Download gorsuch asserts he would be able to buck trump president warns

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VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,544
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2017
© 2017 The New York Times Company
Climate Plans PRESIDENT WARNS
Would Reverse HOLDOUTS IN G.O.P.
Obama Legacy
GORSUCH ASSERTS
HE WOULD BE ABLE
TO BUCK TRUMP
OVER HEALTH BILL
Trump Will Soon Detail
How He’ll Alter Rules BLUNT PRIMARY THREAT
HAS MADE ‘NO PROMISES’
By CORAL DAVENPORT
Expansive and Evasive
in Sometimes Tense
Questioning
WASHINGTON — President
Trump is poised in the coming
days to announce his plans to dismantle the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s climate
change legacy, while also gutting
several smaller but significant
policies aimed at curbing global
warming.
The moves are intended to send
an unmistakable signal to the nation and the world that Mr. Trump
intends to follow through on his
campaign vows to rip apart every
element of what the president has
called Mr. Obama’s “stupid” policies to address climate change.
The timing and exact form of the
announcement remain unsettled,
however.
The executive actions will follow the White House’s release last
week of a proposed budget that
would eliminate climate change
research and prevention programs across the federal government and slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s
budget by 31 percent, more than
any other agency. Mr. Trump also
announced last week that he had
ordered Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, to revise the agency’s
stringent standards on planetwarming tailpipe pollution from
vehicles, another of Mr. Obama’s
key climate change policies.
While the White House is not
expected to explicitly say the
United States is withdrawing from
the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and people familiar
with the White House deliberations say Mr. Trump has not decided whether to do so, the policy
reversals would make it virtually
impossible to meet the emissions
reduction goals set by the Obama
administration under the international agreement.
Continued on Page A16
By ADAM LIPTAK
and MATT FLEGENHEIMER
WASHINGTON — Judge Neil
M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s
Supreme Court nominee, sought
to assure the Senate and the nation on Tuesday that he would be a
fair-minded and independent justice. He said he would not hesitate
to rule against Mr. Trump if the
law required it, and he repeated
his earlier private criticism of Mr.
Trump’s attacks on judges who
had ruled against the administration.
“When anyone criticizes the
honesty or integrity or motives of
a federal judge,” Judge Gorsuch
said at his confirmation hearing,
“I find that disheartening and demoralizing.”
Asked if that general statement
applied to Mr. Trump, Judge Gorsuch said, “Anyone is anyone.”
By turns expansive and evasive, Judge Gorsuch discussed legal doctrines at length, but refused to take positions on specific
issues. He asserted, as have previous Supreme Court nominees,
that it would be unfair to future litigants for him to announce his
views on issues that could come
before the court.
Judge Gorsuch’s style was
folksy, earnest, learned and emphatic, and he easily dodged questions from members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee that he was
not inclined to answer. But he
spoke forcefully about his devotion to the rule of law.
His exchanges with Democratic
senators were sometimes tense
and testy. Yet through every
planned line of attack — from his
record on workers’ rights to his
skepticism of the power of regulatory agencies — Judge Gorsuch
emerged with few scratches.
In response to questions from
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, Judge Gorsuch
expressed admiration for Judge
Continued on Page A19
$2.50
Printed in Chicago
Despite Feverish Efforts,
Party Appears to Lack
the Votes It Needs
This article is by Julie Hirschfeld
Davis, Thomas Kaplan and Robert
Pear.
WASHINGTON — President
Trump on Tuesday turned up the
pressure on recalcitrant Republicans to support a sweeping bill to
overhaul the health care system,
threatening wavering lawmakers
in his party with political payback
if they failed to get behind a measure that has become an early test
of his negotiating power.
In a series of meetings and
phone calls at the White House
and on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump,
Vice President Mike Pence and
Republican congressional leaders
haggled with holdouts over details
as they struggled to assemble a
majority to support a bill that
would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The legislation
is scheduled for a floor vote on
Thursday in the House.
