“These requirements have long been found to increase the costs of infrastructure projects, but the promise of creating even more cost-increasing American jobs makes them a popular provision.
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which Biden signed into law in November 2021 re-upped requirements that federally funded infrastructure use American-made iron and steel. It also expanded those requirements to construction materials like drywall, copper wire, fiber optic cables, and lumber.”
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“Those requirements were supposed to kick in within 180 days of the law’s passage. Right before they did, the Biden administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a sweeping 180-day waiver for new Buy America provisions for construction materials, citing the cost and complexity of complying with those provisions.
Public comments from state departments of transportation, public transit agencies, and contractors all generally supported this waiver and, in fact, asked that it last for at least 18 months and as long as four years.
The reason is pretty straightforward: Buy America provisions greatly increase the costs of infrastructure projects.”
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“Expanding Buy America provisions, and cracking down on waivers, are a staple of all administrations and most State of the Union addresses. The fact they keep exempting themselves from these requirements shows that Biden—and his predecessors—understand at some level that they’re a bad idea.”
“These are the sorts of proposals that sound good in theory—who wouldn’t want to pay less in junk fees? But some of these fees exist for good reasons. (Late fees, for instance, encourage people to pay their bills on time, which is good for both credit card companies and for users, who will otherwise rack up more interest to pay back.) And in any event, companies aren’t simply going to say, “OK, we’ll just make less money.”
Hotels may respond by raising base room rates or charging new fees for typical amenities. Airlines that can’t charge for choosing your seat may raise base ticket prices, baggage fees, or other costs. Banks that can’t fine people for overdrawing their accounts may raise rates for opening an account, require higher minimum balances, or deny more people bank accounts to begin with. Credit card companies that can’t charge late fees may deny more lines of credit or charge higher interest rates. And so on.
All the Biden administration is really doing is shifting people’s costs around.”
“At issue is whether it’s fair to use century-old rules, created during an era of relative abundance, to ration water from the rapidly shriveling river now that the West is on the precipice of climate disaster. With California and its six neighbors locked in a dispute over two competing approaches to divvying up the cuts in water deliveries, whatever the administration decides will almost certainly end up in court.”
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“The current feud centers on California, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and Arizona, a newfound swing state that has proven crucial to the party’s control of the White House and Senate.
The 1,450-mile long Colorado River made much of the West inhabitable, and now supplies water to 40 million Americans from Wyoming to the border with Mexico, as well as an enormously productive agricultural industry. But climate change has shriveled its flows by 20 percent over the past two decades, and for each additional degree of warming, scientists predict the river will shrink another 9 percent.
Water levels at the system’s two main reservoirs are falling so fast, the Interior Department has said that water users must cut consumption by as much as a third of the river’s flows or risk a collapse that could cripple their ability to deliver water out of those dams. That would also cut off hydropower production that is crucial to the stability of the Western grid.
The states broadly agree that the vast majority of those immediate cuts must be made by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, whose decades of overuse have accelerated the crisis. But the fight is over whether California, which holds strong legal rights to the lion’s share of the Lower Basin’s water, should have to share in those reductions.”
“The response from many Republican lawmakers to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday marked a new low for civility in politics in the United States.
Interrupted multiple times by jeering, boos and accusations of lying by GOP members, Biden gamely endured the taunts, at times seeming to revel in the prospect of egging on his political opponents, calling them out over threats to refuse to raise the debt ceiling and other contentious issues.
That led to an outburst by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who called the president “a liar.”
Moments later, when Biden was discussing overdose deaths caused by fentanyl, another Republican House member shouted, “It’s your fault!”
State of the Union addresses, which are mandated by the Constitution, have, for most of the nation’s history, been rather staid affairs. The president reports on the progress being made, outlines policy priorities for the year ahead, while the members of the opposing party or parties choose either to applaud unenthusiastically or sit on their hands in protest. Debate over the substance of the speeches had, until recently, been reserved for after they were finished.”
