Tag: Bidens

GOP tries to paint Biden’s labor nominee as radical, hoping to turn Dem votes against her

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A handful of Senate Democrats have yet to commit to confirming Su, who stepped in as acting secretary after Marty Walsh left the Labor Department’s top job in mid-March to take over as head of the NHL players’ union.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), one of Su’s chief proponents, downplayed concerns about her confirmation, saying her endorsement from Walsh, who was popular with some Republicans, and meetings with senators will help convince moderates to vote for her.
“She’s doing the best job of the whole thing, which is she’s sitting down and making herself available and she’s had a very good meeting with a large number of” senators, Duckworth said in an interview. “And so I think it’s progressing very nicely.”
Duckworth added: “I think she’s making the case for herself. And I think Marty Walsh coming out as strongly as he has in support of her work, is a very helpful voice to have out there.”
Su told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which is weighing her nomination, she would be an honest broker in the job.
“I have been a leader dedicated to finding and expanding the vast areas of common ground between employers and employees,” she said. “I believe that the Department of Labor should make it as easy as possible for employers to keep workers safe on the job.”
Business groups have targeted Su, fearful that she would pursue regulations that would have major ramifications for app-based companies like Uber and Lyft, franchise restaurants and other employers. The gig-job companies, for instance, are battling efforts to make it easier to reclassify some workers as as employees, which would strain their business models.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the Senate committee considering Su’s nomination, cited that industry pressure in his opening remarks Thursday praising Su.

“The debate over Ms. Su really has nothing to do with her qualifications,” he said. “This debate really has everything to do with the fact that she is a champion of the working class in this country.”
Republicans spent much of Thursday’s hearing trying to poke holes in Su’s record at the Labor Department and as a top labor official in California before that, hoping to crack Democratic unity.
Republicans hammered Su for her stewardship of California’s unemployment insurance system, which issued tens of billions in wrongful or fraudulent payments in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. As labor secretary, Su would be in charge of the federal-state partnership on UI.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions confirmation hearing for Julie Su to be the Labor Secretary on Capitol Hill, April 20, 2023.
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Alex Brandon/AP Photo
“The buck stops at the top,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said. “You’re the person running UI, you’re the one who decided to waive the guardrails … the idea of promoting a person who’s had that experience to a position of leadership of the entire Department of Labor makes no sense at all.”
GOP senators also pressed Su for regulatory commitments on independent contractor and joint employer regulations. Su reiterated the Labor Department’s position that it does not have the authority to impose a test similar to California’s controversial “ABC” test for whether a worker is an employee or not and said that the department does not plan to pursue a joint employment rule, which could make companies like fast-food chains liable for violations at their franchises.
“There’s not a joint-employer rule on our regulatory agenda,” Su said, adding that she understands the value of the franchise model given her family’s experience running a pizza shop after immigrating from China.
Republicans also criticized her for a relative lack of experience brokering collective bargaining negotiations — a specialty of Walsh’s — a move geared at sowing doubts among the undecided cohort that includes Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
Su’s nomination is a high-stakes test for Sanders, who took the committee’s gavel in January, as well as the White House, which has at times struggled to shepherd labor nominees through the narrowly divided Senate.
The HELP committee has scheduled a confirmation vote for Su next Wednesday, which would clear the way for a final floor vote later in the year.
Kelly and Tester both said Thursday they’re still undecided on whether they will support her for the position, with Tester saying that he plans to meet one-on-one with Su next week “hopefully.”
Democrats’ calculus is further complicated by the ongoing absence of Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is recovering from shingles and has not been in Washington for several weeks.
When asked about any concerns to get Su confirmed, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer dodged the question and said: “She’s a great nominee and we’re working hard to get her confirmed.”
Su has won the support of some business groups, such as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, but her strongest support comes from labor unions and organizations representing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. If confirmed, Su would be Biden’s first AAPI Cabinet secretary and join three other AAPI Cabinet members.
Unions have recently begun stepping up their efforts on behalf of Su. The AFL-CIO is rolling out a six-figure campaign that includes ads in D.C. and Arizona — home to Kelly and Sinema, both of whom voted to confirm Su as deputy secretary but are on the fence — and is considering whether to expand to other states.
“This is the time for them to show who they stand with: Is it workers, or is it big corporations?” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told reporters Wednesday. “If you voted for her as deputy secretary, the only thing that’s changed is that she has actually more experience and more expertise.”
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#GOP #paint #Bidens #labor #nominee #radical #hoping #turn #Dem #votes
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
House GOP debt limit plan would block Biden’s student loan agenda, prohibit future relief

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The legislation would also bar the Biden administration from moving forward with a new income-driven repayment plan that cuts monthly payments for most borrowers and shortens the timeline to loan forgiveness for some borrowers.
In addition, the GOP plan would permanently prohibit the Education Department from issuing any significant regulation or executive action that would increase the long-term cost to the government of operating the federal student loan programs.
Such a sweeping prohibition would imperil efforts by the administration to provide additional relief or benefits to student loan borrowers. That would include any backup option for canceling large amounts of student debt if the Supreme Court rejects Biden’s student debt relief plan in the coming months.
Key context: The provisions are among dozens of policy changes and spending caps that House Republicans included in their 320-page legislation to raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or until March of next year, whichever comes first.
Republicans have argued that they want concessions from the administration that lower the federal deficit and reduce spending in exchange for their votes to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.
McCarthy said he hopes to pass it in the House next week. But the proposal stands no chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Biden swiftly dismissed McCarthy’s proposal as a nonstarter. “That’s the MAGA economic agenda: spending cuts for working and middle class folks,” Biden said of the plan on Wednesday. “It’s not about fiscal discipline, it’s about cutting benefits for folks that they don’t seem to care much about.”
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#House #GOP #debt #limit #plan #block #Bidens #student #loan #agenda #prohibit #future #relief
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
The Bidens made $579K last year, and paid a 23.8 percent tax rate, their returns show

