Friday, January 31, 2020
Three New National Polls On Democratic Race
The chart above reflects the results of the latest Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between January 22nd and 27th of a national sample of 827 Democratic primary voters, with a 3.4 point margin of error.
The chart above reflects the results of the latest Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between January 26th and 28th of a national sample of 591 Democratic primary voters. (No margin of error was given for just this sample.)
The chart above reflects the results of a new Pew Research Center survey -- done between January 6th and 19th of a national sample of 7,013 Democrats and Leaners, with a 1.8 point margin of error.
Bloomberg Calls for Statehood For Puerto Rico
I am not a supporter of Michael Bloomberg to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. I don't like the way he seems to be trying to buy the nomination by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising (more than any other candidate has been able to raise in donations.)But he has taken a stance that I like -- and it is a stance that no other candidate has taken. He is calling for statehood for the island of Puerto Rico.
I think statehood for Puerto Rico is long overdue, and should be the stance of all the Democratic candidates.
Here is what Bloomberg wrote on this issue in the Orlando Sentinel:
Over the last few decades, Puerto Rico has been decimated by a mounting debt crisis, failed economic policies and mismanagement, a closed naval base that has left deep environmental and health scars, and a series of devastating storms and hurricanes.
This month, a series of earthquakes have damaged buildings, knocked out the island’s largest power plant for up to a year, and left many people terrified about the structural integrity of their homes — and fearing the worst.
To make matters worse, we have a president who doesn’t seem to believe Puerto Rico is his responsibility — or understand that its residents are Americans.
Well, Puerto Ricans are American citizens. And on the mainland, we should see their challenges as our challenges, because a strong Puerto Rico strengthens America. Instead, President Trump just points fingers and tosses paper towels.
For decades, Puerto Ricans and their interests have been ignored by Washington. And there’s a simple reason why: They don’t have a vote in Congress. And so politicians don’t have to care how they feel.
That’s why they don’t have the same funding as other Americans for essential programs, including Medicaid, even though Puerto Rico’s poverty rate, at almost 43%, is more than double that of the highest-poverty U.S. state. And it’s why, when the island faces a natural disaster, Washington is often slow to respond.
Ignoring the island’s needs has come at a substantial cost to U.S. taxpayers. It’s akin to bailing out a bank every year or so, instead of adopting smart regulations that prevent banks from acting recklessly. Or paying for emergency room visits for those without health care insurance, instead of extending coverage that would allow people to see a doctor and prevent costly and deadly illnesses.
There’s a clear solution to this challenge that a majority of Puerto Ricans support. And it’s a solution that, polls show, two-thirds of all Americans also support: statehood. But most candidates for president have been too afraid to back it. They tip-toe around it, to avoid alienating any voters.
Not me. I’ll state it clearly: I support statehood for Puerto Rico. And as president, I will work to pass a bill making it a reality, subject to approval by the people of Puerto Rico — who will make the ultimate decision.
I believe statehood would be good not only for Puerto Rico, but for our whole country.
Here’s why: Until Puerto Rico becomes a state, it will continue to lack the tools and resources needed to build a stronger economy and recover from disasters — and Congress will continue sending just enough money to put Band-Aids on problems, without actually fixing them.
Helping Puerto Rico move from a state of constant crisis to a state of stable and steady growth is a big management challenge — but by combining statehood with a robust economic and rebuilding plan, I know we can get it done.
In consultation with leaders from the island, our campaign has put together a detailed plan that will deal with the island’s debt crisis, alleviate the devastating spending cuts, overhaul the disaster recovery process and put Puerto Rico on the path to growth and stability.
It’s a strong, ambitious and achievable plan — and I believe Puerto Rico’s future should be an important part of the presidential debate. But my fellow presidential candidates, who have been campaigning for a year, haven’t invested any substantial time or resources there, even though Puerto Rico will award more delegates in the Democratic primary than either Iowa or New Hampshire.
Our campaign is different. We believe taking Puerto Rican voters seriously starts in the Democratic primary, and that’s why I’m opening up an office in San Juan and building a ground operation — because the best way to stop Puerto Rico from being ignored in the future is to stop ignoring it right now.
