Fracking Waste Lawsuit Highlights Dangerous Trend of Corporations Targeting Community Rights Defenders

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Fracking Waste Lawsuit Highlights Dangerous Trend of Corporations Targeting Community Rights Defenders

Marcellus Shale rig and gas well operation on Ridge Road in Jackson Township operated by Rex Energy. WCN 24/7 / Flickr

By Simon Davis-Cohen January 18, 2018

In early January, a federal judge ordered the nonprofit law firm Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to pay $52,000 to an oil and gas exploration company for defending a rural Pennsylvania township’s ban on underground injections of fracking waste.

This sanction comes at the request of Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) and the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association, but is part of a growing trend to prevent municipalities across the nation from pushing back against state and federal attempts to overrule them.

Starting in 2012, PGE proposed an injection well which, according to Grant Township’s Board of Supervisors, “would receive 30,000 barrels [1.26 million gallons] of frack wastewater per month for 10 years.” The board of supervisors for this small community near Pittsburgh warned that the injection well “threatens to subject every resident of Grant Township to a slow poisoning, and threatens thousands more who depend on Grant Township’s watershed for clean water.”

The community’s law, they added, bans the injection well “as a violation of our basic civil rights.” PGE operates multiple gas-extraction wells in the township.

Rights of Nature, Local Governance

CELDF, which has defended Grant’s efforts to prevent waste injection wells for over three years, has worked with some 200 municipalities in the U.S. to defend local laws challenging similar corporate projects. The group aims to drive state constitutional change to bolster the rights of local residents and ecosystems against what it calls regressive state preemption and corporate personhood.

Grant Township, for example, is elevating a “right of self-government,” rights “to clean air, water, and soil” and “ecosystem rights” above corporations’ “rights” to inject waste from oil and gas extraction in the township.

These types of local laws often face substantial legal pushback from private corporations and states which claim authority over issues such as fossil fuel production. Along with the sanctions against CELDF, PGE is suing Grant Township itself, population 741, for damages that would likely be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Among its claims: The injection well ban violates the corporation’s rights as a “person” under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments; the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the Contract Clause and Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Grant Township is the fourth local government CELDF has defended in federal court.

‘Frivolous’ Legal Arguments

At the heart of the court’s decision awarding PGE sanctions against the legal nonprofit (the company originally asked for $500,000) is an argument that the sanctions are justified because CELDF’s legal arguments are contrary to “settled” law and therefore “frivolous.” This reasoning asserts that corporate personhood and Pennsylvania’s authority over municipalities on issues affecting drinking water and fossil fuel development is settled, and therefore CELDF’s defense of Grant’s claim to the contrary is “clearly unreasonable.”

Grant Township, the court wrote, “seeks to disavow constitutional rights afforded corporations so as to prevent PGE from the lawful exercise of its right to pursue gas extraction related activities within its borders.” On top of all this, Grant’s law recognized legal rights for a local ecosystem. CELDF’s attempt to represent that ecosystem in court, the judge ruled, violates the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a set of rules that govern how legal proceedings take place in U.S. district courts.

Local Governments Sanctioned Across U.S.

CELDF is not alone in facing sanctions for challenging so-called settled law on similar issues. Defend Local Solutions is a campaign led by Tallahassee’s Mayor Andrew Gillum which is aimed at expanding the powers of municipalities in Florida. The campaign said at least seven states have “super preemption” bills on the books that sanction local officials who dare challenge specific state preemption bills that rescind powers from municipalities.

In Florida, for example, Gillum personally faced the threat of sanctions after he refused to repeal a local law that banned fire arms in public parks (even though the ordinance wasn’t being enforced).

New bills, such as Texas’s highly controversial “show me your papers” and sanctuary city preemption bill (SB4), also include punitive language for municipalities pushing back against state and federal authority.

Texas’s bill would fine local officials and employees $25,000 per day or even remove them from office if they defy the law, according to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Parts of this section of the law, however, are hung up in court. However, the court ruled that local officials can be sanctioned if they outright ban police from asking for people’s immigration papers, and other sections of the bill are in effect, including a section that threatens punishment for local jail officers. The concept of economic retribution for noncompliance is spreading.

Georgia’s 2017 bill, HB37, removes funding from any private college that “prohibits or restricts officials or employees … from communicating or cooperating with federal officials or law enforcement officers with regard to reporting [immigration] status information.” And in 2016 Arizona passed a bill which withholds state funds from localities that enact policy that challenges the state’s claimed supremacy.

In CELDF’s sanction case, the court acknowledges that sanctions can have the effect of “chilling novel legal or factual arguments.”

Thomas Linzey, CELDF’s director and one of the two attorneys being personally sanctioned, said “that’s exactly the point. For years, the oil and gas corporations believed that they could stop the community rights movement by suing municipalities to overturn their local laws; but having failed to do so, they’re now coming after the lawyers who are helping those communities to stop drilling. In many ways, the industry’s filing for sanctions against us is just proof of how strong the community rights movement is becoming.”

In court records, CELDF pointed to Brown v. Board of Education (which overturned “separate but equal” schools for Black and White students, 1954), courts striking down bans on gay marriage, and other novel legal arguments as evidence that sanctions against lawyers who challenge “settled” law could set a dangerous precedent.

“We understand that the real problem isn’t the injection well, but the system of law that keeps trying to shut us down,” the Grant Township Board of Supervisors said in a statement. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.

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Oil and Gas Industry’s 2017 Suing Spree Could Set Speech-Chilling Precedents

Dimock, Pennsylvania resident Ray Kemble

By Sharon Kelly January 2, 2018

In 2017, while the Trump administration absorbed media attention with its cries of “fake news,” the oil and gas industry was busy launching private legal actions across the U.S., attacking critics who presented information and opinions to the public.

Those lesser-noticed legal maneuvers, if successful in 2018, could create chilling new precedents, keeping important facts away from the public eye and making it more expensive and risky to talk about the fossil fuel industry’s real and potential impacts on human health and the air, land, and water.

The past year brought some of the most aggressive lawsuits by the oil and gas industry against environmentalists in recent decades. They included legal moves aimed at preventing researchers from discussing their findings, motions painting political movements as for-profit conspiracies, and even a $5 million dollar lawsuit brought against a cancer patient whose tap water, state investigators determined years ago, was contaminated by gas drilling — by the company that is now suing him.

