The Washington Post National Weekly - September 17, 2017

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

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Politics Divided GOP vexes Trump again 4 Nation Houston cherishes schools’ start 8 5 Myths DACA 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Don’t call it a deal BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

I

f you’re paying attention to the political news right now, you might come to the conclusion that President Trump and Democrats are making deals over Republicans’ heads on some of the biggest issues facing Congress this fall, like immigration and the debt ceiling.

But don’t call it a deal. Don’t even call what they’re doing negotiating, at least not to Republican leaders. They’ve gone out of their way this week to play down whatever it is that Trump and Democrats are doing with their newfound friendship. And that makes sense.

This whole buddy-buddy thing with the other side doesn’t look great for them, and it arguably doesn’t look great for the president.

“It is right and proper that the president talks with the other party,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters Thursday, the morning after Democrats and Trump made a sort-of deal to have Congress protect “dreamers.” But, he said: “These are discussions, not negotiations.”

Ryan repeated that nuance, discussions vs. negotiations, over and over in his short news conference. Talking is different from making policy, he was saying.

Democrats would disagree with that characterization of what came out of their Wednesday dinner with the president. But Thursday’s follow-up to it may have proved Ryan’s broader point that nothing is set in stone in this Washington until it’s set in stone.

Democrats thought they had the outlines of an agreement with the president to protect young adults in the country illegally, but Trump quickly clouded the water the next morning. Will dreamers have a path to citizenship? Will Trump stand down on his wall? Was

KLMNO WEEKLY

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is seen with President Trump in the Oval Office.

there even a deal? That appears to be all up in the air right now.

Ryan is not the only Republican trying to get reporters to stop hyperventilating about Democrats’ and Trump’s newfound inclination to at least discuss things.

Last week, Trump sided with Democrats over Republicans on fiscal issues, effectively allowing Democrats to force another legislative showdown in December over raising the debt ceiling and spending. Trump’s decision came hours after Ryan had told reporters that just raising the debt ceiling only through December was “ridiculous and disgraceful.”

Republican leaders grudgingly obliged and passed legislation they knew Trump would sign, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was eager to talk to the New York Times a few days later about it. Democrats celebrated prematurely, an uncharacteristically chatty McConnell said.

“One of the advantages of being the majority leader is you control the paper,” McConnell said.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 49

In other words: Democrats can strike deals all they want with the president, but Republicans are the ones who write the bills and put them on the floor for a vote.

In the House of Representatives, the majority party has near-absolute power to decide what gets voted on. Ryan made that point Thursday, too: “I think the president understands he has to work with the congressional majorities to get any kind of legislative solution,” he said.

It’s an open question if Trump does understand. In wishing it so, Republican leaders are at least saving face for themselves by reminding everyone that they’re the ones in charge of this situation.

You could also argue they are doing the president a favor.

Democrats were quick to get out in front of what happened Wednesday. They issued a statement announcing that Trump had agreed to protect young adults in the country illegally and that he did not demand money for his border wall in return.

If true, that’s not a great look for a president who made his name on being tough on illegal immigration and on building his wall.

The next morning, Trump tried to do damage control with his infuriated base by reminding everyone that he hadn’t given up on the wall.

But it’s still a possibility he made a deal with Democrats that was anathema to some of his campaign promises.

Ryan and McConnell would like you to know that just because Democrats claim they were negotiating with the president doesn’t mean they actually were — a narrative they very much need to get out for their sake and the president’s. n

© The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TRAVEL BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER As the unemployment and the opioid crisis ravage West Virginia, some say marijuana could be the key to recovery. Photograph by CRAIG CUTLER, for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Tax-cut push runs into old problem

BY D AMIAN P ALETTA, S EAN S ULLIVAN AND K ELSEY S NELL

W

hite House officials trying to jump-start work on the GOP’s top fall priority — tax cuts — are coming up against the same obstacle that has vexed President Trump all year: divided Republican lawmakers.

The White House and GOP congressional leaders agree with the goal of slashing the corporate income tax rate and also cutting individual income taxes to benefit the middle class. But they have yet to agree about which existing tax breaks should be eliminated to pay for it all.

In private talks with top congressional Republicans, Trump advisers are pressing to eliminate or reduce several popular tax deductions, including the interest companies pay on debt, state and local income taxes paid by families and individuals, and the hugely popular mortgage interest deduction.

Several officials from the White House and Capitol Hill confirmed that those options are being considered. But that is where the agreement ends. Congressional leaders, for instance, believe the mortgage deduction is too popular to reduce, according to several officials familiar with the discussions.

All of it has forced negotiators to consider scaling back their plan. And that is before any plan has even been presented to the rank and file.

“It is always difficult, because it means what do you cut?” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “Everything on the books has a constituency, and that’s one of the problems.”

White House officials are still hopeful that they can lower the centerpiece of their effort, the corporate rate, from 35 percent to 15 percent. Many congressional Republicans, however, think that goal is ambitious.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said at a forum hosted by the New York Times recently that

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump and Republicans agree on the goal but not how to pay for it individual deductions for mortgage interest, health insurance premiums and charitable donations should all be preserved. “We see those more as broad-based, important things that should be encouraged,” he said.

That leaves lawmakers and Trump advisers with limited options to pay for the tax cuts they all seek.

Underlying the whole endeavor is the unresolved tension over whether it will constitute the sort of “tax reform” that Ryan has championed for years or a less ambitious but more politically feasible tax cut.

The former is defined as an effort to reduce rates while maintaining federal revenue by elimi-

nating “loopholes” — narrowly applicable deductions, credits and other incentives. The latter would leave the loopholes intact but potentially add trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Ryan and GOP allies have long promised “reform” in the spirit of the bipartisan 1986 rewrite of the tax code, which after three decades of revisions allows individuals and corporations to claim more than $1.6 trillion in tax breaks each year. But in recent months, key players have discussed something closer to the temporary, deficit-exploding tax cuts pushed by President George W. Bush in his first term.

“Just looking at all the promises that were made, you cannot do all

President Trump meets about tax changes this past week at the White House with a bipartisan group of House members — including, from left, Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.), Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.), foreground, and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.).

those promises,” said Mark Mazur, a former head of research, analysis and statistics at the Internal Revenue Service who was later the top tax official in the Obama administration. “Some things will have to get dialed back. They overpromised on a lot of things.”

The process has taken on new urgency with Trump’s recent exhortations to expedite what he has called the largest tax cut in U.S. history. He has traveled to Missouri and North Dakota in recent weeks to deliver speeches; in Missouri, he promised to reduce a “crushing tax burden on our companies and on our workers.”

The White House and Republican leaders are trying a different approach than they used with the

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

5

POLITICS failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, hoping for more agreement upfront rather than risk late defections that doom the entire process.

Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, said administration officials have met with “more than 250 members,” including Democrats, to discuss tax reform.

“Our outreach has been extensive,” he said.

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin huddled with key GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to discuss next steps on the budget and on taxes, according to Republicans familiar with the plans.

They discussed plans for a 2018 budget blueprint — a necessary first step before tax legislation can be taken up. And they drilled down with House and Senate negotiators on tax cuts.

Mnuchin also told a conference in New York on Tuesday that negotiators were still considering a number of unresolved issues. He said, for example, that they had not decided whether to cut tax rates for all 2017 income or just income in 2018 and beyond. He also said Republicans would assume that their tax cut plan would create hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue just based on economic growth, an assertion that many budget experts have said is suspect.

Mnuchin also suggested that companies could be treated variously under the GOP’s tax proposal. He said, for example, that he favored charging a higher tax rate for accounting firms as opposed to manufacturing firms, which he says create jobs.

This past week, the president hosted a bipartisan dinner with three senior Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee and three conservative Democrats from states Trump won whose votes the president is courting for tax legislation. Each of the Democrats who attended said in statements afterward that they were willing to work with Trump — under certain conditions.

Still, congressional GOP leaders are planning to use special budget procedures that would allow them to pass the tax bill with only Republican votes, skirting a potential filibuster from Senate

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) heads to a meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others on Tuesday.

Democrats. But they have made little progress in passing a key prerequisite, the budget blueprint, thanks to partisan infighting.

In the House, hard-line conservatives have demanded a more detailed tax plan before ponying up votes for a budget, which has created a chicken-and-egg problem for GOP leaders. In the Senate, the complication is a Budget Committee where Republicans have a single-vote majority, empowering any single GOP senator on the panel to negotiate the parameters of the tax bill.

“At this point, to pass a budget, it has one purpose, and that one purpose is a vehicle to pass tax reform,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said recently. “I don’t see any real rush for us to do a budget just so it can sit there and mature for six weeks.”

There is already talk among some Republicans close to the process of what happens if GOP leaders are unable to work out their differences.

One Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, speculated Monday that the White House is lying in wait to cut a deal with Democrats if Ryan and McConnell are unable to pass a budget.

Democrats, meanwhile, have launched a campaign called “Not One Penny” aimed at pressuring Republicans to avoid sending more relief to corporations and the wealthy than to the middle and lower classes.

Rep. Richard E. Neal (Mass.), the top Democrat on the House

Ways and Means Committee, said this month that Democrats would accept “the idea of revenue neutrality” but “pay great attention to the distribution tables.”

Neal is not yet convinced that the recent bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling will lead to another one on tax reform.

“Seeing is believing,” he said.

A key element of Trump’s blueprint would drastically reduce rates for businesses and individuals, changes that could eliminate more than $5 trillion in government revenue over 10 years. The president also wants to reduce the number of tax brackets for families and individuals from seven to three — and essentially to lower rates for these earners.

The White House and top Republicans have argued that these changes would lead to hiring, spur economic growth, give companies more money to invest and lure companies back to the United States.

“We’re focused on making sure we get a complete tax-reform package,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “That’s the goal.”

Complicating matters is the fact that two of the largest tax breaks eyed by the White House — eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes, and scaling back the mortgage interest deduction — have powerful interest groups that have made it more difficult for the GOP to coalesce around a plan.

Eliminating the state and local tax deduction would raise $700 billion in new taxes over 10 years, mostly from a handful of states including California, New

York and New Jersey. On the mortgage interest deduction, negotiators are looking at lowering the mortgage cap that people can claim from $1 million to a level that would depend on average home prices in particular regions.

Despite Trump’s goal of cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, negotiators are looking at options that would lower it to around 23 percent, with a 28 percent rate for small businesses that file their taxes differently, said several individuals briefed on the discussions.

The White House has not proposed eliminating a specific corporate tax loophole to offset the rate cut.

Other goals for the White House and top Republicans: eliminating the estate tax and the alternative-minimum tax, and doubling the standard deduction that many Americans can claim when they file their taxes.

Tax experts believe it would be difficult if not impossible to follow through on all of these proposals without adding trillions of dollars to the national debt — even with the elimination of numerous tax breaks. Negotiators are considering making some of the tax changes permanent and allowing others to expire after several years to conform with Senate rules governing expanding the deficit.

Republicans control just 52 of the 100 Senate seats, giving them a very slim margin that just three defections would imperil.

That margin makes Trump’s goal of driving down the corporate tax rate as low as he can all the more challenging — and helps explain why negotiators are scrounging for ways to raise new revenue. The White House also is counting on a rosy estimate of how much future economic growth can be presumed.

