In this week’s politics chat, we do an appraisal of the White House. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): So … where to start? I won’t run through all the things that have happened this week in detail, but here’s a summary from Dafna Linzer at NBC News:

And then after all that, The New York Times reported late Tuesday that President Trump asked James Comey, when he was FBI Director, to end the Michael Flynn investigation (according to a memo apparently written by Comey at the time).

We’ve talked before about whether Trump’s campaign, then President Trump’s administration, were in “disarray.” Usually, the answer is “yes,” and then the crisis (or crises) subside, there’s a period of calm, then it all starts over again. But today let’s talk “Is the Trump administration irreparably damaged?” — the idea we’re trying to get at is some combination of: Are things spinning out of control? Is the White House sustaining lasting damage? Or, does the disarray have momentum?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): So, I started thinking about this yesterday during the podcast taping with an expert in scandals that we had on (the best academic pursuit.) And to me the key question here is always: How will the American public ultimately respond to this? In scandals gone by, politicians were concerned about what people’s long-term view of a scandal might be. In theory, that’s right — what is the public’s ultimate takeaway? But I keep wondering whether or not the frenzied pace at which scandals occur now in some way blunts the impact of each one?

Or is this line of thinking too postmodernist (or something?)

A bit off-topic, but that’s the framework I tend to think about these things in.

micah: No, I think that’s the central question.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Here’s the problem as far I’m concerned: trust, among the public and the media. If I hear a statement from one of Trump’s spokespersons or someone representing the administration, I don’t believe it. How many times have we seen the administration reverse itself? We saw it with Michael Flynn. We saw it with Comey. We see it now with H.R. McMaster and Trump. The trust deficit is part of what crushed Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It seems very difficult to build back up trust once there’s a deficit.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’m normally skeptical of events in the news cycle being overhyped. But I think this is pretty bad for Trump. His worst sequence during either his campaign or his presidency so far, with the possible exception of the Access Hollywood tape and its subsequent aftermath.

micah: The asking-Comey-to-shut-down-the-Flynn-investigation thing seems like a huge development, right?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Good god. This seems really big. It is closer to actual obstruction of justice.

natesilver: I mean … what is there to say? It’s really bad news for Trump that Comey has seemingly created an extensive paper trail of their conversations. This is the sort of thing that would be the basis for impeachment. And at a minimum, the drip-drip-drip of leaks from Comey, and other people in the intelligence community, is going to create a lot of “distractions” for Trump from his ability to pass his agenda.

clare.malone: This is why it’s hard to fire lawyers. Like, legit. On any level — these people are trained to keep paper trails!

perry: It seems like firing Comey may have been worse than just letting Comey investigate Trump’s connections to Russia. This was a huge political mistake, even aside from the ethics of it and the violation of norms.

clare.malone: Yeah. It does seem more and more like a decision that came to Trump out of pique and then was justified by the people around him. The latter part is more fascinating to me still — why they let him do that?

perry: Still, we should be careful about predicting permanent damage to Trump after all that happened in the campaign. Or to say the disarray has momentum and is permanent. What if the health care bill passes in 6-8 weeks?

clare.malone: The campaign thing is really fair to point out, but then the next question to ask is whether the office of the presidency being involved colors things differently. With this scandal — national security being massively disrupted, potentially — that’s something that’s really different from the campaign scandals.

natesilver: It’s sort of a myth that Trump was impervious to damage in the campaign. A lot of the things that people expected to damage him did damage him, at least during the general election. He got elected despite having only about a 38 percent favorability rating for a variety of somewhat quirky circumstances. And during the campaign, he had the benefit of having Clinton as his foil — and she was capable of her own screw-ups, obviously.

I’m not sure there’s anything comparable when you’re president — you’re sort of running against yourself.

harry: Basically, Nate is talking about this.

perry: I’m not saying these controversies don’t matter politically. But winning the presidency is obviously something. Getting a huge health care bill passed would be something. If you can govern and pass big bills, that is the point of being president.

So I guess we maybe should make a distinction between politics (big effect) versus policy (not as sure).

micah: Yeah, let’s separate things that way … politics first …

Do the Comey scandal, the classified info scandal, the latest Times report, etc. do lasting damage to the GOP’s prospects in 2018, and Trump’s re-election chances?

harry: Each is another building block.

clare.malone: I think they do damage. Let’s think of say, those reluctant Trump voters in the suburbs — they might not think that the long-simmering Russia investigation was actually a big deal, but I think if you were a skeptical Trump voter keeping an eye on these things and the accumulating chaos, you’re not exactly thrilled, right? You might not want to abandon him yet, but the chain of events and chaotic scene isn’t great.

natesilver: Soooo … my short answer to that, Micah, is “yeah, sure,” but I’m also not sure it’s quite the right way to be thinking about the question.

micah: What’s the right way?

natesilver: Like, what if firing Comey causes a bunch of people in the intelligence community to turn hostile to Trump, and as a result, some other scandal is exposed that wouldn’t have been exposed otherwise, and that scandal costs him the presidency or gets him impeached?

