We begin today’s roundup with The Washington Post and its take on EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt’s corruption:
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY Administrator Scott Pruitt’s ethics were already in question after he wasted taxpayer money on expensive plane tickets and hotels, a story he tried to rebut, misleadingly, on conservative talk radio last week. Then, last Thursday, ABC News reported that he benefited from a sweetheart deal that allowed him to live in a high-rent area of Washington while paying a relative pittance. His landlord? The wife of an energy and environmental lobbyist. [...]
Given his ethical failings and his hostile approach to major environmental issues, Mr. Pruitt’s tenure as the nation’s top environmental enforcer, though brief, has already been far too long.
Here is Eric Lipton’s analysis of Pruitt’s decision to help his host’s client:
The Environmental Protection Agency signed off last March on a Canadian energy company’s pipeline-expansion plan at the same time that the E.P.A. chief, Scott Pruitt, was renting a condominium linked to the energy company’s powerful Washington lobbying firm.
Both the E.P.A. and the lobbying firm dispute that there was any connection between the agency’s action and the condo rental, for which Mr. Pruitt was paying $50 a night. [...] government ethics experts said that the correlation between the E.P.A.’s action and Mr. Pruitt’s lease arrangement — he was renting from the wife of the head of the lobbying firm Williams & Jensen — illustrates why such ties to industry players can generate questions for public officials: Even if no specific favors were asked for or granted, it can create an appearance of a conflict.
Sam Stein and Lachlan Markay:
The lobbyist-owned townhouse that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rented for relatively small nightly sums also served as a hub for Republican lawmakers hoping to raise money for their congressional campaigns.
A review of fundraising invitations reveals that at least three members of Congress had fundraisers at the now-controversial Capital Hill brownstone during the same period of time that Pruitt was living there. Several of those fundraisers took place on dates when Pruitt was in Washington, D.C., according to a cross-reference of the invitations and Pruitt’s schedule.
Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times blasts Pruitt and Trump for their planned rollback of crucial emission standards:
President Trump and his anti-environmental protection sidekick, Scott Pruitt, are determined to head recklessly in the opposite direction. It's up to California and other environmentally responsible states to stop them.
On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it has abandoned ambitious but much-needed fuel economy rules that required automakers to step up the improvements in their cars' and SUVs' mileage and emissions. Adopted under the Obama administration, the regulations were a crucial piece of the national effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow global climate change. Indeed, the regulations being heedlessly ditched were slated to improve the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks 50% by 2025, to almost 55 miles per gallon. To meet the new standards, automakers were expected to develop and sell more hybrid and electric models, which, over time, would slash oil consumption, smoggy tailpipe pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions.
Eliana Plott and Robinson Meyer explain how Pruitt helped his friends get massive pay raises at the agency:
Pruitt asked that Greenwalt’s salary be raised from $107,435 to $164,200; Hupp’s, from $86,460 to $114,590. Because both women were political appointees, he needed the White House to sign-off on their new pay. According to a source with direct knowledge of the meeting, held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, staffers from the Presidential Personnel Office dismissed Pruitt’s application. The White House, the source said, declined to approve the raises. [...] After the White House rejected their request, Pruitt’s team studied the particulars of the Safe Drinking Water provision, according to the source with direct knowledge of these events. By reappointing Greenwalt and Hupp under this authority, they learned, Pruitt could exercise total control over their contracts and grant the raises on his own.
Pruitt ordered it done.
Switching topics, over at USA Today, Michael Bérubé writes about the “disability cliff”:
It's a dramatic metaphor. But, figuratively speaking, it's not far from the reality of what happens to people with disabilities and their families when they fall off the so-called "disability cliff." That's how we describe what ensues when an individual with disabilities turns 21 and ages out of the support systems that have sustained him or her from infancy through adolescence. It’s where the law ends and a dark, uncertain wilderness begins. [...]
After falling off the disability cliff five years ago, we have worked hard to land in a life that meets our family's needs for the foreseeable future. The unforeseen is another matter. Jamie's current work and living arrangements lack the ability to adapt, both as Jamie's life evolves and as our lives change as caregivers.
Our experiences have shown us how much help people with intellectual disabilities need to live independently. That paradox divides the disability community.
At The Nation, John Nichols writes about Sinclair’s harm to our communities:
[T]he burgeoning debate needs to focus more attention on the issues that explain why Sinclair has grown so influential—those of media consolidation and conglomeration, the homogenization of content and the death of localism—as well as Sinclair’s scheming to grow even more influential.
Eugene Robinson’s column is, as always, a must-read:
You can tell what President Trump is afraid of by what he chooses to lie about. That means he must be petrified of losing support over his failure to build a single mile of the “big, beautiful” border wall he promised.
Trump is scared of a lot of things — special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, honest reporting by the news media, adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and, reportedly, sharks. But nothing seems to make him quake and tremble more than the fear that his core base will realize all his tough-guy huffing and puffing about Latino immigration was a bunch of hot air.
On a final note, don’t miss Jill McGabe’s piece on the Trump administration’s attacks on her family:
To have my personal reputation and integrity and those of my family attacked this way is beyond horrible. It feels awful every day. It keeps me up nights. I made the decision to run for office because I was trying to help people. Instead, it turned into something that was used to attack our family, my husband’s career and the entire FBI. [...]
I have spent countless hours trying to understand how the president and so many others can share such destructive lies about me. Ultimately I believe it somehow never occurred to them that I could be a serious, independent-minded physician who wanted to run for office for legitimate reasons. They rapidly jumped to the conclusion that I must be corrupt, as part of what I believe to be an effort to vilify us to suit their needs. [...]
Now that I can speak on my own behalf, I want people to know that the whole story that everything is based on is just false and utterly absurd. [...] We will not allow ourselves to be defined by a false narrative.