Verbatim Mac - The Debate Intensive



NegElections Trump loses 2020 but it’s close – they pull ahead on policy but calling them socialists keeps him in the race. Blake 7/9 [(Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper)., How Donald Trump wins in 2020: Americans see his opponent as a 'socialist', Washington Post, Jul 09 2019] TDIA new Washington Post-ABC News poll paints a decidedly less grim picture of President Trump’s 2020 reelection chances than previous polls. One question, in particular, suggests one of his main arguments could bear fruit next year. The poll shows Trump’s approval rating hitting a new high for his presidency, at 47 percent among registered voters. Just as importantly, while it shows him trailing Joe Biden by 10 points in a potential 2020 matchup, he’s neck-and-neck with every other Democrat tested. Given that almost all previous polling looked decidedly worse for Trump, this will give him and his supporters some hope. At the same time, he’s still tied with some widely unknown Democrats, which isn’t exactly where you want to be as an incumbent president. But there is one matchup in which Trump actually leads: When voters have to choose between him and a candidate they believe is a “socialist,” Trump led 49 percent to 43 percent. This is obviously a hypothetical exercise. The idea that the Democratic nominee will call themselves a socialist is far-fetched (even Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont prefers to be called a “democratic socialist"). And just because Trump argues that his opponent is a socialist doesn’t mean they will be viewed by everyone — or even most people — accordingly. But the finding does hint at how central this question could be to Trump’s reelection hopes. Given Trump’s long-standing unpopularity, a big question has always been whether he will be able to take the eventual Democratic nominee and drag them down to his level. He showed he could do it in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, who ended the campaign as unpopular as Trump was, but it’s not clear whether he’ll be able to do it again. Trump also has some material to work with. The Democratic candidates in the first debate two weeks ago went further to the left on issues such as health care and immigration than in any modern Democratic primary. Many of them embraced single-payer health care, and some even said they would eliminate private health insurance. Many said they would decriminalize crossing the border without documentation, making it a civil matter. And many said they would support health-care coverage for undocumented immigrants, which California only recently became the first state to experiment with. Not all of these can credibly be called “socialism,” the definition of which is the government controlling the means of production and the dissemination and trade of goods. That’s a distinction that the media would do well to reinforce regularly. But in many ways, the term has come to define creating a massive role for government in American life — via entitlement programs and the like. Even some Democratic candidates are suggesting their opponents are embracing socialism. And to the extent that’s how people understand the term, that’s the context in which they are likely answering poll questions such as this. Plenty have noted that the “socialist” line of attack is hardly new; Republicans have used it in one form or another basically since the Great Depression. But using a talking point and actually making people believe it are two separate things. And this poll shows that while Trump trails among independents in every matchup, he leads a candidate viewed as a “socialist” among independents by eight percentage points, 50-42. At least thus far, Democrats seem more interested in winning their party’s nomination than they are wary of reinforcing the perception that their party is drifting toward the sword. Or perhaps they think that such a strategy could reap benefits by turning out the liberal base in huge numbers. This one poll, though, shows the potential danger that word carries. It turns a race in which Trump trails Biden by 10 into one he wins by six. Expect Trump to use the word early and often.Millennials and suburban women are key to Trump 2020 – his base isn’t enough and those demographics flipped the midterms. He’s almost got them locked down across the board but his reactionary stance on the environment is pushing voters away. Sargent 7/9 Greg Sargent [Opinion writer covering national politics], The Washington Post, “Trump’s base is not enough, and his own advisers know it”, 7/9/19 10:08 am, // TDIIt will not surprise you to learn that President Trump just gave a speech that was full of distortions, this time about his record on the environment and climate change. But it might surprise you to learn why Trump gave this speech: in part because his advisers are trying to mitigate the damage he’s sustained among millennial and suburban female voters. This would seem to undercut Trump’s public bravado about his reelection chances. Trump recently mused in an interview that his base is “phenomenal,” and, when asked whether he needed to expand his appeal beyond it, said: “I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.” Apparently Trump’s own advisers disagree. And the remedies they’re seeking for the problem they’ve identified tell us something interesting about the reelection challenges Trump faces. The New York Times reports that internal polling for Trump’s campaign revealed that his environmental record is a key obstacle to winning millennials and suburban women. Those demographics, of course, helped drive the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018 amid a sizable national popular vote win. According to a senior administration official who reviewed the polling, Trump might not win voters who feel strongly about climate change, but it showed that a certain type of moderate who likes the economy might feel okay about Trump if she is persuaded he’s being “responsible” on environmental issues. Hence Trump’s latest speech, in which he claimed that he has made it a “top priority” to preserve “the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.” Trump actually mouthed the words that we have a “profound obligation to protect America’s extraordinary blessings for the next generation and many generations, frankly, to come.” But as New York Times fact checker Linda Qiu documents, the speech was full of distortions. Trump absurdly took credit for environmental improvements secured under his predecessors. He also misleadingly claimed the United States is leading other countries in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, when in fact our reduction as a percentage of overall emissions — a much more meaningful metric — trails many others. In reality, Trump has sought to dismantle multiple efforts to combat global warming. His Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing a new rule to replace former president Barack Obama’s effort to curb emissions from coal plants, which will undermine progress, as well as another one rolling back tailpipe emissions standards. Trump is pulling out of the Paris climate deal. Trump is doing all this, even though a comprehensive assessment by over a dozen federal agencies — within his own administration — concluded that global warming poses a dire future threat to U.S. interests. Trump dismissed this finding by saying: “I don’t believe it.” What’s interesting here is the apparent need to obscure all of this, and to reposition Trump (try not to burst out laughing here) as mindful of the obligation to preserve our natural inheritance for future generations. Trump’s reelection challenges The brute demographic facts of the matter are as follows. Trump won in 2016 despite losing the national popular vote by nearly 3 million, by scraping out the barest of wins in industrial Midwestern states with disproportionately large populations of blue-collar white voters. Trump’s victory also relied on a falloff in turnout among younger and non-white voters, relative to 2012, and a somewhat larger margin among college-educated whites than expected. But in 2018, these things reversed. Turnout among minorities, young voters and college-educated whites expanded by greater percentages, relative to the previous midterm elections, than it did among non-college-educated whites, and they broke toward Democrats. In 2020, those trends are expected to continue. This does not solve the problem for Democrats. Supercharged turnout among blue-collar whites could help deliver Trump a second term, thanks to his advantage in the electoral college, which rests on the fact that the Midwestern “blue wall” states Trump cracked are not diversifying as quickly. This has led Democrats to strategize over how to win back those non-college-educated white voters, as they should. But as Ron Brownstein has reported, Democrats can also win back those states in part by driving up turnout and vote share among young, non-white and suburban, socially liberal whites, particularly women. Yes, those voters do exist in those states. Trumpism is driving people away Trump’s climate and environmental agenda showcases some of Trumpism’s worst qualities: the anti-regulatory, science-denying GOP orthodoxy; the lies about bringing coal roaring back; the “America First” disdain for international engagement to solve global