It’s sad every Earth Day to see how little Republican support there remains for the commemoration and the cause it represents, as I discussed at New York:

On the first Earth Day, in April 1970, I was a high-school senior at a public school in the conservative suburbs of Atlanta. Classes were canceled, and we had hours of discussions of environmental issues capped by an assembly in which we heard a rousing speech from actor Hal Holbrook. A Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, Jimmy Bentley, had just attacked Earth Day, pointing out that it was being held on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. But he lost his primary, and the idea that government needed to do something about rampant air and water pollution wasn’t terribly controversial. Richard Nixon’s White House picked up on a large and bipartisan swell of concern for the environment, and by the end of that year, Nixon combined a host of federal anti-pollution programs into a new Environment Protection Agency. He also proposed, and Congress approved by big bipartisan margins, a major overhaul of federal air-pollution standards (later known as the Clean Air Act), followed in 1972 by an equally sweeping water-pollution law (later referred to as the Clean Water Act).

It’s an oversimplification to say Republican support for environmental-protection efforts has gone steadily downhill from that point on. But it is clear we have reached a point when the ancient question of trade-offs between the environment and the economy elicits the kind of wildly disparate reactions from Democrats and Republicans characteristic of culture-war issues — even as growing evidence of climate change makes bipartisan action to prevent or mitigate the damage increasingly urgent. Gallup recently reported that there’s a record partisan gap:

“Though Democrats and Republicans have long come down on different sides when considering the tradeoffs between economic growth and environmental protection, the gap between the parties has never been larger. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats, compared with 20% of Republicans, now believe environmental protection should be given the higher priority.

“From 1984 to 1991, the parties expressed similar views on this matter, but by 1995 a divide became evident, which has since gradually expanded. At least half of Democrats have favored the environment over economic growth in all years of Gallup’s trend except during the economically challenged years of 2010 and 2011. Meanwhile, majorities of Republicans typically prioritized the environment from 1984 through 2000, but Republicans have not returned to that level since falling to 47% in 2001.”

There have been several waves of anti-environmental sentiment roiling the GOP over the years, even as Democratic support for prioritizing the planet has steadily grown. In the 1970s a so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the West mobilized conservative hostility to federal land-use policies that restricted development and displaced local control. Meanwhile, the rise of the Christian right in the South fed on conservative-Evangelical hostility to environmentalism as “pagan” and contrary to the biblical injunction for humans to exercise dominion over creation. Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement’s first conquerer of the Republican Party, reflected these trends in key appointments of property-rights activists to federal agencies responsible for the environment (notably, James Watt as secretary of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mother, as EPA administrator).

But despite the Reagan administration’s hard-right turn on the environment, a 1988 Republican assessment of the years from Nixon through Reagan concluded that the public had definitively made environmental protection a permanent part of the landscape for both parties:

“The feverish pitch of Earth Day 1970 passed, but the environmental movement did not go away. Instead, the drive for a cleaner environment became part of our national ethic. Now it is taken for granted, the best possible testimonial that progress is being made. Our nation’s thinking has changed. Endorsing growth without regard to the quality of that growth seems forever behind us.”

It turns out that judgement was a bit premature. In 1995, when Republicans took control of the U.S. House for the first time since the early 1950s, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had once styled himself as an environmentalist, made reining in environmental enforcement by the Clinton administration a major priority, as the Washington Post reported at the time:

“In his first major speech on the environment, delivered to the National Environmental Policy Institute (NEPI), a group of corporate executives and opinion-makers, Gingrich lashed out at the agency’s enforcement of every major environmental statute from the 1980 Superfund law, which governs the cleanup of toxic waste dumps, to the 1990 Clean Air Act, designed to reduce air pollution nationwide.”

But public support for environmental protection, especially among suburban swing voters, was robust enough that it became one of Bill Clinton’s four key priorities in his counterattack against Gingrich. In the wake of the the 42nd president’s easy reelection in 1996, Time magazine reported on the Clinton team’s “key message”:

“’Balancing the budget in a way that protects our values and defends Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment.’ So often was this mantra used that the team referred to it as simply M2E2.”