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The numbers closely mirrored those from last year, when the Bidens reported paying $150,439 in federal income taxes on $610,702 for an effective tax rate of 24.6 percent.
White House officials again released copies of the first family’s tax returns on Tax Day as a demonstration of transparency. Former President Donald Trump had refused to do so while in office and during the 2016 presidential campaign, claiming repeatedly that he was under government audit. With the release of their 2022 taxes, Biden has shared 25 years worth of tax returns that include his years as vice president and an earlier presidential run, according to the White House.
Much of the couple’s income was via the president’s $400,000 salary. Jill Biden was paid $82,335 for her teaching position at Northern Virginia Community College.
The Bidens, who filed their returns jointly, also reported paying $29,023 in state income tax in Delaware, where they have two homes. The first lady reported paying $3,139 in Virginia income tax.
The Bidens hit the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, called SALT, a product of Trump’s tax law and derided by Democrats in high-cost states. They also paid more than $2,000 in additional federal taxes imposed by the Affordable Care Act.
Other charitable donations include $4,000 to Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors; $2,000 to the Fraternal Order of Police Foundation; $1,680 to St. Joseph on the Brandywine (the Bidens’ home parish); $1,125 to Westminster Presbyterian Church; $1,000 each to Cranston Heights Fire Company and Ministry of Caring.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, paid $93,570 in federal income taxes last year, with an effective tax rate of 20.5 percent.
Their combined federal earnings were $456,918, including Harris’ vice presidential salary and a reported $169,665 from Georgetown University, where Emhoff, an intellectual property and business lawyer, joined the Law Center’s teaching ranks in January 2021.

The couple paid $17,612 in California income taxes, and Emhoff paid $9,697 in District of Columbia income tax.
The couple contributed $23,000 to charity during the year. They owed $611 to the IRS.
The income figures for Harris and Emhoff were far below what they reported in prior years when Emhoff was still practicing law. When Harris campaigned for president in 2019, they released 15 years of tax returns, including earning about $2 million in 2018.
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#Bidens #579K #year #paid #percent #tax #rate #returns #show
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 19, 2023
Joint Chiefs shuffle: Biden’s top contenders to replace Trump’s military leaders

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The vacancies give President Biden a chance to put his stamp on the Joint Chiefs as the administration looks to take big steps to counter Chinese aggression in the Pacific, chart a new course in Europe after the Ukraine invasion and dump old weapons systems to make room for new ones.
“These are legacy moments for the Biden administration, but they are also the guard rails for the republic,” Peter Feaver, a former staffer on the National Security Council and author of “Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations.”
It’s also an opportunity for Biden, who named the first Black defense secretary in 2021, to make more historic appointments, including the first female member of the Joint Chiefs. Last year, Biden chose Adm. Linda Fagan to be the first female commandant of the Coast Guard, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security.
POLITICO spoke to 11 current and former Defense Department officials, as well as leaders in academia with knowledge of the discussions to forecast who’s in the running for the jobs. Some were granted anonymity to discuss the subject ahead of the announcements.
Here are the names at the top of the list:
Chair
Current leader: Army Gen. Mark Milley, sworn in Oct. 1, 2019

The frontrunner: Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown
If you ask most people at DoD, the shoo-in for the top job is Gen. C.Q. Brown, the Air Force chief of staff. Brown, a fighter pilot by training, has stellar credentials, serving as commander of the service’s forces both in the Middle East and in the Pacific. He is also the first Black man to serve as Air Force chief of staff, and was nominated for the job the same summer as the Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation.
Brown is not known for making news, and typically sticks closely to the talking points during public appearances and press engagements. But in a rare candid moment, he weighed in on the racial unrest roiling the country in an emotional video describing his experience navigating the issue in the military.
Tapping Brown for the top job would mean plucking him from his current post before his term is up. He was sworn in Aug. 6, 2020, and has another year left as the Air Force’s top officer.

Marine Corps Gen. David Berger
The White House is also considering Gen. David Berger, the Marine Corps Commandant, who has served in the post since July 2019.
Berger “connected” more with the president during his interview for the job, one former DoD official said. Berger’s interview lasted 90 minutes, while Brown’s interview lasted only 40, another former DoD official said.
A career infantry officer, Berger has commanded troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Pacific. Yet he is seen as controversial in some corners of the military. His vision for reshaping the Marines by shedding heavy weaponry in favor of a lighter, faster force has drawn criticism, particularly from retired generals.
The longer interview for Berger doesn’t mean he has the job of course, but one person familiar with both Berger and Brown pointed out that the Marine leader is considered more talkative than the analytical Brown. Plus, Berger’s almost total rethinking of how the Marine Corps will be positioned to fight — particularly in the Pacific — is by far the most ambitious retooling of any of the services in decades, which could have sparked more conversation.
One factor that might weigh against Berger is that the current vice chair, Adm. Christopher Grady, is a Navy officer. Lawmakers frown on having a chair and vice chair from within a department, such as the Department of the Navy, which includes both the Navy and Marine Corps.

Army Gen. Laura Richardson
DoD insiders aren’t ruling out Gen. Laura Richardson, an Army officer serving as the commander of U.S. Southern Command. She is one of only 10 women ever to hold the rank of a four-star general or admiral. A helicopter pilot, Richardson previously served as commanding general of U.S. Army North, and has commanded an assault helicopter battalion in Iraq. She also served as military aide to former Vice President Al Gore, and the Army’s legislative liaison to Congress.
But one unofficial rule of the process is that no two consecutive chairs should be from the same service. Since Milley is also an Army officer, Richardson may be at a disadvantage. However, she is also seen as a candidate to replace Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville.
Army
Current leader: Army Gen. James McConville, sworn in Aug. 9, 2019.

The frontrunner: Army Gen. Randy George
While Richardson is a contender, the top candidate for Army chief of staff is Gen. Randy George, who is serving in the vice chief of staff role. George is an infantry officer who served in the 101st Airborne Division and deployed in support of the Gulf War. He also served as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s senior military assistant from June 2021 to July 2022.

Army Gen. Andrew Poppas
Another possibility is Gen. Andrew Poppas, a former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division. He’s the head of Army Forces Command, a position Milley also held before becoming the Army’s top officer. Poppas also served as director of operations of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, a post Austin held in 2009.
Navy
Current leader: Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday, sworn in on Aug. 22, 2019.