That lawsuit, filed by a shale gas drilling company, claims that a Pennsylvania landowner violated a non-disclosure agreement by talking to the press about his fouled drinking water, his home’s plummeting property value, the impacts of truck traffic on his community, the poor air quality around his home since drilling and fracking began in the area, or other problems he believes the company itself caused.

These oil and gas industry cases — involving novel uses of conspiracy, defamation, and even wire fraud laws — represent new and concerted efforts by large corporations to make individuals and groups pay for presenting information and opinions to the public.

Cancer Patient Gagged

Dimock, Pennsylvania, landowner Ray Kemble, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer in March 2017, was sued in August by Cabot Oil and Gas, which drilled a series of Marcellus shale wells in Kemble’s hometown.

Back in 2010 state environmental regulators concluded that Cabot Oil and Gas’s drilling operations had contaminated the area’s groundwater and ordered the company to cough up $4.6 million. In May 2016, federal health officials concluded that the drinking water in Dimock was indeed unsafe, and in December 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) long-awaited national study warned that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has contaminated drinking water supplies across the U.S. (without directly commenting on Kemble’s situation).

Cabot signed settlements with virtually all of the families drawing water from the contaminated Pennsylvania aquifer, though the precise terms of those agreements remain secret. A separate federal lawsuit, brought by two families down the road from Kemble, the Elys and the Huberts, was settled in September for an undisclosed amount, a sign that the Ely and Hubert settlement also includes a non-disclosure clause.

Cabot’s new lawsuit argues that a 2012 settlement bars Kemble from “disparaging” the company by discussing any harm he believes the company caused him — or even talking about things the company did after the settlement was reached.

But good luck finding out what exactly a settlement agreement between Kemble and the company might have said: In December, Cabot argued in court that it didn’t need to provide the document at the heart of the case to the attorneys representing Kemble’s co-defendents, nevermind the public.

Non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements have been in the public spotlight lately amid the #MeToo scandals, after it came to light that powerful sexual harassers and assaulters frequently used the clauses to prevent those they assaulted from talking publicly.

Critics argue that non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements (NDAs) should also not be used in cases where the public health could be at risk, warning that NDAs could, for example, keep someone sickened after drinking bad water from warning their neighbors about the danger.

Legal experts have questioned whether courts would ever actually enforce such an order — so the case brought by Cabot against Kemble could set a significant precedent.

Cabot also sued Kemble’s attorneys and the law firms where they work for representing Kemble in his earlier lawsuit against Cabot, which Kemble withdrew a few months after his cancer diagnosis (Kemble’s attorneys have cited unspecified “new information” in explaining the decision to drop the case). Kemble’s supporters say they fear that by including Kemble’s attorneys in the lawsuit, Cabot is trying to make it harder for those harmed by powerful companies to find representation.

On December 21, 2017, Susquehanna County Judge Jason J. Legg allowed Cabot’s claims against the attorneys to go forward, while admonishing Cabot for breaking Pennsylvania’s Rules of Civil Procedure by claiming $5 million in damages, even though the rules forbade Cabot to name a specific figure higher than $50,000 in their complaint. The judge noted that the claiming damages of $5 million “may have been designed to attract media attention” and “likely” served no legitimate legal purpose.

To Kemble, the lesson is clear. “This is just a way to shut the people up of the county and of the state, and I just don’t think it’s right,” Kemble said, according to NPR’s State Impact. “We the people have the right to talk.”

Stop Citing Working Paper, Gas Supplier Demands

In a December 11, 2017 letter, natural gas supplier Eversource Energy demanded that environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) stop citing a study that found evidence that Eversource and another utility legally manipulated natural gas pipeline markets in ways that caused astronomical gas price spikes during cold snaps from mid-2013 to mid-2016.

That analysis found that Eversource and Avangrid booked pipeline capacity and then left it unused, driving down New England’s natural gas supplies while demand was high, costing New England’s power customers over $3.6 billion. This working paper, prepared by a group of researchers including an EDF economist, emphasized that researchers hadn’t found that anything the company’s did was illegal, but suggested that the laws might need reform.

Those price spikes have been heavily touted by pipeline builders, who say they prove that New England needs to build more pipelines to carry fracked natural gas to the northern states in winter. The new study calls into question whether gas shortages were caused by a lack of pipelines or a failure to fully use the ones already built.

“Limited pipeline capacity is indeed partly responsible for these extreme prices,” the researchers wrote. “But we also find strong evidence that two firms that held significant shares of the contracts to flow gas on the Algonquin Gas Transmission Pipeline — one of the two major pipelines serving New England — regularly restricted capacity to the region by scheduling deliveries without actually flowing gas.”

The cease and desist letter warns EDF that Eversource could sue the environmental group if it continues to cite claims the company describes as “unsupported by fact.”

EDF told DeSmog that the study has been presented for peer review, the method the scientific and academic communities use to ensure research is rigorous. “The Working Paper is going through the process for academic publication in a peer-review journal,” EDF spokesperson Jon Coifman told DeSmog. “Versions have been presented at several academic conferences and workshops.”

Cease and desist letters are often sought in defamation cases, which allow people and companies to sue when someone harms their reputation by deliberately spreading false factual claims — which means it’s unusual to see a cease and desist letter sent over scientific analysis.

The study was authored by Levi Marks, PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Charles Mason, Chair in Petroleum and Natural Gas Economics at the University of Wyoming, along with EDF researcher Kristina Mohlin, and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins, Assistant Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt.

In November, Eversource and Avangrid were hit with a class action lawsuit over the same general allegations made in the study. The class action argues that the companies violated consumer protection and anti-trust laws, and unjustly enriched themselves by driving up power prices by 20 percent.

EDF has rebuffed the cease and desist demand. “We stand by the analysis and reject this obvious attempt to intimidate and chill legitimate public inquiry,” Coifman told UtilityDive shortly after receiving Eversource’s letter.

Suing the Grassroots

In August, Dakota Access pipeline builder Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) filed a major lawsuit alleging racketeering and conspiracy by the grassroots environmental movement Earth First!, along with environmental groups Greenpeace and Banktrack.

The lawsuit accuses the non-profits of seeking to profit through environmental activism. “Maximizing donations, not saving the environment, is Greenpeace’s true objective,” ETP’s complaint alleges, while accusing pipeline opponents of violating anti-racketeering laws (meant to protect against mafia-style organized crime) and characterizing emails and tweets sent by Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) critics as wire fraud.

