Should Biden be getting more credit for his massive climate bill?
Mike Bebernes, Senior Editor – August 21, 2023
“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates.
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
What’s happening
President Biden held a press conference last week to celebrate the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act — a bill he called the “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever” — becoming law.
The IRA passed through the Senate last August by the narrowest possible margin after months of negotiations among Democrats. Although the bill’s name targeted the soaring inflation of the time, the legislation was essentially a sprawling collection of programs designed to supercharge the country’s green energy transition through investments and tax incentives. It also included a handful of non-climate provisions, including rules to lower the cost of prescription drugs and billions in extra funding for the Internal Revenue Service.
While even the president concedes that the IRA shouldn’t be credited for falling inflation, the bill has already helped drive more than $100 billion into green energy production and created more than 170,000 clean energy jobs — many of them in Republican parts of the country. The White House argues that this is just a preview of the IRA’s full impact, which won’t be realized for several years. One estimate predicted that the bill could result in as much as $1.2 trillion in green energy spending over the next 10 years.
Yet despite these massive investments, voters aren’t giving Biden credit for leading the effort to make the bill a reality. More than half of Americans disapprove of his handling of climate change, and a strong majority say they know little or nothing about what the Inflation Reduction Act has done, according to a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.
Why there’s debate
Many political analysts say that stuffing a bunch of individually popular initiatives into a single bill created a piece of legislation too complicated for voters to wrap their heads around. The slow process of launching major energy projects also means that many Americans haven’t yet seen the impact of the IRA in their communities.
But others say Biden’s real problem is that he’s taking the wrong approach to climate change in the first place. Republicans argue that the IRA is far too large and will end up wasting extraordinary amounts of taxpayer money by imposing the Democrats’ green agenda on the country. Many progressives, on the other hand, say climate-minded voters are disappointed that the bill isn’t nearly big enough and that Biden has undermined his own case by approving fossil fuel projects throughout his presidency.
What’s next
Biden’s effort to draw more attention to the IRA’s benefits is part of a larger effort to change voters’ minds about his stewardship of the economy, which have remained stubbornly low despite persistent growth and tumbling inflation. Convincing Americans that “Bidenomics” is working will likely be a core focus for the president throughout his reelection campaign.
Perspectives
Most Americans can’t make sense of such a massive and complex bill
“I think part of the issue is they have to cram so many things in these giant bills, to get everybody on board and something for everyone to get passed. So it’s really hard for the public to wrap their head around. … It’s very, very tricky when it’s hard to know what’s in it.” — Nova Safo, Marketplace
Americans aren’t seeing the effects in their everyday lives
“While the Inflation Reduction Act is bringing dramatic savings to Medicare recipients, and offers rebates and tax credits to consumers for energy-saving home improvements and electric vehicle purchases, nothing in it really addresses the day-to-day expenses most Americans incur, like groceries and gas.” — Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, to HuffPost
The IRA isn’t remotely enough to change our climate trajectory
“It left the U.S. with no realistic path toward meeting its stated goal of zeroing carbon emissions by 2050. At the rate we’re still pumping planet-heating carbon into the atmosphere, today’s heat waves could come to seem downright pleasant.” — Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg
The IRA is bad policy and voters know it
“Even if you give the bill the most charitable take possible, it’s just throwing money at failed programs and wasted resources.” — Alex Salter, economist at Texas Tech University, to Washington Times
The president has repeatedly undercut his own climate message
“Biden has also faced the ire of climate progressives for somewhat undercutting his landmark moment with an aggressive giveaway of oil and gas drilling leases on public land … and for incentivizing the use of technologies such as carbon capture that have been criticized as an unproven distraction at a time when the world is baking under record heatwaves.” — Oliver Milman, Guardian
Voters will begin to appreciate the IRA once the projects it’s funding get off the ground
“I think, over the long run, a lot of these Republican skeptics, they’re going to start to see jobs in their district, investments. And I think they’re going to come along with the clean energy technologies of the 21st century.” — Leah Stokes, UC Santa Barbara professor of environmental politics, to PBS NewsHour
The media has mostly ignored the actual impact of the IRA
“I’ve covered a lot of policy fights, and a huge problem in how policy coverage is done is there is all this attention to the fight to pass a bill — the Affordable Care Act, the Trump tax cuts, the Inflation Reduction Act. And then the bill passes. And if the fight stops, attention just drops off a cliff.” — Ezra Klein, New York Times.
These Voters Share Almost No Political Beliefs, but They Agree on One Thing: We’re Failing as a Nation
Ruth Igielnik – August 20, 2023
A Jackson, Miss., precinct worker cuts individual “I Voted in Hinds County” stickers from the roll, Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. Each voter in Hinds County receives a sticker upon receipt of a paper ballot. Voters statewide are selecting their party’s nominees for a number of county and statewide offices in their respective Democratic or Republican primaries. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)More
There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground is a belief that the country is headed toward failure.
Overall, 37% of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
Fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. This kind of outlook is more common among voters whose party is out of power. But it’s also noteworthy that fatalists, as we might call them, span the political spectrum. Around 20% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.
Where they disagree is about what may have gotten us to this point.
Why Republicans say the U.S. is in danger of failing
Republican fatalists, much like Republican voters overall, overwhelmingly support former President Donald Trump. This group is largely older — two-thirds of Republicans older than 65 say the country is on the verge of failure — and less educated. They are also more likely than Republican voters overall to get their news from non-Fox conservative media sources like Newsmax or The Epoch Times.
Many of these gloomy Republicans see the Biden administration’s policies as pushing the country to the verge of collapse.
“Things are turning very communistic,” said Margo Creamer, 72, a Trump supporter from Southern California. “The first day Biden became president, he ripped up everything good that happened with Trump; he opened the border — let everyone and anyone in. It’s just insane.”
She added that there was only one way to reverse course: “In this next election if Trump doesn’t win, we’re going to fail as a nation.”
Many Republicans saw the pandemic, and the resulting economic impact, as playing a role in pushing the country toward failure.
“COVID gave everyone a wake-up call on what they can do to us as citizens,” said Dale Bowyer, a Republican in Fulton County, Indiana. “Keeping us in our houses, not being allowed to go to certain places, it was complete control over the United States of America. They think we’re idiots and we wouldn’t notice.”
Why Democrats say the U.S. is in danger of failing
While fewer Democrats see the country as nearing collapse, gender is the defining characteristic associated with this pessimistic outlook. Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts to feel this way.
