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      Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

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      Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.“Then, six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.Turnout in recent cycles has surged for young voters, who were energized by issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.They voted in rising numbers during the midterms last year in Kansas and Michigan, which both had referendums about abortion. And college students, who had long paid little attention to elections, emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms.But even with such gains, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program for the Brennan Center for Justice, said there was still progress to be made.“Their turnout is still far outpaced by their older counterparts,” Mr. Morales-Doyle said.Now, with the 2024 presidential election underway, the battle over young voters has heightened significance.Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration jumped 66 percent among 18- and 19-year-old voters, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.Gov. Brad Little of Idaho gave his approval to a law that bans student ID cards as a form of voter identification.Kyle Green/Associated PressOut of 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others — North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — that do not accept any student IDs, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a group that tracks legislation.Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules on student IDs that colleges and universities have struggled to meet, though some Wisconsin schools have been successful.Proponents of such restrictions often say they are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though instances of fraud are rare. Two lawsuits were filed in state and federal court shortly after Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed the student ID prohibition into law on March 15. “The facts aren’t particularly persuasive if you’re just trying to get through all of these voter suppression bills,” Betsy McBride, the president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, one of the plaintiffs in the state lawsuit, said before the bill’s signing.A fight over out-of-state students in New HampshireIn New Hampshire, which has one of the highest percentages in the nation of college students from out of state, G.O.P. lawmakers proposed a bill this year that would have barred voting access for those students, but it died in committee after failing to muster a single vote.Nearly 59 percent of students at traditional colleges in New Hampshire came from out of state in 2020, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts.The University of New Hampshire had opposed the legislation, while students and other critics had raised questions about its constitutionality.The bill, which would have required students to show their in-state tuition statements when registering to vote, would have even hampered New Hampshire residents attending private schools like Dartmouth College, which doesn’t have an in-state rate, said McKenzie St. Germain, the campaign director for the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting rights group.Sandra Panek, one of the sponsors of the bill that died, said she would like to bring it back if she can get bipartisan support. “We want to encourage our young people to vote,” said Ms. Panek, who regularly tweets about election conspiracy theories. But, she added, elections should be reflective of “those who reside in the New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results.”A Texas ban on campus polling places has made little headwayIn Texas, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill to eliminate all polling places on college campuses this year, Carrie Isaac, cited safety concerns and worries about political violence.Voting advocates see a different motive.“This is just the latest in a long line of attacks on young people’s right to vote in Texas,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that seeks to empower younger voters.Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate all college polling places in the state.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMs. Isaac has also introduced similar legislation to eliminate polling places at primary and secondary schools. In an interview, she mentioned the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers — an attack that was not connected to voting.“Emotions run very high,” Ms. Isaac said. “Poll workers have complained about increased threats to their lives. It’s just not conducive, I believe, to being around children of all ages.”The legislation has been referred to the House Elections Committee, but has yet to receive a hearing in the Legislature. Voting rights experts have expressed skepticism that the bill — one of dozens related to voting introduced for this session — would advance.G.O.P. voting restrictions flounder in other statesIn Virginia, one Republican failed in her effort to repeal a state law that lets teenagers register to vote starting at age 16 if they will turn 18 in time for a general election. Part of a broader package of proposed election restrictions, the bill had no traction in the G.O.P.-controlled House, where it died this year in committee after no discussion.And in Wyoming, concerns about making voting harder on older people appears to have inadvertently helped younger voters. A G.O.P. bill that would have banned most college IDs from being used as voter identification was narrowly defeated in the state House because it also would have banned Medicare and Medicaid insurance cards as proof of identity at the polls, a provision that Republican lawmakers worried could be onerous for older people.“In my mind, all we’re doing is kind of hurting students and old people,” Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the bill, said during a House debate in February.But some barriers are already in placeGeorgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, so students at private institutions, including several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification.Georgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, a rule that means students at private institutions, like several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification. Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIn Ohio, which has for years not accepted student IDs for voting, Republicans in January approved a broader photo ID requirement that also bars students from using university account statements or utility bills for voting purposes, as they had in the past.The Idaho bill will take effect in January. Scott Herndon and Tina Lambert, the bill’s sponsors in the Senate and the House, did not respond to requests for comment, but Mr. Herndon said during a Feb. 24 session that student identification cards had lower vetting standards than those issued by the government.“It isn’t about voter fraud,” he said. “It’s just making sure that the people who show up to vote are who they say they are.”Republicans contended that nearly 99 percent of Idahoans had used their driver’s licenses to vote, but the bill’s opponents pointed out that not all students have driver’s licenses or passports — and that there is a cost associated with both.Mae Roos, a senior at Borah High School in Boise, testified against the bill at a Feb. 10 hearing.“When we’re taught from the very beginning, when we first start trying to participate, that voting is an expensive process, an arduous process, a process rife with barriers, we become disillusioned with that great dream of our democracy,” Ms. Roos said. “We start to believe that our voices are not valued.” More