Or … what if as a result of spilling the beans to Russia, the State Department is less willing to share secrets with Trump, and as a result of his being less knowledgeable, he screws up some foreign policy crisis when he might have done OK otherwise?

micah: So it seems like you would answer our original question in the affirmative, right? The Trump scandals build on themselves.

natesilver: I might posit a semantic difference between “building on themselves” and “having consequences that could persist for months or years.” But basically, yeah.

micah: Right. I mean, the news about Trump asking Comey to stop the Flynn probe was a result of the Comey firing scandal.

Perry, Clare, Harry — you all agree?

clare.malone: The long-term narrative of investigations, scandal, etc., is bad for the voters who were already most on the edge about Trump but who voted for him.

So, yeah.

micah: haha.

clare.malone: But I wanted to say it MY WAY.

natesilver: Yeah — and those marginal/reluctant Trump voters are more important to Trump’s future than Trump’s more devoted base.

harry: Well, yes. But I think we’re thinking about it in somewhat different ways. I don’t think there needs to be any more foreign policy or intelligence fallouts for this to hurt him in the long term. But these scandals probably won’t be the key things remembered if nothing else comes from them, either. It’s part of a long string, which is why this stands out.

perry: Lasting damage to his reelection chances, from the last week? I don’t know. I think his reelection chances were already complicated by his terrible approval ratings. But no, this does not help. I have to say these two words, however: Access Hollywood.

harry: BRB, going to investigate some Trump voters at GOP HQ and see what they think. #realamerica

natesilver: 100 percent of Trump supporters support Trump, according to our reporting.

harry: Agree with Perry. This is Day Two of this new “scandal” or whatever we’re calling it. Maybe it’s Day One. Who knows what else we might find out by Friday?

natesilver: The thing is — while you can maybe portray the Comey firing as being consistent with Trump’s brand, the “sharing state secrets about ISIS with the Russians” thing really isn’t.

clare.malone: OK, how about this:

A lot of whether or not this has lasting effect in the public mind depends on the Democrats. The Republicans were able to make Clinton’s emails the talking point for months and months and months. If the Democrats were able to rhetorically weaponize these series of connected scandals, then I think they do have the potential for real lasting effect.

natesilver: There’s more conflict in this chat than usual. I’m pretty much on Clare’s side.

micah: FIGHT!

perry: Hmm. What is the disagreement?

micah: Perry, don’t ruin it.

clare.malone: Fighting is good in this family, Perry.

harry: I love all of you.

clare.malone: Your shoes are ugly.

perry: I just missed it.

clare.malone: We’re yellers.

micah: We’re trying to hype conflict to sell papers!

clare.malone: Perry, you don’t think the recent scandals have lasting effect, right? Or it’s too soon to know?

perry: I like disagreement. I’m just not sure I disagree with much here. I think these controversies could be damaging.

natesilver: I guess I’m just saying (and I think Clare is saying?) that the “this is probably bad news for Trump” outweighs the margin of uncertainty, so to speak.

clare.malone: Right.

perry: Of course it’s bad news for Trump. But whether it is permanently damaging is a different question.

clare.malone: Right. I think Nate and I are leaning on the side of, this likely is long-term bad.

perry: Can he win re-election after this week? I would say maybe. I assume you guys agree?

micah: Yeah.

clare.malone: If we’re talking about whether or not these are going to have long-term effects, it comes down to whether or not they start to be chinks in the bond between Trump and certain Republicans who always had at least a glimmer of skepticism about him.

natesilver: Right, that’s the way to measure it.

clare.malone: They are kind of the congressional stand-ins for those reluctant Trump voters.

natesilver: The Comey firing and the intelligence slip are both the sort of thing that could be grounds for impeachment, if Congress were so inclined, though.

perry: They are huge policy matters. They are huge violations of political norms. I’m just not sure they fundamentally alter the politics of the country, which are very divided, but with Trump being very unpopular, Democrats favored in 2018 and I have no idea what happens in 2020.

natesilver: One way this week has been damaging for Trump is that it makes impeachment proceedings very likely if Democrats take over the House in 2019.

perry: So that is a great point. And that is something I should have been considering during this chat.

natesilver: (To be clear, impeachment proceedings are not the same thing as the House voting for impeachment, much less the two-thirds of the Senate voting to convict….)

harry: Chris Stirewalt at Fox News had an excellent writeup of this. The idea being that what Trump is doing now isn’t making impeachment any more likely in the next year or so, but 2019 is when the action could begin.

clare.malone: But let’s theorize and say that a small number of concerned Republican senators band together after a few months of what they consider to be illiberal tendencies in the president and decide to do something (I don’t know what). Don’t moves or waves of feeling like that within the Republican establishment ultimately lead to the potential for, say, a decent intraparty challenge in 2020? (To get a lil cray.)

natesilver: So, if Democrats take over the House, 2019 could be a very interesting year. Democrats are holding impeachment hearings, and at the same time, the “invisible primary” for the 2020 GOP nomination is getting underway. Might some Republicans decide that they’re better off with Vice President Mike Pence than with Trump? Or some alternative to both Pence and Trump?

clare.malone: Yeah, Pence.

micah: Ehhh, I don’t see any evidence or rumblings of that level of Trump-abandonment at all. (As of Tuesday at 6 p.m. Eastern.) Remember, if the GOP establishment isn’t behind Trump he cannot win the nomination in 2020. See: “The Party Decides.”