“I have never seen things as bleak or as precarious as they have been the last few years,” said Ann Rubio, a Democrat and funeral director in New York City. “Saying it’s a stolen election plus Jan. 6, it’s terrifying. Now we’re taking away a woman’s right to choose. I feel like I’m watching the wheels come off something.”
For many Democrats, specific issues — especially abortion — are driving their concern about the country’s direction.
Brandon Thompson, 37, a Democrat and veteran living in Tampa, Florida, expressed a litany of concerns about the state of the country: “The regressive laws being passed; women don’t have abortion access in half the country; gerrymandering and stripping people’s rights to vote — stuff like this is happening literally all over the country.
“If things continue to go this way, this young experiment, this young nation, is going to fall apart,” he said.
More than just on the wrong track
Pollsters have long asked a simple question to take the country’s temperature: Are things in the U.S. headed on the right track or are they off in the wrong direction?
Americans’ views on this question have become more polarized in recent years and are often closely tied to views of the party in power. So it is not surprising, for example, that currently 85% of Republicans said the country was on the wrong track, compared with 46% of Democrats. Those numbers are often the exact opposite when there’s a Republican in the White House.
Views on the country’s direction are also often closely linked to the economic environment. Currently, 65% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. That’s relatively high historically, although down from last summer when inflation was peaking and 77% of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the height of the recession in 2008, 81% of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction.
What seems surprising, however, is the large share of voters who say we’re on the verge of breaking down as a nation.
“We’ve moved so far away from what this country was founded on,” said William Dickerson, a Republican from Linwood, North Carolina. “Society as a whole has become so self-aware that we’re infringing on people’s freedoms and the foundation of what makes America great.”
He added: “We tell people what they can and can’t do with their own property and we tell people that you’re wrong because you feel a certain way.”
Voters contacted for the Times/Siena survey were asked the “failing” question only if they already said things were headed in the wrong direction. And while this is the first time a question like this has been asked, the pessimistic responses still seem striking: Two-thirds of Republicans who said the country was headed in the wrong direction said things weren’t just bad — they were so bad that America was in danger of becoming a failed nation.
“Republicans have Trump and others in their party who have undermined their faith in the electoral system,” said Alia Braley, a researcher at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab who studies attitudes toward democracy. “And if Republicans believe democracy is crumbling, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that they will stop behaving like citizens of a democracy.”
She added, “Democrats are often surprised to learn that Republicans are just as afraid as they are about the future of U.S. democracy, and maybe more so.”
Legal scholars increasingly raise constitutional argument that Trump should be barred from presidency
Katelyn Polantz, Reporter Crime and Justice – August 19, 2023
Brandon Bell/Getty Images/FILEWashingtonCNN —
Prominent conservative legal scholars are increasingly raising a constitutional argument that 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump should be barred from the presidency because of his actions to overturn the previous presidential election result.
The latest salvo came Saturday in The Atlantic magazine, from liberal law professor Laurence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig, the former federal appellate judge and a prominent conservative who’s become a strong critic of Trump’s actions after the election.
Not all in the legal community agree – and what the scholars are proposing would need to be tested in court.
Yet Luttig and Tribe’s writings capture a conversation about the Constitution and the 2021 insurrection that is likely to grow heading into the 2024 election season.
They and others base their arguments on a reading of part of the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil War provision that excludes from future office anyone who, previously, as a sworn-in public official, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion … or [had] given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the government.
The pair write: “Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point.
“The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again.”
Law review scrutinizes Trump
Just last week, two members of the Federalist Society, a legal organization that has substantial sway among conservative legal thinkers, released a law review article making a similar argument.
“In our view, on the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack,” law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “The case for disqualification is strong.”
In writing about Trump’s speech from the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, to his supporters who then overran the Capitol, Baude and Paulsen said Trump delivered a “general and specific message” that the election was stolen, calling on the crowd to take immediate action to block the transfer of power before falling silent for hours as the insurrection progressed.
“Trump’s deliberate inaction renders his January 6 speech much more incriminating in hindsight, because it makes it even less plausible (if it was ever plausible) that the crowd’s reaction was all a big mistake or misunderstanding,” they write.
The law professors argued current and former officeholders who took part in supporting or planning the efforts to overturn the election for Trump should also be “stringently scrutinized” under the Constitution should they seek bids for future public office.
Baude and Paulsen also noted that Trump’s “overall course of conduct disqualifies him” from eligibility as a candidate, regardless of whether he is convicted of criminal charges related to the 2020 election – which he now faces in Georgia state court and in federal court – or whether he is held liable in a major civil conspiracy lawsuit related to the attack.
“If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency,” the law review article said.
The pair also looked at the historical intentions of this section of the 14th Amendment, which barred Confederates after the Civil War from holding office again, because if they were to be allowed, the US would never be able to engage in “effective ‘reconstruction’ of the political order” and newly freed formerly enslaved people wouldn’t be properly protected.
“Not since the Civil War has there been so serious a threat to the foundations of the American constitutional republic,” Baude and Paulsen wrote about the Capitol attack and Trump’s illegitimate attempt to hold onto power.
They note that more people died and were injured as a result of the January 6, 2021, attack than in the 1861 Battle of Fort Sumter that began the Civil War.
Question for courts
While the articles from legal scholars amount to opinions at this time, it’s possible the court systems in various states could be asked to look at Trump’s viability as a candidate in 2024 – especially if secretaries of state or other state officials disqualify Trump from their states’ ballots.
Luttig and Tribe acknowledge the question of Trump appearing on ballots in 2024 might ultimately have to be decided by the Supreme Court.
“The process that will play out over the coming year could give rise to momentary social unrest and even violence. But so could the failure to engage in this constitutionally mandated process,” Luttig and Tribe write.
Previously, advocacy groups contested the ability of Republican members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Green and Madison Cawthorn to be ballot candidates in 2022 because of the 14th Amendment and their vocal support of the Capitol rioters. But judges decided neither could be disqualified.
However, one convicted Capitol rioter, Couy Griffin, was removed from an elected county office he held in New Mexico by a judge.
This story has been updated with additional information.
For DeSantis, an Unforced Error Amplifies a Daunting Debate Challenge
Nicholas Nehamas – August 19, 2023
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, speaks during a Nashua Republican City Committee event in Nashua, N.H.. on Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. (Joe Buglewicz/The New York Times)
MIAMI — The first Republican presidential debate next week was already looking like a stern test for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is battling to overcome sagging national poll numbers, a fundraising crunch and an overhaul of his top campaign staff.
Now his tall task appears towering.
