blog 2.5

1. In changing environmental policy, how much bureaucratic regulation has the Trump Administration reduced?
2. How has the Trump Administration changed America's approach to resource extraction?
3. What changes has the Trump Administration made to the Medicaid program?
4. What has been the result of these changes?
5. What policy changed has caused the biggest changes in the federal deficit?
6. How has the Securities and Exchange Commission changed its enforcement of regulations about the stock market?
7. What impact have Trump's policies had on the banking industry?
8. What are three actions Trump has taken to change immigration enforcement?
9. What impact have Trump's policy changes had on refugee resettlement in America?
10. How do Trump's appointments to Circuit Courts compare to Obama's time in office?
1. A major trend of Trump-era policymaking has been to roll back environmental regulation. This involves going through the process of promulgating new rules that are far more lax than those they replace. The New York Times has identified 53 separate rules that have completed the rollback process and 32 more that are still in the works. 
2. It’s not unusual for Republican administrations to take a more skeptical view of environmental regulation, but the Trump administration really has been more uniformly aggressive on this front than its predecessors, as seen by criticism of the Trump Environmental Protection Agency by several of the agency’s Reagan- and Bush-era chiefs. Tendency toward recklessness with regard to politics and public opinion obscured in part by the large volume of coverage dedicated to Trump scandals and Trump’s personal behavior.
3.  Allow states to impose work requirements on their Medicaid programs.
4. uninsurance rates have risen steadily under trump despite improving labor market because of lack of interest in vigorous implementation of affordable care act 
5. tax cuts and jobs act of 2017 
6. brought 40% fewer regulatory actions 
7. trump's financial stability oversight council has removed Obama administration's designation of non-bank financial institutions as "systemically significant" and subject to strutter regulatory oversight. 
8. travel ban, outside of losing skirmish over funding for border wall, there have barely been any efforts to get congressional action on immigration 
9. cut refugee settlement by over 80%, made it more difficult to get H-1B visas for skilled workers and is in the process of stripping their spouses of work permits. 
10. trump has put 46 circuit court judges on the bench in three years compared. to Obama's 55 over eight years. 

blog 2.4 trump and social media

1. 1.6 million 
2. And instead of trying to persuade voters who live in the states that will decide 2020, he appears to instead be trying to rile up his base (and get their information if he doesn’t already have it). His campaign is using Facebook ads as a way to reinforce the narrative cycle from the White House, Republican lawmakers, and conservative media that impeachment is a political plot against the president by Democrats.
3. His ads, by and large, don’t deal with the substance of the allegations — that he and his administration tried to leverage US foreign policy to convince Ukraine to investigate a personal political rival — and instead push conspiracies. They are a way for the president’s reelection campaign to build voter lists, streamline in potential volunteers and donors, and keep public opinion from swinging too far out of Trump’s favor.
4. $284 million
5. Since running that first ad, Trump’s campaign has spent a small fortune on impeachment ads — nearly 30 percent of his total Facebook ad spend in that time.
6. The vast majority of that ad spending — 90 percent — was aimed at people over the age of 35, with nearly 30 percent of that spending geared toward people 65 and over.
7. What Trump is not doing is focusing impeachment ads — or Facebook ads in general — campaigns such as Trump’s lean heavily into trying to get people who already like him engaged and out to vote, and getting them riled up helps that. And that’s what Facebook’s algorithm is built to do: keep people engaged, often with content that reinforces their views or prompts a strong reaction.
8. Trump’s strategy on impeachment puts pressure on Republicans to hold the line. 
9. He has a vast campaign infrastructure and millions upon millions of dollars behind him. At the end of the third quarter of this year, his campaign had $83 million in cash on hand. The best-funded Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, has $33 million.
10. Warren, who called for Trump’s impeachment after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report this spring, is dedicating most of her Facebook impeachment spend to states with a lot of people. She’s list-building. And while her original messaging was around the Mueller report, she is now also running ads on the current impeachment inquiry in Congress- targeting the states Democrats most need to win if they want to defeat him next year: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 