Speaking of:

clare.malone: That guy has been really smart by staying out of the news, if I may say.

micah: John Kasich?

clare.malone: lol. No, Pence.

micah: I was gonna say …

clare.malone: Kasich is basically licking TV lenses.

harry: Two things: 1. If you watch Sanders vs. Kasich, you probably need a life more than I do. 2. The No. 1 thing to watch for as to whether there will be a primary challenge to the sitting president is his approval rating. Trump’s approval rating is low enough that, for a generic president, we’d expect a primary challenge.

natesilver: FWIW, the Senate can also vote to bar someone from holding office in the future if they’re impeached. The baller move for Trump is if he resigned under threat of impeachment in 2019, and then ran for the GOP nomination in 2020 anyway.

clare.malone: Harry, do you have a different metric for how low Trump would have to sink to get a challenge?

harry: I don’t know if it’s any different. The fact that perhaps Trump has a higher approval rating among Republicans compared to what you’d expect given his overall approval rating might stave off a challenge for a little bit, but if he gets much below 40 percent it’ll probably happen. (No guarantees.)

natesilver: The lowest someone ever reached in his approval ratings before getting re-elected anyway was Truman, who fell to about 33 percent by a year or two into his (inherited) first term. But in general, I think a 40-ish percent approval rating is recoverable whereas a 30-ish percent one would create massive problems for Trump.

perry: Shifting gears a bit, I actually do think this week may bring a permanent change in how the media and other Republicans view Trump. He did something that violated a big norm, firing the person who is investigating him. The comparisons of him to Richard Nixon were near constant. No one can laugh off that comparison anymore.

The people who write about authoritarian governments will be published more.

natesilver: Yeah, the fact that Trump has repeatedly undercut his own spokespersons is another long-term consequence here.

perry: Harry said this earlier in the chat, but newspapers are going to start publishing stories and basically ignoring White House denials, which are meaningless now.

natesilver: I feel like, in general in my writing on Trump to date — I won’t speak for the rest of the site — I haven’t done enough to play up the consequences of what happens if you have an incompetent president, or perhaps a mentally unstable one. Those are big things to worry about, separate from authoritarianism.

perry: I don’t know which of those three Trump is, but I think all are possibilities,

clare.malone: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos covers Ronald Reagan/mentally unstable stuff in this piece really well. He gets into how Reagan’s staff were monitoring him and considering possibly invoking constitutional mechanisms to get him out of office.

natesilver: Reagan may have had some issues in his second term, but he also surrounded himself with highly competent people — not something I’m sure you can say for Trump.

People with a lot of defects can get along fine if they hire well.

micah: A little on the nose, Nate.

perry: That is why I think incompetent doesn’t capture well what is going on. Trump could have hired a really strong chief of staff and empowered him. He hired Reince Preibus.

natesilver: Micah is my Reince Preibus.

micah: omg.

perry: Micah is your Howard Baker. Or James Baker. (I’m kidding, but being somewhat serious.)

natesilver: Oops. Yeah, I screwed up the analogy. Micah is one of the Bakers.

perry: Trump doesn’t like managing but also has hired a flawed manager. Or he doesn’t like details.

micah: I’d rather be H.R. Haldeman.

natesilver: Another problem for Trump is that it’s going to be harder for him to hire good people, given how he’s treated the people who have worked for him so far.

micah: For the final bit here, let’s talk about how the past week’s events affect Trump’s agenda. That’s important in that it impacts peoples’ lives, but I think it’s also a good indirect measure of where the administration is.

Do the Comey firing and the Russia/info scandal (we need good shorthand for this) make it harder to enact health care reform?

clare.malone: I like Harry’s theory on this, which I think he’s typing.

perry: Yes, but doesn’t make it impossible. Same for tax reform.

natesilver: Sure, in that passing health care requires Republicans to make a big leap of faith toward Trump, given how unpopular the bill is, and this week will have given them less reason to have faith in him.

clare.malone: Harry’s theory on this (which he’s still typing) is contrarian.

harry: Well, I’m mostly with Nate and Perry here. Everything Trump has done in the last week makes him less likely to be trusted by his own staff. It makes the press less likely to trust anything they say. So to me, it can make an agenda harder to enact.

That said — and I spoke about this on the podcast — the scandals could make it easier to pass less popular legislation because they divert people’s attention. There will be fewer questions about health care because everyone will be asking what the heck is he sharing now with Russia?

natesilver: The scandals also slow down the calendar. Confirming the new FBI director could be contentious, for example. Sen. John Cornyn pulled his name from consideration on Tuesday.

