Miami Herald

Is Trump’s EPA chief bluffing? Or will he go after California’s tough standards on greenhouse gases?

By Stuart Leavenworth     February 9, 2018

Exhaust wafts from a car tailpipe in this 2009 photo from Olympia, Washington. California, Washington and other states have adopted tailpipe emission rules stronger than the federal standard. Recent rhetoric from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has heightened fears the Trump administration may seek to block those states from implementing their standards. Steve Bloom The Olympian

Washington: California officials and clean air advocates are increasingly concerned the Trump administration may attempt to unravel a key program to drive down greenhouse gas emissions from automobile fleets while also jeopardizing the ability of California and other states to set pollution standards stronger than federal rules.

Backed by automakers, Trump officials are in talks with their California counterparts to weaken tough vehicle tailpipe standards approved by the Obama administration. The standards are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, but could also help reduce emissions that cause smog and particulate pollution, and 13 other states have adopted them, including Washington, Pennsylvania and New York.

California has long enjoyed the authority to set pollution standards stronger than the federal government’s, a legacy of the state’s early battles against urban smog, which predated the 1970 Clean Air Act. But in testimony to a Senate committee last week, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt left open the possibilty he might seek to revoke California’s authority.

“Federalism doesn’t mean that one state can dictate to the rest of the country,” Pruitt told the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee. He then added that “we recognize California’s special status in the statute and we are working with them to find consensus around these issues.”

Three days after Pruitt’s comments, the chair of the California Air Resources Board issued her own warning shot against possible EPA intervention.

“I think there would be a war with many states lining up with California,” said CARB Chairwoman Mary Nichols, speaking at a Palo Alto conference sponsored by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Nichols and other state officials note that the EPA, under the Obama administration, granted California a 2013 waiver to implement its own, tougher tailpipe standards. Never before has an EPA administrator attempted to revoke a waiver previously granted to the state.

“The EPA would have to take unprecedented legal action to try to revoke that waiver,” Nichols said during the Feb. 2 conference. “Our best legal judgment is that that can’t be done.”

I THINK THERE WOULD BE A WAR WITH MANY STATES LINING UP WITH CALIFORNIA

Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board

Trump’s latest spat with California and other states comes as the president works to shore up his support among the auto industry in Detroit and Michigan, a state he won, to the surprise of Democrats, in 2016. Since then, Trump has kept his focus on Michigan, pledging in his State of the Union address to cut government mandates and “get the Motor City revving its engines.”

The U.S. auto industry has long opposed conflicting state and federal standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel economy. Auto manufacturers say such conflicts force them to design and make different versions of the same vehicle, driving up prices.

When the Obama administration was in office, it struck a grand bargain with California and automakers to raise the average fuel economy of new cars and light trucks to more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025, as a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The deal, however, included a “midterm review” in 2018 to determine if the final requirements were feasible.

Before leaving office, the Obama administration kept the final requirements in place, over protests of the auto industry. In August, Pruitt and the Transportation Department officially announced they were reviewing and possibly rewriting those standards, which would affect the 2022-2025 model years.

The Trump administration’s plans will be known soon. The EPA plans to decide on future tailpipe emission standards by April 1, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will reveal its new federal fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks by March 30.

Even if Trump revises the Obama-era rules, California and other states could still implement its tougher restrictions, a prospect that concerns many automakers.

“For us, one national program is very important,” said Gloria Bergquist, Vice President for Communication at the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers in Washington, D.C. “It’s good for consumers, and it avoids duplicative programs with duplicative costs.”

In December, several federal officials met with the California Air Resources Board in Sacramento to discuss a possible national standard. The meeting, first reported by Reuters, included William Wehrum, who leads the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deputy chief Heidi King, and Mike Catanzaro, a senior White House aide.

Asked about the status of talks, an EPA spokesman directed McClatchy to Wehrum’s recent comments to reporters, saying he had held “productive discussions” with CARB. Wehrum added he “had no interest whatsoever in withdrawing California’s ability to regulate,” a comment that provoked some laughs back in California.

