If I were a Republican consoling another Republican about the unraveling of the Trump administration, I’d probably start off by telling him or her to “always look on the bright side”. After all, while the impeachment drama holds everyone’s attention, it’s even easier for the ideologues operating in the bowels of the administration (and I do mean bowels, because they’re mostly pieces of shit) to go about their dirty work of destroying what remains of our democracy. Sure, their depredations don’t go completely unnoticed, but they don’t garner the attention they deserve, since they are so swiftly overtaken by yet more criminality or by the exposure of same. Consider this:
The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking.
A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently.
“We are committed to the highest quality science,” Andrew Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, told a congressional committee in September. “Good science is science that can be replicated and independently validated, science that can hold up to scrutiny. That is why we’re moving forward to ensure that the science supporting agency decisions is transparent and available for evaluation by the public and stakeholders.”
The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place.
It is glaringly obvious that they don’t need this data. The studies they are attempting to undermine were conducted using accepted scientific methodology. There is no need to disclose personal information in order to analyze the underlying data. The whole point is to prevent the formulation of any new regulations that actually protect the public health and provide a justification for junking current regulations that provide such protection. Only the affected industries support this approach.
This type of thing is going on throughout the federal bureaucracy. If the Democrats don’t screw up and we manage to get rid of Trump, it will take his successor years to reverse all the damage they’ve done, and who knows how many of those reversals will be overturned by the most partisan and most extreme Supreme Court in history.
So Republicans bummed out by impeachment should definitely look on the bright side. While everyone is looking in one direction, the massive criminality and corruption that pervades the entire administration is hardly noticed and they come ever closer to their goal of destroying democracy and our environment (a real two-fer!).
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