problems. Indeed, as Jedediah Purdy has noted, it also denotes an amoral “politics of grabbing what you can,” a central tenet of Trumpism. Republicans sometimes say Trump might turn things around among college-educated and suburban whites by toning down the craziness and racism, so they vote for him based on the economy. But it’s evident that the policy side of Trumpism, not merely his personal qualities, are also alienating them. Indeed, it’s no accident that Trump has been falsely claiming that migrant detention was worse under Obama and that Obama was responsible for starting family separations. Large majorities now favor allowing Central American refugees to apply for asylum and legalizing undocumented immigrants. Trump’s cruelties are driving majorities toward a more pro-immigrant position — and away from Trumpist nationalism — and the percentages of young voters, women and college-educated whites who hold those positions are overwhelming. Trump certainly could win reelection. He retains the advantages of incumbency and a good economy. But Trump’s base is not enough, and his own advisers know it.Environmental protection is the key issue in the 2020 election – the plan reverses Trump’s stance on the environment just in time to sway moderate voters Crunden 7/8 [(E.A., Crunden covers climate policy and environmental issues at ThinkProgress. Originally from Texas, Ev has reported from many parts of the country and previously covered world issues for Muftah Magazine, with an emphasis on South Asia and Eastern Europe) "Lacking support from voters on climate, Trump tests 2020 environment messaging," Think Progress, 7/8/19] TDIPresident Donald Trump in a speech on Monday sought to test his environmental messaging as he looks towards the 2020 election. The president slammed the Green New Deal and touted energy growth and the economy in a grab for moderate voters wary of his record on climate action. “For years, politicians told Americans that a strong economy and a vibrant energy sector were incompatible with a healthy environment,” Trump declared, arguing that his administration is “proving the exact opposite.” He went on to blast what he called the Obama administration’s “relentless war on American energy” — pointing to pacts like the Paris climate agreement — while praising his own administration’s emphasis on energy exports like natural gas. He also repeated a favorite personal boast, claiming that the United States has the “cleanest air” and “cleanest water.” Trump took aim at the Green New Deal, which calls for the country to mobilize in a decade in order to rapidly decarbonize while creating jobs and enshrining social justice principles. He claimed that the plan would cost “nearly $100 trillion” — a number circulated by the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, and one that experts agree has no factual basis. The president was joined by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Andrew Wheeler, who previewed an agency report out next week showing a drop in criteria air pollutants. The EPA says there has been a 74% drop in those pollutants since 1970, including a 1% decrease from 2018. Other speakers included Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who touted the Trump administration’s recent designation of 1.3 million acres of new wilderness land. And in a moment that seemed designed to appeal to voters in Florida, a battleground state, Trump brought up Bruce Hroback of Port St. Lucie, who runs bait and tackle shops. Hroback made an appeal for assistance for Florida — which has suffered from toxic algae blooms and other water crises — while expressing support for the president. Climate and environmental activists immediately derided Trump’s speech, with many arguing that the administration’s ongoing regulatory rollbacks and pushback against climate science undermine the president’s messaging. “Given the Trump administration’s record of attacks against our national parks and public lands, the president’s speech on environmental achievements is baffling,” Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement. Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, called the press conference a “spectacle,” while Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) called Trump “the most anti-environmental president in U.S. history.” But the speech itself underscores the extent to which climate and environmental issues are emerging as a major point of concern for voters — a trend that seems to be worrying the White House. Trump has made rolling back environmental regulations a hallmark of his tenure, using the EPA in particular to weaken or gut a number of Obama-era protections. That includes replacing the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which was meant to target coal-fired power plants in order to reduce emissions nationally. The Trump administration has instead backed the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, which public health experts and environmentalists have argued could do more damage than no rule at all. The ACE rule largely kicks authority over lowering emissions to states, giving them more time and oversight over the process, unlike the CPP, which concentrated power at the federal level. Industry officials and lobbyists have welcomed the administration’s approach. But it could be a liability with general election voters. Monday’s speech coincides with a new poll showing that Americans broadly disapprove of Trump’s approach to climate change. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday showed Trump with the highest approval ratings of his presidency, 44%, likely due to an improving economy. But his approval ratings on most major issues were much lower, particularly on climate change. Only 29% of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of global warming, while 62% disapproved. That chasm marked the widest spread on any issue assessed in the poll, over topics like abortion and immigration. Sunday’s poll showed that there is polarization along partisan lines on climate issues; only 6% of Republicans considered climate change to be the most important issue, a contrast with Democrats, who were closer to 30%. That gap reinforces a growing divide that has cropped up over the past year. Climate issues have rarely been a priority for either party, but Democrats are increasingly being pushed by their voters to act. Among Democratic voters, the popularity of proposals like the Green New Deal has prompted presidential candidates to emphasize climate action. Contenders like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have repeatedly spoken about climate action, and several, including former Vice President Joe Biden and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), have released sweeping climate plans. Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) is basing his entire presidential run around global warming. But Republicans have struggled to hit their stride on the issue. Party members oppose the Green New Deal, but few have proposed alternatives that would meaningfully address climate change. Trump has largely scorned any such efforts — an approach that he doubled down on during Monday’s speech. Whether or not the president is able to make inroads with voters on climate issues remains to be seen, but advocates noted after his speech that Trump failed to mention global warming. Former EPA administrator Carol Browner, who led the agency under former President Bill Clinton, highlighted the oversight in a statement responding to Trump. “Without the President’s acknowledgement of climate change as a threat to our economy, our environment and our health,” said Browner, “his record on the environment can only be described as a total failure.”Trumps second term guarantees extinction - irreversible climate change and a nuclear arms race and swings the supreme court right for generations – turns the aff because a strong right wing court will set precedents against the environment Starr 5/15 Paul Starr [professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction], 5-15-2019, "Trump’s Second Term," Atlantic, TDIThis is one of those moments. After four years as president, Trump will have made at least two Supreme Court appointments, signed into law tax cuts, and rolled back federal regulation of the environment and the economy. Whatever you think of these actions, many of them can probably be offset or entirely undone in the future. The effects of a full eight years of Trump will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to undo. Three areas—climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and control of the Supreme Court—illustrate the historic significance of the 2020 election. The first two problems will become much harder to address as time goes on. The third one stands to remake our constitutional democracy and undermine the capacity for future change. In short, the biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and reelecting Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility. Climate policy is now the most obvious example. For a long time, even many of the people who acknowledged the reality of climate change thought of it as a slow process that did not demand immediate action. But today, amid extreme weather events and worsening scientific forecasts, the costs of our delay are clearly mounting, as are the associated dangers. To have a chance at keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius—the objective of the Paris climate agreement—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2030, CO2 emissions must drop some 45 percent from 2010 levels. Instead of declining, however, they are rising. In his first term, Trump has announced plans to cancel existing climate reforms, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards and limits on emissions from new coal-fired power plants, and he has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. His reelection would put off a national commitment to decarbonization until at least the second half of the 2020s, while encouraging other countries to do nothing as well. And change that is delayed becomes more economically and politically difficult. According to the Global Carbon Project, if decarbonization had begun globally in 2000, an emissions reduction of about 2 percent a year would have been sufficient to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Now it will need to be approximately 5 percent a year. If we wait another decade, it will be about 9 percent. In the United States, the economic disruption and popular resistance sure to arise from such an abrupt transition may be more than our political system can bear. No one knows, moreover, when the world might hit irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would likely doom us to a catastrophic sea-level rise. The 2020 election will also determine whether the U.S. continues on a course that all but guarantees another kind of runaway global change—a stepped-up arms race, and with it a heightened risk of nuclear accidents and nuclear war. Trump’s “America first” doctrine, attacks on America’s alliances, and unilateral withdrawal from arms-control treaties have made the world far more dangerous. After pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement (in so doing, badly damaging America’s reputation as both an ally and a negotiating partner), Trump failed to secure from North Korea anything approaching the Iran deal’s terms, leaving Kim Jong Un not only unchecked but with increased international standing. Many world leaders are hoping that Trump’s presidency is a blip—that he will lose in 2020, and that his successor will renew America’s commitments to its allies and to the principles of multilateralism and nonproliferation. If he is reelected, however, several countries may opt to pursue nuclear weapons, especially those in regions that have relied on American security guarantees, such as the Middle East and Northeast Asia. At stake is the global nonproliferation regime that the United States and other countries have maintained over the past several decades to persuade nonnuclear powers to stay that way. That this regime has largely succeeded is a tribute to a combination of tactics, including U.S. bilateral and alliance-based defense commitments to nonnuclear countries, punishments and incentives, and pledges by the U.S. and Russia—as the world’s leading nuclear powers—to make dramatic cuts to their own arsenals. In his first term, Trump has begun to undermine the nonproliferation regime and dismantle the remaining arms-control treaties between Washington and Moscow. In October, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Russian violations of the treaty that Trump cited are inexcusable, he has made no effort to hold Russia to its obligations—to the contrary, by destroying the treaty, he has let Russia off the hook. What’s more, he has displayed no interest in extending New START, which since 2011 has limited the strategic nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States. If the treaty is allowed to expire, 2021 will mark the first year since 1972 without a legally binding agreement in place to control and reduce the deadliest arsenals ever created. The prospect of a new nuclear arms race is suddenly very real. With the end of verifiable limits on American and Russian nuclear weapons, both countries will lose the right to inspect each other’s arsenal, and will face greater uncertainty about each other’s capabilities and intentions. Already, rhetoric has taken an ominous turn: After Trump suspended U.S. participation in the INF Treaty on February 2, Vladimir Putin quickly followed suit and promised a “symmetrical response” to new American weapons. Trump replied a few days later in his State of the Union address, threatening to “outspend and out-innovate all others by far” in weapons development. The treaties signed by the United States and Russia beginning in the 1980s have resulted in the elimination of nearly 90 percent of their nuclear weapons; the end of the Cold War seemed to confirm that those weapons had limited military utility. Now—as the U.S. and Russia abandon their commitment to arms control, and Trump’s “America first” approach causes countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia to question the durability of U.S. security guarantees—the stage is being set for more states to go nuclear and for the U.S. and Russia to ramp up weapons development. This breathtaking historical reversal would, like global warming, likely feed on itself, becoming more and more difficult to undo. Finally, a second term for Trump would entrench changes at home, perhaps the most durable of which involves the Supreme Court. With a full eight years, he would probably have the opportunity to replace two more justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 87 at the beginning of the next presidential term, and Stephen Breyer will be 82. Whether you regard the prospect of four Trump-appointed justices as a good or a bad thing will depend on your politics and preferences—but there is no denying that the impact on the nation’s highest court would be momentous. Not since Richard Nixon has a president named four new Supreme Court justices, and not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has one had the opportunity to alter the Court’s ideological balance so decisively. In Nixon’s time, conservatives did not approach court vacancies with a clear conception of their judicial objectives or with carefully vetted candidates; both Nixon and Gerald Ford appointed justices who ended up on the Court’s liberal wing. Since then, however, the conservative movement has built a formidable legal network designed to ensure that future judicial vacancies would not be squandered. The justices nominated by recent Republican presidents reflect this shift. But because the Court’s conservative majorities have remained slim, a series of Republican appointees—Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and most recently John Roberts—have, by occasionally breaking ranks, held the Court back from a full-scale reversal of liberal principles and precedents. With a 7–2 rather than a 5–4 majority, however, the Court’s conservatives could no longer be checked by a lone swing vote. Much of the public discussion about the Court’s future focuses on Roe v. Wade and other decisions expanding rights, protecting free speech, or mandating separation of Church and state. Much less public attention has been paid to conservative activists’ interest in reversing precedents that since the New Deal era have enabled the federal government to regulate labor and the economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conservative justices regularly struck down laws and regulations such as limits on work hours. Only in 1937, after ruling major New Deal programs unconstitutional, did the Court uphold a state minimum-wage law. In the decades that followed, the Court invoked the Constitution’s commerce clause, which authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, as the basis for upholding laws regulating virtually any activity affecting the economy. A great deal of federal law, from labor standards to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to health and environmental regulation, rests on that foundation. But the Court’s conservative majority has recently been chipping away at the expansive interpretation of the commerce clause, and some jurists on the right want to return to the pre-1937 era, thereby sharply limiting the government’s regulatory powers. In 2012, the Court’s five conservative justices held that the Affordable Care Act’s penalty for failing to obtain insurance—the so-called individual mandate—was not justified by the commerce clause. In a sweeping dissent from the majority’s opinion, four of those justices voted to strike down the entire ACA for that reason. The law survived only because the fifth conservative, Chief Justice Roberts, held that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of the government’s taxing power. If the Court had included seven conservative justices in 2012, it would almost certainly have declared the ACA null and void. This is the fate awaiting much existing social and economic legislation and regulation if Trump is reelected. And that’s to say nothing of future legislation such as measures to limit climate change, which might well be struck down by a Court adhering to an originalist interpretation of our 18th-century Constitution. Democracy is always a gamble, but ordinarily the stakes involve short-term wins and losses. Much more hangs in the balance next year. With a second term, Trump’s presidency would go from an aberration to a turning point in American history. But it would not usher in an era marked by stability. The effects of climate change and the risks associated with another nuclear arms race are bound to be convulsive. And Trump’s reelection would leave the country contending with both dangers under the worst possible conditions, deeply alienated from friends abroad and deeply divided at home. The Supreme Court, furthermore, would be far out of line with public opinion and at the center of political conflict, much as the Court was in the 1930s before it relented on the key policies of the New Deal. The choice Americans face in 2020 is one we will not get to make again. What remains to be seen is whether voters will grasp the stakes before them. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s emails absorbed more media and public attention than any other issue. In 2018, Trump tried to focus attention on a ragtag caravan of a few thousand Central Americans approaching the southern border. That effort failed, but the master of distraction will be back at it next year. If we cannot focus on what matters, we may sleepwalk into a truly perilous future.Frontlines UQ – Dems WinDems win now – best modelsRakich 6/19 Nathaniel Rakich [Nathaniel Rakich is FiveThirtyEight’s elections analyst], 6-19-2019, "Our Best Tool For Predicting Midterm Elections Works In Presidential Years Too," FiveThirtyEight, TDI If you followed polls of the generic congressional ballot, you knew as early as summer 2017 that signs pointed to a wave election for Democrats in 2018. Now, for your prognosticating pleasure, the FiveThirtyEight generic ballot tracker is back to help you track the battle for the U.S. House in 2020. The congressional generic ballot question asks voters which party or which party’s candidate they’d support for Congress (usually as opposed to the name of the specific candidate they plan to support).1 And as of midday Wednesday, Democrats held a 6.2-point lead over Republicans — a solid advantage but still smaller than the 8.7-point lead they held in our polling average on Election Day 2018.2 This jibes with other early signs that suggest that while Democratic enthusiasm has ebbed a bit since last year, the political environment still favors Democrats. A 2017 analysis by Harry Enten found that the generic congressional ballot is one of the most accurate predictors of who will get the most votes for Congress in a midterm election. I wondered whether the same could be said for generic ballot polls in presidential election years. Borrowing from Harry’s methodology, I conducted a similar analysis for recent presidential election years and found that their generic ballot polling is just as predictive. Specifically, for presidential election cycles starting with 1996, I compared either Gallup’s final generic-ballot poll of the cycle3 or RealClearPolitics’s final polling average4 with the House national popular-vote margin and found that the final polling missed by an average of 2 percentage points.5 The same analysis for midterm election cycles starting with 1994 found that the final polling in those cycles missed by an average of 3 percentage points.6 Harry also found that even early generic-ballot polls, more than a year before a midterm election, have some predictive power. My analysis found the same for early generic-ballot polls in presidential cycles like 2020. Basically, although polls can certainly evolve over time, generic ballot polls have historically proved pretty stable. The table below compares the national House popular vote in presidential cycles since 1996 with an average of pollster averages7 that I calculated using all the polls I could find from between January and June of the year before the election. And as you can see, it reveals a decent relationship between a party’s performance in early generic-ballot polls and its ultimate performance at the ballot box. That is, the national House popular vote in presidential cycles has usually wound up within a few points of those early polls. In most presidential cycles, the two parties were neck and neck in early generic-ballot polls, as they were in the eventual congressional elections (as measured by the popular vote). The lone exception is 2008, which was a Democratic wave year — something the early generic-ballot polls correctly predicted. In summary, generic congressional ballot polls — even early ones — are good measures of the national mood. And because the national mood affects not only congressional elections, but also presidential ones, that means generic ballot polling might provide a back door for approximating presidential election results too. As you can see in the table below, final generic-ballot polling — and to a lesser extent early generic-ballot polling — has come pretty close to the results of the national popular vote for president as well as for House since 2000. That’s pretty good, considering these polls are measuring elections for an entirely different branch of government, although it’s worth noting that even a polling error of 3 or 5 points can change the outcome if the race is close. It’s yet another demonstration of how partisanship is the dominant force in today’s politics; these days, people overwhelmingly vote for the same partyup and down the ticket. Congressional vote preferences may not drive the results of the presidential race (it’s more likely the other way around), but the former still reflect the latter. And if early generic-ballot polls are, as they seem to be, mildly predictive, then the fact that Democrats currently lead them by 6.2 points is a bad sign for President Trump. It suggests that the national political environment is still blue, and given how closely the House and presidential popular votes have lined up this century, that’s an important thing to keep in mind for the 2020 presidential election.Environmental issues push away voters – dems winMcKibben 7/8 Bill McKibben [a former New Yorker staff writer, is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College], New Yorker, Why Donald Trump Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment”, 7/8/19, // TDI“Brazen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is the Interior Secretary, and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who is the administrator of the E.P.A.—both of whom have been trying to gut America’s environmental laws. Oh, and on the day when a rainfall described by local authorities as “historic” managed to flood the White House basement. By now, we are used to Trump’s big-lie technique. Even by that standard, however, the claim that “we are working harder than many previous Administrations, maybe almost all of them,” on environmental protection will be believed by exactly no one for whom words have not yet lost their common-sense meaning. Trying to parse the nonsense of Trump’s speech sentence by sentence is silly, so concentrate instead on its underlying meaning: the oil companies clearly won a crucial battle with Trump’s election, postponing their moment of reckoning. (Less so the coal barons, whose decline was already too far advanced). But they clearly sense that they are losing the war, and more decisively than before. Trump’s big-man folly—withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, for instance, when it would have been easy enough to sabotage progress more quietly—has decisively discomforted the suburban voters that he must retain for reelection. By all accounts, it was the President’s pollsters who insisted on this strange talk, because they are desperately afraid that they are losing those independents (particularly women) who have come to fear the physical future that climate change is imposing. What does it mean, after all, to boast that we have the “cleanest air” ever, when wildfire smoke now obscures swaths of sky for large portions of the year? What does it mean to say the water is cleaner than it was in 1970, when water now drops from the sky in such volumes that insurance companies have begun to declare cellars “uninsurable?” The absurdity of the whole enterprise is clear when you remember that Trump doesn’t even believe that global warming is real—he has stated this repeatedly. In that case, only fear of the polls could possibly drive him to stress that America’s carbon emissions are down (except for, um, last year, when they went, um, up). Why else would he care? So that’s craven as well as brazen. But cravenness is probably a good sign—it means that the school strikers and the divestment campaigners and the pipeline protesters and the marching scientists have carried the debate. The tiny minority of climate deniers currently wield federal political power, but it’s finally beginning to sink in with the broader public that climate change is the threat of our time. Among Democrats, that process is well advanced—by some measures, climate change is the No. 1 voting issue in the primary, and, indeed, they are announcing serious cash-on-the-barrelhead plans to do something about it. But Trump’s performance on Monday must indicate that it’s also increasingly the case among independents, the group that holds the key to his electoral future. This is good not because it means that Trump will act—he won’t. It’s good because it means that if we move past Trumpism there’s at least a somewhat greater chance that the larger political system will move, too. But, at this point, it’s also hard to believe that political action will be swift enough or comprehensive enough to make a decisive difference. After