The next big spasm of anti-environmental passion in the GOP accompanied the tea-party movement that tormented Barack Obama’s administration. Even prior to Obama’s election, the fiery hostility of Republicans in energy-producing states to bipartisan plans to cap greenhouse-gas emissions and set up a trading system for allocations made this an increasingly partisan issue. In 2009, former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin penned an op-ed attacking Obama’s “cap and trade” proposal with the unsubtle headline “Drill, daby, drill.” The proposal subsequently died in the U.S. Senate in 2010 thanks to staunch GOP opposition. Soon thereafter, many Republicans began embracing an old John Birch Society conspiracy theory known as Agenda 21 that alleged a United Nations plot to stamp out capitalism via local land-use regulations on places like strip malls and golf courses.

By the time the GOP was captured by a development-mad real-estate tycoon named Donald Trump, Republican environmentalism was already on the ropes with various strains of climate-change denial becoming party orthodoxy. Trump campaigned in 2016 on a platform that included abolition of the EPA, though he satisfied himself with revoking environmental regulations, withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate-change accords, and putting into place appointees like EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, a former oil lobbyist who was forced from office after a brief but spectacularly scandal-plagued tenure.

Now maximum unapologetic exploitation of fossil fuels and rejection of climate-change actions have entered the MAGA canon along with the preemption of state laws and local ordinances that annoy energy companies and property holders. The Green New Deal proposed by progressive Democrats to address climate change is being treated by GOP opponents as full-on Marxism. And the modest down payment on climate-change investments contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act were opposed by every single House Republican.

As unprecedented storms buffet the country every season of the year and evidence of irreversible climate change grows clearer, we can only long for the bipartisanship that surrounded that first Earth Day 53 years ago. Even Republicans forced by local circumstances to deal with the consequences of climate change (including Florida governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) won’t admit or support doing anything about the obvious causes. Obama once vainly expressed the hope that the conservative extremism of the tea-party movement would abate and “the fever will break.” Instead, it’s gotten worse. And the set of highly polarized issues on which (as Senator Tim Scott puts it) Republicans believe “Joe Biden and the radical left” are planning to “ruin America” most definitely includes the environmental emergencies of the 21st century.

 

Sometimes you read the news and don’t know whether the laugh or cry. That’s how I felt when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street to complain that the president isn’t talking to him about the debt limit. So I wrote it up at New York:

When Kevin McCarthy won the House speakership in January after a humiliating 15-ballot contest, he already knew his slippery grip on the gavel would depend on how he handled a debt-limit fight with Joe Biden and the Democrats. It’s now clear that the preliminary rounds are going very poorly for McCarthy.

He began by placing a huge obstacle in the path of any actual negotiations with the White House or Senate Democrats over conditions for a debt-limit increase or suspension. As my colleague Jonathan Chait pointed out, since 1990 congressional Republicans have categorically refused even to consider tax increases of any sort as part of a solution to the deficits and debt they profess to abhor (at least during Democratic administrations). Subsequently, they haven’t really tried to negotiate on fiscal policy; they’ve made unilateral demands and tried to take hostages.

But McCarthy’s situation is far worse than that of his hostage-taking predecessors such as Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan. He has found it impossible to achieve consensus within his own caucus over a clear list of spending-cut demands. And Biden has very skillfully forced Republicans to repudiate their most unpopular positions, notably the ancient GOP desire to “reform” (i.e., cut and privatize) Social Security and Medicare. So even as Biden and the Democrats consistently called for enactment of a clean debt-limit measure without conditions or drama, and the administration released a full budget proposal, McCarthy and his House Republicans have been unable to come up with much of anything specific, other than ruling out Social Security and Medicare cuts and bickering among themselves about defense spending.

So with time beginning to run out for dealing with the debt limit, McCarthy chose to take his weak and vague position and present it as a tough-minded and specific set of demands with a speech aimed at the GOP’s financial-community friends. At the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, McCarthy said Republicans “want Congress to place limits on federal spending, claw back COVID-19 aid, and require Americans to work to receive federal benefits,” as The Wall Street Journal put it.

The Hill explains what that means:

“The Speaker said the forthcoming plan will seek to limit federal spending, with proposals to return discretionary funding levels to 2022 levels ‘and then limit the growth of spending over the next 10 years to 1 percent of annual growth,’ without ‘touching Social Security and Medicare.’”

The proposed “limit on federal spending” is actually just a cap on discretionary spending (i.e., not to entitlement programs) and does not distinguish between defense and nondefense spending. “Caps” like this are what you propose when you literally have no clue what to propose; future Congresses will have to figure out what it means. The only specifics — the COVID clawback and toughened work requirements for benefit programs like SNAP — are boilerplate conservative policies that please the GOP base by tormenting poor people and state and local governments and apparently do pretty well in focus groups.

