DISPATCHES

NRA TRIES TO DISTANCE ITSELF FROM RUSSIA BY HIRING MAN KNOWN FOR WORKING WITH FOREIGN ADVERSARIES.

For an organization currently swamped with questions about its relationship with Russian donors, the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) announcement (5/7), naming Oliver “Ollie” North as its next president, was a strange move.

After all, there are few figures in modern American history more closely tied to instances of working with foreign adversaries — and then lying about it, ad nauseum — than North, Casey Michel noted at ThinkProgress (5/7). Nor are there any other groups, outside of those affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, that have gotten as much recent attention for their bizarre ties with Russian funding sources.

“A trade association for the arms industry now will be headed by the most famous arms-trafficker in American history,” Charles P. Pierce wrote at Esquire.com.

North has flown under the radar over the past few years, appearing primarily on conservative radio and Fox News. But he is best known for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, which rocked Ronald Reagan’s second term and is often cited as the most prominent executive scandal since the days of Watergate — until the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia at least.

Briefly, the scandal involved the Reagan administration selling illegal arms to the Iranian regime, which had kept Americans hostage until Reagan was elected and inaugurated, in what former Iranian President Bani Sadr said was the payoff of a deal between the Reagan campaign and Ayatollah Khomeini. A significant amount of the money generated from those sales was then redirected to the far-right Contras in Nicaragua. All of these dealings were kept from the American public, which only learned about the developments after a Congressional investigation into the transfers.

North, then working for the National Security Council, played a central role in the sale of arms to Iran and reallocating funds to the Contras — despite the fact that Congress had passed legislation barring any aid to the group. When the revelations came to light, North was fired. He would later be sentenced on multiple counts, including destroying relevant documents and the obstruction of Congress.

The convictions were later overturned and never seemed to dampen North’s reputation — at least among American right-wing circles. (Reagan would, at one point, describe North as a “hero.”) As such, the fact that he was selected as NRA president is as unsurprising as it is indicative.

The timing of North’s hiring presents its own raft of questions — especially given the rolling revelations about the NRA’s relationship with a Russian official accused of massive money laundering, as well as Russian donations that may have been funneled to the Trump campaign.

North was something of a Russia hawk over the past few years, criticizing the Obama administration’s response to Moscow’s aggression over the past few years.

However, his position seems to have softened somewhere under the Trump administration. While North, unlike outgoing NRA President Pete Brownell, hasn’t taken recent trips to Moscow to meet with Russian officials already sanctioned by the US, North suggested last year that Trump may be able to circumvent American sanctions against Russia — much as the Reagan administration did with Iran.

TRUMP EXPLORING NEW WAYS TO HURT PEOPLE. President Trump is sending a plan to Congress that calls for stripping more than $15 billion in previously approved spending, with the hope that it will temper conservative angst over ballooning budget deficits, the Washington Post reported (5/7).

Almost half of the proposed cuts would come from two accounts within the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that White House officials said expired last year or are not expected to be drawn upon. An additional $800 million in cuts would come from money created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to test innovative payment and service delivery models.

Those are just a handful of the more than 30 programs the White House is proposing to Congress for “rescission,” a process of culling back money that was previously authorized. Once the White House sends the request to Congress, lawmakers have 45 days to vote on the plan or a scaled-back version of it through a simple majority vote, avoiding a Senate filibuster.

This is after Republicans passed over $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy last December.

“Let’s be honest about what this is: President Trump and Republicans in Congress are looking to tear apart the bipartisan [CHIP], hurting middle-class families and low-income children, to appease the most conservative special interests and feel better about blowing up the deficit to give the wealthiest few and biggest corporations huge tax breaks,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told the Post.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement, “After giving billionaires and corporations $1.5 trillion in tax breaks, what does President Trump do next? Call for cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It does not get much more disgraceful than that. We already have 28 million people in this country who have no health insurance. We cannot be in the business of making it harder for people, least of all children, to get the health care they need. We should be making health care guaranteed to everyone through Medicare for all.”

The government spent $3.98 trillion and brought in $3.32 trillion in revenue last year, leaving a deficit of $665 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The deficit this year is projected to widen to $804 billion and then hit $981 billion in 2019. In 2020, the government will record deficits that exceed $1 trillion annually unless changes are made.

REPORT: TRUMP TEAM HIRED SPY FIRM FOR ‘DIRTY OPS’ ON IRAN DEAL. People connected to Donald Trump hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the London Observer reported in the Guardian’s US edition (5/5)l.

People in the Trump camp contacted Black Cube, a private firm established by former Israeli intel analysts, in May 2017 to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The revelations came days before Trump’s May 12 deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program.

