When President Donald Trump last week called for Congress to approve an executive “line-item veto,” it provoked convulsions among America’s Googletariat.
“Trump has a secret plan to evade the Constitution and create a line-item veto, apparently,” read a headline in the Washington Post. “Trump administration botches basic civics while calling for line-item veto,” wrote one of the Post’s “fact checkers.” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s blog mocked Trump for falling for a “misguided gimmick” pushed by congressional Republicans in the 1990s. “A quarter of a century later, it feels like we’re watching an episode of That ’90s Show,” snarked Maddow’s blog.
It would probably surprise former Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold and Democratic President Barack Obama that they were complicit in this mid-90’s Republican subterfuge. Because in the past, both have joined Republicans like current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in proposing a version of the line-item veto they considered to be constitutional. (The idea is far from new; President Ulysses S. Grant first asked for the authority in the 1860s.)
Back in the 1990s, Congress passed a bill providing the president with a clean authority to veto specific spending items from legislation. President Bill Clinton signed the law, but the Supreme Court overturned it in 1998, arguing that allowing the president to unilaterally approve or deny programs constituted a violation of the separation of powers. The president must, according to the court, “approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto.”
Since then, both Democrats and Republicans (and now Donald Trump, who is either depending on what cable news show he just watched) have been looking for a constitutional way to implement a line-item veto. They have primarily settled on a structure where the president, after signing a spending bill, could identify a number of pork-barrel programs to which he or she objected. Those items would then be sent back to Congress and put to a separate vote — if an item couldn’t withstand an open-air vote, it would be eliminated and the money initially intended for the program would be applied to deficit reduction.
In joining Feingold and Obama in pushing for this expanded veto authority, Ryan argued it was the best way to trim unnecessary spending tucked into massive bills. In the days of out-of-control earmarks, when the House and Senate had to vote on a final version of a spending bill, legislators were typically voting on a “conference report” — a non-amendable agreement between the two houses with myriad special spending projects packed in at the last minute. The president can only give the package a full thumbs’ up or down, regardless of how wasteful some of the spending hidden in the bill may be.
Aside from such a system being a recipe for scandal, Ryan and Feingold argued an altered line-item veto would shine some sunlight on wasteful spending tucked into massive bills. In a 1996 interview, Ryan said he hoped he could “embarrass things out of bills” by forcing individual votes on unnecessary projects.
The primary opponents of the line-item veto are legislative leaders, who need pork-barrel spending projects to buy votes from their members. As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) fought against it when it was proposed by President George W. Bush. In 2006, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he likes “the line-item veto about like I like a bad sore throat.”
However, the Ryan-Feingold-Obama-Bush plan (at the time given the sexy name “The Expedited Line-Item Veto and Rescissions Act”) still allowed Congress to have final say on whether a program was approved. Further, it would grant the president lesser veto powers than 46 governors currently enjoy — that includes Wisconsin, where a governor can still strike full sentences and write in different spending amounts, creating new laws never intended by the Legislature.
An altered line-item veto wouldn’t be a panacea for solving government overspending. But exposing earmarks was a good idea then and still is now. Just because one version of the line-item veto has been struck down doesn’t mean there are aren’t other equally valuable, bipartisan options available – they’re just harder to Google than “Stupid Face Trump Dummy Supreme Court Line Item Veto Fathead.”
-
No comments on Give presidents gubernatorial power
-
The number one single today in 1965:
The number one album today in 1976 was Peter Frampton’s “Frampton Comes Alive,” the best selling live album in rock music history:
The number one album today in 1993 was Depeche Mode’s “Songs of Faith and Devotion”:
Birthdays start with one-hit wonder Sheb Wooley:
-
Was anyone surprised by the recent CNN poll finding President Trump’s approval rating at 42 percent, the highest it has been since the first Infrastructure Week?
