“On Leadership”: Does President Obama’s Actions Only Count As Leadership If He’s Taking Steps Republicans Like?
By all appearances, President Obama would welcome the chance to work with lawmakers on a solution to combat the climate crisis. But in 2010, a cap-and-trade bill couldn’t overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate, and the legislative prospects effectively collapsed after the GOP claimed a House majority in 2011.
There are, however, some steps the president can take on his own, and it appears Obama is increasingly prepared to do just that.
On the heels of the Senate’s passage of a long-awaited farm bill, the Obama administration is to announce on Wednesday the creation of seven regional “climate hubs” aimed at helping farmers and rural communities respond to the risks of climate change, including drought, invasive pests, fires and floods.
White House officials describe the move as one of several executive actions that President Obama will take on climate change without action from Congress.
In substance, the creation of the climate hubs is a limited step, but it is part of a broader campaign by the administration to advance climate policy wherever possible with executive authority. The action is also part of a push to build political support for the administration’s more divisive moves on climate change – in particular, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on coal-fired power plants.
This move follows a more expansive climate policy Obama unveiled last June, relying almost exclusively on executive authority already acknowledged by the Supreme Court.
To be sure, these “climate hubs” are a fairly modest policy, intended to help a limited number of farmers adapt to changing conditions. But in the bigger picture, it’s also evidence of a sixth-year president eager to do something fairly specific with his power: lead.
And the more I think about it, the more common this seems to be.
There are a notable group of pundits who have spent much of Obama’s presidency demanding that he “lead more.” It’s never been entirely clear what, specifically, these pundits expect the president to do, especially in the face of unyielding and reflexive opposition from Congress, but the complaints seemed rooted in misplaced expectations and confusion over institutional limits.
As the argument goes, if only the president were willing to lead – louder, harder, and bigger – he could somehow advance his agenda through sheer force of will, institutional constraints be damned. And if Congress resists, it’s necessarily evidence that Obama is leading poorly – after all, if only he were a more leading leader, Congress would, you know, follow his lead. The line of criticism became so tiresome and so common that Greg Sargent began mocking it with a convenient label: the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.
What’s I’m curious about now, however, is whether those same pundits are willing to concede that in the West Wing, there’s been all kinds of leading going on lately.
When Republicans threatened to hold the debt ceiling hostage last fall, promising to crash the economy on purpose unless Democrats met their demands, Obama drew a line in the sand – there would be no negotiations over the full faith and credit of the United States – and the GOP backed down. In the process, a new precedent was set, thanks to the president’s willingness to lead.
When a bill to impose new Iranian sanctions threatened to sabotage international nuclear diplomacy, Obama stepped up, applied pressure, worked the phones, arranged meetings, and convinced senators to hold off and give the ongoing talks a chance. The president’s leadership turned a bill that appeared ready to pass and stopped it in its tracks.
When congressional Republicans balked at a minimum-wage increase, Obama used the powers available to him to give thousands of government contractors a raise. The GOP remains outraged, but the president showed leadership and ignored the complaints. Obama now appears ready to take similar executive action on addressing climate change.
So here’s the question for the “lead more” pundits: doesn’t this count as presidential leadership, too? Or do Obama’s actions only count as leadership if he’s taking steps Republicans like?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 5, 2014
“A Culture Of Privatization And Deregulation”: West Virginia Spill, Where “Regulation” Is A Dirty Word, Shady Businesses Flourish
Asked about the spill of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into a West Virginia river – a disaster that shut down schools and businesses, sent hundreds of residents seeking medical treatment and left an estimated 300,000 Mountain Staters without potable water – Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters that he is “entirely confident that there are ample regulations already on the books to protect the health and safety of the American people.”
Others weren’t as sanguine. “We have a culture of deregulation – regulation has been turned into a dirty word down here,” says Russell Mokhiber, the West Virginia-based editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. “Both the Democratic and Republican parties are complicit,” he told Moyers & Company.“The chemical and coal industries have a stranglehold on most institutions in the state. The political situation is locked up.”
Jennifer Sass, a lecturer in environmental health at George Washington University told The New York Times, “West Virginia has a pattern of resisting federal oversight and what they consider EPA interference, and that really puts workers and the population at risk.”
A 2009 investigation by the Times found that “hundreds of workplaces in West Virginia had violated pollution laws without paying fines.”
Current and former West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection employees said their enforcement efforts had been undermined by bureaucratic disorganization; a departmental preference to let polluters escape punishment if they promised to try harder; and a revolving door of regulators who left for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed.
But this isn’t just a story of anti-regulatory zeal – and the price hundreds of thousands of West Virginians paid for it. As new details emerge about Freedom Industries, the company responsible for the leak, it’s becoming clear that it’s also a tale of how shady businesses can prosper in an environment where regulatory capture by an industry is so deeply entrenched.