On Thursday, key details about how he might approach the crucial debate were revealed in a report from The New York Times about a trove of documents posted online by a political consulting firm associated with Never Back Down, the super political action committee that has in many ways taken over his campaign.
The advice on display, which included potential attack lines and debate tactics, could be somewhat condescending — reminding DeSantis, for example, that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children. Other parts were perhaps too revealing: suggesting that the governor attack entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been gaining on him in the polls but had otherwise not been widely seen as a candidate on DeSantis’ level.
The disclosure of the documents seemed to leave DeSantis in something of a no-win situation. Follow the advice too closely, and he risks walking into a political buzz saw, with his rivals painting him as overly rehearsed, inauthentic or beholden to political consultants. Ignoring it may be the likelier route — but could also leave DeSantis open to criticisms that he failed to meet expectations, for instance, by not taking down Ramaswamy.
“I don’t think anybody is going to have a harder job at the debate than Ron DeSantis,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “He’s fighting a lot of skepticism and a lot of hungry challengers.”
As for the documents, Conant described their exposure as an unforced error: “The less you say about your strategy ahead of a debate, the better off you’re going to be.”
DeSantis’ campaign suggested late Thursday that Never Back Down’s advice had revealed nothing about his debate strategy.
“This was not a campaign memo and we were not aware of it prior to the article,” Andrew Romeo, the campaign’s communications director, said in a statement. “We are well accustomed to the attacks from all sides as the media and other candidates realize Ron DeSantis is the strongest candidate best positioned to take down Joe Biden.”
Onstage Wednesday, those attacks, and DeSantis’ response to them, could be the gravest risk: He has appeared prickly in past debates and had gaffes exploited by his opponents. Current rivals like former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a notoriously pugnacious debater, could pose a threat.
So could other challengers seeking to dethrone DeSantis as the race’s No. 2, including Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; the smooth-talking Ramaswamy; or even former Vice President Mike Pence, a longtime conservative talk radio host accustomed to verbal sparring.
DeSantis’ allies still hope that the governor will use the debate in Milwaukee to break out from the wide field of contenders who have prevented him from coalescing broader support. The debate, they say, is the first time that many Americans will tune in to the 2024 campaign, allowing DeSantis to tell his story to the largest audience he has ever faced.
DeSantis has been preparing for the debate with practice sessions at least once a week. He is expected to highlight his policy proposals on immigration, the economy and countering China. He has also been doing a steady round of interviews with mainstream news outlets, where he has faced tougher questions.
Much has depended on whether former President Donald Trump, the spotlight-grabbing showman, shows up. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Trump had told people close to him that he had made up his mind to skip the debate. Instead, he is said to be planning to hold an online interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Regardless of Trump’s attendance at the debate, taking him on remains a problem.
The documents from Never Back Down advise DeSantis to defend Trump when Christie, a Trump critic, attacks him but to tell voters that he is the candidate “who will keep the movement that Donald Trump started going.”
DeSantis has walked a similarly fine line in his criticisms of Trump this summer, chiding him for not debating and failing to “drain the swamp” as president. But he has also been careful not to offend the former president’s legion of supporters.
Without Trump onstage, DeSantis will be the de facto front-runner, meaning he could face a barrage of attacks.
Wearing the bull’s-eye could prove uncomfortable for DeSantis, a 44-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer known to bristle under criticism. His opponents will hope to score viral moments highlighting his defensiveness and casting him as awkward and robotic. A meme-able gaffe, no matter how transitory, runs the risk of overshadowing any strength he might project as a policy expert or a decisive young leader.
DeSantis’ most prominent debates — in his contests for governor against Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor of Florida turned Democratic member of Congress, and Andrew Gillum, at the time the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida — do not necessarily offer hope to his supporters. They are now largely remembered for encounters that left DeSantis angry or tongue-tied.
Last year, as DeSantis ran for reelection with his sights already set on the presidential race, Crist asked his rival if he would “look in the eyes of the people of the state of Florida” and pledge to serve a full term.
“Yes or no?” Crist said, turning to DeSantis, who stood silent and stone-faced, refusing to answer.
“Yes or no, Ron?” Crist asked again, taking advantage of the dead air.
(By the debate rules, candidates were not allowed to question each other directly — a prohibition Crist ignored.)
Finally, DeSantis spoke. “Is it my time?” he asked the moderator.
“It’s a fair question,” Crist continued. Then he turned to the audience. “He won’t tell you.”
By the time DeSantis broke the awkwardness to deliver a seemingly rehearsed counterpunch, calling Crist a “worn-out old donkey,” the damage had been done.
It was exactly the kind of moment the Crist campaign had been gunning for.
“DeSantis doesn’t take punches well,” said Joshua Karp, a Democratic strategist who led Crist’s debate preparations. “And his fundamental problem as a communicator is that he’s either attacking or explaining. He’s never telling a story. He’s never reaching people from the heart.”
Karp, who also led Gillum’s debate preparations four years earlier, said DeSantis struggled with a challenging aspect of debating: “Listening to what your opponent has to say and then deploying the right amount of warmth and strength and dexterity to counter it.”
That weakness was on display against Gillum in 2018.
At the time, DeSantis was under fire for having said that voters should not “monkey this up” by electing Gillum, who is Black. His comments were widely criticized as racist.
Confronted by the debate moderator, DeSantis angrily interrupted, his voice rising as he said he had stood up for people of all races as a military lawyer and prosecutor. “I am not going to bow down to the altar of political correctness,” he added. “I am not going to let the media smear me.”
Gillum, known as a gifted public speaker, seized on the opportunity.
“My grandmother used to say, ‘A hit dog will holler,’ and it hollered through this room,” he said of DeSantis, before landing a strong blow: “Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”
DeSantis visibly winced and scoffed.
He had prepared for the confrontation, according to tapes of his debate practice sessions that were leaked this year and first reported by ABC News. One of his advisers, Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., a DeSantis ally who has since endorsed Trump, had urged him to express regret to those who had been offended. (Donalds is Black.)
But DeSantis insisted on an aggressive response.
“If I show any weakness on that, I think I lose my base. I think that I appear to be less than a leader,” he said. “And so, I just think I’ve got to come at it full throttle and say that’s wrong.”
Separately, in an echo of the advice offered by Never Back Down, the tapes show an adviser telling DeSantis that he should write the word “likable” in capital letters at the top of his notebook as a reminder.
Despite the debate stumbles, DeSantis won both elections, squeaking past Gillum and then crushing Crist four years later. And his showing in the 2018 Republican primary debates, when he was able to cast himself as a Trump-backed insurgent, received better reviews.