The thousand undifferentiated scoops in the phantasmal Mueller investigation, the vicissitudes of his hundred shifting positions on DACA and the fabled border wall, Stormy Daniels, a reversal of course in Syria and Afghanistan, moronic schemes from the White House to turn food stamps into some kind of vast network of state-run bread and milk distribution centers, endless championing of the Wall Street gazillionaires against whom he had supposedly been running in 2016, relentless staff turnaround, a so-far-illusory trade war conducted from the internet with minimal strategy or cohesion, even “covfefe”: Not one of these things matters to the not-quite-majority of Americans who voted for Trump. They still like him.
Why shouldn’t they? The reasons for opposing Trump were clear from the beginning. He was a crude, mean-spirited man whose most noteworthy accomplishments were kicking old people out of their homes to make room for casino parking lots, speculating publicly about whether the duly elected president of the United States was a jihadist plant, and pretending to fire Gary Busey in the fake board-room of a made-up company on NBC. It was only the staggering irrelevance of what all 15 other Republican candidates were saying — it is almost sad now to think of the millions of words of Heritage Foundation PowerPoints still gathering virtual dust on Jeb Bush’s website — that made his candidacy possible. Years later the GOP is still talking nonsense about freedom and entrepreneurship, the Democrats are still obsessed with where people go to the bathroom, and Trump is still being rude on television. Nothing has changed. If anything, there is good reason to believe that in the weeks and months to come polls without the historic Republican bias of Rassmussen will approach the 50 percent mark.
It’s not surprising that after little more than a year in office many people who voted for a president still support him. But it’s also surprising that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he had before taking office. Unless it’s the negative reporting that is the problem, which I suspect is very largely the case. You can only ask adults to participate in the fiction that a retweet of a wrestling GIF is a credible threat of violence against some nerd reporters at a cable station or delight in what you hope will be the failure of American trade policy before they decide to tune you out. Very largely this had already happened by Inauguration Day, but now the work of MSNBC and The New York Timesand PolitiFact is complete. Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what is false and have decided that they do not much care either.
There was, I like fondly to imagine, a different course that might have been taken here. It is just possible, I suppose, that members of my profession could have exercised their reasoning faculties to decide what in the administration was good, what was bad, what was unremarkable or indistinguishable from what any modern president would do, what was painfully idiotic, what was, perhaps, evil. We chose not to exercise this responsibility. Instead we decided to indulge in our live-action roleplaying fantasies about being brave selfless journos taking on a mean demagogue because we love the Constitution so much.
There is, however, a faint glimmer of hope for Trump’s enemies in the media. Making it work would require the coordinated efforts of a vast number of persons — conspiracy is the word for it, or maybe even “collusion” — but that shouldn’t be difficult in the era of modern internet-based communication. If we want to convince people who voted for him that the president no longer deserves their support, we need to stop talking about him. Or to be more precise, we need to stop making Trump the universal metric according to which all of human conduct is weighed and considered.
If Trump argues against free trade, consider the issue on its merits. The idea that liberalizing the production and distribution of goods and services across national borders will automatically enrich everyone — instead of just the already wealthy in rich and poor countries alike — has had its critics on the left and the right for centuries; even President Obama was skeptical of NAFTA during his first Senate campaign and as late as the 2008 election he was telling audiences that it should be renegotiated. When Trump criticizes Amazon for its monopolistic practices, don’t turn it into a tedious finger-wagging exercise in fact-checking (and if you work for a newspaper owned by its founder and CEO, maybe avoid saying anything if you don’t have to); subject the company to the same scrutiny you would reserve for any other giant corporation that treats America’s cities as its fiefdoms and her people as its grateful serfs.
Pretending that anything the president says or does is bad because he is the one saying or doing isn’t just bad journalism. You might as well be wearing a MAGA hat and whooping about the Wall.