all, the Obama Administration, which sincerely believed that climate change was real, succeeded only in replacing some coal-fired power generation with natural gas, which in turn succeeded only in replacing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions with heat-trapping methane emissions. (It’s not clear that total greenhouse-gas emissions budged at all during the Obama years.) If the G.O.P. maintains any political traction at all in the next dispensation, it will be hard to pass legislation like the Green New Deal, which represents precisely the scale of commitment needed to catch up with the out-of-control physics of global warming. If the Trump follies have lowered the bar to the point where a return to Obama-era politics is all that’s politically possible, then significantly slowing the rise of the planet’s temperature by federal action will remain difficult. So it’s profoundly important that activists keep the pressure on other power centers, too: on state and local governments, and on the financial institutions that keep the fossil-fuel industry afloat. To use an unfortunately apropos metaphor, all that pressure will eventually force a hole in the dam. The political flop sweat that Trump was trying to mop up on Monday is a sure small sign of the coming deluge. StatesCounter Plan Text: The 50 United States, District of Columbia and US Territorial Governments should grant legal personhood to natural freshwater ecosystems States are key laboratories for climate policy. State lead allows faster adjustment, effective federal follow on and more aggressive enforcement. Even partial federal preemption slows implementation and enforce and kills CP solvency. Aulisi et al 07 [(Andrew Aulisi is the director of the Markets and Enterprise Program, John Larsen is a research analyst, and Jonathan Pershing is the director of the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute. Paul Posner is the director of the Public Administration Program at George Mason University) “CLIMATE POLICY IN THE STATE LABORATORY How States Influence Federal Regulation and the Implications for Climate Change Policy in the United States” World Resources Institute, August 2007] TDIThe United States federal government is lagging behind the governments of other industrialized countries in developing policies to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the same time, however, many U.S. states are seeking to implement aggressive, mandatory emissions controls. In many areas of public policy, the states have led in policy development and innovation and have subsequently infl uenced federal action. The relationship between state and federal policymaking is complex, however, and the states do not often have a clear and unique claim to leadership and public policy successes. In fact, on matters of great public concern, state and federal policymakers usually work concurrently and sometimes cooperatively, although state governments may be more nimble and closer to affected constituencies and therefore better able to implement policy responses more quickly. When the states do lead, they may innovate policies that incubate at the state level for some time before a window of opportunity arises at the national level to allow for their relatively quick acceptance by the federal government. Conversely, the states may attempt to lead in a given area of policy only to be thwarted by federal preemption and thus lose their ability to set the policy agenda. To understand the state–federal relationship and its implications for climate change policy in the United States, we reviewed eleven successful and two unsuccessful instances of policy diffusion from the state to the federal level, known as vertical diffusion. These case examples include environment and energy policies as well as policies involving other major areas of public concern, such as education and welfare. Each case describes the social, economic, or environmental problem being addressed, the signifi cant events, the drivers for change, the principal stakeholders, the level of communication and cooperation between the states and the federal government, the action by the states, and the subsequent federal policy outcome. Using these cases, we identifi ed and evaluated seven factors related to the successful vertical diffusion of policy. We then discussed two notable mandatory climate regulations at the state level, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and the California GHG vehicle standards, and examined their potential to shape federal action based on our seven factors. The most important of these factors appears to be state advocacy for federal policy adoption. Another important factor, closely linked to state advocacy, is the spillover effect or the degree to which the perceived benefi ts and costs of a policy (and the problem it is meant to address) cross state lines. The existence of a strong spillover effect coupled with state advocacy appears to be suffi cient to catalyze vertical diffusion even without the widespread state adoption of a policy. Indeed, although the widespread adoption of a policy at the state level, or horizontal diffusion, can be important, it does not guarantee that the policy will diffuse to the federal level. The power of example also is important. The fact that states are able to create, design, and implement policies often serves as a strong impetus for federal action. The infl uence of empirical cost data does not seem to be a signifi cant factor, however. In some cases, the reason might have been that cost was simply not a major issue or relevant data were not available. In other cases, the federal decision-making process found the cost data to be either unnecessary or not worthy of attention. Businesses’ support of federal policies is complex. Although businesses often call on the federal government to preempt state policy initiatives, those state initiatives that are adopted by the federal government may force businesses to accept a compromise somewhere between total federal preemption and full state retention of regulatory jurisdiction, in the form of federal standards or minimums refl ecting (at least in part) the states’ regulatory goals. In cases dealing with environment and energy policies specifi cally, federal action was almost always in the form of partial preemption, essentially setting a fl oor for the policy but allowing the states to exceed that minimum. Consequently, states may fi nd themselves perpetually “raising the bar” for policy action. In other words, the policy activism of some states may ultimately have the effect of forcing other states to follow suit in order to comply with federal requirements. Moreover, if partial preemption by the federal government allows states to exceed the federal minimums, then aggressive states may continue to separate themselves through new policy activism, thereby perpetuating a state patchwork of policies and raising the prospect of a cyclical process of federal partial preemption. A state–federal cycle of policy development is particularly relevant to climate change, which is a long-term problem requiring long-term solutions and technology and market adjustments. The states may play the role of policy innovator for decades by routinely establishing the leading edge of emissions and market regulation, tailored to their individual state circumstances, with the federal govern ment periodically stepping in and setting policy fl oors. In this sense, partial preemption by the federal government in the area of climate change could be a useful and appropriate outcome. In addition, even if the federal government were to act aggressively on climate change policy, its long-term nature suggests that the states’ policy innovation and activism will continue to be relevant indefinitely. Even in the face of federal resistance to additional regulation, the states’ policy activism is likely to create pressure and set the stage for federal action when political circumstances change and a federal “policy window” opens, thus enabling the policy to be adopted more quickly than if the states had not previously taken action. Both the RGGI and the California GHG vehicle emissions standards appear poised to have a profound effect on U.S. federal climate change policy, probably shaping and accelerating the federal adoption of mandatory controls on GHG emissions. These initiatives contain the factors for successful vertical diffusion: a push by state champions, policy learning, and a strong spillover effect. Although both policies could lead to horizontal diffusion between states, our case studies suggest that this will not be the critical factor. Also, whereas our case studies show mixed results for the importance of business support, characteristics of both the RGGI and the California initiative indicate that businesses will advocate federal uniformity, probably resulting in partial preemption. The RGGI and the California initiative have important implications that go beyond the timing of federal policy. Climate policy can take a variety of forms and may include a combination of measures such as market-based programs, taxation, regulatory standards, international agreements, and the research, development, and deployment of technologies. Indeed, any effective response to climate change is likely to include all these measures, although policymakers are likely to emphasize one or more over