Ideology kills

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Scott Pruitt, mass murderer..

He’s also taken some highly unusual, even paranoid, precautions, armoring himself with a 24/7 security detail, building a $25,000 secret phone booth in his office, spending $9,000 to sweep his office for surveillance bugs, and hiding his schedule from the public. When one employee turned one of the celebratory posters around, Pruitt assigned a worker to look through security camera records to see who did it, Newsweek reported. Pruitt’s posters are a list of the regulatory rollbacks he’s delivered to his allies in coal, oil, gas, and chemicals industries. These gifts include the reversal of a ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to developmental problems in children.

Some of the biggest changes Pruitt has made at the EPA have come by not doing anything at all. He’s steering the EPA’s work at an agonizingly slow pace,delaying and slowing the implementation of laws and running interference for many of the sectors EPA is supposed to regulate. With more staff and funding cuts looming, even fewer toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards will be measured, and the statues that protect against them won’t be enforced.. “People will get sick and die,” Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, told Vox. “It’s that simple.” Some 230,000 Americans already die each year due to hazardous chemical exposures. “You stop enforcing those regulations and that number will go way up,” she said.

Under his leadership, the EPA already has tried to roll back at least 19 environmental regulations, from undoing proposed greenhouse gas regulations to relaxing standards for ozone pollution. 

The EPA is essentially an environmental public health agency. Its regulations directly affect millions of Americans as it diagnoses ailments in the air, water, and soil, to name a few, and prescribes solutions. It has had a pretty great track record. The Clean Air Act, for example, reduced conventional air pollutants by 70 percent since 1970. Substances like ozone, carbon monoxide, and lead have dangerous consequences for human health like heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory arrests. According to one estimate, the legislation prevents 184,000 premature deaths each year and has saved $22 trillion in health care costs over a period of 20 years.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is slowly strangling his agency - Vox

Keeping Americans safe!

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And of course the "Freedom" caucus is against any form of gun control

Some of President Donald Trump’s biggest fans in Congress — members of the conservative Freedom Caucus — are worried he’s taking gun control too far. As the deadly shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school, which killed 17 and injured more than a dozen others, sparks a national conversation around gun control, the White House is pushing Congress to actually pass gun control measures. But a group of the House’s most conservative and Tea Party-sympathetic lawmakers are concerned the momentum might be headed in the wrong direction, and they’re cooking up alternatives to rein in the president. “We’re pretty sure they’re going to do something just for the sake of doing something,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) said, leaving a raucous debate between Freedom Caucus members on how to address the White House’s gun control push. Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) said members were shocked by where Trump was willing to go on gun control.

The Freedom Caucus is fighting to rein in Trump on gun control - Vox

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The story of Medicaid so far has been of gradual expansion, from the absolutely most vulnerable Americans to a broader social safety net for all Americans in or near poverty. But now, under Trump, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have signaled that they are open to unprecedented policy changes, most notably requirements that many Medicaid beneficiaries either work or look for work. The Trump administration could initiate the most dramatic reductions in Medicaid enrollment and spending since the program began, even though Trump as a presidential candidate promised he would not cut Medicaid.

The precise consequences are difficult to project. But states seeking waivers for work requirements and other restrictions are estimating as much as an 8 percent or 15 percent cut to their Medicaid rolls. Not every Medicaid recipient, not even most, will be subjected to some of these harsher rules. But there is a sizable population who could soon face a real risk of losing health coverage..

Trump’s hidden war on Medicaid - Vox

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Response of a Republican to hundreds of thousands of young protesters against gun violence:

‘How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that.’ That’s what former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum had to say Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” about students protesting for gun control legislation in “March for Our Lives” events across the country a day earlier. “They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” Santorum continued. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?’”

Rick Santorum to Parkland students: Stop protesting and learn CPR - MarketWatch

Amazing stuff..