Compared with an actual spending plan or a federal budget, McCarthy’s “proposal” is laughable. But with House Freedom Caucus members, who value partisanship above all else, able to depose him at the drop of a hat (in the most humiliating concession he made to become Speaker), McCarthy took this weak tea and tried to make it sound like a slug of tough medicine, as The Hill notes:

“In his pitch to Wall Street to cut spending, McCarthy said he had ‘full confidence’ that reducing federal spending would help ‘grow our economy’ and ‘end the dependence on China.’

“’We will curb inflation and we will protect Social Security and Medicare for the next generation, and America will be stronger for it,’ he said. ‘If you agree, don’t sit back, join us.’”

Now that he has talked tough on Wall Street, McCarthy can go back to the very difficult task of turning this proposal into something he can actually get his members to approve with virtually no margin for error, particularly since some of the more extreme members of his conference don’t even believe a debt default would be especially problematic as long as bondholders are paid. If he fails, there might be just enough House Republicans unwilling to trigger a default and a potential global economic catastrophe to force McCarthy to cave and allow a debt measure to get to Biden’s desk with or without token concessions made to save the Speaker’s face and gavel. He and his party really need a fiscal plan B that’s more viable than destructive threats and empty posturing. Right now, as they say in Texas, McCarthy is all hat and no cattle.

As a long-time student of Christian Right politics, I’ve been intrigued about how the various 2024 Republican presidential candidates will appeal to this (for them) key constituency, so I was all eyes and ears when Ron DeSantis spoke at Liberty University, as I explained at New York:

For a while now, I’ve had April 14 circled on my calendar as the day when Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Ron DeSantis would be speaking at Liberty University. The huge school in Lynchburg, Virginia, is associated with the late Jerry Falwell Sr., who turned the small Baptist college into a conservative Evangelical powerhouse. For decades, Republican politicians (and a few Democrats) have shown the flag at the school’s regular student assemblies (known as Convocations) to indicate their understanding of — and in many cases their solidarity with — the agenda of the Christian right.

When DeSantis signed a radical new “heartbeat” law banning abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy on the very eve of the speech at Liberty, I thought, Aha. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, inking the draconian measure in private at 10:30 p.m., only 15 minutes after it arrived on his desk. Perhaps he was spooked by polls showing overwhelming opposition to the law among Floridians. Or maybe he was waiting to present the new law like a gift to the culture warriors of Liberty.

But no. Liberty chancellor Jonathan Falwell touted the new abortion law in his introduction of DeSantis to predictably loud cheers. But the hero of the hour did not mention it in his relatively brief remarks.

Indeed, DeSantis’s appearance provided a sharp contrast to the trappings of the event. Before he spoke, the students joyfully sang a couple of “contemporary Christian” tunes and the old hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy.” The crowd seemed ready for some religiopolitical fire and brimstone. And then … DeSantis pretty much delivered the stock speech he’s been using in appearances all over the country, an extended series of boasts about how he’s made Florida a “refuge of sanity,” attracting hordes of blue-state escapees hungry for wealth and freedom. It was like going to church and, instead of a sermon, hearing a speech prepared for a Rotary Club. He said not a word about his personal faith (which is pretty much a mystery); Jesus’ name went unmentioned; the “unborn” received no loving tributes. Other than a pro forma word of thanks for the prayers various people had offered his wife during her recent battle with breast cancer and another pro forma shout-out to God for endowing the human race with the freedoms DeSantis is allegedly protecting, it was an entirely secular speech.

So the Liberty students left with pretty much the same impression of DeSantis that the more politically astute among them probably had going in: He’s the enemy of their enemies, a man happy to bully LGBTQ+ children, public-school teachers, corporate-diversity personnel, Mickey Mouse, and anyone who is “woke,” but not necessarily because he’s hearing voices from a higher authority than the GOP. If DeSantis’s listeners learned anything about him, it was probably his frequently repeated reminders that, after all this right-wing nastiness, the voters of his state rewarded him with a landslide reelection. This could happen in America in 2024, too, was his not-so-subtle message.

Maybe this soulless and firmly transactional approach is all DeSantis needs to do to strengthen his standing among conservative Evangelicals. But this seems like a lost opportunity for him to create real buzz in one of the leading forums of that very important segment of the Republican-primary electorate. After all, another transactional favorite of the Christian right, Donald Trump, has created an opening by blaming the extremism of anti-abortion activists and the candidates they backed for the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterm elections. In Iowa, where DeSantis must begin his uphill challenge to Trump (assuming he doesn’t get cold feet at the last moment), there’s a palpable sense the evangelical voters who lifted Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016 to victory in the caucuses are up for grabs. It is very much in DeSantis’s interest to make sure he and not Mike Pence, Tim Scott, or anyone else is the beneficiary of any Christian-right estrangement from Trump.