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      G.O.P. States Abandon Group That Helps Fight Voter Fraud

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      Five red states have severed ties since last year with the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps maintain accurate voter rolls.First to leave was Louisiana, followed by Alabama.Then, in one fell swoop, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced on Monday that they would drop out of a bipartisan network of about 30 states that helps maintain accurate voter rolls, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media.Ohio may not be far behind, according to a letter sent to the group Monday from the state’s chief election official, Frank LaRose. Mr. LaRose and his counterparts in the five states that left the group are all Republicans.For more than a year, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit organization known as ERIC, has been hit with false claims from allies of former President Donald J. Trump who say it is a voter registration vehicle for Democrats that received money from George Soros, the liberal billionaire and philanthropist, when it was created in 2012.Mr. Trump even chimed in on Monday, urging all Republican governors to sever ties with the group, baselessly claiming in a Truth Social media post that it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.The Republicans who announced their states were leaving the group cited complaints about governance issues, chiefly that it mails newly eligible voters who have not registered ahead of federal elections. They also accused the group of opening itself up to a partisan influence.In an interview on Tuesday, Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who is Missouri’s secretary of state, said that the group had balked at his state’s calls for reforms, some of which were expected to be weighed by the group’s board of directors at a meeting on March 17. He denied that the decision to pull out was fueled by what the organization and its defenders have described as a right-wing smear campaign.“It’s not like I was antagonistic toward cleaning our voter rolls,” Mr. Ashcroft said.Shane Hamlin, the group’s executive director, did not comment about particular complaints of the states in an email on Tuesday, but referred to an open letter that he wrote on March 2 saying that the organization had been the subject of substantial misinformation regarding the nature of its work and who has access to voter lists.Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, withdrew the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center in January, a day after he was sworn in.Butch Dill/Associated PressDefenders of the group lamented the departures, saying they would weaken the group’s information-sharing efforts and undermine it financially because of lost dues. And, they said, the defections conflict with the election integrity mantra that has motivated Republicans since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Republicans haven’t always been so sour about the work of the coalition, which Louisiana left in 2022.It was just last year that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mentioned the group’s benefit to his state, which he described as useful for checking voter rolls during a news conference announcing the highly contentious arrests of about 20 people on voter fraud charges. He was joined then by Cord Byrd, Florida’s secretary of state, a fellow Republican who, on Monday, was expressing a much different opinion. In an announcement that Florida was leaving the group, Mr. Byrd said that the state’s concerns about data security and “partisan tendencies” had not been addressed.“Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC,” Mr. Byrd said.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, who is considering a Republican run for president, did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. LaRose, in Ohio, also had a stark shift in tone: After recently describing the group to reporters as imperfect but still “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” by Monday he was also calling for reforms and put the group on notice.“Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to and including our withdrawal from membership,” Mr. LaRose wrote. “I implore you to do the right thing.”The complaints about partisanship seem centered on David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped develop the group and is a nonvoting board member. Mr. Ashcroft said he didn’t think that Mr. Becker, a former director of the elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts who has vocally debunked election fraud claims, including disputing Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, should be on the board.Mr. Becker is the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, another nonpartisan group that has been attacked by election deniers.“There’s truth and there’s lies,” Mr. Becker said on a video call with reporters on Tuesday. “I will continue to stand for the truth.”Mr. Hamlin vowed that the organization would “continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”While some Republican states are ending their relationship with the group, California, the nation’s most populous state, could potentially join its ranks under a bill proposed by a Democratic state lawmaker. But in Texas, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill with the opposite intention.Still, Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Texas’s Republican secretary of state, said in an email on Tuesday that “We are not currently aware of any system comparable to ERIC, but are open to learning about other potentially viable, cost-effective alternatives.”New York, another heavily populated state, is also not a member of the group.Seven states started the organization more than a decade ago. It charges new members a one-time fee of $25,000 and annual dues that are partly based on the citizen voting age population in each state. The Pew Charitable Trusts provided seed funding to the group, but that money was separate from donations that it had received from Mr. Soros, according to the website PolitiFact.Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is Maine’s secretary of state, said in an interview on Tuesday that the group had been particularly helpful in identifying voters who have died or may no longer live in the state, which became a member in 2021.“We have a lot of Mainers who retire to Florida for example,” Ms. Bellows said.Ms. Bellows called the recent defections “tragic” and said that her office had received several inquiries from residents who had read criticism of the group online.“Unfortunately, this move by our colleagues in Florida and elsewhere to leave ERIC in part because of misinformation being spread by election deniers deprives all of us of the ability to effectively clean our voter rolls and fight voter fraud,” she said. More