Blog 2.2- Iowa Caucus

1. The dinner — historically the largest gathering of voters in Iowa — marked the beginning of a final push to the caucuses at a moment when support for a number of candidates has seen major shifts. For those who have benefitted from those changes, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the evening provided an opportunity to solidify that momentum; and for candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who have seen some erosion of support, the dinner was a chance to reenergize their base and make their cases to voters still undecided.
2. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll from late October found that 29 percent of voters are still undecided on who to choose. And a September Des Moines Register poll found that only about 20 percent of voters know for certain who they will caucus for.
3. Biden entered the race as the presumed frontrunner, and still leads in national polling; the Times/Sienna poll put him in fourth, however, behind Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg (in that order). Buttigieg has seen a large increase in support in recent Iowa polling, including in the Suffolk/USA Today survey, which put him in third.
4. At Friday’s event, Buttigieg worked to visualize that increasing support by filling 12 sections of the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, Iowa, which held more than 13,000 attendees this year, according to NBC News. Buttigieg gave an address that worked to cement his position as a centrist in contrast to Warren (in a recent interview, he said the primary would ultimately come down to him and the senator) and that endeavored to link himself to President Barack Obama, who gave an acclaimed address at the event in 2007.
5. Warren, who the Times poll found to be the current frontrunner, sought to remind voters about her ideas, and argued progressive policies were the way to energize voters both during the primary and the general election. And although Warren had released her plan to fund Medicare-for-all Friday following criticism for having previously failed to do so, she focused more on political ideology.
6. Sanders gave his usual stump speech on the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all and was the only top-tier candidate to not attack other opponents, according to the New York Times’ Sydney Ember and Reid J. Epstein. Unlike most of the other candidates, Sanders did not buy any seating for his supporters but instead hosted a watch party for them. He donated the $20,000 in ticket fees to the Iowa Democratic Party. 
7. February 3rd. 

Blog 2.3- Virgina's Election results ...

1. Last week, democrats took control of both state's legislative bodies on Tuesday, and have said they plan to ratify the ERA which would make Virginia the 38th and finial state. 

2. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

3. In the first year after the amendment was passed, 22 states ratified it.  Indiana became the 35th state to ratify the ERA in 1977. Then its momentum stalled. After lying dormant for decades, the ERA has begun to gain momentum in recent years. Nevada ratified it in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and now Virginia appears to be on the cusp of doing so.

4. A 38th state ratifying the ERA wouldn’t be the end of it. It’s 37 years past the deadline Congress set for it to become a constitutional amendment: Congress originally set a 1979 deadline, and when that date hit, the amendment only had 35 ratifications. Congress extended the deadline to 1982, but it missed that as well.

5. Congress put a seven-year deadline for ratifying the ERA in 1972. 
6. Virginia got close to ratifying the ERA last year, but the GOP-controlled legislature ultimately rejected it. A House committee refused to take it up, and a Senate panel defeated it 9 to 5. Men cast all of the “no” votes. With Democrats in control, hopes are high that next time around will be different.
7. It’s 37 years past the deadline Congress set for it to become a constitutional amendment: Congress originally set a 1979 deadline, and when that date hit, the amendment only had 35 ratifications. Congress extended the deadline to 1982, but it missed that as well. Still, there are some potential workarounds. A 2013 report said Congress could just vote to change the previous deadline.Rep. Jackie Speier and Sen. Ben Cardin introduced legislation in 2017 that would remove the ratification deadline for the ERA. 

8. In 1982, an undergraduate student, Gregory Watson, figured out that the amendment could still be ratified and started what would eventually become a successful grassroots campaign to ratify, in 1992, the 27th Amendment.