Mnuchin has said the majority of the new tax revenue they plan to raise will come from economic growth, but House and Senate leaders have suggested that such inflated assumptions won’t pass muster with the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional body that provides a crucial review of all tax proposal.

“Tax reform is hard and hasn’t happened for 31 years for a reason,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

“It is always difficult, because it means what do you cut?”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) says about changing the tax code.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has said that individual deductions for mortgage interest, health insurance premiums and charitable donations should be preserved.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Bipartisan praise for storm response BY

D AVID N AKAMURA

H

urricane Harvey was just beginning to unleash its full fury on Houston when President Trump took to Twitter to praise his new emergency management chief, Brock Long: “You are doing a great job — the world is watching!”

To Mark Merritt, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in the Clinton administration, the tweet seemed premature.

“I was having a ‘Brownie’ flashback,” said Merritt, referring to Michael Brown, the FEMA administrator lauded by President George W. Bush for doing a “heck of a job” during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In Trump’s case, however, the social media “attaboy” proved more prescient. Facing off against a pair of historic storms — first Harvey in Texas and Louisiana, then Hurricane Irma through the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida — Trump’s administration has earned bipartisan praise for coordinating the federal response with state and local officials, avoiding the type of catastrophe that marked the Bush administration’s response to Katrina, a storm that killed more than 1,800 people.

Harvey and Irma wreaked widespread destruction that will take years and billions of dollars to recover from, and the death toll from the two storms, including in the Caribbean, has reached over 100, according to authorities. Experts caution that the affected communities will need consistent support and attention even as the dramatic images of destroyed buildings and flooded neighborhoods recede from public view.

But for a Trump administration whose first eight months has been marked by internecine squabbles and a lack of legislative accomplishments, the initial competence in managing the storms represented a relief — and a rare chance to take credit.

“While I’m preaching caution to make sure people understand that this is an ongoing effort and

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

Trump administration inspires confidence with its handling of first phase of hurricane relief efforts that there’s still going to be long, painful days ahead, I am doubling down on my assertion that this is the best-integrated, full-scale response effort in our nation’s history,” Thomas Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, told reporters at the White House last week.

Several major policy questions have been raised in the wake of the storms, including whether Trump will reconsider his proposals to slash FEMA’s grant programs and his administration’s hostility to regulations aimed at protecting the environment. And in the early days of Harvey, Trump often focused on the performance of his team and the scale of the storm rather than the plight of victims.

But overall, emergency management veterans said, Trump and his team deserve acknowledgment for getting through the first phase of the crisis in a way that inspired public confidence.

At the request of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), the president signed a declaration, before the storm made landfall, to authorize disaster relief funds available to individuals. Kenneth E. Mapp, governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, said he spoke Monday with Trump, who expressed concern and said he would try to visit the islands. And Trump is working with Congress to authorize $7.9 billion in emergency funds for Harvey relief, the first of what is expected to be several tranches of federal aid.

“President Trump, for all the negatives we’ve heard about him, has done the right thing: He picked a great team and let them do their job,” said Merritt, now a private consultant who has worked previously with Long, Alabama’s former emergency management director.

Despite the early tweet to Long, who was confirmed to the FEMA job in June, Trump “did not inter-

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers deliver supplies during a visit with flood survivors and volunteers Sept. 2 in Houston after Hurricane Harvey.

fere, and even his Twitter did not interfere,” Merritt said. “We didn’t have a Twitter setback.”

Bossert, who briefed Trump on the progress of the storms, has significant experience, having worked in FEMA’s policy shop during the Bush administration.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who headed the Department of Homeland Security for five months, also brought a familiarity with FEMA and a close working relationship with acting DHS secretary Elaine Duke. Two of Kelly’s deputies, Kirstjen Nielsen and Joseph Hagin, worked on hurricane relief efforts in the Bush administration.

And Long served as the hurricane program manager at FEMA from 2001 to 2006. Former Bush aides recalled a video conference on Air Force One during Katrina when Hagin was with the president on the plane and Long was on the other end at the agency.

“The people who are there have lived through painful experiences,” said Steve Atkiss, a former operations aide to Bush. “They are acutely attuned to what could go wrong, and having them in place prevents you from stepping on a lot of land mines.”

Administration officials said that on several occasions, Trump picked up the phone and, unbeknown to aides, called Texas’s Abbott and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to ask whether they needed anything.

Trump has developed a reputation as a chief executive uninterested in delving into the minutiae of policy. But aides said the president was attentive and asked detailed questions in the numerous briefings from Bossert. Trump led several conference calls that included agency officials, spoke with Cabinet members ahead of Harvey and convened a full Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat at Camp David as Irma made landfall in Florida.

“His basic direction was to do the right thing and do it in a timely fashion,” said Doug Fears, the senior director of resilience policy at the National Security Council. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

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P0LITICS ANALYSIS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Ranking Democrats’ hopes for 2020 BY

A ARON B LAKE

W

e are a little more than a year away from the start of the 2020 presidential race.

In many ways it’s already begun, of course. But November 2018, right after the midterm election, is when a slew of Democrats are going to be really tempted to throw their hats in the ring.

Given the field is likely to be as big as any we’ve ever seen, there will be a premium on getting started early, raising money and building a base.

It will also be tempting because there’s no 800-pound gorilla in the field. There’s no Hillary Clinton or even a Barack Obama — a high-profile rising star who seems destined for big things if he wanted to run — that we can see right now. Yes, there are front-runners, but the Democratic Party is in a huge state of flux, and it’s not clear who’s leading it.

That makes what I’m about to do both wildly speculative and lengthy.

Here are what I see as the top 15 contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2020, ranked in ascending order.

15. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg The Facebook founder has offered not-quite-Shermanesque denials that he’ll run, but pretty much everything else he’s doing suggests he will. A few things keep him at the bottom of this list: 1. We don’t know if he’d run as a Democrat or an independent.

2. He’s got real problems given Facebook’s role in spreading fake news in 2016 and the revelation that it sold ads to Russians.

3. I just don’t see it. But he does have money — lots and lots of it.

14. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti Another thing I’m skeptical of is mayors becoming president.

Only one former mayor has been elected president — Grover Cleveland, who was mayor of Buffalo — and he became governor first. Cities are messy, and they leave you with all kinds of baggage even if you’re successful. Democrats like Garcetti, but Los Angeles is not a great launchpad.

13. Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) Kaine proved a perfectly capable running mate and served well in his role as attack dog in the vice-presidential debate. But he didn’t light the world on fire, and I’m not sure I see the argument that says he’s what the Democratic Party is looking for.

12. Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick Patrick is far down on this list for one main reason: People don’t think he’ll run. He has virtually disappeared from the public spot-

light and took a job at Bain Capital — you know, Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital — which would sure be a curious move if he saw a presidential campaign in his future. Most people think he doesn’t. But if he did want to run, I think he’s a real contender, and he’d have instant infrastructure with a lot of former Obama folks ready to jump onboard.

11. Oprah Winfrey/Mark Cuban/Howard Schultz/Bob Iger/Sheryl Sandberg Okay, I’ll admit that it’s a real cop-out to put these five together.

Winfrey is certainly a different kind of billionaire than Cuban, former Starbucks CEO Schultz, Disney CEO Iger and Facebook chief operating officer Sandberg.

Schultz and Iger seem perhaps the most likely to run, but Winfrey would be instantly formidable if she did. And if Democrats decide to fight a billionaire president with a billionaire Democrat, any of these make more sense to me than Zuckerberg. If I had to pick one, it would be Schultz.

10. Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) If Democrats want to go populist and progressive, Brown fits the bill. If they’re worried about losing the Rust Belt and the white working class again, he also helps, and does so better than any name on this list. And he seems to have a newfound appetite for national politics. Call this your first real sleeper pick. First, though, he’ll need to get past his 2018 reelection bid in a swing state.

15. Zuckerberg

14. Garcetti

13. Kaine

3. Murphy

2. Biden

1. Sanders

9. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo Cuomo is very likely to win a third term as governor next year.

From there, what else does he have to do but run for president?

He’ll have to get past some issues with the Democratic base (see: Zephyr Teachout’s surprisingly strong 2014 primary challenge against him), but Cuomo could be a really pragmatic pick.

8. Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) Booker’s presidential campaign has often seemed to be a matter of when, not if. He’s certainly among the biggest political talents on this list and would quickly garner attention. He’s also got the mayor thing, though, having run Newark, and having the scars to prove it.

7. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.)

Speaking of candidates with lots of buzz: Harris entered the Senate with huge expectations this year. It would be a quick jump to running for president, though, and as with Cuomo, there are some lingering tensions between her and progressives that she might want to spend some more time putting behind her. She seemed to set about that by supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health care bill.

6. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) Gillibrand said pretty definitively back in May that she won’t run. But nobody really believes her. And it’s not like she’s going to lose her 2018 reelection bid. She also seems to have made all the right moves so far. “She positioned herself way early . . . in terms of her votes; she moved to the left really quickly,” said one influential Democratic strategist I spoke with.

5. California Gov. Jerry Brown Brown will be 82 years old on Election Day 2020. He first ran for president in 1976 — which is half a lifetime ago, even for him. And yet, when I spoke with knowledgeable Democrats, his name came up as much as just about anyone else’s. They see him as uniquely able to take the fight to

Trump. Something to keep an eye on: California is looking to move its primary right behind Iowa and New Hampshire. If it succeeds, Brown’s stock shoots up and maybe the race gets more tempting.

4. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.)

I don’t think she will run — especially if Sanders tries again, as it seems he probably will. But if she did, Warren would instantly have a strong base of support.

3. Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.)

Murphy has impressed plenty of folks since entering the Senate in 2013, particularly with his messaging. He’s also got clear progressive bona fides — on gun control and fighting Trump — without seeming like too much of a Northeastern liberal. He says he’s not interested in running, but nearly everyone thinks he’d be an instant contender. He may be the one guy on this list that not enough people are talking about.

2. Former vice president Joe Biden Biden seems to have nothing but regret about not running in 2016. Like Sherrod Brown, he seems like an obvious fit for a party that wants to win back the white working class and the Rust Belt. But he’ll be 77 years old in 2020, and his previous presidential campaigns have gone basically nowhere. Being a well-liked vice president isn’t the same as doing the hard work of running and winning by yourself. But Biden’s time — if it ever comes — may be arriving.

1. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) In contrast to all the other names on this list, Sanders seems to be gearing up for another go — and admitting it. Those around him seem to think it’ll happen.

He’s a year older than Biden, but it’s difficult to see why Democrats wouldn’t think he deserved a chance at being the nominee after what happened in 2016. And he remains pretty broadly popular.

The big X-Factor here is the federal investigation into a land deal pursued by his wife, which appears to be no small nuisance. n

©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Welcomed words: ‘Back to school’ M ORIAH B ALINGIT Houston BY

T

erra Black, 11, awoke on her first day of sixth grade on a cot in the middle of a sprawling convention hall in downtown Houston, the place she has called home since escaping neck-deep floodwater that threatened her family’s apartment. Here, in bathrooms she shares with about 1,400 other evacuees, she got ready for school, styling her hair and slipping on a pink T-shirt her mother had snatched from a donation pile.