But I would say this: The fact that House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have been largely forgiving of Trump’s recent problems suggests that they’re still holding out hope of getting some substantive legislation passed.

clare.malone: Yeah, Ryan and McConnell didn’t bat an eye, really, at this.

harry: McConnell did speak out Tuesday morning in a way that was clearly not pleased, given how quiet McConnell normally is.

micah: Yeah, McConnell really came down hard on Trump, Harry. Here’s his blistering quote: “I think we could do with a little less drama from the White House on a lot of things so we can focus on our agenda, which is deregulation, tax reform, repealing and replacing Obamacare.”

natesilver: I don’t think that kind of opposition counts for much unless it eventually turns into hard-and-fast consequences. Which, so far, we haven’t seen.

micah: My default stance on the bulk of Republican officials is: I’ll believe they’re bucking Trump when they take identifiable steps to do so.

So let’s close on this: What’s the standard for Republicans truly checking Trump? It’s definitely not anonymously complaining about the White House to media outlets.

harry: We need to keep an eye on two things. No. 1 is how often senators vote with Trump. No. 2 how many bills get passed? They often won’t bring stuff to the floor if it won’t pass. So the two of those in combination are key.

clare.malone: Once we see people besides Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and John McCain be vocal about Trump opposition, then you’ll know if the tide is turning.

Maybe that comes from things like, upcoming, who replaces Comey — what sort of direction you go with that position is key. For example. I wonder if anyone besides Graham types in the Senate would voice opposition to a highly partisan pick.

natesilver: For me, the markers of real GOP pushback would include forming a select committee to investigate Trump-Russia stuff, or failing to confirm a key Trump cabinet nominee.

perry: Yeah, voting down nominees who are problematic. Like Trey Gowdy for FBI director, if that happened. (Although, Gowdy took himself out of the running, too.)

natesilver: Or if we’re looking at anonymous complaining … if we start to see Republicans anonymously suggesting that Trump should resign, that would be meaningful.

perry: Or truly condemning acts that violate norms, like the Comey firing.

And yeah, calling for a special prosecutor or a select committee would be important.

My other measure would be co-sponsoring legislation that takes on some of the business/tax issues around Trump. McConnell/Ryan will never let that stuff get to the floor, but if 150 House Republicans and 30 senators are on a bill calling for Trump to release his taxes, that is something

micah: So things are moving fast, but based on the fact that we haven’t really seen any of that as of Tuesday evening, the GOP is still with Trump.

perry: Oh yes.

From J.D. Martinez to Josh Donaldson, hitters throughout the big leagues have been honing a new approach at the plate, hunting for big flies and eschewing worm burners. It’s a change rooted in the latest metrics, which say balls hit in the air tend to be more valuable than grounders — particularly since the home run surge of 2015 started turning a higher percentage of fly balls into home runs than ever. So, over the last two years, batters have adjusted their swings accordingly, sending ever more balls skyward.

The resulting trend toward fly balls has significantly improved a handful of hitters, helping them achieve far better results than when they slapped more grounders. Some observers have even suggested it could be contributing to the surge in home runs. But a closer look at the data shows that, while there is a sweeping transformation underway, it seems to be hurting as many players as it is helping.

A batter can hit more fly balls by changing the angle of his swing. Instead of the slight downward plane recommended by many instructors, more of today’s batters are adopting uppercut swings that drive the ball into the air. And across the league, the effect is palpable.

Over the past three seasons, the ratio of ground balls to fly balls in MLB has dropped from 1.34 grounders per fly in 2015 to 1.25 this year. For individual players, the changes are even more significant. FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan documented a historic number of players who have dropped their ground-ball percentage by 5 percent or more since 2015.

Some of those players have benefited greatly from these swing changes. Oakland Athletics first baseman Yonder Alonso nearly halved the number of grounders he’s hitting so far this year, and he also boasts a personal-best 178 weighted Runs Created plus, one of the best marks in the league. There are similar anecdotes for Martinez, Donaldson, Nationals All-Star second baseman Daniel Murphy and others.

So there is definitely a fly-ball revolution underway in baseball. But that revolution is not without its discontents. Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto recently disparaged the trend towards fly-ball hitting in an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer. “I see it with a lot of guys. Everyone tells the good stories, but there’s a lot of s—ty stories of guys who are wasting their time trying things,” Votto said, as quoted in the Enquirer.

Votto is right; being a more productive hitter really isn’t as simple as “elevate to celebrate.” Over the last three years, just as many hitters have suffered by increasing their fly-ball rate as have benefited. Here’s a chart showing each hitter’s change in fly-ball rate from the previous year, in comparison with his change in weighted On-Base Average (wOBA).

Among players who increased their fly-ball rate, it was almost exactly a toss-up as to whether their wOBA would get better or worse. Similarly, players who decreased their fly-ball rate had about a 50/50 split of improving and worsening wOBAs. Overall, the correlation between a batter’s changing fly ball rate and his subsequent change in production is nonexistent. That same lack of correlation holds if you use the more advanced metrics (such as launch angle) tracked by MLB’s StatCast system.

