January 10, 2018

Trump to Blue States: Drop Dead

The guy with a smile on his face is Florida governor Rick Scott. And why not? The other guy is Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has just agreed to exempt Florida from new rules opening up offshore oil drilling everywhere else.Scott Keeler/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA

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It just never ends:

“Local voice matters.” But only as long as that voice is a Republican governor in an important swing state. West coast states with Democratic governors who didn’t vote for Donald Trump can pound sand. Ditto for Virginia, which opposes drilling off its coast. Ditto for northeastern states, all of which oppose drilling off their coasts. You guys didn’t vote for Trump, so tough luck.

To state the obvious, the problem here isn’t so much that California is likely to see lots of new offshore oil rigs in its future. Lease auctions for public lands in the West haven’t attracted much bidding, and I suspect the same will be true for offshore leases. Rather, the problem is that the Trump administration is being run like the mafia, with friendly states getting explicitly favorable treatment and enemy states—this is how Trump seems to think of them—being gleefully punished. This attitude has already spread to Republicans in Congress, who crafted their tax bill with petty punishments of blue states as a top priority.

This is not—repeat not—something that Democrats have ever made a habit of. The stimulus bill treated every state fairly. Obamacare treated every state fairly. Even in judicial appointments, a favorite playground for partisan politics, every state was treated fairly. But now Republicans are doing their best to bring back the kind of frankly punitive spoils-system politics that we all thought had been long abandoned. We’re sure learning a lot these days about what “conservative” means in the 21st century.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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