Blog 2.1-Impeachment

1. Months after the impeachment, Clinton hadn’t just survived the impeachment process — he had managed to weather it with high approval ratings and the backing of his party.2. For one thing, the case against Clinton hinged on the findings in Starr’s report. By contrast, today’s Democrats didn’t choose to orient their inquiry around findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that examined misconduct by Trump: They are instead building a case against the president in real time, which makes it harder to predict where the public will ultimately land. Also, many Americans saw Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky as a “private matter,” but Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is much more clearly tied to his role as commander-in-chief. So it’s entirely possible that the public will be less forgiving this time.3.  By the time the House of Representatives voted to open an impeachment inquiry against Clinton in October 1998, the allegations against the president had been in the news for months. Clinton had publicly confessed to the affair in August, and in mid-September, Starr delivered his lengthy and salacious report — which included a case for impeaching Clinton — to Congress. By the time this formal announcement came, Clinton was popular and impeachment was not. 4. In mid-August 1998, an ABC News poll found that only 38 percent of Republicans thought Clinton should be impeached and removed from office. But by the time the House had voted to impeach him, about two-thirds of Republicans were on board. The GOP’s attacks, though, didn’t seem to have the effect of boosting overall support for impeachment; if anything, it just resulted in a widening partisan divide.5. It wasn’t always clear that Democrats would stand by Clinton. Some distanced themselves from the president in the lead-up to the midterm elections; others even questioned whether he should resign. The initial vote to refer Starr’s report to the House Judiciary Committee for further investigation passed by an overwhelming margin. And when the House voted a few weeks later to open a formal impeachment inquiry, 31 moderate Democrats were in support. 6. When it was the Senate’s turn to decide whether Clinton should remain in office, only Republicans crossed the aisle, with 10 GOP senators voting to acquit Clinton on at least one of the charges.7. With no committed Republican support so far, it’s very difficult to argue that there aren’t partisan elements to the investigation. And as with the Clinton impeachment, Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided about the president’s conduct, which could make it difficult to build a true consensus around impeachment. 8. The Democrats’ inquiry is different, though, in that they don’t have a completed investigation like Starr’s. Democrats had an opportunity to frame an impeachment inquiry around a completed special counsel investigation after the exhaustive findings in Mueller’s report became public, but only moved forward with impeachment after the Ukraine allegations presented a new scandal and an evolving set of facts to pursue. As a result, they may be able to avoid (or at least mitigate) the perception that they were just looking for an excuse to impeach Trump, especially as new evidence continues to emerge.8.  While the allegations against Clinton were personal and moral, the conduct at issue in Trump’s case is much more closely linked to his power as president, which could mean the public will be less inclined to dismiss it as human error.

impeachment and the public blog 1.6

1. The polling we have so far mostly shows an uptick in support for impeachment. But according to the initial polls at least, public opinion doesn’t seem to have shifted dramatically from where it was following both the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on April 18 and Mueller’s testimony before Congress on July 24. The majority of Americans still do not favor impeachment, although more than two-thirds of Democrats do.
2. A  majority of Americans do disapprove of Trump’s actions. A YouGov/Economist poll released Wednesday found that 52 percent of Americans said it is inappropriate for the president to request a foreign government open an investigation into a potential political opponent. 
3. In that same poll, 62 percent of Americans said that it is inappropriate for the president to threaten withholding foreign aid to a country if it refuses to “take an action which personally benefits the President.”
4. In the Quinnipiac University poll that came out after the publication of the Mueller report, 54 percent of Americans thought Trump had “attempted to derail or obstruct the investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election,” and 46 percent thought Trump had committed crimes while president, but only 29 percent said Congress should begin the impeachment process.
5. All of this polling is really preliminary. Even over the course of this week, a lot has happened that the polls don’t account for. 
6. Not all of these polls capture changes in public opinion following Pelosi’s announcement of an official impeachment inquiry, nor do they capture public reactions to the memo of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky that the White House released on Wednesday. And none of them factor in the testimony of Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire before Congress on Thursday morning.
7. According to a Marist poll conducted Wednesday, 32 percent of Americans said they weren’t closely following news about the impeachment inquiry
8. A Selzer poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa showed Sen. Elizabeth Warren as the first choice of 22 percent of voters, putting her neck-and-neck with former Vice President Joe Biden, who had 20 percent support. Bernie Sanders came in third with 11 percent. The poll, which was sponsored by the Des Moines Register, CNN and Mediacom, has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points, which means Warren and Biden are more or less tied.

Blog 1.5 Congress and POTUS

1. Nancy is the Speaker of the House. 
2. Alleged Trump engaged in an improper conversation with a foreign leader was made public last week. 
3. Congress should push to amend the Justice Department’s guidance that says a sitting president cannot be indicted by passing a law that makes the procedure for indictment explicit. “A president should be indicted, if he’s committed a wrongdoing — any president,” Pelosi said.
4. Nancy Pelosi did put her support behind current investigations being carried out by various House committees, saying Congress has a duty to abide by “the facts and the law.” She said that the investigations have been stymied by the executive branch’s lack of cooperation and by the White House’s declarations of executive privilege, arguing that both are simply more evidence that new laws are needed. 
5. Pelosi said that this case already reveals at least one violation of the law, because Joseph Maguire, the director of national intelligence, declined to relay the whistleblower’s complaint to Congress, as is required by law.
6. Adam Schiff is the House Intelligence Committee chair. 
7. Moderate Democrats and those representing swing districts have warned the speaker that moving forward on impeachment would alienate their voters.
8. American voters, including Democratic voters, are themselves divided on the subject of impeachment. According to recent polling by Politico and Morning Consult, 37 percent of voters support impeachment, while half outright oppose it. Predictably, the support comes nearly entirely from Democratic voters: about 70 percent of Democratic respondents said they support impeachment proceedings, while just 6 percent of Republican voters said the same.

