Mother Nature (WRATH)

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A ‘Chilling Message’: Trump Critics See a Deeper Agenda in California Feud
By Coral Davenport
Oct. 3, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s political feud with California has spread collateral damage across more than a dozen other states, which have seen their regulatory authority curtailed and their autonomy threatened by a Trump administration intent on weakening the environmental statutes of the country’s most populous state.

When the administration last month revoked California’s authority to set state-level standards on climate-warming tailpipe emissions, it simultaneously stripped that power from 13 other states that follow California’s standards and ensured that no other state could set fuel-efficiency standards in the future. The Environmental Protection Agency last week followed up with letters to California that threatened to wield rarely used provisions of environmental law to withhold federal funding from the state if it did not take specific steps to clean its air and water.

“This is new and unusual,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a Republican lawyer who served in the E.P.A. in both Bush administrations. “E.P.A. has in the past been reluctant to use the very potent mechanism of withholding federal funding, as long as the state is acting in good faith.”

“But,” he added, “there’s obviously some bad blood.”

The maneuvers reversed the traditional positions of the two parties. Republicans have often claimed the mantle of protectors of states’ rights, and the prerogative of state governments as the laboratories of democracy. Democrats have often championed the pre-eminence of Washington over the states in battles over civil rights and health care. That has not always been the case. Republicans in Washington have tried to block state assisted-suicide laws, for instance, while Democrats have championed liberal state laws, for example on gun control.

The fight over California’s fuel-economy standards fits into that last category, but legal experts said the Trump administration’s actions are new. They amount to a novel weaponizing of environmental laws intended not only to undermine California’s liberal government but to send a message to other states that might defy Mr. Trump.

“It looks like a search-and-destroy, and it sends a chilling message to other states,” said Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

In this case, critics noted, the Clean Air Act specifically offered states the ability to set their own environmental standards if Washington grants them a waiver.

“This is a very powerful tool that the Clean Air Act gives to the states,” said Phil Weiser, the attorney general of Colorado. “To pull the rug out from states, to do something this prescriptive, this stepping-on-states’ rights, is a threat to the very principle of states’ rights.”

The E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, said this week that the administration believed in states’ rights, to a point. California’s economic power is so great that its policies have gravitational force far beyond its border: “We embrace federalism and the role of the states,” Mr. Wheeler said, “but federalism does not mean that one state can dictate standards for the nation.”

But impugning California’s commitment to clean air and water struck William K. Reilly, who headed the E.P.A. under the first President George Bush, as disingenuous, he said. The state, he said, is “historically the originator of the most innovative and successful air pollution controls” in the country.

“I’d be surprised if the E.P.A administrator could defend this letter and keep a straight face,” he said.

Mr. Wheeler did just that on Wednesday when he was asked if his letters to California were political retaliation for the state’s efforts against his policies.

“No, not at all,” he said. “We found a lot of discrepancies between the way California is operating their water programs compared to others states.”

Mr. Wheeler announced last month that the E.P.A. would revoke a waiver granted to California by the Obama administration that allowed the state to establish its own tough fuel economy standards for cars sold into its giant market. That waiver had been granted under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which allows states to set tighter emissions standards.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/climate/trump-california-environment.html?