The lawsuit claims that ETP suffered nearly a billion dollars in damages and seeks to legally bar defendants from engaging in political protests. But civil rights advocates have taken issue with the coporation’s approach.

“Defendants employed time-honored, lawful means to advance their views, protected by core constitutional rights of free speech and association,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief objecting to ETP’s claims of racketeering, defamation, and conspiracy. “Under ETP’s theories, ordinary political speech that runs counter to a corporation’s business interests could expose the speaker to enormous, unwarranted liability.”

In December, attorneys for Earth First Journal, a publication whose name echoes the name of the activist group Earth First!, arrived in federal court to argue that Earth First! is a social movement based on a shared set of ideas, and not a legal entity like a corporation, and therefore isn’t a thing that you can sue.

Earth First!, the journal’s attorney said, lacks the sorts of characteristics you’d find at something like a corporation, like a leadership structure, employees, or even members.

Even if the oil industry’s 2017 lawsuits don’t make it very far, the specter of defending multi-million dollar legal claims could make non-profits and social movements nervous about publicly criticizing powerful corporations.

And that, opponents say, is exactly the point.

“Defending major lawsuits like these against deep-pocketed corporations is extremely expensive, time consuming, and stressful, particularly for cash strapped non-profits,” ACLU staff attorney Brian Hauss wrote in a December 6, 2017 post about ETP’s 231-page lawsuit. “If the courts have any sense, this case won’t get to trial. But ETP doesn’t need to win in court to do major damage.”

It’s Official: 2017 Was the Hottest Year Without an El Niño

EcoWatch

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It’s Official: 2017 Was the Hottest Year Without an El Niño

Lorraine Chow January 19, 2018

The United Nations announced Thursday that 2017 was the hottest year on record without an El Niño event kicking up global annual temperatures.

Last year’s average surface temperatures—driven by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions—was 1.1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial times, putting the world on course to breach the internationally agreed “1.5°C” temperature barrier to avoid dangerous climate change set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Significantly, the Paris agreement could be negatively impacted by President Donald Trump and his administration’s rash of anti-environmental policies. Trump, who famously denies climate change and wants to promote U.S. fossil fuels, plans to repeal the Clean Power Plan that limits power plant emissions and intends to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark climate accord.

The UN report was based on a consolidated analysis by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) of five leading international datasets.

Other international organizations have also placed 2017 as either the second or third hottest year behind 2016, which happened to be bolstered by El Niño. (Warmer waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean during an El Niño can boost warming effects around the globe). On Thursday, NASA ranked last year was the second warmest since record-keeping began in 1880. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which uses a different analytical method, ranked it third.

However, as WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas pointed out, “Temperatures tell only a small part of the story.”

The long-term temperature trend is far more important than the ranking of individual years, he explained. Seventeen of the 18 warmest years on record have all been during this century.

The warming in the Arctic, which is heating up at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet, “will have profound and long-lasting repercussions on sea levels, and on weather patterns in other parts of the world,” Taalas said, noting that the warmth in 2017 was accompanied by extreme weather in many countries around the world.

“The United States of America had its most expensive year ever in terms of weather and climate disasters, whilst other countries saw their development slowed or reversed by tropical cyclones, floods and drought,” he said.

NOAA said earlier this month that weather and climate-related disasters cost a record $306 billion in 2017. The federal agency listed several noteworthy events, including the wildfires in the west, with total costs of $18 billion, tripling the previous U.S. annual wildfire cost record. The year’s string of devastating hurricaneswere also very expensive. Hurricane Harvey had total costs of $125 billion. Hurricanes Maria and Irma had total costs of $90 billion and $50 billion, respectively.

Two kids kill half-a-million bees and wipe out a honey business, police say

Miami Herald

Two kids kill half-a-million bees and wipe out a honey business, police say

A bee flies back to a swarm in an oak tree in Salina, Kan., in this file photo. In Iowa, a honey farm owner says the killing of a half million bees last month was a “senseless” act. AP file photo

By Max Londberg January 18, 2018

Two juveniles have been charged with killing more than a half million bees at a honey business last month in Iowa.

The juveniles allegedly destroyed 50 hives at the Wild Hill Honey business in Sioux City, exposing the hundreds of thousands of bees to bitter cold.

“All of the beehives on the honey farm were destroyed and approximately 500,000 bees perished in the frigid temperatures,” Sioux City police said in a release.

The names of the juveniles have not been released, but they are 12 and 13 years old, the Sioux City Journal reported. They’re charged with criminal mischief, agricultural animal facilities offenses and burglary.

Justin and Tori Englehardt, the owners of Wild Hill, were despondent by the “senseless” act.

“They knocked over every single hive, killing all the bees. They wiped us out completely,” Justin Engelhardt told the Journal. “They broke into our shed, they took all our equipment out and threw it out in the snow, smashed what they could. Doesn’t look like anything was stolen, everything was just vandalized or destroyed.”

Even so, the owners vowed to rebuild the business, which is estimated to cost about $60,000. The damage was not covered by the owners’ insurance, but fundraising campaigns have raised thousands of dollars for the recovery.

The owners thanked donors in a post on a GoFundMe page.

“Because of you, we will be able to continue our business in the spring. We are deeply moved by your compassion. Between the contributions and the equipment we were able to salvage, our needs have been met.”

Video: Bees found to have buzzworthy brain power

Researchers at the Queen Mary University of London taught the bees to roll a ball towards a hole in return for food, challenging many preconceived notions about how intelligent insects can be.

O.J. Loukola et al., Science (2017); edited by Cristina Rayas/McClatchy

Englehardt told the Journal that he believed the story resonated with so many because of the declining population of bees due to habitat loss.

Last year, some species of bees were identified as endangered for the first time ever.

A mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, in which worker bees abandon their queen, has contributed to declining bee numbers.

“Bees are critical, and people are conscious of the fact that bees are having a hard time right now and facing some real challenges,” Englehardt said.

Video: Virtual beekeepers help save the honeybees

Concern about colony collapse among the honeybees spurred Bryan and Barbara Ritter of Garland, Kan., to leave leave their jobs in the Kansas City area and move to a farm about 100 miles south and become virtual beekeepers. Essentially we keep bees for others,” Barbara Ritter explained.