the others. In this respect, the RGGI and the California vehicle emissions standards may determine the shape of U.S. federal climate policy and thus suggest a disinclination to certain policy approaches. For example, if the state initiatives are to shape federal policy, then one might expect the eventual federal program to use a market approach to large point sources of emissions combined with an emphasis on improving effi ciency in the transportation sector. Such an outcome could come at the expense of an alternative approach that focuses on “upstream” carbon pricing attached to fossil fuels coupled with subsidies to promote alternative transportation fuels. These are important trade-offs that state policy precedents certainly infl uence, though not necessarily in a decisive manner. For public offi cials, business representatives, and nongovernment experts establishing national standards for climate policy and GHG emissions regulation, our analysis suggests the following set of actions that they might take: The support and encouragement of state champions promoting their own standards as well as broader federal action may have the most impact on vertical policy diffusion. RECOMMENDATION: States should invest in communications programs to allow state experts to speak in public forums and provide testimony on state policy goals. States should focus on how actions by other states and the federal government can help achieve policy goals while addressing possible inequities associated with a patchwork of state actions. In particular, states should advocate for the preservation of their ability to implement policies that can reduce GHG emissions. A problem as complex as climate change will almost certainly require continuous, long-term innovation. Stifl ing the states’ capacity to contribute to this innovation may in time result in diminished or delayed federal policy action on this issue over the long-term. The quick development and implementation of state policies will allow any lessons learned to be used in the federal effort. This may apply to innovative policy designs, the policy design process, and the actual program performance. For the RGGI, the lessons may pertain to similar allocation methods, offset rules, set-aside rules, or an open stakeholder process, and for the auto sector, a federal standard may draw on the extensive technical work done in California. RECOMMENDATION: States should not delay policy design and implementation work in order to gauge federal policy debates and direction. Rather, state policy action taken today is more likely to inform and shape the federal outcome rather than the other way around, posing a potential advantage for early actors. Research and analyses detailing the extent to which the costs and benefi ts of climate policies spill over state boundaries may generate more enthusiasm for a federal program and are likely to be more effective if married to state advocacy efforts. RECOMMENDATION: To inform the federal policy debate, states should disseminate analyses, modeling results, forecasts, and actual program data related to their climate policies and programs, particularly in the context of state policy goals and the extent to which states can solve the climate problem. While horizontal diffusion was not as important as other factors, programs with wider state diffusion were more likely to be adopted at the federal level. Thus, efforts to persuade other states to adopt the RGGI and California standards are likely to increase the chances of a similar federal program. Also, given the prevalence of federal partial preemption as a response to state policy activism, the development of more stringent standards at the state level is likely to lead to more stringent federal standards. RECOMMENDATION: State policies should be designed with a view to interstate cooperation, sharing of information, and the incremental development of multi-state collective action that is tantamount to a national program. Such collective, coordinated action by several states could result in a meaningful and environmentally effective U.S. response to climate change in lieu of federal action. Finally, some measure of business support is helpful at any level of policy development but is not always critical to vertical diffusion. If the RGGI or the California vehicle emissions standards succeed at resolving industry opposition and/or creating an impetus for policy uniformity through federal action, then these policies stand a greater chance of being adopted or emulated by the federal government. RECOMMENDATION: States should promote and convene business coalitions that share their policy goals in an effort to help design or endorse policies, specifi cally policies that are suitable to state implementation while also leveraging federal action. Localized solutions alone create culture shift – national politics are impenetrable Kauffman and Martin 18[(Craig M. Kauffman University of Oregon Assistant Professor, Political Science and Pamela L. Martin examines issues of sustainability, energy, and rights at Coastal Carolina University. She is the author of Oil in the Soil: The Politics of Paying to Preserve the Amazon and coauthor of An Introduction to World Politics: Conflict and Consensus on a Small Planet.), “Constructing Rights of Nature Norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand” Global Environmental Politics Volume 18 | Issue 4 | November 2018 p.43-62, November 16, 2018] TDIThe first US RoN ordinance has its roots in the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). CELDF was formed in 1995 by environmental lawyers who concluded that existing environmental laws were inadequate. They advocated new laws that prevented environmental harm (rather than merely mitigating it) and that strengthened the rights of communities to protect themselves from environmental degradation caused by industrial activity. Influenced by the work of Christopher Stone (1972) and others, they saw RoN as an important legal tool for achieving these goals. CELDF recognized that they faced a closed national political opportunity structure at the federal level and so shifted contestation to local political arenas. CELDF established a new approach to grassroots organizing centered on Democracy Schools that trained community residents “to confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and earth.”9 CELDF began helping communities develop community bills of rights that could provide a legal basis for residents to defend their interests against corporations that invoked property rights to justify environmentally destructive behavior. Framing RoN as a way to defend local democracy was effective because of its cultural resonance in the US. Importantly, this framing has resonated not only in liberal communities known for environmental activism but also in conservative communities like Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania (Linzey 2017). In 2006, a local supervisor for Tamaqua Borough named Cathy Miorelli attended a CELDF Democracy School. Miorelli was concerned about a planned new sewage sludge deposit facility in the borough. A nurse, Miorelli had been studying the increasing incidences of cancer in her vicinity and gathered evidence of a cancer linked to industrial toxins like benzene. Since her community bordered three superfund sites, she worried that contamination by yet another facility would put residents at even more risk. Inspired to take action, Cathy ran for and won a seat as a local supervisor and attended CELDF’s Democracy School. After the experience, Miorelli said, “I realized that we could act on what we wanted most and put together an ordinance that would prevent contaminants from coming into our town.”10 Miorelli arranged for CELDF representatives to meet with the Tamaqua Council and draft an ordinance recognizing RoN as part of a set of community rights. Miorelli, the mayor, and the council of supervisors held several town meetings to educate the public and mobilize popular support. Despite the threat of lawsuits against the town and individual supervisors, Tamaqua Borough passed the world’s first RoN ordinance in 2006 (Tamaqua Borough 2006). The Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance was novel in that it considers natural communities and ecosystems to be legal “persons” and explicitly denies the same recognition to corporations. This is to limit corporations’ rights to interfere “with the existence and flourishing of natural communities or ecosystems” (Tamaqua Borough 2006, 4). The ordinance treats RoN as a tool for strengthening community rights vis-à-vis corporate property rights so that community members can ensure that their community (human and natural) is healthy and flourishes.Aff ElectionsUQ – Trump Wins Trump wins 2020 – he repeatedly breaks statistical models – his approval rating and base membership is trending upward and he has the most resilient base in history. Vittert and Lind 6/12 [(Liberty Vittert Professor of the Practice of Data Science, Washington University in St Louis. Brendan Lind JD/MBA Candidate, Harvard Business School. “Despite Unpopularity, Trump Can Win 2020. Here's How”, The National Interest, June 12, 2019)We think that pollsters, and the general public, shouldn’t compare Trump’s approval ratings to past presidents. What can be compared? The difference of highs and lows. According to historical Gallup polls, Trump’s spread – the difference between the highest recorded and lowest recorded approval rating poll – has never been more than 13%. Not a single president since this type of robust polling began, back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, has ever shown this level of consistency in approval ratings. In fact, the next-smallest spreadwas 27%, for John F. Kennedy. Trump’s approval ratings show that he has the strongest base in historical times. 