Our President Wants Us to Drink Toxic Water

6 min readThis Week in the Laboratories of Democracy(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to This Post)Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where a pay phone was ringing, and it just about blew your mind.We begin in New York, where every faucet is a surprise. From NYSFocus:Many of Tupper Lake’s roughly 5,000 residents are wary of drinking the village’s water straight from the tap. It is tainted with a toxic disinfectant and has long violated state safety standards, though it’s officially deemed acceptable to use. And Tupper Lake is far from alone. A NYCity News Service and New York Focus analysis of 2024 state Department of Health data, the latest available, found that 79 public water systems across the state have water contaminated with toxins exceeding state limits. These water systems serve more than 575,000 New Yorkers, from wealthy Long Island suburbs to working-class upstate towns, though the state notes that some water recorded as contaminated may not be delivered to customers.In 2020, the health department set maximum acceptable levels for the industrial solvent 1,4-dioxane and PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” These toxins joined 10 others listed as drinking water contaminants, including arsenic, radioactive radium and uranium. New York ranks among the states with the highest number of contaminants in its tap water. Many communities are trying to improve the quality of their water, spending millions of dollars to shut contaminated wells, build new treatment facilities, and find cleaner water sources.But nobody has to worry, because the administration has wished away all the dangers. From PBS:The Trump administration is moving to roll back limits on some PFAS, the toxic forever chemicals found in the drinking water of millions of Americans. The Biden era rule set the first national drinking water limits for several PFAS compounds, but industry groups argued the standards were legally flawed and too costly to meet. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says the chemicals still need to be addressed, but that the previous administration overreached. I'm sure the folks in Tupper Lake will be reassured.Fontana regularly hears about how the problem affects Tupper Lake residents. Many residents have turned to stocking up on bottled water and buying expensive home filtration systems, Fontana said. Some even avoid giving tap water to their pets. “It’s devastating to this community,” she said. “It’s very difficult to go through the day without somebody talking about the water situation in the community, and this has been ongoing for many, many, many years.”Maybe not.We move along to Alaska, and to one of the strangest episodes in the GOP's efforts to run down imaginary voter fraud. It involves families from American Samoa who have moved to Alaska and who presumed, logically, that they would be eligible to vote in local elections. Most of these folks live in Whittier, a village of 272 people south of Anchorage. And it is there where our crime-stoppers novella begins. From Bolts:The family lived together in the small harbor town of Whittier, Alaska. They all hail originally from the faraway U.S. territory of American Samoa, which they thought gave them the right to vote in their local elections, as is the case for people born in every other U.S. state and territory. But unbeknownst to them, and even to many Alaska officials, American Samoans are denied voting rights outside of American Samoa, since they are classified as U.S. nationals and not citizens. State officials accused them of intentionally voting as non-citizens, and filed the criminal charges that have consumed Pese’s family for nearly three years. But Sunday’s cemetery visit was a celebration. Pese brought balloons, flowers, and Samoan-style pork buns, plus his wife and kids, and they shared the good news with Suli: Late Friday, Alaska prosecutors, fresh off a loss at the state Court of Appeals, had decided to drop the voter fraud charges against this family. “It’s a huge amount of weight lifted off my shoulders,” Pese told Bolts from the gravesite. “I’ve never been stressed out so badly.”His mother, who had been among the 11 defendants in the case, died while under prosecution. On her death bed, Suli, matriarch of the robust American Samoan community in Whittier, told friends and family how worried she was about the case. “She would praise the Lord and she would throw a barbecue to celebrate this victory,” Pese said. “I know she’s really happy right now.” The Samoans were caught up in a baffling conundrum about their voting rights as Alaskans, one that even the police who arrested them didn't pretend to understand.The prosecutions were a harsh civics lesson for American Samoans like Smith and Pese, who, as U.S. nationals, live in a sort of limbo status that confers various privileges, such as Social Security and a U.S. passport, but that also denies the right to vote in state or local elections—much less to seek elected office—if they ever move from American Samoa to another part of the country. For election purposes on any U.S. soil outside of American Samoa, they’re treated as though they are non-citizen immigrants.The Whittier relatives are among thousands of American Samoan nationals living in Alaska. Like many in that community, they had been confused about their voting rights. Smith told the Alaska state troopers who arrested her in 2023 that she’d thought she could participate in local elections, but not in presidential elections. Even the cops who arrested Smith—and then returned months later to interrogate 10 of her relatives—were themselves confused about the law. “I thought people of American Samoa were U.S. citizens,” one trooper told Pese, Bolts found in a review of the interrogations.Nevertheless, the Republican governor and attorney general of Alaska spotted an opportunity inside of all the confusion. They hung felony charges on the Whittier 11.This move horrified civil rights advocates in Alaska, who told Bolts they felt the prosecution was nothing more than a Trumpian bid to prove the existence of widespread voter fraud by non-citizens, which in fact is extraordinarily rare. The prosecutions also spooked many U.S. nationals outside of Whittier, some of whom have also voted, or at least registered to vote, thanks to Alaska’s longstanding failure to clear up the very confusion that had ensnared people in Whittier. “There were questions across the whole state,” Tafilisaunoa Toleafoa, executive director of the nonprofit Pacific Community of Alaska, told Bolts on Sunday. “Whittier has a high number of American Samoans, yes, but so do Anchorage and Juneau and Utqiagvik and Fairbanks. Community members have reached out, concerned about the possibility of the same thing.Finally, after three years of threatening the Whittier defendants with 10-year prison sentences, Alaskan officials dropped the charges. Which was an immense relief to them. However, they still can't vote. Someone should fix that.And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official International Sodbuster Friedman of the Algarve brings us a tale of American education. From NonDoc:In its Wednesday ruling, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals vacated a 2024 preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of parts of the law. But the three-judge panel declined to review First Amendment “right-to-receive” arguments in the case, and the two-judge majority disagreed with the district court about the plaintiff’s likelihood of success in their claims that two of the eight concepts included in the law—passed in 2021 as House Bill 1775—are “vague” and thus violate the 14th Amendment.In his opinion (embedded below), Phillips wrote that educators are not in violation of subsection B by teaching about “a historical or popular figure’s beliefs, nor by encouraging discussion about current events and ideas.” Rather, they would be in violation by “instructing students that any of the eight racist or sexist concepts is correct. ... In short, subsection B prohibits teachers from proselytizing students to accept certain racist or sexist creeds as truth,” Phillips wrote. “Apart from any prohibited racist or sexist editorializing, teachers remain free to instruct about historical or popular issues, and students remain free to draw their own conclusions.”This explanation owes a great deal to the Monty Python sketch about the Philosophy Department of the University of Woolamaloo in Australia. A new professor arrives and, after some initial confusion because the new man is not named Bruce, it is explained that he is free to teach all the great Socialist thinkers provided that he emphasizes that they were wrong.This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.