Tammy Ljungblad The Kansas City Star

Trump Is Scrambling To Avoid A Special Election Defeat In This Rust Belt District

HuffPost

Trump Is Scrambling To Avoid A Special Election Defeat In This Rust Belt District

Daniel Marans, HuffPost January 18, 2018

HOUSTON, Pa. ― Conor Lamb, the Democrat running to represent this district in Congress, was wrapping up an interview with a reporter last week when Ted Skowvron, a 93-year-old veteran in a World War II cap, walked over to shake his hand.

Lamb thanked Skowvron for his service and asked him where he’d served.

Skowvron informed Lamb that was he was a ball gunner on a B-17 in the European theater. But he was more interested in discussing President Donald Trump.

“I just wanted to let you know: Get in there and get him out! Cuz if you don’t do it, I’m coming down myself,” the lifelong Democrat and retired union crane operator exclaimed.

Meet the Resistance here in Pennsylvania’s southwestern corner. Lamb is hoping there are enough voters like Skowvron who will help him score another upset victory for Democrats and flip a GOP-held seat in the special election on March 13.

This district should be no problem for Republicans to hang onto. Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered the 18th District to combine GOP-leaning Pittsburgh suburbs with once-Democratic mill towns and rural areas that have trended steadily more Republican in recent national elections. Tim Murphy, the Republican incumbent, ran unopposed in 2014 and 2016, and Trump won the district by a whopping 20 percentage points.

But the special election clearly has Republicans on edge.

Lamb is competing with Republican Rick Saccone, a 59-year-old state representative and former military intelligence officer. Murphy had held the seat comfortably since 2003, but resigned in October after it emerged that the anti-abortion congressman had asked a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to have an abortion.

Democrats have had a string of victories since Trump’s inauguration. In fact, they’ve flipped 34 state legislative seats, one governor’s seat and one U.S. Senate seat from red to blue. Republicans, meanwhile, have only picked up four state legislative seats.

Trump is heading to the 18th District on Thursday to stave off another potentially embarrassing defeat. He’ll hold a rally for Saccone, whose fundraising has reportedly been lackluster.

Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping that the energy from the base and the excitement from other wins over the past year will bubble over to benefit Lamb as well.

Democrat Conor Lamb, 33, a veteran of the Marines and former federal prosecutor, is running in a district Donald Trump won by a landslide.

An Upset In The Heart Of Trump Country?

Skowvron was one of some 85 people who braved snow-clogged roads and temperatures in the teens on Saturday to hear Lamb, a 33-year-old former federal prosecutor and veteran of the Marines, speak briefly at an American Legion hall in a small town southwest of Pittsburgh.

The boisterous crowd, which gave Lamb the whooping welcome of a celebrity, looked like the district. It was overwhelmingly white, with more VFW caps, union pins and Pittsburgh Steelers shirts than pink pussy hats and anti-Trump gear. But the audience members were just as energized as any other resistance gathering, realizing they have a viable Democratic congressional candidate for the first time in years.

“It’s been a very, very long time” since a crowd that big turned out for a Democrat in the district, said Joe Zupancic, a 48-year-old attorney running as a Democratic candidate for an open state House seat. The last time, he estimated, was “probably back in the ’90s, when this seat was Democrat to begin with.”

No one’s denying that Lamb has an uphill climb.

In a special election where low turnout is a given, however, the district’s higher-than-normal level of Democratic enthusiasm matters.

Add to the mix a Democratic candidate with a strong biography and a Republican candidate with a record at odds with the district’s influential labor unions, and it becomes clear why the national Republican Party is not taking any chances.

Earlier this month, the deep-pocketed Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC affiliated with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), announced the opening of a field office in the district. The operation will include 50 full-time door knockers who aim to make 250,000 voter contacts, the super PAC said.

Republican outside groups are also on the airwaves ahead of either candidate. Ending Spending Inc., a super PAC backed by the billionaire Ricketts family, made a $1 million ad buy in support of Saccone. And the pro-Trump 45Committee is spending $500,000 on ads, including a 30-second released last week that hits “Liberal Conor Lamb” for opposing Trump’s tax cut bill.

In addition, Vice President Mike Pence is slated to campaign for Saccone. The Republican National Committee has a permanent field office in Western Pennsylvania that is helping to turn out GOP voters, and the super PAC America Rising has been sending a video tracker to all of Lamb’s campaign events.

National Democratic groups, by contrast, are thus far largely limiting their support for Lamb to verbal praise for his bid. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect House Democrats, said it had no investments to announce at this time. And when asked about its involvement in the race, the Democratic National Committee referred HuffPost to its monthly $10,000 contribution to the Pennsylvania Democratic Party through the Every ZIP Code Counts program.

End Citizens United, a national liberal PAC, announced its endorsement of Lamb on Wednesday. The group raised $600,000 to elect Alabama Democrat Doug Jones to the Senate, but it is not clear how much it plans to spend on Lamb’s behalf.

The DCCC and DNC “have to kind of wait and see how much the Lamb team raises, because it is gonna be an expensive race,” said a Democratic source with knowledge of the national party’s considerations.

“It is not helpful for them for the party to be coming in and being so overt,” the source added.

It’s still possible to craft winning messages to win at least segments of the white working class that enables the party to do well everywhere. Mike Mikus, Democratic campaign consultant

The southwestern Pennsylvania district offers a unique proving ground for Democrats whose strongest electoral performances since November 2016 have largely been in districts Trump lost or won only narrowly. If Democrats flip the 18th, or even hold the GOP to a narrow margin, it will put Republicans on notice that no seat is immune to a Democratic midterm wave.

It is also liable to make the Democrats think twice about ignoring former Democratic strongholds in the Rust Belt where Trump outperformed his Republican predecessors.

“The problem with a lot of people in Washington is that they equate white working-class, non-college-educated voters as being racist Neanderthals and should be written off,” said Mike Mikus, a veteran Democratic strategist based in the district. “Obviously, the Democratic Party should never turn away from its values of inclusion and equality, but it’s still possible to craft winning messages to win at least segments of the white working class that enables the party to do well everywhere, rather than just the coastal elites, the big cities.”

The saga of declining Democratic fortunes in the industrial areas of Pennsylvania and other Great Lakes states is by now a familiar yarn. Deindustrialization weakened the labor unions that bound many working-class residents to the party, and Democrats’ increasingly progressive stances on racial and cultural issues created an opening for socially conservative Republican candidates.

