Last Call For Climate Of Change

The White House will reveal President Obama's finalized slate of executive actions on climate change and the nation's power plants, and they are big, big news.

The rules are the final, tougher versions of proposed regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency announced in 2012 and 2014. If they withstand the expected legal challenges, the regulations will set in motion sweeping policy changes that could shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants, freeze construction of new coal plants and create a boom in the production of wind and solar power and other renewable energy sources.

As the president came to see the fight against climate change as central to his legacy, as important as the Affordable Care Act, he moved to strengthen the energy proposals, advisers said. The health law became the dominant political issue of the 2010 congressional elections and faced dozens of legislative assaults before surviving two Supreme Court challenges largely intact.

“Climate change is not a problem for another generation, not anymore,” Mr. Obama said in a video posted on Facebook at midnight Saturday. He called the new rules “the biggest, most important step we’ve ever taken to combat climate change.”

The most aggressive of the regulations requires the nation’s existing power plants to cut emissions 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, an increase from the 30 percent target proposed in the draft regulation.

That new rule also demands that power plants use more renewable sources of energy like wind and solar power. While the proposed rule would have allowed states to lower emissions by transitioning from plants fired by coal to plants fired by natural gas, which produces about half the carbon pollution of coal, the final rule is intended to push electric utilities to invest more quickly in renewable sources, raising to 28 percent from 22 percent the share of generating capacity that would come from such sources.

In its final version, the rule retains the same basic structure as the draft proposal: It assigns each state a target for reducing its carbon pollution from power plants, but allows states to create their own custom plans for doing so. States have to submit an initial version of their plans by 2016 and final versions by 2018.

But over all, the final rule is even stronger than earlier drafts and can be seen as an effort by Mr. Obama to stake out an uncompromising position on the issue during his final months in office.

The GOP plan here is simple: tie up the rules in court until a Republican president can simply unmake them. 

Closer to home here, these new rules are now Jack Conway's nightmare.  No matter what he does, he'll be attacked as "Obama's stooge in Kentucky" and if he runs away from Obama and sides with the GOP on this, he'll lose by double digits like Alison Grimes did last year.

And frankly, Conway doesn't have the charisma or the intestinal fortitude to defend these rules.

I really don't want Matt Bevin as my governor.  I don't want to have to depend on Bevin being too crazy to elect in order to stop him.

I may not have a choice.

The Adventures Of K-PAX

At the beginning of last month I mentioned that Texas Republican AG Ken Paxton was facing possible securities fraud indictment over abusing the power of his office.  Turns out that those grand jury charges are officially being unsealed against Paxton on Monday, according to Dallas TV station WFAA.

A grand jury has indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on multiple felony charges, according to several sources who are familiar with the complaints.

The charges will be unsealed in McKinney on Monday about noon, and a Tarrant County judge has already been appointed to preside over the case, sources told News 8.

After the indictments are unsealed, Paxton can surrender to be photographed, fingerprinted and booked at any of the state's 254 county jails.

It's unclear exactly what Paxton will be indicted for, although a grand jury here has heard evidence that Paxton, 52, violated securities laws.

Special prosecutors in the Paxton case told News 8 they planned to present a third-degree charge of failing to register with the state securities board, as the law requires. They also said they planned to present a first degree felony charge against Paxton accusing him of securities fraud. All indications are that charge is related to Servergy, a McKinney-based company that has been under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Paxton does not have to resign or step down from statewide office as he prepares to face a criminal trial. He can continue to work, just as Gov. Rick Perry did after his two felony indictments in August 2014.

Paxton's case, legal experts predict, will go to trial since his law license and statewide office are now on the line.

The charges are pretty serious, expected to include at least three felony counts.  Paxton has already paid a $1,000 fine for failing to register management fees for helping his friend and campaign donor, Fritz Mowery, as a consultant.  But the special investigation apparently has found new evidence, turned up by the Texas Rangers, that goes far beyond a simple "administrative error" as Paxton called it.

The NY Times has more.

Sunday Long Read: The Fight To Vote

Jim Rutenberg's piece in the NY Times on the history of Republican party's assault on the Voting Rights Act is indispensable reading this week, as he talks to Henry Frye, the first black State Supreme Court Justice in North Carolina, about the lawsuit against the state's harsh new voting restrictions that will affect mostly minority voters.

What changed this state of affairs was the passage, 50 years ago this month, of the Voting Rights Act. Signed on Aug. 6, 1965, it was meant to correct “a clear and simple wrong,” as Lyndon Johnson said. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.” It eliminated literacy tests and other Jim Crow tactics, and — in a key provision called Section 5 — required North Carolina and six other states with histories of black disenfranchisement to submit any future change in statewide voting law, no matter how small, for approval by federal authorities in Washington. No longer would the states be able to invent clever new ways to suppress the vote. Johnson called the legislation “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom,” and not without justification. By 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act became law, black registration had increased substantially across the South, to 62 percent. Frye himself became a beneficiary of the act that same year when, after a close election, he became the first black state representative to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly since Reconstruction.

In the decades that followed, Frye and hundreds of other new black legislators built on the promise of the Voting Rights Act, not just easing access to the ballot but finding ways to actively encourage voting, with new state laws allowing people to register at the Department of Motor Vehicles and public-assistance offices; to register and vote on the same day; to have ballots count even when filed in the wrong precinct; to vote by mail; and, perhaps most significant, to vote weeks before Election Day. All of those advances were protected by the Voting Rights Act, and they helped black registration increase steadily. In 2008, for the first time, black turnout was nearly equal to white turnout, and Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president.

Since then, however, the legal trend has abruptly reversed. In 2010, Republicans flipped control of 11 state legislatures and, raising the specter of voter fraud, began undoing much of the work of Frye and subsequent generations of state legislators. They rolled back early voting, eliminated same-day registration, disqualified ballots filed outside home precincts and created new demands for photo ID at polling places. In 2013, the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, directly countermanded the Section 5 authority of the Justice Department to dispute any of these changes in the states Section 5 covered. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job, and it was time to move on. Republican state legislators proceeded with a new round of even more restrictive voting laws.

All of these seemingly sudden changes were a result of a little-known part of the American civil rights story. It involves a largely Republican countermovement of ideologues and partisan operatives who, from the moment the Voting Rights Act became law, methodically set out to undercut or dismantle its most important requirements. The story of that decades-long battle over the iconic law’s tenets and effects has rarely been told, but in July many of its veteran warriors met in a North Carolina courthouse to argue the legality of a new state voting law that the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School has called one of the “most restrictive since the Jim Crow era.” The decision, which is expected later this year, could determine whether the civil rights movement’s signature achievement is still justified 50 years after its signing, or if the movement itself is finished.

Republicans have been trying to destroy the Voting Rights Act for generations.  They are scared of black voters and absolutely terrified of Asian and Latino voters.  Making it harder to vote in order to lower turnout to the right kind of people is all they care about.