When Wehrum served in the EPA during the George W. Bush administration, he was a key figure in rejecting California’s original request for a waiver to reduce greenhouse gases from automobiles. California sued over that decision, which was ultimately reversed when Obama came to office.

The potential for California to strike a deal with the Trump administration concerns some environmentalists, but they doubt it will happen. “I’m not sure that there is any room for compromise on California’s part,” said Irene Gutierrez, a San Francisco-based lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group. CARB officials did not respond to an inquiry.

Gutierrez said California has spent years documenting how its standards are feasible and crucial to the state’s goals of reducing greenhouse gases. California law requires it to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

A big part of that program is transitioning to electric and other zero-emission vehicles. At his recent State of the State speech, Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled plans to have 5 million zero-emission vehicles in California by 2030, up from a planned 1.5 million in 2025.

California showed further defiance toward the Trump EPA on Thursday. The California Air Resource Board voted to retain two Obama-era rules on greenhouse gas emissions from medium-and-heavy duty trucks, after the EPA claimed it lacked the authority to enact the rules.

If EPA’s Pruitt sought to revoke California’s tailpipe emissions waiver, he would likely unravel the peace treaty struck under Obama, which halted years of litigation involving California, the auto industry and other players. EPA would have to go through a rulemaking process to revoke the waiver, which could take years, and then prevail in expected litigation.

As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt filed numerous lawsuits against EPA, often claiming the agency was stomping on state sovereignty.

That makes his current position somewhat ironic, said Gutierrez. “He was all about states rights when he was attorney general,” she said.

USA Today

Scientists rebuff EPA chief’s claim that global warming may be good

John Bacon, USA Today       February 8, 2018

(Photo: Pete Marovich)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s assertion that global warming might be beneficial because “humans have most flourished” during warming trends is drawing heavy skepticism from many climate-change experts.

Pruitt, in an interview with KSNV-TV in Las Vegas this week, acknowledged that “human activity” contributes to global warming, thus walking back his previous statements questioning whether carbon dioxide levels driven higher by human pollution play a role in climate change.

“No one disputes the climate changes,” Pruitt said. “We obviously contribute to it … our activity contributes to it.”

But Pruitt questioned whether climate change is an “existential threat.”

“We know humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends,” Pruitt said. “I think there are assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That is fairly arrogant, for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Penn State and co-author of The Madhouse Effect, said Pruitt’s claims are a “wonderful example of what we call the ‘stages of denial.'”

The only consistency in the various arguments of climate change deniers is that we should continue to burn fossil fuels, Mann said.

“As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious argument, like ‘it will be good for us,'” Mann said.

Stanford environment professor Chris Field, who oversaw a United Nations and World Meteorological Organization scientific report on climate change, echoed Mann’s sentiments. Field said “thousands” of studies document that a warming planet causes a host of problems, not just from high temperatures but also from heat waves, higher seas, heavier downpours, and more frequent destructive hurricanes and wildfires.

“With all these impacts, you can imagine the occasional business that benefits,” he said. “For example, homebuilders after a fire or flood. But the vast majority of the people experience losses, sometimes catastrophic losses.”

Speculation “isn’t helpful,” Field said. “The evidence based on real observations of real events is overwhelming.”

Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, said the impact of global warming on health and the sustainability of the food supply are “not good.”

“Because of local variability there are locations where warming has had some benefit,” Goldman acknowledged, adding that “things are worse, overall.”

Pruitt said he wants an “honest, open, transparent debate about what do we know, what don’t we know, so the American people can be informed and they can make decisions on their own with respect to these issues.”

Pruitt also questioned what role his agency should have in curbing the carbon dioxide footprint. He said EPA efforts to do so during the Obama administration were mostly rejected by the courts, and that his job is to “execute, not legislate” pollution laws.