Congressional Democrats held on for years in increasingly conservative districts by stressing kitchen-table economic issues and union bona fides, while bucking liberal orthodoxy on issues like guns, abortion and the environment. Mark Critz, the last Democratic House candidate to win in swathes of the current 18th District (before its borders were subsequently redrawn), ran in a May 2010 special election as an opponent of gun control and abortion rights, as well as the newly enacted Affordable Care Act.

Even as the 18th District’s voters have increasingly rejected Democrats in federal elections, the party has retained some power at the state and local levels. Democrats enjoy majorities on the county commissions in 3 in 4 counties in the district.

“The people in this district who voted for Trump do not view a ‘D’ by your name as a disqualifier,” Mikus said.

Lamb speaks to voters at the American Legion Post in Houston, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 13, 2017. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Picking ‘Somebody In The Middle’

Due to the rushed timeline for the special election, both Lamb and Saccone were selected by party officials and activists at their respective conventions, rather than in primaries.

Lamb nonetheless defeated six rivals for the post.

Allen Kukovich, who served as a Democratic state lawmaker from 1977 to 2004 and voted for Lamb at the party convention in November, said Lamb “struck me as somebody who was ready right now. And with the special election and the national exposure that this is likely to get, there is very limited time to grow into the job.”

The district’s Democratic hands also opted for a candidate with unimpeachable patriotic credentials, deep roots in the district and relatively moderate policy stances ― criteria perhaps equally as important as preparedness.

“It’s important that the progressive Democrats understand this is a tough district to win,” said Nate Regotti, chief of staff to state Rep. Pam Snyder, a Democrat who represents a portion of the district on the West Virginia border. “They want somebody in the middle that’s gonna represent them no matter how they feel, and I think Conor Lamb’s gonna do that.”

Lamb, a native of Mt. Lebanon, an affluent suburb just south of Pittsburgh, is the scion of an Irish-Catholic Democratic family that has been influential in regional politics for generations. His grandfather, Thomas Lamb, served as the Democratic majority leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate.

Lamb is running on creating decent-paying jobs through a massive infrastructure bill, protecting Social Security and Medicare, and marshaling federal resources to address the opioid crisis that has ravaged many of the old mill towns southwest of Pittsburgh.

Although Lamb touts his experience tackling heroin and opiate trafficking as a federal prosecutor, he favors a health care driven approach to solving the epidemic.

Speaking to HuffPost, Lamb calmly rattled off proposals to secure federal funding for more rehabilitation facilities, longer rehab stays and medical treatment upon release.

He views these plans as a critical point of contrast with his rival Saccone, who voted for a state House budget that cut $10 million in funding for the life-saving opioid overdose drug Naloxone.

“You wanna talk about being pro-life? You don’t vote against a drug that saves people’s lives,” Lamb said.

Lamb also sees protecting the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion as a key component in the fight against opiate abuse, since it is frequently the program that provides insurance for addicts. He would shore up the health care law’s private insurance exchanges through technocratic fixes like extending public reinsurance to participating insurers.

You wanna talk about being pro-life? You don’t vote against a drug that saves people’s lives. Conor Lamb

Although Lamb does not rule out more progressive reforms like the creation of a Medicaid or Medicare buy-in, he has concerns about the costs of expanding those programs. He supports empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.

Saccone’s campaign declined HuffPost’s repeated requests to speak to the candidate or get more clarification on his policy positions.

But Saccone has said he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and his campaign website says that he “will utilize free-market principles to fix our healthcare crisis.”

Saccone, an Iraq War veteran with a Ph.D. in international affairs and experience as an American diplomat in North Korea, has campaigned as an enthusiastic supporter of Trump’s agenda, saying he was ”Trump before Trump was Trump.”

The national Republican groups that have converged on Pennsylvania’s 18th District to buttress Saccone’s bid are meanwhile trying to portray Lamb as a liberal disciple of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). To preempt this critique, Lamb announced earlier this month that if elected, he would not vote for Pelosi as House Democratic leader.

“I know Conor Lamb is doing his very best to backpedal away from Nancy Pelosi,” Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, told HuffPost. “But I don’t think he’s backpedaling fast enough to fool the people of the 18th District into thinking that he wouldn’t be a loyal foot soldier for Pelosi if he was ever elected.”

Rick Saccone attends the Conservative Political Action Conference with his wife Yong in February 2017. Democrats hope Saccone's disagreements with labor unions prove to be a weakness. (Mike Theiler / Reuters)

Lamb is far from a doctrinaire liberal, though. He has staked out centrist positions on everything from coal ― which he told HuffPost “has an important place in our energy strategy” ― to gun policy, an area where he believes it is unnecessary to expand on the “laws on the books.”

Asked whether he backs any additional restrictions on abortion, however, Lamb, who has said that he is personally pro-life, firmly ruled out the idea.

“Once you make something a right, it’s a right. And it’s like that for a reason,” he said.

Lamb also said he was open to working with Trump on crafting national security policy and passing an infrastructure bill.

“I’m not running against President Trump, and people in my district are not looking for someone running against President Trump,” Lamb said. “They want to know what the difference is between me and Rick Saccone, so that’s what we talk about.”

In his speech at Saturday’s American Legion event, Lamb eschewed discussion of policy ― let alone Trump ― in favor of a homily about military service and the local community.

But after a nearly five-minute riff on the importance of memorializing veterans, Lamb pivoted to argue that unionized workers deserved similar recognition for their service. He invoked as a model the churchyard memorial in nearby Castle Shannon for Philip Murray, the founder of the region’s mighty United Steelworkers union.

“In Western Pennsylvania, it’s no surprise that we put a statue of one of our great labor leaders right there in the churchyard for everyone to see, forever,” Lamb said.

Testing Organized Labor’s Clout

If Lamb pulls off an upset win, it will likely be on the back of organized labor.

About 19 percent of the residents in this steel- and coal-heavy district are either active or retired members of a labor union, according to Frank Snyder, the secretary-treasurer of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, the state’s largest labor federation, who introduced Lamb at the American Legion. That is significantly higher than the national rate of union membership, which was 10.7 percent in 2016.

Beyond financial contributions, labor provides a massive, organic field operation.

