“I would gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country”

That’s what right-wing influencer Samantha Stone said at a recent Turning Point USA Women's Leadership Summit. Turning Point is run by Charlie Kirk’s widow following his death. The Summit included some women who said they were willing to give up their right to vote because they trust their husbands to represent them. It’s a long way from the good trouble made by the suffragettes to that Summit. If you haven’t actually listened to these women express their views, this five-minute clip compiled by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is worth your time. “My perspective as a Christian woman,” one young woman says, “is that my husband and I are one flesh. I vote the same way he does, so honestly, I would be okay with giving up my right to vote, because I know that he would represent me well.” Another chimes in that her daughter won’t need to be able to vote because she knows she’ll marry a godly man. The viewpoint is shocking and even laughable when most people are exposed to it for the first time. And it does give rise to a number of questions. But we would be unwise to reject what these women are saying out of hand. Yes, it seems too ridiculous to become reality. There is a Handmaid’s Tale quality to these women’s voices; they are willing to bargain away their own personhood for what they perceive to be the security of marriage and motherhood. And it’s still a fringe view, even at Turning Point. But so many views we once considered fringe, ranging from the unitary executive theory to the demise of Roe v. Wade and women’s ability to access reproductive health care, have become mainstream. We are a country that tried, but failed, to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment simply provides that equality of rights under the law cannot be denied or abridged by the U.S. or any state on account of sex. In other words, women aren’t second class citizens; they possess equal rights to men. But the Amendment never made it across the finish line. (There is still work in that regard underway). So instead of dismissing what we see here as ridiculous, it’s a good moment to recommit to the principle that all people, women included, are entitled to equal rights. If MAGA women don’t want to vote, that’s their prerogative. As for me, I intend to exercise my rights fully. These women who would willingly give up their right to vote seem to have absorbed the idea that political power is dangerous in their own hands. It's worth considering how ideas like this get planted and who seeks to benefit from them. These are the conversations Civil Discourse exists to have—not shouting matches, but careful looks at what's really happening to our democracy and why.  Thank you for being here with me for them. And if you aren’t already a subscriber, join us if that's the kind of thinking you want in your inbox. This is a community of people who take democracy seriously, and there's room in it for all of us. We have so much work to do. We’re in this together, Joyce Vance

 

Trump Plans to Protect Methane-Leaking Stripper Wells. This Billionaire Donor Will Benefit

Hilcorp CEO Jeffery Hildebrand during a meeting with U.S. oil company executives at the White House on Jan. 9 Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

It was before dawn on a Friday in January when a Gulfstream G600 with the burnt-orange Texas Longhorns logo on its tail landed at Dulles airport outside Washington, D.C. Its owner, a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand, had been summoned to the White House. By mid-afternoon he was in the East Room, just three seats from President Donald Trump, who had recently ordered the military raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Now Trump wanted Hildebrand and two dozen other energy executives to commit to investing $100 billion in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry. 

Many couched their enthusiasm with caveats. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “un-investable” without changes to its legal system. The head of ConocoPhillips wanted U.S. government financing. But Hildebrand, a major Trump donor whose wife had been named ambassador to Costa Rica, had already seen how loyalty could be rewarded. Even though he had no notable operations outside the U.S., he hunched toward a microphone and said in a halting voice, “Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”

“That’s good,” Trump said. “You’ll be very happy.”

As the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, low-producing “stripper wells,” Hildebrand needs Trump’s favor. Long one of the oil industry’s top polluters, Hilcorp releases unusually large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. 

Hildebrand had never been a leading political contributor. But in 2024, the Biden administration issued aggressive restrictions on methane pollution — rules that would impose steep costs on Hilcorp — and the once-obscure tycoon became one of Trump’s biggest oil industry supporters, giving millions to his campaign.

Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency,  putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. 

That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.

Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and natural gas. But in recent studies, scientists have identified them as the source of roughly half the sector’s methane emissions — in part because they tend to be thinly monitored, run-down and thus prone to leaking. As a result, these barely productive wells play an outsize role in climate change, disproportionately amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires. 

In a world where global warming fixes can seem impossibly daunting, stripper wells are the rare low-hanging fruit, said Andrew Logan of Ceres, a climate advocacy group. “If you could lose 6% of production and cut emissions in half, who wouldn’t make that trade?” Logan said. “It’s a question of who benefits and who doesn’t, and who has the power.”

“Well Vents Randomly”

Kendra Pinto and Josh Eisenfeld drove a rented Dodge Ram to the site of a Hilcorp well in San Juan County, New Mexico, last August. As infrared camera operators with the nonprofit Earthworks, they were used to roaming through remote areas to investigate leaks at oil and gas wells. But the San Juan is especially lonely terrain, with bumpy dirt roads snaking between scattered scrub and rusting pump jacks, the nodding apparatuses that lift oil and gas from thousands of feet underground. 

A sign marked the site as Hilcorp’s Huerfano Unit 119 well, one of the company’s 11,000 in the region. It was little more than a patch of gravel hosting two unmarked storage tanks and what oil workers call a Christmas tree: the cluster of valves that caps the well itself. Drilled in 1969, the well now produces a small but steady trickle of natural gas, enough to generate around $50 of revenue per day. 

