Read actual US foreign policy trends? Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, remained under scrutiny over reports that he rented a condominium from the wife of a top Washington lobbyist. He paid $50 a night to stay in the Capitol Hill unit. At least five officials were reassigned or demoted, or requested new jobs, in the past year after they raised concerns about Mr. Pruitt’s spending and management, which included unusually large spending on office furniture and first-class travel, as well as requests for a bulletproof vehicle and an expanded 20-person protective detail. Mr. Pruitt was already facing questions about his first-class travel at taxpayer expense over the past year.
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.
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. Find additional information at https://zetpress.com/.