Air Force Says Supreme Court Gave It Right to Poison Drinking Water

The U.S. Air Force is claiming that it cannot depollute drinking water that it contaminated with dangerous forever chemicals because the U.S. Supreme Court has stripped federal regulators of the authority to make it clean it up.

In June, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference, a 40-year-old doctrine that required judges to defer to a federal agency when determining the meaning of any ambiguous laws that agency should try to enforce. The Air Force has claimed that without the Chevron deference, the Environmental Protection Agency cannot order it to address its own pollution, The Guardian reported Monday.

In Tucson, Arizona, several Air Force bases have been polluting the drinking water, contaminating it with trichloroethylene, a volatile organic compound produced in industrial work, and PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which do not naturally break down. These chemicals can accumulate inside the human body and have been linked to a myriad of severe health problems.

In May, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Air Force and National Guard to develop a plan to address the pollution, which would cost them an estimated $25 million—just 0.1 percent of the Air Force’s budget. The Air Force refused, stating that “the EPA’s order can not withstand review” and therefore it wouldn’t be beholden to it, according to The Guardian.

The Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference in the ruling for Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, leading many to fear that agencies such as the EPA would be stripped of their regulatory power. The court’s decision allows the federal judiciary to take on the role of scientists and policymakers, instead of administrative agencies that are staffed by experts on the issue at hand.

Former EPA officials and legal experts told The Guardian that the ruling would likely not apply in this case, because the new precedent only affects rule-making, not enforcement. To challenge the EPA’s regulatory order, the Air Force would need to sue the EPA, which it legally can’t do because one branch of government cannot sue another. A business, however, could challenge the order.

Deborah Ann Sivas, director of the Stanford University Environmental Law Clinic, told The Guardian that the Air Force seemed to be testing just how far it could push the new precedent, which has severely kneecapped regulators.

“It feels almost like an intimidation tactic, but it will be interesting to see if others take this approach and it bleeds over,” Sivas said.

Last year, a report from the Department of Defense found that at least 245 U.S. military bases had contaminated or threatened to contaminate nearby drinking water with PFAS. The Department of Defense is one of the biggest contributors to PFAS pollution in the country.

If Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, Betsy DeVos would like a job again, but only if it involves phasing out the entire Department of Education.

DeVos told The Detroit News Saturday that she didn’t think Trump would ask her to return to her post as secretary of education, but if asked, she would like to serve with the “goal of phasing out the Department of Education as we tried to do through the budgetary process in the first administration.”

DeVos also said that she would like to pass “a major education freedom bill in the form of a tax credit mechanism,” alluding to school choice vouchers at the federal tax level, part of conservatives’ grand plans to eventually get rid of public education in America. The former Trump Cabinet member made the comments at a campaign event for Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan.

DeVos was one of the least popular Cabinet secretaries under the Trump administration. Not only did she have no experience working in or with public schools, but she also fought for increased school privatization, argued in favor of guns in schools, rolled back protections for LGBTQ students, and made it easier for schools to ignore sexual misconduct.  

DeVos resigned on January 7, 2021, citing the violence of the Capitol insurrection the day before. She also discussed with other Cabinet members the possibility of invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and removing Trump from office.

While DeVos hasn’t publicly endorsed Trump for president in 2024, last week she said she’s “definitely supporting the Republican ticket,” according to The Detroit News.  Will she be Trump’s pick for secretary of education if he returns to the White House? His Cabinet the second time around would likely be a lot worse, but it’s hard to exceed DeVos’s unpopularity, unless Trump has someone like Christopher Rufo in mind.

A far-flung political gamble by the House Freedom Caucus could end up compromising the election for Donald Trump.

With Congress still in recess, the hard-right minority faction has already come out in support of a continuing resolution to extend government funding past the September 30 shutdown date with the hopes of thwarting a postelection omnibus that could benefit Democrats. But the proposition comes with a catch: passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, which would expand proof-of-citizenship voting requirements for federal elections. SAVE, which passed the Republican-controlled House in June, would also force voter-roll purge requirements on states.

“The House Freedom Caucus believes that House Republicans should return to Washington to continue the work of passing all 12 appropriations bills to cut spending and advance our policy priorities,” the caucus said in a statement.