The citizens of Puerto Rico deserve to have their voices heard — not only in the presidential primary election, but in the general election, too. They deserve real representation in Washington that reflects their interests. And they deserve the same federal funding for disaster relief and reconstruction that all other Americans would expect.
The best way to make that happen is through statehood. And it’s the only way for Washington to stop ignoring the island and applying Band-Aids — and start forming a true partnership with elected leaders there who are on the same footing as other representatives around the country.
The time has come to sew Puerto Rico’s star into our national flag. As president, when voters there are ready to begin the stitching, I’ll bring Congress and the whole country together to get it done.
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Biden, Sanders, And Warren Leading In Texas
The image above shows the results of the newest Texas Lyceum Poll -- done between January 10th and 19th of a sample of 431 likely Texas Democratic primary voters, with a 4.89 point margin of error.
Texas will send 228 pledged delegates to the national convention. As this stand right now, Biden and Sanders will get the bulk of those delegates, and a few could go to Warren. No one else is close to the required percentage (15% statewide or in the state's senatorial districts).
Who Would Fare Better Against Biden - Warren Or Sanders?
Some progressives think Joe Biden is too moderate. They want a more progressive candidate to be the Democratic Party nominee. But which progressive (Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders) would have the best chance to beat Biden?
Data for Progress (which has worked with both the Warren and Sanders campaigns) asked YouGov to do a poll for them to find out. They questioned 1,619 Democratic voters between January 18th and 26th, and their survey has a margin of error of 2.6 points.
Here's how Holly Otterbein at Politico describes those results:
A new national poll commissioned by a progressive group reports that Elizabeth Warren would perform better in a one-on-one primary with Joe Biden than Bernie Sanders.
As Sanders surges in the polls days before the Iowa caucuses, an organization allied with the Massachusetts senator is seizing on it as evidence that she is the best-equipped progressive to take on the former vice president.
The online survey testing hypothetical match-ups by Data for Progress, which was conducted by YouGov Blue, showed that 47 percent of likely Democratic voters said they would support Biden if a national race were held today, while 45 percent said they would back Warren, according to the poll. If the primary were between Sanders and Biden, 53 percent said they would vote for Biden and 41 percent would get behind Sanders.
“The data shows voters pretty clearly that if you don't want Joe Biden as the nominee, the best chance we have to prevent that is this contest boiling down to Warren and Biden,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Warren-aligned Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “She can unite and energize the party and is the best foot forward for progressives to get past Biden and Trump.”
In the closing weeks of the campaign, Warren has sought to position herself as a unity candidate who can bring together the moderate and liberal wings of the Democratic Party. But progressive leaders and organizations have increasingly consolidated behind Sanders, who has risen in early-state and national polling. He is first in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
The question of how to best defeat Biden has been a source of anxiety among left-wing activists, with some worrying that Sanders and Warren could split the vote and hand the nomination to him. Other progressives have argued that Sanders and Warren should both stay in the primary and potentially combine delegates to beat Biden.
The Data for Progress poll showed that if it were three-way race, 42 percent said they would vote for Biden, 30 percent would back Warren, and 23 percent would support Sanders. The rest of the Democratic field was not tested.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Trump Mideast "Peace Plan" Is Dead On Arrival
After assuming office, Donald Trump bragged that he would come up with a plan that would solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of developing that plan, in spite of the fact that Kushner had no foreign policy experience or expertise.
Most people looked at the Trump administration's love for Israel and hatred for muslims (except for rich Saudis), and doubted they could find a solution in the Middle East. The doubters were right. For the last two years, Kushner met repeatedly with Israelis and did not have any meetings at all with Palestinian leaders.
It should be no surprise then that when the Trump "peace plan" was announced on Tuesday, it gave Israel everything it wanted -- including allowing Israel to annex all the land they had stolen from the Palestinians to build illegal settlements. The Palestinians would be given only limited sovereignty and a tiny piece of East Jerusalem as its capital.