Before taking over the EPA, Pruitt served as Oklahoma’s attorney general. In that roll the Republican sued 14 times to block clean air and water safeguards established by the EPA, the agency he now leads.

The Trump administration has worked to roll back the Clean Power Plan that the Obama White House pushed out in 2015 to combat climate change. And Trump’s decision to bow out of the Paris Agreement, an international accord to reduce carbon emissions, has drawn outrage from Democrats and environmental groups.

ThinkProgress

GOP congressman powers his off-grid solar home with a Tesla battery

But libertarian, MIT grad Rep. Massie (R-KY) is still a climate science denier

Joe Romm     February 8, 2018

Screenshot of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) in his garage, before he salvages a Tesla car battery pack to run his off-grid home.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is an MIT-trained engineer and libertarian who has been living off-grid with his family for over a decade and driving a Tesla Model S for five years.

On Sunday, he posted a YouTube video on his “DIY battery quest” to replace the 12-year-old lead-acid batteries with some new Tesla lithium batteries. As he explains, while living off-grid is expensive, the new batteries could cut his nighttime electricity costs in half, from $0.25 a kilowatt hour to $0.12 a kilowatt hour, which is close to the price of retail electricity.

But while Elon Musk makes his popular Powerwall battery for use with residential solar systems, Tesla doesn’t sell one for off-grid use. And Tesla won’t sell you Model S batteries by themselves.

Tesla Announces New Product To ‘Fundamentally Change The Way The World Uses Energy’

So, being an engineer, Massie decided to see if he could buy a wrecked Tesla vehicle, salvage the batteries, and then retool them for use in his home.

This 23-minute video documents what he calls a “pretty dag-gone exciting” do-it-yourself adventure, in which he travels to Georgia to buy a wrecked Tesla Model S for $15,000 and successfully uses its  lithium battery to replace the messy and high maintenance lead-acid batteries.

Massie was motivated by his strong libertarian streak, as he told the center-right website Rare.us Wednesday: “When you go off-the-grid, you have more choices for where to build your house. Land that wasn’t developable because of a lack of access to public utilities suddenly becomes viable by going off the grid. Plus homeowners won’t have to run wires across their neighbors’ land.”

But while Massie is not your typical partisan Republican — he won the first Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventiveness ever awarded — he doesn’t embrace climate science. He told Science magazine back in 2012, “Most of the public is still debating whether the earth is heating up. But I think the real question is by how much? I’m still looking for an answer I can hold onto.”

Massie added, “I honestly think that it’s an open question… I think the jury is still out on the contribution of our activities to the change in the earth’s climate.”

One fact about climate change that’s worth repeating

In fact, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists — over 97 percent — understand that humans are the primary cause of climate change, and that the best estimate is that humans are responsible for all recent warming. And they have known that for years.

ThinkProgress

EPA chief Pruitt reveals Trump climate policy is built on a lie

Pruitt says humans ‘most flourished’ during warming trends. Science says otherwise.

Joe Romm     February 7, 2018

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt and President Donald Trump announcing the U.S. plan to withdraw from Paris Climate Accord. June 1, 2017. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been working overtime to promote fossil fuels and rollback U.S. climate action; policies that climate scientists and over 190 nations say will lead to catastrophic levels of warming.

On Tuesday, Pruitt, who has long denied basic climate science, explained part of his underlying motivation for the Trump administration’s dangerous policies: the idea that more global warming could be a good thing that helps the world “flourish.”

Pruitt told KSNV television in Nevada, “I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing.” He falsely asserted, “We know that humans have most flourished during times of, what, warming trends?”

In fact, the scientific literature could not be clearer that humans have flourished when the climate is stable.

TEMPERATURE CHANGE OVER PAST 11,000 YEARS (IN BLUE) PLUS PROJECTED WARMING OVER THE NEXT CENTURY ON HUMANITY’S CURRENT EMISSIONS PATH.

Indeed, stable temperatures enabled the development of modern civilization, global agriculture, and a world that could sustain a vast population.

