“Doing What They Do Best”: House Republicans Just Passed A Bill Forbidding Scientists From Advising The EPA On Their Own Research
Congressional climate wars were dominated Tuesday by the U.S. Senate, which spent the day debating, and ultimately failing to pass, a bill approving the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While all that was happening, and largely unnoticed, the House was busy doing what it does best: attacking science.
H.R. 1422, which passed 229-191, would shake up the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board, placing restrictions on those pesky scientists and creating room for experts with overt financial ties to the industries affected by EPA regulations.
The bill is being framed as a play for transparency: Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, argued that the board’s current structure is problematic because it “excludes industry experts, but not officials for environmental advocacy groups.” The inclusion of industry experts, he said, would right this injustice.
But the White House, which threatened to veto the bill, said it would “negatively affect the appointment of experts and would weaken the scientific independence and integrity of the SAB.”
In what might be the most ridiculous aspect of the whole thing, the bill forbids scientific experts from participating in “advisory activities” that either directly or indirectly involve their own work. In case that wasn’t clear: experts would be forbidden from sharing their expertise in their own research — the bizarre assumption, apparently, being that having conducted peer-reviewed studies on a topic would constitute a conflict of interest. “In other words,” wrote Union of Concerned Scientists director Andrew A. Rosenberg in an editorial for RollCall, “academic scientists who know the most about a subject can’t weigh in, but experts paid by corporations who want to block regulations can.”
Speaking on the House floor Tuesday, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., summed up what was going on: “I get it, you don’t like science,” he told bill sponsor Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah. “And you don’t like science that interferes with the interests of your corporate clients. But we need science to protect public health and the environment.”
The House, alas, is staying the course, voting this week on two other bills aimed at impeding the EPA, including one that prevents the agency from relying on what it calls “secret science” in crafting its regulations — but which in reality, opponents argue, would effectively block the EPA from adopting any new rules to protect public health. The trio, wrote Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, in an editorial for the Hill, represents “the culmination of one of the most anti-science and anti-health campaigns I’ve witnessed in my 22 years as a member of Congress.”
The White House has threatened to veto all three.
By: Lindsay Abrams, Salon, November 19, 2014
“What The Keystone Vote Tells Us About The Democratic Party”: Republicans Succeeding In Defining What It Means To Be A Liberal
The bill to authorize construction of the Keystone pipeline failed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate last night by a single vote. Every Republican voted in favor, since support for the idea of sending Canadian oil to American refineries so it can be processed for sale overseas has become a core value of conservatism. But they were joined by 14 Democrats. And if we look at who those Democrats are, we can learn quite a bit about the state of their party.
Five of those Democrats are red-staters who discovered this year that “distancing” yourself from Barack Obama isn’t enough to win re-election in a year of extremely low turnout. The first is Mary Landrieu, on whose behalf this entire exercise was mounted, on the absurd theory that Louisiana voters will turn out in droves for her runoff in December once they learn how much she loves oil, a fact of which they were supposedly unaware before now. Then we have Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and John Walsh of Montana. The first three lost their seats, and Walsh would have been ousted by voters had he not resigned over a plagiarism scandal.
The next group of Democrats are also from red states: Heidi Heitkamp of South Dakota, John Tester of Montana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Through whatever combination of electoral fear and genuine conviction, these are among the senators who disagree with their colleagues most often. McCaskill is a particularly notable case; lately she has been moving to the right in visible ways, including proclaiming her opposition to Harry Reid remaining leader of the Democrats in the Senate and criticizing President Obama’s proposed actions on immigration. Rumor has it that she’s preparing to run for governor, which could help explain why.
The final group of Democrats who voted in favor of the pipeline may have each had their own reasons, but none could have imagined that voting against the pipeline would be a huge political liability. These were Michael Bennet of Colorado, Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Tom Carper of Delaware.
So what does this tell us? To a great degree it suggests that Republicans are still succeeding in defining what it means to be a liberal, striking fear into the hearts of any Democrat who wants to win in a red state. Republicans haven’t actually spent too much time arguing the environmental concerns over Keystone, other than to dismiss them out of hand. Instead, they’ve touted the pipeline as a jobs boon that would boost the entire American economy, a claim no sane person believes.
But red-state Democrats still live their lives in a state of perpetual terror that someone might call them a liberal (the only red-state Democrats who voted No were Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, both of whom are retiring).