The plan is abysmally unfair, and its no surprise that it was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders. And it has a zero chance of actually solving the Palestinian crisis (or even making a tiny bit of progress toward that).
Sanders Popularity With Older Voters Is Dropping
The Morning Consult Poll questions about 5,000 respondents each day. The chart above shows the favorability of candidate Bernie Sanders from December 30th through January 26th. It includes 17,836 Democratic primary voters, with a 1 point margin of error.
Sanders favorability among young voters has remained constant over that period (at 67%). But he is now losing significant support among older voters (65+). Staring with 48%, that support has declined to 35% -- a drop of 13 points in slightly less than a month.
That's not good for Sanders, since older voters are the most likely to vote in large numbers.
The Candidate That Could Not Beat Trump - Bernie Sanders
Why? Because the most important thing for the 2020 election is to get Donald Trump out of the White House -- and Sanders is the candidate that I am convinced could not beat Trump in the general election.
Note that Trump has attacked all of the leading Democratic candidates -- all but one. He has not attacked Bernie Sanders. In fact, he has supported Sanders by claiming the Democratic Party has not been fair to him.
Why is this? Because Bernie Sanders is the person Trump (and Republicans) want to face in the November election. Running against Sanders would be the GOP's dream! That's because they have a ton of material to use against Sanders -- mostly a lifetime of his own claims to be a socialist. By November, they would have many moderate voters convinced that Sanders is basically a communist.
Here is just a small part of an article in The Atlantic about this. It was written by David From.
Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. A Politico profile in 2015 by Michael Kruse argued that Sanders had benefited from “an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear” of writing about Sanders’s personal history “rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.”
The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything it’s got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip of twisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says in a forthcoming documentary. She stood by those words in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this past weekend, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, that Sanders—alone among the Democratic aspirants in 2020—had refused to meet with her. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, you will hear Clinton’s negative assessment of him repeated so often by pro-Trump talkers that you will almost think Clinton is Trump’s running mate.
Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages” being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that “many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies,” as Ronald Radosh reported in The Daily Beast. Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that.
The members of the team around Sanders are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle. They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Biden, Warren, And Sanders Lead In Super Tuesday States
The chart above is from the new CBS News Battleground Tracker / YouGov Poll -- done between January 16th and 23rd of 8,593 Democratic voters in the 14 Super Tuesday states, and has a margin of error of 1.6 points.
Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren remain far ahead of their competitors in the Democratic race. Pete Buttigieg still has trouble getting traction outside of Iowa, and in fact has been overtaken by Michael Bloomberg (who has spent over a hundred million on advertising in the Super Tuesday states.
Monday, January 27, 2020
Views Of Democrats On Who Could Beat Trump
The chart above is from the Morning Consult Poll. The survey was done between January 17th and 19th of a national sample of 752 Democratic voters, with a 4 point margin of error.
The chart shows that a majority of Democrats think there are five qualities of a candidate that would make it harder for them to beat Donald Trump -- being gay/lesbian, being a woman, being a socialist, being older than 70, and being a candidate of color.
We can dismiss two of those immediately. There are no candidates of color left among the Democratic leaders, and a candidate over 70 would just be another such (since Trump is also over 70).
That leaves three qualities. Personally, I think we can dismiss the candidate being a woman also. Remember, Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, and lost only because of a quirk regarding our electoral college system. I believe the nation is ready for a female president, and neither of the two leading women candidates (Warren and Klobuchar) have the baggage than Clinton had (after years of right-wing lies told about her).
I am a bit more leery of an LGBT candidate (Buttigieg). Polls show we are a far less homophobic nation than in the past, but who knows what people will do when then are alone in the voting booth. Will they vote old prejudices?
The one that really worries me is "socialist". Many progressives would like to think they could explain that away in a general campaign. I disagree. Many decades of propaganda have too many Americans frightened of socialism. And the Republicans (especially Trump) are licking their chops at the thought of running against a self-admitted socialist.