On paper, it runs remarkably cleanly. According to New Mexico’s oil regulator, Hilcorp has not reported any “venting” — releasing gas — from the well since May 2024. At the site itself, however, a wire fence surrounded some of the equipment, bearing a yellow caution sign that read, “Well vents randomly.”

A Hilcorp installation in New Mexico in August 2025 Courtesy of Earthworks

Methane is invisible to the human eye. But on June 29 last year, a satellite detected a massive methane plume erupting from this very location. According to the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, a NASA partner that one oil executive defined as a “platform to disseminate the sins of our industry,” the methane was being discharged at a rate of 199 kilograms an hour. That’s equivalent to about 12 times the volume of natural gas the well typically produces over that time. The cause was unknown, but according to scientists who have studied the issue, such “super-emitter” events typically stem from some kind of neglect or malfunction — if not from an intentional release. Most last a couple of hours, but some can go on for weeks. Super-emitter plumes have also been identified at other Hilcorp wells.

Pinto and Eisenfeld observed smaller, more persistent leaks as well. When they trained their infrared camera on one of the storage tanks, wispy clouds of pollution could be seen streaming from a pressure-release valve. 

The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public

“That shouldn’t just be constantly …” Eisenfeld said, trailing off. The finding was far from abnormal, though. Of the eight Hilcorp wells he and Pinto visited that day, seven were seen to be leaking. 

In response to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica, Hilcorp spokesperson Nick Piatek said in an email that the Huerfano Unit 119 well “is fully compliant with state and federal regulations” and that the company inspects the site monthly. He also suggested that the company’s approach caused less environmental harm than drilling new wells: “By extending and optimizing the life of existing assets with pre-built infrastructure, our model limits the need for new development elsewhere.” The company is “proud,” he added, of recent efforts to reduce its emissions.

Hilcorp is hardly an outlier in its approach to methane releases. America’s oil and gas system is vast, aging, and in many places largely left to police itself. Of the country’s roughly 1 million active wells, more than two-thirds are stripper wells, each producing the equivalent of up to 15 barrels a day. Many produce less than a single barrel a day. 

(Newer wells, by contrast, can pump 1,000 a day or more.) Each well site, in turn, is equipped with numerous valves, flanges and other fittings that can leak unless inspected regularly. Some components were explicitly designed to vent small amounts of gas — a legacy of an era when methane’s role in global warming wasn’t widely understood.

A Hilcorp installation in New Mexico in May Courtesy of Charlie Barrett/Oilfield Witness

Methane, the main component of natural gas, turns into carbon dioxide when burned to heat a home or generate electricity. But when the gas enters the atmosphere directly, it becomes a much more powerful climate pollutant — one that is responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. 

Methane exists underground alongside other fossil fuels and is brought to the surface whether oil or natural gas is being pumped. While it’s a valuable product in itself, capturing it is not always cost-effective. So companies often burn it off, or just vent it, sending it straight into the atmosphere. 

Apart from the climate impact, this is all sheer waste, as none of the methane’s energy is being harnessed for a human need. Yet with few exceptions, federal rules have allowed these practices at wells drilled before 2012 — which include the overwhelming majority of stripper wells. 

Methane leakage is such a routine part of oil and gas production that the EPA often assumes it is happening when asking the industry to calculate its emissions. Even so, those numbers drastically understate the actual emissions observed by plane and satellite. 

A study led by Evan Sherwin of Stanford, published in the journal Nature in 2024, took close to a million measurements to find that the true figures were, on average, nearly three times higher. Partly that is because companies have never had to report super-emitter events to the EPA. In one region, nearly 10% of all the natural gas produced was being lost to the atmosphere, the study found. 

But limiting methane pollution presents a rare opportunity. While carbon dioxide can persist in the atmosphere for centuries, methane breaks down relatively fast, in about a dozen years. Halting these releases, then, would bring a swift payoff.  “Methane is the best lever we have to slow the march of climate change in our lifetime,” said Stanford researcher Rob Jackson. That is especially important, he added, as the planet approaches tipping points — temperature thresholds beyond which forests, coral reefs and ice sheets start to collapse irreversibly.

Unlike with other major methane sources, such as belching cattle or melting permafrost, the technology to curb emissions from oil and gas operations is already viable, and fairly cheap. In the fight against global warming, Jackson said, “It’s the best bang for our buck.” 

The “Dung Beetle Model”

To build a fortune on the discarded scraps of the oil and gas industry takes a rare instinct for hidden value, an appetite for risk and an obsession with keeping costs down. 

Among the nation’s stripper well owners, Hildebrand has done it best, amassing a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $15 billion. Yet at a time when many billionaires are embracing celebrity, he has maintained an unusually low profile. At 67, he’s almost completely avoided speaking to reporters, and he didn’t respond to multiple interview requests from ProPublica. Even Trump, despite having invited him to the White House, seemed hazy on Hildebrand’s role in the oil industry. “I hear he does a good job,” the president said when reached by ProPublica on his cellphone.

While he avoids the public eye, Hildebrand circulates openly in the overlapping worlds of wealthy businesspeople, private clubs and Republican power brokers. He has been known to hold exclusive parties at his 1,200-acre ranch in Aspen, Colorado — which used to belong, in part, to the musician (and environmentalist) John Denver. He also owns a polo team called Tonkawa, a fixture of the winter season in the sport’s unofficial capital of Wellington, Florida, a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. A video of a 2021 match shows him in a white helmet and forest-green jersey, riding a bay pony as he swings his mallet, trying and failing to keep the ball from the opposing side’s patron, a Russian banker named Andrey Borodin. 

