Yxxx,2017-05-08,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
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National Edition
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VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,591
MONDAY, MAY 8, 2017
© 2017 The New York Times Company
A G.O.P. PRINCIPLE E.P.A. Widens
SHED IN THE FIGHT An Open Door
For Businesses
OVER HEALTH CARE
Printed in Chicago
$2.50
FRANCE ELECTS MACRON PRESIDENT,
SHUNNING AN EMERGENT FAR RIGHT
At Least Five Scientists
Focus Moves to Cutting, Ousted From a Board
Instead of Ending,
Popular Benefits
By JEREMY W. PETERS
WASHINGTON — As they take
their victory lap for passing a bill
that would repeal and replace
much of the Affordable Care Act,
President Trump and congressional Republicans have been
largely silent about one of the
most remarkable aspects of what
their legislation would do: take a
step toward dismantling a vast
government entitlement program, something that has never
been accomplished in the modern
era.
Fighting the expansion of the
so-called welfare state is a fundamental premise of the American
conservative movement. But as
tens of millions of Americans have
come to rely on coverage under
the 2010 health law, Republicans
have learned the political risks of
being seen as taking a hatchet to
the program, however imperfect it
may be.
So conservatives have now cast
aside their high-minded arguments of political principle, replacing them with dense discussions of policy. Pre-existing conditions, risk pools and premium
costs — not the more conventional
Republican disquisitions in favor
of the free market, personal responsibility and smaller government — dominate the debate today.
This dramatic shift in focus has
confirmed what conservatives
said they always feared when
Democrats granted the government expansive new powers over
health care. The government can
giveth, they said, but it can almost
never taketh away.
The health care law, said Thomas Miller, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has underscored how new
entitlements inevitably become
part of what he called the
“demilitarized zone” of politics.
“One of the problems Republicans have had in 2017 is that the
narrative and the discussion have
changed,” Mr. Miller said.
“The territory could not be
liberated — you could only contain
its expansion,” he added. “Unlike
a speculative law which had not
been fully unloaded, put in place
with money starting to flow, peoContinued on Page A12
By CORAL DAVENPORT
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency has
dismissed at least five members of
a major scientific review board,
the latest signal of what critics call
a campaign by the Trump administration to shrink the agency’s
regulatory reach by reducing the
role of academic research.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he
would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to
regulate, as part of the wide net it
plans to cast. “The administrator
believes we should have people on
this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” said the
spokesman, J. P. Freire.
The dismissals on Friday came
about six weeks after the House
passed a bill aimed at changing
the composition of another E.P.A.
scientific review board to include
more representation from the corporate world.
President Trump has directed
Mr. Pruitt to radically remake the
E.P.A., pushing for deep cuts in its
budget — including a 40 percent
reduction for its main scientific
branch — and instructing him to
roll back major Obama-era regulations on climate change and
clean water protection. In recent
weeks, the agency has removed
some scientific data on climate
change from its websites, and Mr.
Pruitt has publicly questioned the
established science of humancaused climate change.
In his first outings as E.P.A. administrator, Mr. Pruitt has made a
point of visiting coal mines and
pledging that his agency will seek
to restore that industry, even
though many members of both of
the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory
boards have historically recommended stringent constraints on
coal pollution to combat climate
change.
Mr. Freire said the agency
wanted “to take as inclusive an approach to regulation as possible.”
“We want to expand the pool of
applicants” for the scientific
board, he said, “to as broad a
range as possible, to include universities that aren’t typically represented and issues that aren’t
typically represented.”
Continued on Page A14
LAURENT CIPRIANI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Supporters of Emmanuel Macron, 39, a former investment banker and economy minister, celebrated at the Louvre on Sunday.
NEWS ANALYSIS
A Steady, if Bland, Voice
Luck, Political Skill and a Campaign Rival
Many Couldn’t Stomach Seal a Victory
By ADAM NOSSITER
PARIS — The French presidential runoff transcended national politics. It was globalization against nationalism. It was
the future versus the past. Open
versus closed.
But in his resounding victory
on Sunday night, Emmanuel
Macron, the centrist who has
never held elected office, won
because he was the beneficiary
of a uniquely French historic and
cultural legacy, where many
voters wanted change but were
appalled at the type of populist
anger that had upturned politics
in Britain and the United States.
He trounced the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, keeping her
well under 40 percent, even as
her aides said before the vote
that anything below that figure
would be considered a failure.
His victory quickly brought joy
from Europe’s political establishment, especially since a Le Pen
victory would have plunged the
European Union into crisis. But
in the end, Mr. Macron, only 39, a
former investment banker and
an uninspired campaigner, won
because of luck, an unexpected
demonstration of political skill,
and the ingrained fears and
contempt that a majority of
French still feel toward Ms. Le
Pen and her party, the National
Front.
For the past year, a pressing
Continued on Page A9
Centrist Sweeps to Victory in a Contest Seen
as a Gauge of Populist Anger in the West
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
PARIS — Emmanuel Macron, a
youthful former investment banker, handily won France’s presidential election on Sunday, defeating
the staunch nationalist Marine Le
Pen after voters firmly rejected
her far-right message and backed
his call for centrist change.
