Editorials of The Times

In this time of political division, the broad storyline of the omnibus spending bill approved late last week is largely a heartening one. With the Democratic leadership in full resistance mode and the Republicans facing a treacherous political climate in the fall elections, Congress repudiated President Donald Trump’s extreme budget cuts in rare bipartisan fashion. In doing so, it protected a range of domestic programs the president had targeted for huge reductions, if not outright elimination, and sent an infuriated Trump scuttling off to Mar-a-Lago with yet another problem to worry about: a mediocre Congress making a lazy president look even worse by actually accomplishing something.

A cynic observing this unusual Capitol Hill lovefest could plausibly argue that it’s easy enough for Republicans and Democrats to link arms when there’s serious money to be spent. And it is: There is plenty of old-fashioned pork in this bill. Even so, it is hard to argue with an outcome that preserved and in some cases increased funding for vital health, education, foreign aid, infrastructure and environmental programs while providing a fraction of what Trump wanted for his border wall — the presumed reason for his choleric withdrawal to his Florida fortress.

There is another storyline within the broader one, and it, too, is heartening: the willingness of the Democratic leadership to stand up to mischief-makers in Congress itself. A bill of this magnitude — $1.3 trillion altogether, including hundreds of billions for the military — is fertile ground for legislators wishing to sneak in provisions that are unlikely to survive on their own and need the protective cover of a big must-pass bill. As a rule, these so-called riders have nothing to do with spending and are aimed primarily at changing policy or undermining basic laws.

Many of the most damaging riders in the bill were devised by Republicans and involved environmental policy. Among other things, they would have delayed enforcement of clean-air regulations, killed two Obama-era rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases from oil and gas wells, weakened protections for endangered species and insulated the Trump administration from legal challenges to its efforts to repeal clean-water rules.

That these and many more riders were deleted from the bill is a tribute to Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, and allies like Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Thomas Carper of Delaware, all willing to annoy some powerful interests along the way. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska and chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, had hoped to torpedo protections for old growth trees in Alaska’s forests. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., had hoped for a retirement present after 40 years in the Senate in the form of a flood-control project known as the Yazoo Pumps, a bad idea that has been kicking around for decades and would drain 200,000 acres of wetlands in the Mississippi Delta so that soybean farmers, who have drunk liberally from the public trough, could plant more crops. Both he and Murkowski were denied.

The budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump proposed to cut by 31 percent, stayed even. Funding for energy efficiency and renewable-energy programs, facing a nearly 70 percent cut, went up. Money for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a vehicle for protecting threatened open space, rose to $425 million, far more than the $64 million in the president’s budget.

Congress’ generosity is unlikely to enlarge the cramped vision of the people who run the agencies most responsible for the environment — the EPA and the Interior and Energy departments. Their driving impulse has been to roll back any Obama-era initiative that discomfits the coal, oil and gas industries. All in all, however, Friday was a sunny day for the environmental and scientific communities, which had known nothing but gloomy days since the moment Trump took office. It’s time they got a good one.

Among the most disturbing accusations the pornographic film star Stephanie Clifford made in her “60 Minutes” interview about President Donald Trump was that after she sold her story about Trump to a magazine in 2011, a man approached her in a parking lot, while she was with her infant daughter, and said: “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.”

“And then he leaned around,” she continued, “and looked at my daughter and said: ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.'”

Five years later, said Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, when Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen offered to pay her $130,000 to be silent about her relationship with Trump, she took the deal because she “was concerned for my family and their safety."

There is, of course, only Clifford’s word on this incident, which reads like a scene from a low-grade gangster movie. But this is not the first time that someone who has crossed Donald Trump has spoken of being threatened.

Last year, BuzzFeed News reported that in 2009, a lawyer representing investors at risk of losing more than $1 billion in a Trump casino bankruptcy got a frightening phone call from a man who called himself Carmine. If you keep messing “with Mr. Trump,” the caller said, using more pungent language, “we know where you live, and we’re going to your house for your wife and kids.” The FBI found that the call was made from a telephone booth across from the Ed Sullivan Theater, just before Trump was a guest on the “Late Show With David Letterman” there.

The private investigator Bo Dietl said he had worked over the years for Trump and that “if someone was targeting Donald on something, and going after him, I would do some confidential investigation for him as far as to deter anybody going after Donald.”

Dietl denied any knowledge of the threatening phone call, but, BuzzFeed reported, he referred to “shareholders” in Atlantic City “doing something” and sending a lawyer after Trump. So, Dietl said, Trump had him dig up dirt about the lawyer.