There’s a striking tension between Hildebrand’s status as one of the country’s most prolific polluters and his otherwise conventional life as a God-fearing, upstanding Texas businessman. He is less a rogue actor than the product of a deeply American system that rewards production at all costs. 

A devout Catholic and philanthropist, he is especially passionate about wildlife conservation, according to Stuart Stedman and Karen Starr Hunke, fellow board members at Texas A&M’s Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. Yet they and others who know him through the institute said they’d never once heard him mention climate change — an omission that points to a far narrower view of environmental stewardship. 

The closest Hildebrand has come to addressing the issue publicly is in a rare speech he gave in 2022, accepting an award as a distinguished alumnus at UT Austin. A husky, square-jawed man, he wore a burnt-orange suit jacket and a burnt-orange tie. 

He cited an old quote he interpreted as a celebration of the oil industry: “Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth.” Then he quipped that “in this Green New Deal era we live in” — a reference to the Democrats’ climate agenda — such sentiments might no longer be welcome.

Jeffery Hildebrand owns and plays on a polo team called Tonkawa. Joel Auerbach/Getty Images

Born in 1959 in Houston, America’s energy capital, Hildebrand graduated from high school at a time when oil prices were soaring. Determined to start his own oil business, he studied geology and petroleum engineering at UT Austin, where he was in the Kappa Alpha fraternity. He worked briefly for Exxon and a few other companies, including that of a prominent Houston investor named Jack Trotter, before starting Hilcorp in ’89 with Trotter’s backing.

The oil business is filled with stories of crazy risks, near-bankruptcies and improbable rebounds. Hildebrand likes to recount that he used his wife’s car as collateral for a loan to drill some early wells. In a speech for his induction into the Texas Business Hall of Fame, he said they turned out to be “dry holes” — failures — but the return on Melinda’s investment would prove “infinite” (only a slight exaggeration).

He started buying stripper wells from larger companies, a niche that is relatively cheap to break into. As a well ages and the underlying reservoir is depleted, pressure in the well drops, and production along with it. The price for a package of these wells tends to be low — one friend recalled “when a big deal for Jeff was $5 million” — but to turn a profit, the new owners have to cut costs. 

Typically, they do this by playing fast and loose with environmental rules, according to Clark Williams-Derry of the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who calls this the “dung beetle model.”

As Hildebrand expanded into other states, loading up on debt to make ever larger acquisitions, there’s evidence he followed this model. According to records obtained by ProPublica from state and federal environmental regulators, his company has racked up dozens of violations over the past decade. To cite one notable example, after a Hilcorp natural gas pipeline ruptured in Alaska’s Cook Inlet in December 2016, it spewed methane for nearly four months until it was finally repaired. Activists across the country call the company “Spillcorp.”

The penalties, though, have largely amounted to a slap on the wrist, rarely exceeding $500,000 — and often coming in far lower. “I would frankly put that in the category of just operating costs,” said Matt Bernstein, an analyst at the research firm Rystad Energy.

What set Hildebrand apart from other “dung beetles” was that he also found ways to squeeze out more oil and gas from aging wells, not only cutting costs but increasing revenue. His secret was what he has called a “pretty simple” formula: attract top geologists and engineers by offering Wall Street-style incentives, allowing them to effectively take partnership stakes in projects. According to a person involved in an early deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Hildebrand would offer 1.1 times what Hilcorp’s own analysis said an acquisition was worth, betting on the “magic” of his team. 

The 2010s saw the landmark Paris Agreement on global warming, the rise of teen activist Greta Thunberg and the first pledge by a major oil company to effectively zero its emissions. None of that dissuaded Hildebrand from doubling down on aging wells. In 2017, he spent $3 billion to mount his largest acquisition yet: ConocoPhillips’ operation in the San Juan Basin, where Pinto and Eisenfeld would later identify so many leaks. Once among the country’s top sources of natural gas, the region had since fallen into decline — and it was already notorious for its methane pollution.

Soon after, according to a Clean Air Task Force analysis of data companies report to the EPA, Hilcorp became the No. 1 emitter of methane in the entire U.S. oil and gas industry.

Washington Comes for Stripper Wells

President Joe Biden presented the first serious threat to Hildebrand’s business. As part of his ambitious climate agenda, the EPA issued rules aimed at cutting methane pollution from oil and gas operations by a whopping 80% — and they took direct aim at stripper wells.

For the first time, outside a patchwork of state rules, older wells would face requirements for regular leak inspections and limits on venting and flaring. Companies would be forced to respond to satellite reports of super-emitters, making repairs if necessary. A fee would also be imposed on excess methane emissions, costing the oil and gas industry an estimated $500 million a year. 

Even the Department of Justice got involved, filing suits to crack down on improper methane releases. One found that Hilcorp had failed to capture the emissions when it redrilled 145 wells in the San Juan — discharges large enough that Don Schreiber, a rancher who documented some of the events, described hearing a “jet engine” sound as the gas rushed into the air. This time, the penalties were more than a slap on the wrist; although Hilcorp did not admit to wrongdoing, it settled the allegations for $9.4 million.

