SEARCHING FOR UNITY -- CELEBRATING THE FOURTH ON THE LAKE

It's raining on the Great Sacandaga Lake this 4th of July.

The great lake occupies a little more than forty-one square miles at the southeastern edge of New York's Adirondack Park.  

Both the park and the lake were government projects. In 1885, New York designated publicly owned lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills as "forest preserves" and in 1894 the state mandated that those preserves would be "forever wild". In 1902, roughly 2.8 million acres of that wilderness was then defined as the Adirondack Park, and in the hundred plus years since, it has grown to over six million acres.  For its part, the great lake was created in 1930 following six years of study and construction that damned the Sacandaga River at Conklingville to create what was initially called a reservoir. In the '60s, the name was changed to the Great Sacandaga Lake.

If it seems that very little in the nature of public works has ever gotten done in America without some argument in favor of economic growth, that is because . . .

Very little in the nature of public works has ever gotten done in America without some argument in favor of economic growth.

The park and the lake were no exceptions.  

The former owed its genesis to an incipient tourism industry that took root there in the mid to late 19th century combined with lawyer-engineer Verplanck Colvin's 1875 survey report warning that lumbering was destroying the Adirondack watershed and imperiling the survival of the Erie Canal, then a major source of New York's economic empire. And the latter was basically a flood control project. The Sacandaga River flowed into the Hudson, which in the spring surged and flooded Albany.  Damning the Sacandaga helped to regulate that surge and abate the flooding.

Back then, the Republican Party ran New York and supported both projects.  And  when he became the nation's 26th President, New York's Republican  former governor, Theodore Roosevelt, championed both the  conservation of the nation's  natural resources -- signing legislation that created five national parks and executive orders that preserved 150 million acres of forest -- and the regulation of its waterways. In 1907, he created the Inland Waterways Commission,  and after World War I highlighted the nation's rail congestion crisis, the work of that commission over time resulted in completion of the Atlantic and Gulf intercoastal waterways projects that created navigational barge channels from Maine to the nation's Mexican border, re-canalization of the Ohio River, and later development of both the Columbia River in the west and the St. Lawrence Seaway in the east.  

All of this was supported for the most part by the Republican Party and, when added to Democratic Party projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (which electrified the south)  or completing the Hoover dam (which irrigated the southwest), made infrastructure truly bi-partisan.  That unity continued into the 1950s when President Eisenhower inaugurated construction of the interstate highway system and was even preserved into the early '70s when President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the latter of which required that federal projects be assessed for their environmental impact.

NEPA, however, was as far as the GOP would go.  Two years after it was passed, Nixon vetoed the expanded Clean Water Act, and though his veto was overridden by the Democratic Congress two hours after it was issued, it marked something of a limit for his party.  Since then, the party has been at war with itself on the environment.  On the side of de-regulation and rollback were Reagan and Trump, whose appointed heads of the EPA -- Anne Gorsuch (mother of the current Supreme Court Justice) in Reagan's case  and Scott Pruitt in Trump's -- pushed to weaken the anti-pollution laws.  On the side of accomodation were the two Bushes, both of whom championed so-called market-based solutions to pollution like cap and trade.

Today's America, it now goes without saying, is polarized in the extreme. 

Trump's voters still believe the lie that he did not lose last year and GOP legislatures are turning that lie into statutes designed to suppress Democratic voter turnout in future elections, limiting all the measures (early, mail-in and absentee voting) that significantly increased turnout in 2020.  Meanwhile, at the federal level, the anti-majority rule  filibuster survives and was used to kill the Democrats' voting rights bills that would have mitigated the GOP's state legislative assaults.  On the cable shows, the right wing is all abuzz on critical race theory, pretending it will destroy George Washington's legacy.  And in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott says he'll build Trump's border wall with federal Covid  relief funds . . .

Even though Abbott has no authority to do so. 

If, therefore, you are looking for any signs of governmental or political unity on this 4th of July, the pickings are slim to non-existent.

Except on infrastructure.

Where the are some green shoots.

Earlier in the year, President Biden and the Democrats proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure bill designed to fund the nation's desperate need to re-build its roads, bridges, highways, airports and water and rail systems and extend broadband to the nation's rural and ex-urban precincts.  The proposal, however, also sought to increase spending on electric cars and charging stations, on green energy, on child care and on health care.  These latter efforts were proposed as down payments on the need to combat climate change and in recognition of the fact that things like child care and health care often drive employment decisions.  Put simply, you can't work if the kids have no baby sitter or you are sick without insurance and can't afford care.

The GOP opposed the Democrats' proposal more or less in unison.  It claimed that anything other than traditional infrastructure (the so-called hard stuff like roads, bridges, airports and railroads) was just a  mask for the Democrats' socialism (which is what the GOP calls all measures  that expand health coverage or child care, combat climate change or are advertised as part of the so-called Green New Deal), and that anything increasing taxes was a non-starter.  Into that breach, however, stepped a group of ten Senators (five Democrats and five Republicans) who -- mirabile dictu -- came up with a bi-partisan bill.  That proposal was substantially higher than what the GOP had offered Biden early on but did not include the Democratic proposals on climate change and health and child care.  For those, the Democrats will have to fashion a second package and pass it via the budget reconciliation procedure to avoid a filibuster.  

So there you have it.

As you pledge allegiance to the flag on this 4th of July, the nation -- thanks to the Civil War -- is still indivisible.  

Thanks largely to Trump and his continuing hold on the fact free, however, it is still very much . . 

Divided.

But then there is the Adirondack Park, the Great Sacandaga Lake , and their progeny . . .

Which remind me, even in the rain, that it was  not always thus.

And Joe Biden and Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney and Rob Portman et al's infrastructure compromise.

Which reminds me that even now . . .

It does not have to be.

Happy Birthday America.