Some of you may say that the Republicans will call any of the Democrats a socialist -- no matter who gets nominated. That is true. But the charge won't stick for any of them but Bernie Sanders. That's because they can use his own words against him (and pictures of him in Moscow and with the Sandinistas). It's why he's the only candidate they haven't attacked. They would love to have Sanders as the nominee, because they believe he would be the easiest to beat. I agree.
Des Moines Register Endorses Warren For President
The paper's editorial board has endorsed Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Here is what they had to say about their endorsement.
The outstanding caliber of Democratic candidates makes it difficult to choose just one.
But ultimately Iowa caucusgoers need to do that. Who would make the best president at this point in the country’s history? At a time when the economic deck has become so stacked against working Americans that the gap between rich and poor is the highest in more than 50 years? At a time when a generation of war has stressed military families and sapped the treasury?
The Des Moines Register editorial board endorses Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses as the best leader for these times.
The senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts is not the radical some perceive her to be. She was a registered Republican until 1996. She is a capitalist. “I love what markets can do,” she said. “They are what make us rich, they are what create opportunity.”
But she wants fair markets, with rules and accountability. She wants a government that works for people, not one corrupted by cash.
A former Harvard professor and expert in bankruptcy law, she helped set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The agency was specifically designed to prevent a repeat of the banking crisis and look out for little guys swindled by lenders and credit card companies.
She believes government should actively work to prevent and respond to abusive practices that jeopardize individuals and the country’s economy.
Warren doesn’t measure the health of the economy by looking at the stock market or an unemployment rate that doesn’t count the longtime jobless or chronically underemployed. She measures it by how working families are doing. Many are not doing well, and Warren seeks major reforms to help them.
A qualification: Some of her ideas for “big, structural change” go too far. This board could not endorse the wholesale overhaul of corporate governance or cumulative levels of taxation she proposes. While the board has long supported single-payer health insurance, it believes a gradual transition is the more realistic approach. But Warren is pushing in the right direction.
She believes access to health care is a human right.
She would make climate change a top priority and use her executive power to roll back Trump administration policies that prop up fossil fuels.
She says corporations should have less Washington influence, children should be protected from gun violence, child care should be affordable, immigrants deserve compassion, mass incarceration should end and the wealthy should pay more in taxes.
Those ideas are not radical. They are right. They would improve life in America, and they are generally shared by the other Democratic candidates, who bring their own strengths to this race.
Former Vice President Joe Biden would restore credibility in the White House and respect among allies around the world. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg brings refreshingly smart, youthful optimism. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota offers a track record of bipartisan achievement. Much like Warren, Bernie Sanders champions the working class.
But at this moment, our country needs more. We need a president who can work the levers of government to translate ideas into signed laws and effective regulations. We need a president committed to bringing our troops home from open-ended foreign entanglements. We need a president who understands that the American dream itself is at risk: the ideal that someone who works hard and plays by the rules can get ahead, and that their children will do even better. With Warren, the Oval Office will be occupied by someone who has made rebuilding the middle class her life’s work.
These tall tasks will require resilience and courage in the face of inevitable attacks from the GOP — both during the campaign and while in office.
Warren has proven she is tough and fearless.
But toughness can also be perceived as divisive, as can rhetoric that vilifies the wealthy, lobbyists and corporations that employ millions of people. Relentless attack mode threatens to further fracture a country riven by party, income and racial divides.
Unifying the country may not be possible, but to gain the support required to govern, she must show that her vision will lift people up rather than divide them.
Warren’s competence, respect for others and status as the nation’s first female president would be a fitting response to the ignorance, sexism and xenophobia of the Trump Oval Office.
She is a thinker, a policy wonk and a hard worker. She remembers her own family’s struggles to make ends meet and her own desperation as a working mother needing child care.
She cares about people, and she will use her seemingly endless energy and passion to fight for them.
At this moment, when the very fabric of American life is at stake, Elizabeth Warren is the president this nation needs.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Will Bernie's Supporters Help Re-Elect Trump?