With the new rules gradually being phased in, Hildebrand effectively made parallel bets. Getting a jump on compliance, Hilcorp started upgrading much of its aging equipment — and its methane numbers declined. “That’s a win,” said Lesley Feldman of the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that advocates for cutting emissions. “That means the policy is working. And we’ve seen evidence of other companies doing this too.”

Yet while Feldman celebrated the reductions, she did question their magnitude. Hilcorp spokesperson Piatek said the company’s methane numbers had fallen by “nearly 80% in recent years.” But, Feldman said after examining Hilcorp’s most recent data, that decline is artificially inflated by recent changes to the reporting rules, which make comparisons to previous years misleading. The data itself may be suspect, she added, because the EPA has yet to publicly verify it — and Hilcorp has previously made huge upward revisions to its reported emissions. (Piatek didn’t respond when ProPublica pointed out the artificially inflated reduction.)

Even taking the numbers at face value, Hilcorp remains one of the oil industry’s top methane emitters, according to a ProPublica analysis of EPA data. 

Since he was still looking at substantial compliance costs, Hildebrand’s other bet was to step up his political contributions. Since 2020, he and his wife have given more than $15 million to Trump and other Republicans in federal races, placing them among the top donors in an industry that overwhelmingly supports the president and his party. (That compares to just over $3 million in the entire two decades prior.) The recipients have included Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. August Pfluger, both of Texas — two of the most vocal opponents to the methane fee, which they call the “natural gas tax.” 

During the 2024 campaign, Hildebrand also co-hosted at least three high-dollar fundraisers for Trump, who promised to “unleash American energy” by dismantling climate regulations. One was a lavish dinner held a short drive from Hildebrand’s Aspen ranch, at a home sprinkled with art by Andy Warhol (a tiny self-portrait), Damien Hirst (a mirrored pill cabinet) and Jack Pierson (mismatched lettering that spelled out the word “badass”). The home belonged to another donor later graced with an appointment: the investor John Phelan, who would briefly serve as Trump’s Navy secretary.

Hildebrand co-hosted two of the fundraisers in Houston. One was reportedly scheduled to take place at his own home, but, due to security concerns, it was moved to a hotel owned by the sports and entertainment magnate Tilman Fertitta, who would be named ambassador to Italy. The other was followed by a private roundtable where, according to Teofilo Lingi, an investor who was present, oil executives discussed the methane rules with Trump himself.

The Rollback

At a previous event with Trump, Hildebrand said, “I’m really here today to represent the independent energy companies, the family-owned businesses that are in this industry.” 

This mom-and-pop image clashes with the reality that the independents, as they are known, are highly organized into an alphabet soup of newly influential lobbying groups — with Hildebrand a member of several. Hilcorp CEO Greg Lalicker sits on the board of the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which also represents Diversified, the country’s single largest owner of stripper wells. At least until recently, another Hilcorp executive was a director at the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), which represents smaller producers, including many stripper well owners. 

In an industry long hostile to regulation, the independents have often displayed a more open contempt toward climate policy than the global oil giants. And they have historically had little say in emissions rules. “They didn’t want to be regulated, but they kind of knew that was a losing argument,” said Joseph Goffman, who held top EPA roles under both President Barack Obama and Biden.

Hildebrand received an early sign that was going to change when, less than three weeks after the 2025 inauguration, Trump tapped his wife to be ambassador to Costa Rica — even though she was primarily known for charity work and for opening a doughnut shop in their wealthy Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Melinda Hildebrand didn’t respond to requests for comment, but when ProPublica asked Trump why he appointed her, he said, “I don’t know, because you know, I get recommendations. … I see the list of people, but we only name good people, and I’m sure she’s very good.” 

Later that month, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively killed the methane fee, and Trump nominated a former Hilcorp lobbyist named Aaron Szabo to oversee the EPA’s climate regulations. 

Szabo, an otherwise inconspicuous former bureaucrat, helped to unite two distinct networks with overlapping ambitions. As a lobbyist for Hilcorp and other oil and gas companies, he had already helped to draft a letter from the AXPC opposing the new methane rules. 

He then became a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute and gave advice on climate regulations for the EPA chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. The chapter specifically recommended dismantling the program to address super-emitters.

Now tasked with rewriting the methane rules, Szabo has been seeking input from oil industry groups including the AXPC, the IPAA and the National Stripper Well Association (NSWA), according to interviews with industry representatives and current and former EPA officials, records of closed-door conversations, and agency emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests by the watchdog group Fieldnotes and shared with ProPublica.

“It’s the first time in 20 years of my business that they’ll even answer the phone,” NSWA Chair Patrick Montalban told ProPublica, referring to top regulators. He described an informal atmosphere where independent oil executives called on old personal connections to open the doors. He himself had met not just with Szabo but with EPA chief Lee Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He and Wright, he noted, have both served on the board of yet another oil industry group. (Press offices for the departments of Interior and Energy didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.)

The IPAA’s Lee Fuller, on a private conference call with industry representatives, also spoke glowingly about a meeting with Szabo’s office last year. Previously, he said, the EPA had never even considered the group’s requests to create separate methane rules for stripper wells. 

This time, though, agency staff brought it up unprompted — which suggests that it was already on Szabo’s agenda. Presented with this opening, the IPAA later asked for stripper wells to be exempted from the methane rules entirely.