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      The Democrats botched the Ohio disaster response – and handed Trump a victory | Michael Massing

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      The Democrats botched the Ohio disaster response – and handed Trump a victoryMichael MassingThe failure of Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportion, to appear for nearly three weeks recalls the incompetence of Fema during Hurricane Katrina“Where’s Pete Buttigieg?” someone shouted at a February 15 town hall meeting in East Palestine, Ohio. “I don’t know,” Mayor Trent Conaway replied.Twelve days earlier, a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals had derailed near the town. Three days later, the company announced it was going to carry out a controlled burn of vinyl chloride that would send dangerous gasses into the air, forcing many of East Palestine’s 4,700 residents to evacuate. They returned after receiving assurances that the air and water were safe, but a strong chemical odor clung to the town, and many continued to complain of headaches, nausea, and burning throats. And so several hundred residents had crowded into a local school to demand answers. Conaway said that two weeks had passed before anyone at the White House had contacted him, and the US secretary of transportation still hadn’t materialized.In Washington, Republicans made hay. “Secretary Buttigieg laughing about Chinese spy balloons, while ignoring the Ohio train derailment, shows you how out of touch Democrats are,” Ohio congressman Jim Jordan tweeted. Senator Marco Rubio called Buttigieg “an incompetent who is focused solely on his fantasies about his political future & needs to be fired”.On Fox, Tucker Carlson mocked Buttigieg for commemorating “Transit Equity Day” while remaining silent about the majority-white, struggling East Palestine. If the disaster had happened in a rich Washington DC neighborhood like Georgetown, he said, the National Guard would have been called in, and the story would have led every news channel. “But it happened to the poor benighted town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten and in the view of people who lead this country, forgettable.”But it wasn’t just the right who complained. Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted that “East Palestine railroad derailment will have a significant negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the residents for decades … We need Congressional inquiry and direct action from @PeteButtigieg to address this tragedy.” In a rare show of partisanship, Senator Ted Cruz said he “fully agreed” with her.On 22 February, Donald Trump visited East Palestine. He distributed thousands of bottles of Trump-branded water, walked through the town with his son Donald Trump Jr and Ohio senator JD Vance, and visited a local McDonald’s to buy food for first responders. “You are not forgotten,” Trump said in a speech not far from the accident site. “In too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal.”The next day, Buttigieg finally showed. Surveying the site of the derailment in a hard hat and safety vest, he acknowledged that he could have spoken out “sooner” about the accident. “I was taking pains to respect the role that I have, the role that I don’t have – but that should not have stopped me from weighing in about how I felt about what was happening.” He tweeted a photo of himself at the site along with the message that he was “amazed by the resilience and decency of the people of East Palestine”.The Department of Transportation did not have the lead role in the accident response – that fell to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Transportation Safety Board – but the failure of the nation’s top transportation official to appear at the disaster site for nearly three weeks inevitably recalled the incompetence and disengagement of Fema director Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. (President George W Bush famously claimed Brown was doing “a heck of a job”.) It also allowed Trump to present himself as the champion of blue-collar America.How could so poised and polished a figure as Buttigieg so badly miscalculate? A glowing Washington Post profile in August 2021 described him as a skilled communicator and “nimble public speaker” who “rarely makes verbal miscues”.President Joe Biden had made Buttigieg the lead spokesman for his massive infrastructure program, offering him an opportunity to meet with local officials around the country as he promoted roads, ports, bridges and tunnels. During the presidential campaign, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor had assumed the mantle of outsider, but, the Post observed, he had “quickly morphed into a quintessential Washington insider” – omnipresent on television, a fixture at dinners, a tireless networker seeking to advance both the president’s agenda and his own political prospects.Buttigieg’s East Palestine no-show can help answer the question, What’s the matter with Ohio? Formerly considered a “battleground state”, it has in recent years become unshakably red. Columbiana county, where East Palestine is located, is a microcosm. In 2008, John McCain barely took the county with 52% of the vote. Donald Trump won 68% in 2016 and 71.5% in 2020 – a reflection of the perception that the Democrats had abandoned small-town America.In January, Biden went to Covington, Kentucky, to publicize the awarding of $1.6bn in federal funds to reconstruct a bridge over the Ohio River to Cincinnati, a key regional artery. He was joined by Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and Ohio governor Mike DeWine. The Democrats hope that such investments and ceremonies over the long term can help repair the damage done to the Democrats’ standing in the midwest by their longstanding embrace of free trade, globalization and the outsourcing of jobs to China and Mexico.In the short term, however, Buttigieg’s no-show in East Palestine reinforces the perception that the Democrats really don’t care. It didn’t help that on February 20, as East Palestine was still dealing with the fallout from the derailment, Biden made his surprise visit to Kyiv. “The biggest slap in the face,” Mayor Conaway called it on Fox News, adding, “that tells you right now he doesn’t care about us. He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning that he was in Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us, and I’m furious.”All the investment in bridges, roads, and factories will not translate into political gains if the party continues to be missing in action.Heck of a job.
