It’s Monday, December 9. What we’re still following: Newly revealed documents about the Afghanistan war: “Almost everyone in the government has been lying about it for years,” David Graham argues.
In today’s newsletter: what 24 states and Puerto Rico still can’t do. Plus, new arguments about America’s “magical-thinking” involvement in the Middle East.
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« TODAY IN POLITICS »
(ERIN SCOTT / REUTERS)
Individual states can only do so much.
600,000 Californians faced a blackout earlier this year. Wildfires across the west are getting a whole lot worse. Swaths of the Midwest were inundated by historic flooding in the spring.
Ideas such as the Green New Deal have become household names. One after the other, 2020 Democrats have been outdoing each other with ambitious climate plans (two who had come out with top-notch plans have since dropped out). But the Trump administration has been pushing in another direction.
1. The president has been on a deregulation tear. The administration has targeted environmental rules such as California’s decades-old authority to set higher car-emission standards than the nation as a whole. It’s part of a broader administration push to punish the blue, largely coastal states that have rebuked him since the 2016 election, Ron Brownstein writes.
2. Trump came into office with promises to bring back coal jobs in economically downtrodden parts of the country. Coal, though, has continued to decline as a share of energy production. Even so, that trend hasn’t meant a corresponding upswing for renewables.
3. Trump formally began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement last month. Does this pattern of actions suggest he’s a climate denier? Our climate-change reporter Robinson Meyer argues that the president adheres to this other ideology entirely.
4. Twenty-four states and Puerto Rico pledged to pick up the emissions-reduction torch and uphold the goals of the treaty. How successful have they been? These states are making significant cuts to their emissions—but they won’t be able to do enough to make up for the big carbon-emitting states not participating in the alliance.
—Saahil Desai
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« SNAPSHOT »
(Loren Elliott / Reuters)
Republican staff counsel Stephen Castor faces news cameras as he pulls his notes out of a reusable plastic grocery bag at the start of the House Judiciary Committee’s second impeachment hearing today.
It was supposed to be procedural. But the hearing went off the rails almost immediately, Russell Berman writes.
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« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »
(Maya Alleruzzo / AP)
1. “We let our ambitions outstrip the practical possibilities of a region where perfect is rarely on the menu.”
A former Deputy Secretary of State has this diagnosis for the impossible American strategy in the Middle East over the last few decades and under multiple presidents.
The current administration’s recent moves—sending 3,000 new troops to Saudi Arabia, hastily retreating from northern Syria—only adds to the string of missteps, William Burns argues. There’s a way out of the foreign-policy hole the U.S. has dug itself: It just requires big trade-offs and a heavy dose of realism.
More: A Democratic president in 2020 could upend U.S.-Saudi alliance, even beyond what President Obama started.
2. “Donald Trump’s lawyer is Benjamin Franklin’s night sweats.”
The butt-dials to reporters, the foot-in-mouth television ubiquity—Rudy Giuliani’s antics belie his success as “one of the most outrageously effective influence peddlers of all time,” Franklin Foer argues.
More: By most accounts, Giuliani will stick around Trump’s orbit, Elaina Plott reports. Maybe he knows too much for Trump to drop him now.
3. “The vast majority of people are not even aware the problem exists.”
Our San Francisco-based staff writer Annie Lowrey visited a national forest in Northern California with federal agents from the U.S. Forest Service to find illegal marijuana farms.
These “trespass grows” are the latest overlooked environmental catastrophe fueled by, lopsided federal laws and the black market, she writes:
In subtle ways, the trespass grows pervert natural ecosystems: They are greener, wetter, and emptier than the surrounding forest, attracting animals to them.
These growers may be endangering both humans and wildlife.
More: Uneven legislation on marijuana is also worsening economic inequality, Sarah Milov argues. And since regulators still decide who can sell weed in states where it is legal, the rich are still getting richer.
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« EVENING READ »
(Nathan Troester)
What ideas of morality, faith, and politics motivate the American pastor and theologian Timothy Keller? What does he think about evil? Peter Wehner interviews Keller:
“I really did need something to help me sift my inner feelings to figure out who I was, and which of these inner feelings is me and which of these is not.”
That “something” turned out to be the Christian faith, to which he converted at the end of his sophomore year. For Keller, faith involved the convergence of mind and heart. “I tend to think a fully formed Christian is somebody who finds Christianity both rationally and intellectually credible, but also emotionally and existentially true and satisfying,” he said.
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Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai and Christian Paz, with help from Shan Wang. You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.
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