2020 by the numbers There are still nine months to go until the first ballots will be cast in the race to the White House for 2020, and the Democratic nominee’s identity will most likely not be known for almost a year. Still, Trump’s chances of reelection are being discussed daily. Trump’s approval ratings are unlikely to go over 50%, given his lackluster starting point. So what does he actually need to win? A simple statistical model applied to recorded approval ratings shows Trump has been garnering higher and higher approval ratings since taking office. Put simply, his base is staying strong and even growing. This is in direct contrast to all presidents except Bill Clinton. Past incumbent presidents followed the rule that 49% approval and above means winning reelection, and anything below meant no second term. But Trump did not start at, nor will most likely ever reach, that level of approval. Americans may again see something that, statistically speaking, has never been seen before. Approval ratings have high correlations with predicting the next president, but with Trump, the numbers are outside any historical trends. The most unpopular winner ever may very likely win again.Most Americans think Trump wins – he doesn’t need the popular vote, he’s survived 2.5 years of impeachment and is scandal-proof. Hendricks 6/8 [SCOTTY HENDRICKS, Poll finds most Americans believe Trump will win the 2020 election, 08 Big Think, June, 2019] TDIDespite poll numbers that suggest he has an uphill battle for re-election despite, the same people who don't support Trump for re-election think that he will probably win anyway. The poll, which interviewed 1006 adults by telephone, shows that 54 percent of Americans think Trump will win re-election. This means that Trump, whose overall approval rating is negative, is doing better in this regard than Obama was doing with better approval ratings at the same point in their Presidencies. This is despite a majority of the surveyed holding negative opinions on how Trump is doing on a wide variety of issues. On the topics of immigration, trade, foreign policy, and help to the middle-class Trump's approval ratings are at least a few points below his disapproval ratings. He fares a little better on the issue of the economy in general, with about half of those polled saying they approve of how he has managed the economy. Why would people think this? The dissidence between the numbers who disapprove of how he is doing and the number who think he will be re-elected can be explained by the fact that not everybody who disapproves of him thinks he'll lose. In December of last year, 81 percent of the people who disapproved of how Trump was handling the economy said they felt he would lose re-election; this poll shows that number is now 67 percent. The tide has changed. How does that hold up? I mean, it still doesn’t make sense. If a majority disapproves of him, and they all know that, then why would they think he’d win again anyway? Historically speaking, most American presidents win re-election. This includes the ones who aren't as popular as they'd like to be. Think for a minute about the few that have lost re-election; a lot of them had crises or other significant problems going in that were at least partly to blame for how the race turned out. Supposing that Trump will get re-elected fits the historical pattern. Given that his supporters don't seem to care about any scandals he gets involved in and suddenly don't think the personal lives of politicians matter when considering their fitness for office, the issues that derailed the re-election of others might not affect Trump all that much, anyway — i.e., his base will still vote for him. And, of course, not having the support of a majority of Americans didn't stop him from getting into office the first time. Even if he does worse the second time around, he could still win the Electoral College. One doesn't have to be too cynical or bad at math to think this is a probable outcome. A cynical turn wouldn't be too far-fetched either, how many other presidents endured such a wide public support for impeachment this long without leaving? If this doesn't get him out now, why think he'll lose next year?No Link There is a 0 percent chance that the aff results in voters believing Trump is pro-climate. He routinely denies climate change and has executed the most extensive and anti-scientific climate deregulation agenda in history. Kaufman 7/9 [(Alexander Kaufman is reporter at HuffPost, based in New York. He covers climate change, environmental policy and politics. He has reported from Greenland, China, Vietnam and Brazil. His climate reporting won a 2018 SEAL Award.) “Bush’s EPA Chief Slams Trump’s Environment Speech: ‘He’s Living In His Own Reality’”, 07/09/2019Republican Christine Todd Whitman, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator during President George W. Bush’s administration, dismissed President Donald Trump’s bid to recast himself as an environmental champion, calling the effort doomed to fail amid an ongoing assault on air and water protections. In an interview with HuffPost, Whitman said Trump’s 45-minute speech on Monday touting his “environmental leadership” showed he “knows he’s on shaky ground” going into the 2020 election in which, for the first time, global warming and ecological collapse may emerge as core issues. Whitman said Trump’s attempt to put a positive spin on his administration’s environmental record is unlikely to impress anyone beyond his loyal base of supporters. “He’s living in his own reality,” Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, said by phone Tuesday. “He’s definitely in another world.” In his White House speech, Trump scraped the barrel for environmental achievements that didn’t require an asterisk, pointing to his signing a bipartisan bill to reduce garbage in the ocean. Other items he highlighted were more problematic in terms of making his case. Trump bragged about progress in delisting Superfund sites, but that’s largely a procedural step based on clean-up work that began, in some cases, decades ago. He stressed how much he values public lands, noting the 1.3 million acres he designated for protection ― but glossed over the more than 2 million acres he shaved off other national monuments. Joined at the podium by EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, they spotlighted a 74% reduction in air pollution since 1970, skirting the latest federal data that show a 15% increase in days with unhealthy air in 2017 and 2018, compared to 2013 through 2016. Yet the misleading examples, Whitman said, are secondary to the glaring reality that Trump’s deregulatory blitz poses a risk to environmental health by any measure. Since taking office, the Trump administration has sought to repeal, replace or delay more than 80 environmental regulations, particularly those dealing with planet-warming emissions from the fossil fuel sector. Wheeler finalized a proposal last month to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a sweeping regulation on coal-fired utilities, with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, a modest requirement to add retrofits to some plants. The White House is also working to unwind fuel economy standards, setting up a prolonged legal fight that, as automakers publicly oppose the plan, is widely criticized as a giveaway to oil companies. Adding policy weight to the president’s routine taunting of climate scientists ― he delights in pointing to temporary cold snaps as evidence disproving irrefutable long-term warming trends ―, the administration appointed climate change skeptics to key White House positions and gutted science advisory boards. The regulatory rollbacks come as carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere are hitting levels unseen in 800,000 years, and scientists across the globe resoundingly warn that the world is quickly running out of time to avoid catastrophic warming. “I don’t think the American people are going to buy that we are somehow going to do better with the environment when we are rolling back every regulation and eviscerating the Science Advisory Board,” Whitman said. “Right now, Republicans and the president are on the wrong side of the issue.”States Effective environmental policy is only feasible through the federal government—state enforcement depends on federal enforcement. Giles ’17 “Why we cant just leave environmental protection to the states”, Grist, April 26, 2017, Cynthia Giles, Cynthia Giles is the former head of the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. , TDI The Trump budget proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t just slash funding for the EPA. It contains a less-noticed but important policy shift: eliminating federal enforcement where states and the EPA share enforcement authority. The budget plan directs the EPA to stop enforcing laws to protect clean air and water in most cases, based on