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We kept saying that the focus on Pruitt's scandals, as manifold as they are, isn't the main issue. It's his destruction of the EPA and its duties to protect the environment and, ultimately, lives:

Thursday morning’s hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was supposed to be all about Scott Pruitt, the embattled head of the Environmental Protection Agency. But it also turned out to be about Drew Wynne. Wynne was 31 years old when he died last October, after using paint stripper containing the toxic chemical methylene chloride. The EPA proposed a ban on methylene chloride shortly before President Barack Obama left office last year. In December, however, Pruitt’s EPA indefinitely delayed that ban.

“Mr. Pruitt, your deregulatory agenda cost lives,” New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone said, after recounting Wynne’s story. Last month, Wynne’s family called Pruitt’s decision “a terrible mistake” and urged him to finalize the ban. Pallone also entered into the record a letter he received from the family of Joshua Atkins, a 31-year-old who died in February after using a common paint stripper on his bike. “You have the power to finalize the ban on methylene chloride now and prevent more deaths, but you haven’t done it,” Pallone said. “Do you have anything to say to these families?”

Pruitt was well-prepared to defend himself over the many ethics scandals surrounding him. He was less prepared for this line of questioning. He said his staff was “reviewing” the proposed ban, adding that “there has been no decision at this time.” Pallone scoffed. “Obviously, you have nothing to say to these families.”

For instance: the hundreds of households in Chicago with dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water. Congressman Bobby Rush of Illinois noted that Pruitt twice delayed a rule to reduce lead in drinking water; twice delayed another rule on lead paint in commercial buildings; and recently proposed a rule to limit the number of human health studies that can be used at the EPA. “These important studies are critical in identifying potential risks to public health, including those related to lead contamination,” Rush said.

The Democrats also highlighted victims of climate change, such as Bill Taylor, a fisherman who owns Seattle-based Taylor Shellfish.Congressman Derek Kilmer of Washington said Taylor’s business “is constantly threatened by algal blooms and acidic waters.” He also mentioned Fawn Sharp, the president of the Quinault Indian Nation, who is planning to relocate her entire village due to sea-level rise and intensified storms. Kilmer then cited Pruitt’s rollback of the Clean Power Plan, and Pruitt’s comments from February in which he said climate change could “help humans flourish.”

Scott Pruitt Is Forced to Confront Reality | The New Republic

Ideology kills..

[Admin]

The department argued in court on Thursday that key components of the Obama-era law are unconstitutional.  The DOJ argued that ObamaCare’s protections against people with pre-existing conditions being denied coverage or charged more should be invalidated, maintaining that the individual mandate that people have insurance or face a tax penalty is now unconstitutional. Sessions' move marks a break in the DOJ normally federal laws when they are challenged in court.

Sessions sends letter to Ryan explaining rationale for not defending ObamaCare | TheHill

So the DOJ is attacking its own laws, with potentially devastating consequences for millions of people..

And he's a hypocrite of course as well, arguing in 2011 that the DOJ should defend existing laws or if not, the head of the DOJ should resign:

Back in February 2011, President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder announced that his DOJ would no longer defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (commonly known as “DOMA,” it was a 1996 law that prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages). Outraged, GOP leaders criticized the move as an abdication of the DOJ’s duty and some urged Holder’s resignation and budget cuts to the department. A House resolution condemning the decision garnered 123 sponsors and co-sponsors, including then-Reps. Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Mick Mulvaney. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, then a Republican presidential hopeful, even briefly floated the possibility of presidential impeachment.

The anti-LGBTQ Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama, was among the most vocal. At a March 2011 confirmation hearing for the Solicitor General, he said that Holder should have stood up to Obama and resigned, rather that stopping his DOMA defense. “[T]he Attorney General should have told the President, ‘I know you may have changed your mind, Mr. President, but this is a statutory law passed by the Congress of the United States, it’s been upheld Constitutionally and it has to be defended. We cannot fail to defend that statute. And then what happens? I think what happens is the President says, ‘okay, I wish we could….’ And I think he would have backed off. If not, then you have to resign.””