The frontrunner: Navy Adm. Lisa Franchetti
Navy Adm. Lisa Franchetti, currently the vice chief of naval operations, is widely seen as a lock for the top job. The second woman to hold the vice CNO job, Franchetti also holds a degree in journalism. A career surface warfare officer, Franchetti served on the Joint Staff, and commanded the destroyer USS Ross.

Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo
There has also been some talk of Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, as a possible candidate. He is a longshot, however, and is considered the top pick to take over as head of Indo-Pacific Command in two years when Adm. John Aquilino moves on.
Air Force
Current leader: Gen. C.Q. Brown, sworn in on Aug. 6, 2020.

The frontrunner: Gen. Jacqueline Von Ovost
If Brown is tapped to be the next chair, that creates an opening to be the top leader of the Air Force.
There’s a lot of buzz around Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, who as the commander of U.S. Transportation Command has been at the center of all DoD’s most high-profile efforts during the Biden administration. Her forces moved vaccines during the Covid-19 response, flew evacuees from Kabul airport in 2021 and are shipping weapons to Ukraine. She is the first female head of Transportation Command, and would be the first woman to head the Air Force.

Gen. David Allvin
The Air Force’s No. 2 military officer since 2020, Allvin previously served as the director for strategy, plans, and policy on the Joint Staff. He comes from the air mobility community and commanded forces in Afghanistan and Europe.
Marine Corps
Current leader: Gen. David Berger, sworn in on July 11, 2019

The frontrunner: Gen. Eric Smith
Gen. Eric Smith is the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, making him the service’s No. 2 general. He has commanded at every level, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a general officer, he commanded the Marine Corps’ forces in U.S. Southern Command, as well as Marine Corps Combat Development Command. He also served in the Pentagon as senior military assistant to the defense secretary in 2016 to 2017.

Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl
While Smith has for months topped the list as a successor to Berger, another candidate in high standing is Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, who leads the Marine Corps’ Combat Development Command. In that job, Heckl has pushed to test and implement Berger’s reforms, and he has in many ways been the service’s public face for modernization in the Berger vein.
Joe Gould, Paul McLeary and Lee Hudson contributed to this report.
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#Joint #Chiefs #shuffle #Bidens #top #contenders #replace #Trumps #military #leaders
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 18, 2023
Biden’s poll numbers look grim as he preps for reelection bid

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According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average approval rating stands at 43 percent, about 9 points lower than his 52 percent disapproval rating. That’s only 1 point higher than Trump’s FiveThirtyEight approval rating on April 15, 2019, at the same point in his one-term presidency.
Determining the extent to which Biden’s poor job rating endangers his likely reelection bid is not just an academic exercise. A deep dive into the numbers reveals Biden isn’t just struggling with independents and near-unanimous disapproval among Republicans. He’s also soft among Democrats and left-leaning demographic groups, a weakness that suggests a diminished enthusiasm for his candidacy — though something that could be papered over by partisan voting patterns in the general election.
That’s because the possible “alternative” to Biden next November could be Trump, whose personal favorability ratings are generally worse than Biden’s. Even as Trump has expanded his lead in the GOP presidential primary, he remains less popular than his Oval Office successor.
For Biden, the polling presents both serious warning signs and reasons to think his peril may be overstated. Here’s why:
Biden’s tenuous place in history
Biden’s 43-percent approval rating at this juncture of his term puts him roughly even with past presidents who have both won — Barack Obama (43 percent), Ronald Reagan (41 percent) — and lost, like Trump (42 percent) and Jimmy Carter (40 percent).

But to underscore how things can change between mid-April of the year before the election and the next November, both George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush, sported high approval ratings at this point. George H.W. Bush was just a couple of months removed from the successful Operation Desert Storm and had an approval rating of 77 percent in mid-April, according to Gallup, which maintains the deepest archives of presidential job ratings.
The elder Bush would go on to win only 37 percent of the vote in a three-way race with Bill Clinton (43 percent) and independent Ross Perot (19 percent), owing to economic woes that overshadowed the credit he’d gotten from the first Iraq war.
George W. Bush had a 75 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll in mid-April 2003 — about a month into the second Iraq War. He won reelection, though by just 2 percentage points over Democrat John Kerry.