“I’m a little nervous,” Terra said later, grinning widely as she munched on a breakfast sandwich at a nearby Walmart. “It’s a new year, a new learning experience.”

Tens of thousands of schoolchildren returned to school Monday, two weeks after Hurricane Harvey battered the city, flooding homes, sweeping away uniforms and school supplies, and shuttering one of the nation’s largest school districts.

For a city in recovery — and especially for displaced children such as Terra — the reopening of 268 of the district’s 280 schools represents a critical step toward normalcy in a city where thousands of homes remain uninhabitable and where signs of the storm still abound.

Public officials heralded the reopening of the schools as one of the surest signs the region was bouncing back.

“We have let the nation and the world know that the city is back in business, and one way of demonstrating that is for the schools to be open, for the kids to be learning, for the bands to be playing, for our athletes to be performing,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a news conference in the school library at Bruce Elementary.

“Nothing better than Texas football.”

But while educators celebrated the return of students, they braced for the myriad challenges students face in the storm’s aftermath: missing school days, lost school supplies and uniforms, psychological trauma and transience. There

TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In flood-ravaged Houston, return to classrooms represents a significant step toward normalcy were teachers, too, who lost everything, and about 270 were unable to return to work Monday.

There was also the financial toll: Superintendent Richard A. Carranza estimates the storm will cost the district roughly $700 million, a third of the annual budget.

Carranza said the district was attempting to meet the needs created by the storm. The district is providing breakfast, lunch and dinner to all schoolchildren this year, regardless of their families’ incomes. It also relaxed requirements so families who were forced to move and could not find lost birth certificates and other records would be able to move to new schools.

As the sun rose Monday, Ruth Rojas walked her two children, 9-year-old Adrian and 11-year-old Joseline, out of the convention center, where they have lived since the Coast Guard rescued them from their home north of Houston.

The siblings had attended school in a suburban district, but Rojas was unsure when — or if — they would be able to return home.

So with the help of school staff stationed inside the sprawling shelter, she registered them at two local schools: Red Elementary and Meyerland Middle. She was relieved she did not have to have her children’s paperwork, which is locked in a car flooded during the hurricane.

A yellow school bus fetched the children from the convention center.

“I want them to keep up with everything. I didn’t want them to get behind,” said Rojas, who added that her daughter was in the gifted program. “It was important for me and for them.”

Parents said they hoped the return to school would be therapeutic for their children, whose lives and routines have been upended by the storm. Stephanie MeltonCurtis escaped the storm with her

Terra Black, 11, takes a photo of little sister Edahlia Payne, 4, beside their mother, Terri Black, after breakfast at a Walmart on Monday, the first day of school in Houston, where Hurricane Harvey caused devastating flooding.

family by walking about two miles through chest-deep water, with her husband, Travis Curtis, carrying their 3-year-old daughter, Talayah, on his shoulders. Later, Talayah came home and asked why her bed and toys were in a pile on the curb.

Melton-Curtis worries the experience scarred Talayah and welcomed the chance for her to start pre-kindergarten.

“I think it will take her mind off of it,” Melton-Curtis said. “She won’t have to worry.”

Many schoolchildren like Terra and Talayah could recount similar stories of narrowly surviving the flood, which killed at least 22 people, including a family whose van was inundated by floodwater.

Carranza said the district was preparing teachers for the possibility that many children may arrive with psychological damage from the storm and its aftermath.

The district planned to train all teachers in “trauma-informed pedagogy” and to dispatch crisis counselors to schools.

“This is going to be a year of incredible academic growth, but it’s also going to be a year of recovery,” Carranza said.

School was also a welcome respite from boredom for many children stuck at the convention center. Save the Children had set up a Kids Zone with arts and crafts and other activities, but there were otherwise few diversions.

At Gregory-Lincoln Education Center in Houston, Terra sat among her classmates in her English, language arts and reading class, working intently on a work sheet titled “All About Me,” asking for her favorite color and game and about her family.

Teacher Kathryn Green oriented students to the classroom, pointing out the motivational posters. As she gestured around the room, Green urged the students to treat the space as if it were their own.

“This is your classroom. This is your homeroom. This is your home,” Green said insistently.

“You guys are going to learn we’re a family.” n ©The Washington Post

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How did Irma compare with Andrew?

BY

P ETER W HORISKEY

T

he specter of Hurricane Andrew haunted Florida the other week. Though its winds — which lifted the roofs from tens of thousands of homes — had vanished 25 years ago, the storm remained the stuff of Floridian nightmares.

And yet, Hurricane Irma seemed destined to be worse.

It was among the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic. Much broader than Andrew and taking aim at several major cities, its violence could touch far more people.

But as Floridians took stock of the damage last week, it appeared that although Irma affected a far broader swath of the state, it was not the terror that Andrew had been.

“Irma and Andrew were as different as two hurricanes can be,” said Bryan Norcross, senior hurricane meteorologist at the Weather Channel, who earned fame as the chief meteorologist at Miami’s NBC affiliate when Andrew struck. “The damage in Irma is significantly less intense, but it is vastly more widespread.”

It will take weeks to total up the damage, but at first blush, the Irma toll falls short of Andrew.

According to the National Hurricane Center, Andrew reportedly destroyed over 25,000 homes and damaged 101,000 others. There are no such figures available for Irma, but experts say early assessments suggest that in Florida, the number of homes destroyed by Irma will be significantly lower.

In Andrew, the Category 5 winds stripped roofs off and flicked away roof trusses as if they were matchsticks. Two-by-fours became airborne and damaged other homes. In some mobilehome parks, no walls remained vertical, the winds leaving only junkyard heaps of sodden clothing, appliances and furniture.

“We don’t really have all the damage assessments from where Irma’s core hit, but from the pictures I’ve seen . . . the major structures are still standing,” said Max Mayfield, former director of the

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Hurricane Andrew was fiercer but will likely end up being less costly National Hurricane Center and now a hurricane specialist at WPLG-TV in Miami. With Irma, “there will be weaker structures and mobile homes and carports and trees down. Most houses are still standing. I’m thanking God that we didn’t have more.”

Irma’s winds weren’t strong enough to destroy many homes, unless they were in the path of falling trees or falling debris, Norcross said.

“Homes caught in the storm surge in the Keys were obviously destroyed, but the total numbers there are not like in a metropolitan area,” he said.

Still, when measured by the cost of insured damages, the far-ranging problems of Irma may prove more troublesome than even those in Andrew, which at the time was the costliest hurricane to make landfall in the United States.

Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide estimates that insur-

ance companies will pay losses in the United States resulting from Hurricane Irma ranging from $20 billion to $40 billion.

By contrast, such losses in Andrew were estimated at $27 billion, adjusted for inflation.

Those figures seem to rank Irma and Andrew at similar levels.

But they do not include flood losses on homes, and with those, Irma could prove to have a higher total.

Flood losses, which are typically covered by the federal flood insurance program, were minimal in Hurricane Andrew. Wind caused the vast majority of that storm’s wreckage. It is too early to tell how much such claims will amount to in Irma, which appears to have caused substantial flooding.

About 41 percent of homes in the portions of South Florida at most risk of flooding have flood insurance policies, according to Syndeste, a risk management firm.

So why hasn’t Irma proven to be

People enjoy the beach next to a sailboat that washed ashore from Hurricane Irma at Miami Marine Stadium. Damage from Irma in Florida was less intense but more widespread.

— so far — as catastrophic as Andrew? Experts cite two reasons.

For one thing, Floridians learned from Andrew. The building codes got tougher throughout the state, especially in MiamiDade and Broward counties, which reportedly have the toughest hurricane standards in the country. In addition, many Floridians invested in hurricane shutters, thanks in large part to the insurance companies that made it expensive for those who didn’t.

Perhaps even more important, Irma fell short of the forecasts. The monster that Irma was grew tamer before making its second Florida landfall on Marco Island. By that time, its sustained winds had dropped to 115 mph. While that may sound little different from the feared winds of 130 mph or more, a small decrease in wind speed means a larger decrease in the force the storm exerts. n ©The Washington Post

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A mystifying absence in Germany G RIFF W ITTE Berlin BY

I

n 2015, suspected Russian hackers broke into the computer networks of the German Parliament and made off with a mother lode of data — 16 gigabytes, enough to account for a million or more emails.

Ever since, German politicians have been watching nervously for the fruits of that hack to be revealed, and for possible embarrassment and scandal to follow.

Many warily eyed September 2017 — the date of the next German election — as the likely window for Russian meddling to once again rattle the foundations of a Western democracy.

But with the vote only one week away — and with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s European nemesis, Chancellor Angela Merkel, seemingly on track for a comfortable win — the hacked emails haven’t materialized.

Nor have Russian-linked propaganda networks churned into overdrive with disinformation campaigns. Even Kremlin-orchestrated bots — blamed for the viral spread of fake news in last year’s U.S. presidential campaign — have been conspicuously silent.

The apparent absence of a robust Russian campaign to sabotage the German vote has become a mystery among officials and experts who had warned of a likely onslaught.

Have Germany’s defensive measures — significantly boosted after the hacks and propaganda campaigns that preceded last November’s U.S. vote — actually succeeded? Or has Russia decided to pull back, reckoning that the costs of antagonizing Merkel outweigh the benefits?

Or perhaps Moscow is simply biding its time.

“That’s what makes me worried,” said Maksymilian Czuperski, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “Why is it so quiet? It doesn’t feel right.”

Much is at stake for Russia in the German vote. Merkel, a Russian speaker who has jousted with

CHRISTOPH SCHMIDT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Officials expected Russia to try to influence the nation’s elections, but little has happened so far Putin throughout her 12-year tenure as chancellor, is critical to the Western alliance’s chances of hanging together amid a concerted Russian campaign to pick it apart.

To her left and her right are German parties that have advocated a far softer line on Moscow. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, in particular, has taken stands that would please Putin, including calls to abolish the European Union.

Putin has denied that his government is behind efforts to influence elections in the United States and beyond, while coyly acknowledging that “patriotically minded” Russians may be acting on their own.

But if Russia was hoping to undermine Merkel before the Sept. 24 vote, it doesn’t appear to be working: Her center-right party has remained well ahead of all competitors in all polls, while the AfD’s support seems to have topped out at about 10 percent.

Whether Russia makes a concerted push to meddle may not be known until election night — or beyond. German authorities are certainly not yet declaring victory, and they have urged politicians and the public to remain on alert as the campaign hits the homestretch.

But overall, officials and experts say the scale of apparent Russian interference is far lower than they had expected.

If evidence of Russian meddling continues to be minimal, experts say, there may be valuable lessons in understanding why Germany has proved unusually resilient.

One is that German authorities have been especially aggressive in trying to publicize and combat Russian sabotage efforts as they emerge — a contrast to the United States, where the Obama administration last year was reluctant to sound the alarm on what intelligence agencies later concluded was a concerted Russian cam-

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Thomas Strobl, the regional leader of the Christian Democratic Union in BadenWuerttemberg, wave to supporters in Reutlingen, Germany, on Sept. 9.

paign to help then-candidate Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

When pro-Russian news outlets began circulating a story last year about a Russian-German girl named Lisa who was allegedly abducted and raped by Arab migrants, German officials shot down the story and accused Moscow of “political propaganda.”