Next week, Trump’s campaign will be paying close attention to the most minute aspects of DeSantis’ performance.
“There will be an entire war room team that will be watching and highlighting each awkward thing DeSantis does,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign. “He needs to be on his best behavior.”
Hurricane Hilary threatens ‘catastrophic and life-threatening’ flooding in Mexico and California
Ignacio Martinez and Julie Watson – August 19, 2023
This Friday, Aug. 18, 2023, 1:10 p.m. EDT satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Hurricane Hilary, right, off Mexico’s Pacific coast. It grew rapidly to Category 4 strength and could reach Southern California as the first tropical storm there in 84 years, causing “significant and rare impacts” including extensive flooding. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said a tropical storm watch has been issued for Southern California, the first time it has ever done that. (NOAA via AP)Seal Beach resident Tom Ostrom, walks past a home protected with sandbags in Seal Beach, Calif., Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. Hurricane Hilary is churning off Mexico’s Pacific coast as a powerful Category 4 storm threatening to unleash torrential rains on the mudslide-prone border city of Tijuana before heading into Southern California as the first tropical storm there in 84 years. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)Cal Fire Firefighter-Paramedic Capt. Tyler Williams checks the sandbags set outside of his garage in Seal Beach, Calif., Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. Hurricane Hilary is churning off Mexico’s Pacific coast as a powerful Category 4 storm threatening to unleash torrential rains on the mudslide-prone border city of Tijuana before heading into Southern California as the first tropical storm there in 84 years. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)Seal Beach resident Tom Ostrom, right, sits along an empty water-pipe to be used to pump sea water back to the Pacific Ocean as homes are protected by sand berms in Seal Beach, Calif., Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. Hurricane Hilary is churning off Mexico’s Pacific coast as a powerful Category 4 storm threatening to unleash torrential rains on the mudslide-prone border city of Tijuana before heading into Southern California as the first tropical storm there in 84 years. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)A couple walks along berms in Seal Beach, Calif., Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. Officials in Southern California were also re-enforcing sand berms, built to protect low-lying coastal communities against winter surf. Hurricane Hilary is churning off Mexico’s Pacific coast as a powerful Category 4 storm threatening to unleash torrential rains on the mudslide-prone border city of Tijuana before heading into Southern California as the first tropical storm there in 84 years. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico (AP) — Hurricane Hilary headed for Mexico’s Baja California on Saturday as the U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding” for the peninsula and for the southwestern United States, where it was forecast to cross the border as a tropical storm on Sunday.
Officials as far north as Los Angeles scrambled to get the homeless off the streets, set up shelters and prepare for evacuations.
Hilary is expected to plow into Mexico’s Baja peninsula on Saturday night and then surge northward and enter the history books as the first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm and potential flood warnings for a wide swath of Southern California from the Pacific coast to interior mountains and deserts. Officials talked of evacuation plans for California’s Catalina Island.
“I don’t think any of us — I know me particularly — never thought I’d be standing here talking about a hurricane or a tropical storm,” said Janice Hahn, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
After rapidly gaining power early Friday, Hilary slowed some later in the day but remained a major Category 3 hurricane early Saturday with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph (205 kph), down from 145 mph (230 kph).
Early on Saturday, the storm was centered about 235 miles (375 kilometers) west of the southern tip of the Baja peninsula. It was moving north-northwest at 16 mph (26 kph) and was expected to turn more toward the north and pick up speed.
The latest forecast track pointed to Hilary making landfall along a sparsely populated area of the Baja peninsula at a point about 200 miles (330 kilometers) south of the Pacific port city of Ensenada.
It is then expected to continue northward up the peninsula, raising fears that its heavy rains could cause dangerous flooding in the border city of Tijuana, where many homes in the city of 1.9 million cling precariously to steep hillsides.
Mayor Montserrat Caballero Ramirez said the city was setting up four shelters in high-risk zones and warning people in risky zones.
“We are a vulnerable city being on one of the most visited borders in the world and because of our landscape,” she said.
Concern was rising in the U.S., too.
The National Park Service closed Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve to keep people from becoming stranded amid flooding. Cities across the region, including in Arizona, were offering sandbags to safeguard properties against floodwaters. Major League Baseball rescheduled three Sunday games in Southern California, moving them to Saturday as part of split-doubleheaders,
Deputies with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department took to the road to urge homeless people living in riverbeds to seek shelter. Authorities in the city were arranging food, cots and shelters for people who needed them.
SpaceX delayed the launch of a satellite-carrying rocket from a base on California’s central coast until at least Monday. The company said conditions in the Pacific could make it difficult for a ship to recover the rocket booster.
President Joe Biden said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had pre-positioned staff and supplies in the region.
“I urge everyone, everyone in the path of this storm, to take precautions and listen to the guidance of state and local officials,” Biden told reporters Friday at Camp David, where he is meeting with the leaders of Japan and South Korea.
Officials in Southern California were re-enforcing sand berms, built to protect low-lying coastal communities against winter surf, like in Huntington Beach, which dubs itself as “Surf City USA.”
In nearby Newport Beach, Tanner Atkinson waited in a line of vehicles for free sandbags at a city distribution point.
“I mean a lot of people here are excited because the waves are gonna get pretty heavy,” Atkinson said. “But I mean, it’s gonna be some rain, so usually there’s some flooding and the landslides and things like that.”
Some schools in Cabo San Lucas were being prepared as temporary shelters, and in La Paz, the picturesque capital of Baja California Sur state on the Sea of Cortez, police patrolled closed beaches to keep swimmers out of the whipped-up surf. Schools were shut down in five municipalities.
It was increasingly likely that Hilary would reach California on Sunday while still at tropical storm strength, though widespread rain was expected to begin as early as Saturday, the National Weather Service’s San Diego office said.
Hurricane officials said the storm could bring heavy rainfall to the southwestern United States, dumping 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimeters) in places, with isolated amounts of up to 10 inches (25 centimeters), in portions of southern California and southern Nevada.
“Two to three inches of rainfall in Southern California is unheard of” for this time of year, said Kristen Corbosiero, a University at Albany atmospheric scientist who specializes in Pacific hurricanes. “That’s a whole summer and fall amount of rain coming in probably 6 to 12 hours.”
The region could face once-in-a-century rains and there is a good chance Nevada will break its all-time rainfall record, said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections and a former government in-flight hurricane meteorologist.
Watson reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein in Washington, Maria Verza and Mark Stevenson in Mexico City, John Antczak in Los Angeles, and Eugene Garcia in Newport Beach, California, contributed to this report.