This 2011 quote from Jeff Sessions just became really awkward – ThinkProgress

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Speaking of "keeping Americans safe" 

During President Donald Trump’s first year in office, the number of uninsured Americans increased by an estimated 3.2 million. That’s the conclusion of a new Gallup-Sharecare poll, which noted that the uninsured rate in the fourth quarter of 2017—12.2%—is 1.3 percentage points higher than the record low of 10.9% in the final quarter of 2016. That’s the largest single-year increase since Gallup and Sharecare started tracking the uninsured rate in 2008. However, it’s still a lot lower than the 18% high seen in 2013—before the Affordable Care Act’s main insurance market reforms went into effect.

Uninsured rate rises during Trump's first year in office | FierceHealthcare

A part of these 3.2M people are going to get sick and a part of these will face serious consequences for not having coverage, like medical debts or even bankruptcies, or avoidable health complications or even death.

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The Trump administration has agreed in part, saying the mandate and the law’s popular protections for preexisting conditions should be nullified in a recently filed legal brief. “Those parts that the court explicitly upheld under the taxing power, the Department of Justice conceded, under the court’s reasoning, no longer had a constitutional basis,” Cruz, who studied law at Harvard and served as Texas’s solicitor general before coming to Congress, told me. “I think that is a reasonable position for the Justice Department to take.” “I think the consequence if the court agrees with the state of Texas’s lawsuit will be that consumers will have more choices, more competition, more options, more individual freedom and lower premiums,” he continued. “That’s a win for health care consumers across the country.”

The left-leaning Urban Institute just estimated that the number of uninsured Americans would jump to 51 million, a 50 percent increase, if the Texas case were successful and the entire law were found unconstitutional. Legal experts, on the right and the left, have said that the Trump administration’s position in the case is “absurd” and “ludicrous” because if Congress had intended to invalidate the preexisting conditions rules along with the mandate penalty in the tax bill, they would have. A senior career Justice Department attorney also resigned following the administration’s decision not to defend the health care law, as the Washington Post reported.

Ted Cruz defends lawsuit to overturn Obamacare preexisting condition rules - Vox

Killing Obamacare will kill many people, throw others into medical bankruptcy and/or set them up with avoidable medical conditions..

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Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which gave millions of low-income adults access to health insurance, was linked to a 6 percent reduction in opioid overdose death rates — potentially preventing thousands of deaths — according to a new study in JAMA Network Open.
The study looked at what happened in counties in states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act by 2017, compared to counties in states that didn’t expand Medicaid, accounting for variables like demographic and policy differences. The Medicaid expansion was made optional in a 2012 Supreme Court ruling, and only 32 states and Washington, DC, had opted to expand by the study period (with the total rising to 37 in the past few years).
The study helps put to rest claims by some Republican lawmakers, particularly Sen. Ron Johnson (WI), that the Medicaid expansion made the opioid crisis worse by expanding access to painkillers. The new study, echoing others before it, suggests the Medicaid expansion had the opposite effect, and that there wasn’t a link between the expansion and more deaths caused by painkillers, with the possible — and relatively uncommon — exception of methadone used in pain treatment.

Medicaid expansion linked to 6% reduction in opioid overdose deaths - Vox

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After a drawn-out battle between a Democratic governor and Republican legislature, the conservative Wisconsin supreme court issued a last-minute order telling confused election officials to proceed with the state’s primary election – despite a pandemic. With coronavirus numbers in Wisconsin up sharply in recent days, the court’s decision risks sending countless (Democratic) voters to early and painful deaths. In contrast to the 15 states which have postponed primary elections, Wisconsin alone will send voters to the polls in April.

The decision is mind-boggling. It gets even worse: on Tuesday, the entire city of Milwaukee had just five polling places, down from the usual 180. Officials were reportedly preparing for as many as 10,000 people at each one. How could this be possible? The last few weeks have brought us irrefutable evidence that self-quarantine and social distancing save lives. Conversely, allowing normal gatherings to go forward – like New Orleans Mardi Gras, the Michigan primary, even a single party of jet-setters in Connecticut – leads to soaring death rates.

Wisconsin decided to allow people to vote this week. People will die as a result | Sandy Tolan | Opinion | The Guardian