Although there are some fly-ball success stories, plenty of hitters have swung up only to see their wOBA dive down. For every Yonder Alonso there is a 2016 Kiké Hernandez, who spiked his fly-ball rate by 11.7 percentage points, only to watch his wOBA drop by 89 points. Or maybe you’d prefer Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward, the owner of a dreadful wOBA 21 percent worse than the league average in 2016. The Cubs are at the vanguard of the fly-ball revolution, reportedly championing the phrase “there’s no slug on the ground.” Heyward seems to have listened, because he increased his fly-ball rate by almost 10 percentage points after joining the Cubs. But in contrast with the success stories of players such as Alonso and Martinez, the change has had a disastrous effect on Heyward.

So adopting an uppercut swing won’t necessarily make a player great. But it will probably make them hit more home runs. (When players up their rate of fly balls, the consequence is usually more dingers.) The increasing rate of fly balls leaguewide seems to explain some of the explosion in home runs from 2015 to 2016 (although that still leaves the mid-year 2015 increase in home runs a mystery, even setting aside the speculation around — and puzzling evidence for and against — ball juicing).

Home runs are great! But the problem is that fly balls also come with other, less desirable consequences. For example, players who hit more fly balls into the outfield also hit more pop-ups on the infield, which are about as valuable as striking out. Given his aforementioned criticism of fly balls, maybe it’s no coincidence that Joey Votto is also one of baseball’s best at avoiding infield pop-ups — he probably knows the two are related.

Moreover, the conscious effort to adapt an unnatural swing plane could harm a player’s natural hitting motion. Heyward had been a productive hitter earlier in his career with similar fly-ball rates as last season, but his swing mechanics were notably confused a year ago, which resulted in an obvious weak spot against low pitches.

In an interview with CSN Chicago, Cubs hitting coach John Mallee described the work he was doing to improve Heyward for the 2017 season. “He’s trying to mirror the swing that he had then…. It’s not actually making a change; it’s just getting him to who he was,” Mallee said. Bucking the revolution, Heyward has hit significantly fewer fly balls this season, and his production has improved, as well (although he’s still underperforming expectations).

Stories such as Heyward’s show that the fly-ball revolution is not for every hitter. Notably, many of the players who have transformed the most by adopting uppercut swings were underperforming before. Alonso was a below-average hitter last season; Donaldson was a former high draft pick who struggled for years to come into his own. Tinkering with their swing planes might have been the secret to unlocking their full potential. But for players with established mechanics like Heyward, adopting a new philosophy is a riskier proposition. All told, it’s tough to predict whether more fly balls are the missing ingredient for a hitter, or just a harmful distraction.

The Humane Society and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families seem like two groups that could, conceivably, coexist in adjoining booths at your local Earth Day festival. But these organizations have instead ended up on opposite sides in a debate over how the Environmental Protection Agency should go about regulating thousands of potentially harmful chemicals that Americans come into contact with every day.

This disagreement between the people who would like to help you adopt a puppy and the people who would like to help you avoid hormone-altering deodorant — and conversely, a spot of agreement between the Humane Society and trade associations for the petrochemical industry — goes beyond the details of a specific EPA proposal. Instead, experts say, it reflects a long-standing (and maybe impossible-to-solve) difference of opinion about risk, data collection and the role that animal sacrifice plays in keeping humans safe.

From early 20th century factory workers poisoned by radioactive paint to growing concerns that flame-retardant chemicals used on sofas and pillows could be linked to birth defects and cancer, the history of American industry is rife with cases of workers and consumers learning that a product they thought was safe actually wasn’t. In some instances, the effects of a toxic exposure play out in quick and obvious ways — those factory workers who painted watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint made from radium began to sicken and die in gruesome ways after just a couple of years on the job. But some health impacts — an increase in lifetime risk of cancer, say — are harder to spot. And the links between those effects and exposure to a specific amount of a specific chemical are harder to prove.

That difficulty is compounded by the fact that, much of the time, we don’t even know what chemicals we’re being exposed to, at what amount, or what risks those chemicals are associated with. The EPA has had the authority to regulate the chemicals used in household products since 1976, but it had no control over chemicals that were already being manufactured and sold before that year: a collection that includes 62,000 substances. Moreover, the EPA isn’t even always aware of what all’s in the stuff you buy. The trade publication Chemical and Engineering News recently wrote about a study in which EPA researchers ground up 100 consumer products, including cereal and baby toys, and found 3,800 chemicals — only 200 of which were chemicals the EPA had expected to turn up.

Last summer, Congress took the first step toward increasing public knowledge about, and regulatory oversight of, toxic chemicals, passing the bipartisan Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. Among other things, the act made it mandatory for the EPA to evaluate all the chemicals used in consumer products and to apply a risk-based safety standard, rather than one that has to balance a chemical’s risks against its industrial usefulness. It’s such a popular change that even the proposed 2018 EPA budget, which would reduce the agency’s funding by 31 percent and eliminate 50 programs and subprograms, provides increased funding to implement the Lautenberg Act. But putting the plan into action means filling in the holes in our knowledge, which means doing a lot of toxicology research — and this is where groups that might otherwise join hands and sing “Kumbaya” around the peace pole start to disagree.