-
The number 15 British song today in 1966 was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards:
The number one single today in 1966:
The number one single today in 1977:
-
Today in 1967, John Lennon took his Rolls–Royce to J.P. Fallon Ltd. in Surrey, England, to see if it could paint the car in psychedelic colors. The result three months later:
The number one single today in 1973:
-
Today in 1956, the CBS Radio Network premiered Alan Freed’s “Rock and Roll Dance Party.”
The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1962, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met someone who called himself Elmo Lewis. His real name was Brian Jones.
-
Steven Bochco, one of the most influential TV producers of the past 30 years died Sunday. Todd VanDerWerff explains:
As a TV writer in the late 1960s and ’70s, Bochco worked on everything from Columbo to McMillan & Wife, cranking out sharp scripts for the well-oiled TV machines of the time. But it was when he joined the then-powerful MTM Productions (the company behind classic sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show) to help the company jump-start its drama division that he became someone who must be acknowledged in even the most cursory summaries of TV’s history.
His first show with MTM, Paris, which ran for 13 episodes in 1979 and 1980, was groundbreaking for the time, starring James Earl Jones as a police captain whose relationships with the officers working under him were satisfyingly complex. What’s more, the show actually followed him home to see how he interacted with his wife, something few police dramas had done before. In its interest in contemporary issues and the protagonist’s personal life, Paris served as a cursory blueprint for what was to come.
But it was Bochco’s next show that would change everything. Co-created with Michael Kozoll, Hill Street Blues would debut in 1981 on NBC and run for 144 episodes that altered television forever. From its storytelling style to its visuals, Hill Street rewrote the rules of what a TV drama could be, and made possible the boom in great drama that followed in the ’90s and 2000s.
Here, then, are Hill Street Blues and four other TV shows that will help you understand why Steven Bochco is one of the all-time greatest TV producers.
1) Hill Street Blues
If you were to watch just one series to understand how dramatically Bochco changed the game, make it this one. Even better, take a look at one of the great dramas of the ’70s — like The Rockford Files, for instance — then look at this one to see just how differently it approached its storytelling.
Hill Street Blues, which debuted in 1981 and ran until 1987, is often incorrectly cited as the first serialized TV drama. Daytime and primetime soaps had, of course, been telling continuing stories for decades at that point. But what Hill Street did was wed this storytelling model, which was written off by many critics of the time as disreputable, to the slightly more prestigious cop drama.
The show bears some similarities to Paris. The police officers of Hill Street Station (in an unnamed city somewhere east of the Mississippi) dealt with major social issues they encountered throughout their neighborhood, some of which walked right through the door and into their station. The camera followed the officers home to see what their personal lives were like, and the series was interested in how those personal lives affected their professional ones.
But it was Bochco and Kozoll’s interest in merging serialization and case-of-the-week storytelling that proved most revolutionary. Hill Street didn’t push the reset button at the end of every episode. Events that happened in one episode affected the next, and over the series’ 144 episodes, viewers learned so much about the show’s characters from how they were affected by the cases they took on.
The two also brought a bolder cinematic language to the series, using documentary-style techniques that made it feel as if viewers were just dropping in on some real station somewhere, unannounced, enhancing the feel that everything in the show was really happening somewhere.
MTM pushed Bochco off the series in its fifth season, and while the show ran until season seven without him (under the tutelage of his protege David Milch, himself a major TV influence), it never quite recaptured the glories of its early days, when it looked radically different from everything else on TV. To watch Hill Street in 2018 is to find it a little quaint — TV drama has evolved considerably since then — but it’s impossible to imagine almost any drama on the air now without nodding toward the influence of this one series.
2) Doogie Howser, MD
Typically, a glance at Bochco’s work would go from Hill Street to the other drama series he co-created that won four Emmys for Best Drama — 1986’s LA Law. But while that series has its charms, its reliance on sensationalism that no longer seems as sensational has made it age the most poorly of Bochco’s well-known series.