Maybe the Floridian will display an overtly religious awakening somewhere on the road to Cedar Rapids. But at this point, he’s playing the same game as the master of manipulation from Mar-a-Lago, who will be happy to remind anti-abortion voters that DeSantis would never have had the opportunity to shut down Florida’s abortion clinics if Trump hadn’t stacked the Supreme Court and forced the reversal of Roe v. Wade. And if DeSantis is ultimately going to offer Republicans little more than a more electable version of what Trump has more entertainingly offered them since 2015, potential supporters will find excuses not to turn out for him on cold nights in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the flesh may be willing but the spirit may be weak.

This sure looked like the year when all the “parental rights” rhetoric might give Republicans the boost they needed to enact the private school subsidies they’ve pursued for decades. But as I explained at New York, the drive to dismantle public schools has run into trouble in Georgia and Texas:

For longtime conservative enthusiasts for diverting public-education dollars into private schools (or home schools), the “parental rights” movement being embraced by Republicans across the country has been a godsend. With residual heartburn over COVID-19 restrictions on in-school instruction and fresh outrage over alleged “woke” teachers and administrators teaching kids about sex, gender identity and racism, the hoary cause of school vouchers has received a new impetus in many Republican-controlled states. That’s despite growing evidence that vouchers don’t tend to produce good educational outcomes, while undermining funding for public schools (including charter public schools that provide significant school choice).

While many jurisdictions have approved small voucher experiments, often aimed at special-education students with few public options, Republicans are now taking vouchers to a new level. Since last year, five states have made the leap to universal vouchers, which enable parents to pay for private-school tuition and/or offset homeschooling costs: Arizona in 2022 (though the state voted for Biden and two Democratic senators, the GOP controlled all three branches of state government until this year), followed by Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and most recently Florida in 2023.

But now, rural Republican opposition to vouchers has stopped voucher proposals being backed vocally by two of the country’s most powerful GOP governors.

In Georgia, a major expansion of vouchers that Governor Brian Kemp put his considerable political heft behind unexpectedly lost when 16 mostly rural House Republicans voted against it; the bill lost by four votes and died for this session of the legislature. For one thing, many rural communities without private schools would be on the losing end of the funding shift. For another, past efforts by voucher fans to threaten Republican lawmakers with primary opposition appear to have backfired.

And now in Texas, another private-school subsidy initiative that Governor Greg Abbott has made his signature proposal for 2023 has encountered similar Republican opposition. Last week, the Texas House approved a budget amendment prohibiting use of public funds for private schools. Twenty-four Republicans — again, mostly from rural areas — voted with Democrats to give the funding amendment an 86-52 win. While the House has not yet dealt with a Senate-passed version of Abbott’s proposal, there’s no obvious path for overcoming bipartisan opposition.

These developments reinforce two big problems with vouchers aside from their poor record of improving educational results. First, as my colleague Jonathan Chait recently pointed out, most of the beneficiaries of voucher proposals have already abandoned public schools and are simply grasping for tax money to subsidize decisions they’ve already made, undermining the very idea of educational reform via school choice: “Providing vouchers didn’t give children choices; it simply sent checks to parents who were already privately educating their children.”

But second, voucher plans, and indeed the underlying philosophy that education is simply a publicly provided service for parents, ignores the civic role that public schools often play for parents and nonparents alike, particularly in rural areas. What urban and suburban conservatives may deplore as “government schools” are the glue in many small communities, as NBC News recently explained in a report from the small and intensely conservative West Texas town of Robert Lee during a track meet that drew fans to the public high school from around the area:

“It’s not just sporting events that make the school the center of the town’s identity. It’s where residents host potluck fundraisers to help pay a loved one’s medical bills, or gather for the annual Robert Lee BBQ Cookoff. There’s no gym or YMCA in Robert Lee, but the school weight room is open to the public in the evenings and on weekends. So is the playground. Lupe Torres, the school district’s head of maintenance and facilities, said he doubts many folks in Austin understand the indelible connection that rural Texans have to their public schools.”

Resident of towns like these also laugh at the idea their public schools are sinister transmission belts for “wokeness.”