Even the history of Freedom Industries is murky. It was co-founded in 1992 by Carl Kennedy and Gary Southern — who during a Friday press conference sipped bottled water and told reporters that he’d had a really trying day. Southern had been president but the firm’s website now lists Dennis Farrell, a college friend of Kennedy’s (with whom he also opened a sports bar in 2002), as president instead. As Businessweek put it, “That clearly needs sorting out.” According to The Charleston Gazette, Southern is also the president of Enviromine, “which makes products to help remediate environmental problems from mining.”
Kennedy may or may not remain with the company; according to The Gazette, he’s still listed on documents the firm filed with the Secretary of State’s office, but a woman who answered the phone at the company said he was no longer with Freedom Industries.
That may be a distinction without a difference. Only weeks ago, the firm merged with several others: Etowah River Terminal, Poca Blending and Crete Technologies. According to The Gazette, in 2007, Kennedy claimed to have stakes in both Etowah River Terminal and Poca Blending. Prior to the merger, these companies already had complementary operations in the Kanawha Valley, known as “Chemical Valley.”
Carl Kennedy’s history reads like that of a character in an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel. In 1987, he pleaded guilty to selling between 10 and 12 ounces of cocaine in a case that would lead to the federal prosecution of then-Charleston Mayor Mike Roark, a former prosecutor himself who, according to The New York Times, “was once nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’ for his zeal in fighting drug abuse.” He was charged with 30 counts of cocaine possession.
The Gazette’s David Gutman reports that in the early 2000s, when Kennedy was the accountant for Freedom Industries, Poca Blending and New River Chemical Co., he pled guilty to withholding $1 million in taxes from employees’ paychecks and pocketing it rather than sending it to Uncle Sam. He also owed $200,000 in unpaid state taxes. Sentenced to three years in prison, Kennedy got his time cut in half “after he cooperated with authorities by making controlled cocaine buys and wearing a wire in conversations with a former business associate.”
In 2005, Etowah River Terminal lost its license for failing to file an annual report. It was resurrected in 2011, according to The Gazette.
Despite Kennedy’s reluctance to send tax dollars to Washington, in 2009 Freedom Industries was happy to accept stimulus funds which helped the company stay afloat. David Gutman recalled that “sand, silt and mud had built up in the river, making it difficult for barges to travel the 2.5 miles from the company’s river terminal to the Elk’s confluence with the Kanawha.”
The company was in deep trouble until the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the waterway, thanks to a $400,000 grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “It could’ve put us out of business,” Dennis Farrell told the Charleston Daily Mail. “At some point we wouldn’t have been economically fit to run the facility. That’s our claim to fame: the barges.”
Questionable Response
Last week, Gary Southern told reporters that Freedom Industries’ employees had discovered the spill, but that claim was contradicted by reports that officials from the state’s Environmental Protection Agency found it independently after nearby residents complained of a suspicious odor.
According to the Daily Mail, a team of inspectors visited the facility this week, and issued five violations for poor maintenance and operations, insufficient employee training and reporting, and storing chemicals in an above-ground tank without a secondary containment wall.
As The New York Times noted, “lawmakers have yet to explain why the storage facility was allowed to sit on the river and so close to a water treatment plant that is the largest in the state.” The facility hasn’t been inspected since 1991 because, unlike other states, West Virginia requires it only of chemical manufacturers and emitters, not storage facilities.
According to The Gazette, in 2010, experts from the US Chemical Safety Board asked the state to create a new program to prevent accidents and releases in Chemical Valley. Those recommendations followed a 2008 fatal explosion at a Bayer Chemicals plant. They were ignored.
The chemical released last week, 4-methylcyclohexane methane, isn’t classified as a hazardous material, which under state law would have required the leak to be reported within 15 minutes. The Daily Mail reported that “a different legislative rule states a facility must give ‘immediate’ notice of a spill, but leaves it up to the head of the [state’s Department of Environmental Protection] to determine what ‘immediate’ means in each case.”
The chemical’s classification as non-hazardous may also explain why state officials didn’t have an emergency response plan in place, despite the facility’s close proximity to a major water supply.
That 4-methylcyclohexane methane isn’t considered hazardous doesn’t mean it’s safe. Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Mother Jones that little is known about its potential effects in humans. According to Denison, studies have found the substance to be lethal in rats at high doses, but it’s impossible to extrapolate from those data how humans might respond to smaller quantities of the chemical.
Today, many West Virginia residents are angry that they had no idea of the hazards posed by the storage facility. Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, told The Huffington Post, “No one seemed to be aware or care that this dangerous chemical was upstream from our largest drinking water intake in the state. It was a recipe for disaster.” The same chemicals are stored in above ground tanks across the state, but it’s difficult for public health and environmental activists to know where.
