Read the newest geopolitical trends? 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 : But now that the U.K. is bidding farewell to this ill-conceived and ill-begotten project, the British government has to resume control of its internal market regulations, which is what this bill does. It merely restores to Her Majesty’s government the plenary domestic power over trade and regulation that almost every other government in the world takes for granted. So, why all the fuss? The problem, as ever in these negotiations, is Northern Ireland. It’s the only part of the U.K. that shares a land border with a member of the EU — the Irish Republic. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which put an end to the decades-long civil conflict in the province between Protestant unionists and Catholic secessionists, established an open border on the island of Ireland so that people and goods could travel seamlessly between North and South. This was a rather easy measure to implement because both the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland were in the EU at the time, and so they were bound by the same customs and market regulations.
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. See extra details at here.