{"id":13193,"date":"2023-08-06T23:08:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-06T23:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13193"},"modified":"2023-08-06T23:08:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-06T23:08:22","slug":"trump-governs-by-grudge-in-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13193","title":{"rendered":"Trump Governs by Grudge in California"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

alifornians don\u2019t vote for Trump, and he\u2019s showing them what he can do about it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The Editorial Board<\/em><\/a>, NY Times<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\n1961, at a news conference three years before he became the Republican\npresidential nominee, the right-wing Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, surveying\nthe progressive tendencies of voters in New York and its neighbors, was moved\nto observe<\/a>: \u201cSometimes I think this country would be\nbetter off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out\nto sea.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

President\nTrump may be forgiven for feeling the same way about California, a state that\ngets the president\u2019s goat<\/a> more than any other. He lost the state by\nabout two to one in 2016, and a new poll by the Institute of Governmental Studies<\/a> at the\nUniversity of California, Berkeley, says he\u2019s likely to do even worse next\ntime, maybe falling short of even 30 percent of the vote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile,\nhe is being hammered on a regular basis by California\u2019s energetic attorney\ngeneral, Xavier Becerra. As of late last month, Mr. Becerra had filed or joined 60 lawsuits<\/a> against the Trump\nadministration, on issues ranging from the environment to immigration to the\ncensus, where legal action by California and other states blocked the\nadministration\u2019s effort to add a citizenship question to the census survey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For\nthe last few weeks, Mr. Trump has been deep into retaliation mode, occasionally\nfor reasons of policy, more often out of pique. His decision last month to try to revoke<\/a> California\u2019s historic right to set\nits own fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards was largely a policy\nmatter, part and parcel of his effort to roll back President Obama\u2019s aggressive\nclean car rules. That effort would be rendered incomplete as long as California\nmaintained the right to set its own higher standards, which govern a huge chunk\nof the car market now and would do so going forward unless somehow Mr. Trump,\nin plain violation<\/a> of the original Clean Air Act,\ngot rid of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two\nother recent actions by the administration seem more spiteful. On Sept. 24,\nAndrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent a letter<\/a> to the state accusing<\/a> it of failing to meet federal air\nquality standards and threatening to withhold billions in federal highway funds\nif California did not do more to clean up its air. Two days later<\/a>, Mr. Wheeler sent another letter<\/a> charging California officials with failing\nto address multiple instances of discharges exceeding federal standards under\nthe Clean Water Act, including pollution from trash, drug paraphernalia and\nhuman waste left on the pavement by homeless people in big cities like San\nFrancisco and Los Angeles. (Mr. Trump has blasted state officials<\/a> for being too tolerant of\nthe homeless, but has offered no concrete solutions and actually cut funding\nfor housing in his recent budgets.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nis true that California has dirty air. According to the American Lung\nAssociation, seven of the country\u2019s 10 metropolitan areas<\/a> with\nthe worst ozone or smog pollution are in California. There are several reasons:\nCalifornia has a warm climate, a lot of people and vehicles, huge agriculture\nand fossil fuel industries, and mountainous terrain that traps pollutants in\nthe skies above populous areas. California has long been aware of the problem;\nthat is, in fact, precisely the reason it asked the federal government for\npermission, in the late 1960s, to set its own strict air pollution standards,\npermission the Trump administration is now seeking to revoke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But\nno similar threats were sent to three dozen other states that, according to The Washington Post<\/a>, contain counties that failed\nto meet those national benchmarks for air pollution. Nor were any threatening\nletters sent to the estimated 3,500 community water systems<\/a> elsewhere in the\ncountry that failed to comply with federal water quality standards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\nwhat, really, is the purpose of Mr. Wheeler\u2019s public scoldings? To portray\nCalifornians as uniquely irresponsible? To deflect criticism from Mr. Trump\u2019s\nown sorry environmental record? It\u2019s hard to tell, but knowing Mr. Trump and\nhis jealousies, he must hate it that when the world seeks evidence that America\ncares about climate change, it looks to state capitals like Sacramento and\nAlbany and Olympia, and not Mr. Trump\u2019s Washington. Also, Hillary Clinton\u2019s four million vote margin<\/a> in the state more than accounted for his national popular vote loss<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile,\nas Mr. Trump\u2019s handmaiden, Mr. Wheeler has done the reputation of his agency no\nfavors. There have been times in the E.P.A.\u2019s long and controversial life when\nit fell down on the job by abdicating its regulatory responsibilities, as it\ndid during Ann Gorsuch<\/a>\u2019s reign under President Ronald\nReagan. There have been times when it has been accused of overreach simply for\ncarrying out its responsibilities under the nation\u2019s basic environmental laws.\nBut never, so far as we can recall, has it been so obviously deployed as an\ninstrument of political retribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Californians\nfear that more such warfare lies ahead. Rumors abound in Sacramento that Mr.\nTrump is poised to use the federal Endangered Species Act to roll back\nprotections for California\u2019s migratory salmon and other species by pumping more\nwater from California\u2019s Central Valley to farms and cities. To preserve the\ndelicate balance now in place, the State Legislature last month approved a remarkable bill<\/a> that would have\nallowed the state\u2019s own endangered species protections to override anything\nthat Mr. Trump proposed to do. Though a strong environmentalist, Gov. Gavin\nNewsom vetoed the bill<\/a> because he said it would limit\nhis own efforts to find a compromise among the water users. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even so, the Legislature\u2019s action sends a strong message to Mr. Trump: Leave us and our environment alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

alifornians don’t vote for Trump, and he’s showing them what he can do about it. The Editorial Board, NY Times In 1961, at a news conference three years before he became the Republican presidential nominee, […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[83,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-13193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13195,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13193\/revisions\/13195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}