      Michael Massing is the author most recently of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionDonald TrumpPete ButtigiegOhioPollutionHealthcommentReuse this content More

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      Sherrod Brown in tough election fight as Ohio crash tests Democrats’ chances

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      Sherrod Brown in tough election fight as Ohio crash tests Democrats’ chances Leftwing senator has bucked trend of statewide Democratic losses but derailment in East Palestine set to test re-election hopesUS Senator Sherrod Brown has survived a decade of statewide Democratic losses in Ohio by building a reputation as the rare person in his party who can still connect with the white working-class voters who have increasingly shifted to Republicans.But as he heads into what could be a tough re-election campaign, Brown is facing a critical test in the aftermath of the train derailment in the eastern Ohio village of East Palestine.US Capitol rioter pleads guilty to stealing badge from beaten officerRead moreRepublicans, including Donald Trump, argue the federal response shows Democrats have left such regions behind. Brown is under heightened pressure to prove them wrong.In the early stages of what will be a fierce fight for control of Congress next year, the response to the train derailment in Ohio is emerging as an early barometer of whether Democrats can rebuild support in working-class communities.Brown has laid the blame for the disaster squarely on the corporation that operated the train that derailed, Norfolk Southern, and positioned himself as a fighter for places like East Palestine.“It’s the kind of community that’s too often forgotten about or exploited by corporate America,” he told reporters this week. “My job is always to fight for the dignity of work, to fight for these workers, to fight for these communities, to make sure this never happens again. I’ll work with anyone to do that and to get these reforms passed.”Brown has also made a pair of visits to East Palestine to meet with emergency workers and local residents. And this week, he followed with bipartisan legislative action to call on federal agencies to make long-term medical testing available to residents as well as proposing new federal safety regulations and financial consequences for train operators.As the images of black, billowing smoke from the wreck and concerns of local residents morphed from a man-made disaster into a political battleground, there is a growing sense among lawmakers that locals don’t appreciate being used as a political backdrop.Republican congressman Bill Johnson, who represents the area, called on Joe Biden to visit the community. The US president has not made the trip and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s trip there was pre-empted by Trump last week.Safety regulators say Ohio toxic train derailment ‘100% preventable’Read moreThe stretches of eastern Ohio industrial towns have tilted increasingly to Republicans over the last decade, contributing to Ohio’s shift from a presidential bellwether to a potential GOP stronghold. Republicans have cast it as a forgotten swath of the country – fertile ground for Trump’s grievance politics.But the region is also familiar ground for Brown, who has become a mainstay in the state’s political constellation with a populist brand. Brown, who wears suits purchased from a union shop near his Cleveland home, has developed an old-school network of union support over a decades-long political career that began in the General Assembly.David Pepper, a former chair of the Ohio Democratic party, says Brown’s “secret sauce” is his willingness to take his made-in-America, union-strong messaging to the people outside cities.“That guy is fighting against big corporations for the little guy,” Pepper said.For Democrats, he’s proof they can still win in the Buckeye State. But Ohio is both a must-win presidential state for Republicans and a potential path to a Senate majority, and Brown sits atop the list of seats that could be flipped in 2024.TopicsDemocratsOhio train derailmentOhioUS politicsUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      After the East Palestine disaster, Congress needs to pass the Derail Act | Chris Deluzio and Rohit Khanna

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      After the East Palestine disaster, Congress needs to pass the Derail ActChris Deluzio and Ro KhannaOur legislation will help to address the wrongs of what happened in OhioOn February 3, a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, just across the state line with Pennsylvania. A fire erupted, an evacuation order was issued, and the dangerous chemical being transported, vinyl chloride, was spilled. It’s a devastating tragedy and one that could have been prevented.Here’s the real reason the EPA doesn’t want to test for toxins in East Palestine | Stephen LesterRead moreOne of us represents constituents in Beaver county, Pennsylvania, and the people who live, work and play just miles from the site of the Norfolk Southern derailment. The other has spent six years visiting factory towns, rural communities and working on policies to bring manufacturing and technology jobs to communities decimated by globalization. Residents are scared about their health and livelihoods. They are unsure whether the air, water and soil will be safe after this disaster. They want answers, accountability and assurance that something like this will never happen again.These are the working-class folks who feel invisible and abandoned by our nation. American communities have been hurt by decades of deindustrialization, watching as disastrous trade and economic policies sent their jobs overseas. Now, they are being displaced from their homes because of corporate greed and weak regulations that failed to keep them safe from toxic chemicals.From western Pennsylvania to Silicon Valley, political leaders from across the country have a moral duty to speak out loudly for better safety regulations and to acknowledge what the people around East Palestine and so many Americans are going through.That’s why we have come together to introduce the Derail Act, the first piece of legislation in Congress to hold the railroads accountable and protect Americans. The bill will ensure that trains carrying hazardous materials are properly classified and rail carriers are required to take proper safety precautions when carrying these materials across the country. That means investing in newer rail cars, better braking equipment, setting stricter speed limits, and more.Our legislation will also improve information sharing by requiring rail carriers to report to the National Response Center, state officials and local officials within 24 hours after a train carrying toxic chemicals derails. This is something concrete that we can do to address the wrongs of what happened.This bill is an important step forward, but there is much more that needs to be done. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Transportation repealed a train safety rule that would have required trains carrying highly hazardous material to have electronic brakes installed to help stop quickly. That rule should be immediately reinstated. The Biden administration should also work closely with DoT to establish new, commonsense rules like preventing older train cars from carrying dangerous materials and mandating two-person minimum crews to help respond in the case of an emergency.To directly help the people of East Palestine and Darlington Township, we should require Norfolk Southern, the railroad responsible for the accident, to pay for all clean up and relocation costs. The EPA has already ordered the company to offer cleaning services to those impacted and has the power to charge it $70,000 per day for failure to comply. If a company can afford to pay their CEO $4m a year and provide billions in stock buybacks to shareholders, it can afford to clean up the wreckage it has caused.What this situation comes down to is the difference between those who think that government should let companies chase profits at any cost and those, like us, who instead believe that government must protect our workers and our communities. Over the past few years, Norfolk Southern reported a rise in accidents also corresponding to a rise in profits. And just months before the derailment, the company was lobbying DoT against safety standards. These companies are not going to hold themselves responsible, and it’s putting their workers and the public at risk. It is up to us to push back against the lobbying blitz and stand with workers and regular Americans.For the past 40 years, our nation has given corporations free rein and been complicit in the hollowing out of our middle class. Our governing class watched it happen. No more. This is the moment to create a society that works for everyone. We need a patriotic economy where working conditions are safe, human needs are prioritized, and everyone is treated with dignity and respect.