Mr. Macron, 39, who has never
held elected office, will be the
youngest president in the 59-year
history of France’s Fifth Republic
after leading an improbable campaign that swept aside France’s
establishment political parties.
The election was watched
around the world for magnifying
many of the broader tensions rippling through Western democracies, including the United States:
populist anger at the political
mainstream, economic insecurity
among middle-class voters and
rising resentment toward immigrants.
EMMANUEL
MACRON
MARINE
Le PEN
66.1% 33.9%
100 percent of communes reporting
Mr. Macron’s victory offered
significant relief to the European
Union, which Ms. Le Pen had
threatened to leave. His platform
to loosen labor rules, make France
more competitive globally and
deepen ties with the European
Union is also likely to reassure a
global financial market that was
jittery at the prospect of a Le Pen
victory.
Continued on Page A9
Confederate Monuments Fall, and Tempers Flare Rikers Tumult Rises: Monitor Accused of Spying
By RICHARD FAUSSET
NEW ORLEANS — For Malcolm Suber, the Confederate monuments that dot this Deep South
city stand for white supremacy,
pure and simple. Instead of just
taking them down, Mr. Suber, an
African-American activist and organizer, would like to see the city
pass out sledgehammers and “let
everybody take a whack — just
like the Berlin Wall.”
For Frank B. Stewart Jr., a white
New Orleans native, the city government’s plan to remove the
statues — an idea championed by
New Orleans’s white mayor, Mitch
Landrieu — feels like an Orwellian
attempt to erase history. Last
week, Mr. Stewart, 81, a businessman and civic leader, argued as
much in a letter he published as a
two-page advertisement in The
Advocate, a local newspaper.
“I ask you, Mitch, should the
Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed
since they were built entirely from
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
A New Orleans city worker wearing body armor as he measured
a statue of Jefferson Davis in preparation for its removal.
slave labor?” he wrote.
Mr. Stewart also wondered
about the Roman Colosseum: “It
was built by slaves, who lived horrible lives under Roman oppression, but it still stands today and
we learn so much from seeing it.”
Such are the irreconcilable parameters of an ugly battle over
race and history in New Orleans
that seems to only be growing ugContinued on Page A16
NEW YORK A18-19
BUSINESS DAY B1-5
Freed From Boko Haram
Unpaid Fares Plague Railroad
About 80 of the 300 girls kidnapped
three years ago have been released, but
some parents don’t yet know if their
daughters are safe.
PAGE A10
New Jersey Transit’s latest problem is
uncollected ticket revenue — perhaps
$5.5 million last year. Conductors say
trains are understaffed.
PAGE A18
INTERNATIONAL A4-10
New York City’s Department of
Investigation has picked apart
practically every facet of the troubled Rikers Island jail complex in
recent years, including abuses
committed by guards and inmates
and the misuse of official cars by
the commissioner and his staff.
Now it is taking aim at the very
person who is supposed to prevent wrongdoing at the jail from
within — the head of the Correction Department’s Investigation
Division.
The Department of Investigation believes the jail official, Gregory Kuczinski, has orchestrated a
spying campaign against it and
has called for his removal.
In a long letter to Mayor Bill de
Blasio, the Department of Investigation said Mr. Kuczinski and his
subordinates violated city rules
and regulations by repeatedly listening in on telephone calls be-
A Claim of Listening In
as Informants Spoke
to an Investigator
tween an investigator with the
agency and inmates who were
serving as informants, several
people with knowledge of the letter said.
In an interview late on Sunday,
the Correction Department commissioner, Joseph Ponte, insisted
that “there was no improper
eavesdropping.” As soon as Correction Department investigators
determined that they had been listening in on a conversation involving a Department of Investigation
staff member, he said, they
stopped the surveillance.
“Clearly there was no intent to
interfere with D.O.I. and anything
they were doing,” he said.
Mr. Kuczinski, in a separate
phone interview on Sunday, denied wrongdoing and called the
reaction of officials at the investigation agency “ridiculous,” saying: “Are they trying to cover
something up? I don’t know.”
The letter from the head of the
department, Mark G. Peters, was
sent to Mayor de Blasio on
Wednesday, according to the people. They spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the contents
of the letter were confidential.
The letter said that Mr. Ponte
had learned of the surveillance in
February, after another official
had shut it down, the people said.
But Mr. Ponte did not report the
surveillance to the investigation
agency, nor did he take any action
against Mr. Kuczinski, whom he
had promoted into his current job.
The accusation came just a
week after the Department of Investigation issued a report
sharply rebuking Mr. Ponte, Mr.
Continued on Page A19
SPORTSMONDAY D1-8
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21
YouTube Stars Feel Ad Pinch
A Baseball Dream
John McCain
Creators of niche videos say their income has plunged since concerns about
offensive content prompted major
companies to remove ads.
PAGE B1
Gift Ngoepe of the Pittsburgh Pirates
this season became the first African to
play in the major leagues. His path has
never been conventional.
PAGE D1
PAGE A21
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