“The capacity … is having volunteer union members talking member to member at the workplace, at their homes, over the telephone,” Snyder said.

“Our election program is gonna focus on educating union members, not saying, ‘Conor Lamb’s the best,’” Snyder added. “We’re gonna compare the two candidates: This is where he is on education or Medicare or Medicaid, and then you decide.”

The United Steelworkers, which has about 20,000 active and retired members in the district, plan to contact every member before Election Day, said Tim Waters, the union’s national political director.

“The reaction that we’re getting right now is enthusiasm in a lot of ways at the same level that we saw in Alabama. And that was significant enthusiasm,” Waters said.

The reaction that we’re getting right now is enthusiasm in a lot of ways at the same level that we saw in Alabama. And that was significant enthusiasm. Tim Waters, United Steelworkers

Labor unions’ support for Lamb is as much a function of Saccone’s status as an opponent of union priorities as it is of the Democratic candidate’s strengths.

In 2016, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO endorsed the GOP incumbent Murphy in the district. He was running uncontested, but labor didn’t have to back him. It did so, however, because Murphy maintained at least some pro-labor stances, including support for the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal building contractors to pay the “prevailing wage” and benefits in a given area. In practice, the law typically ensures that federal contracts use union labor.

Saccone, by contrast, co-sponsored legislation in Pennsylvania that would have curtailed the state’s prevailing wage law. In 2014, Saccone also picked up the endorsement of Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Work Committee, a group that seeks to make Pennsylvania a state where unions are forbidden from mandating the payment of dues from workers they represent.

Steven Mazza, a council representative for the regional branch of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, which counts 1,800 members in the district, said Saccone’s record gives the union a compelling case to take to its members, including those who voted for Murphy or Trump.

“Part of the thing we have to do is tell our members that did support Murphy, it’s about supporting federal Davis-Bacon, and Saccone doesn’t,” Mazza said. “I don’t think we can get into the issue that [Saccone’s] a really bad person and [Lamb’s] a really great person.”

Mazza and other union officials fear that if Trump moves ahead with an infrastructure bill, fiscal conservatives in Congress will try to waive Davis-Bacon to bring down the cost.

He also worries that Trump will give anti-union Republicans like the vice president a free hand to pass national right-to-work legislation now that higher priorities like tax reform are out of the way.

Such a law would “cut our jobs in half,” Mazza said.

Lamb’s campaign has also sought to point out that Joe Ricketts, whose family funds the pro-Saccone Ending Spending super PAC, has a reputation for union-busting. Ricketts abruptly closed the DNAInfo and Gothamist news sites after employees at the New York offices voted to unionize.

Across the 18th District’s bedroom communities and industrial hamlets, many voters were only just becoming aware of the special election. Several residents knew little more than either Lamb or Saccone’s name.

But conversations with some Republican-leaning union members revealed that Saccone’s hostility to labor priorities could sway them to vote for Lamb.

In a conversation at the McDonald’s in Burgettstown, Don Dowler, a 73-year-old retiree, described himself as a union member “all my life,” with stints in the United Steelworkers, as well as unions representing railroad and maintenance workers.

Dowler voted for Trump and is inclined to vote for the GOP nominee in the special election. He left open the possibility that an anti-labor Republican would be a bridge too far, however.

“That might affect me, yeah. It depends which way he goes,” Dowler said.

Aaron McKindley, 18, got a job at the Union Electric Steel plant down the road after graduating high school. A member of the United Steelworkers, he told HuffPost that he would have voted for Trump if he had been old enough.

But the prospect of an anti-union Republican candidate could convince McKindley to vote Democratic.

“I guess long-term, yeah, it would definitely affect me,” he concluded. “It’s like I said, I don’t vote on parties. I vote on individuals.”

Corporations Must Pay Their Fair Share!

EcoWatch

January 18, 2018

You wouldn’t stand for Tony’s behaviour, so don’t let corporations get away with it.

ACT NOW: http://act.gp/justice

Cape Town could be the first city in the world to run out of

350.org shared TIME‘s video.

Cape Town could be the first city in the world to run out of water http://ti.me/2rbaFin

January 16, 2018

Cape Town’s water crisis is set to intensify with Day Zero soon approaching.

Cape Town Is Days Away From Running Out of Water

Cape Town could be the first city in the world to run out of water http://ti.me/2rbaFin

Posted by TIME on Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Trump Wants More Norwegians. Its Not Going to Happen.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders — US Senator for Vermont

January 17, 2018

Hey Mr. President, maybe the reason why more Americans emigrated to Norway last year than the other way around is because they have universal health care and a strong social democracy.

Trump Wants More Norwegians

Hey Mr. President, maybe the reason why more Americans emigrated to Norway last year than the other way around is because they have universal health care and a strong social democracy.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, January 17, 2018

One year in, Trump’s environmental agenda is already taking a measurable toll

Los Angeles Times

One year in, Trump’s environmental agenda is already taking a measurable toll

Evan Halper, Contact Reporter January 18, 2018

A massive coal ash spill near Knoxville, Tenn., in 2008 forever changed life for Janie Clark’s family and left her husband with crippling health problems. So Clark was astounded late last year when she heard what the Environmental Protection Agency had done.

In September, at the behest of power companies, the agency shelved a requirement that coal plants remove some of the most toxic chemicals from their wastewater. The infamous Kingston power plant that released millions of cubic yards of toxic coal ash into area rivers was among some 50 plants given a reprieve.

After the EPA’s action, the plant’s owners delayed new wastewater treatment technology for at least two years.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Clark said. “It is like a slap in the face. It is like everything that has happened is just being ignored.”

The real-time impact of the most industry-friendly regulatory regime in decades is at times overshadowed by policy battles that are years from resolution. President Trump’s moves to shrink national monuments, return drilling to the waters off the West Coast and allow natural gas companies to release more methane into the air are destined to be tied up in court for the foreseeable future. The contentious Keystone XL pipeline may never get built as volatile oil prices threaten its profitability.

Yet under EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the air and the water are already being affected as the administration tinkers with programs obscure to most Americans, with names like “Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for Steam Electric Power Plants” and “Air Quality Designations for Ozone.”

Pruitt sued the EPA more than a dozen times when he was Oklahoma attorney general, challenging the agency’s restrictions on the fossil fuel industry and authority to protect the nation’s air and water. Now under his leadership, the agency’s enforcement actions against scofflaws have plummeted, agency data indicate.