American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.
Behind the sense that the political system is broken lies a collision between forces both old and new
By Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse – August 18, 2023
In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them.
They aren’t wrong.
Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise.
The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is both an extreme emblem of what happens when democracy stops functioning as it should and the result of relentless attacks by former president Donald Trump on the legitimacy of the election process based on lies and distortions, a continuing threat to U.S. democracy.
In more routine ways, the political system feeds frustration and discontent with its incapacity to respond to the public’s needs. There is little on the horizon to suggest solutions.
The failure has multiple origins,including a collapse of trust in institutions. But one of the most significant is a collision between forces both old and new.
The old dates to the writing of the Constitution — debates and compromises that resulted in representation in the House based on population and in the Senatebased on equal standing forthe states; the odd system by which we elect presidents; and lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. In general, the founders often distrusted the masses and sought to create structural protections against them.
The newer element, which has gathered strength in recent decades, is the deepening polarization of the political system. Various factors have caused this:shifts within the two parties that have enlarged the ideological gap between them;geographic sorting that haswidened the differences between red and blue states; a growing urban-rural divide; and greater hostility among individuals toward political opponents.
The result is that today, a minority of the population can exercise outsize influence on policies and leadership, leading many Americans increasingly to feel that the government is a captive of minority rule.
Twice in the past two decades, the president was elected while losing the popular vote —George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. That had happened only three times in the previous 200-plus years. The dynamic extends beyond the presidency to the other two branches of government.
A new Washington Post analysis found that four of the nine current justices on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population. Since 1998, Republicans have had a majority in the Senate a total of 12 years but did not during that time represent more than half the nation’s population, The Post’s analysis of population data and Senate composition shows.
The Post also found that during Trump’s presidency, 43 percent of all judicial and governmental nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. Under President Biden, not quite 5 percent of nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
The state of democracy is not uniformly negative. In moments of crisis especially, elected officials have found common ground. At times, government action does reflect the public will. Under Trump, bipartisan congressional majorities passed and the president signed multiple rounds of relief during the covid-19 pandemic. Biden and Congress came together to pass a major infrastructure package in 2021. Last year, there was bipartisan agreement on legislation to spur production of semiconductor chips in the United States.
At times, protection of minorities and their rights from the will of the majority is needed and necessary. Checks and balances afford further protections that nonetheless can seem to hamstring government’s ability to function effectively. But on balance, the situation now is dire. Americans are more dissatisfied with their government than are citizens in almost every other democracy, according to polling.
Henry Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has been studying these issues for many years. As he surveys the current state of the United States’ democracy, he comes away deeply pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”
This is the first in a series of reports examining what is fueling the visceral feeling many Americans have that their government does not represent them. Alongside debates over specific policies, the overall state of democracy roils the national discussion. Heading into the 2024 presidential election, this issue is likely to be a critical factor for many voters.
Distrust in government
Trust in the federal government began to decline during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and then took a big hit amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. There have been occasional rebounds — after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, or during the late 1990s when the economy was doing well. But for the past two decades — through good economic times and bad — mistrust has been persistent.
Individual institutions have suffered as well. Of late it is the Supreme Court’s reputation has been damaged due to rulings that have gone against popular opinion and a heightened sense that the court has become politicized. For Congress, the decline has been ongoing for decades. Only Wall Street and television news have seen more precipitous declines in trust over the past four decades, according to calculations published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Americans have long been skeptical of the power of the central government. Scandals and corruption over the years have added to the problem. Lately, officials have openly attacked the very institutions of which they are a part, making it even harder for thebureaucracy to function effectively. No one has done this more than Trump. Attacks on institutions have been a hallmark of his time in politics.
While there is some universality to these conditions, citizens in only a handful of democratic countries take a dimmer view of their government than Americans do of theirs.
Polarization
For much of the United States’ history, the constitutional system created by the founders worked reasonably well. The Civil War is an obvious exception, and other periods have tested the collective will. But overall, government generally functioned, even if not perfectly.
More recently, however, the system’s weaknesses became more apparent as tribalism shapes much of political behavior and the Republican Party has departed from its historical moorings. Trump’s impact has distorted traditional Republican conservatism and has led many Republicans to accept as reality demonstrably untrue beliefs. The best example of that is that a majority in the GOP say Biden was not legitimately elected. The hard-right wing of the Republican Party and Trump voters in particular have been resistant to compromise.
“In comparison to European countries, our constitutional system is not well suited for polarized political parties,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford Law School.
Election of presidents
The Constitution created an unusual mechanism for electing the president — an electoral college. It was built on assumptions that over the years have proved to be faulty.
The founders distrusted a system based on the popular vote, fearing many citizens would not be well-informed. They put power in the hands of electors. They thought the House would often end up picking the president, not anticipating the effects of what quickly became a two-party system in the United States. The rationale for the current system has been overrun by the realities of today’s politics.
“It was created because the founders couldn’t figure out what to do,” said George C. Edwards III, a political science professor at Texas A&M University and author of “Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America.” “It doesn’t work at all as the founders intended.”
During the first two centuries of the country’s history, there were only three cases in which the person elected president did not receive a majority of the popular vote, in 1824, 1876 and 1888. Now it has happened twice in a quarter century and could happen again in 2024. In both 2000, when Bush became president, and 2016, when Trump was elected, the popular vote supported the Democratic nominee, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton respectively, yet the electoral college vote went in favor of the Republican.
During the past two decades, the number of competitive states in presidential elections, where the victory margin has been five percentage points or fewer, has declined. Meanwhile, the number of states decided by margins of 15 percentage points or more has increased, based on an analysis of state-by-state results by The Post.
Because the outcome in the most competitive states can be decided by a relatively small number of votes, Republicans now have a significantly better chance of winning in the electoral college than in the popular vote. Democrats, meanwhile, roll up huge margins in deep blue states like California that give them no significant boost in the electoral college math.
Congress
In the Great Compromise among delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the House was to be divided based on population, while the Senate would give each state equal representation regardless of population.
In times past, many state delegations to the Senate were split between the two major parties. In 1982, for example, about two-dozen states had split representation. Today there are only six true splits,and those states account for about 9 percent of the U.S. population.
Republicans tend to have full control in less populated states, creating an imbalance in the number of senators they send to Washington and the percentage of the national population they represent. Even when they have recently held a majority in the Senate, they represent a minority of the population. In 2024, two of the nation’s least populous states — West Virginia and Montana — could flip control of the Senate from Democrats to Republicans, if GOP challengers prevail over Democratic incumbents.