Hilcorp spokesperson Piatek declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the influence campaign. The IPAA also declined to comment but sent an email linking to a recent statement of support for deregulating stripper wells that nonetheless nodded toward “our shared environmental goals.” 

The heart of the stripper-well owners’ argument is that they simply cannot afford to be regulated. “Venting and flaring are essential for the survivability of low production wells,” an IPAA lawyer named James D. Elliott wrote in an email to EPA officials last year. He cited estimates that the methane rules would force 300,000 of the lowest-producing wells to shut down. Framing this as a blow to small-business owners, he didn’t acknowledge that it would have almost no impact on the U.S. energy supply.

The AXPC declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the group’s interactions with Szabo’s staff but sent a statement from CEO Anne Bradbury saying its members were “committed to building on a legacy of world-leading methane emission reductions.” In a “policy roadmap” published on its website in March, however, it asked the EPA to “incorporate greater flexibility for low-producing and mature assets.” 

Some members of the coalition have argued, inaccurately, that stripper wells are not significant sources of methane pollution. In a Zoom interview with ProPublica, NSWA board member Sam Bradley played a slideshow that he said he’d shared with Szabo’s staff. One slide purported to show the emissions from various sources. Stripper wells ranked lower than both the collective exhalations of the U.S. populace and what Bradley called “smoke and brisket” — barbecues. (In reality, these are negligible sources of emissions.)

Hildebrand and his fellow stripper-well owners appear likely to win exemptions. Speaking with industry representatives last month, the AXPC’s Wendy Kirchoff shared early details of Szabo’s plan to weaken the methane rules, confirming it will cover stripper wells, according to a recording reviewed by ProPublica. 

Szabo himself didn’t respond to questions sent by ProPublica, and the EPA’s press office declined to comment on the details. But the agency confirmed it is working on a proposal to “provide relief” to the oil industry, saying in a statement, “We heard consistently from American oil and natural gas producers (shocker that we meet with stakeholders) that the Biden-Harris Administration’s oil and gas methane regulations were unworkable and unnecessarily restricted American energy dominance.”

To protect carve-outs from rollback by a future Democratic administration, Pfluger, the representative from Texas, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., have proposed a bill to simply exempt stripper wells from EPA emissions rules — allowing them to pollute the atmosphere at will, with scant economic benefit. The NSWA and the IPAA both helped to craft the legislation, according to an internal newsletter from a state trade group that represents many stripper-well owners. 

In effect, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are weighing whether to preserve the business model that made Hildebrand rich, no matter the cost to the global climate. As energy assets, his wells may be marginal. But as political currency, they have become more valuable than ever before.

ProPublica, Alex Mierjeski and Joel Jacobs contributed research and data analysis.

Contributors: Alex Cuadros

 

The Question Inside Trump's White House Wasn't Whether They Could Suspend Rights—It Was Whether They Could Get Away with It

The headline read “Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right.” It teased the story like this: “Secret memos show that the White House debated last year, to a greater degree than previously known, whether to limit habeas corpus rights for undocumented immigrants.” What follows is an outrageous attempt, even though it ultimately failed, at least for now, to shatter firmly established constitutional rights and protections.

In sharing this story, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are giving us a peek at their forthcoming book. Leaving aside, for the moment, the inevitable debate over whether journalists have an obligation to report in real time as opposed to holding their most interesting revelations for later publication, their reporting in this story puts together some previously known or suspected information with new details to provide detailed support for understanding this administration as a threat to democratic ideals.

On April 29, 20205, A confidential memo written by White House staff secretary Will Scharf, who is a lawyer, warned Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles that a plan to suspend habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants was in the works. Haberman and Swan write that it was “careful and lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of law.”

Habeas corpus is the legal right to challenge government-imposed confinement. The Latin phrase roughly translates to “you shall have the body,” and the legal doctrine brings people to court to require the government to justify why an individual is in custody—regardless of citizenship status.

In other words, it’s the basic check that prevents government from locking people up indefinitely without sufficient reason. It’s a foundational protection against “disappearing people”. Habeas is the heart of due process.

Its constitutional roots are in Article I, Section 9, which prohibits interfering with the right of habeas corpus, noting that it “shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Its origins go back to England and the Magna Carta. And it is the law—something this administration and this president have shown casual disregard for at times, frequently with impunity, so the fact that this instance drew high level concern signifies how truly shocking the ideas were.

Habeas has been suspended only a few times in our nation’s history, and only in genuine emergencies; never as a pretext or with a deliberate intent to circumvent people’s legal rights for political purposes. It happened during the Civil War, during Reconstruction in nine South Carolina counties to combat white supremacist Klan violence, and after 9/11 for enemy combatants held at Guantánamo. Suspension always generates significant legal and political controversy, even in these emergency settings. No surprise that it did here.

The Times reports that “Trump and some members of his team wanted to test how far the emboldened president’s authority could be pushed, setting off previously unreported internal struggles over where the limits should be.” That’s a polite way of saying they wanted to suspend habeas so people they were trying to deport couldn’t take advantage of it, something they were fully entitled to do.

In his memo, Scharf cautioned Wiles that suspending habeas is only available in the face of rebellion or invasion and that courts “have almost uniformly held that only Congress can do it.” (The “almost” is because of Lincoln suspended habeas during the Civil War, not Congress, which drew dissent from Judge, later Justice, Taney, but the issue was never fully resolved).