German intelligence officials have also named Russian-linked groups as the likely culprit behind the Bundestag hack, and they have been outspoken in their belief that Moscow will try to sway the German electorate against Merkel.

German lawmakers, meanwhile, in June passed stringent legislation that imposes multimillion-euro fines on companies that fail to remove fake news and defamatory content from their websites. The legislation, which was vigorously opposed by Facebook and other social media firms, does not go into effect until October.

But already, companies have begun to comply.

Sijbren de Jong, a Russia expert at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies, said the Russians may also have decided to play a less aggressive role in the German vote after they “overplayed their hand in the U.S.” For a variety of reasons, de Jong said, direct interference in German elections would be a risky bet. Not least are the economic considerations for two countries that remain close trading partners, despite sanctions that Merkel has championed.

“The German economy is a large market for key Russian companies,” he said. “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

Annegret Bendiek, an analyst with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said it is still possible that in the waning days of the campaign, Russian operatives will try to unsettle things. But she’s doubtful. Even the hacked Bundestag documents may never see the light of day.

“It’s been my job for 10 years to read these kinds of documents,” she said. “You can’t imagine. They are so boring.” n ©The Washington Post

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Refugees flood into Bangladesh A NNIE G OWEN Dhaka, Bangladesh BY

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he number of Rohingya refugees fleeing a military crackdown in Burma has now topped 370,000, a crisis the United Nations human rights chief called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Hundreds of thousands of the long-persecuted ethnic minority continued to stream via land and rickety boats into Bangladesh, arriving exhausted, dehydrated and recounting tales of nightmarish horrors at the hands of the Burmese military, including friends and neighbors shot dead and homes torched before their eyes.

“It seems they wanted us to leave the country,” said Nurjahan, an elderly Rohingya woman who escaped her burning village 10 days ago and ended up camped by the side of the road, unsure of where to go.

Speaking in Geneva on Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration put the number fleeing Burma at 370,000 but admitted it could rise sharply.

“Clearly the estimates have been bypassed several times over,” said spokesman Leonard Doyle.

“I’m reluctant to give a number, but obviously people fear that it could go much higher.”

As the refugees continue to inundate the area, ferry operators are charging about $122 for a river crossing — far out of reach for many of them.

Relief efforts have been rapidly overwhelmed, with food, temporary shelter kits and other supplies running low. Prices of vegetables, bamboo and plastic sheeting used to make shelters are soaring. With camps full, many of the Rohingya refugees like Nurjahan have simply sat on the roadside.

Last week, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, visited the camps in the Cox’s Bazar area of the country, which has sheltered thousands of the stateless Rohingya refugees since an earlier exodus in the 1990s. Her foreign minister has accused Burma of committing “genocide.”

She said Burma, also known as

BERNAT ARMANGUE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Over 370,000 Rohingya flee Burma; U.N. official calls it ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ Myanmar, would have to take back its Rohingya refugees, since Burmese authorities “created this problem, and they will have to solve it.”

International condemnation of Burma’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has intensified, along with repeated calls for her Nobel Peace Prize, which she won in 1991 as a result of her long fight for democracy in Burma, to be rescinded — something the Nobel committee has said will not happen.

On Monday, the White House issued a statement condemning the attacks and the ensuing violence, saying it was “deeply troubled” by the ongoing crisis and “alarmed” by “allegations of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, burning of villages, massacres, and rape, by security forces and by civilians acting with these forces’ consent.”

Matthew Smith, chief executive of Fortify Rights, a human rights group, said investigators from the group spent nine days at the bor-

der documenting those atrocities.

Suu Kyi has long had strong supporters in the U.S. Congress and in the Obama administration, who saw her as the one leader who could bridge the country’s tentative transition from military junta to civilian government.

But with Suu Kyi’s continued reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya’s plight and the ensuing human rights crisis, her star has begun to dim. Her supporters say the episode has demonstrated how limited her powers are, as the military still controls 25 percent of the seats in the parliament as well as the security forces.

Burma’s more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims are essentially stateless, and the Burmese government considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The minority group has endured decades of discrimination and neglect, which worsened in 2012 after Rohingya clashed with Buddhists in Burma’s Rakhine State. Over 100,000 were then con-

A Rohingya man, with bags of puffed rice stuffed into his vest, stretches his arms out for food distributed by local volunteers Sept. 9 in Kutupalong, Bangladesh. With Rohingya refugees still flooding across the border from Burma, fights are erupting over food and water.

fined to camps, where their movement, access to jobs and education were severely restricted.

A mother of two, Khadiza, 35, said they were used to living with violence but this latest episode was different: “Both the army and the Buddhists attacked us this time.”

At first, her husband convinced her things would improve, but when a neighboring village was burned, they decided to leave. As they were fleeing, their group came under fire, and the couple were separated, she said. She has not seen her husband since.

“I have no idea where he is now,” she said. “I only came to save my two children.”

The exodus began Aug. 25 after a group of Rohingya militants called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked dozens of police outposts and an army camp, killing 12 and igniting days of violent retribution.

In addition to torching hundreds of villages and killing civilians, the Burmese military has been accused by Amnesty International and other human rights groups of planting land mines at the border, based on the wounds of some of those who escaped.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein pointed to satellite imagery and reports of “security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages.”

“The Myanmar government should stop pretending that the Rohingyas are setting fire to their own homes and laying waste to their own villages,” he added, a swipe at Suu Kyi’s government, which has accused the Rohingya of doing the torching themselves.

Since the emergence of armed Rohingya rebels, Suu Kyi’s government has shifted its position, framing it as a matter of national security rather than a humanitarian crisis. On Monday, her government spokesman, Zaw Htay, reiterated that position, saying in a statement the government shares the concern of the international community over the “violence ignited by the acts of terrorism.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

Hanging on to a seed of hope

BY MARK LYNN FERGUSON

J

ohnsie Gooslin spent Jan. 16, 2015, tending his babies — that’s what he called his marijuana plants. More than 70 of them were growing in a hydroponic system of his own design. Sometimes, he’d stay in his barn for 16 hours straight, perfecting his technique.

That night, he left around 8 o’clock to head home. The moon was waning, down to a sliver, which left the sky as dark as the ridges that lined it. As he pulled away, the lights from his late-model Kia swept across his childhood hollow and his parents’ trailer, which stood just up the road from the barn. He turned onto West Virginia Route 65. Crossing Mingo County, he passed the Delbarton Mine, where he had

worked on and off for 14 years before his back gave out. Though Johnsie was built like a linebacker, falling once from a coal truck and twice from end loaders had taken a toll. At 36, his disks were a mess, and sciatica sometimes shot pain to his knees.

Still, he managed to lift the buckets that held his plants; friends sometimes helped. In another part of the barn, they had set up a man cave with a big-screen TV and girlie posters.

When they weren’t transplanting and trimming, they played video games and discussed their passion for cultivating pot. None of them had studied marijuana like Johnsie, but they all loved growing, seeing it not just as a hobby or a way to make a buck but as an act of compassion.

“Mostly the people that bought were older men and women, Vietnam veterans and people

that’s been hurt,” Johnsie told me. “I mean, to hear them say, ‘You know, ever since I started smoking your pot, I ain’t touched a pain pill . . .”

He trailed off, shaking his head, but it was clear what he meant. In a state with one of the nation’s highest rates of overdose deaths, most of them opioid-related, it felt good to give people an alternative, one that even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said this year has never caused an overdose fatality.

Minutes after leaving the barn, Johnsie parked in the light of his own trailer, a newly remodeled 14-by-60 that he shared with his wife, Faye, and 14-year-old daughter Bethany.

His phone rang. It was a neighbor from Rutherford Branch Road, where the barn stood. Cops were there, asking about him.

Inside, Johnsie dialed his mother. Two offi-

Could legalizing marijuana ease the opioid crisis and reduce joblessness in W.Va.? cers, she told him, were standing in her living room. She handed the phone to one of them.

Though he didn’t have a search warrant for the barn, the officer said he could get one, according to Johnsie. “But,” he said, “I think it would be better if you come and talk to me first.” (This account is based largely on Johnsie’s recollection. Neither arresting officer was permitted to be interviewed for this story, but it is consistent with a description of Johnsie’s case in the 2015 West Virginia State Police Annual Report.)

Johnsie hung up. He’d placed cameras around his building and vented it out the back, but people were packed tight into that narrow hollow. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out what was inside. Turning to his wife, he said, “Look, I’m going up there, and I’m going to jail.”

With Skoal tobacco, his one chemical vice, pressed tightly against his cheek, Johnsie drove back to Rutherford Branch Road, where officers met him outside. “It’s like this. I got your dad. I got a lot of pot on him,” Senior Trooper D.L. Contos told him. This was no surprise. Sam Gooslin had smoked pot for decades, and half of Johnsie’s pot went to him. His dad relied on it to ease pain from lung cancer, a new ailment layered atop others — diabetes, a stroke, four heart attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“He’s a Vietnam veteran,” Johnsie recalls Contos saying. “I respect that. I don’t want to see a veteran go to jail. If you make me go get a search warrant, I’m taking you to jail, and I’m gonna get your dad on felony conspiracy charges because he’s taking the blame on what’s going on up there.”

Johnsie had only one option. He crossed the road and unlocked the barn, opening a series of doors to release a flood of light. The officers paused. One said he had busted hundreds of marijuana operations and had never seen anything like this. For the next two hours, Johnsie walked the officers through his process. He explained the role of the lights and hydroponics; why he placed three plants in a bucket, not one; how he used gibberellic acid to push the plants at just the right time. At the end, he recalls Contos telling him they had to seize his plants, but, referring to Johnsie’s equipment and supplies, he said, “I’m not going to take it away. One day, this might be legal.”

The first time Johnsie planted pot, he was 14.

He stole a single seed from his father and buried continues on next page

Johnsie Gooslin, outside of the barn where he grew marijuana.

He gave much of it to his ailing father, who relied on it to relieve pain. Opposite page: Matewan, W.Va., at sunrise.

Photographs by SARAH L. VOISIN The Washington Post

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from previous page

it. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he recalls.

“I was just a kid being a kid.” That seed barely grew, but it did take root in a sense. Years later, while still working in the mines, he began reading about marijuana cultivation. Though he’d already learned that he couldn’t smoke it himself (every attempt made his heart race and left him paranoid), the science behind the plant, the act of nurturing it, enthralled him.

After he stopped working at the mine about five years ago, and after his father gave him the barn, Johnsie tried growing marijuana again, this time treating the exercise more as a science experiment.

He was actually the third generation of Gooslins with a passion for pot. His father didn’t grow it but smoked it constantly. His grandfather, a former Kentucky constable, was just the opposite. He never used marijuana but sold it to supplement his retirement income. At one time, this sort of thing wasn’t uncommon, says 1st Sgt. Michael Smith, who heads West Virginia’s drug-eradication efforts: “It was generally local individuals that would go back in the woods and, similar to the image of old-time moonshiners, they would get them a clandestine location and take care of their crops.

Families would grow marijuana. . . . They would hand it down.”

Reliable estimates of the size of the marijuana market in West Virginia are hard to come by.

According to the group NORML, which advocates for marijuana legalization, pot has been West Virginia’s most valuable cash crop for the past 20 years.