The policies of climate science deniers like Pruitt and Trump would serve only to speed up the destruction of a livable climate, a key reason scientists have been increasingly outspoken against them.

“As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious argument, like ‘it will be good for us’,” climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress. “And that keeps their funders like the Koch brothers, very happy.”

Even Fox News slams EPA chief’s climate denial: ‘All kinds of studies contradict you’

Chris Wallace utterly debunks Scott Pruitt’s lies about the central role carbon pollution plays in warming.

This isn’t the first time Pruitt has used a specious talking point this year. In January, he told Reuters, “The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?” Even though scientists debunked him at the time, Pruitt actually got snarky Tuesday saying, “Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature is in the year 2100–in the year 2018? It’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

In fact, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explained last month, “There is no one perfect temperature for the earth, but there is for us humans, and that’s the temperature we’ve had over the last few thousands of years when we built our civilization, agriculture, economy, and infrastructure.”

She noted: “Two-thirds of the world’s largest cities are located within a meter of sea level. What happens when sea level rises a meter or more, as it’s likely to this century? We can’t pick up Shanghai or London or New York and move them. Most of our arable land is already carefully allocated and farmed. ”

Hayhoe put together an explainer video for PBS on the very talking point Pruitt is now pushing:

Bottom line: It’s not arrogant for us to listen to the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, and join with the rest of the world in the fight to avoid catastrophic temperature changes. What’s arrogant is ignoring science while  jeopardizing the health and well-being of Americans and billions of people around the globe.

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

The ‘swamp’ in action: GOP advances coal lobbyist for EPA job

By Steve Benen      February 7, 2018

The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stands in Washington, D.C. Photo by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty

Americans who voted for Donald Trump because they liked his rhetoric about “draining the swamp” should probably avert their eyes – because today’s news is about as swampy as it gets.

Republican senators used their majority to advance President Donald Trump’s nomination of a former coal-industry lobbyist to serve as the second-highest ranking official at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Environment and Public Works Committee voted along party lines 11-10 on Wednesday to send the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to the full Senate for a vote.

Let’s back up for a minute to provide some important context. For the last several years, Wheeler was a lobbyist for, among others, Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal companies and fierce opponent of environmental safeguards. (Murray Energy’s CEO, Bob Murray, has also been a generous Donald Trump donor.)

In addition to his background as a lobbyist for polluters, Wheeler also served as chief counsel for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of the nation’s preeminent climate deniers.

It’s against this backdrop that Donald Trump thought it’d be a good idea to put Wheeler in a position to help lead the Environmental Protection Agency – a decision literally every Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee endorsed this morning.

The New Republic’s Emily Atkin recently explained, “Wheeler is not just the figurative embodiment of the swamp, but the literal embodiment of it. The coal industry is responsible for 72 percent of toxic water contamination in the United States, making it the nation’s largest water polluter. That’s according to the agency where Wheeler is about to be second in command – the agency that is charged with protecting clean water. There’s no better person to represent how polluted Trump’s swamp has become.”

Wait, it gets a little worse.

Bloomberg Politics noted today that this particular coal lobbyist also “hosted fundraisers for top Republicans on the committee that advanced his nomination Wednesday.”

[L]ast May, while Wheeler was an outside lobbyist for energy companies including coal miner Murray Energy Corp. and uranium explorer Energy Fuel Resources Inc., he helped organize Washington fundraisers for the committee’s chairman and former chairman – Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

The events, first reported by The Intercept and the watchdog group Documented on Wednesday, included a lunch with former Inhofe staffers at a Mexican restaurant in Washington on May 4, 2017, and a breakfast at Wheeler’s K Street office roughly two weeks later.

I can appreciate the fact that this White House has made several ridiculous nominations, especially when it comes to the environment. My personal favorite was Michael Dourson, a man who helped chemical companies fight against chemical safety regulations, only to be nominated by Trump to lead the EPA’s office of chemical safety.

