US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7208

GOP Makes Good On 2009 Promise To Block President’s Healthcare Bill

WASHINGTON—Telling Americans this was the kind of leadership and accountability they could expect from the GOP, congressional Republicans held a press conference Monday to celebrate making good on their 2009 promise to block the president’s healthcare bill. “Eight years ago, our party made a solemn pledge to do everything in our power to ensure that a healthcare bill put forth by the president of the United States did not become law, and through our actions last week, that is exactly what we have done,” said Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who declared that Republican leaders had never forgotten the vow they made almost a decade ago and noted that, when presented earlier this month with a comprehensive healthcare reform plan championed by the White House, they quickly stopped it in its tracks and refused to relent until it was dead. “True to our word, we successfully prevented the executive branch from pushing through a sweeping bill that would have completely remade the U.S. healthcare system. When we said in 2009 that we would not let the president enact a plan that would affect tens of millions of Americans, that was not just empty rhetoric, and on Friday, we stood up and put an end to the president’s bill for good. Voters will not forget our resolute action.” McCarthy went on to add that throughout the remainder of this term, the American people could count on their Republican representatives to uphold the vows they made repeatedly between 2008 and 2016 to obstruct the president’s agenda at every turn.

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, will be questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of the panel's investigation into Russia’s interference during the 2016 election.

"Mr. Kushner has volunteered to be interviewed as part of the committee's investigation into the Russian activities surrounding the 2016 election," senators Richard Burr (R, N.C.) and Mark Warner (D, Va.), the committee's chairman and vice chairman, told the New York Times in a statement.

America’s biggest coal boss is hopeful that his industry will soon be freed of “fraudulent” green legislation that has hampered his industry, but warned Donald Trump to “temper” expectations about a boom in mining jobs.

Robert Murray, founder and chief executive of Murray Energy, the largest privately held coalminer in the US, is confident Trump will follow through with campaign plans to reinvigorate the coal industry and will start by scrapping Barack Obama’s clean power plan (CPP), Obama’s signature climate change plan.

The CPP was designed to cut the power sector’s carbon emissions by 32% by 2030, and Trump may move as soon as this week to overturn it. Murray blames it for shuttering coal-fired power plants and freezing new constructions during the Obama presidency. Repeal would be a major victory for Murray Energy, which filed a lawsuit against the CPP in 2015 that is now backed by more than two dozen states.

Murray, who met with Trump last month, also expects the president to end the classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant in the US, a classification brought in under the Obama administration. “We do not have a climate change or global warming problem, we have an energy cost problem,” Murray told the Guardian.

Murray met Trump in February when the president signed repeal of the Stream Protection Rule, Obama-era legislation that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris in streams and which Murray called an “unlawful and destructive” attempt to “destroy our nation’s underground coalmines and put our nation’s coalminers out of work” .

It was the 77-year-old Murray’s first visit to the White House and, he hopes, the first of a series that will help push coal’s agenda.

Trump pledged to bring back coal jobs during his presidential bid and repeated those promises last week. “As we speak, we are preparing new executive actions to save our coal industry and to save our wonderful coalminers from continuing to be put out of work. The miners are coming back,” Trump told a rally in Louisville, Kentucky.

While Trump did not provide specific details, he did reiterate plans to defang the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), now led by Trump appointee and longtime EPA critic Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma. Trump said this week he would transform the EPA from “a job killer into a job creator”.

Murray has presented Trump with a plan, part of which would overturn many of the protections brought under Obama in by the EPA, including the 2009 classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant – a ruling known as ‘the “endangerment finding”.

“Carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act of 1971 was never a pollutant,” said Murray. “That endangerment finding needs to be overturned. It’s on my list of what needs to be done, because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.”

During the campaign Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax”, said Obama’s regulation of carbon dioxide was “an overreach that punishes rather than helps Americans”.

Trump’s election has been a boon to coal, said Murray, after what he sees as Obama’s attempts to destroy the industry. But he has also warned the president he should “temper” expectations for jobs growth in the industry.

“I would not say it’s a good time in the coal industry. It’s a better time,” he said.

“Politically it’s much better. Barack Obama and his Democrat supporters were the greatest destroyers the United States of America has ever seen in its history. He destroyed reliable electric power in America, he destroyed low-cost electric power in America, and he attempted to totally destroy the United States coal industry.”

Murray said Democrats had failed to defeat Trump because they had failed to listen to people like his workers. “I live among these people. These are the people who fought the wars and built our country and they were forgotten by Democrats who had gone to Hollywood characters, liberal elitists and radical environmentalists. That’s all they represent today. They lost these quiet Americans. This was a victory for the working people,” he said.

When Obama came to power, coal provided 52% of US electricity; now it is closer to 30%. The fall is down to competition from cheap, shale gas and the closure of 411 coal-fired power plants under Obama’s administration as more than 50 coalmining companies went bankrupt.

While Murray said new plants using “clean coal” technologies could soon be built, he doesn’t expect that coal’s share of the market will rise significantly in the future.

On March 28 2017 06:44 LegalLord wrote:
Obama did back in 08-12. Was as stupid then as it is now. But we all have our delusions.

The delusion train has moved on to pro-fracking politics. Coal is yesterday's trashy energy source.

On March 28 2017 06:53 Buckyman wrote:
A hostile regulatory environment can put anyone out of business, no matter how sound their finances and business practices are.

On March 28 2017 06:53 Buckyman wrote:
A hostile regulatory environment can put anyone out of business, no matter how sound their finances and business practices are.

On March 28 2017 07:13 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Idk if it's worse when they're trying to frack on our water aquifers and say it's completely safe...

http://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/local/florida/2017/03/22/florida-fracking-ban-supporters-rally-bill-faces-trouble/99486110/

On March 28 2017 07:13 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Idk if it's worse when they're trying to frack on our water aquifers and say it's completely safe...

http://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/local/florida/2017/03/22/florida-fracking-ban-supporters-rally-bill-faces-trouble/99486110/

Partisanship has a way of coloring views of the news, especially of highly-charged stories involving Trump campaign and transition officials turning up in government surveillance.

This week, CNN reported: “The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN.”

Righties, particularly those of the anti-anti-Trump bent, focuses on the “supposed” and the “possibly” to conclude the story was No Big Deal. The story is certainly qualified, but the dismissal tends to ignore the fact that it’s a report on an ongoing investigation and that unless some sort of charge is brought, it’s a fair bet the evidence will be below the level needed to bring charges.

Conversely, the same basic group of righties thought this week’s press event by Rep. Devin Nunes — chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — (helpfully transcribed by Lawfare) was a Very Big Deal.

Nunes initially claimed that: “on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked. And fourth and finally, I want to be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.” [...]

Nunes, however, further raises the serious allegation that Trump or members of his transition team were “unmasked” (i.e., their identities were not redacted as would usually be the case for U.S. citizens in cases of incidental collection) in cases without foreign intelligence value, and that said reports were widely disseminated. This is precisely the concern civil libertarians have raised about our foreign surveillance efforts during the post-9/11 era.