      Congressman Chris Deluzio is a US representative from Pennsylvania’s 17th district
      Congressman Rohit Khanna is US representative from California’s 17th congressional district
      TopicsOhio train derailmentOpinionUS politicsUS CongressOhioHouse of RepresentativesDemocratsRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      What’s in the air in East Palestine, Ohio? – podcast

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      When a train derailed in a small town in Ohio last month, it shed its toxic load, spewed smoke and set off a political firestorm that is still raging

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      On the evening of 3 February, a train made up of 149 carriages and more than a mile long came off the rails in the small Ohio town of East Palestine. No one was injured but the train shed its cargo, which included toxic chemicals including vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani has been reporting from East Palestine where residents have returned to their homes after those within the disaster’s exclusion zone were forced to leave the area. She tells Michael Safi that local people are furious about the way the accident happened – and how the cleanup has been handled. Seeing an opportunity, Donald Trump arrived last week to distribute bottles of water as well as campaign material for his 2024 presidential run. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden was criticised for visiting Ukraine rather than East Palestine. This week, Ohio’s two senators have prepared a bill aimed at federal regulations around what trains can legally transport and under what conditions. But much of the anger from local people is focused on how close the rail industry has got to government in recent years, in order to allegedly water down existing restrictions, which many in East Palestine believe to be an important factor behind the disaster in their town. More

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      ‘Crafting an illusion’: US rail firms’ multimillion-dollar PR push

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      ‘Crafting an illusion’: US rail firms’ multimillion-dollar PR pushNorfolk Southern, the company behind the Ohio train crash, and other rail firms spent millions on marketing and lobbyingSix children, smiling and laughing, sit at a table with lunch boxes open in front of them. “Hey guys! My dad can stop a train with his finger,” one brags. “My mom can see into the future,” another says, holding up her hands as binoculars. “My mom? She speaks train,” a third claims.‘Nobody has answers’: Ohio residents fearful of health risks near train siteRead moreJust then, her mom walks into the room. Another child asks if it’s true that she can talk to trains. “You betcha,” she says with a wink, as she stands in front of a sky-blue sign emblazoned with the logo of the Norfolk Southern Corporation.The kids’ conversation takes place in “Everyday Superheroes”, a 2018 video created for Norfolk Southern, the $12.7bn operator of the train carrying toxic chemicals that derailed earlier this month in East Palestine, Ohio, causing an environmental disaster of still unknown proportions.The video, part of an ad campaign called “Reimagine Possible”, was produced by RP3, a Maryland-based public relations agency. RP3 said the campaign was designed to reach “policymakers and opinion elites… whose perceptions are vital to Norfolk Southern’s success.” The people targeted by the campaign “tend to support companies whose leadership helps spur innovation and growth”, the agency wrote, explaining in a case study how the campaign was designed to “convince people they’re actually innovative”.The PR push is a window into a years-long, multimillion-dollar campaign by America’s biggest railroad corporations to win favor among federal regulators and policymakers and push back against calls for tougher regulation – a successful campaign that is coming under closer scrutiny following the Ohio disaster.Another video, set to its own version of School House Rock’s Conjunction Junction, starts with the lyrics: “Norfolk Southern, what’s your function? Hooking up the country, helping business run. Trains! They haul everything, safely and on time.”Between 2015 and 2022, the Association of American Railroads (AAR), the trade organization representing large train companies, spent more than $39.4m lobbying the federal government, according to data compiled by the nonprofit OpenSecrets. The AAR and its dues-paying members, who include Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, BNSF and CSX, have also made millions of dollars’ worth of political contributions.But as Norfolk Southern’s “Reimagine Possible” campaign reflects, the industry also employs more indirect tactics to promote what the AAR calls “balanced regulation”, its euphemism for eliminating mandatory, government-enforced safety standards in favor of voluntary, industry-led oversight.An analysis by the Guardian found that between 2015 and 2019, the most recent year for which data are available, the AAR paid Subject Matter, a Washington DC-based PR and government affairs firm, more than $23.3m for “paid media consulting + advertising,” according to the AAR’s annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). That sum represents nearly as much as the group spent on lobbying during the same period.Subject Matter’s work for the AAR included “Freight Rail Works”, which the agency described as “a comprehensive campaign to help ensure this critical industry remains top-of-mind for Washington DC-area policymakers and influencers.” “Transforming for Tomorrow”, another campaign produced by Subject Matter, was designed to “showcase the surprising technological advancements that power America’s rail network” and “cover all major touchpoints for our DC beltway audience”. Neither Subject Matter nor RP3 responded to a request for comment.According to the AAR’s 2019 tax filing, the trade association’s “integrated communications campaign” is designed in part to demonstrate “how railroads use modern technology to improve safety and provide public benefits”.As part of its communications push, the AAR has paid for dozens of