the false assumption that if the EPA pulls back, the states can pick up the slack. Here’s why that’s wrong. First, states often don’t enforce the laws within their own borders when the people primarily harmed live downwind or downriver in another state. States don’t want to spend their money or their political capital to benefit other states. The federal government has the responsibility to protect everyone — like the millions of people on the East Coast who suffer the effects from large air polluters in the Midwest. Second, many significant violators are national companies that operate in many states. Individual states can’t effectively take on nationwide operations. Filing cases one state at a time is inefficient and leads to inconsistent results. The EPA enforces against national and multinational companies, and, through a single case, can secure an agreement that cuts pollution at all of a company’s facilities nationwide. States frequently join the EPA in these national cases, as they did in the recent case against Tesoro Corporation that required the company to cut health-threatening air pollution from its refineries in six states, from Hawaii to North Dakota. Without the EPA taking the lead, these nationwide results would be impossible. Third, many states don’t take action to enforce criminal environmental laws. Environmental crimes have real victims, who are injured and sometimes killed by companies that cut corners on toxic pollution control. The EPA’s criminal enforcement, especially against individual managers, sends a powerful deterrent message: Company managers who are considering cheating on drinking-water tests or turning off air-pollution controls better think twice before making choices that could land them in jail. Fourth, states don’t always have the political will to take on powerful companies. When the EPA sued Southern Coal Corporation for long-standing and serious water-pollution violations across Appalachia, four states — Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — joined the EPA in that case. West Virginia did not sign on, even though many of the violations occurred there. Why? The owner of the company was influential in the state, and now serves as its governor. The EPA is far less likely to be held hostage to companies with local political clout. Fifth, companies that play by the rules need protection from companies that cheat. Weak enforcement gives an unfair competitive advantage to companies that violate the law. The EPA helps to ensure a level playing field and prevent a race to the bottom by providing backup for states that don’t have the resources or the will to insist on compliance. When I served at the EPA, companies would contact us frequently — even from Oklahoma, the home state of Scott Pruitt, the EPA’s current administrator — asking the EPA to take action against competitors that were skirting the law. Sixth, sidelining the EPA won’t empower states, it will weaken them. Companies have known that if they don’t resolve their enforcement problems at the state level, they may have to face the EPA instead. Announcing that the EPA is no longer a threat will change that dynamic. A diminished EPA will encourage companies to push back against state enforcers. The proposal that Trump claims will help states will instead make their jobs harder. The vast majority of the EPA’s enforcement work where it shares authority with states is focused on health threats that states can’t or won’t address. The people of Flint, Michigan, understand this too well; even though the city and state were primarily responsible for delivering clean water to city residents, it was an EPA order that started the city on the road to recovery. When Congress created our national environmental laws, with huge bipartisan majorities, it envisioned a dynamic state and federal partnership. The laws won’t work with only federal or only state implementation; protection of the public requires strong government at both levels. But Trump’s EPA proposes that the federal government vacate the field. Don’t be fooled by the suggestion that if the EPA walks away, everything will still be fine because states will step to the plate and enforce the law. The EPA’s retreat will only embolden industry and weaken states. If the EPA is not there to enforce laws, then in many cases no one will. Without USFG regulation, global spillover occurs. And only USFG is able to incentivize innovation and ingenuity regarding environmental policy.Schalit ’17 “Why shifting regulatory power to the states won’t improve the environment”, The Conversation, Michael Livermore, Michael A. Livermore joined the faculty as an associate professor of law in 2013. His primary teaching and research interests are in administrative law, computational analysis of legal texts, environmental law, cost-benefit analysis and regulation. He has published numerous books, chapters and articles on these topics, with a special focus on the role of interest groups and public-choice dynamics in shaping the application and methodology of cost-benefit analysis, August 2 2017, , TDIThere is even more need for a federal role in addressing problems that have global impacts, such as climate change. Once greenhouse gases are emitted, they do not just cause warming in the place where they were released. Instead, they mix in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change around the world. This means that no given jurisdiction pays the full cost of its emissions. Instead, in the language of economics, these impacts are externalities that are felt elsewhere. This is why a global agreement is needed to effectively slow climate change. The United States has already withdrawn from the Paris climate accord. If we pull back on regulating greenhouse gases nationally as well, many states will have little incentive to take action. Under the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which Pruitt is reviewing and has told states to ignore, every state was required to figure out how to meet a carbon reduction goal. However, it did not dictate how they should do it. This approach would have produced valuable political information from red and purple states, which tend to rely more heavily than blue states on fossil fuels. By forcing Republican leaders to craft state climate policies and sell them to their constituents, the Clean Power Plan promoted what I consider truly useful experimentation that could have helped break the national gridlock on climate policy. Now, without a prod from the federal government, those experiments are unlikely to occur. EPA’s retreat will mean that we have less, not more, insight into smart and politically viable ways of cutting carbon emissions. Any regulation can be improved on, and the Trump administration could have risen to that challenge. Instead, the leadership at EPA is abdicating the agency’s traditional leadership role. In doing so, it is promoting stagnation and backsliding rather than innovation.States don’t fill in when federal environmental regulations go away which disproportionately affects minorities—empirically proven.Gallay 7/9 “Doing less with less at EPA: Environmental enforcement has plummeted in the era of Trump. Here’s what we can do about that”, American Bar, Paul Gallay, Paul Gallay?has been president of Riverkeeper, an advocacy organization for the Hudson River and its tributaries, since 2010. Paul previously served in New York State’s Departments of Law and Environmental Conservation, in the land conservation movement, and in private practice. He teaches “U.S. Water and Energy Policy” at Columbia University, July 9 2019, , TDIThe decline in federal and state enforcement and inspection programs described above is exposing Americans to higher levels of pollution. From 2015 to 2018, inspections of large water pollution discharge permit holders declined by 8 percent, while serious incidents of water pollution increased by 10 percent (rising from 1,507 to 1,659). U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Enforcement and Compliance History Online: State Water Dashboard. Similarly, inspections at facilities regulated under the Clean Air Act also dropped between 2015 and 2018, correlating with a striking 28 percent increase in high profile violations at such facilities (rising from 362 to 462). Id. This means trouble for our health and welfare. Whether due to the abandonment of efforts to control methane flaring in North Dakota, the loosening of selenium and sulfur dioxide restrictions at power plants in West Virginia and Texas, or the significant delays related to regulating chlorpyrifos in California farm fields, countless Americans are less safe due to the increases in pollution associated with President Trump’s desire to eliminate EPA “in almost every form.” S. Eder et al., This Is Our Reality Now, N.Y. Times, Dec. 27, 2018. The damage will fall most seriously on people of color, as shown by studies like that by Dr. Robert Bullard, Distinguished Professor at the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University, who famously demonstrated that “poor whites do better than middle-class blacks,” when it comes to exposure to pollution, because of inequitable housing policies, barriers to full participation in permit proceedings, and the resulting concentration of toxic activities in heavily-minority neighborhoods. ................
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