be.”

California, which has a waiver under the 1970 Clean Air Act giving it the right to set its own vehicle emissions standards, reached an agreement with the Obama administration and the auto industry that established the first limits on tailpipe carbon emissions. The next phase of the standards calls for improving the average fuel efficiency of new cars and light trucks to about 50 miles per gallon by 2025 in lab tests, corresponding to a real-world performance of about 36 mpg. By 2030, that would reduce global warming pollution by nearly 4 billion tons, akin to shutting down 140 coal-fired power plants over that time frame.

California wants to stick with the standards. Pruitt, echoing the specious claims of auto industry trade groups, announced in early April that he wants to roll them back. Putting aside the fact that the auto industry’s own analysis concluded that carmakers can meet the 2025 targets primarily with conventional vehicles, what happened to Pruitt’s “cooperative federalism” ideal, especially since California is not acting alone?

Thirteen states, mostly in the Northeast and Northwest, and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s stricter emissions standards. Together they represent at least a third of the U.S. auto market. And in response to Pruitt’s roll-back announcement, 12 state attorneys general and 63 mayors from 26 states released a declaration supporting the stronger standards. “Such standards are particularly appropriate given the serious public impacts of air pollution in our cities and states and the severe impacts of climate change…,” the declaration reads. “If the administration attempts to deny states and cities the basic right to protect their citizens, we will strongly challenge such an effort in court.”

That declaration sounds a lot like what Pruitt endorsed at the conclusion of his CPAC speech, but of course he was referring to state efforts to weaken federal environmental safeguards, not strengthen them. “We are going to restore power back to the people,” he said. “We are going to recognize the regulatory uncertainty and the regulatory state needs to be reined in, we’re going to make sure the states are recognized for the authority they have, and we are going to do the work that’s important to advance freedom and liberty for the future. It’s an exciting time.

“The folks in D.C. have a new attitude,” Pruitt continued. “It’s an attitude that no longer are we going to dictate to those across the country and tell them how to live each and every day. It’s an attitude that says we’re going to empower citizens and the states. It’s an idea of federalism and believing in liberty.”

The CPAC crowd gave him a standing ovation, but the reception he’s now getting from both Democrats and Republicans alike is considerably cooler. At this point, Mr. Pruitt may soon find himself out of a job.

EPA Failure to Regulate Toxic Waste by Nancy Ohanian

Some of Elliott's offerings at the UCS and at the Huffington Post can be seen here and here.