sponsored articles in the Washington Post and Politico, two publications widely read by the “policymakers and opinion elites” who the group targets with its messages of innovation and self-regulation. Under headlines such as “No need to fix a freight rail system that is thriving” and “How America’s freight railroads became great again,” the AAR touts its members’ impact on the US economy and warns of the consequences of new regulations. Other stories, including “How freight rail is putting the brakes on human error,” argue that the industry is already making technology investments on its own, with the implication (and sometimes the explicit connection) that new safety requirements are unnecessary or even detrimental to those efforts.The rail industry has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year funding GoRail, a tax-exempt 501(c)4 organization that advocates for the railroad industry before local, state and federal policymakers and officials. According to IRS filings, between 2015 and 2019 the AAR gave $2m to GoRail, a sum that represents more than one-fifth of GoRail’s total revenue during that period.GoRail’s operations are tightly integrated with the country’s largest rail companies, and its agenda is closely aligned with their interests. GoRail’s board consists almost entirely of railroad executives and the president of the AAR, and the role of board chair rotates annually among executives from Norfolk Southern, BNSF, Union Pacific and other firms. GoRail and the AAR, as well as Railpac, the AAR’s political action committee, all operate out of the same building in Washington DC. Neither GoRail nor the AAR responded to requests for comment.Unlike the AAR, however, GoRail exists to generate grassroots support – or the appearance of grassroots support – for the industry’s policy agenda. GoRail’s annual reports and IRS filings regularly boast of how many letters it sent to Congress, social media “impressions” it generated and “lawmaker-advocate connections” and “educational meetings” it organized. As a Norfolk Southern executive who chaired the GoRail board wrote in the organization’s 2017 annual report, “Via thousands of field meetings with key local influencers annually and a sophisticated media strategy, GoRail’s team is able to build the relationships that matter and then utilize these connections to impact policy decisions when it counts.”One policy decision to which the industry remains strongly opposed is a proposal from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to require most trains, particularly those carrying hazardous materials, to have at least two crew members on board. The “train staffing” rule’s supporters, including railroad workers and their union representatives, argue that having multiple workers on board makes trains safer to operate and leaves them more capable of responding to accidents when they occur.Individual companies such as Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific, as well as GoRail and the AAR, have helped lead the industry’s opposition to the proposal, frequently using the same arguments that they deploy in their PR campaigns to argue that the rule is unnecessary because of their investments in new technologies.Crew tried to stop Ohio train after alert about wheel bearing, safety report findsRead moreDuring a 14 December FRA hearing about the rule, for instance, a representative for Norfolk Southern told the FRA that the company opposed the train staffing requirement in part because it would prevent the company from “redeploy[ing]” conductors from trains to “ground-based role[s]”. “Once again technology has supplanted the conductor’s traditional safety role,” the representative said.A Union Pacific representative, meanwhile, told the FRA that while the company “has always been, and continues to be, a driver of innovation in this industry”, the train staffing proposal “is threatening to take us down the path of obsolescence”. A GoRail issue brief makes a similar claim that “Mandating a specific railroad crew is a disincentive to research new technologies”.In quarterly earnings calls and presentations to shareholders, however, the companies suggest that reducing the number of workers on trains is as much about cutting short-term costs as it is about developing new technology or promoting innovation. Even as Norfolk Southern’s PR campaign calls its workers “everyday superheroes”, over the past two decades the company has managed to cut more than 9,600 jobs while increasing shareholder dividends and stock buybacks by 4,500%, as More Perfect Union recently reported. “Crew staffing of trains…has remained consistent,” a company spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement. “Norfolk Southern continues to make substantial progress recruiting new crew members.”“When [companies] think of railroad, they do not think of cutting-edge. They think of cutting crew size and cutting corners to do it,” said Vincent Verna, a representative of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and a former locomotive engineer for Union Pacific, during the 14 December FRA hearing. “Simply cutting the size of the crew for more profits has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with avarice.”The railroad industry has deployed a similar two-step argument in opposition to other safety proposals, including a rule that would have required trains to use electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, as the Lever reported. The publication found that during the Trump administration, Norfolk Southern and the AAR helped defeat a proposal to require ECP brakes on trains carrying hazardous materials – even though ECP brakes were one of the innovations that industry leaders, including Norfolk Southern, had “previously touted” as examples of the industry’s technological prowess.While there is little doubt that railroad companies are indeed investing in and implementing new technology, the industry appears determined to use the idea of technology – as well as the prospect of future technology – to defeat new safety requirements and regulations.Its approach was summed up in a 2017 blog post from the PR agency hired by the AAR to “deliver [the] message home to policymakers” that the industry’s technology investments are important for the US economy. The agency created a video of a hard hat- and yellow safety vest-clad spokesperson for Freight Rail Works being “cloned” dozens of times. The video’s header: “Association of American Railroads: Crafting an illusion to deliver a powerful message”.TopicsOhio train derailmentRail industryUS politicsOhiofeaturesReuse this content More