In the 2016 election, too many of Bernie Sanders' supporters were angry that he did not get the nomination -- and a significant portion of them then refused to support the Democratic nominee (Clinton) in the general election. That, combined with too many Democrats staying home (thinking Clinton would easily win), caused Donald Trump to win the electoral college.
Have Democrats learned their lesson? Hopefully, they have. I think most will actually go to the polls this year, convinced they must to keep Trump from being re-elected.
But this new poll shows the same might not be true of Bernie's supporters. About 90% of Warren supporters, 87% of Biden supporters, and 86% of Buttigieg supporters say they will vote vote the Democratic nominee -- even if their candidate does not win the nomination.
Sadly, the same is not true of Bernie supporters. Only 53% say they will vote for the Democratic nominee if it is not Sanders. Another 31% say it would depend on who the nominee is, and a whopping 16% say they would NOT vote for the Democratic nominee if it is not Bernie Sanders. Evidently that 16% (and possibly another 31%) would be happy to see Trump re-elected.
The chart above is from a recent Emerson College Poll -- done between January 21st and 23rd of a national sample of 1,128 registered voters, with a 2.8 point margin of error.
Doomsday Clock Moves Close To Midnight Than Ever Before
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock again. It now stands at 100 seconds (1 2/3 minutes) before midnight. That's closer to midnight (doomsday) than the clock has ever been.
Here's just part of what The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had to say about their latest setting:
Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.
In the nuclear realm, national leaders have ended or undermined several major arms control treaties and negotiations during the last year, creating an environment conducive to a renewed nuclear arms race, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to lowered barriers to nuclear war. Political conflicts regarding nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea remain unresolved and are, if anything, worsening. US-Russia cooperation on arms control and disarmament is all but nonexistent.
Public awareness of the climate crisis grew over the course of 2019, largely because of mass protests by young people around the world. Just the same, governmental action on climate change still falls far short of meeting the challenge at hand. At UN climate meetings last year, national delegates made fine speeches but put forward few concrete plans to further limit the carbon dioxide emissions that are disrupting Earth’s climate. This limited political response came during a year when the effects of manmade climate change were manifested by one of the warmest years on record, extensive wildfires, and quicker-than-expected melting of glacial ice.
Continued corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision making depend has heightened the nuclear and climate threats. In the last year, many governments used cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns to sow distrust in institutions and among nations, undermining domestic and international efforts to foster peace and protect the planet.
This situation—two major threats to human civilization, amplified by sophisticated, technology-propelled propaganda—would be serious enough if leaders around the world were focused on managing the danger and reducing the risk of catastrophe. Instead, over the last two years, we have seen influential leaders denigrate and discard the most effective methods for addressing complex threats—international agreements with strong verification regimes—in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain. By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, these leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later.
Faced with this daunting threat landscape and a new willingness of political leaders to reject the negotiations and institutions that can protect civilization over the long term, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today moves the Doomsday Clock 20 seconds closer to midnight—closer to apocalypse than ever. In so doing, board members are explicitly warning leaders and citizens around the world that the international security situation is now more dangerous than it has ever been, even at the height of the Cold War.
Civilization-ending nuclear war—whether started by design, blunder, or simple miscommunication—is a genuine possibility. Climate change that could devastate the planet is undeniably happening. And for a variety of reasons that include a corrupted and manipulated media environment, democratic governments and other institutions that should be working to address these threats have failed to rise to the challenge.
The Bulletin believes that human beings can manage the dangers posed by the technology that humans create. Indeed, in the 1990s leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union took bold actions that made nuclear war markedly less likely—and as a result the Bulletin moved the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock the farthest it has been from midnight.
But given the inaction—and in too many cases counterproductive actions—of international leaders, the members of the Science and Security Board are compelled to declare a state of emergency that requires the immediate, focused, and unrelenting attention of the entire world. It is 100 seconds to midnight. The Clock continues to tick. Immediate action is required.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Second Poll Shows A Majority Wants Trump's Removal
The charts above reflect the results of a new survey from the Pew Research Center -- done between January 6th and 19th of a national sample of 12,638 adults, with a margin of error of 1.3 points.