Lately, however, marijuana has been overshadowed by opioids, which are devastating parts of coal country. In Mingo County, where Johnsie lives, a single pharmacy pumped out 9 million hydrocodone pills over just two years, according to a 2016 investigation by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. That was enough for every man, woman and child in the area to have 350 of them. Hydrocodone was part of a new generation of opioids that pharmaceutical companies introduced in the United States in the past two decades and heavily marketed to doctors as posing minimal risk for addiction.

That, of course, wasn’t true, and as government officials cracked down on prescription opioids, they became prohibitively expensive, pushing addicts in West Virginia and elsewhere toward illegal substitutes, including heroin, which ran about a third the price.

The Mountain State is now ground zero of one of the worst drug crises in our nation’s history. In 2015, 725 people died of overdoses in the state, the highest rate per capita in the country. Last year, that figure grew another 15 percent, reaching a staggering 844 deaths. That averages to one West Virginian dying from an overdose every 11 hours. Eighty-six percent of the state’s overdose deaths in 2016 involved an opioid.

While there are no easy answers to the opioid crisis, a growing body of research suggests that legalizing marijuana could help. More than a dozen states with legal medical marijuana have recorded significant drops in overdose deaths

from other drugs, including heroin, according to a 2014 study in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. A 2015 pilot study by Yasmin Hurd at the Behavioral Health System’s Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai found that cannabidiol, a compound in marijuana, minimized cravings for opioids, making it easier for participants to stop using them.

And unlike methadone, an opioid that is used in drug treatment to minimize cravings for opioids, cannabidiol was not addictive. Hurd is pursuing further research but argues that legislators must address this epidemic now. “You can’t wait for all the ducks to be lined up,” she says. “You sometimes have to make bold steps.”

Attempts to decriminalize marijuana in West Virginia date to at least 2010, but for years no bills made it out of committee. As of 2015, the year of Johnsie’s arrest, stalwarts in the Republican-dominated legislature still could not bring themselves to legalize marijuana for medical use. But younger lawmakers would not let the issue go.

One of the leading proponents of loosening restrictions on marijuana in West Virginia is Democratic state Del. Mike Pushkin, who represents parts of Charleston and its surrounding areas. Pushkin is an unconventional pol — a cabdriver and folk musician who has spoken about his own struggles with addiction. He once told the Charleston Gazette-Mail how he spent 11 years living from crisis to crisis. “I’m sure there were times that my mother would have thought it more likely she would be attending my funeral than she would be attending my swearing-in at the Capitol,” he said.

“We’re really like a Third World country inside the United States.”

Del. Mike Pushkin (D), talking about West Virginia’s economic crisis

It took a spiritual awakening to get his addiction under control. To stay sober, he said, he volunteers at detox facilities and talks to addicts in area jails. This experience informs his policy positions. He’s sure West Virginia can’t arrest its way out of this drug crisis. And he has pushed his colleagues to consider marijuana in a new light. “While marijuana is described as a gateway drug, that’s not proven,” he says. “What is proven is that a lot of people who are prescribed painkillers get hooked on heroin.”

Though he spent only 14 hours in jail, Johnsie returned to his trailer a different man. The police did not confiscate his equipment, but he was still charged with a felony for cultivating marijuana. That, combined with his back problems, made it nearly impossible to find work.

He was not allowed to leave the state, which meant he could not move to a place where he could grow marijuana legally.

With his $1,000 or so in monthly pot sales gone and Faye making just $9 an hour as a cashier at a gas station, cash was dwindling fast. They had begun receiving $129 in food stamps, but that didn’t help much. “Three people eats more than that in a week,” Faye says.

Johnsie’s lawyer, Wesley Kent Varney, chose for strategic reasons not to rush his case, instead engaging in a slow, courteous dialogue with Mingo County prosecuting attorney Teresa Maynard. He thought he could get Johnsie off on a technicality, in part because the pot the police confiscated later disappeared.

Varney told me police also found no marijuana “bricked up” for shipping, no scales, not

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even any large sums of money — making this a low-priority case for Maynard. Even when she proposed a plea bargain that would have put Johnsie under home arrest, Varney sat on the option, hoping to get a better deal. (Maynard declined to comment for this story.)

That approach kept Johnsie free, but his family’s losses started adding up. Debt collectors began calling. Both their cars were repossessed. “Before I was arrested,” he says, “we was both pushing an 800 credit score. Wasn’t nothing we couldn’t buy on credit at any given time.

Now, I think mine is 500 and hers is like 470.

Pitiful.”

About a year after his arrest, the bank came for their trailer — the nicest place Johnsie had ever lived, and just about the only home his teen daughter could remember. The family got 24 hours’ notice. Their sole option was moving to the battered trailer next door that had passed hands in Faye’s family over and over until it was empty and rusting with bent underpinnings and insulation peeking through holes in the walls.

It was raining that day, and no one could help. That left Johnsie, with his bad back, and Faye to carry their belongings through the mud. They hauled all they could but ended up leaving a lot. “We worked ourselves to death,” Faye recalls, “and we just couldn’t do it.”

She didn’t go outside when the repo guys came. Instead, she watched through a leaky aluminum-framed window as they hitched up their trailer and hauled it off. Her living-room furniture, desk and bed frame were still inside.

After that, Johnsie rarely left home. During

the days, while his daughter was at school and Faye at work, he alternated between his computer chair, where he read articles about marijuana reform elsewhere (Massachusetts, Maine, California and Nevada would all legalize adult use of the drug in 2016), and the window. There, he’d chew tobacco and stare at bare soil, where their old home had rested.

In May 2016, Pushkin introduced a bill in the West Virginia House of Delegates to let adults grow, use and possess a limited quantity of marijuana, provided that they paid a one-time fee of $500. That month, he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he didn’t have high hopes for its passage. He was right: It wasn’t even debated in a committee. But it did spark media attention and prompted an eye-opening brief from the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, which showed that a marijuana tax could be a boon for the state, generating as much as $194 million annually if the drug were legal for adult use. That would be enough to eliminate West Virginia’s projected deficit and create a $183 million surplus, a dramatic improvement in a place that’s been slashing everything from higher education to Medicaid as it tries to stay afloat.

Indeed, Pushkin’s argument for marijuana legalization had a strong economic component. “They’re not having the types of budget issues in Colorado that we’re having here,” he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. In Colorado, where pot is now fully legalized, the industry created 18,000 full-time jobs in 2015 alone. New Frontier Data, a financial consultancy in Washington, estimates that by 2020 the marijuana

Opposite page: Gooslin arrives home; above, he and his family — daughter Bethany, left, and wife Faye — had to move into a dilapidated trailer after theirs was repossessed.

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industry will create upward of a quarter of a million jobs in the United States, more than manufacturing is expected to create.

It’s hard to imagine anywhere that could use these jobs more than West Virginia. Since the 1980s, both coal and manufacturing in the Mountain State have been in a steep decline. As these industries have dried up, so have others that rely on them — such as freight rail, which has cut jobs by the thousands and begun pulling up tracks.

Smart leaders would have diversified their economy decades ago, but that didn’t happen here. “We’ve been relying on the extraction industries for far too long,” Pushkin said, noting that West Virginia is not just experiencing a budget crisis or even a drug crisis. The state’s population is shrinking; many who stay are depressed by their prospects and taking poor care of themselves. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper published in February found a positive correlation between a county’s unemployment rate and its opioid overdose death rate. And a link between unemployment and drug use was also confirmed by a metaanalysis of 28 studies, including 10 done in the United States, that appeared in the June issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy.

Diabetes rates exceed 150 percent of the U.S. average in some parts of West Virginia, and obesity is just as severe. Pushkin sees the opioid crisis as more of a symptom of the underlying economic one. “When you see countries that are based on one industry, those are mainly Third World countries,” he says. “We’re really like a Third World country inside the United States.”

In his rundown trailer, with no end to his legal limbo in sight, Johnsie soon faced another setback. His father had begun having seizures.

They became so routine that Johnsie was not alarmed when, on June 24, 2016, he got a call informing him that Sam Gooslin was bound for the hospital. But this time, when Johnsie arrived and said his name at the nurse’s station, a chaplain approached. “I knew then it wasn’t good,” he recalls. No one was sure, but they thought his father might have had another stroke. This one was just too big.

As the two-year anniversary of his arrest approached, Johnsie found himself without his father, unable to pursue his passion and flat broke. He grew more reclusive and stopped having people over because he was ashamed of where he lived. “Gained 20 pounds,” he says.

“Just sitting and waiting on death.”

But just as he began to feel like he was fighting a losing battle, Maynard, who had lost her reelection bid, decided to step down early.

The incoming county prosecuting attorney, Jonathan Jewell, was inheriting a mound of cases. Varney was quick to point out a case that the new prosecutor could settle fast — one where the defendant, Johnsie, had kept his nose clean for two years while on bond. This was a gift to Jewell, who scheduled a hearing for Jan. 31. (Jewell did not respond to requests for comment.) continues on next page

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COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Left, Gooslin at his mother’s house near his barn. On the left is a photo of him as a child. He worked in coal mining on and off for 14 years but had to stop because of back problems.

Above, the outline of a marijuana leaf on the wall of the barn.

from previous page

For several nights prior, Johnsie lay awake, thinking about all that had happened. Beside his sleeping wife, with his daughter just a thin, splintered wall away, he tried to picture their future. He couldn’t work coal, not with his back like it was, or even stand at a register all day.

That and growing marijuana was about all he was qualified to do.

He could probably get a job at a legal growhouse in California. He knew somebody who knew somebody who owned one. But Johnsie was a good-old-boy conservative. He supported Trump and pokes fun at liberals. He loves guns and four-wheeling. “I just don’t know if I can handle California,” he once said. Plus, how could he uproot Bethany while she was doing so well in school — taking advanced placement classes? He wouldn’t dare do anything to upset her future.

The morning of his hearing, Johnsie rose bleary-eyed and, with Faye, drove under a bright winter sky. The 20-minute ride was quiet. They didn’t know what to expect at the Mingo County Courthouse. Inside, things moved fast. Each lawyer said a few words, and within 10 minutes, West Virginia Circuit Court Judge Miki J. Thompson dismissed the case without prejudice. For the first time in two years, Johnsie was truly free. He and Faye drove back to their side of the county and, at the gas station where she worked, celebrated with ice cream cones.

Meanwhile in Charleston, Pushkin and likeminded lawmakers saw an opening to try again for legalization. In late 2016, both gubernatorial candidates had publicly supported legalizing medical marijuana. And some of their colleagues were showing a new openness to it. In

February, he backed legislation focusing on medical marijuana. While it met with familiar opposition in the House of Delegates, a similar bill wove through the state Senate with bipartisan support. This forced the House speaker and other old-guard Republicans to soften their stance. The bill not only made it out of committee, it was debated on the House floor — and an amended version passed.

The bill permits patients to use pot derivatives, such as oils and pills, but prohibits smoking the plant or growing it at home. Just 10 growers will be authorized statewide, and the price to play will be steep — a $50,000 registration fee. On April 19, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (D) signed it into law.

Many lawmakers who voted for the bill were reacting to public pressure and media scrutiny.