Without question, Republicans won’t give up on vouchers anytime soon; too many big GOP donors and conservative Evangelical activists (who are often deeply committed to homeschooling) sincerely want to destroy traditional public schools. And again, there’s a built-in constituency of people already educating their kids privately for whom vouchers are simply a redistribution of taxpayer dollars in their favor. But it’s becoming clear that reframing the education debate as a battle between parents and unionized teachers and bureaucratic administrators hasn’t gotten rid of the idea that there’s something in public schools that the public values enough to preserve.

For southern Democrats in particular, the North Carolina legislator whose change of party handed Republicans a super-majority brought back lots of bad memories. But the defector in question didn’t fit any of the major precedents, as I explained at New York:

Party switching has a long if not entirely honorable history, especially in the South. So on its face, North Carolina Democratic legislator Tricia Cotham’s defection to the GOP on Wednesday is mostly shocking because of its impact. Her flip gives Republicans a supermajority in both branches of the state legislature, thus neutralizing Democratic governor Roy Cooper’s veto power for the next two years.

But Cotham’s reasons for switching parties are a bit of a mystery. She served in the legislature for five terms, from 2007 to 2016, and was a standard-brand moderate-to-liberal Democrat. She turned her attention to the U.S. House in 2016, but lost the Democratic primary. Cotham returned to the North Carolina House this year after successfully campaigning on a “platform of raising the minimum wage, protecting voting rights and bolstering L.B.G.T.Q. rights,” according to the New York Times. While legislators sometimes change parties because their district has become more competitive due to redistricting or demographic change, that isn’t the case here. The Charlotte Observer describes North Carolina’s 12th House District as a “Democrat stronghold,” with 60 percent of voters backing Cotham’s former party.

So why did Cotham flip so soon after being elected as a Democrat from a Democratic district? Like most party switchers, she’s adopted the posture that the party actually left her, as the Times reported:

“[Cotham said] she had been bullied by her fellow Democrats and had grown alienated from the party on issues like school choice.

“’The modern-day Democratic Party has become unrecognizable to me and to so many others throughout this state and this country,’ she said in a brief speech. She said both she and her young children had been subjected to personal attacks by Democrats in the state, and denounced what she called attempts to ‘control’ her. ‘They have pushed me out,’ she said.”

Local political reporter Steve Harrison told WFAE that Cotham had raised eyebrows by voting with Republicans a few times since returning to Raleigh this year:

“One of the first [defections] came in December when she was the only Democrat to vote for a constitutional amendment that would make members of the state Board of Election elected rather than appointed. And there were others, a bill requiring sheriffs to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

But the moment her voting record really got hostile attention from Democrats came a week ago when she (along with two other Democrats) missed a vote that overrode Cooper’s veto of a bill repealing the state’s pistol permitting law. She reportedly was absent due to a medical appointment related to long-COVID symptoms, and was publicly opposed to the veto override. But at least one local progressive group hinted at “accountability measures” against the absentees, including Cotham.

Was that enough to convince Cotham to turn her coat so soon after being sent by Democratic voters to the legislature? It’s unclear. In her statement defending her decision, she offered a sort of Twitter-made-her-do-it explanation, as the Washington Post noted:

“Cotham, wearing red and standing in front of NCGOP signs, said the turning point in her decision was when she faced backlash for using the American flag and a prayer-hands emoji in her social media handles and on her vehicles.”

Regardless of whether she was pushed or jumped, Cotham now faces certain opposition in 2024 if she runs for reelection; indeed, Democrats are demanding she resign her seat immediately, arguing that it was won under false pretenses. It’s unclear what her new friends in the GOP will do to protect her. “Republicans can redraw the House map and perhaps draw a …seat that leans red, or maybe Cotham just runs for statewide office,” Steve Harrison reported.

This, however, raises even more questions. Will Republican voters really embrace a candidate who just ran on standard Democratic issues? Is her pro-LGBTQ record really compatible with the state party that gave us the first anti-transgender “bathroom bill”? What will GOP voters make of Cotham co-sponsoring a bill codifying abortion protections in January? And will they embrace a woman who once took to the floor of the North Carolina House to talk about her own abortion, calling it a “deeply personal decision” and claiming that GOP lawmakers just want to “play doctor”?

Local TV station WBTV, which interviewed Cotham on Tuesday night, said she “would not commit to positions on specific legislation but indicated she was open to supporting new abortion restrictions.” So anyone anxious to know what kind of consequences this very strange political move will have for abortion rights in North Carolina will have to keep guessing for now.