It's looking more and more like the Senate Republicans are engaging in a cover-up for Donald Trump. They claim to see no new evidence, while refusing to hear witnesses or documents that would provide that new evidence. They have made up their minds to protect Trump.
But that is not what they American public wants. About 70% of the public says Trump has done unethical things while in office, and about 63% say Trump has done illegal things while in office. And they don't like it.
Yesterday, I brought you a CNN poll that showed 51% of the public wants the Senate to remove Trump from office. Now a new poll says the same. It is the survey done by the Pew Research Center, and it has a huge sample (about 12 times as large as the CNN sample).
A majority of Americans want Trump removed from office. The Republicans are not going to do that, but it's becoming clear that if the Republicans won't uphold the Constitution, the public will (by voting Trump out of office next November).
Trump To Allow Pollution Of America's Watershed
This time, it's Obama's effort to make sure Americans have clean and safe water.
Trump has moved to allow his corporate cronies in the fossil fuel, agriculture, and chemical industries to have an easier time dumping their poisons in the country's watershed. For him, another few dollars of corporate profit is more important that assuring Americans have safe water.
Here is part of how Coral Davenport describes Trump's scandalous move in The New York Times:
From Day 1 of his administration, President Trump vowed to repeal President Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will be implemented in about 60 days, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws, loosening or eliminating rules on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining, oil drilling and endangered species protections.
Although Mr. Trump frequently speaks of his desire for the United States to have “crystal-clean water,” he has called his predecessor’s signature clean-water regulation “horrible,” “destructive” and “one of the worst examples of federal” overreach.
Although Mr. Trump frequently speaks of his desire for the United States to have “crystal-clean water,” he has called his predecessor’s signature clean-water regulation “horrible,” “destructive” and “one of the worst examples of federal” overreach.
Mr. Trump’s replacement, called the “Navigable Waters Protection Rule,” finishes the process. It not only rolls back key portions of the 2015 rule that had guaranteed protections under the 1972 Clean Water Act to certain wetlands and streams that run intermittently or run temporarily underground, but also relieves landowners of the need to seek permits that the Environmental Protection Agency had considered on a case-by-case basis before the Obama rule. . . .
The new water rule for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into hundreds of thousands of waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects.
“This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen,” said Blan Holman, a lawyer specializing in federal water policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution. This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the ’70s and ’80s that Americans have relied on for their health.”. . .The Obama rule protected about 60 percent of the nation’s waterways, including large bodies of water such as the Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi River and Puget Sound, and smaller headwaters, wetlands, seasonal streams and streams that run temporarily underground. It limited the discharge of pollutants such as fertilizers, pesticides and industrial chemicals into those waters.
The new rule, written by the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers, will retain federal protections of large bodies of water, as well as larger rivers and streams that flow into them and wetlands that lie adjacent to them. But it removes protections for many other waters, including wetlands that are not adjacent to large bodies of water, some seasonal streams that flow for only a portion of the year, “ephemeral” streams that only flow after rainstorms, and groundwater.
Legal experts say that Mr. Trump’s replacement rule would go further than simply repealing and replacing the 2015 Obama rule — it would also eliminate protections to smaller headwaters that have been implemented for decades under the 1972 Clean Water Act.
“This is rolling back federal jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act further than it’s ever been before,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School. “Waters that have been protected for almost 50 years will no longer be protected under the Clean Water Act.”
That could open millions of acres of pristine wetlands to pollution or destruction, and allow chemicals and other pollutants to be discharged into smaller headland waters that eventually drain into larger water bodies, experts in water management said. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat. . . .
The E.P.A.’s Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of 41 scientists responsible for evaluating the scientific integrity of the agency’s regulations, concluded that the new Trump water rule ignores science by “failing to acknowledge watershed systems.” They found “no scientific justification” for excluding certain bodies of water from protection under the new regulations, concluding that pollutants from those smaller and seasonal bodies of water can still have a significant impact on the health of larger water systems.
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