Judicial Impeachmet

1. A majority of the House must approve an indictment to impeach and two-thirds supermajority of the US Senate must convict for the judge or justice to lose their office. 
2. The House has, in the course of federal history, impeached 13 judges, and the Senate has convicted and removed eight. Of those convicted, seven were district judges.
3. Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provides for the removal of “the President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States … on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
4. Focusing on the five most recent cases in which judges were impeached, from 1986 to present, impeachment and removal typically comes in cases of clear, criminal wrongdoing. Harry Claiborne was impeached and removed in 1986, two years after receiving a two-year prison sentence for falsifying income tax returns. Alcee Hastings, who has since become a representative from Florida, was removed in 1989 for receiving a $150,000 bribe to reduce prison sentences for members of the mob. Walter Nixon was removed in 1989, three years after receiving a five-year prison sentence for perjury. Before his impeachment in 2009, Samuel Kent pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and sentenced to 33 months in prison for lying about his sexual abuse of female employees. G. Thomas Porteous stood accused of accepting bribes from lawyers with business before him, and of failing to recuse himself from cases involving people who allegedly bribed him.
5. Kavanaugh and Thomas both have enthusiastic supporters in the Senate, and it’s doubtful that enough Republicans would defect to make removal viable.
6. The precedents in this country, as they have developed, reflect the fact that conduct which may not constitute a crime, but which may still be serious misbehavior bringing disrepute upon the public office involved, may provide a sufficient ground for impeachment. What constitutes an impeachable offense is less than completely fair so it may be whatever the House and Senate think it is. 

preparing for the Iowa caucus

1. The Iowa Democratic Party planned to hold a "virtual caucus" over a phone system alongside the regular caucus this February.
2. The DNC will recommend rejecting, per a statement from the Democratic Party, since these phone systems could be susceptible to hackers. 
3. The reason a virtual caucus system came into existence in the first place was the DNC responding to longtime criticism that Iowa’s caucus should be accessible to voters who can’t show up in-person. The DNC mandated that Iowa and Nevada — the two early states left with caucuses rather than primaries — find a way to become more accessible. Now, the national party is nixing its virtual caucus plans. Some fear the fallout could end the Iowa caucuses as we know them and have dramatic effects on the nomination process as a whole.
4. Iowa is the first state to vote in the primary calendar, which shows which candidates have momentum and which don't. Iowa also does not decide who will be president, but they decide who will not in part because of the media narrative that is shown after the primary election. 
5. Caucuses have always been controversial because they are long, complicated affairs where caucus-goers meet and literally sort themselves into groups based on the candidates they support. Unlike the relative ease of a primary election, caucuses can take hours and exclude people who cannot show up on caucus night if they have disabilities, are elderly, or just have job or childcare commitments. 
6. More people participating in the caucus process in recent elections has led to an accessibility issue for many and the caucuses are getting unwieldy due to the number of people coming. 
7. Many are arguing that this new form of caucus could be manipulated because of the voters voting over the phone and the risk of hacking as well as how these votes would be counted and how they would be accounted for. When the Rules and Bylaws Committee in San Francisco met earlier this month they tested the system and found it could be easily y hacked, a major worry for many people. 
8. Iowa loves its first-in-the-nation caucus status, and there’s a huge barrier to Iowa moving to a primary: New Hampshire. New Hampshire has long claimed the nation’s first primary (which Iowa has worked around with a caucus), something it’s been able to hang onto for years because of a certain state law. 
9. New Hampshire ensures it is the first primary with a law that saw that if any other state tries to move its primary before New Hampshire, it allows New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner to change the primary date, moving it a week before the other state, which causes a problem for Iowa to change to primary. 

Marijuana Law Issues

1. More than a quarter of the US population now lives in a state that allows marijuana for nonmusical purposes. 
2. In 2012, Colorado and Washington state became the first states to vote to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. 
3. Vermont and Washington, DC do not allow marijuana sales for recreational purposes, meaning it's not legal to buy and sell pot in either jurisdiction, although residents in both places can legally grow it. In DC, the allowance of "gifting" has led to some vendors selling products like  Each state where marijuana is legal has laws for people 21 and older. They allow marijuana, with a limit on how many plants are allowed and there is variation in how much someone can legally possess. In the other states that have legalized marijuana, legal sales are on their way or already underway; however, local jurisdictions can decline to allow marijuana sales within their borders. Some states that have legalized marijuana have also erased criminal records for past marijuana offenses. 