Jack Straw, who as British foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.” According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

That Trump and those around him are capable of stooping to this kind of thing should surprise approximately nobody, Charles P. Pierce wrote at Esquire.com (5/7). “In fact, the suspicious mind wanders back to last week, when the president* talked about what he ‘had’ on Sen. Jon Tester [D-Mont.]. And then there’s John Kerry, the former Secretary of State who brokered the Iranian deal on behalf of the Obama administration. On May 4, the Boston Globe ran a story that said Kerry was engaging in back-channel diplomacy to try and save the Iran deal. This has sent the flying monkeys aloft in full cry. They want Kerry tried under the Logan Act.”

Here is what the Globe story said:

“He sat down at the United Nations with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings. With the Iran deal facing its gravest threat since it was signed in 2015, Kerry has been on an aggressive yet stealthy mission to preserve it, using his deep lists of contacts gleaned during his time as the top US diplomat to try to apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside. President Trump, who has consistently criticized the pact and campaigned in 2016 on scuttling it, faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue abiding by its terms.”

Pierce added, “I hate playing Guess The Source, but you can’t help but notice that the gist of the Globe story is, on a grander scale, exactly the kind of information that the Guardian said the security firm was trying to get on Rhodes and Kahl. A person ‘briefed on the meetings’? I wonder who briefed him, and why.

“Things were bound to get wild as the May 12 deadline approached for the president* to decide whether or not to abandon the deal. Bibi Netanyahu has gone full Cheney, bellowing ominously about Persian treachery and hidden weapons. Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, has said that the United States will suffer ‘historic regret’ if it bails on the deal. And now this, a foreign intel firm trying to cut the legs out from under political opponents.”

CONSUMERS WILL PAY FOR TRUMP SABOTAGE OF ACA. When Donald Trump took steps to sabotage Affordable Care Act, every relevant voice in the debate – insurers, hospitals, medical professionals, industry experts, et al – told the president that he would make things worse for the public. There’s fresh evidence that those warnings were correct.

Two of Virginia’s ObamaCare insurers are requesting significant premium hikes for 2019, according to initial filings released (5/4). Both Cigna and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield cited policies advocated by the Trump administration, including the repeal of ObamaCare’s individual mandate, as part of its justifications for the increases, The Hill reported.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said (5/1) that repealing the requirement that all Americans have health insurance or face a tax penalty, may not have been such a good idea after all. “There are many, and I’m one of them, who believes … you’ll likely have individuals who are younger and healthier not participating in that market, and consequently, that drives up the cost for other folks within that market,” Price said during the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., according to the Washington Times.”

As complex as health care can be – everyone except the president knows how complicated it can be – this is quite simple. Trump took deliberate steps he knew would make health care coverage more expensive for millions of American consumers, and as a consequence, health care coverage is becoming more expensive for millions of American consumers, Steve Benen noted at Maddowblog.com (5/7).

Chet Burrell, the CEO of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, conceded to the Washington Post that he fears the system is “materially worse” under Trump. He added, “Continuing actions on the part of the administration to systematically undermine the market and make it almost impossible to carry out the mission” to provide health care coverage to the public.

Before anyone suggests this is the natural result of an effective ACA model, it’s important to understand how wrong that argument is, Benen noted. Burrell went on to say, “Did Obamacare work? Did the people who needed the coverage get it? Hell, yes.”

That was before Trump and congressional Republicans got to work – not repealing the ACA, but weakening the system in ways that impose fresh financial burdens on families for no good reason other than partisan spite.

TRUMP VOTERS HURT MOST BY TRUMP POLICIES, NEW STUDY FINDS. Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds.

The ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress US economic growth by up to a third.”

As the Wall Street Journal summed up the findings: “Climate Change May Deeply Wound Long-Term US Growth.”

The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress.org (5/4).

The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.

In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.

Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”

The estimated summer impact “for the 10 warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those 10 states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.

AMERICANS SPEND TIME IN ICE PRISON TRYING TO PROVE CITIZENSHIP. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents repeatedly pick up US citizens for deportation by mistake, making wrongful arrests based on incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations, according to a Los Angeles Times review of federal lawsuits, internal ICE documents and interviews.

Since 2012, ICE has released from its custody more than 1,480 people after investigating their citizenship claims, according to agency figures. And a Times review of Department of Justice records and interviews with immigration attorneys uncovered hundreds of additional cases in the country’s immigration courts in which people were forced to prove they are Americans and sometimes spent months or even years in detention.

Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto, Calif., and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s US passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a US citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time, even though her husband had brought her US passport to a court hearing.

Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (5/1) that ICE had the shackles off during the Obama administration. “However, under this administration, even the minimal restrictions on the agency have been removed.”