That’s why Russell Mokhiber cautions against focusing too much on Freedom Industries itself. “It’s really not about an individual corporation,” he said. “It’s a question of why the state has allowed the chemical and coal industry to get away with this. Because however you slice it, you see privatization and deregulation at the heart of these kinds of cases.”
By: James Holland, Bill Moyer’s Blog, January 16, 2014
“Endless Crusades”: Tea Party Delays Spending, Beats Dead Horse
It will only cover three days, but once again next week Congress will have to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open. The current resolution expires on Wednesday, and even though a budget agreement was reached last month, appropriators in both chambers still haven’t nailed down a plan to tell various agencies what they can spend.
There are many reasons for that delay — the appropriations committees only had a few weeks after the budget deal to cobble together a massive $1 trillion bill, known as an omnibus. But one of the biggest is that House Republicans from the Tea Party wing have demanded that the bill reflect their ideological goals.
They have insisted, for example, that no money be spent to implement the health care reform law, or that various aspects of the law be cut back so sharply that it would not be workable. They don’t want money spent to implement the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. They want sharp reductions in the National Labor Relations Board.
More than 130 of these so-called riders have been filed by lawmakers, many of whom wouldn’t vote for the omnibus even if their provisions were adopted. Some are particularly ridiculous, including:
* Forbidding the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing its rule on the safe removal of lead paint.
* Prohibiting the Fish and Wildlife Service from including the sage grouse on the endangered species list.
* Prohibiting subsidies for any health care plan that includes abortion. (Many states already forbid this, but this rider would make the ban nationwide.)
* Banning the government from requiring federal contractors to disclose their political contributions — one of the Obama administration’s better transparency proposals, which it eventually dropped in the face of business opposition.
Many of these riders have been dropped by the negotiators, but some, including those involving the health care law, have yet to be resolved. (Appropriators think the omnibus bill will be ready by next week.) Republican leaders can’t afford another government shutdown, but apparently they haven’t yet convinced their most radical members to stop their endless crusades.
By: David Firestone, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, January 10, 2014
“Solely An Oppositional Movement”: Why Winning Elections Is The Last Thing The Tea Party Wants
Keith Humphreys asks a provocative question: Does the Tea Party even want to win elections? This comes up in response to a long article in the National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry telling the Tea Party to get its head out of the clouds and start doing things that will help Republicans win. While it’s tricky to ascribe specific desires and intentions to a large, complicated collection of people like the Tea Party, to the extent we can, I think the answer to whether they want to win is pretty clearly no. And there’s a certain logic to it.
The reason is that the Tea Party is an oppositional movement, and oppositional movements only thrive when they’re in the opposition. They can talk all they like about both Republicans and Democrats being part of the problem, and being opposed just to “Washington,” but we all know that at its heart it’s about Barack Obama and everything he represents. If Hillary Clinton or another Democrat becomes president in 2016, most of the anger and resentment that gives the movement life will get transferred to that person, and it will continue. But as I’ve held for a few years now, as a movement the Tea Party has a firm expiration date, which is the inauguration of the next Republican president.
The movement also holds a contempt for compromise of any sort as one of its fundamental pillars, which is fairly easy to stick with when your side is out of power. It’s not like you’re going to be getting much of what you want anyway, so you can scoff at the half-loaves your more reasonable colleagues are offering up. But when there’s a Republican administration the gifts to conservatism will be showering down from every cloud, and they’ll be much tougher to say no to. How about we give you an appointment at the EPA, where you can destroy the agency from the inside instead of railing at it from the street? What say we do the same to the Labor Department? Now that our bills won’t get vetoed, let’s start slashing away at food stamps and CHIP and all those other programs the “takers” suckle on. It’s time to party! In that atmosphere, there’s so much to say yes to that saying no to everything isn’t so attractive anymore.
And when it can’t shout “No!”, the Tea Party will have no more reason for being. Obviously, even if it’s dead as a movement, many of the people who championed it will still be in Congress. But saying no won’t be as attractive for them either. It’s one thing to imagine yourself a brave warrior standing up against Barack Obama and his plan to turn America into a nightmare of socialist misery. It’s another to, say, fight against cuts to Medicaid because you want even bigger cuts to Medicaid. That’s far less romantic.
So no, as a whole the Tea Party doesn’t have much of an interest in winning elections, because if it helped Republicans have a resounding win, it would literally be the last thing the movement ever did.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 31, 2013
“Achieving Conservative Objectives:” Behold The Paradigm, Roberts Court Cloaks Its Activism In Complexity
To understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s order on greenhouse-gas regulations, I had to read it three times — and I’m a law professor. The complication isn’t a coincidence. It’s the very essence of the imprint that Chief Justice John Roberts is putting on the court.