4. Marijuana legalization is generally taken to represent the removal of all government-enforced penalties for possessing and using marijuana. In most, but not all, cases, legalization also paves the way for the legal sales and home-growing of marijuana. Decriminalization generally eliminates jail or prison time for limited possession of marijuana, but some other penalties remain in place, treating a minor marijuana offense more like a minor traffic violation. You would still get a fine for possessing or selling an amount within the decriminalized limits. States with stricter decriminalization laws can also attach some jail or prison time to possessing larger amounts of marijuana, sales, or trafficking. 

5. The ACLU found that there are several hundred thousand arrests for marijuana possession each year and these arrests cost law enforcement time and money, as well as damaging the government's credibility. 

6. A major concern if marijuana is legalized is that letting for-profit businesses - "Big Marijuana" - market and sell cannabis may lead them to market aggressively to heavy pot users, who may have a drug problem which. is what happened in the alcohol and tobacco industries. 

7. Support for marijuana legalization rose from 12 percent in 1969 to 31 percent in 2000 to 66 percent  in 2018. A 2014 survey found 63 percent of Americans agree states should move away from harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, and 67 percent said drug policy should focus more on providing treatment over prosecuting drug users. Overall this shows, Americans are fed up with drug and criminal justice policies that have contributed to higher incarceration rates while doing little to solve ongoing drug crises. 

8. The federal government classifies marijuana as a schedule 1 drug, meaning it's perceived to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. That classification puts marijuana in the same category as heroin and a more restrictive category as heroin and a more restrictive category that schedule 2 drugs like cocaine and meth. This means that the federal government doesn't see marijuana and heroin as equally dangerous or that it considers it more dangerous than meth or cocaine, this means that marijuana has a high potential for abuse. 

9. The Obama administration, thought the federal government has also taken a relaxed approach to marijuana legalization at the state level, generally letting states do as they wish as long as they met certain criteria (such as not letting legal pot fall into kids' hands or cross state line.) The Trump Administration suggested it would take a tougher line under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but current Attorney General William Barr backed off the tougher approach and said he would more ore less go back to the Obama-era policies. 

10. Pot’s criminal classification at the federal level has other serious ramifications for marijuana policy even in places where state law says the drug is legal. Many state-legal marijuana businesses, for instance, must function as cash-only enterprises, since many banks are nervous about dealing with businesses that are essentially breaking federal law. Businesses also can’t file for several deductions, and, as a result, their effective income tax rates can soar to as high as 90 percent or more. 

David Koch

1. The Koch brothers supported "liberty" or "economic freedom." They spent a good amount of money funding and promoting these ideas in academia; however, these ideas often coincided with their business and financial interests because Koch Industries is a major oil refining and chemical conglomerate. They fought any policies aimed at reining in carbon emissions and combating climate change, since it would be bad for their business. They opposed the government and wanted environmental regulations.

2. Fred C. Koch founded an oil refinery company, then in the 1960s his health began to fail and he gave Charles a larger role in running things at the company. After their father's death, Charles transformed his father's company into the behemoth Koch Industries that made him and David two of the richest people in the world. 

3. Years before the 1980 presidential election, Charles and David became increasingly interested in libertarian ideas on economics and began devoting money to those causes. In the 1980 presidential election, David Koch was on the ballot as the nominee for Vice President of the US Libertarian Party. This set him and his brother apart from both major political parties. Following this, they founded and funded academic institutions and academic programs to spread ideas, as well as nonprofit groups to try and build support for those ideas and pressure Congress and state legislatures. After they began seeing third-party as pointless, they became major Republican donors. 

4. Obama was trying to pass both a major expansion of government health care spending and a cap-and-trade bill designed to rein in carbon emissions and combat climate change. Charles Koch saw this agenda as an assault on American freedom and that Democrats' policies threaten to erode our economic freedom.The Democrats' cap-and-trade bill passed in the house, but after widespread backlash from many groups including Koch-funded groups, it was never brought for a vote in the Senate. After Obamacare passes, the Kochs helped that many Democrats who voted for it would pay a price through a broad effort to help Republicans win in the 2010 midterms. 

5. Koch's spent money on a complex web of dark money groups organizing and ads which was extremely successful and the GOP won enormous gains in the House and in state legislatures in 2010, which helped shape the next decade of American politics. 

first post

first post