While You Obsessed Over Trumps Scandals, Hes Fundamentally Changed The Country

While You Obsessed Over Trump’s Scandals, He’s Fundamentally Changed The Country

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-scandals-policy_us_592f1effe4b0540ffc841a46?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000016&section=politics



The president has immense power and, despite the Russia saga, he is using it.
By Sam Stein



Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The more removed from the White House, the more the Trump administration seems to have achieved.

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But legislative progress is only one vehicle that moves a president’s agenda. And there have been profound policy changes on a variety of administrative fronts, often obscured by scandals emerging from the White House.

All of this smoke is missing the steady progress that the modern Republican Party is achieving. Grover Norquist

Take reports that Trump will leave the Paris Agreement on climate change, the milestone global accord to lower carbon emissions in the face of overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming.

The president’s retrenchment will have immense, generations-long geopolitical ripple effects. Yet on Wednesday morning, it competed for media attention alongside the fallout from Trump’s bizarre Twitter typo the night before and the backlash against comedian Kathy Griffin’s vulgar depiction of a severed Trump head.

On regulatory policy, Trump’s impact has far outpaced the coverage it’s often received. He’s made it harder for workers to set up retirement accounts and has delayed the implementation of workplace safety rules. He repealed a regulation protecting workers from wage theft and allowed employers with spotty labor records to get government contracts. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has hit the brakes on a rule that would require firms to report worker injury data online. Trump has given coal companies permission to dump debris into local streams and canceled requirements for reporting methane emissions. Both the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines have been allowed to proceed, and coal companies have been allowed to again lease on public lands.

Elsewhere, Trump has made moves that will fundamentally alter the way our economy operates and individuals live their lives. His appointment of Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission is one of them. Pai is poised to dismantle net neutrality rules, moving away from treating online content as a public utility and toward a system that allows cable and telecom industry interests to control content and traffic. “That appointment,” Norquist said, “is [determining] 16 percent of the economy.”

Much attention has focused on the way the courts and Congress have stymied Trump’s immigration policy. But even absent a travel ban or a border wall, he has dramatically altered the government’s approach. Deportations of undocumented immigrants have grown steadily under Trump’s watch, especially among noncriminals............................