As its ninth term clicks into gear, the Roberts court has finally developed something like an identity of its own. It avoids highly activist conservative headlines that would drive Democrats to the polls. At the same time, behind a screen of legal complexity, it achieves significant conservative objectives.
The court’s health care decision is an obvious recent example: Roberts cast the deciding vote to uphold mandatory coverage, enraging conservatives and encouraging liberals. But by striking down the provision that pressured states to extend Medicaid, the court gutted the universal coverage that was the Affordable Care Act’s ethical ideal.
The regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions bids fair to produce a similarly confusing result. The court had been asked to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that upheld Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gases that are the Barack Obama administration’s most significant accomplishments for environmental protection. The court declined to review — and thus left in place — the regulations on motor-vehicle emissions. It also chose not to review the basic question of the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Environmentalists cheered this result.
At the same time, however, the court agreed to review a single, wildly technical-sounding question: “Whether EPA permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases.” What this question asks in English, roughly speaking, is whether the EPA was allowed to issue emissions regulations governing factories and power plants under the authority of the law that lets it regulate cars and trucks. And what that means in practical terms is that the court could strike down the Obama EPA’s existing greenhouse-gas regulations for the nonmoving (“stationary”) polluters who create much of the pollution that drives global warming.
Behold the Roberts paradigm! Or don’t behold it: The hand is quicker than the eye. The headline allows environmental regulation to stand. The fine print suggests that the most important part of the existing regulations enacted by the Obama administration could be ditched.
And, remarkably enough, environmentalists are buying into the shell game as well. Some experts hastened to explain that, even if the Roberts court were to strike down the stationary-source regulations on the grounds that they were not authorized by laws permitting regulation of motor vehicles, there would still be other ways under the Clean Air Act to enact such rules. The court’s decision to hear the case, they implied, shouldn’t worry environmentalists too much.
The experts’ observation is technically correct but could prove too optimistic. The administration plans to enact different regulations covering coal-fired power plants, under different authority. But if the court were to strike down the existing stationary-source regulations in June 2014, significant uncertainty will result. The court’s reasoning, which cannot be foreseen, could potentially call into question other types of regulation. The litigation surrounding the planned regulations — and believe me, there’ll be litigation — will have to take into account the court’s reasoning, whatever it may be. The apparently narrow question to be addressed doesn’t guarantee a holding acoustically sealed off from regulations under different authority.
Coincidentally, the energy producers and manufacturers who make up the stationary-source polluters form a concentrated interest group. They will lobby to fight the new regulations, no doubt using the argument that greenhouse gases have already been significantly cut by regulating drivers. And, of course, drivers’ interests are more diffuse, so (surprise!) their lobbying power is weaker. They are, in short, perfect patsies to take the regulatory hit.
All this adds up to an extremely sophisticated strategy for the justices who agreed to take the case. Even if they strike down the regulations, they will be doing so on the highly technical basis that the EPA relied on the wrong source of authority. Environmentalists will focus the public’s attention on enacting new regulation, thereby distracting the public from blaming the court. The whole decision will look Solomonic — upholding a part of the regulations while striking down another part — rather than like pro-business activism. The court’s legitimacy will be preserved, even strengthened.
What makes this strategy hallmark John Roberts is how markedly it differs from the approaches of the court’s other conservatives. Justice Antonin Scalia, still the intellectual leader of the conservative wing into his increasingly cantankerous mid-70s, declares his broad principles of originalism and textualism and puts them into practice, most of the time consistently. His swashbuckling decisions and clever, incisive rhetoric leave you in no doubt where he stands. You can love him or hate him (I myself feel both emotions, usually simultaneously), but you always, always know where he stands. Justice Clarence Thomas is similarly out there, lauding the virtues of the 18th century. No one could call either of these justices crafty.
In their decades on the court — each having served with Chief Justice William Rehnquist — Scalia and Thomas never managed to achieve the conservative revolution that the Ronald Reagan era promised and the Federalist Society championed. Radical — and radically consistent — they couldn’t hold the center, frequently losing the votes of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy when the chips were down. Rehnquist, equally conservative but less openly ideological, couldn’t help. As men of principle, which judges are supposed to be, Scalia and Thomas might feel a perverse pride in never winning the big ones. As men of action, they have mostly failed.
Roberts is a horse of a different color. As a former law clerk to then-Justice Rehnquist, he decided to win, even at the cost of temporarily alienating his conservative elders. His legal craft is unmatched — because if you’re the Supreme Court, it’s much better to win while appearing to lose than to lose by insisting on looking as if you’ve won.
By: Noah Feldman, Bloomberg View, Published in The National Memo, October 17, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 