But at least in that case, a handful of Senate Republicans balked and the nomination died. Today, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s GOP members unanimously agreed to advance Andrew Wheeler’s nomination – despite (because of?) his coal lobbying past.

The nomination now heads to the Senate floor. Watch this space.

Explore:   The MaddowBlog

The Atlantic

Boycott the Republican Party

If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees.

Edmon de Haro

By Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes      March 2018 Issue

A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”

From The Atlantic March 2018 issue: The Plot Against America, Paul Manafort and the Fall of Washington, By Franklin Foer

Count us in, Mr. Beasley. We’re with you, though we tend to go with dangerous rather than stupid. And no one could be more surprised that we’re saying this than we are.

We have both spent our professional careers strenuously avoiding partisanship in our writing and thinking. We have both done work that is, in different ways, ideologically eclectic, and that has—over a long period of time—cast us as not merely nonpartisans but antipartisans. Temperamentally, we agree with the late Christopher Hitchens: Partisanship makes you stupid. We are the kind of voters who political scientists say barely exist—true independents who scour candidates’ records in order to base our votes on individual merit, not party brand.

This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).

Of course, lots of people vote a straight ticket. Some do so because they are partisan. Others do so because of a particular policy position: Many pro-lifers, for example, will not vote for Democrats, even pro-life Democrats, because they see the Democratic Party as institutionally committed to the slaughter of babies.

We are not motivated by the belief that Republican policies are wrongheaded. We agree with many traditional GOP positions.

We’re proposing something different. We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans.

For us, this represents a counsel of desperation. So allow us to step back and explain what drove us to what we call oppositional partisanship.

To avoid misunderstanding, here are some things we are not saying. First, although we worry about extremism in the GOP, that is not a reason to boycott the party. We agree with political analysts who say that the Republicans veered off-center earlier and more sharply than the Democrats—but recently the Democrats have made up for lost time by moving rapidly leftward. In any case, under normal circumstances our response to radicalization within a party would be to support sane people within that party.

Nor is our oppositional partisanship motivated by the belief that Republican policies are wrongheaded. Republicans are a variegated bunch, and we agree with many traditional GOP positions. One of us has spent the past several years arguing that counterterrorism authorities should be granted robust powers, defending detentions at Guantánamo Bay, and supporting the confirmations of any number of conservative judges and justices whose nominations enraged liberals. The other is a Burkean conservative with libertarian tendencies and a long history of activism against left-wing intolerance. And even if we did consistently reject Republican policy positions, that would not be sufficient basis to boycott the entire party—just to oppose the bad ideas advanced by it.

One more nonreason for our stance: that we are horrified by the president. To be sure, we are horrified by much that Trump has said and done. But many members of his party are likewise horrified. Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, as well as former Governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have spoken out and conducted themselves with integrity. Abandoning an entire party means abandoning many brave and honorable people. We would not do that based simply on rot at the top.

So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.

Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered, and the party, as a party, has quickly moved on. A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.

The second unforgivable sin is Trump’s encouragement of a foreign adversary’s interference in U.S. electoral processes. Leave aside the question of whether Trump’s cooperation with the Russians violated the law. He at least tacitly collaborated with a foreign-intelligence operation against his country—sometimes in full public view. This started during the campaign, when he called upon the Russians to steal and release his opponent’s emails, and has continued during his presidency, as he equivocates on whether foreign intervention occurred and smears intelligence professionals who stand by the facts. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has confirmed his nominees, doggedly pursued its agenda on tax reform and health care, and attacked—of course—Hillary Clinton.

We don’t mean to deny credit where it is due: Some congressional Republicans pushed back. Last year, pressure from individual Republicans seemed to discourage Trump from firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and probably prevented action against Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Moreover, Republicans as a group have constrained Trump on occasion. Congress imposed tough sanctions on Russia over the president’s objections. The Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a serious Russia investigation under the leadership of Richard Burr. But the broader response to Trump’s behavior has been tolerant and, often, enabling.

