CPR’s Member Scholars and staff are off to a fast start on the op-ed front in 2018. We list them all on our op-ed page, but here’s a quick roundup of pieces they’ve placed so far.

Member Scholar Alejandro Camacho joins his UC-Irvine colleague Michael Robinson-Dorn in a piece published by The Conversation. In "Turning power over to states won't improve protection for endangered species," they summarize their recent analysis of state endangered species laws and state funding for enforcement. They write, “Our review shows that most states are poorly positioned to assume primary responsibility for endangered species protection. State laws generally are weaker and less comprehensive than the Endangered Species Act,” and the states themselves are contributing just 5 percent of funding for enforcement of the Act.

In the Bay Journal, Rena Steinzor and David Flores update an op-ed from the end …

During the State of the Union address last night, no one was surprised to hear President Trump brag about all the work his administration has done slashing regulatory safeguards for health, safety, the environment, and financial security. It’s clearly one of his proudest first-year accomplishments — making us all less safe and more vulnerable to industries that profit by polluting the air and water, creating unsafe working conditions, using underhanded financial practices, or selling dangerous products. The president thinks that regulations that curb such misbehavior are simply too costly to indulge and refuses to acknowledge their value in any way.

If you listen carefully when he makes that pitch, you’ll notice that he would have us believe that safeguards for health, safety, the environment, and financial security generate untold “costs” for industry. But as with so many things that are clear to Donald Trump but that …

CPR’s Member Scholars and staff rounded out a prolific year of op-ed writing with pieces covering several topics, touching on the Endangered Species Act, the scuttling of criminal justice reform, saving the Chesapeake Bay, the Administration’s efforts to unravel the Clean Power Plan, and the tax bill President Trump signed into law last week. You can read all 46 of this year's op-eds here, but here’s a brief roundup of the latest:

In an October 29, 2017, piece in The Hill, Bill Buzbee says that the Trump administration’s efforts to wish away the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan are headed for “rocky shoals.” Among other problems, the repeal push is proceeding in the absence of a formal rulemaking process. “Just last year,” he writes, “the Supreme Court reiterated that an agency proposing a policy change must provide a ‘reasoned explanation for …

"Despite the most extensive bipartisan support in many years for the reform of mass incarceration in the United States, the Trump administration has ignored this enormous problem and focuses solely on greater leniency for white collar criminals."

So writes CPR’s Rena Steinzor in her latest op-ed in The Hill. She goes on to describe the circumstances under which the Department of Justice abandoned its prosecution of HSBC, and with it a deferred prosecution agreement that would have settled a “massive criminal case accusing HSBC of money-laundering for Mexican drug cartels and allegedly serving as banker for rogue states like Iran and Sudan. The bank dramatically expanded its compliance efforts even as it stood accused of committing further crimes, including assisting its customers in evading U.S. taxes. But its agreement went up in a puff of smoke.”

The key to the bipartisan legislation was a conservative …

"You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"

Winston Smith, 1984

Donald Trump has never been known for the breadth of his vocabulary. In his case, I’ve always assumed that was a marker of a not particularly curious mind. The guy’s openly contemptuous of higher education; he says he doesn’t read books because he gets what he needs to know from “watching the shows.” When speaking, he likes to repeat things, uttering the same short sentence or phrase two or three times in the same breath, presumably for emphasis. And his word choices won’t be adding to anyone’s vocabulary. He uses “very” very often, for example, and “very, very” very frequently, too.

Now we learn that the president and his team …

If there's a defining value to the tax bill now working its way through Congress, it's greed. How else to account for a bill that wipes out tax deductions for health care expenses, double-taxes the money you pay in state and local income taxes, eliminates the deduction for interest on student loans, and at the same time eliminates the tax that's now paid on estates in excess of $5.5 million, eliminates the alternative minimum tax, and slashes corporate taxes, all while adding $1.5 trillion to the federal debt? The principal objective of this bill is to make rich people richer, and it accomplishes that by squeezing pretty much everybody else – some right away, some in a few years.

Of course, greed is at the heart of much of President Trump's policy agenda. In its service, he's rolled back environmental regulations …

As appalling as the first five months of the Trump presidency have been to those of us who care about public policy and good government, we can't claim to be surprised. As Hillary Clinton memorably explained to historians last summer in Philadelphia, "There is no other Donald Trump. This is it."

But what has been a surprise is how bad this Congress has been at legislating. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are hardly newbies to the Washington scene or the political process. In particular, McConnell is the quintessential political insider: He's not much of a spokesman and is not known as an "ideas guy." But he knows the rules of the Senate, has built relationships with his Republican colleagues, knows how to wield power, and because he feels no need to be popular outside of Kentucky, he is willing to do things that are unpopular …