But at a private meeting with
House Republicans at the Capitol,
the president also delivered a
blunt warning that many of those
present would lose their seats in
next year’s midterm congressional elections if the effort failed.
“I’m going to come after you,”
Mr. Trump told Representative
Mark Meadows, Republican of
North Carolina, a prime holdout
and the chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, a hotbed of
concern about the legislation, according to several people in the
room who described his comments on condition of anonymity
because the session was private.
“I believe Mark and his group will
Continued on Page A14
SCRUTINY FOR LOYALIST Roger J. Stone Jr. is being investigated in
connection with Russian interference in the 2016 election. PAGE A12
PRESIDENT’S SELF-IMAGE Mr. Trump remains fixated on debunked
wiretapping allegations. Why is he digging in his heels? PAGE A18
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC THAYER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
On the second day of his confirmation hearing, Judge Neil M. Gorsuch was folksy but emphatic.
ARTS ADVOCACY DAY Activists arrived in Washington, asking leaders
to preserve funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. PAGE A17
Devices Banned Iowa Drive Is Opening Battle for School Choice Becoming Rodrigo Duterte,
band, the best part may be that the governor’s mansion and both
On Some Planes
Strongman in the Philippines
the school costs them only $85 per houses of the State Legislature,
By DANA GOLDSTEIN
month. As it does for one-third of proposals to significantly expand
DES MOINES — When she was
Over ISIS Fears shopping
St. Theresa students, the state school choice programs in Iowa
for a school for her
This article is by Ron Nixon,
Adam Goldman and Eric Schmitt.
WASHINGTON — Intelligence
showing that the Islamic State is
developing a bomb hidden in portable electronics spurred the
United States and Britain on Tuesday to bar passengers from airports in a total of 10 Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptop computers, iPads and other
devices larger than a cellphone
aboard direct inbound flights, two
senior American counterterrorism officials said.
Two additional American officials said the explosives were designed to be hidden in laptop batteries. All four spoke on condition
of anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly discuss the
sensitive information.
The Trump administration
maintained that the new restrictions did not signal a credible, specific threat of an imminent attack.
Officials said the alert reflects
concerns that the Islamic State is
ready — or soon will be — to
launch new capabilities against
the West. Sean Spicer, the White
House press secretary, declined to
address the intelligence during a
Continued on Page A17
daughter Alma, Mary Kakayo
found a lot to like in St. Theresa
Catholic, including its Catholic social justice theme, student prayer
and hour of religious instruction
every day.
“Morally, my child knows how
to respect others,” said Ms.
Kakayo, whose daughter is now in
the fourth grade. “She knows
when to listen, and when to talk
and bring in her ideas.”
For Ms. Kakayo and her hus-
covers more than half of Alma’s
$3,025 tuition in a program that resembles the Trump administration’s proposal for a federal private school choice plan.
But few topics in education are
more controversial than the idea
of diverting public money to private institutions, and Iowa has become a study in the kind of political fights that may be in store
for the administration.
Despite Republican control of
KATHRYN GAMBLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A tuition program at St. Theresa School in Des Moines resembles a White House proposal for a federal school-choice plan.
NATIONAL A12-20
INTERNATIONAL A4-11
BUSINESS DAY B1-6
Prison for Gunman’s Friend
‘Powder Keg’ Feared in Libya
Officials said a man who knew Dylann
S. Roof before he killed nine people in a
church had lied to the F.B.I.
PAGE A12
The Islamic State in Libya, once considered its most lethal branch outside Iraq
and Syria, is regrouping, exploiting the
chaos gripping the country.
PAGE A4
Creation of Synthetic Embryos
Scientists may soon be able to grow
human organs, and they worry ethical
constraints are outmoded.
PAGE A20
Syrian Rebels Surprise Capital
Syrian insurgents seized government
positions outside Damascus on the third
day of a renewed offensive.