And although the law passed, there is no certainty that the trend toward loosening restrictions on marijuana will continue. “Close to half the people who voted for that [legislation] are against medical cannabis,” Pushkin told me, “but we got something on the books. I do believe we can fix it.” A bill he introduced to tax medical marijuana is in committee. Beyond that, Pushkin admits, he is still figuring out what to do next.

Johnsie doesn’t like coffee. Rather than order anything at the coffee shop where he and I are meeting Pushkin on a Friday in May, he waits at an empty table, nervous and fidgeting.

I get hot tea, and we talk about how unlikely this sit-down is. With his background, Johnsie never imagined he’d talk to a man who could help undo laws that ruined his life. But when I told Pushkin about Johnsie weeks before and asked if they could meet, the delegate said yes.

Coming off an 11-hour shift of cab driving,

“I’m sorry that this prohibition has turned somebody who was just trying to help their father into a criminal.”

Pushkin, talking about Johnsie Gooslin

one that took him clear to Ohio and back, Pushkin walks in while wiping rainwater from his shirt. Both men wear jeans. Pushkin’s jeans have a hole over the left pocket. Johnsie’s are paired with a button-down for the occasion.

Though neither looks their part — a West Virginia delegate and a former pot grower — they somehow appear to belong at the same table.

With a handshake and a nod, they begin a slow discourse on the new marijuana law.

Johnsie may have found a financial backer, a Michigan businessman who visits Mingo County’s ATV trail a few times a year, but breaking into legal marijuana production would be much easier if the fee were lower. He references a provision that’s popular in other states, one that assigns “caregivers” to patients.

These licensed professionals help people get and use their marijuana. They can even grow it for them. By his own admission, Pushkin doesn’t know a lot about the provision, but he’s always looking for new ideas. “I wouldn’t mind going back and trying to get that in,” he later tells me, showing the kind of openness that defines his vision for West Virginia.

Pushkin still sees tremendous potential in his home state. Charleston, for instance, has the kind of “cultural capital” that attracts newer industries — prewar buildings galore, gritty warehouses begging to become lofts, and indie businesses that include a sprawling bookstorecafe-gallery and a new art-house cinema. In many ways, it resembles Pittsburgh or Asheville, N.C., before those cities became hipster meccas, and Pushkin looks to those places as models. Legalizing recreational use of marijuana could be another asset, a way to boost tourism and retain young people. “I want to fight to make it the kind of state friends want to

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TRAVEL move back to,” he later says. “I want to help make this a cool place again.”

The scruffy delegate pauses to sip his coffee, and Johnsie fiddles with his phone. Quiet passes between them until Johnsie begins to talk about his passion for marijuana.

“I’d fall asleep at night studying,” he says, “with the laptop still on.” He describes the intricacies of growing, his hydroponic technique, how he kept his plants budding.

Pushkin looks down. When he first learned about Johnsie, he said, “I’m sorry that this prohibition has turned somebody who was just trying to help their father into a criminal.”

Sitting across from this man who lost everything, who had been stripped of his home and livelihood, who is no longer permitted to pursue his passion, Pushkin grips his mug. “This is the kind of story that needs to be told in the statehouse,” he says and shakes his head.

The two talk a few minutes more until Pushkin’s coffee is gone. He stands up and — though many politicians wouldn’t have even entertained a conversation with a former marijuana grower — he extends his hand. “I’m going to give you my number,” he says, looking Johnsie in the eye. “Call anytime you need help.”

After they part, Johnsie and I go for pizza; then he drives an hour in the rain, back to Mingo County, where he and Faye have been keeping their expenses low. She has saved just enough to buy a used car. He now drives a 17-year-old truck inherited from an uncle and spends his days making low-cost improvements to his trailer.

While hanging drywall one day to cover torn wallpaper and exposed wires, he deliberates on his future. He still hates the idea of moving to another state. West Virginia gets ahold of you, he once told me, and won’t let go.

Maybe he can get one of those 10 marijuana-farm licenses. Maybe the legislature will make it easier for regular people to take part in this new industry. He’s not sure how exactly, but he’s determined to grow his “babies” again.

He beams at the thought. “Hook the water and electricity up, and I’d have seeds in the cups tonight,” he muses and spits chewing tobacco into an empty bottle. “I’m ready to go anytime, when the law says you can do it.”n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Taking long flights is hard.

These strategies can help.

BY

C HRISTOPHER E LLIOTT

S

urviving long-haul flights wasn’t Akshay Nanavati’s top concern as a Marine.

Nanavati, who served as a communication liaison in Iraq, worried more about what would happen after the 15-hour trip from San Diego to Baghdad.

“We had to hit the ground running,” remembers Nanavati, now a consultant based in Basking Ridge, N.J. He made it through his tour of duty, but his capacity for enduring long flights with equanimity did not. After a recent 18-hour flight from New York to Bangalore, “I arrived in India groggy,” he recalls. “I couldn’t work or spend quality time with my family for two full days.”

Sitting motionless in a pressurized aluminum tube for hours at a time can take a heavy toll on your body. Potential side effects include dehydration, fatigue and an increased risk of deep vein thrombosis, a potentially fatal condition. At the same time, we are all spending more time on planes. For example, a nonstop flight from New York to Houston takes about four hours — a flight that took only 2½ hours in 1973. Why? Planes are flying slower to save fuel, some airlines are padding their schedules to ensure on-time arrivals, and there’s just a lot more air traffic.

New research conducted by the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Center is taking an interdisciplinary approach to preventing the fatigue associated with marathon flights. Scientists are reviewing issues including nutrition, physical activity and sleep, hoping to help travelers avoid reactions like Nanavati’s.

The project is a collaboration with Qantas, which will use the results to develop a new approach to long-haul travel ahead of the first Boeing 787 Dreamliner flights later this year. The aircraft will fly routes that include London to Perth, which at almost 17 hours is the third-longest passenger flight in the world.

“We’re developing a suite of in-

terventions and services that support health and wellness in the air and assist in shifting body clocks to ease the effects of jet lag,” said Perkins Center Academic Director Stephen Simpson. “Ultimately, these will begin in the days leading up to flight in the form of advice delivered through apps and devices, then in features of the transit lounges, in the services offered onboard the aircraft, and then continue with further advice after arriving at the destination.”

Of course, one of the easiest

GETTY IMAGES

ways to make a flight more bearable — and lessen the risk of deep vein thrombosis — is to offer passengers a reasonable amount of personal space. In an effort to squeeze more people onto planes, airlines have reduced the amount of legroom, a step that passenger advocates say can increase the likelihood of blood clots.

Philip Capps, the head of customer product and service development at Quantas, says the 787 has been designed to maximize comfort. “In business class, for example, the seats are laid out in a 1-2-1 configuration so that every passenger has direct aisle access,” he said.

And economy-class passengers will get 32 inches of seat pitch — a rough measure of legroom — compared with the Airbus A380’s 31 inches.

But let’s face it, most of us won’t be flying on a Dreamliner any time soon. Until then, how do you get through a whole day on the plane?

Spending more than 12 hours on a plane is a mind game, says

LaVonne Markus, a travel agent with Travel Leaders in Stillwater, Minn. “You have to accept that it will be a long flight,” she said.

Nanavati uses two strategies to avoid a repeat of his Bangalore flight. First, he stopped ordering Bloody Marys and switched to water to stay hydrated. Second, he stays up the night before his flight and brings an eye mask so that he can sleep on the plane. That helps him adjust to new time zones faster.

Staying up late is only half the solution, said Topher Morrison, an education consultant in Tampa who travels frequently. “Don’t follow the flight feeding schedule,” he said. “Follow the landing’s feeding schedule.” In other words, if you’re flying to Sydney, have lunch when it’s lunchtime in Sydney — even if it means getting up in the middle of the night to eat.

If you’re in economy class, you’ll be sitting in an upright position for hours at a time. “Get up and move,” advised Jeremy Smith, a spine surgeon at Hoag Orthopedic Institute in Irvine, Calif. Smith says you should give your body a break by standing up every 30 to 45 minutes. And don’t forget to bring a comfortable travel pillow for neck support.

In fact, if you do only one thing on your next long-haul flight, make sure you move, say survivors such as Kelly Merritt. I use the term “survivor” literally. After a series of lengthy flights, she developed a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed her. She says her physician told her that flying was a contributing factor.

“It’s critical for travelers on long-haul flights to stay active during all aspects of the flight,” said Merritt, an author who lives in Pilot Mountain, N.C. “This can mean wiggling your feet and toes, getting up to walk around, anything that keeps the blood from pooling in your feet.”

Until science comes through with a workaround, this may be the best advice of all. If you want to survive, move. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Gorbachev’s path toward change N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D AVID E . H OFFMAN

N GORBACHEV His Life and Times

By William Taubman Norton. 852 pp. $39.95

ear the end of William Taubman’s superb new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, the author describes the Russian president and his wife, Raisa, vacationing at Foros on the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula, strolling along the shoreline just days before the failed coup attempt of 1991. As had been their habit for many years, their walks were marked by lively conversation.

They debated: Are political leaders shaped more by personality or circumstances? They decided that leaders ride history like a tiger, and that it brings out the best in people. “Situations elevate leaders,” they concluded, according to Taubman, “often turning traits that ordinarily look like weakness into strengths.”

This is the essential question about Gorbachev and the momentous history he made. How did it happen that a peasant son of a remote province in the Soviet Union, who arrived at Moscow State University “looking and sounding like a country bumpkin,” who became a regional Communist Party boss, a protege of KGB chief Yuri Andropov, and who “kept bookmark-filled volumes from Lenin’s collected works on his desk” would lead the Soviet Union over the precipice, end the Cold War and vanquish the very Communist ideology he so diligently studied in Lenin’s books?

The answer is woven through the pages of this enlightening biography. Taubman, professor emeritus of political science at Amherst College, and the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Nikita Khrushchev, devotes a full third of this work to Gorbachev’s early years, and with great skill lays bare the evolution that was so important to his later actions. Taubman shows that as he rose through the ranks, Gorbachev harbored profound doubts about all he saw, culminating,

FRITZ REISS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, are seen in 1986.

upon taking office in March 1985, in his declaration to Raisa during another stroll: “We just can’t go on living like this.” Gorbachev was a juggernaut, an unseen agent of radical change sneaking up on the calcified Soviet Politburo. But his intent was not to destroy. He thought he could save the Soviet Union and make socialism great again. In Taubman’s hands, the journey is an extraordinary story of one man and history in a tense wrestling match. The man wins by losing.

Gorbachev, from his youth, saw the giant gap between Communist Party slogans and the poor living conditions and repressive environment of everyday life. His freshman classmates at Moscow State University may have sneered at the country bumpkin who wore on his lapel the coveted “Order of the Red Banner of Labor” he earned in five summers of helping his father run a mammoth combine harvester, but Gorbachev also knew, better than they, that Stalin’s collectivization had left the countryside a disaster.

Later, in his first party job, he wrote to his future wife that local bosses were “disgusting” in the way they behaved: arrogant, impudent and conventional. As a regional party boss himself, he was shocked by the sight of a remote village, Gorkaya Balka, or Bitter Hollow, made up of “low, smoke-belching huts, blackened dilapidated fences” and asked, “How is it possible, how can anyone live like that?”