Instead, take a look at this 1989 to 1993 series, co-created with David E. Kelley (another Bochco protege who went on to great things in his own right). Following a whiz kid teenager who is already in his second year of residency as a surgeon at the age of 16, Doogie is not a particularly great television show, but it’s useful for looking at a form Bochco was interested in but never quite cracked: the dramedy. (His other good series in this form is the even more obscure John Ritter vehicle Hooperman.)
Doogie and Hooperman were part of a late ’80s movement toward comedies that were filmed more like movies and not in front of live studio audiences. As such, they didn’t feature the sounds of audience laughter and were often less reliant on punchlines and more reliant on a kind of soft-focus drama — too light to have the sharper edges of a Hill Street but darker than something like contemporary comedy Cheers. And if you’re thinking that sounds a lot like many comedies on the air right now, you wouldn’t be wrong.
These days, Doogie is better known for its high-concept premise and launching the career of its star, Neil Patrick Harris, but it’s worth checking out to see yet another TV form in its early days, with Bochco right there helping it along.
Doogie was produced as part of a six-year, 10-series deal with ABC that Bochco signed in 1987. It was a deal that would go on to produce many of his most memorable series. But it was also a deal that would produce his most infamous flop.
3) Cop Rock
No list of bizarre TV flops is complete without 1990’s Cop Rock, a one-season weirdo that was co-created with William M. Finkelstein, which wedded Bochco’s beloved cop show format to original songs written by Randy Newman. This means that, yes, Cop Rock was a musical, something wildly original at the time but also so out there that nobody was quite ready for it.
That can sometimes mean a series that was ahead of its time, but Cop Rock isn’t quite that. It has its moments (as a recent DVD release by Shout Factory makes clear), but it’s also clear that no one involved has quite thought through what the series will look like beyond, “I guess the cops will sing every once in a while?” Discussing the serious social issues that animated a lot of Bochco’s work via song and dance ended up feeling as if it was trivializing them, unfortunately.
But it’s still worth checking out an episode of the show (or, really, just a few clips on YouTube) to see a series so far ahead of its time that TV is only really just now figuring out what a musical drama might look like. And it’s also worth remembering that for all his hits, Bochco had a lot of flops too — though few as memorable as this one.
4) NYPD Blue
Bochco’s biggest success with ABC (where he made his home for almost 20 years, going beyond his original six-year deal) was this 1993 debut, co-created with Milch, which ran for 12 seasons and 261 episodes, following the officers of a New York police precinct as they worked cases, dealt with personal problems, and confronted social issues of the day. If that sounds a lot like Hill Street, well, you’re not wrong. But while NYPD was nowhere near as influential as that earlier show, it changed TV in more subtle ways.
The one that seemed most important at the time was the show’s embrace of rawer language and sexual content than other series of the time. (Famously, ABC put several warnings about nudity on the broadcast of the series’ pilot — but all that was shown were a couple of bare butts, rather than the much more salacious images the warnings seemed to promise.)
Watching the series in 2018 will probably lead you to wonder why anybody was so upset, but several local ABC affiliates refused to air NYPD Blue when it debuted. That it no longer seems all that coarse in 2018 is probably a sign of how it really did change television.
But a more lasting legacy stems from the series’ protagonist, Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz, a racist cop who didn’t always play by the rules but got results, darn it. He feels, at many turns, heavily modeled on Popeye Doyle, the cop played by Gene Hackman in the Oscar-winning 1971 film The French Connection. But Bochco and Milch (who wrote the operatic scripts for the series’ first seven seasons) used television to dig deeper into what made Sipowicz the man he was, changing and even softening him over time.
If you don’t particularly feel like watching a racist cop antihero in 2018, that more than makes sense. But Sipowicz is an important step in TV’s embrace of the antihero. He’s not as revolutionary as All in the Family’s Archie Bunker (who came to TV in 1971) or Tony Soprano (who debuted in 1999), but he comfortably straddles the gap between the two. He was a dark and complicated character at a time when TV was sorely lacking for such a thing.