This has had an impact especially on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees. During the four years Trump was in office, nearly half of the individuals nominated for key positions were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. No other recent president had more than 5 percent confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
Through gerrymandering, population dispersion and the sorting of where people prefer to live, competition for House seats has declined.
The overwhelming majorityof districts now lean strongly either to Republicans or to Democrats. In those districts, that makes the primary election more important than the general election. Because turnout is generally concentrated among the most fervent voters in primary contests, more extreme candidates have an advantage. This has widened the ideological gap in the House, which makes compromise even more difficult.
It has also led to the kinds of dysfunction seen this year, such as the multi-ballot marathon to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker, or the threats to let the government default on its debts that ultimately were avoided by an old-fashioned bit of compromise.
As the number of swing districts has declined, another phenomenon has become evident: Even in open-seat races, which historically have been more contested than those involving incumbents, the number of landslide victories by members of both major parties has increased dramatically.
The Supreme Court
Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections. But during that time, Republican presidents have nominated six of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices, including the three nominated by Trump, were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
The percentage of Americans represented by senators voting to confirm justices has been decreasing over the past half century. Now that justices can be confirmed with a simple majority vote, rather than a supermajority, the phenomenon of confirmation by a majority of senators representing a minority of citizens has become common place when Republicans hold the Senate majority.
State legislatures
In Washington, political divisions have led to gridlock and inaction on many issues. In the states, the opposite has occurred because states have increasingly become either mostly red or mostly blue.
In just two states is the legislature split between Republicans and Democrats. In more than half of the states, the dominant party enjoys a supermajority, which means they can override vetoes by a governor of a different party or generally have their will on legislation.
Similarly, full control of state government — the legislature and the governor’s office — is the rule rather than the exception. Today 39 states fit this definition. The result is a sharper and sharper divergence in the public policy agendas of the states.
The dominant party has been able to move aggressively to enact its governing priorities. That has meant tight restrictions on abortion in Republican states and few or no restrictions in blue states; it’s meant challenges to LGBTQ rights in red states and affirmation of those rights in blue states.
These divisions have made it possible for the dominant party to govern with little regard to the interests of those with allegiance to the minority party and often little accountability as well. The result is two Americas with competing agendas and values.
Public opinion vs. public policy
The gap between public policy and public opinion is one major consequence of today’s frozen federal government. Three of the most talked about issues reflect that: abortion, guns and immigration.
On abortion, most Americans oppose last year’s Supreme Courtdecision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion. On guns, big majorities favor individual proposals to tighten laws, but the gun lobby remains powerful enough to block action.
On immigration, there has been a majority for some years favoring tougher border controls along with a path to citizenship, with some penalties, for the millions of undocumented immigrants living here. Every effort to deal with this in Congress over the past two decades has failed, including attempts to resolve the plight of people brought here illegally as children, known as “dreamers.”
The Constitution
One way to deal with some of the structural issues — the electoral college, a Senate where a minority of the population can elect a majority of members or the lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices — would be by amending the Constitution. But the U.S. Constitution, though written to be amended, has proved to be virtually impossible to change. Nor is there cross-party agreement on what ails the system. Many conservatives are satisfied with the status quo and say liberals want to change the rules for purely partisan reasons.
It was the drafters of state constitutions who saw the need for amending such documents. Over the history of the country, state constitutions have been amended thousands of times — more than half of all those proposed. But while there have been about 12,000 proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Congress has submitted just 33 to the states, of which 27 have been ratified.
The last amendment was approved in 1992, and that was a provision that had been proposed along with others that became the Bill of Rights. In reality, it has been half a century since a contemporary amendment has been ratified. Given the political conditions in the country, the prospect of two-thirds of both the House and Senate voting to propose an amendment and then three-fourths of the states ratifying it seems extremely unlikely.
To remain a living document, the Constitution needs to be adaptable to changing times, perspectives and conditions. The alternative to amending the Constitution is through judicial interpretation by the Supreme Court. Today the court is dominated by “originalists” who interpret the document through a strict reading of the words and timesin which it was written — long a goal of conservatives. But the America of 2023 is not the America of the framers of the Constitution in the late 18th century, a time when enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person and women did not have the right to vote.
Not all countries have written constitutions — Britain, for example. But the amendment process when functioning effectively is “a mechanism to peaceful revolution,” said historian Jill Lepore, who directs the Amendments Project at Harvard University. So there is value to a written constitution, but only if it can be changed.
“The danger,” Lepore said, “is that it becomes brittle and fixed — and then the only way to change your system of government or to reform a part of it is through an insurrection.”
About this project
In the analysis of population data and Senate composition, The Post’s count of senators in each year represents the composition of the Senate on Jan. 31 of that year, with two exceptions: Al Franken is counted in the 2009 Senate and Norris Cotton is counted in the 1975 Senate. In the analysis of confirmations over time, The Post examined all Senate roll call votes with a result of “confirmed.” For all senators who voted to confirm a given nominee, The Post calculated the percent of Americans from the states of those senators that year, with each senator representing half of their state population. Many nominees to various positions were confirmed with a voice vote or through a unanimous consent agreement; these confirmations are not reflected in this data. In the analysis of House elections, The Post determined open House races using several sources, including FEC and MIT elections results data.
Reporting by Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse. Editing by Griff Witte. Copy editing by Mina Hag. Project editing by KC Schaper. Design and development by Courtney Beesch and Tyler Remmel. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Illustrations by Courtney Beesch with images from iStock. Topper animation by Emma Kumer. Photo editing by Christine T. Nguyen. Graphics by Clara Ence Morse and Hanna Zakharenko. Graphics editing by Kevin Uhrmacher. Data editing by Anu Narayanswamy. Visual enterprise editing by Sarah Frostenson. Research provided by Monika Mathur. Additional editing, production and support by Philip Rucker, Peter Wallsten, Jenna Johnson and Tom Justice.
We Just Got a Hint About Conservatives’ New Supreme Court Strategy on Abortion
Mary Ziegler – August 17, 2023
What does this augur for the Supreme Court? Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Robert Alexander/Getty Images and Bill Grenblatt via Getty Images.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit again voted to reimpose limits on the abortion pill mifepristone. If the court had its way, the clock would turn back to 2016, when patients could get mifepristone for only seven weeks of pregnancy, and only after more than one in-person visit with a physician. The ruling won’t have any immediate impact because the Supreme Court issued a stay last spring that keeps the status quo in place as litigation continues. But even if this ruling doesn’t change anything on the ground, it represents conservatives’ best guess that the Supreme Court is going to go much further than it did in Dobbs in limiting abortion at a national level—even if not necessarily in this case.