Still later, Gorbachev joined a Soviet delegation visiting Czechoslovakia after Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. In Brno, factory workers turned their backs on him, and the lesson he drew was that Moscow’s use of force had solved nothing.

Gorbachev carried these doubts into power as Soviet general secretary and later president, pioneering earth-shattering reform, yet navigating the politics ever so gingerly, trying not to offend the hard-liners, yearning for still more rapid and radical change, and frustrated that he didn’t really know how to achieve

it. Taubman portrays Gorbachev as a visionary determined to “go far,” a leader with “innate optimism and self-confidence, a substantial intellect,” and a strong desire to prove himself, but also a gradualist undermined by his own initial uncertainty and unwillingness to abandon the Soviet system.

The core of the rot in the Soviet system was the economy, but Gorbachev mustered only half-measures and could not make the leap to capitalism, backing away from Grigory Yavlinsky’s “500 Days” plan for a transition to market.

Taubman does not dwell on it, but one of the most remarkable changes of the Gorbachev era, still recalled today, were the cooperatives, the first private businesses, from which the Boris Yeltsin-era oligarchs got their early taste of profit. (Full disclosure: I shared some research materials with Taubman, and we once attended a conference with Gorbachev in Moscow.)

For all his weaknesses, Gorbachev opened a path to democracy for tens of millions of people, eased a Cold War that locked the globe into confrontation for four decades and shattered Soviet Communism in the land where it was born.

In his superb summary, Taubman asserts, “The Soviet Union fell apart when Gorbachev weakened the state in an attempt to strengthen the individual.” Gorbachev’s accomplishments and his struggle are not appreciated today in Russia or the former Soviet republics. But someday, perhaps, a statue will be built to honor a country bumpkin who rose to the moment in history, and shoved totalitarianism into the grave. n Hoffman is a former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post, and author of “The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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A return journey to Kingsbridge

She gave him her kidney — and heart

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

B ILL S HEEHAN

hen Ken Follett’s “The Pillars of the Earth” was first published in 1989, it represented a considerable gamble. By that point, Follett had acquired a passionate following through such lean, propulsive thrillers as “Eye of the Needle” and “The Key to Rebecca.” Suddenly, he was offering his readers something new and unexpected: a thousand-page epic set in 12th-century England about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge. That gamble, of course, paid off handsomely. “Pillars” has since become Follett’s most popular book, selling tens of millions of copies and establishing him as a master of the historical epic.

“World Without End,” a hugely successful follow-up to “Pillars,” appeared in 2007. Now, more than 25 years after the series began, Follett turns once again to Kingsbridge in “A Column of Fire.”

The Kingsbridge novels are essentially independent narratives that share a common historical background. “A Column of Fire,” however, stands slightly apart from the others. First, it moves beyond the Middle Ages into the very different world of Elizabethan England. Second, it ranges well beyond Kingsbridge into the wider world of a divided Europe, propelling a large cast of characters through England, Scotland, France, Spain and the Netherlands. While the first two volumes dealt with ambitious building projects — the cathedral in “Pillars of the Earth,” a bridge and hospital in “World Without End” — the new book proceeds from a more abstract premise: the radical notion of religious tolerance.

The narrative begins in 1558, late in the reign of Bloody Mary, the ferocious Catholic queen who burned hundreds of heretics (i.e.

Protestants) at the stake. Upon Mary’s premature death, her Protestant half sister Elizabeth

assumed the throne, promising a more tolerant attitude toward religious differences. But her reforms suffered a near-fatal blow when Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and all who supported her, deepening the existing schism throughout most of Europe.

This is the world through which Follett’s characters must make their way. Two families, the Willards and the Fitzgeralds, dominate the novel. They and others will find their lives shaped and sometimes warped by the unnatural pressures of an endless religious war.

The real spine of the narrative is the deeply researched historical backdrop against which these private dramas play out. History has provided Follett with some spectacular dramatic moments, and he takes full advantage, recreating them with a historian’s eye for detail and a novelist’s gift for narrative suspense. Among the more dramatic interludes are the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, in which Parisian Catholics murdered thousands of Huguenots (French Protestants); the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, an act that sent shock waves throughout Europe; and the miraculous defeat of the Spanish Armada by a much smaller force led by Sir Francis Drake.

Like its predecessors in the Kingsbridge series, “A Column of Fire” is absorbing, painlessly educational and a great deal of fun.

Follett uses the tools of popular fiction to great effect in these books, illuminating a nation’s gradual progress toward modernity. In Follett’s hands, that story takes on a narrative life that is difficult, if not impossible, to resist. I only hope it continues.

There are many more stories to be told. n Sheehan is the author of “At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry Into the Fiction of Peter Straub.” This was written for The Washington Post.

M A COLUMN OF FIRE

By Ken Follett Viking. 916 pp. $36

HUNDREDS OF INTERLACED FINGERS A Kidney Doctor’s Search for the Perfect Match

By Vanessa Grubbs Amistad. 261 pp. $25.99

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REVIEWED BY

N ANCY S ZOKAN

idway through her thoughtful and endearing memoir, Vanessa Grubbs shifts gears.

The first half of “Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers” is largely a love story — an account of how the author, an attending physician and faculty member at a hospital in Oakland, Calif., fell for Robert Phillips, a former hospital trustee and aspiring politician with end-stage kidney disease.

Within months, she was smitten enough to help him get off dialysis — and leapfrog the complex inequities of the organ-donation system — by giving him one of her kidneys.

Their courtship and marriage, told alongside their kidney surgeries and their aftermath, are related in a style both medically detailed and girlishly romantic.

Waiting in pre-op, in a gown “with too few ties in the back to make my booty feel securely hidden,” Grubbs seems as breathlessly excited as a bride; and later, when she and Phillips fear that his body is rejecting her kidney, she sounds more like a lover than a doctor. “I had to believe” the transplant would eventually take, she writes. “He had my kidney and my heart.”

The book’s second half, in contrast, is dominated by medical histories and the social and ethical issues that surround kidney disease. Inspired by her husband (who has survived with her kidney for more than a decade), Grubbs changed her career goals and embarked on a fellowship in nephrology. But her writing remains warm and conversational.

Partly because of Grubbs’s unpretentious tone, the book’s lengthy explanatory passages are eminently readable — whether she’s describing the 400 years of scientific inquiry that led to dialysis, or how a condition called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, which can lead to chronic kidney disease, relates to a gene that evolved to resist the sub-Sa-

haran African parasite that causes sleeping sickness.

That gene, naturally, is more common in people of African ancestry — and that’s just one of many ways Grubbs explores the issues of kidney disease and treatment that confront people of color. She, like Phillips, is black.

When Phillips had counseling before his transplant, it seemed that medical staff members were trying to discourage him: “African Americans reject kidney transplants more often,” the transplant nephrologist warned, then apparently tried to cast it as a compliment. “Their immune systems are just so strong.”

One of the book’s more troubling passages reflects Grubbs’s awareness of the unquantifiable attitudes that underlie health care. It describes how scar tissue from Phillips’s previous hernia surgeries made it difficult to connect Grubbs’s ureter to his bladder; rather than burrow through the tissue, the surgeon took a simpler route, linking the couple’s ureters to each other. But the connection kinked, urine leaked, and the transplant appeared likely to fail until another surgeon corrected the situation.

It was only later, after a white mentor of Grubbs’s brought up the subject of race, that she wondered if the original surgeon would have tried harder, done the difficult burrowing the first time around, if the patient on the table had been someone he “more closely identified with” — someone of the same color.

The question is raised not with resentment but with concern, reflecting the general good humor that permeates this earnest, satisfying book — which, it should be noted, ends with a typically practical and readable appendix: Twelve pages of frequently asked questions for people who have, or fear they have, kidney disease. n Szokan is an editor at The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Freshman year of college badly needs a makeover JEFFREY J. SELINGO is the author of “There is Life After College.” He is also former editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, a trustee of Ithaca College and a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

Over the past several weeks, millions of young adults went off to college for the first time. My Facebook feed was filled with pictures of parents and their tear­filled goodbyes as they dropped off their kids on campuses to begin their next chapter in life.

For students and parents, the beginning of freshman year is often the culmination of a year or more of searching for the perfect match in a college. It is filled with hope and joy, but what colleges rarely tell prospective students is that it’s also filled with plenty of failures. As the author and columnist Frank Bruni recently pointed out, the freshman year of college is a lonely one for many students.

It’s also the year when most students drop out. In 2015, only a little more than half of students who enrolled in college in 2009 made it to graduation, with the largest percentage leaving after their freshman year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

“For far too many students, the first year of college is still a pretty dismal experience,” said George L. Mehaffy, vice president for academic leadership and change at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

“But it doesn’t have to be.”

Mehaffy is leading a project with 44 public universities to redesign the first year of college.

Most students and parents think that if they made it through high school and were accepted to college, they’ll jump through the next hoop without a problem.

Students go off to college with plenty of worries, but finishing their degree is usually not one of them.

The reasons freshmen get derailed that first year are varied.

Academics, of course, play a big role. More than one-third of students say the transition to college classes was difficult for them, according to a survey of freshmen by the Higher

Education Research Institute at UCLA. For many students, high school was a breeze, and they had a support network of parents and teachers who directed their learning every step of the way.

That safety net disappears when they get to college. In the UCLA survey, some students reported they found it difficult to manage their time, develop effective study skills, or understand what professors expect.

Another problem is that too many freshmen treat college as a spectator sport, waiting for it to happen to them. They sit back and wait for professors to deliver lessons in the classroom. They participate in campus life but too often from the sidelines, so they lack any deep engagement in activities. They fail to cultivate relationships with professors or staff on campus who might lend advice and act as mentors. Nearly one-third of freshmen seriously consider leaving school during their first year, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual poll of freshmen and seniors.

The freshman year of college is in desperate need of a makeover.

One urgent need is to fix the first-year curriculum. “It lacks both relevance and coherence for

NICK DRAPER/JACKSONVILLE JOURNAL COURIER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Josh Damotte, left, helps freshman Ulises Izquierdo move in to Illinois College in Jacksonville, Ill., last month. The first year of college, with its impersonal classes and difficult academics, can be daunting.

the students that experience it,” Mehaffy said.

Students have too many choices, and rather than find that liberating, they are paralyzed by it. Many students arrive without really knowing what they want to do, or have aspirations that never match their talents. A student may want to be a nurse but runs into trouble with biology, or aspires to be an engineer but fails math. Colleges need to build clearer pathways through four years so students can better see and understand their route to a degree.

That pathway could start in high school. About one in four freshmen take college-level courses during high school as part of dual enrollment programs. Students who took academically rigorous dual-credit courses were significantly more engaged in the first year of college, according to the studentengagement survey.

Another key reform is to force freshmen to engage early on and find their “tribe” so that they don’t feel lonely — and that should start with where they live.

After a decade of building luxury dorms with private bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens, a few colleges are beginning to move back to the basics. Georgia State University has recently built dorms with smaller rooms and dining halls on the ground floor

to reduce costs for students and increase a sense of community.

The University of Delaware just opened a new freshman residential complex that is at the center of the academic campus and has plenty of lounge and study space to allow students to make friends and feel more connected.