In 1982, after the New York City housing commissioner, Anthony Gliedman, declined to grant a $20 million tax abatement for Trump Tower, Gliedman told the New York City police commissioner that he had received a call “threatening his life” over the abatement, according to BuzzFeed. (Gliedman later went to work for Trump.)

Brent Blakely, a lawyer for Cohen — a lawyer for a lawyer, that’s how this crew rolls — demanded an apology from Clifford and said of her accusation, “Mr. Cohen had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any such person or incident, and does not even believe that any such person exists, or that such incident ever occurred.”

Clifford, of course, never said Cohen had anything to do with the threat, although on Monday she sued him for defamation for implying last month that she was lying about the president. But Trump likes his lawyers to blow hard, like his mentor, the legal torpedo Roy Cohn.

In July 2015, The Daily Beast reported that a book about the Trumps said that during divorce proceedings more than 25 years ago Trump’s first wife, Ivana, said that once, in a furious rage, he had raped her. Cohen got angry with the Daily Beast reporters: “I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. … You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up. … You’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”

We live at a time when a porn star displays more credibility and class than a president, the president’s lawyers distinguish themselves through swagger more than legal skill, and we seriously wonder just how thuggish the man in the Oval Office is. It seems like a bad dream.

In a last-minute move that would give Republicans an advantage in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, the Trump administration is reinstating a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. Coming from an administration that has expressed incredible hostility toward immigrants, the change was not surprising, but it’s galling nonetheless.

The commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, announced the decision late Monday, less than a week before the Census Bureau, which his agency oversees, is supposed to send a final list of questions for the 2020 census to Congress. If the decision stands — the attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra, has filed a lawsuit seeking to block it, and other elected officials are preparing to do so, too — it would be the first time in nearly 70 years that the federal government has asked people filling out census forms to list their citizenship status.

This is important because the census count determines how many House seats each state gets. The census is also used to determine how more than $600 billion in federal spending is allocated across the country, including Medicaid, food stamps and grants to schools. Asking about citizenship will reduce responses from immigrant families, which are already less likely than others to answer government surveys and are today terrified by President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. An inaccurate count is likely to provide more representation to states with fewer immigrants and relatively higher response rates and take seats away from states like California where response rates would be relatively lower. Given the geography of American politics, that would probably lead to more power for Republicans, and less for Democrats. Experts say response rates will fall even from citizens and permanent residents because they may have family members who are unauthorized immigrants.

Ross’ decision was based on the disingenuous argument that the Department of Justice needs to know the citizenship status of residents in each census tract so it can better protect the rights of minority voters under the Voting Rights Act. Even putting aside the laughable notion that this administration cares about minority voting rights, this argument is bunkum — the Justice Department has been enforcing that law without access to such data for decades. The last census that asked people to report their citizenship status was conducted in 1950, 15 years before the Voting Rights Act became law. What’s more, the Justice Department already has access to citizenship data through the American Community Survey, which is conducted every year.

The timing of this change is highly suspect. It comes too late to be included in a field test of the 2020 census that the government is conducting right now with 275,000 households in Providence County, Rhode Island. In his memo, Ross sought to downplay concerns that the citizenship question would reduce response rates by claiming there was no “empirical evidence” to back up that argument. Yet, by seeking to insert the question so late in the process, he himself has prevented officials from empirically testing how people will react to it.

The evidence that does exist shows that the concerns about the citizenship question curbing participation are legitimate. The Census Bureau reported in a September memo that its surveyors were encountering significant resistance from immigrants about providing personal information to the government because they feared it would not be kept confidential. “The immigrant is not going to trust the census employee when they are continuously hearing a contradicting message from the media every day threatening to deport immigrants,” one Arabic-speaking respondent told the bureau.

Even Ross acknowledged in an October House hearing that adding questions to the census reduced response rates because “the more things you ask in those forms, the less likely you are to get them in."

This is not the first time the Trump administration has sought to compromise the integrity of the census. Last year, the Census Bureau reduced its field test to just Rhode Island after discarding test locations in Washington state and West Virginia, citing a lack of funds. In his budget request to Congress, the president asked for a modest increase in the census budget, far less than what most experts say is needed. (Lawmakers largely ignored his request last week when they increased the bureau’s budget by $1.34 billion, about twice as much as he had sought.) The administration has also undermined the Census Bureau by failing to nominate a leader for the agency since its last permanent director left last summer. And, until recently, the administration was considering nominating as deputy director a political-science professor who has argued in favor of partisan gerrymandering and against competitive elections.

By now, many people have come to expect that Trump will inject politics into every policy decision. But even by this administration’s low standards, trifling with the census, which is required by the Constitution and is a fundamental building block of American democracy, represents a serious breach of trust.