If these votes don’t change, when Republicans bring the pipeline up again in the new Congress, it will have enough votes to overcome a filibuster — but still fall short of the 67 that would be needed to override a presidential veto. And the Democrats who supported the pipeline will find that it really didn’t help them.
Their red state colleagues who lost their elections have already found out that high-profile breaks with their party don’t keep you politically safe. And indeed, those red-state losses have made the Democratic caucus in the Senate more liberal, and it’s possible that in 2016 the number of red state Democrats will decline even further (even if Democrats gain seats overall). So even if there is still the possibility of Dem divisions on some issues, the fracturing off of red state Dems could matter less and less over time, making the future of Democrats in Congress one of more, not less, unity.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, November 19, 2014
“It’s Not Just Ferguson – It’s All Of America”: The Drift Towards Police As Warrior Cops Instead Of Guardians Of The People
There’s a very good chance that your local police arrest black Americans at a rate more disproportional than in Ferguson, MO, where the police killing of unarmed Michael Brown unleashed decades of anger over police abuse.
The awful truth is that Ferguson Police Department’s nearly 3-to-1 disparity in arresting blacks is well below the norm in many cities and towns, including those far north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
With a grand jury poised to decide any day now whether the white officer who shot Brown six times will be indicted — which seems unlikely — new protests will focus attention on Ferguson. But what we really need is a debate about the role of police, their training and their discretion.
We need to restore the idea of police as guardians. We must bring an end to the changes that libertarian journalist Radley Balko details in his important book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
Reporters for USA Today brought to light the disproportionate arrest rates. They analyzed Uniform Crime Report data that local police departments sent to the FBI for 2011 and 2012.
Only 173 of 3,538 police departments arrested blacks at disproportionately low rates, while Ferguson PD and 1,581 other departments arrested blacks at rates significantly higher than their share of the local population.
In big cities like tolerant and cosmopolitan San Francisco and small ones like Duluth, the data reveal arrest rates by race far more troubling than those in Ferguson. In 70 cities from coast to coast, police arrest black people at 10 times the rate of people who are not black.
These numbers help explain the palpable resentment of young black men and the fears of parents.
Disparate arrest rates tell us that the legacy of slavery is far from over, no matter how blind our Supreme Court is with its decisions on voting, procedural rights and executions.
Ferguson is part of a subtle new racist phenomenon, a modern variation on “sundown towns,” which literally posted crude signs telling blacks not to be around after dark.
Back when Ferguson was mostly a white working-class town, the police chained a street leading to a neighboring black community to make a point about who belonged and who was unwelcome. Now Ferguson is mostly black, but its elected leaders and its police force are almost all white.
Today’s tactics of oppression and racial profiling defile our Constitution and waste taxpayer money.
Ezekiel Edwards, who runs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project, told USA Today, “We shouldn’t continue to see this kind of staggering disparity wherever we look.”
The question to ask ourselves is whether we look at all.
This disparity in arrests occurs even in Rochester, New York, which before the Civil War was among the few places that gave runaway slaves refuge and became the adopted home of the most famous among them, Frederick Douglass, and his abolitionist newspaper The North Star.
Blacks in Rochester were 2.4 times more likely to be arrested than whites in 2011 and 2012, the official data show. The Rochester city rates may reflect an ongoing gang war fueled by drug dealing in the fifth poorest city in America. But what about the surrounding suburbs, where arrest rates were vastly out of proportion?
I live five blocks south of the Rochester city line in the town of Brighton, a community of highly educated people from around the world and known for social consciousness. Brighton arrests black people at 6.4 times their share of the population, more than twice the rate of Ferguson, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported.
One could excuse that by saying, who knew? But that is just an excuse.
The right questions: Why didn’t we know? What public purpose is being served by these arrests? Do the arrests have a solid basis or do they serve to harass? Who was arrested and what for? Are these arrests for serious crimes or petty reasons? How many of these arrests result in convictions? Do these arrests help justify the current size — and expense — of our police force? Do people of color believe the police want them to feel unwelcome?
After that comes the most important question, the one that is needed to move us from thought to action: What will we do about this?