“Furthermore, the Continuing Resolution should include the SAVE Act—as called for by President Trump—to prevent non-citizens from voting to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years,” they added.

Noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is, of course, already illegal. Critics warn that the SAVE Act could be used to disenfranchise American citizens, as Republicans rally to preemptively frame the 2024 election as compromised.

“The SAVE Act is nothing more than a partisan scare tactic meant to erode confidence in our elections,” Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray told NBC News. “It is already illegal for noncitizens to register and vote in federal elections—our elections are free and fair, despite the dangerous, often incoherent, ramblings of Donald Trump.”

Holding the government hostage in order to pass a redundant and dangerous new set of voter requirements could look very bad for Republicans in an already tenuous election cycle—especially if the gamble fails and sends the government headlong into a shutdown as a result.

Congress is in recess until September 9 and will have just 13 voting days before the end of the fiscal year. The Freedom Caucus’s demand could put House Speaker Mike Johnson in a tight spot: He has repeatedly worked to prevent a government shutdown, but he first unveiled the SAVE Act alongside Trump.

Johnson has not yet made a decision on any details for a continuing resolution, including its potential expiration date.

“We’re having some very thoughtful discussion about the pros and cons of the various strategies on it, and that decision is not yet determined, but it will be very soon,” he told The Hill last week in reference to a potential stopgap spending bill, though he noted that it was not “obvious” that one would be necessary.

A pro-Donald Trump super PAC is preparing a $100 million dollar ad campaign hoping to smear Vice President Kamala Harris as a left-wing “lunatic” to voters in swing states.

MAGA Inc., a super PAC that has previously been used to financially buoy the Trump campaign as its candidate hemorrhaged funds across his legal battles, will launch a series of ads targeting Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Monday.

The ads will paint Harris as a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House,” according to David Lee and Chris Grant, MAGA Inc.’s top political strategists. Specifically, they will focus on Harris’s immigration policies and her prosecutorial record, one person familiar with the plan told Politico.

“Americans might vote for a liberal, but they won’t vote for a lunatic,” the memo said.

One of Trump’s senior advisers previously said that Trump’s campaign planned to dig up “several Willie Hortons” from Harris’s prosecutorial record, a reference to a series of racist ads from the 1980s, with which to attack the vice president.

The new ad blitz is timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention, which will take place next week in Chicago. The ads will target voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, all crucial battleground states.

Last week, Trump claimed that while he was lying low at Mar-a-Lago, as his running mate J.D. Vance trailed Harris across the country, he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

Trump’s forays into political ads on Monday are already proving unfocused at best, detrimental at worst. When Trump posted a new advertisement on X Monday, the move sent shares in Truth Social tumbling to their lowest level in months. Another Trump ad released Monday levied its attacks against President Joe Biden, not his actual opponent, Harris. Another ad inexplicably implied he would have been endorsed by former President Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump’s social media network is losing money just as the former president and convicted felon has resumed posting on X (formerly Twitter).

Trump Media & Technology shares dropped to $24.60, their lowest price level in months, after Trump posted on X early Monday for the first time in more than a year. Shares may drop even further as Trump is supposed to sit down for an interview with X CEO Elon Musk Monday night.

The plummeting stock comes after many investors bought shares in the media company hoping for a boost during the 2024 election, with a possible Trump victory netting an even higher increase. Trump Media reported a loss of $16 million in its first full quarter as a publicly traded company Friday, earning just $836,900 for the period ending June 30.

It’s the latest run of bad news for Truth Social, which is rapidly losing users. It was expected to be an easy money grab for Trump, who owns 60 percent of the company. But even the company’s net loss of $58.2 million in 2023 had to be reaudited after its accounting firm was charged with “massive fraud.” At the very least, Trump Media’s meager numbers last quarter were a huge improvement from the previous one, when it lost an astonishing $327.6 million and only brought in $770,500 in revenue.

Trump is stuck with his company’s stock for just one more month, when he is legally allowed to sell his shares without board approval. He can’t try to increase the share price by bragging, as he did with his real estate properties, because that would be illegal.  Even though the Supreme Court gave him a break with its immunity ruling, he still needs cash to pay his mounting legal bills. It’s only a matter of time before September arrives and Trump dumps his stock. The question is, how low will the share price be?