“a senior Defense Department official said that Chinese spy balloons entered American airspace three times during Trump’s tenure and once before during the current administration.”
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“the difference between past instances and the one from last week, Defense Department officials said, is that those balloons never stayed above U.S. territory for a significant period of time. When pressed for specifics, such as the date, location and duration of those instances, Biden administration officials refused to provide them to POLITICO, citing the classified nature of that information.”
“The framework will triple refugee resettlement from Latin America and the Caribbean in 2023 and 2024, for an annual cap of 20,000. Each month, up to 30,000 migrants combined from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba may come to live and work in the U.S. on a two-year status if they secure an American sponsor and pass background checks.
Meanwhile, the White House says “individuals who irregularly cross the Panama, Mexico, or U.S. border after the date of this announcement will be ineligible for the parole process and will be subject to expulsion to Mexico,” which will accept up to 30,000 migrants monthly from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba who have been expelled. Mexico will do so under an expansion of the pandemic-era Title 42 order, which allows for the immediate expulsion of border crossers. Previously, Mexico only accepted Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans removed under Title 42. (It recently began accepting expelled Venezuelans as well.) Unauthorized migrants “will be increasingly subject to expedited removal to their country of origin and subject to a five-year ban on reentry,” according to the White House.
Certain aspects of the framework will likely help reduce the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, which has been a great challenge for the Biden administration so far. Under the new parole pathway, migrants can begin the process to secure legal passage to the U.S. from their home countries rather than doing so through an asylum claim (which can only be initiated at a port of entry or on U.S. soil). This could help save them a dangerous northward journey and reduce overcrowding at the border.”
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“The pathway for Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Haitians mirrors similar programs established for Ukrainians and Venezuelans last year. Those programs helped reduce unlawful crossings among those groups, says Bier: “The Ukrainian parole program eliminated migration to the U.S.-Mexico border by Ukrainians. Venezuela’s program has already turned migration to be mostly legal.” Last summer, Customs and Border Protection reopened ports of entry to Haitians, which “basically ended illegal immigration by Haitians,” Bier explains.”
“President Biden still isn’t what you’d call popular, but he’s closer to popular than he’s been in some time. On Jan. 11, Biden hit a 44.1 percent approval rating in FiveThirtyEight’s average — his highest mark since October 2021. That was 3 percentage points higher than it was on Nov. 9, which isn’t a huge increase in the grand scheme of things, but in this polarized age where any movement in the president’s approval rating is rare, it’s a veritable Bidenaissance.
This is the part of the story where you expect me to explain why this is happening. Which is understandable, except it’s impossible to know for sure what’s behind this shift. One leading theory, though: It’s because inflation has been slowing down. Prices in December 2022 were just 6.5 percent higher than they were in December 2021, which was the lowest inflation rate in over a year. Gas prices, another highly visible metric of the strain on Americans’ wallets, also plummeted from an average of $3.80 per gallon in November to $3.32 per gallon in December. These seem like pretty compelling explanations, considering how closely Biden’s approval rating was tied to the inflation rate and gas prices last year.”
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“But is Biden’s luck about to run out? The discovery of a handful of classified documents from the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Delaware home has generated arguably the first bad news story for Biden in months, and it’s fair to wonder whether it will reverse — or at least halt — his miniature political comeback. The few polls that have been conducted since these revelations suggest that Americans think Biden acted badly, and that could be dragging down his approval rating.”
“In addition to the “small number” of classified documents in President Joe Biden’s former think tank office, it turns out, he had a “small number” in the garage of his house in Wilmington, Delaware, plus one more in a room adjacent to the garage.* These were Obama administration records that Biden came across during his time as vice president, and they were definitely not supposed to be in those locations. What had initially seemed like a single lapse now looks like a pattern of carelessness, which creates several problems for Biden and the Justice Department.