The EPA published its proposed plan for implementing the new act Jan. 17 in the Federal Register. In public comments submitted to the agency, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy network that works in education and policy for consumer environmental health, supported what the EPA wants to do. And the Humane Society and other animal-rights organizations didn’t. And that’s because of the tools used by the field of toxicology. This research, aimed at understanding the effects of chemical substances on the human body and where to draw the line between a safe amount and a dangerous exposure, relies on data collected from laboratory experiments. Some of those experiments are “in vitro” — they’re done in a test tube (or, more accurately, in one of dozens of tubes packed together like a honeycomb) using human or animal cells. Others, though, are “in vivo,” conducted in the bodies of living creatures such as rats or zebra fish. Representatives from both the Humane Society and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families said they want to see the Lautenberg Act implemented. But the Humane Society is concerned that the EPA’s specific plan will increase the number of animals who die on our behalf.

In particular, the Humane Society is worried about an extra step that’s been added to the process. As legislated, the Lautenberg Act was a two-step system meant to help the EPA move quickly through tens of thousands of substances: First, prioritize chemicals based on potential for risk, then evaluate the safety of those designated “high priority.” And the EPA’s proposed plan retains this framework. Once a chemical enters the prioritization phase, the EPA has nine to 12 months to figure out whether it should be low priority or high priority. Low-priority chemicals are effectively set aside, as far as the evaluation process is concerned, and the industry can keep using them as before. Meanwhile, high-priority chemicals enter the evaluation phase, where the EPA has three years to figure out what risk the substance poses to human health and how it should be regulated. But the EPA has added a step: The pre-prioritization phase, a time for figuring out what data exists for a given chemical and whether the agency has enough information to truly know how the chemical should be prioritized. And, unlike the other steps, there’s no ticking clock for pre-prioritization. It could last a month. It could last years. “It creates this new sort of black box where they’ll ask for all the info they think they’ll need for the entire risk-assessment process,” said Kate Willett, director of regulatory toxicology, risk assessment and alternatives for the Humane Society. Willett thinks there’s a lack of transparency here that could result in companies feeling pressured to conduct new animal research for chemicals that might end up classified as low priority anyway, a scenario that, she said, would make those animals’ deaths a waste.

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment on this added phase, but Holly Davies, senior toxicologist in the Washington State Department of Ecology and a member of the EPA’s scientific advisory board on chemical safety testing, said a pre-prioritization step made sense to her because it helps the agency ensure that it doesn’t end up with more chemicals in the prioritization and evaluation phases than it can process in the allotted time frame. She pointed out that there’s no minimum amount of data that a company has to provide as part of pre-prioritization. And, she said, even if a company chose to do more tests at that phase, the information would be valuable no matter what priority the chemical was later assigned. “For me, to do a test in animals and find there is no effect, it’s not wasted,” she said. “Because now you know there is no effect. If testing puts something in the low-priority category, then that’s useful.”

Useful? Or a waste? What’s really being debated here isn’t just the presence or absence of a this phase in the EPA’s assessment of chemicals. It’s something more fundamental: If we want to keep people safe, is it necessary to experiment on animals?

That is a far-reaching question without easy answers. “It’s been going on for years,” said Andy Igrejas, director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. He believes animal testing is a crucial part of protecting humans.

But concerns about animal testing — what animals it’s being done on and how well it works — aren’t confined to animal-rights groups. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health stopped funding research on chimpanzees, the animal most closely related to humans, after a National Academies report found that the research being done on them was unnecessary and unethical. Other research has found considerable problems associated with translating the results of animal studies to humans, both because of differences in biology and because of research problems created by the humans themselves. A 2009 paper examining why animal models weren’t terribly predictive of human responses to chemical exposure noted that animal studies were significantly less likely than human studies to be systematically reviewed, a process in which scientists compile and analyze multiple published studies on the same topic to see if they are pointing toward a common outcome. The same paper found that it was more common for animal studies not to follow basic scientific methodological rules, like blinding to prevent the researchers from knowing which animals have been exposed and which haven’t.

That convergence of practical, ethical and biological problems has created a movement within toxicology to get more research done, faster, and with less reliance on animals. The National Toxicology Program, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, even has a lab that’s dedicated to developing and testing alternative toxicological methods. Primarily, that means using new high-speed testing systems that allow researchers to run the same experiment quickly on hundreds of cells at once and then using mathematical modeling to take the results of many kinds of these studies — research on human cells, research on purified human hormone receptors, research on fish embryos — and combine them into a single prediction of a chemical’s impact on a full-scale human.

Davies still thinks traditional animal research is important, though. Almost every method we have of studying the human biological impacts of chemical exposure is flawed, she said. Nothing, not even a human, is a perfect proxy for what will happen to humans, broadly, when they come into contact with a given chemical. Instead, she said, animal testing is part of a suite of testing strategies that, taken together, can help us understand potential risks. “It’s building up a picture of what we know,” Davies told me. “You have data that’s in vitro, data in non-mammals, data in mice. And they all contribute to the story in a way that makes sense.”

From Willett’s perspective, groups primarily focused on animal rights and groups primarily focused on environmental health agree on more of this than they disagree on. But faced with imperfect methodology, deeply important questions for human health and big philosophical and ethical implications, different people are likely to come to diffferent conclusions about what to prioritize and how to proceed. That’s part of what the EPA is considering now, as it reviews public comments and puts together a finalized plan for the future of chemical exposure research.