This case began when the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of anti-abortion doctors, set up shop in Amarillo, Texas, where a judge widely believed to be the most hostile to abortion in the country, Matthew Kacsmaryk, presides. AHM, which is represented by the Christian-right powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, argued that the Food and Drug Administration lacked the authority to approve the pill mifepristone all the way back in 2000. Last spring, Kacsmaryk lived up to expectations, issuing a humdinger of an opinion agreeing with this claim and embracing the language of fetal personhood. Not much later, a different 5th Circuit panel concluded that the plaintiffs had waited too long to challenge the original approval of mifepristone, but held that the plaintiffs would probably prevail on their claims that the FDA did not have the power to lift restrictions on mifepristone in both 2016 and 2021. The Supreme Court, however, did not seem to be buying any of it. The court issued a stay that keeps the status quo in place as litigation continues.
One of the factors the court considers in issuing a stay is the plaintiffs’ probability of prevailing when the case is all said and done. Most of the justices seem to think this case is doomed.
Given the Supreme Court’s obvious skepticism, judges with more self-restraint might have let this case die. There are explosive claims made by these plaintiffs that many conservatives want the Supreme Court to take up sooner or later. AHM argues that the federal Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law, means that the FDA did not have the authority to permit access to mifepristone via telehealth. According to the plaintiffs, that’s because mailing abortion pills is already a federal crime. In fact, if the Comstock Act is interpreted in this light, any abortion violates federal law: No procedure in the nation takes place without a drug or device going through the mail. That argument is not a slam-dunk—it ignores decades of precedent interpreting the statute far more narrowly—but ambitious anti-abortion lawyers still have big plans for Comstock. Based on what the majority of the three-person panel ruled, the 5th Circuit could be saving this argument for a better case, as they instead ruled on procedural grounds (in a separate opinion partially concurring and dissenting from the panel majority, Trump appointee James C. Ho stated that the Comstock Act meant that it is illegal to send abortion medication via mail). The same wait-and-see game goes for claims that the FDA did not have the authority to loosen restrictions on mifepristone, or even to approve it in the first place.
But the 5th Circuit, by ruling in part with AHM on procedural grounds, is also is placing a bet that no case is procedurally defective enough for the court that gave us Dobbs. To say the plaintiffs’ case for standing is weak is to put the matter gently. The physicians bringing the case stressed that they had treated patients for mifepristone complications in the past. Since the complication rate for mifepristone is not zero (it stands at roughly 0.3 percent), that meant that some future patients might suffer complications, and might seek care from the doctors bringing the case, and some of those doctors might suffer conscience-based injuries. If you think that sounds speculative, you aren’t wrong. The 5th Circuit understood this problem and dedicated a whopping three-dozen pages to explaining why against all evidence, these plaintiffs do have standing.
Even the substance of the decision—which would reinstate restrictions in place in 2016—seems intended to lower the temperature, likely to try to make things more palatable for the Supreme Court. The majority refused to address the Comstock Act and steered clear of explicitly pro-life language.
Reading Judge Ho’s partial dissent makes this tactical move that much clearer. Judge Ho described mifepristone as a drug that takes the life of an unborn child. He concluded that the FDA lacked the authority to approve mifepristone in 2000 because—as abortion opponents have long argued—pregnancy is not a disease, but a normal rite of passage. He chided his colleagues for not ruling on the relevance of the Comstock Act and argued that the act does amount to a ban on mailing abortion pills. He argued that physicians treating a patient for post-abortion complications suffer an “aesthetic harm” worthy of redress.
But the differences between the two opinions are strategic, not substantive. The panel members were united in believing that no standing defect will worry this Supreme Court if it has a chance to limit access to abortion. Judge Ho is just ready to say the quiet part out loud—and to press the court to go even further, even faster. In that way, the majority’s opinion may be a snapshot of where the Supreme Court is today—on this case and abortion more broadly. Judge Ho’s opinion is a prediction about where the court is headed—if not in this case, then in the future.
Reimposing 2016 restrictions on mifepristone would have dramatic effects. But as Judge Ho’s opinion makes clear, mifepristone rules are just the beginning. If these plaintiffs have standing, it’s hard to see how conservatives raising other challenges to controversial drugs, such as those used in gender-affirming care or IVF, won’t be able to establish the same thing. And if the Comstock Act means what Judge Ho thinks it does, then a Republican president could seek to treat any abortion anywhere as a federal crime.
What does this augur for the Supreme Court? The plaintiffs’ standing arguments don’t sound any better when the 5th Circuit makes them. From a procedural standpoint, this case is still a dud. Given this truth—and the fact that the Supreme Court already seems to have its doubts about this case—this is still unlikely to be the case that revolutionizes access to the leading abortion method nationwide.
But the judges on the 5th Circuit understand who is on the Supreme Court, and they know that any loss is likely to be temporary. This ruling may shift the Overton window—passing off the majority opinion here as a sensible, middle-ground outcome. And if the court isn’t ready to go much further on abortion yet, that will likely change later. Judges with more self-restraint might have let this case go. But as the 5th Circuit seems to believe that when it comes to this Supreme Court on abortion, there is no reason for self-restraint when you have nothing to lose.
Trump-Appointed Judge Cites Wildlife Cases As a Reason to Ban Abortion Pills
Susan Rinkunas – August 17, 2023
Photo: CQ Roll Call via AP Images (AP)
On Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said it would restrict access to the main abortion pill, mifepristone, allowing its use only through seven weeks of pregnancy (down from the current 10) and banning telemedicine prescriptions of it. (None of the proposed changes will take effect until the Supreme Court weighs in on the case.)
But Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho—who was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas in GOP megadonor Harlan Crow’s library in 2018—wanted his colleagues go even further. He would have fully reversed the Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion pill, and he used some uh, wild, reasons to support his argument. Ho wrote in his unhingedconcurrence that the plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors, have standing in the case because they like looking at babies, and the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill deprives them of that right. He cites “aesthetic injury” precedent from past cases involving federal decisions that threatened wildlife and plants:
It’s….pretty close to comparing women and pregnant people to wild animals! And he kept going!