First, Biden is no longer in a position to criticize Donald Trump’s “totally irresponsible” handling of sensitive material that he retained when he left office. Second, the delay in acknowledging Biden’s retention of classified records and obfuscation of its scope look like blatant attempts to minimize the political fallout. Third, a criminal prosecution of Trump for his handling of the government documents he took to Mar-a-Lago, which was always an iffy proposition, now seems doomed for political as well as legal reasons.
That is not to say there are no meaningful differences between what Trump did and what Biden did. Based on what we know so far, Trump’s stash, which included 325 classified documents along with thousands of unclassified government records, was much larger than Biden’s. And unlike Biden, Trump persistently resisted returning the documents, apparently because he considered them his personal property. That resistance included months of wrangling with the National Archives and Records Administration and incomplete compliance with a federal subpoena, which culminated in the FBI’s August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
Then again, Biden kept classified records in unapproved locations for six years, while Trump managed to do that for about a year and a half. Biden said he was “surprised” to learn last fall about the documents in his former office. Biden “takes classified information and materials seriously,” said Richard Sauber, the “special counsel to the president” who is overseeing the White House’s response to the case of the misplaced secrets. “We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.””
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“there is considerably more evidence to support an inference of criminal intent in Trump’s case. That applies to all three potential charges that the FBI mentioned in its Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit: removing or concealing government documents, retaining “national defense information,” and obstructing a federal investigation.
But all three charges include mens rea elements that will be hard to satisfy even in Trump’s case. Based on what we know so far, it is plausible that Trump’s conduct can be explained by a combination of ignorance, arrogance, stubbornness, laziness, and carelessness rather than criminal intent.
Even if Smith turns up more evidence that Trump “willfully” mishandled documents or deliberately obstructed the FBI’s investigation, prosecuting him while giving Biden a pass is bound to be perceived as unfair, inconsistent, and politically motivated. Trump’s supporters surely would see it that way, and so would many Americans who have no particular allegiance to him and might even be inclined to vote for Biden in 2024.
To avoid the firestorm that such a decision would ignite, Garland could let Smith and Hur lay out their findings, make a show of carefully weighing them, and then decide there is not enough evidence in either case to prove criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt. That might even turn out to be true.”
“White House lawyers initially found sensitive documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington — where Biden kept a personal office — on Nov. 2, a day before the midterm elections, and notified the Justice Department. On Dec. 20, Biden’s team notified the department of a second batch of documents in Biden’s Wilmington garage. On Thursday, they informed the department of another document found in Biden’s house. Garland was briefed on the investigation on Jan. 5.”
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“there are significant differences in the timeline of the Trump-related documents and those found at Biden’s office and home. The National Archives discovered the presence of records with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago in January 2022, after a protracted effort to reclaim presidential records that Trump had warehoused at his estate since leaving office. Trump sent an initial batch of 15 boxes back to the archive that month.
After discovering the material marked classified, the Archives forwarded the matter to the Justice Department, which soon subpoenaed Trump’s presidential office for all other documents with classified markings. The department also subpoenaed security footage to review the handling of the documents, which were kept in a storage room and Trump’s personal office.
But Justice Department investigators said evidence they collected showed that even after the subpoena, Trump’s team had not turned over everything in their possession — even as the ex-president’s aides presented the department with a signed attestation that all subpoenaed documents had been turned over. The FBI discovered another trove of sensitive records after executing a search at Trump’s estate in August, including some that he kept in his personal office.
Biden’s team, by contrast, has repeatedly emphasized its proactive approach to the discovery of the records. In two statements, White House lawyer Richard Sauber said Biden’s own team discovered the documents, immediately alerted the Archives and the Justice Department and returned the records. Similarly, they conducted additional searches and have pledged to cooperate with department investigators.
Trump sued last year to demand the return of documents seized by the FBI, a battle that reached the Supreme Court, only to result in a sharp rejection of his effort to sideline the Justice Department investigation. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have demanded assessments of the potential damage to national security caused by the handling of the documents.”