The Supreme Court had already weighed in to confirm Scharf’s caution. By early April in the J.G.G. case, even as it permitted the government to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans who were in the U.S. without legal status, the Justices made it clear detainees could use habeas to challenge removal. The administration was frustrated by it because it slowed down deportations and the drive for large numbers they could tout publicly.

Scharf also wrote a memo to warn against invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops on American streets for use against protestors exercising their First Amendment rights against Trump’s mass deportation policy. The reporting says JD Vance, who is a lawyer, pushed to invoke it shortly after a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis without justification.

The push for suspending habeas came from Stephen Miller. Miller is not a lawyer and he frequently seems to view the law as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an essential element of American democracy. That view appears to be what galvanized the ultra-conservative Scharf. No closet liberal, he contributed to the legal work that allowed Trump to outrun the Mar-a-Lago criminal case.

The reporting here is not completely clear, but it appears that Scharf was motivated by the fear that if the administration pushed too far after the bad result for them in the J.G.G. case, the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, would shut them down, limiting their ability to make other changes. That makes sense, since Scharf appears to subscribe to notions of an expansive unitary executive. The report in the Times suggests that “Their worry was self-inflicted damage: Weak legal arguments would invite sweeping rulings against the administration, and those rulings would constrain everything that came after.”

So, this was not a matter of constitutional principle; it seems to have come down to expediency—how much the administration could get away with before it set off one of the other two branches of government that could counter it.

The administration used other tools to make it difficult for detained immigrants to enforce their legal rights and to tamp down on protests, some ultimately disallowed by the courts, others un-American. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the others.

The reporting clarifies that Miller’s role extended to advocating for the suspension of basic rights, and that he was narrowly run off. The same appears to be true for the Vice President. The risk is not over. It is a warning for what could be coming, one that cannot be ignored.

Every White House tries to prevent its internal disputes and debates from being aired in public. With this White House, that airing is essential, as the court of public opinion is frequently the only or the best guardrail. Knowing this, the administration has made a concerted effort to keep its secrets.

Considered and rejected in that past moment, moves to suspend habeas and invoke the Insurrection Act could easily be reconsidered if the relevant actors in the White House develop concerns about their hold on power in advance of the upcoming election. That makes it incumbent on all of us to stay informed.

Authoritarian movements depend on people forgetting what happened yesterday. One of the things we do together here is keep a long memory. If that matters to you—if you want reporting grounded in documents, law, and context, and a community committed to paying attention—then I hope you'll join us. We have work to do.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Removing his Brand

 

 Out of all the over 300 legal cases and matters that your paid subscriptions have helped make possible, few have garnered more attention than our fights to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and to stop his $1.8 billion slush fund. Now both are finally happening — and that’s good news for our democracy.

Let’s start with the Kennedy Center, where this happened in the wee hours early on Saturday: A worker removes a letter from Donald Trump's name from the wall of the Kennedy Center on Saturday. (Cliff Owen/AP)

The removal of Trump’s name was thanks to our client, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), to my colleagues at Democracy Defenders Action, to our co-counsel Washington Litigation Group — and to your paid subscriptions, which help fuel my and my colleagues’ pro-democracy litigation.

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Of course, Trump being Trump, he and his cronies did it in the stupidest and most unlawful way. Throughout the 24 hours before the Friday midnight deadline, Trump & Co. kept trying and failing to get a stay of the order to remove his name. We responded to his desperate gambits with snap filings of our own and defeated him at both the trial and appellate level.

Then Trump blew past the court-ordered midnight Friday deadline in order to erect a scaffold and then hang a tarp, clearly so he could attempt to hide the removal of the letters. It was a literal cover-up! But, true to form, he botched the attempt to hide the removal, allowing photographers to capture an iconic image.

The scale of Trump’s corruption makes Richard Nixon look like a piker — and Trump’s bumbling makes the Watergate burglars look slick. As we noted in response to the regime’s midnight motion to get another 12 hours, “Defendants had two weeks to comply with the order, and only need an extension because of their inexcusable delay.”

Meanwhile, the whole pathetic display only heightened already strong public attention across the nation. Why do people care so much about this case? Trump’s name on that building defaced the memory of a beloved, fallen president. We don’t need more than that to be horrified.

But there is more. The Trump administration has featured the most outrageous corruption of any president in American history. Like the $1.8 billion slush fund (more in a minute about that), the Kennedy Center renaming is a corruption scandal. The naming rights to the building are literally priceless. Congress mandated the name, and by law that is sacrosanct. For Trump to violate that by putting his own name on the structure is yet another theft from the American people.

And the removal of the name is visible, tangible proof that Trump’s corruption and Trump himself can be stopped — that the rule of law still reigns in America and we can take back the institutions of our democracy. And if Trump thinks he’s just gonna leave the tarp there indefinitely to cover up his shame, we have plans for that, too...

-The Contrarian 

Musk, GOP's Newest Scam, Payouts to Trump's Loyalists, ICE, Citizen's United Alert, Bob Kennedy

 

— Forty-five years of Reaganomics finally rolled off the assembly line this week with its crowning achievement: the world’s first trillionaire. When SpaceX shares hit the public markets in the largest IPO in human history, Elon Musk’s net worth sailed past one thousand billion dollars, a figure with so many zeroes you need a calculator to count them and a heart of solid granite to defend them. Back in 1981, Reagan promised that if we just showered the wealthy with tax cuts and stopped enforcing antitrust laws, the blessings would trickle down onto the rest of us. 

