GOP Congress taking care of their people

[Steve James]

With everything that Republicans want to do — repeal Obamacare, overhaul the tax code — it might seem odd that one of Congress’ very first acts would be to kill an obscure Obama-era regulation that restricts coal companies from dumping mining waste into streams and waterways.

But that is indeed what’s going on. On Thursday, the Senate voted 54-45 to repeal the so-called “stream protection rule” — using a regulation-killing tool known as the Congressional Review Act. The House took a similar vote yesterday, and if President Trump agrees, the stream protection rule will be dead. Coal companies will now have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.

Killing this regulation won’t really help Trump fulfill his goal of reversing the coal industry’s decline; that decline has more to do with cheap natural gas than anything else. Instead, Republicans are mostly focusing on this rule because they can. Because the stream protection rule wasn’t finished until very late in 2016, it’s much, much easier to kill than most of the other Obama-era rules around coal pollution. It was an easy target, so long as the GOP acted fast.

What Obama’s “stream protection rule” actually does
Coal mining is a messy business. In parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, for instance, mining companies often get at underground coal seams by blowing up the tops of mountains — a process known as mountaintop removal mining. Once that’s done, they’ll frequently dump the debris into the valleys below, which can contaminate streams and waterways with toxic heavy metals.

Appalachian Voices, an environmental group, estimates that coal companies have buried over 2,000 miles of streams in the region through mountaintop removal mining. And studies have found that when this all debris and waste gets into water supplies, it can have dire health impacts for the people living nearby.

Are we great yet?

[Steve James]

This was also expected, but Robert Reich puts it into perspective.

Today, Trump orders a rollback of regulations over Wall Street, including Dodd-Frank. Does he really think Americans have amnesia? That they’ve forgotten what happened when Wall Street turned the economy into a casino, and then, when its bets went sour in 2008, needed a giant taxpayer funded bailout? Does he really believe Americans forget losing their jobs, homes, and savings in the fallout? And that not a single bank executive went to jail?

By the way, the biggest banks are far bigger today than they were in 2008. Then, the five biggest had 25 percent of U.S. banking assets. Today they have 44 percent. If they were too big to fail then, they’re far too big to fail now. Getting rid of Dodd-Frank triples the odds of another financial crisis.
In his presidential campaign, Trump blamed Wall Street for being part of the Washington swamp – and pounded Hillary for being too close to the Street by taking big speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. But Trump has brought more big guns from the Street into his administration than in any previous administration – mostly from Goldman-Sachs.

Before he joined Trump as head of his economic council, Gary Cohn was president of Goldman Sachs. Trump’s right-hand man, Steve Bannon, was at Goldman Sachs. Other Goldman alums around Trump are Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s pick for Treasury; Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Dina Powell, another White House adviser.

A decade ago, Goldman Sachs really did defraud investors and rip off their customers (as of today it’s paid nearly $9 billion in government fines), and many of these people were there.
Hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy, lies on top of lies, payoffs to the powerful and privileged on top of more payoffs. And we haven’t even finished the second week.

[Steve James]

A pattern will emerge.

"The Senate voted strictly along party lines Friday morning to repeal a regulation requiring disclosures for the payments that energy companies make to foreign governments. The measure passed 52-47 in a pre-dawn vote.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) foreign payments rule was mandated by a key provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and was meant to reduce corruption in resource-rich countries by detailing the royalties and other payments that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies make to governments."

[Steve James]

Just months after an election plagued with foreign influence, a Republican-controlled House committee voted Tuesday to eliminate the independent, bipartisan agency tasked with helping states secure their voting systems.

The Committee on House Administration voted 6–3, along party lines, to move forward with the Election Assistance Commission Termination Act, legislation that would eliminate the only agency responsible for making sure voting machines cannot be hacked.

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) was formed in the wake of the disastrous 2000 election to administer federal help to states to update and improve their voting systems. In recent years, the agency has worked to ensure that elections are accessible to those with disabilities, allocated funds for innovative election technology, and studied and reported election best practices, among other roles.
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Thomas Hicks, one of three commissioners currently on the EAC, told ThinkProgress that eliminating the agency would be “a huge mistake.”

“It’s the only agency that deals with the administration of elections,” he said. “We touch 8,000 jurisdictions across the country, from voter registration to the counting of ballots... My read of the [termination] bill is that it just eliminates the agency but doesn’t move the responsibilities around.”

In a preliminary vote Tuesday, the House committee decided to bring the issue to the entire chamber for a vote. Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), the chairman of the committee, argued that the EAC was formed as a temporary agency, and that the issues it was designed to address have been resolved.

But a number of voting rights organizations have pushed back on that claim. Before Tuesday’s vote, the Brennan Center for Justice wrote a letter to Harper and the ranking Democratic member of the House committee, urging them to vote against the EAC termination legislation.

“A lot of Americans are expressing concerns right now about the security of the election system and their confidence in the election system,” said Tomas Lopez, counsel with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “The EAC is exactly the kind of place that can actually address the concerns that people have.”

A group of 38 organizations and individuals, including the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, also wrote a letter urging the committee to oppose the legislation, and to instead strengthen the EAC and provide it with the additional staff it needs. At full capacity, the EAC should have four commissioners working to respond to election issues.

While Russian hacking appears to have been a problem unique to the 2016 election, Hicks said that every election brings new challenges, which speaks to the need for the EAC.

I wonder what the president will say about this.