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Discover hot political 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.

On September 16 the editorial board of the New York Times did the impossible. It said something nice about President Trump. “The normalization of relations between Israel and two Arab states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is, on the face of it, a good and beneficial development,” the editors wrote. They even went so far as to say that the “Trump administration deserves credit for brokering it.” I had to read that sentence twice to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Perhaps the world really is ending.

US Foreign politics and Brexit 2020 latest : Boris Johnson has said that the measure is “protective” in nature, and necessary because of the way that the EU has tried to “leverage” their regulatory conquest of Northern Ireland in trade negotiations with the British government. During these negotiations, it is alleged, the EU has threatened to ban the sale of British agricultural products in the EU. This action would, under the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement, involve banning the importation of food from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. You read that right: According to the British government’s chief negotiator David Frost, the EU has threatened to impose an internal food blockade within the United Kingdom between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Faced with what they clearly view as an insulting ultimatum, the Conservative government decided to violate the agreement they had wrongly signed up to in the first place.

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. Read even more details on here.