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      East Palestine Crisis Tests a Trump-Backed Senator

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      J.D. Vance, the freshman senator from Ohio, is in the spotlight for the first time in his tenure as he responds to the train derailment and its aftermath.EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — As Donald J. Trump criticized the federal response to the train derailment that has shaken this Ohio town, there was one leader in Washington he praised repeatedly — the man he helped propel to Congress, Senator J.D. Vance.“J.D. Vance has been incredible,” Mr. Trump told reporters and local officials on Wednesday at an East Palestine firehouse, as Mr. Vance stood behind him.While a fight brews between Democrats and Republicans over the role of the federal government in the derailment’s aftermath, Mr. Vance, 38, has been at the center of it all. Some of his actions have been the conventional response of any seasoned politician. He has drafted letters calling on federal officials for more oversight and met with some of the residents most affected by the derailment and chemical spill. But he also has joined far-right Republican figures in depicting the deep-red village in northeastern Ohio as a forgotten place, taking a page from Mr. Trump’s grievance-politics playbook.“I grew up in a town that was neglected by the national media and was affected by a lot of dumb policies,” Mr. Vance said in a brief interview, as he briskly left the firehouse on Wednesday. “I worry that unless we keep the pressure on the federal policymakers and the corporations that caused this problem, a lot of people are going to be forgotten and left behind.”The White House has pushed back on such criticism from Republicans, accusing both the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers of dismantling the Obama-era rail safety measures meant to prevent episodes like the East Palestine derailment. And at least one media critic has accused Mr. Vance of fanning the flames of white grievance by attacking the Biden administration as deserting white Americans.For Mr. Vance, the response to the derailment could serve as a pivot point. It is the first major crisis in his tenure as a newly elected senator and it has provided him with the chance to show the voters who viewed him with skepticism during his campaign that he has not strayed far from his humble Ohio roots.Officials are cleaning up in East Palestine, including Sulphur Run, a creek that flows through the town.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesThe derailment has also given him an opening to tap into a theme that first brought national attention to his Senate ambitions: speaking up for working-class Ohioans, many of them white, who he has suggested have been victimized by the politics of the left.In one of his first campaign ads, he bluntly played to white grievance, looking at the camera and asking voters a question: “Are you a racist?” He argued in the ad that Democratic voters were “pouring into this country” through unchecked borders, echoing the “great replacement theory,” the far-right notion that undocumented immigrants are coming to America to usurp the political power of native-born white voters.In a red state that Mr. Trump won in both 2016 and 2020, many residents in East Palestine and its surrounding towns were not following the national back-and-forth over the government response as they worried about the potential effects of the spill. But they had followed Mr. Vance’s attempts to bring attention to their plight on local media outlets and approved of his handling of the crisis, even as some said there was more work to be done.The Train Derailment in East Palestine, OhioWhen a freight train derailed in Ohio on Feb. 3, it set off evacuation orders, a toxic chemical scare and a federal investigation.A Heated Town Hall: Hundreds of Ohio residents gathered to demand answers about the fallout from the derailed train. Officials for the railroad company pulled out hours earlier, infuriating locals.Cleanup Costs: The Environmental Protection Agency ordered Norfolk Southern, the operator of the derailed train, to clean up any resulting contamination and pay all the costs.Farmers Fear a ‘Forever Scar’: The train derailment has upended a region of Ohio where generations of families could afford to buy acres of land, raise livestock and plant gardens.Trump’s Visit: In East Palestine, the former president attacked the Biden administration’s handling of the train derailment, even as his own environmental policies while in office have been criticized.“I think a lot of people are watching him right now to see how he is handling it,” said Kayla Miller, 31, who owns a farm in nearby Negley. “I think he genuinely cares about our situation and cares about our town.”Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist turned first-time politician, became a sought-after voice on the white working-class after the release of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which explored his family ties to Appalachia and traced his path from humble origins in southwestern Ohio to the military and later to Yale Law School.When he returned to Ohio, he was initially viewed as an outsider. He was funded by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, and had spent much of his time in San Francisco after leaving his home state. Ahead of the state’s Republican primary in May 2022, more than three dozen Republican county and state committee leaders urged Mr. Trump in a letter to not endorse Mr. Vance. They questioned his Republican credentials and noted he had often denounced Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.Mr. Vance has been a sharp critic of the Biden administration on inflation and border policies, largely falling in line with Republicans pushing for isolationism as the answer to loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. As residents coped with the derailment, Mr. Vance sent letters to the company that operated the freight train, Norfolk Southern, asking it to broaden its criteria for reimbursements to residents beyond a one-mile radius of the derailment zone..