The numbers emerging from the federal government’s database of enforcement actions against polluters show that from the time Pruitt took the helm early last year through November, the dollar amount of pollution-control equipment and cleanup activity the EPA demanded dropped by more than 85%. Even compared with the dollar amount required during the same period of the George W. Bush administration, there is a dropoff of more than 50%.

“It is one thing to say we have a change of administration and a different level of emphasis and focus,” said Cynthia Giles, who led the EPA’s enforcement office during the Obama administration and has analyzed the recent data. “But this kind of drop is not a change of emphasis. That is abandonment. That is a very, very big deal.”

The EPA strenuously objects to the characterization. The agency says holding polluters accountable remains a priority, that a nine-month snapshot of the data does not tell a complete story and that in many cases the EPA has shifted enforcement of environmental violations to state agencies.

Yet those state agencies often lack the resources and sophistication to handle them.

Even in California, where state leaders defiantly assert that their agencies will hold polluters accountable where the EPA retreats, a case involving large amounts of toxic material at the former Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance highlights how ill-equipped the state can be for enforcement responsibilities.

When EPA inspectors arrived at the refinery in December 2016, they found 265 tons of toxic material had sat illegally at the site, in unsuitable tanks, for 26 years, according to a copy of their report provided to The Times by the Washington-based Environmental Integrity Project. Such material is supposed to be moved to a hazardous waste facility within a year, according to Kandice Bellamy, a retired EPA inspector in California who was part of the team.

State inspectors had earlier been to the site while the many tons of toxic material sat there, Bellamy said, but apparently had not done anything about it.

State officials refused to comment, saying the refinery remained subject to investigation.

“One of the alarming things with this facility is that not too far in the past there had been an explosion there, and they had to evacuate a sizable chunk of the area,” Bellamy said, referring to an incident in 2015 which the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates accidents at plants, called a “serious near miss” that could have resulted in a “potentially catastrophic release” into surrounding communities.

“And we still found things that were of concern.”

Bellamy said the federal team was dismayed EPA higher-ups did not pursue the long list of potential violations they drew up, many of them serious. Instead, the case was turned back over to the state.

“We had the sense that they [EPA] had decided not to take on any of these challenging type cases because any refinery operator and their attorney could just appeal directly to the administrator in Washington,” Bellamy said. “And their pleas would most likely be seen favorably by this administration.”

An EPA spokeswoman in Southern California declined to discuss the case, writing in an email that “EPA’s policy is not to comment on investigations nor potential investigations.”

In another case, in southwestern Michigan, the Trump administration abandoned a years-long push to require a coal-fired electrical plant operated by DTE Energy to update its pollution controls.

A federal appeals court had twice upheld the EPA’s position. But the administration changed direction and put the company in the clear. That decision relaxed restrictions on harmful emissions that owners of other coal-fired power plants will be subject to when they expand facilities.

Pruitt announced the new policy in a December memo, writing that it is not the EPA’s place to investigate whether plant operators are lowballing the emissions that renovated facilities will generate.

The move is expected to slow the pace at which plants install state of the art pollution controls, just as the EPA decision that so upset Janie Clark in Knoxville is moving utilities to slow down plans to remove some of the most toxic materials from coal plant wastewater.

The EPA delay of the wastewater rule, made after power companies protested it would cost jobs and undermine Trump’s energy agenda, is having ripple effects across the country.

Coal plants that were poised to start installing the new technology as soon as this year are now balking.

“We were working with a good number of utilities who immediately said we are putting this on hold,” said Jamie Peterson, CEO of San Diego-based Frontier Water Systems, a company that installs the treatment technology.

“If this rule had not been changed, there would be a significant amount of work being done right now,” said Peterson. “The market has dropped by 80 or 90%.” Regulatory documents obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center confirm that plants are changing their plans.

As the market for high-tech equipment meant to keep some of the most harmful toxins from migrating into drinking water craters during the Trump administration, the market for the highest-polluting trucks is looking up.

The attorneys general of California and 11 other states call the trucks a “pollution menace” that produce 20 to 40 times the harmful emissions of new trucks their size, but the industry that makes “gliders” — trucks built using a new chassis and an old, refurbished diesel engine — has been given a big gift by the administration.

Federal officials are racing to block a rule taking effect this month that aims to keep gliders off the road. The regulation limits the number of new gliders not meeting emission standards to roughly 1,500 each year, nationwide, and eventually bans them altogether. The EPA is moving to change the rule to allow unlimited gliders.

Pruitt pilloried the cap as an attempt by the Obama administration to “bend the rule of law and expand the reach of the federal government in a way that threatened to put an entire industry of specialized truck manufacturers out of business.”

The California Air Resources Board warns the about-face threatens to completely offset all the clean-air gains it has made through the state’s aggressive regulation of heavy diesel trucks and “have a profoundly harmful impact on public health.”

The trucks would continue to roll onto the roads at the same time California and many other states are scrambling to deal with another blow the EPA delivered to their efforts to clean the air. The agency has delayed for at least six months its deadline for declaring which parts of the country are plagued with smog levels that violate new, stricter limits guided by the Clean Air Act.

The EPA’s delay inhibits state and regional air regulators from taking actions to confront the pollution. In California alone, the ozone standards are projected to save as many as 218 lives and prevent 120,000 missed days of school each year.

The EPA says it will have new rules ready by April, but Janet McCabe, who headed the agency’s clean air efforts during the Obama administration, said even so, the delay has consequences.

“If you are an asthmatic exposed to high levels of air pollution, it can mean a lot of missed school days in that six months,” McCabe said.

Zinke Pushes Two-Thirds Of National Park Service Advisory Panel To Resign

HuffPost

Zinke Pushes Two-Thirds Of National Park Service Advisory Panel To Resign

Doha Madani, HuffPost January 16, 2018

Most of the members of the National Park Service Advisory Board have tendered their resignation over frustrations with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, The Washington Post reports.

Nine of the 12 board members quit Monday night, citing Zinke’s refusal to convene the citizen advisory panel or discuss matters with it since he came into office last March. Zinke has drawn criticism for a number of his actions in the Interior Department, including silencing scientists about climate change.

Zinke has rejected numerous requests to meet with the advisory panel, which is required to meet twice a year, despite his efforts to review restructuring national parks. Departing board Chairman Tony Knowles told the Post that the panel has waited to work with Zinke but has been “frozen out.”