And those differences will continue to have big implications for the process of turning science into policy, at the EPA and elsewhere. “If you aren’t increasing the information base, then you aren’t solving one of the main problems,” Igrejas said about the EPA’s toxicology testing. Willett, meanwhile, questioned whether that was true. “From our standpoint, based on experience over the past 30 years or so, simply adding more information to the mix doesn’t necessarily make you make better decisions.”

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

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10 percent

Ford Motor Co. plans to cut 10 percent of its global workforce, with a focus on salaried employees. The company will cut $3 billion this year. [The Wall Street Journal]

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78 percent

An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 78 percent of Americans would prefer that an investigation into ties between Russia and President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign be led by an independent prosecutor or commission. [CNN]

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101 years, 38 days

Age of Bryson William Verdun Hayes, who on Sunday became the oldest person to skydive. [The Guardian]

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10,000 boxes

General Mills is setting up a sweepstakes where the prize is one of 10,000 boxes of marshmallow-only Lucky Charms cereal. When you think about it, this is the closest we’re gonna get to what’s essentially an extremely shabby version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and based on the already ridiculous sugar content of standard Charms, it will almost certainly result in about as many human casualties. Seriously, you can just buy the marshmallows in bulk on the internet if you’re cool with your UPS guy losing all remaining respect for you. [StarTribune]

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$7 million

Organizers of the notorious Fyre Festival, a failed attempt at a Bahamas music festival promoted by “influencers,” borrowed up to $7 million in a mad last-minute attempt to make good on the festival’s lofty promises and avoid becoming an international laughing stock, new documents show. It did not go great. [Bloomberg]

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$9.7 billion

Twenty-nine states threaten suspension of a person’s driver’s license as a way to make them pay traffic fines. Californians owed their state $9.7 billion in traffic debt last year, and it turns out that people who can’t afford to pay are not magically transformed into people who can afford to pay the minute you take away their license to drive. [The Atlantic]

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If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.

There have been lots of questions, especially among liberals, about when congressional Republicans might turn on President Trump, particularly in the wake of his controversial firing of FBI Director James Comey and the reports late Monday that he compromised classified information. The assumption behind these questions is that at a certain point, something so outrageous will be revealed about Trump that the resulting scandal will … er … trump party loyalty.

But, at least historically speaking, even the biggest scandals don’t wash away partisanship.

We went back and looked at key congressional votes during three relatively recent periods in which a president was accused of wrongdoing: Watergate (Richard Nixon), Iran-contra (Ronald Reagan) and the Monica Lewinsky scandal (Bill Clinton). Two trends stick out. First, partisanship still matters. And in a big way. Second, when defections do come, they’re more likely to come from the centrist wing of a party.

Even as Nixon aides resigned and the Watergate controversy grew around the president in 1973, many congressional Republicans were arguing that the investigations of the president were overly aggressive. Two future GOP presidents, George H.W. Bush (then chairman of the Republican National Committee) and Reagan (then governor of California), called Nixon and assured him that he could get through the scandal. Things escalated in October 1973 when Nixon ordered the firing of the special prosecutor investigating his administration, leading both the attorney general and deputy attorney general to resign, in what is now known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

But Nixon retained party loyalists in Congress even after that dramatic move to stop those investigating him. The House Judiciary Committee held a series of votes about recommending Nixon’s impeachment in July 1974. All 21 committee Democrats, and six committee Republicans, voted for the first article of impeachment, which essentially accused Nixon of obstructing the investigation of the Watergate break-in. The other 11 Republicans voted against that article. There were three articles of impeachment against Nixon. Nineteen Democrats voted for all three articles of impeachment. Just one Republican did. A majority of the Republicans on the committee, 10 of the 17, voted against all three articles.

Nixon resigned before the full House voted on impeachment, partly because Republican officials finally began abandoning him. But Nixon didn’t step down until Aug. 8, 1974, more than two years after the Watergate break-in.

The 1998 House votes impeaching Clinton — who was essentially accused of lying and trying to block the investigation into his his affair with White House intern Lewinsky — were also split almost entirely along partisan lines, with the Republican majority ensuring that two of the four articles of impeachment were adopted. Clinton was impeached on a perjury charge in a 228-206 vote; 223 Republicans and five Democrats voted “yes,” while 200 Democrats, five Republicans and one independent voted against it. On the other charge to pass, obstruction of justice, 216 Republicans and five Democrats voted “yes,” while 199 Democrats, 12 Republicans and one independent voted “no.”

In the Senate, in turn, party loyalty saved Clinton from being removed from office. Because removal requires a two-thirds majority and Democrats controlled 45 of the 100 Senate seats, 12 Democrats (along with all 55 Republicans) would have had to vote against Clinton for him to be removed from office. But all 45 Democrats voted “no” on both articles.