For Biden, not only is 18 months a long time, but he faces challenges both foreign and domestic, including slowing-but-persistent inflation and a possible economic recession.
Trouble with swing voters
Biden ousted Trump from the White House thanks to a coalition that combined the entire Democratic base with key swing groups who don’t identify with either party. But now both blocs show significant cracks in their approval of Biden.
Among independents, a group Biden won by double digits in 2020, the president is now underwater by a roughly 2-to-1margin, according to two polls released in late March from Fox News and Quinnipiac University.
In the Fox News poll, only 35 percent of voters approved of the job Biden is doing, while 65 percent disapproved. In the Quinnipiac poll, Biden’s numbers with independents are even worse: just 26 percent approve, and 67 percent disapprove.
Biden is 17 points underwater among suburban voters in the Fox News poll and 23 points in arrears in a Pew Research Center survey from late March and early April. Swingy suburban voters are a group Biden won narrowly over Trump in both the network exit poll (Biden +2 among suburban voters) and AP Votecast (Biden +10), a voter survey commissioned by The Associated Press and Fox News.
Biden won self-described moderates by 20 to 30 points in 2020, but the same group is evenly split on his job approval, according to the Fox News poll: 47 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove.
Softness among Democrats and core constituencies
Perceptions of Biden’s job performance are uniquely tepid among base voters — Democrats and other left-leaning demographic groups — in ways that his most recent predecessors, Trump and Barack Obama, never experienced. Even as they inspired enmity among members of the opposite party, both Trump and Obama won the same level of approval from their own party.
But that’s not happening with Biden. Virtually all Republicans say they disapprove of his job performance — 90 percent or greater in each of the three polls referenced above — but Democrats aren’t answering with their own approval.
In the Fox News and Quinnipiac polls, approval of Biden’s job performance among Democrats is around 80 percent. The Pew Research Center survey combines Democrats with independents who say they lean more toward the Democratic Party — still a must-win group for Biden — and finds his approval rating lower, at 67 percent.
Moreover, Biden is struggling with key subgroups of the Democratic base. He won around 9-in-10 Black voters in 2020, but only 59 percent of Black respondents to the Pew Research Center poll said they approve of how Biden is handling his job as president.
So far, Biden isn’t facing a credible threat for the presidential nomination within the Democratic Party. Should he enter the race, the only announced challengers with any degree of name ID he’d face are Marianne Williamson, who dropped out of the 2020 race before voting began, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the senator whose most prominent public advocacy in recent years has been against vaccinations (according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation polling, only 8 percent of Democrats say they won’t receive the Covid vaccine, underscoring how difficult it will be to sell primary voters on an anti-vaccination platform).
Still, Biden faces a distinct — and without recent precedent — lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy among Democrats. In a CNN poll from last month, only 68 percent of Democrats said Biden deserves to be reelected next year.
In this way, Biden’s approval rating might actually overstate his electoral position: Around 1-in-10 Americans who say they approve of Biden’s job performance, 11 percent, say they don’t think he deserves to be reelected. In other words, they think he’s doing a good job, but harbor doubts about another term.
CNN noted that the 11 percent is a greater share than the overlap between Trump and Obama approvers and those who thought they deserved second terms. Those numbers were 3 and 5 percent for Trump and Obama, respectively.
But there’s also reason to believe Democrats will come home next November. Even as his approval rating and reelection numbers lag, Biden is still running neck-and-neck with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in general-election matchups — and winning most Democrats in the process.
In the Quinnipiac poll, despite his 80 percent approval rating with Democratic voters, Biden wins 93 percent of Democrats in a head-to-head with Trump and 94 percent in a faceoff with DeSantis.
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#Bidens #poll #numbers #grim #preps #reelection #bid
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 15, 2023
A major question has hung over Biden’s trip to Ireland: Would he stay forever?

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“When you’re here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave,” Biden marveled soon after his arrival at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant. A capacity crowd had waited for hours to see him in the rustic pub. “Coming here feels like coming home.”
When presidents travel abroad, they are traditionally tight, focused affairs calibrated with a specific goal in mind: To advance the White House’s interests and shape the place they will soon leave behind. But for three days in Ireland, as Biden roamed the countryside by motorcade with his sister Valerie and son Hunter in tow, the president seemed content to exist within it.
He met dignitaries and townspeople. He toasted his Irish ancestors, the Irish people, Irish Americans and even the “quite a few,” he said, “who wish they were lucky enough to be Irish.”
He took a selfie with nationalist politician and alleged former Irish Republican Army member Gerry Adams, as well as with an Irish reporter and nearly anyone else who wanted one. He kissed babies and had a close encounter with a sliotar.
He butchered the name of New Zealand’s famed rugby team — badly. At one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to make friends with the Irish president’s dog. In a surprise to nobody, he quoted at least three different Irish poets but may have quoted his Grandpa Finnegan even more.
And all that came before Friday evening, when Biden traveled west across the country to County Mayo, where he recalled “the history and hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors in front of an estimated 20,000 gathered at a 19th-century cathedral on the banks of the River Moy.
“Family is the beginning, the middle and the end,” Biden said. “That’s the Irish of it: the beginning, middle and the end.”
Just hours earlier, Biden had visited the Knock Shrine, a pilgrimage site for Catholics made all the more significant by a chance meeting with the priest who administered last rites to his late son, Beau. The encounter reportedly brought Biden to tears.

President Joe Biden touches part of the original stonework from the apparition gable at the Knock Shrine as he talks with Father Richard Gibbons, parish priest and rector of Knock Shrine, in Knock, Ireland, Friday, April 14, 2023.
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Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Biden had come to Ireland to reaffirm its close relationship with the U.S. — and to reaffirm his own personal relationship with a place he credits for shaping him. It was here that the criticisms he faces at home seemed to fade away: His age didn’t make him old, it provided him wisdom. His gaffes didn’t make him shaky, they gave him charm.
Biden has made no secret of his deep fascination with his ancestral origins. And since visiting Ireland as vice president to trace his lineage, he’d eagerly sought a reason to come back. The White House found its justification in the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement that largely ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland — a U.S. brokered deal that’s served as an integral element of the island’s tight relationship with America.
Yet Biden spent only a handful of hours in Northern Ireland before jetting off to his ancestral homeland. Combined with the dearth of policy announcements or apparent progress on political priorities, the move raised questions over whether the trip was, as one reporter put it, “a taxpayer-funded family reunion.”
The White House rejected the characterization, pointing to his speeches and meetings with Irish and U.K. leaders. Biden, though, appeared otherwise determined not to let thorny political demands intrude too much on his mutual lovefest with the people of Ireland.
The president has answered only a single question unrelated to his visit, on the search for the Pentagon document leaker. The most substantive answer he gave all week to any query came in response to the child who had asked about the key to success — prompting Biden to launch into a winding and often-told anecdote about the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms and the importance of not judging people’s motives.
“That’s a long answer to a real quick question,” he conceded, well after the child had lost interest.
At times, it was tough to tell where Biden as president ended and Biden as tourist began. His tour through the country was sentimental and joyful. During a visit to Carlingford Castle, he peered across the water through gathering fog, chatting quietly with a local guide enlisted to bring him through the last Irish landmark Biden’s great-great-grandfather saw before embarking for America over 170 years ago.
“It feels wonderful,” Biden said of his emotions upon visiting the site, as a bagpipe and drum ensemble prepared to strike up an original piece entitled: “A Biden Return.”