Finally, professors play a key role in students’ success, but often freshmen are stuck in large lecture-style classes in which they rarely get to talk with faculty members and find themselves interacting with graduate teaching assistants or part-time professors.

About two out of five freshmen say they have “never discussed ideas from readings or classes with faculty members outside of class.” Colleges should figure out ways to provide smaller classes for freshmen even if they have to cut back on them for upperclassmen.

When freshmen arrive on many campuses, they are given a survey from UCLA that measures their well-being, political beliefs and what they hope to achieve in college. In the most recent version of that survey, 86 percent of freshmen said they expected to graduate in four years. The reality is that fewer than 40 percent do, and the first year of college has emerged as the most critical barrier to students succeeding. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Sexual-assault policies need fixing RUTH MARCUS is a Washington Post columnist.

There is no reason to trust the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos when it comes to policing sexual assault on college campuses. Actually, make that stronger: There is every reason not to trust them.

Not only because of the president’s own words and behavior, but because of the dismissive comments of the department’s top civil rights official, Candice Jackson, about campus sexual-assault claims: that “the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’ ” Jackson may have apologized; there is no erasing the underlying attitude.

And yet it is also true that the current regime under which campus sexual-assault allegations are investigated and adjudicated is seriously flawed. Before the Obama administration instructed colleges and universities that they had to take sexual-assault allegations seriously — or risk losing federal funds — the system was way too disposed to discourage complaints. But the Obama administration’s move also prompted an overcorrection at some institutions that failed to do enough to protect the rights of students accused of wrongdoing.

Which is how I find myself in the unexpected position of writing not to lambaste DeVos but to praise her, albeit tentatively

and preliminarily, for announcing plans to rework the department’s approach to Title IX, the federal law prohibiting gender discrimination at educational institutions.

An assault, especially an assault left unpunished, can ruin a student’s life. A finding of liability can ruin a life as well, with a student potentially expelled and branded a sexual predator. So any accusation must be thoroughly investigated, but in a way that affords the alleged perpetrator the essential elements of due process — among them the right to full notice of the allegations and representation by counsel; the opportunity to crossexamine witnesses and present a

defense; and the chance to have the dispute overseen by an independent and impartial decision-maker, preferably based on a standard higher than a mere preponderance of evidence.

“The truth is that the system established by the prior administration has failed too many students,” DeVos said.

“There must be a better way forward. Every survivor of sexual misconduct must be taken seriously. Every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined.”

The condemnation was swift.

“Don’t be duped by today’s announcement,” said Fatima Goss Graves of the National Women’s Law Center. “What seems merely procedural is a blunt attack on survivors of sexual assault.”

The proof will be in the details of what the Trump administration produces. Still, you don’t have to be a DeVos-like conservative to have qualms about the existing approach — and to bristle at the dismissal of such concerns. Indeed, you could be a feminist legal scholar at Harvard Law School.

Four such experts — Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen, hardly DeVos clones — wrote to the Education Department last month describing how many

“terrified” college administrators “over-complied” with the Obama administration’s directive.

Colleges have adopted definitions of sexual wrongdoing, they wrote, that include “conduct that is merely unwelcome . . . even if the person accused had no way of knowing it was unwanted, and even if the accuser’s sense that it was unwelcome arose after the encounter.” Meanwhile, “the procedures for enforcing these definitions are frequently so unfair as to be truly shocking.”

In a disturbing new online series for the Atlantic, Emily Yoffe describes University of Massachusetts student Kwadwo Bonsu’s encounter with a fellow student who began to perform oral sex on him after they smoked marijuana together, then decided she wanted to stop. Later, the female student “realized I’d been sexually assaulted” and reported the incident. Amherst police closed the case without charges, but Bonsu was barred from living on campus and then suspended.

If DeVos’s legacy is to defuse Title IX’s effectiveness in combating sexual assault, that will be a tragedy. If her intervention means that the law is wielded with more precision and fairness, that will be an impressive achievement from a surprising source. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Democrats have become socialists DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his bid for the Democratic nomination, he was often asked whether he, a democratic socialist, would actually become a Democrat. Now, more than a year after he ignited a movement with his unsuccessful bid, that question is moot.

The Democrats have become socialists.

This became official, more or less, Wednesday afternoon, when Sanders rolled out his socialized health-care plan, Medicare for All, and he was supported by 16 of his Senate Democratic colleagues who signed on as co-sponsors, including the party’s rising stars and potential presidential candidates in 2020: Elizabeth Warren. Cory Booker. Kamala Harris. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Several of them dutifully joined Sanders, who is threatening another presidential run himself, at the rollout event in one of the largest hearing rooms on Capitol Hill and praised the guru of the singlepayer movement for governmentrun universal health care.

“I’m all in on this. Thank you, Bernie,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.).

Gillibrand (N.Y.): “I will be standing with Bernie.”

Warren (Mass.): “I want to say thank you to Bernie for all that you have done.”

“The reason we have a chance to achieve” single-payer health care, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), “is because of advocates like Bernie Sanders

and Elizabeth Warren.”

This is a dramatic shift. In 2013, when Sanders introduced similar legislation, he didn’t have a single co-sponsor. By contrast, you could have been forgiven for thinking Wednesday’s rollout, with Sanders, Warren, Booker, Harris and Gillibrand testing their messages, was the first Democratic cattle call of the 2020 campaign. There were a couple hundred liberal activists in the room and another 50 in an overflow room.

This embrace of an unabashedly socialist position by the Democrats delights nobody more than the original socialists, the Democratic Socialists of America. David Duhalde, the group’s deputy director, was one

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

of the first in line for the event, carrying a Medicare-for-All sign.

“Socialism has been most successful in this country when its ideas have been adopted by other parties,” he said, listing the enactment of labor laws, Social Security and Medicare. But “this is a high water mark,” he said.

In the short term, I’ve argued, this development is a bad thing for Democrats. The nation’s focus has been on divisions among Republicans and their inability to enact any sort of agenda under President Trump. The singlepayer issue highlights Democratic divisions and united Republicans.

Notably, only one Democrat who faces a competitive reelection, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), signed on with Sanders.

The socialized-medicine bill is popular with the Democratic base but is a liability for Democratic candidates in the swing districts and Republican states that Democrats need to win to retake the House and Senate.

The Republican National Committee, seizing the rare opportunity to play offense, sent out a news release and a video attacking the plan: “Legislation does NOT include how to pay for the $32 trillion program. . . Plans of 156M(!!) Americans would be

upended.” And Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), announcing yet another attempt at repealing Obamacare on Wednesday, tried to use the Sanders plan to revive the moribund effort. He said his bill was Republicans’ “best and only chance” to prevent singlepayer health care.

It’s not hard to see Graham’s prophecy coming true over time, particularly if Republicans, unable to replace Obamacare, continue to sabotage the program and let it fall apart, leaving millions without health care. Republicans have another problem fighting single-payer care now. Because they called Obamacare “socialized medicine,” even though it’s a market-based plan, they have nothing worse to fire at Democrats for embracing the real thing.

Sanders lost the nomination battle to Hillary Clinton, but he seems to be winning the war over the direction of the Democratic agenda. Sanders now has 35 percent of the Senate Democratic Caucus, and some of the biggest names in the party, embracing his call. So when he predicts, as he did Wednesday, that “this nation, sooner than people believe, will in fact pass a Medicare-for-All, single-payer system,” it doesn’t sound as crazy as it once did. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

DACA BY

D AVID B IER

President Trump on Thursday dangled a potential deal with Demo­ crats to allow hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States. This was in response to an earlier decision by the administration to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arriv­ als program, with a six­month delay to provide a chance for Congress to save the 2012 program. Here are some common myths about DACA. MYTH NO. 1 DACA provoked an increase in illegal immigration.

DACA applies only to immigrants who entered before their 16th birthdays and who have lived in the country continuously since at least June 15, 2007 — more than a decade ago. No one entering now can apply.

Perhaps those who believe this myth think that children coming to the border are confused on this point. But the facts don’t support that view either. To begin with, the timing is wrong. According to data from the Border Patrol, the increase in migrant children in 2012 — the year President Barack Obama announced DACA — occurred entirely in the months before the president announced the policy. The rate of increase also remained the same in 2013 as it was in 2012. Even then, the total number of juveniles attempting to cross the border — unaccompanied and otherwise — never returned to the prerecession levels of the mid-2000s.

Another problem with the theory is that although the majority of DACA beneficiaries are of Mexican origin, the increase in children crossing the border stems from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. These countries share one common trait: much higher than average levels of violence than anywhere else in North America. A careful study of this phenomenon by economist Michael Clemens found that more than anything else, a rise in homicides between 2007 and 2009 set off a chain of

events that led to the rise of child migration.

MYTH NO. 2 DACA has taken jobs from Americans.

This myth even has a name in economics: the lump of labor fallacy. It supposes that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, and that any increase in workers results in unemployment. Yet this notion is easily disproved. From 1970 to 2017, the U.S. labor force doubled.

Rather than ending up with a 50 percent unemployment rate, U.S. employment doubled.

We depend on other workers, DACA recipients included, to buy the products and services we produce. That’s one reason earlier efforts to restrict immigration did not produce any wage gains.

MYTH NO. 3 Repealing DACA would benefit taxpayers.

According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), firstgeneration immigrants who enter the United States as children (including all DACA recipients) pay, on average, more in taxes over their lifetimes than they receive in benefits, regardless of their education level. DACA recipients end up contributing more than the average, because they are not eligible for any federal means-tested welfare: cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, health-care tax credits or anything else.

They also are better educated than the average immigrant.

Applicants must have at least a

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Andrea Robertson, right, marches with other supporters of the DACA program toward the Trump International Hotel in the District on Sept. 5.

high school degree to enter the program. Thirty-two percent of DACA recipients are pursuing a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 36 percent of those older than 25 already have a higher education degree. The NAS finds that among recent immigrants who entered as children, those with a high school degree are positive to the government, to the tune of $60,000 to $153,000 in net present value, meaning it’s like each immigrant cutting a check for that amount at the door. For those with a bachelor’s degree, it’s a net positive of $160,000 to $316,000.

MYTH NO. 4 DACA repeal protects communities from criminals.

DACA participants are not criminals. Unauthorized immigrants — the applicant pool for DACA — are much less likely to end up in prison, indicating lower levels of criminality. More important, to participate in DACA, applicants must pass a background check. They have to live here without committing a serious offense. If they are arrested, DACA can be taken away even without a conviction.

Only 2,139 out of almost 800,000 DACA recipients have lost their permits because of criminal or public safety concerns

— that’s just a quarter of 1 percent. Four times as many U.S.-born Americans are in prison. About 35 times as many Americans have ended up behind bars at some point before age 34.

MYTH NO. 5 DACA repeal is just about politics.

Legal issues certainly factored into the Trump administration’s calculation. The timing coincided with a deadline that several states imposed on the administration, stating that if the president did not wind down DACA by Sept. 5, they would sue.

Obama should know that defending DACA legally could be difficult. After all, when he attempted to implement a similar but much broader program in 2015 for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens, courts shut him down. Obama implemented DACA without going through Congress, and although some legal scholars dispute whether it faces the same legal issues as the 2015 program, the Trump administration would have confronted a real possibility of defeat had it had chosen to defend DACA in court. n Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2017

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