In 2015, ICE officials instructed agents to conduct deeper investigations into a person’s possible citizenship, requiring them to check if a person met any of a number of indicators of citizenship, such as whether they had served in the military or were adopted by a US.citizen.

In immigration court, however, those born outside the country still must prove why they belong in the US. A former senior attorney for ICE’s regional office in Los Angeles said a 2009 directive to conduct legal reviews of all citizenship claims brought dozens of cases to her desk every week. The people were all in custody, and agents, she said, generally assumed they were lying.

NEWEST ATTACK ON ROE V. WADE: ABORTION OPPONENTS ARE DONE BEING SUBTLE. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a new law (5/4) that effectively bans abortions around the sixth week of pregnancy — before many people are even aware that they are pregnant. It’s a cartoonish attack on the right to choose, the kind of legislation by blunderbuss that rarely ends well for policymakers, Ian Millhiser writes at ThinkProgress.org (5/7).

As recently as 2016, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that states may not enact a law restricting abortion “if the ‘purpose or effect’ of the provision ‘is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.” Iowa’s six-week abortion ban takes effect long before a fetus becomes viable (even especially optimistic studies indicate that a fetus is unlikely to survive outside of the womb without 22 weeks of gestation). And Iowa’s new law does not simply “place a substantial obstacle” before patients seeking an abortion — it forbids abortion outright for most patients with pre-viable pregnancies.

Iowa’s new law closely maps a similar ban enacted by North Dakota in 2013. That law was struck down by a panel of three Republican appointees to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit — the same circuit that oversees Iowa — so Iowa’s new ban should have no legal legs to stand on when it arrives in court.

But a six-week ban is not the sort of law a governor signs if they have any interest in complying with court decisions, Millhiser noted. It’s the sort of law a governor signs if they want to slap the justices in the face and dare those justices to slap back.

Abortion opponents used to be devilishly clever. In 2013, Texas lawmakers enacted HB 2, an anti-abortion law imposing expensive requirements on abortion facilities and strict credentialing requirements on abortion providers. The genius of HB 2 is that it did not look like an abortion ban. It looked like an ordinary health regulation, something disingenuous lawmakers could sell as an effort to make abortions safer — even as their law shut down the overwhelming majority of abortion clinics in Texas.

Texas lawmakers bet that, by dressing up their abortion ban up as something else, they could convince the Supreme Court to play along with this sham. Had the court agreed to play this game, it could have been the effective end of the right to choose, as states would have gained the power to make it so expensive to operate an abortion clinic that no clinic could survive.

But Texas’ gambit did not prevail. In *Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellderstedt*, Justice Anthony Kennedy crossed over to vote with the Court’s four liberals. For the moment, at least, the right to choose was saved.

If abortion opponents had no viable path to get to five votes on the Supreme Court, this entire discussion would be academic. But Donald Trump is fast remaking the courts in the conservative Federalist Society’s image. Neil Gorsuch occupies a seat on the Supreme Court, bringing with him an almost certain vote against women’s reproductive rights. And Iowa’s abortion ban will be heard by the most Republican-dominated federal appeals court in the country.

Republican appointees hold 10 of the 11 active judgeships on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. One of Trump’s recent appointments, Judge Steven Grasz, was deemed “not qualified” to serve as a judge by the American Bar Association, in part due to concerns that Grasz would ignore the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions in order to uphold laws restricting reproductive choice. And Trump’s already named three judges to this court.

So there is no guarantee that the Eighth Circuit will faithfully apply the Supreme Court’s abortion precedents when it hears a challenge to Iowa’s six-week ban. Even after the Eighth Circuit’s decision striking down North Dakota’s abortion ban, the court’s newly Trumped up majority may now have the votes it needs to uphold Iowa’s law.

If past is prologue, moreover, such a challenge may not reach the Supreme Court for a few years — Texas’ HB 2 became law in 2013, but it was not struck down by the justices for another three years. In that amount of time, the membership of the Court can change. The 81-year-old Justice Kennedy could make good on rumors that he plans to retire, or one of the court’s elderly members could no longer be able to serve.

If that happens, and if Trump manages to appoint someone like Gorsuch to fill the new vacancy, Iowa’s abortion ban could provide an ideal vehicle for the Supreme Court to wipe away all that remains of *Roe v. Wade*.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION STOPS SHORT OF MOST RESTRICTIVE MEDICAID PROPOSAL. The Trump administration denied Kansas’ request to create an unprecedented “lifetime limit” on Medicaid, a federal insurance largely for the poor and disabled.

The administration has already approved work requirements in Medicaid, a controversial move in itself, but the rejection of the lifetime limit indicates that time limits on Medicaid coverage go too far for the Trump administration, The Hill reported (5/7).