Arrest rates are an indicator, not a diagnosis, of social ills. Reading the comments in several Gannett newspapers (which include USA Today as a separate section), it is clear many people assume a direct correlation between arrests and criminal activity. However, the problem may be not with those arrested, but with the police.
We imbue police officers with enormous discretion, as exhaustively detailed in six years of litigation over the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration believed it was reducing crime by detaining young non-white males, though it would never put it quite that way. If such strategies worked, then why didn’t NYPD harass the Wall Street bankers whose white-collar crimes sank the economy six years ago?
Curiously missing from the stop-and-frisk debate was whether it was nothing more than featherbedding; creating needless work to justify the size of the NYPD and its outsized overtime costs.
Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general, issued a report examining 150,000 NYPD arrests from 2009 through 2012. Just one in 33 arrests resulted in a conviction of any kind, and just 1 in 1,000 in a conviction for a violent crime. But processing all those arrests created statistics that the NYPD used to assert that officers were being productive — not to mention earning overtime for end-of-shift collars.
You can examine the NYPD’s own data on stop-and-frisk from 2003 through 2013. In that last year police stopped, questioned, and frisked about 2,200 people per day – more than seven times as many as in 2002.
To get an idea of why so many white Americans see police differently from so many black Americans, read this very interesting and simple matrix showing differences in arrest rates between an area near New York University and a poor neighborhood near Yankee Stadium.
Current New York City mayor Bill de Blasio settled the case in January 2014 with a promise to stop the excessive use of stop-and-frisk.
Favoritism by police is not always racial. It can by favoritism for celebrities, as we’ve seen in the recent New York Times exposés of apparently criminal conduct by college and National Football League players who assaulted women, mistreated children and fled traffic accidents they caused. The victims discovered that the police were indeed guardians – of the offenders.
Abundant signs exist that police across America tend to treat those not privileged with white skin – and affluence – with greater suspicion.
How else to explain the story a worried Rochester executive tells? Several times a month his adult son, who works into the night, gets pulled over on the way home. As best the family can tell, some cops see reasonable cause for a stop in these facts: young black male in expensive new car driving alone after midnight.
How, other than racism, to explain a daytime traffic stop on Sunset Boulevard in which a middle-aged black man in a Rolls Royce, his daughters in the back seat, was ordered out at gunpoint? Without permission, officers ransacked his leather satchel until they found something that caused them fear and alarm – a badge identifying the driver as No. 3 in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
Most white Americans have never had a cop pull them over for no reason except that they seemed out of place, as the late Johnny Cochran did in 1979. I have. In Beverly Hills and in Longport, NJ, officers whose initial demeanor was hostile pulled me over in broad daylight. The basis of their suspicions? My Toyota Corolla, its paint dulled by the years, looked out of place in towns whose residents drive luxury cars.
Police who instill fear are not police who catch bad guys, because it is citizens informing the police who solve crimes. Police who see “black skin” and “criminal” as synonymous need to be fired. And the burden for addressing these problems should fall squarely where it belongs – on the white majority whose values, and blindness, allow the drift towards police as warrior cops instead of guardians of the people.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, November 20, 2014
“We Were Strangers Once Too”: President Obama Announces Executive Order For Deportation Relief
President Barack Obama on Thursday announced plans to sign an executive order sparing up to 5 million unauthorized immigrants from deportation, arguing that congressional inaction left him little choice but to use his executive authority on the issue.
In the summer of 2013, Obama noted, the U.S. Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill on a bipartisan 68 to 32 vote, raising advocates’ hopes that an overhaul was in sight. But House Speaker John Boehner never brought the measure to a House vote, and Obama took Congress to task for its failure to act in his Thursday evening address. House Republicans, Obama charged, “refused to allow that simple vote.”
Until Congress moves on the issue, Obama said, the best path forward is executive action. In his speech, the president laid out a three-point plan. First, the U.S. will beef up border security and continue to focus on capturing unauthorized migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. The president will also establish incentives that will keep highly skilled immigrants in the country — a top priority for GOP-leaning business groups, Finally — and most controversially — Obama said his administration would “deal responsibly” with unauthorized immigrants already in the country.
Emphasizing that the U.S. would continue to deport immigrants deemed security threats, Obama said that he would order agencies to prioritize the most dangerous unauthorized immigrants for deportation. “Felons, not families” and “criminals, not children” would be the focus of U.S. enforcement efforts, the president said. The president referenced the nation’s immigrant history, saying, “we were strangers once too.”