Finally, during Iran-contra, Democrats controlled the House but did not push to impeach the president. Special congressional committees in the House and Senate were created to investigate the Reagan administration’s sale of weapons to Iran and the sending of money to the “contras,” a group fighting the governing regime in Nicaragua. There was a final, joint report that blasted the administration for violating a number of laws and suggested that Reagan — whose administration said he was unaware of the actions of his aides — should have known what was going on. The two committees, combined, had 15 Democrats and 11 Republicans. All 15 Democrats but just three of the Republicans signed on to the official report, while eight of the 11 Republicans wrote a minority report dissenting from the majority’s findings.

These were three of the biggest scandals in modern American history, and party loyalty stayed strong almost through the end of each.

The second trend is that there is an ideological component to party loyalty during scandal. In the simplest sense, more moderate members (in comparison to Congress overall) are more likely to split from a president of their party. Let’s look at the same votes and decisions as above for Watergate and Iran-contra, as well as the vote on the initial impeachment investigation of Clinton’s conduct. (To make a more apples-to-apples comparison, since Nixon and Reagan were never formally impeached.) According to DW-Nominate scores, which measure the ideology of each member of Congress based on roll call votes from previous congresses, the few Republicans who broke with Nixon and Reagan were more liberal than the rest of Republicans in Congress then. Similarly, the 31 Democrats who joined Republicans to support the initial impeachment investigation of Clinton’s conduct were generally more conservative than the 175 Democrats in Congress who opposed that GOP proposal.

These votes and decisions make for a messy comparison. They were on different actions and came at different points in each scandal’s development. They also had different stakes, which can affect how strongly partisan lines hold. For example, in the Nixon era, the vote to give the House Judiciary Committee subpoena power as part of its investigation was adopted by a 410-4 margin.

Still, the idea that at some point party loyalty goes out the window and politicians become nonpartisan statesmen doesn’t hold up historically.

What does this mean for today?

The historical data suggests that, first, Republicans overall are likely to stand with Trump amid the controversy. And that has largely been the case. According to a New York Times tally, 139 Democrats and independents are calling for a special counsel to investigate the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia — which Comey’s FBI was investigating at the time of his firing. No Republican in Congress supports a Department of Justice-appointed special counsel focused solely on the 2016 election and Trump. (This is likely because Republicans fear a special counsel is hard to control and could expand and lengthen his investigation, like Kenneth Starr did as independent counsel probing Clinton.)

Only six of the combined 290 Republicans in the House and Senate back the next most aggressive option, some kind of special committee in Congress (along the lines of the ones created amid Watergate and Iran-contra) or an independent outside group (such as the commission of largely retired officials that investigated the 9/11 attacks). Eighty-five Democrats have called for a special committee or investigation. So essentially almost all Democrats support some kind of ramp-up of the investigation, compared with about 2 percent of congressional Republicans.

History also suggests that those who are breaking with Trump, or will do so in the future, are more liberal than other Republicans. That has been true so far as well, with some caveats. In addition to the six who have backed some kind of special investigation, 42 Republicans have said that they had concerns about the Comey firing. These 48 GOP members (15 senators and 33 House members) were more likely to be moderate and somewhat more anti-establishment (meaning they vote against the party leadership on some measures) than their colleagues, according to their DW-Nominate scores. The group of 33 House members is disproportionately associated with the center-right Tuesday Group and includes few from the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Of course, in one sense, we don’t have to guess which Republicans are more likely to break from the president: There was already a big test of loyalty to Trump, less than a year ago. After he won the GOP presidential nomination, a small bloc of senators and House members refused to endorse him, and a disproportionate number came from the left wing of the party.

That was in the summer of 2016. The biggest scandal of the Trump campaign came in the fall, with the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape on Oct. 8. The number of anti-Trump Republicans expanded slightly after its release, but the vast majority of Republicans in Congress still supported Trump on Election Day, despite his unpopularity and the series of controversies about his conduct, most notably bragging about sexual misconduct on tape.

Our data is capturing only formal votes, and it could miss other decisions made by members. Perhaps the most important example is Howard Baker, who was the top Republican member of the Senate Watergate committee, which aggressively investigated Nixon and generally worked in a bipartisan way. Baker and the other two Republicans on the committee joined with its Democrats to obtain tapes of the president’s Oval Office conversations. (At the same time, even Baker felt loyalty to his party, as his aides at times discussed the committee’s processes with the Nixon White House.)

Who might be the Baker of today? John McCain, of Arizona, is the only Republican in the Senate currently calling for a special committee to investigate the president. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, is urging Trump not to pick a GOP politician to replace Comey as the FBI director. Arizona’s Jeff Flake and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, both during the campaign and last week amid the Comey firing, have questioned Trump’s decision-making and judgment.

Overall, though, the lesson from history is simple. In the wake of Comey’s firing, Democrats are encouraging Republicans to “put country over party.” In making this call, they are essentially asking congressional Republicans to do something politicians historically have not: push for punishments and the potential removal of a president from their own party.

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How big of a scandal is President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey? The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew, senior writer Perry Bacon Jr. and Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston who studies political scandals, try to figure that out. The team also discusses how the recent resignation of Census Bureau Director John Thompson could affect preparations for the 2020 census.

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