“We seek to create a pathway out of poverty, but we also understand that people’s circumstances change, and we must ensure that our programs are sustainable and available to them when they need and qualify for them,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma said during an American Hospital Association meeting.

Lifetime coverage limits cap access to coverage. Had CMS approved Kansas’ request, Medicaid members would have been limited to a three-year lifetime limit. Four other states (Arizona, Maine, Utah and Wisconsin) also sought to implement lifetime caps for Medicaid.

The Trump administration has been allowing states to impose sweeping changes to Medicaid; most notable was its approval of Kentucky’s work requirements in February. But it appears as if lifetime limits went too far this time, Amanda Michelle Gomez noted at ThinkProgress (5/7).

Lifetime limits aren’t exactly popular, as two-thirds of people surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation say “Medicaid should be available to low-income people for as long as they qualify, without a time limit, while one-third say it should only be available to low-income people for a limited amount of time in order to provide temporary help.” The policy would have especially hurt low-wage workers who may not get coverage through their employers and reached the Medicaid limit through no fault of their own.

Work requirements and time limits aren’t the only ways states are overhauling their Medicaid programs. In addition to approving Indiana’s work requirements, CMS approved a provision that requires Medicaid enrollees to pay a premium surcharge if they smoke cigarettes. Verma also OK’d Arkansas’ coverage lockout, which drops an individual from coverage if they fail to meet the work requirement for three months. And the Trump administration permitted Iowa to end “retroactive eligibility” — meaning, providers will no longer be reimbursed for treating patients who likely qualified for coverage, but weren’t yet enrolled. Roughly 40,000 Iowans had their benefits reduced.

The Trump administration could approve other punitive policies, as well. For example, Wisconsin is trying to mandate drug screening and testing for Medicaid beneficiaries. And Arkansas is still waiting to hear back on whether CMS will greenlight “partial expansion” — a policy that allows a state to limit Medicaid expansion to people with incomes up to 100% of the poverty level, rather than the 138% envisioned under the Affordable Care Act, while still receiving enhanced federal funding.

TEXAS OFFICIALS IGNORE DIOXIN SPREAD IN HOUSTON WATERWAYS. For decades, paper mill waste barged down the Houston Ship Channel was buried on the banks of the river. An agreement announced in April has cleared the way for the San Jacinto Waste Pits to finally be cleaned up. But dioxin damage already has spread far beyond the waste pits, the Houston Chronicle and The Associated Press found.

More than 30 hotspots — small sites where dioxin has settled — have been located in sediments along the river, the Houston Ship Channel and into Galveston Bay, according to University of Houston research conducted from 2001 to 2011 and pieced together by the news organizations, the Chronicle reported (5/3) .

The affected areas are alongside parks and residential neighborhoods with thousands of homes. But the residents’ wells or yards have not been tested by state health officials.

Details about the hotspots have not been made public by Texas environmental regulators, who used more than $5 million in federal money to pay for the research. In 2012, they ended a fact-finding committee that oversaw the project and had proposed new standards for dioxin and PCBs that could have been costly to corporate polluters.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to release the full results of the studies that identified the sources of dioxin and PCBs, even to academic researchers, Harris County officials and lawyers who later sued companies over environmental damage. The research funding ended in 2011, leaving unanswered questions about whether toxic damage spread even farther during hurricanes Ike and Harvey.

The university data linked hotspots primarily to three sources: the leaking waste pits, the original site of the paper mill in Pasadena and a major chemical complex in nearby Deer Park that is part of another Superfund site, records show. None has been cleaned up.

Under the Clean Water Act and state law, Texas authorities were required to address dioxin and PCBs in the river and ship channel, waterways officially designated as “impaired.” Setting such standards could have forced the responsible companies to clean up and upgrade contaminated stormwater and wastewater treatment.

The state’s approach to dioxin follows the same pattern the Chronicle and AP previously identified in an investigation into air and water pollution releases from Hurricane Harvey. The news organizations found that state and federal regulators did little in response to massive releases of toxic pollution reported during and after Harvey’s torrential rains.

Similarly, Texas regulators have not followed up on the dioxin research with additional testing to see if wells, parks or property also are contaminated by the pollutants that formed the toxic hotspots.

The Texas Department of Health Services warned in 1990 that catfish and crabs in the San Jacinto and parts of upper Galveston Bay area contained so much dioxin that local seafood posed potential health risks — and banned its consumption by children and pregnant women.

The Environmental Protection Agency already had been funding initiatives to clean up the nation’s impaired rivers and identify sources of toxic substances in sediments and water that poisoned fish. The actions came in response to revelations in the 1980s that one of the most dangerous dioxin forms had been unleashed into the environment from paper bleaching and chemical manufacturing.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018

Populist.com