The Supreme Court has recognized that “the person who observes or works with a particular animal threatened by a federal decision is facing perceptible harm, since the very subject of his interest will no longer exist.” Lujan, 504 U.S. at 566. Every circuit, including our own, has concluded that, when a federal agency authorizes third parties to harm flora or fauna that a plaintiff intends to view or study, that satisfies all of the requirements for Article III standing. …
In all of these cases, a federal agency approved some action—such as developing land or using pesticides—that threatens to destroy the animal or plant life that plaintiffs wish to enjoy. This injury is redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside the agency approval.
And so too here. The FDA has approved the use of a drug that threatens to destroy the unborn children in whom Plaintiffs have an interest. And this injury is likewise redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside approval of that abortifacient drug.
I see no basis for allowing Article III standing based on aesthetic injury when it comes to animals and plants—but not unborn human life.
This whole flora/fauna line of reasoning gets even creepier when you read this sentence from Ho: “Pregnancy is not a bad or unhealthy condition of the body—it’s a natural consequence of a healthy and functioning reproductive system.” It really sounds like, to him, that women are nothing more than broodmares whose function is to gestate and bring joy to others gazing at them in their habitat.
Judge Ho is an established troll. He notoriously asked during a May hearing, “Is pregnancy a serious illness? When we celebrated Mother’s Day, were we celebrating illness?” But it’s still scary to think what the Supreme Court will do with his writings in the case when they finally weigh in—right in the middle of the 2024 election. It’s also scary to think that Ho, who was on Donald Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, could get nominated to the high court if Trump wins the presidency in 2024.
Americans Are Not Really That “Divided” About Donald Trump’s Conduct
Ben Mathis-Lilley – August 16, 2023
Donald Trump at a golf tournament in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Aug. 13. Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
There are two buckets into which most discourse about public opinion regarding Donald Trump’s indictments can be sorted. One of those buckets is labeled “Republican primary,” and it’s where we can put the (accurate) observation that each successive indictment seems to boost Trump’s primary polling lead over Ron “I Have Never Seen a Worse Campaign or Candidate” DeSantis even further. (For what it’s worth, Semafor’s Dave Weigel is reporting that DeSantis “isn’t dead yet” in Iowa, so there’s that.)
The other bucket is labeled “divided America,” and it’s where the country’s headline-writing editors enjoy putting polls which allegedly show that the former president’s conduct divides a fretful, collectively indecisive United States along partisan lines. It’s a polarized country and we can’t agree on anything these days, on account of the polarization, yada yada—you’ve heard it all before.
On Wednesday, for instance, the Associated Press published the results of a new poll that it conducted with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research under the headline “Americans are divided on partisan lines over Trump’s actions in election cases.”
But are they, really? While it’s true that about 50 percent of Americans will say in any given poll that they support Trump’s prosecution, and that 50 percent is only half of the country, half of people believing something does not mean that the other half believe its opposite. In August 1974, just before he resigned, only 57 percent of Americans told Gallup that Richard Nixon should be removed from office—but that does not mean that a polarized electorate was diametrically paralyzed by the question of whether Richard Nixon was a bum. (They believed that he was, and they were correct.)
So let’s look at the data in more detail. The AP asked Republicans, Democrats, and independent voters about Trump’s “alleged attempt to interfere in Georgia’s vote count in the 2020 presidential election” and his “role in what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” They were given the choice of describing his behavior as “illegal,” calling it “unethical but not illegal,” saying he did “nothing wrong,” or saying they didn’t know enough about it to answer.
Overall, about both Georgia’s vote count and “what happened at the U.S. Capitol,” 64 percent of American adults said Trump’s conduct was either illegal or unethical. And only 21 percent said he did nothing wrong in relation to Jan. 6, while 15 percent said he did nothing wrong in Georgia. If you boil things down to “what he did was bad” or “what he did was OK,” Trump is a loser by margins of 64–21 and 64–15.
Those would be pretty lopsided scores in the United States’ beloved sport of American football! And the numbers aren’t even that great for Trump among Republicans. A combined 42 percent of Republicans told the AP that Trump’s conduct in Georgia was illegal or unethical, while only 31 percent said he’d done nothing wrong. Regarding Jan. 6, 38 percent of Republicans said Trump behaved illegally or unethically, with 46 percent coming down on the side of “nothing wrong.”
To be fair, with more media exposure to the particulars of the case, it’s likely that responses on the Georgia question among Republican voters will end up matching responses on the Jan. 6 question, which is to say that a plurality of them will say Trump didn’t do anything wrong. That said, we’re talking about a narrow plurality, and another way to frame the numbers is that only aminority of Republicans themselves are to willing to say that Trump’s Jan. 6 –related behavior was appropriate. If anything, it’s the Republican Party that’s divided on this issue, not “Americans.”
There are limitations to what can be concluded from the data. The belief that Trump behaved unethically or illegally doesn’t translate directly into support for Biden, his presumed 2024 general election opponent; Trump and Biden matchups are currently more or less even. And about half of Americans, according to a recent ABC News-Ipsos poll, believe the prosecutions of Trump are “politically motivated,” which, to quote the 1996 feature film Romeo + Juliet, implies the existence of a sizable “pox on both their houses” tranche.
That said, the next time you read the phrase “Americans divided on Trump behavior,” you should mentally replace it with the phrase “Americans divided on Trump behavior like so: About half think it was criminal, a sixth or so think it was bad but not illegal, a fifth think it was fine, and the remaining [counting on fingers for 45 seconds] two-fifteenths have, blessedly, not read a news headline in decades, if ever.” Then you should go outside. Summer’s almost over!
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they wouldn’t support Donald Trump in 2024, poll says
Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY – August 17, 2023
WASHINGTON — Nearly two-out-of-three Americans said they would probably not or definitely not support former President Donald Trump in a new poll ahead of the 2024 race for the White House.
Trump was indicted on 13 counts by a grand jury in Georgia earlier this week for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. That marks his fourth indictment of the year and comes amid his mounting legal troubles in other civil cases.
But the former president’s criminal charges may not be affecting his grip on Republican voters during the 2024 primary election.
About 63% said of Republicans said they want Trump to run in 2024, according to the polling. And 74% of Republicans said they would back Trump in November 2024.
Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, told the Associated Press that “there is a meaningful number of voters who have voted for Trump twice and can’t vote for him again after all of this.”
He has falsely attempted to cast the indictments as “politically motivated” by his rivals in Washington, including President Joe Biden.
But despite his legal troubles, Trump remains the GOP frontrunner for the Republican Party with 53% of support in the crowded field of GOP candidates, according to a polling average from RealClearPolitics. His indictments have also spurred fundraising for his campaign.
The poll of 1,165 adults was conducted from Aug. 10 to Aug. 14. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