“We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” Knowles wrote in a letter to Zinke, which was obtained by the Post.

All nine panel members, who are not employees of the Interior Department but are citizens who have shown a commitment to the National Park Service, have terms set to expire in May. Their early departure leaves the government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks, according to the Post.

Phil Francis, chairman of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said in a news release that he understood the members’ frustration at the “complete lack of response” from the Interior secretary.

“This discourteous and disrespectful treatment of the Board is inexcusable and, unfortunately, consistent with a decidedly anti-park pattern demonstrated by Secretary Zinke’s department,” Francis said in the release sent to HuffPost.

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Joel Clement, a former employee who claims the Interior Department retaliated against him for his work on climate change, told HuffPost in October that the morale under Zinke was “in the toilet.” Clement also criticized Zinke’s comments that questioned the department staff’s “loyalty” to him and President Donald Trump.

“It’s profoundly offensive because it portrays a lack of understanding about the civil service and the mission of the agency,” Clement told HuffPost. “It made it clear that what he’s trying to do is not work with the career staff and advance the mission ― he’s trying to undercut the agency and its mission. And it became very clear that his interests were aligned with special interests, like the oil and gas industry.”

CNN Politics

9 Park Service advisory board members quit

By Sara Ganim and Sophie Tatum, CNN January 16, 2018

Ryan Zinke

Washington (CNN)Nine members of the National Park System Advisory Board quit Tuesday, citing concern over the Trump administration’s priorities regarding the national parks, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

The letter, sent by nine members of the board to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, says the group has been unable to meet with Zinke and the Interior Department during his first year in the position.

The author of the letter, former Alaska Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles, said the board is supposed to meet twice a year. However, he said, he’s been told things were “suspended.”

Previous administrations met with the board immediately, Knowles noted, having served on the board for seven years.

A request for comment has not been returned by the Interior Department.

The Washington Post reported the resignations Tuesday evening.

“Here we were just being basically stonewalled. … They had no interest in learning our agenda, and what we had to brief them on,” Knowles told CNN. “The board said we need to make a statement. We can’t make a statement to the secretary, then we need to make a public statement.”

Eight of the nine who were part of the letter had terms expiring in May, and suspected Interior was running out the clock.

“For the last year we have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership between the NPSAB and the DOI as prescribed by law,” the letter reads. “We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new department team are clearly not part of its agenda.”

“I have a profound concern that the mission of stewardship, protection, and advancement of our National Parks has been set aside,” the letter said.

Trump ends 1st year with lowest average approval rating

Associated Press – Yahoo Finance

Trump ends 1st year with lowest average approval rating

Emily Swanson, Associated Press January 16, 2018

Graphic shows average job approval ratings for U.S. presidents in the first year of office.

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is a record not to be coveted: Donald Trump is wrapping up a year in office with the lowest average approval rating of any elected president in his first term.

That’s according to polling by Gallup, which shows that Trump has averaged just a 39 percent approval rating since his inauguration. The previous low was held by Bill Clinton, whose first-year average stood 10 points higher than Trump’s, at 49 percent.

Recent surveys show most Americans view Trump as a divisive figure and even question his fitness for office. One relative bright spot for Trump is his handling of the economy, though even there his ratings are not as high as might be expected given a relatively strong economy.

What the polls show about how Americans view their president a year into his term:

Unusual Popularity

Trump’s current approval rating in Gallup’s weekly poll is comparable to his average rating, standing at just 38 percent, with 57 percent saying they disapprove.

The persistence of Trump’s first-year blues is unprecedented for a president so early in his term. Americans usually give their new presidents the benefit of the doubt, but Trump’s “honeymoon period,” to the extent he had one, saw his approval rating only as high as 45 percent.

Since then, Trump has spent more time under 40 percent than any other first-year president.

Presidents have recovered from periods of low popularity before. For example, Clinton’s rating fell to just 37 percent in June 1993 before quickly regaining ground, and he went on to win re-election. Harry S. Truman held the approval of less than 40 percent of Americans for significant chunks of his first term and was also re-elected. He went on to set Gallup’s lowest-ever approval mark, at just 22 percent in 1952.

Trump’s lowest point in Gallup’s weekly polling — 35 percent — remains higher than those of several earlier presidents. Truman, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter all had their ratings dip under 30 percent.

Strong Suits

There aren’t many bright spots for Trump, but there are some. For one, most Republicans continue to approve of him — 83 percent of registered voters who identify as Republicans, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll.

The same poll found that most voters overall find Trump to be intelligent and a strong person.

And positive ratings for Trump’s handling of the economy have tended to run higher than his overall job ratings.

In a December poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Trump’s rating on handling the economy was 8 percentage points higher than his overall approval, though even that stood at just 40 percent in the survey, which was a particularly negative one for Trump.

In the Quinnipiac poll, voters were more likely to say Trump is helping the economy than hurting it, 37 percent to 29 percent. On the other hand, more said President Barack Obama deserves the credit than Trump does, 49 percent to 40 percent.

On The Issues

Aside from the economy, surveys have suggested few policy bright spots for Trump.

Health care has been a consistent low point. Seven in 10 Americans in the December AP-NORC poll said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the issue, even as 85 percent called the issue very important to them personally.

In another AP-NORC poll conducted late in 2017, just 23 percent of Americans said he has kept the promises he made while running for president, while 30 percent said he’s tried and failed and 45 percent said he has not done so at all. More than half said the country is worse off since Trump became president.

That poll was conducted before the passage of a tax bill that Trump signed into law in late December, but there’s little sign that the law will have an immediate positive impact. A Gallup poll conducted in January found that just 33 percent of Americans approved of the legislation.

Character Concerns

But it may be character more than policy that’s driving negative opinions of Trump. In the January poll by Quinnipiac University, most voters said Trump is not level-headed, honest or even fit to serve as president.

And the AP-NORC poll conducted in December found that two-thirds of Americans thought the country has become even more divided as a result of Trump’s presidency.

In a July Gallup poll that asked those who disapproved of Trump for their reasons why, most cited his personality or character over issues, policies or overall job performance. That stood in stark contrast to Gallup’s polling on Obama in 2009 and George W. Bush in 2001, when far fewer cited such concerns about personality or character as reasons for their negative opinions.