President Joe Biden tours Carlingford Castle with Micheál Martin, Tánaiste of Ireland, in County Louth, Ireland, Wednesday, April 12, 2023.
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Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
In Dundalk, a short ride from the castle through the County Louth where his Finnegan ancestors once lived, Biden bantered with workers at a local market, debating which food and souvenirs to buy. (He left, the town paper later reported, with a bounty: Lemon meringue, chocolate eclairs, bread and butter pudding, pear and almond cake, and a mug with an image of a dog on it.)
And on Thursday, as he became the fourth U.S. president to address a joint session of Ireland’s Parliament, Biden paused to recognize the familial significance of what he would term “one of the great honors of my career.”
“Well mom,” he said, looking skyward, “you said it would happen.”
In between speeches and state dinners, the scenes at times bordered on chaos. Throngs of well-wishers lined Biden’s routes, some stationing themselves mere inches off the road as the motorcade whipped by. Others gathered on highway overpasses in the driving rain, waving Irish and American flags.
As Biden stopped in local towns and businesses, the tight spaces and swelling crowds caused visible alarm among his Secret Service detail. “A security nightmare,” one agent muttered at one point.
But Biden, basking in the middle of it all, seemed unconcerned.
“I wish our mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, were here today. She’d be so damn proud,” he said in the Windsor Bar, surrounded by a mix of relatives, Irish officials and local residents. “Louth held such a special place in her heart, it really did.”
As the trip wore on and the outside world fell away, Biden appeared to feel increasingly at home — a sentiment he expressed so frequently that some reporters and aides joked he might actually stay.
“I don’t know why the hell my ancestors left here. It’s beautiful,” he said on Wednesday.
“I only wish I could stay longer,” he told Irish lawmakers on Thursday.
“I’m not going home,” he said, admiring the Irish president’s residence.
Biden, however reluctantly, would eventually have to head home, set as he was to depart the Irish coast late Friday for his family’s adopted shores of Delaware. But well before then, he made permanent his intention to return.
“Your feet will bring you to where your heart is,” Biden wrote in the guestbook at the Irish president’s residence, in reference to a line he attributed to William Butler Yeats that he said his grandfather often quoted.
It was a slightly more poetic way of reiterating a pledge that he’d already made at the Windsor Bar, before striding back into the cold, where the crowds stood eager and waiting: “The bad news for all of you is, we’ll be back,” Biden said. “There’s no way to keep us out.”
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#major #question #hung #Bidens #trip #Ireland #stay
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 15, 2023
The nerd’s guide to Biden’s newest electric vehicle push

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How big a deal is this really?
Potentially very big.
If Wednesday’s proposals work out the way Biden’s regulators envision, two out of every three new cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. in 2032 will be electric — more than 10 times the current national sales rate.
That figure includes a projection that 78 percent of sedans, 68 percent of pickups and 62 percent of crossovers and SUVs could be battery-powered just nine years from now.
Electric vehicle sales are rising already, of course. Some automakers, such as Ford and General Motors, have announced plans to stop making gasoline-powered cars entirely by 2035.
But without stricter regulations, the EPA says, electric vehicles would make up only 39 percent of new sales in 2032.
The agency also projects that half of new “vocational” vehicles — such as garbage trucks and school buses — will be electric that year under its proposals, as well as 25 percent of long-haul freight tractor trailers.
Aren’t electric vehicles more expensive than gasoline-powered ones?
Yes. And EPA estimated that its proposal would add an incremental cost of $844 for cars and $1,385 for trucks in 2032.
But it also contends that those upfront costs will be more than offset by consumers’ savings on fuel and maintenance (electric cars don’t need oil changes, for example), as well as purchasing incentives. The agency says the average buyer of a car or light-duty truck will save $12,000 over the vehicle’s lifetime.

That’s on top of the rule’s projected benefits in reduced oil imports, reductions in diseases related to air pollution and a lessening of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
How would the EPA’s rule work?
The first and most sweeping rule, Reg. 2060-AV49, covers light-duty cars and trucks as well as medium-duty vehicles, a class that includes larger SUVs and passenger vans.
It seeks to prod automakers to produce more electric vehicles by slashing the amount of greenhouse gases allowed to come out of tailpipes.
For light-duty vehicles, the new target would be an average of 82 grams of carbon dioxide per mile traveled in 2032. That’s down roughly half from the administration’s existing target for 2026.
The target is a “fleet average” that the EPA calculates for each auto manufacturer. That means that an automaker’s sales of zero-carbon electric vehicles can offset the pollution from its fossil-fuel cars and trucks, though automakers may pursue more efficiencies in gasoline-powered models as well.
The final real-world figures can also vary depending on how automakers choose to comply with the rule.
The rule also strengthens limits on vehicles’ conventional air pollutants — a step that would also increase the incentives for carmakers to go electric.
For acid-rain-causing nitrogen oxides and other organic gases, the standard would be reduced to 12 milligrams per mile in 2032, down 60 percent from an Obama-era requirement. EPA also proposed a standard for “particulate matter” (i.e., soot) that’s down as much as 92 percent from current standards.
In addition to the primary proposal, Alejandra Nunez, EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for mobile sources, said the agency is soliciting comments on several alternative regulatory options of varying stringency for light-duty vehicles. The least stringent would achieve 64 percent electric vehicle penetration in 2032, Nunez said, while the most would reach 69 percent.
Is that all?
No! The proposal also includes several tweaks to a compliance program that EPA has been using to help automakers meet its requirements.
The agency is maintaining a system in which companies that produce less-polluting vehicles can earn “credits” that they can then sell to their more-polluting rivals. (These credits have been a revenue source for companies like Toyota and Tesla.)
On the other hand, EPA wants to phase out a bonus credits program that rewarded companies for adopting technologies such as solar roof panels and high-efficiency headlights.
EPA also wants to stop giving credits to electric vehicle manufacturers for using more efficient air conditioning.
EPA’s second proposed rule, Reg. 2060-AV50, would cover heavy-duty vehicles such as tractor-trailers and vocational vehicles — the source of a quarter of the transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. The rule follows two prior rounds of greenhouse gas regulations for heavy-duty trucks that manufacturers largely accepted.
That proposal also creates warranty requirements for batteries on zero-emissions trucks and would require automakers to install “state of health” battery monitors accessible to customers.
The light-duty proposal will be open for 60 days of public comment and the heavy-duty proposal for 50 days of comment once published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks.
But wait — didn’t Biden just make it harder to get tax breaks for electric vehicles?
Yes, less than two weeks ago: Under a Treasury Department proposal announced March 31, fewer of the electric cars and trucks now on the market will qualify for the $7,500-per-vehicle tax breaks intended to make EVs more affordable for consumers.
The aim, as mandated by Congress, is to ensure that vehicles receiving the credits are made in the U.S., and that their critical parts and minerals come from either the United States or its closest trading partners. Even tighter restrictions from Treasury — aimed at boxing out countries like China — are due later this year.
So which vehicles will qualify for the tax credits?
Stay tuned: By Tuesday, automakers are supposed to confirm which of their models meet the new Treasury requirements. (They’ll have to swear this under penalty of perjury.)
But when POLITICO questioned the car companies last week, they said just five of the 91 electric car models now sold in the U.S. clearly qualified for the full tax break. Those all came from American automakers, with General Motors, Ford and Tesla leading the pack.
What other obstacles could complicate Biden’s goals?
The U.S. still doesn’t have nearly enough chargers for all the electric vehicles that the EPA wants to see on the highways. And many of the chargers that exist suffer from malfunctions, slow charging and other woes, as David Ferris recently documented for POLITICO’s E&E News.
Questions linger about whether the U.S. electric grid can stand up to the load of charging so many vehicles, and whether domestic manufacturing and mining can ramp up fast enough to make sure EVs are produced domestically.
The administration’s hope is that the prodding from the EPA, the availability of tax breaks and other incentives for technologies such as charging stations will speed up a transformation to electric vehicles that market forces are already pushing to bring about. That’s a work in progress, of course.
What do people say about the rule?
Many environmental groups welcomed Wednesday’s news. Dan Lashof, U.S. director for the World Resources Institute, said in a statement that EPA’s proposals will “speed the United States’ auto industry toward an all-electric future faster than any regulation has before.”
But Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign, argued that the proposal isn’t stringent enough. He called on the EPA to write a regulation that achieves 67 percent electric vehicle sales in 2030 — two years earlier than the agency’s timeline.
“Biden shouldn’t let automakers’ can’t-do attitude sabotage his best shot at cutting carbon emissions,” Becker said in a statement.
Republicans were, notably, less thrilled. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) accused Biden of trying “to ban the cars we drive,” a common refrain from GOP critics of the new rule.
“The ‘electrification of everything’ is not a solution,” Barrasso said Wednesday. “It’s a road to higher prices and fewer choices.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
Who’s thrilled by electric cars? The trend that could help or hurt Biden’s climate agenda.