The president’s plan expands the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for those brought to the U.S. as minors; the program will no longer have an age cap. More crucially — contingent on passing a background check — parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents who have themselves been in the U.S. for at least five years will be spared deportation. That protection alone affects an estimated 4 million people.
Obama cautioned that the changes do not apply to any migrants who recently arrived in the U.S. or those who may come in the future.
The president’s invocation of executive authority on the issue drew the ire of conservative Republicans, including incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said executive action would represent a “defiance of the people.” The president is poised for a showdown with the GOP over the issue when a unified GOP Congress takes control in January.
“The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every Democratic president for the past half century,” Obama said in his address. “To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”
Progressives cheered the president’s announcement.
“Today, parents who have lived here for years and had to constantly worry that they could be torn away from their children will no longer have to look over their shoulders. With House Republicans continuing to block immigration reform legislation in Congress, the president is taking a bold step that is fully within his authority to begin fixing the system,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former Obama administration aide.
By: Luke Brinker, Salon, November 20, 2014
“Changing The Way The Votes Are Counted”: Republicans Revive Bold Scheme To Rig Presidential Elections
After Republicans failed to capture the White House in 2012, they dusted off a tried-and-true plan to improve their future electoral prospects. No, they wouldn’t moderate their views or expand their appeal to win votes. They would just change the way that the votes are counted!
The plan: to rig the electoral college with the ultimate goal of squeaking out a Republican presidential win, even in an increasingly challenging electoral landscape.
Here’s how it was supposed to work.
Before the 2010 election, Republican strategists focused energy and resources on gaining control of state legislatures, and succeeded in flipping party control of legislative chambers in blue states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. This allowed Republican legislatures to draw congressional districts, gerrymandering their states to ensure future Republican gains even in states where Democrats tend to win statewide.
GOP strategists then took it a step further. What if Republicans used their control over these blue states and their favorably gerrymandered electoral maps to make it harder for Democrats to win presidential elections?
Under the Constitution, each state determines how it will distribute its electoral votes to presidential candidates. All but two states (Maine and Nebraska) have a “winner take all” system, in which the winner of the state’s popular vote earns all of its electoral votes. The Republican plan would keep the “winner take all” system in big, solidly red states like Texas. But it would change it in big, blue states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, ensuring that a Democratic candidate who wins the popular vote in the state doesn’t go home with all of its electoral votes.
For instance, under the plan originally proposed in Pennsylvania after the 2012 election, which would have divided the state’s electoral votes up by gerrymandered congressional districts, Mitt Romney would have won 13 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, despite having lost the state’s popular vote. Last year, the Republican-controlled state house in the presidential swing state of Virginia put forward a plan to do something similar. If the Virginia plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have carried away nine of the state’s 13 electoral vote, despite having lost the state’s popular vote to Barack Obama.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus made the goal of the scheme clear when he endorsed it last year, saying, “I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at.”
The proposals in Pennsylvania and Virginia sank after groups like People For the American Way got out the word and residents realized the proposals were part of a blatant political ploy. But this month, the scheme was resurrected in Michigan, where a Republican state lawmaker is proposing his own plan to dilute the power of his state’s reliably Democratic electoral college block. Under the plan introduced by Rep. Pete Lund, Michigan’s electoral votes would be distributed according to a formula tied to the popular vote. It’s not as blatant as the original Pennsylvania and Virginia proposals were, but it has the same goal: If it had been in effect in the last presidential election, it would have cut President Obama’s electoral total in Michigan down to 12 from 16.
These plans can initially seem reasonable, even to progressives, many of whom are wary of the electoral college system. But this isn’t a good-government plan to change the way our presidential elections are conducted. It’s a targeted plot to get more electoral votes for Republicans, even when they’re losing the popular vote. It’s no coincidence that these plans have often been quietly introduced in lame duck sessions, when voters are paying less attention. These measures, if allowed to be passed quickly in a few states with little debate and attention, could have national implications and change American political history.
Voters should be allowed to pick their politicians. But this is yet another case of politicians trying to pick their voters. Like with voter suppression schemes and extreme gerrymandering, the GOP is trying to change the rules of the game for their own benefit. Voters can’t let them get away with it.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, November 20, 2014
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