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.He has worked with Republicans and Democrats — including two of the region’s top Democrats, Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — to call on federal public health officials to provide resources to help the state monitor people’s health. They have also pressed federal environmental agencies to monitor the hazardous chemical compounds, or dioxins, that the derailment released into the region’s air and soil.He has met with business owners and affected residents. He also visited a creek near the derailment site, releasing a video in which he used a stick to stir a filmy substance in the water that he described as evidence of possible contamination.“I’ve just been doing a lot of talking to people on the ground here,” he said, speaking to reporters in downtown East Palestine last week. “Obviously, I am more concerned about the public safety component of this here. Is the air breathable? Is the water drinkable?”“I think a lot of people are watching him right now to see how he is handling it,” Kayla Miller said of Mr. Vance. “I think he genuinely cares about our situation and cares about our town.” Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Mr. Vance reinforced his loyalty to the former president even as some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters now privately worry about his grip on the party and his chances of winning the presidency again. Mr. Vance and Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s son, followed the former president as he made stops at local businesses to shake hands with customers and pass out Make America Great Again hats. In short remarks at the fire station, Mr. Vance thanked Mr. Trump for visiting and bringing national attention with him.“The most important thing that we can take from this visit is that we can’t forget about the people of East Palestine,” Mr. Vance told reporters.He said later that he believed Mr. Trump’s presence would help keep the pressure on federal officials to take action. Asked about criticism from the White House on the Republican opposition to rail safety measures, Mr. Vance said attempts to politicize the issue would not help East Palestine residents. According to the website PolitiFact, a rail safety rule repealed as part of a broad regulatory rollback under the Trump administration would have had no impact on the East Palestine derailment.Mr. Vance and other Republicans have subtly evoked white disaffection by portraying a largely white, rural and conservative area as neglected by federal officials. On a Fox News interview this month, he accused Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, of focusing on “how we have too many white male construction workers” instead of talking about the frequency of train derailments and railroad safety.On Wednesday, he rejected the notion that he was playing to racial grievance. “I don’t know how I am doing that or anybody else is doing that,” Mr. Vance said outside the firehouse. “This is a community that has been affected by the problem, and they deserve help.”At the same time, far from East Palestine, Mr. Vance has used his brief time in the Senate to go on the offensive on race, accusing Democrats of injecting it into politics.This month, he criticized Gigi B. Sohn, Mr. Biden’s nominee to the Federal Communications Commission, for playing into “this weird racialization of American political rhetoric in the last few years.” And in his campaign ad on the border, he criticized Democrats for calling people racists because they wanted to talk about Mr. Biden’s border policies and the impact those policies were having on the opioid crisis, which has ravaged largely white, rural parts of the industrial Midwest and across the nation.East Palestine residents said that before the freight train derailed on Feb. 3, many Ohioans seemed to know little about their hometown, which sits just below the manufacturing hub of Youngstown, near the Pennsylvania border. Now, the village of 4,761 in a red county Mr. Vance handily won has been under the national glare.Residents have been concerned about the air quality, and especially worried if the local water is safe to drink.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe crisis has spurred complicated feelings among residents about the necessity of government oversight, but many said federal agencies should take on a greater role holding Norfolk Southern accountable.In interviews this week, several residents said they had developed coughs or odd rashes, and some had farm animals die. Ms. Miller and her husband, Chase Miller, said that they had lost two chickens and three rabbits and that more farm animals had fallen ill. One of the main side effects of a gas released, vinyl chloride, they read, is cancer.“So, in five years, am I going to have liver cancer? Am I going to be able to see my kids graduate?” she said.Her husband added, “My biggest worry is that they are going to forget about Negley, they are going to forget about the local towns where the water runs to.”State and federal officials have said that they have yet to detect dangerous levels of chemicals in the air or municipal water, and tests are continuing.Leaving a grocery store with stacks of water bottles on Monday, Butch Foster, 76, a farmer and former school custodian, said he refused to leave his home after the spill until federal officials declared the air safe to breathe. But after spending some time outside, he noticed black mucus coming out of his nose, so he did not want to drink the municipal water.Mr. Foster had watched the video of Mr. Vance stirring the waters in the creek. He said the senator he had done a good job of calling attention to his and other residents’ concerns.“I just know they need to do more,” he said. More