And if you do feel like checking NYPD Blue out, you’re in luck. The entire series was just added to Hulu.
5) Murder One
Here’s another Bochco series (co-created with Charles H. Eglee and Channing Gibson) that didn’t work out, running for just two seasons between 1995 and 1997. But the storytelling model it used ended up being hugely influential around a decade later. It just took a move to cable to do so.
The idea behind Murder One was that every season of the show would follow one murder trial from start to finish, as a team of lawyers tried to defend their client and, along the way, figure out who really did it, all the better to exonerate him. And the first season, which followed the investigation of the murder of 15-year-old Jessica Costello, stuck to that core idea, with numerous twists and turns and several memorable performances (most notably from Stanley Tucci as a possibly sociopathic philanthropist whose path intersected with Jessica’s).
The problem was that a traditional 22-episode broadcast TV season was a little too much for a story like this, leading to some serious dead weight in the middle (though both the first two and last two hours are excellent). In season two, Murder One went from one case to a handful, which played out over the course of the season, but that, weirdly, wasn’t as gripping. The show was canceled.
The producers of the later series 24, which took some cues from Murder One, would solve this by piling story arcs on top of each other across their 24-episode seasons. But it took the cable drama, with its 10- and 13-episode seasons, to really solve the problem. On a cable show, the “case of the season” had enough space to really allow time to dig into all of the suspects, but not so much space that the writers had to vamp for time (at least when it was done well).
This means that, weirdly, in the Netflix era, Murder One is the show of Bochco’s that perhaps looks the most influential. But that was the man’s career in a nutshell. Even when he was producing a series that didn’t work, he was reinventing television.
Ryan Parker writes about perhaps Bochco’s most notable character:When Dennis Franz learned on Sunday that his longtime friend and former TV boss, Steve Bochco, had died after a battle with cancer, he simply could not process what he was hearing.“It was a day of shock for me,” the actor on Tuesday told The Hollywood Reporter. Bochco was 74.
Knowing one another for decades and working together on some of television’s most iconic, groundbreaking programs, Franz simply could not wrap his mind around the loss of the the strong-willed writer and producer who created Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and L.A. Law, among other shows.
“I consider Steven to be a leader and a visionary in television,” says Franz, who played Detective Andrew “Andy” Sipowicz for the full 12-season run of ABC’s NYPD Blue. “He left such a beautiful legacy of so much memorable work, which to me puts him in an icon status.”
Franz worked closely with Bochco initially playing most notably fan favorite Lt. Norman Buntz on NBC’s Hill Street Blues, which ran from 1981 to 1987, before starring on ABC’s NYPD Blue.
-
One of the media trends facilitated by social media is a list of the top _____ of ______.
While top ___ lists have been around since mass media, late night TV host David Letterman probably gets credit for popularizing them.
I have recently seen a couple of top 10 lists about car movies, or movies where cars play a prominent role. I somewhat agree with one and not the one I can’t find.
Letterman was trying to be funny. Others try to be insightful or merely controversial, since each obviously is merely one opinion and not (usually) based on anything close to objectivity. My list is based on my own subjective opinion of the vehicles involved, along with if a non-car-buff can watch without being bored into slumber.
Anyway, here is my top 10 ist of car movies, which does not include several worthy honorable mention selections, such as “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior,” “Le Mans,” “Grand Prix” (no, those are not two movies about Pontiacs), “Live and Let Die” (in fact one could do an entire list of James Bond movies rated by car chase), “The Driver,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “The Transporter,” and so on.
Number 10:
This was a better movie than “Cannonball Run,” which consisted of fine cars, but not very fine acting.
Number 9:
Not the Nicholas Cage remake.
Number 8:
We didn’t include Reynolds’ “Cannonball Run,” but we will include this because it combines cool car scenes with a compelling story of brotherly revenge. Ned Beatty did a great job as a malevolent redneck sheriff. The sequel, “Gator,” lacks the car chases, though it does have a boat chase.