PAGE A4
NEW YORK A21-23
are stalled, at least for now. The
pushback has come from groups
traditionally opposed to the idea
— Democrats, school districts,
teachers’ unions and parents committed to public schools — but also
from some conservatives concerned about the cost to the state.
Iowa is one of 31 states where
legislators have proposed creating or expanding school choice
programs this year, without
Washington even lifting a finger.
Even if just a few of the bills pass,
the number of children attending
private schools with public money
could greatly increase, one reason
the proposals are meeting resistance.
“There is a national discussion
about this, and obviously Donald
Trump has brought it up,” said
State
Representative
Walt
Rogers, chairman of the House
Education Committee. He said a
modest expansion in Iowa remained possible this year. “I tell
people, ‘This discussion isn’t going away.’”
A powerful force in the movement is Mr. Trump’s secretary of
education, the philanthropist
Betsy DeVos. She has spent
decades arguing that public
schools have a monopoly on eduContinued on Page A13
By RICHARD C. PADDOCK
DAVAO CITY, Philippines —
President Rodrigo Duterte relishes the image of killer-savior. He
boasts of killing criminals by his
own hand. On occasion, he calls
for mass murder.
Speaking of the drug addicts he
says are destroying the Philippines, he said, “I would be
happy to slaughter them.”
Mr. Duterte and his friends
have long cultivated legends of his
sadistic exploits, like throwing a
drug lord from a helicopter and
forcing a tourist who violated a
smoking ban to eat his cigarette
butt at gunpoint.
It is a thuggish image that Mr.
Duterte embraces.
Whether Mr. Duterte has done
what he says — the killings he
claims to have carried out are impossible to verify — he has realized his gory vision in national policy. First as a mayor, now as president of the Philippines, he has encouraged the police and vigilantes
to kill thousands of people with
impunity.
While his draconian justice and
coarse manner have earned him
widespread condemnation outside the Philippines, an in-depth
look at his rise to power and interviews with many people close to
REUTERS
Rodrigo Duterte in 1997.
him reveal a man of multiple contradictions.
He has alienated many with
outrageous comments and irrational behavior, yet remains
wildly popular. He is an antidrug
crusader, yet has struggled with
drug abuse himself. And he grew
up a child of privilege, the son of a
provincial governor, yet was subjected to regular beatings.
His mother whipped him so often for his misbehavior that she
wore out her horsewhip, according to his brother, Emmanuel
Duterte. At parochial school, he
was caned by Jesuit priests and,
the president says, molested by
one. By his teenage years, he was
known as a street brawler.
“Violence in the house, violence
in the school and violence in the
neighborhood,”
Emmanuel
Duterte said. “That is why he is always angry. Because if you have
Continued on Page A10
FOOD D1-8
SPORTSWEDNESDAY B7-11
End of a Remarkable Streak
The Taste of Memory
Red Sox Are Well Armed
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index
had gone 64 consecutive days without
declining more than 1 percent during a
trading session, until Tuesday. PAGE B1
Paula Wolfert, who helped popularize
Mediterranean cooking, is fighting
dementia with diet and resolve. PAGE D1
Chris Sale gives Boston pitching depth
the Yankees can only dream of. PAGE B7
Sushi With a Side of Buzz
ARTS C1-6
A Holocaust Education
At the Anne Frank House and other
museums, exhibits are being fine-tuned
to fill in the blanks for students. PAGE C1
Breslin’s Eye for the Invisible
Protest Over Emmett Till Art
Jimmy Breslin stood apart from the
crowd, telling stories of people who had
been ignored. About New York. PAGE A21
A white artist’s painting of the lynching
victim, at the Whitney Biennial, has
some calling for its removal.
PAGE C1
Pete Wells reviews the New York version of Sugarfish, but Sushi on Jones,
below, is a bare-bones favorite. PAGE D6
OBITUARIES A24-25
Architect of Bulls’ Dynasty
As general manager, Jerry Krause built
six N.B.A. titlists. He was 77. PAGE A25
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A26-27
Thomas L. Friedman
PAGE A27
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