Forty-five years later, the trickle has arrived: one man now commands more money than most countries while the people who actually build his rockets and bolt together his cars are still scrapping for a living wage and desperately begging for a union. Within hours, calls went up for an aggressive wealth tax, with one campaigner noting that a fortune this size “requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression” as well as a tax code lovingly written by and for the man it enriches. The critics are right that trillionaires shouldn’t exist, and not out of envy: no human being earns a trillion dollars, they extract it, a dime at a time, from everyone standing below them. Musk didn’t break the system to get here. The system performed flawlessly, exactly as Reagan and the GOP’s billionaires designed it. The only question left is whether we keep calling this capitalism or finally admit it’s a just the 21st century version of a feudal estate with modern branding.

— The Trump administration has a bold new idea for Americans who can’t afford their medical bills: borrow the money from the very insurance company that’s already refusing to pay them. Under a White House proposal floated this week, cash-strapped patients would take out loans from their health insurers to cover the bills those same insurers helped inflate. It’s a scheme one Democratic congresswoman warned could “ruin people’s finances” while handing insurers a shiny new incentive to deny your care and then collect a fortune in interest on your desperation. I suppose we should admire the elegance of the GOP’s newest scam: the massive Republican donors win when you get sick, win again when you borrow, and win a third time when you default and they get a court to take away your house to repay your loan. That’s not a healthcare system that any other country in the world would recognize; it’s a payday-loan window with a stethoscope hanging in it. 

And before anyone wrings their hands about how we “simply can’t afford” something humane like Medicare for All, note that the Republican increase in Pentagon spending this year alone dwarfs the entire projected Social Security shortfall for 2034, which is the very “crisis” they keep invoking to justify gutting your retirement. We have bottomless money for missiles and putting Trump‘s name on everything, but not a nickel for Grandma’s knee replacement, and somehow the corporate media never quite finds the column inches to mention it. Forty-five years after Reagan taught us that government was the problem, we’ve finally built a GOP-run government that fulfills his claim.

— It turns out the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage belongs entirely to the insurance companies. A pair of reports from the HHS inspector general released this week found that the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage plans — UnitedHealthcare, CVS Health, and Humana — rejected prior-authorization requests for long-term and rehabilitative care at rates that, in some cases, sailed past 70 percent. Across the industry, denial rates for long-term care ran anywhere from 8 percent up to a jaw-dropping 80 percent, a spread the inspector general’s office found genuinely alarming, and one University of Pittsburgh health-policy professor called “quite staggering.” Here’s the detail that most clearly shows what a scam this is: when patients actually appealed, the plans reversed their own denials a remarkable 95 percent of the time, meaning that first “no” was wrong almost every single time anyone bothered to take the (considerable) time and effort necessary to challenge it. 

Medicare Advantage plans collect a flat fee per patient from our government and then pocket whatever they don’t spend on your stroke recovery or your shattered hip, which means saying “no” to your care is, quite literally, how they enrich their shareholders and pay their senior executives with their multi-million-dollar-a-year salaries. Nearly 20 million Americans are enrolled with just these three companies, most blissfully unaware that their “coverage” is engineered to refuse first and pay later, if ever. For-profit insurers, the report found, deny more than nonprofits, because of course they do. And all of them deny more than real Medicare, which doesn’t even do pre-clearance so it never denies anybody. This is what you get when you hand Wall Street the keys to Grandma’s hospital room: the corporation always wins, and the patient always loses.

— A federal judge just slammed the brakes — again — on Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his violent, murderous cult members. This week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema extended her block on the grandly titled “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.8 billion pile of your money that Trump’s Justice Department invented to compensate “victims of weaponization,” a category that conveniently sweeps in the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, smeared shit on the walls, and killed four cops while trying to “hang Mike Pence.” 

The whole thing sprang from Trump’s preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his own tax returns (total tax bill $750), and even congressional Republicans gagged hard enough to force acting Attorney General (and Trump criminal defense lawyer) Todd Blanche to declare “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.” But hold the champagne. As Reuters reports, Trump’s allies already have a Plan B teed up: funneling payouts to loyalists through the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets aggrieved insurrectionists file claims and lawsuits against the government and quietly settle out of court. “At my level, the fund is dead,” shrugged one senior DOJ official, all while leaving the back door propped wide open for the same money to stroll out a different exit. Hundreds of January 6th defendants have already filed their claims. With the Trump Crime Family and their shock troops, the grift doesn’t die; it just files an amended complaint.

— Nothing says “law and order” quite like masked federal agents tackling a man to the pavement at his kid’s preschool graduation while toddlers' scream. That is precisely what unfolded in Baltimore this week, where ICE agents arrested two parents in the parking lot of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School during a graduation ceremony as witnesses filmed and children wailed. The parents had their kids in the back seat when they were “ripped from the car,” according to Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, and teachers rushed the children indoors to spare them the spectacle. 