Number 7:
This might be the best movie overall of this list. The cars are cool, and so is the music for those who grew up in that age. (For those unaware: The ’55 Chevy the future Han Solo crashes in a drag race was the repainted car in “Two Lane Blacktop” of two years earlier.)
Number 6:
Not the Mark Wahlberg remake.
Number 5:
Reynolds returns. (The sequels are not worth your time, however.)
Number 4:
Not the Viggo Mortenson remake.
Number 3:
Number 2:
And the number 1 car movie of all time according to myself:
The greatest car chase of all time, plus young Jacqueline Bisset, oily politician Robert Vaughn, a compelling story, a fantastic Lalo Schifrin soundtrack, and the greatest car chase of all time.
-
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Studios.
The movies won no Academy Awards, but sold a lot of tickets and a lot of records.
The number one album today in 1968 was the soundtrack to “The Graduate”:
-
After Donald Trump, the individual in DC with the biggest target on his back is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. When he was attorney general of Oklahoma, he sued the EPA more than a dozen times to get the powerful regulatory agency to stay within its legal authority. His nomination was deeply concerning to radical environmentalists inside and outside the media. As a result, he and his team have been under a microscope since even before his confirmation in early 2017.
Well-funded environmental groups, many with former EPA staffers, deluge the agency with FOIA requests to catch someone in a scandal. Unlike how they covered Obama-era EPA administrators, media outlets constantly request information about everything Pruitt does, from his schedule to his travel particulars. Whipped-up partisans have made unprecedented numbers of death threats against him and his family. Powerful liberals opine against him.
Some suggest the death threats are understandable. Liberal Republican governors of New Jersey despise the man. Thomas Kean was calling on him to resign a year ago. Christine Todd Whitman gave inappropriately unserious comments about the death threats. Chris Christie did George Stephanopolous’ bidding by trying to throw Pruitt under the bus this past weekend. Maybe there is something in the water of Jersey.
The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol, who this week tweeted his desire for Michelle Obama to run and defeat Donald Trump, said Pruitt was a parody of sycophancy for supporting a conservative deregulatory agenda. He also thrice tweeted his excitement over the possibility of leftists ousting Pruitt. Fellow NeverTrump enthusiast and Washington Post in-house conservative (really!) Jennifer Rubin also expressed giddiness about him possibly being fired.
And John Podesta — yes, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign — was given valuable Washington Post editorial space to say Pruitt must go. Paul Waldman also stomped his feet and demanded Pruitt must resign, mostly for the crime of doing “the most harm to the United States of America” being effective.
But unlike so many Republican politicians in the world today, Pruitt has not been deterred. He worked to scrap Obama administration regulations that exceeded EPA authority and harmed the coal industry. He rescinded confusing and contradictory water rules that hurt farmers and ranchers. He shepherded the U.S. departure from the uneven and horribly negotiated Paris climate accord. He is demanding scientific rigor for agency work.
Pruit is not some anti-environmentalist but someone who wants the EPA to do what Congress charges it with doing to improve the nation’s environment. So he awarded $100 million to upgrade drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and began an effort to eradicate lead poisoning from drinking water. He committed additional funds to deal with the EPA’s botching of the Gold King Mine release that polluted Colorado and Utah.
There are poor ways, average ways, and shrewd ways to tackle the constitutional problems that arise from the administrative state. Many Republicans either don’t realize the problems of an unelected bureaucracy’s power, or fail to combat those problems effectively. Pruitt is in the final category, demonstrating competency and a devotion to rule of law. And he has the courage that so many of his GOP peers lack, not being intimidated by the normal media frenzy that intimidates other Republican appointees.
