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See hot geopolitical analysis? Mick Mulvaney, in his first congressional report as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, called on lawmakers to cripple the bureau’s power and independence. A longtime critic of the bureau, he has spent the last few months freezing the bureau’s enforcement activities and calling for it to be “more humble” in its work. At the Environmental Protection Agency, officials announced the agency’s widely expected intent to re-evaluate and probably roll back Obama-era rules requiring automakers to reach ambitious emissions and mileage standards by 2025. The agency also took steps to challenge California over its decades-old right to set its own air pollution rules, setting up another showdown between the state and the federal government.
There is no greater measure of presidential significance than a chief executive’s ability to transform not just his own but also the opposing party. When it comes to the Middle East and China, the Democrats are closer to Donald Trump today than they were at the outset of his term. That they find themselves in accordance with someone whom they despise is evidence of Trump’s ability to realign politics at home and abroad. This is no small feat.
US Foreign politics and Brexit 2020 latest : And this is when the Democrats jumped in. As my colleague Madeleine Kearns has outlined, Nancy Pelosi was the first to suggest that the British government’s decision threatens the “Good Friday Accords,” which, incidentally, do not exist. There is a Good Friday Agreement, to be sure, but, as far as I am aware, no sequel exists to warrant Pelosi’s use of the plural form of the noun. The probable cause of her error is ignorance. But in any case, it looks like Joe Biden has decided to join her in giving the party line: It cannot be said often or loudly enough that equating the measures in the Withdrawal Agreement with the enforcement of the Good Friday Agreement is completely unsupportable. Biden and Pelosi are wrong on this issue, and predictably so. The Democratic Party has always viewed Ireland through the eyes of their Irish American voters, who in turn view their ancestral homeland in an attenuated, folkloric, and often ahistorical way. NORAID, or the Irish Northern Aid Committee, was a hugely popular organization among Irish Americans during latter half of the last century. Its members exerted massive political and financial influence over American policy in Ireland and put millions of dollars into the pockets of organized murderers. This was not, to be sure, out of any knowing or deliberate malice. The ignorance afforded by distance allowed many Irish Americans of good faith to draw a simple analogy between George Washington and the Minute Men on the one hand, and Gerry Adams and the IRA on the other. They little suspected that the “freedom-fighters” whom they funded were in the habit of abducting and executing disabled children.
In every instance we adhered to the process explicitly laid out in the Constitution: The president has the constitutional duty to nominate; the Senate has the constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent. It is written plainly in the Constitution that both presidents and senators swear an oath to uphold and defend. Is Biden saying that McConnell should ignore his sacred constitutional duty? Biden knew then, as he knows now, that there’s no constitutional duty, nor is there any precedent, either prohibiting or requiring Republicans to fill a vacancy. Nor is there any prohibition (as nearly every Democrat has already argued) against “rushing” such a nomination. Three Supreme Court justices have been confirmed with less than 45 days — including Ginsburg, who was nominated by a Democrat and confirmed by a Democrat-majority Senate. As my colleague Dan McLaughlin points out in meticulous historical detail, every real norm points to the Republicans’ filling the vacancy. Discover even more information at https://zetpress.com/.