A parent recording the scene can be heard shouting that the agents were on school property, a fact that registered not at all with these masked, murderous thugs who increasingly treat the Constitution as if it were merely a polite suggestion. Baltimore had passed an emergency ordinance barely a month ago barring federal agents from arrests at “sensitive locations” like schools; doing their best imitation of Putin’s secret police, ICE shredded it like confetti while spitting on the graves of the authors of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Mayor Brandon Scott condemned the raid as a “disturbing incident” and made plain this kind of enforcement isn’t welcome in his city, while Governor Wes Moore noted that terrorizing children at their own schools makes precisely no one safer. But safety was never the point for these fascists. The point is the fear: the theater of masked, unidentified, armed, uniformed men snatching parents in front of weeping four-year-olds and broadcasting it as a warning to every family in America. This is what a fascist secret police force looks like in its toddler-traumatizing phase.

— Citizens United Alert! Maine’s Susan Collins — the senator who has elevated the furrowed brow of “deep concern” into performance art all while reliably voting however her biggest donors prefer — is mounting her reelection bid with the backing of nearly 100 billionaires. Her campaign has become an oligarchs’ support group project! Her opponent, Graham Platner, points out that his own operation runs on an average donation of $26 from actual human beings, even as corporate dark money floods into Maine to keep Collins right where the donor class wants her. 

This is the exact world five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court conjured when they ruled 5:4 in Citizens United that money is speech and corporations are people: sixteen years on, a hundred billionaires can simply buy a senator and call the receipt “democracy.” Concerned yet, Susan?

— Strange Alert! Our nation’s heroin addict health secretary, Bob Kennedy, is now actively cheering on clinics that inject autistic children — some as young as 18 months — with umbilical-cord stem cells in unapproved, unproven “treatments” that can run $20,000 a pop, occasionally after sedating the toddler with ketamine first. Desperate parents are promised near-miracles; what the FDA actually documented back in 2021 were reports of “blindness, tumor formation, infections” and worse. 

In sixteen months on the job, Kennedy has fired thousands of health officials, defunded $31 million in autism research, and waged open war on childhood vaccines, all while rolling out the welcome mat for the snake-oil salesmen he apparently regards as colleagues. The quack is coming from inside the house.

The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

 

A.I.’s Effects on Creativity in Education

 

I am a big fan of technology. I’ve blissfully given over my spatial reasoning to Google Maps. I use artificial intelligence to chase down articles, do research, fix my grammar mistakes and whip up last-minute school-night recipes.

But I’ve recently drawn a sharp line in the sand: no A.I. for writing. I’m not talking about expense reports or routine emails. I mean actual writing, and the creative brainstorming that precedes it to explore different perspectives or develop novel insights. Increasingly, many people I talk to — from students to teachers to peers — tell me that they think it’s OK to use A.I. chatbots for brainstorming as long as they do the “real work” of writing.

But this misunderstands something critical: Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking.

This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories.

The erosion of creative thinking means young people will struggle to navigate uncertainty. Workers will strain to adapt to a shifting labor market. And society will miss out on the new ideas that can solve complex problems and enhance lives.

For the past eight years, the Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has been leading a national research team tracking the range of novel ideas that college-bound high school students present in their application essays, before and after the introduction of ChatGPT.

In one study, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more “creative” by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.

In a separate study, the team found that human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas than those produced by A.I.

Another experiment run by a different research team compared short stories written by humans to those written with A.I. assistance. As with the student essays in Dr. Green’s study, A.I.-assisted works had more interesting vocabulary and were rated more enjoyable to read, but the underlying story lines were more homogeneous. Distinctive and offbeat ideas — with surprising characters or unusual settings — are often shunted to the side when A.I. is involved.

For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a “good” sentence or essay, based on the text it’s been trained on. It can identify sophisticated and creative word patterns independently of whether the underlying ideas represent something new.

When teenagers write their own essays, the work reflects their thoughts and personalities, their attempts to make meaning of their experiences. When we search for words, we are sifting through the same brain networks that form connections between ideas. A student who writes, “I’ll always think of learning to swim when I see a kite flying,” is connecting unique personal experiences in her life, which until recently was a clear signal of truly creative thinking.

Another way A.I. interaction can narrow ideas is through the power of suggestion. Once a chatbot suggests a direction, humans tend to lock in on it. The conversational nature of A.I. can make it difficult to distinguish where the user’s thinking ends and the bot’s begins, making it effortless for people to adopt A.I.-generated perspectives as their own.

It’s easy to see how an impressionable teenager could forgo writing the unconventional essay — about, say, what it feels like to play jazz or cook with your grandmother — in favor of whatever A.I. suggests.

Even more problematic, Dr. Green’s research shows that A.I. has the largest homogenizing impact on students who are farthest from the mean and have unique perspectives, including neurodivergent students and those from racial and linguistic minorities.

This is not to say that A.I. can never support human creativity. Workers with deep knowledge of their craft can use A.I. to streamline technical or administrative tasks in order to focus on the parts of their jobs where originality lives — including teachers having more time to devise engaging lessons and illustrators devoting more attention to developing visual concepts. A.I. gives specialists the time they need to do what humans do best: brainstorming ideas to creatively solve problems.

Our species’ ability to come up with unexpected and original ideas is something to protect and nurture. That’s especially true for today’s adolescents. A world where creative thinking flourishes is a world that has a better chance to weather the changes that A.I. will bring.

Rebecca Winthrop is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and led its global task force on A.I. and education.

NY Times