Recently, a coordinated attempt to oust him has taken shape, as this liberal TV producer notes:
The Washington Post sent out an edition of an email newsletter that nicely summed up the coordinated hit on Pruitt. He rented a room that critics say created an appearance of conflict because he got a good rate and the husband of the woman he rented from heads a law firm that does some lobbying. He was approved for the room by an 18-year career ethics person at EPA, but liberal Pruitt opponents are “concerned.” The general rental space also was used by three members of Congress for fundraising on days Pruitt was in town. He wasn’t invited to the events, didn’t attend them, and even if he had no ethics laws would have been violated, but liberal Pruitt opponents are “concerned.”
Supposedly few people in the White House are coming to Pruitt’s defense, particularly if you don’t count the president and his chief of staff, who made calls of support to him. Oh, also, EPA officials considered leasing a private jet for Pruitt to accommodate his travel and security needs but didn’t do it. Yes, that’s really one of the stories.
Also, Pruitt “bypassed” the White House to get raises for two of his top aides who came to DC from Oklahoma. Pruitt didn’t get White House approval to sign off on the pay raises, but EPA officials used an authority that other EPA administrators used to set pay. Pruitt said he wasn’t aware that the actions hadn’t been submitted for White House approval, so he directed his staff to do that.
Other recent supposed scandals include that his security team had him flying first class because of the death threats and other physical security threats. The real reason for the media/resistance/establishment chatter about ousting Pruitt, however, is that Pruitt tackles the abuse of the rule of law at EPA head on and has been effective at advancing a conservative deregulatory agenda.
Just this week the EPA announced a rollback of Obama fuel efficiency standards that were part of the Paris arrangement, were set too high, short-circuited the regulatory process, and were favoring pick-ups and SUVs over the automobiles hit with the standards. In a statement, Pruitt said, “Obama’s EPA cut the midterm evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality and set the standards too high.” California is already suing to block the rollback.
A Sudden, Disparate Interest
The media and activists didn’t treat Obama’s EPA secretary, Lisa Jackson, with any rigor, despite her demonstrable corrutpion. She used the alias “Richard Windsor” to correspond secretly with people outside of the EPA, including with environmental activists and the man who would lead the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. When this same woman criticized the Trump administration for lack of transparency, almost nobody in the media pointed out how ludicrous a messenger she was. She’s now a VP at Apple. When the EPA broke laws, only conservative media showed any interest.It’s not that there was no media coverage of the EPA-caused Gold King Mine spill, the EPA-ignored Flint Water Crisis, the EPA administrator misleading Congress, the EPA violating federal propaganda policies, or many other problems under Jackson and her Obama replacement Gina McCarthy, but it was never done with the same bloodthirsty frenzy surrounding Pruitt. Not even a tiny fraction of it.
For many people on the left, EPA regulations touch on quasi-religious views. They treat people like Pruitt as heretics who must be destroyed. That’s fine, and expected from the members of the resistance. These Resistance members predict they will succeed in ousting Pruitt. They hate him and want him gone. They recognize that he’s not just a problem, but a big problem. That’s why we’re witnessing the coordinated hits on him.
More details on that double standard here.
If the anti-Pruitt campaign does succeed, it would be a tremendous victory for the left, and one that would embolden them like nothing else. It would also utterly destroy conservative base morale. Conservatives have put up with a lot during the Trump era and much of that can be explained by the actual policy wins. Pruitt is entrenching rule of law in the administrative state and rescinding liberty-crushing regulations that exceed EPA authority. His work getting the United States out of economy-harming regulatory schemes is responsible for much of the economic successes of Trump’s first year.
The reasons the media and their Resistance followers hate Pruitt are the same reasons conservatives love him and why conservatives are willing to support Trump. No, the reason is not that he got approval from a career ethics official to rent a room for a few months last year. Let’s stop pretending so. If Trump were to fulfill the Resistance’s desire to oust Pruitt, it would be against his own political interest. His instincts about that tend to be pretty sharp, so don’t be surprised if Pruitt continues to serve and continues to anger the media and other Democrats and establishment figures.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 