The reason is that Trump and his forces have taken command of the party. Anti-Trump Republicans can muster only rearguard actions, which we doubt can hold the line against a multiyear, multifront assault from Trump and his allies.

It is tempting to assume that this assault will fail. After all, Trump is unpopular, the Republican Party’s prospects in this year’s midterm elections are dim, and the president is under aggressive investigation. What’s more, democratic institutions held up pretty well in the first year of the Trump administration. Won’t they get us through the rest?

Perhaps. But we should not count on the past year to provide the template for the next three. Under the pressure of persistent attacks, many of them seemingly minor, democratic institutions can erode gradually until they suddenly fail. That the structures hold up for a while does not mean they will hold up indefinitely—and if they do, they may not hold up well.

Edmon de Haro

Even now, erosion is visible. Republican partisans and policy makers routinely accept insults to constitutional norms that, under Barack Obama, they would have condemned as outrageous. When Trump tweeted about taking “NBC and the Networks” off the air (“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked”), congressional Republicans were quick to repudiate … left-wing media bias. In a poll by the Cato Institute, almost two-thirds of Republican respondents agreed with the president that journalists are “an enemy of the American people.” How much damage can Trump do in the next three years? We don’t know, but we see no grounds to be complacent.

The optimistic outcome depends to some degree on precisely the sort of oppositional partisanship we are prescribing. For Trump to be restrained going forward, key congressional enablers will need to lose their seats in the midterm elections to people who will use legislation and oversight to push back against the administration. Without such electoral losses, the picture looks decidedly grimmer.

Finally, we might not be talking about just three more years. Trump could get reelected; incumbent presidents usually do. In any event, he is likely, at a minimum, to be re-nominated for the presidency.

That’s because Trump has won the heart of the Republican base. He may be unpopular with the public at large, but among Republicans, nothing he and his supporters said or did during his first year in office drove his Gallup approval ratings significantly below 80 percent. Forced to choose between their support for Trump and their suspicion of Russia, conservatives went with Trump. Forced to choose between their support for Trump and their insistence that character matters, evangelicals went with Trump.

It’s Trump’s party now; or, perhaps more to the point, it’s Trumpism’s party, because a portion of the base seems eager to out-Trump Trump. In last year’s special election to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Republican primary voters defied the president himself by nominating a candidate who was openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and many stuck with him when he was credibly alleged to have been a child molester. After initially balking, the Republican Party threw its institutional support behind him too. In Virginia, pressure from the base drove a previously sensible Republican gubernatorial candidate into the fever swamps. Faced with the choice between soul-killing accommodation and futile resistance, many Republican politicians who renounce Trumpism are fleeing the party or exiting politics altogether. Of those who remain, many are fighting for their political lives against a nihilistic insurgency.

So we arrive at a syllogism:

(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.
(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.

If the syllogism holds, then the most-important tasks in U.S. politics right now are to change the Republicans’ trajectory and to deprive them of power in the meantime. In our two-party system, the surest way to accomplish these things is to support the other party, in every race from president to dogcatcher. The goal is to make the Republican Party answerable at every level, exacting a political price so stinging as to force the party back into the democratic fold.

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The off-year elections in November showed that this is possible. Democrats flooded polling places, desperate to “resist.” Independents added their voice. Even some Republicans abandoned their party. One Virginia Republican, explaining why he had just voted for Democrats in every race, told The Washington Post, “I’ve been with the Republicans my whole life, but what the party has been doing is appalling.” Trump’s base stayed loyal but was overwhelmed by other voters. A few more spankings like that will give anti-Trump Republicans a fighting chance to regain influence within their party.

We understand why Republicans, even moderate ones, are reluctant to cross party lines. Party, today, is identity. But in the through-the-looking-glass era of Donald Trump, the best thing Republicans can do for their party is vote against it.

We understand, too, the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. Its left is extreme, its center is confused, and it has its share of bad apples. But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same.