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Republican lawmakers are predicting a consumer backlash to the latest mandate from Washington. But industry analysts say car buyers are showing a growing appetite for vehicles that can be refueled with an electric cord rather than a gas pump.
“Honestly, the vehicles being delivered by automakers are a lot better — people are willing to sit on waiting lists for two or three years,” said Chris Harto, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “There’s a huge amount of pent-up demand for EVs right now, and automakers aren’t delivering.”
Just two years ago, Biden said he wanted electric vehicles to make up half of new car and truck sales by the end of the decade. The EPA proposal could push electric vehicles even further.
Electric vehicles made up about 5.6 percent of cars and trucks sold in 2022 — not nearly enough to achieve the large emissions reductions that scientists say are needed to avoid debilitating impacts of climate change. That was up from 1.8 percent in 2020 and 3.1 percent in 2021, according to data from S&P Global Mobility.
The EPA rules will only reinforce automakers’ move toward electric vehicles, said Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at the consultancy Gartner. “These rules would really just take away any sort of safety net or ability to turn back,” he said, adding that automakers will likely also press EPA for loopholes “to give wriggle room to the market.”
The upcoming regulations come as the federal government is pouring billions of dollars into the construction of charging stations along highways and incentives for people who buy EVs. But they also come as the Biden administration is potentially raising the cost of electric cars by requiring manufacturers to make the vehicles in the U.S., while using battery minerals from the United States or its closest trading partners — not China.
So far, the popularity of EVs is on the rise, and that could increase if the EPA rules lead to more models, some advocates said.
“Every single state in the union continued to see steady growth in electric vehicle sales in the last decade,” said Lisa Frank, who heads the Washington, D.C., legislative office at Environment America.

On the other hand, it’s unknown if automakers will be able to produce EVs for the mass market while also overcoming the tremendous expense of bringing a new kind of vehicle to scale. For that reason, today’s EVs carry a higher price tag than traditional models. (Prices for the cheapest model from Tesla, the nation’s top electric carmaker, start at just under $42,000.)
“The challenge is that as of now, the vehicles aren’t affordable enough that there’ll be a big enough buying base for them to be bought in these numbers,” said John Gartner, who leads EV and charging infrastructure research at the Center for Sustainable Energy, a California nonprofit.
When contacted by POLITICO’s E&E News, no automakers wanted to comment on the forthcoming rule. Some pointed to a statement put out last week by an industry lobbying group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.
“The question isn’t whether it can be done, it’s how fast it can be done,” the Alliance for Automotive Innovation said of the transition to electric vehicles, adding that it “will depend almost exclusively on having the right policies and market conditions.”
The rules come as state officials, and Congress, race ahead with their own efforts to transition away from gasoline-powered transportation.
California approved a rule that would require all new vehicles sold in the state to be emissions-free by 2035, including plug-in hybrids.
Congress included billions of dollars to build public EV charging stations in the 2021 infrastructure law. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act dedicated billions more to tax credits and other incentives for people who buy the cars and a broad array of carmakers and parts suppliers.
The rules have been shaped in part by EPA tests of cars and components at the agency’s lab in Ann Arbor, Mich., and also by technical research and input from carmakers.
“As they consider all of those things, they think, what is the maximum they can push the industry?” said Dave Cooke, senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The proposed rule will cover greenhouse gas emissions for cars built in 2027 and future model years. Current EPA regulations, which cover cars built through 2026, are expected to push EV adoption to 17 percent of new car sales by the time they expire.
Bloomberg first reported that the rules could exceed Biden’s goal of making half of all new cars carbon-free by 2030. The New York Times reported separately that EPA’s tailpipe rule could push EVs to as much as 67 percent of new cars sales.
Separately, EPA is also planning to roll out greenhouse gas limits on heavy-duty trucks starting in model year 2027, following up on its rules that were finalized last year to limit soot and smog-forming pollution like nitrogen oxides from the trucking industry.
Historically, EPA hasn’t told carmakers what kinds of vehicles to produce when it sets greenhouse gas standards. Instead, it has set a limit — a certain number of grams of carbon dioxide per mile driven — that each company has to meet over the entire fleet of vehicles it sells each year.
Companies that exceed the goal can build up credits to use in future years and can trade credits among themselves.
Major carmakers including General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Corp. have already set their own goals to produce more electric vehicles. The EPA proposal “is kind of saying, ‘All right, put your money where your mouth is,’” said Simon Mui, director of clean vehicles and fuels at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The rules are already attracting scrutiny. Environmental advocacy and consumer groups have argued that EPA should push for even more emissions reductions, particularly given the demand for electric cars and trucks.
Lawmakers are also beginning to push back by criticizing the regulations as a threat to blue-collar Americans.
“The EPA needs to explain to the constituents in my district that they should be driving some puny electric car instead of their pickup trucks,” Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said Monday on Twitter, linking to a photo of an electric-powered Smart car from Europe.
Beyond the rhetoric, conservatives in Congress may have a chance to block the latest emissions rules. Republicans in the Senate and House, for instance, have introduced a proposal under the Congressional Review Act to roll back the EPA rules on soot and smog from heavy-duty trucks.
Timothy Cama contributed to this report.
A version of this report first ran in E&E News’ Climatewire. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
Why Joe Biden’s whirlwind trip to Belfast went better than it looked

