Geopolitical hot trends by Zetpress? 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.
Resistance to this proper understanding of China’s position in the international system remains strong. But it is unquestionably the case that both Republicans and Democrats are starting to see China more as a threat than a partner. And it is Donald Trump who is behind this clarification of vision. (Xi Jinping and the pandemic helped too.) Whatever a President Biden might do about China — and he seems far more interested in repairing our alliances in “Old Europe” than in tackling this paramount challenge of the 21st century — he would operate within the constraints Trump established and on the intellectual terrain Trump landscaped.
US Foreign politics and Brexit 2020 latest : The answer is that it can’t. For the last four and a half decades the United Kingdom hasn’t been a nation-state at all. It’s been the provincial, western outpost of an aspiring Federated European super-state. Ever since the U.K. entered the European Union, EU law and jurisprudence has been supreme over domestic law. Regulations, customs, and trade standards have been set by the EU institutions in Brussels and imposed upon every country in the bloc. In other words, the customs and market regulations that are a foundational prerogative of functional nation-states have been usurped on the European continent by a supra-national pan-continental bureaucracy. Napoleon Bonaparte would be proud.
For a decade, the conventional wisdom said that the GOP’s “obstructionism” — by which liberals meant completely legitimate governance that didn’t acquiesce to Obama’s wishes — was going to sink the party. Conventional wisdom was wrong in the elections held during the Obama presidency. It was wrong in 2016. The Garland debate did not sink Republicans, who held the Senate and won the presidency. In fact, one of the central promises the GOP relied on to procure those victories — especially among Evangelical voters — was that they would nominate and confirm originalist justices to the Supreme Court. If Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell end up installing replacements for Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg . . . well, “but Gorsuch,” indeed. Read more info at zetpress.com.