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BELFAST — He came, he saw … and he got the hell out as fast as he could.
But Joe Biden’s brief visit to Northern Ireland across Tuesday night and Wednesday — 18 hours total, about half of them in bed — featured none of the gaffes that have previously blotted his diplomatic copybook. (That would change, however, after he headed south to the Republic of Ireland a few hours later.)
Indeed, the U.S. president successfully navigated Northern Ireland’s famously choppy political waters, avoided throwing a spotlight on the failure of its unity government — and even revealed an often-hidden and more hopeful reality: Off-camera, these supposedly warring politicians actually get on well.

Wednesday’s gathering at Ulster University in Belfast brought Northern Ireland’s opposing political leaders — including the key figure blocking the revival of power-sharing, Democratic Unionist chief Jeffrey Donaldson — side by side at last, along with a selfie-shooting Biden.
The president carefully avoided confronting Donaldson directly about his party’s yearlong blockade of the Northern Ireland Assembly, while dangling the prospect of billions of dollars of U.S. business investment if powersharing is restored.
And instead of extolling his famous Irish Catholic roots, Biden’s speech noted the English and Protestant elements of his family tree, and the disproportionate contribution of Ulster Scots immigrants to the foundation of the United States.
“The family ties, the pride, those Ulster Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep,” Biden told the audience.
“Men born in Ulster were among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for freedom’s cause … Your history is our history.”
If Biden had punches to throw in the Democratic Unionists’ direction, he pulled them.
Speaking to POLITICO, a visibly relieved Donaldson said afterward that he’d appreciated the president’s “measured and balanced remarks” — and distanced himself from his unionist colleagues’ pointed criticisms of Biden as a poodle to Irish nationalism and even the outlawed IRA.
He also rebuffed a claim by his predecessor as DUP leader, Arlene Foster, that Biden “hates the United Kingdom,” stating: “The United Kingdom and the United States have a strong alliance and we want to build on that.”
Donaldson added that he had been reassured by the president during a brief backstage conversation “that he respects the integrity of Northern Ireland, that he respects our ability to restore the [power-sharing] institutions on the basis that we respect what the Belfast Agreement said — that Northern Ireland remains an integral part of the United Kingdom, and there should be no barrier to trade within the United Kingdom.”
The backdrop to the speech had been one of surprising unity, with unionists and Irish nationalists chatting amicably in the audience against background music of soft jazz.
Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy — the Irish republican party’s finance minister in the five-party government that collapsed in October because of DUP obstruction — laughed heartily alongside former Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt as the two discussed the ins and outs of power-sharing.
“The parties do work well together when they get the opportunity,” Murphy told POLITICO afterward.
He noted that Biden’s speech diplomatically avoided assigning blame for the Stormont impasse and focused on making a better Northern Ireland for today’s Ulster University students, who are too young to remember the three decades of bloodshed that ended following paramilitary cease-fires in the mid-1990s.
But Murphy added: “Biden’s pitch is about the future. The DUP don’t get that. If they think they somehow got off the hook here because they didn’t get a slap from an American president. Well, the rest of this society’s moving on with or without them.”
US President Joe Biden delivers a speech at the Windsor Bar in Dundalk, Ireland | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Most of those present agreed that, even though some leaders had wanted Biden to visit the Stormont parliament building overlooking Belfast, the president’s decision not to do so meant their failure to form a new government hadn’t become the central image of the visit.
“Of course it’s a missed opportunity. We don’t have an assembly and an executive,” said Naomi Long, leader of the center-ground Alliance Party and justice minister in the failed government.
“But to have gone to Stormont today when it isn’t operating would have been farcical,” she said.
The assembly’s caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey, also from Sinn Féin, agreed that in hindsight, Biden was probably right to have declined his own invitation to visit what is essentially Ground Zero of Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction.
“It ran the risk of underlining the problem,” Maskey said. “It’s just as well he didn’t go there because you’d be spending the next two or three days trying to repair negative media.”
While Biden strikingly spent less than a day in Belfast before crossing the border to spend the rest of the week touring the Republic of Ireland, he left behind his new envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy III, who will spend the next 10 days building business and political contacts across the U.K. region.
Kennedy, making his first trip here, chatted and joked with DUP politicians, particularly Emma Little-Pengelly, a close Donaldson ally and former special adviser to previous party leaders Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.
They discussed tourist highlights of Northern Ireland’s glorious Giant’s Causeway coast and the best ice cream parlors in its resort towns. (Kennedy made a note of Little-Pengelly’s favorite: Morelli’s of Portstewart.)
Kennedy insisted Biden hadn’t needed to spend too much time in Belfast talking to local leaders this week — because he’d just had all of them, including Donaldson, as guests to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day.
His own mission, Kennedy added, “is not about the United States government coming in to tell the people of Northern Ireland what they need to do.”
“They’ve got a vision of what that future can be,” he said. “We can support them.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
Biden’s Northern Ireland ultimatum looks doomed to fail

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LONDON — Joe Biden is not someone known for his subtlety.
His gaffe-prone nature — which saw him last week confuse the New Zealand rugby team with British forces from the Irish War of Independence — leaves little in the way of nuance.
But he is also a sentimental man from a long gone era of Washington, who specializes in a type of homespun, aw-shucks affability that would be seen as naff in a younger president.

His lack of subtlety was on show in Belfast last week as he issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — return to Northern Ireland’s power sharing arrangements or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. business investment.
The DUP — a unionist party that does not take kindly to lectures from American presidents — is refusing to sit in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to its anger with the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which has created trade friction between the region and the rest of the U.K.
The DUP is also refusing to support the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework, which aims to fix the economic problems created by the protocol, despite hopes it would see the party reconvene the Northern Irish Assembly.
The president on Wednesday urged Northern Irish leaders to “unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning.”
However, American business groups paint a far more complex and nuanced view of future foreign investment into Northern Ireland than offered up by Biden.
Biden told a Belfast crowd on Wednesday there were “scores of major American corporations wanting to come here” to invest, but that a suspended Stormont was acting as a block on that activity.
One U.S. business figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Biden’s flighty rhetoric was “exaggerated” and that many businesses would be looking beyond the state of the regional assembly to make their investment decisions.
The president spoke as if Ulster would be rewarded with floods of American greenbacks if the DUP reverses its intransigence, predicting that Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product (GDP) would soon be triple its 1998 level. Its GDP is currently around double the size of when the Good Friday Agreement was struck in 1998.
Emanuel Adam, executive director of BritishAmerican Business, said this sounded like a “magic figure” unless Biden “knows something we don’t know about.”
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. told POLITICO that U.S. politicians for “too long” have “promised some economic El Dorado or bonanza if you only do what we say politically … but that bonanza has never arrived and people are not naive enough here to believe it ever will.”
“A presidential visit is always welcome, but the glitter on top is not an economic driver,” he said.
Joe Biden addresses a crowd of thousands on April 14, 2023 in Ballina, Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Facing both ways
The British government is hoping the Windsor Framework will ease economic tensions in Northern Ireland and create politically stable conditions for inward foreign direct investment.
The framework removes many checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and has begun to slowly create a more collaborative relationship between London and Brussels on a number of fronts — two elements which have been warmly welcomed across the Atlantic.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, and the U.K.’s internal market.
“That’s like the world’s most exciting economic zone,” Sunak said in February.
Jake Colvin, head of Washington’s National Foreign Trade Council business group, said U.S. firms wanted to see “confidence that the frictions over the protocol have indeed been resolved.”
“Businesses will look to mechanisms like the Windsor Framework to provide stability,” he said.
Marjorie Chorlins, senior vice president for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Windsor Framework was “very important” for U.S. businesses and that “certainty about the relationship between the U.K. and the EU is critical.”
She said a reconvened Stormont would mean more legislative stability on issues like skills and healthcare, but added that there were a whole range of other broader U.K. wide economic factors that will play a major part in investment decisions.
This is particularly salient in a week where official figures showed the U.K.’s GDP flatlining and predictions that Britain will be the worst economic performer in the G20 this year.
“We want to see a return to robust growth and prosperity for the U.K. broadly and are eager to work with government at all levels,” Chorlins said.
“Political and economic instability in the U.K. has been a challenge for businesses of all sizes.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market | Pool photo by Paul Faith/Getty Images
Her words underline just how much global reputational damage last year’s carousel of prime ministers caused for the U.K., with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently warning of a “hangover effect” from Liz Truss’ premiership and the broader Westminster psychodrama of 2022.
America’s Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, accompanied the president last week and has been charged with drumming up U.S. corporate interest in Northern Ireland.
Kennedy said Northern Ireland is already “the number-one foreign investment location for proximity and market access.”
Northern Ireland has been home to £1.5 billion of American investment in the past decade and had the second-most FDI projects per capita out of all U.K. regions in 2021.
Claire Hanna, Westminster MP for the nationalist SDLP, believes reconvening Stormont would “signal a seriousness that there isn’t going to be anymore mucking around.”
“It’s also about the signal that the restoration of Stormont sends — that these are the accepted trading arrangements,” she said.
Hanna says the DUP’s willingness to “demonize the two biggest trading blocs in the world — the U.S. and EU” — was damaging to the country’s future economic prospects.
‘The money goes south’
At a more practical level, Biden’s ultimatum appears to carry zero weight with DUP representatives.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson made it clear last week that he was unmoved by Biden’s economic proclamations and gave no guarantee his party would sit in the regional assembly in the foreseeable future.
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson told POLITICO.
“But fundamental to the success of our economy is our ability to trade within our biggest market, which is of course the United Kingdom.”
A DUP official said U.S. governments had been promising extra American billions in exchange “for selling out to Sinn Féin and Dublin” since the 1990s and “when America talks about corporate investment, we get the crumbs and that investment really all ends up in the Republic [of Ireland].”
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson said | Behal/Irish Government via Getty Images
“The Americans talk big, but the money goes south,” the DUP official said.
This underscores the stark reality that challenges Northern Ireland any time it pitches for U.S. investment — the competing proposition offered by its southern neighbor with its internationally low 12.5 percent rate on corporate profits.
Emanuel Adam with BritishAmerican Business said there was a noticeable feeling in Washington that firms want to do business in Dublin.
“When [Irish Prime Minister] Leo Varadkar and his team were here recently, I could tell how confident the Irish are these days,” he said. “There are not as many questions for them as there are around the U.K.”
Biden’s economic ultimatum looks toothless from the DUP’s perspective and its resonance may be as short-lived as his trip to Belfast itself.
This story has been updated to correct an historical reference.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023