Europe as a whole faces a host of rising political and security threats, alongside the constant demands of a grinding war in Ukraine with no clear end in sight and with newfound complications owing to leaks of strategic documents.
And as Biden departs for his first overseas trip since February, the challenges at home are multiplying: Deepening divides over the rise in gun violence, a court ruling aimed at further restricting abortion access, and lingering questions about his own political future.
The White House has scrambled to respond, spending recent days doing diplomatic damage control over the document leak, gaming out its legal response on abortion and seeking new ways to pressure the GOP on guns. Those efforts have taken increasing priority across various parts of the administration, officials said, adding that Biden will remain briefed as he travels abroad.
But those gathering storm clouds risk overshadowing a trip that Biden has looked forward to more than all others since winning the White House — and one that aides envisioned as an opportunity for the Irish Catholic president to play up his personal bond with Ireland and celebrate political progress there.
Biden on Wednesday will mark the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement that mostly ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He then will travel to the Irish Republic for the first time since he traced his lineage through the countryside as vice president in 2016.
“This is something you can sense he’s hoping will go well,” said Robert Savage, an Irish history scholar at Boston College. “He loves Ireland, and he wants to bask in the limelight of an American success story.”
But that gauzy depiction may be at odds with what awaits Biden on the ground. When he lands Tuesday night in Belfast, he’ll arrive in a region that hasn’t had a working legislature for the past year, and whose leaders are deadlocked over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit future. The U.K.’s exit from the European Union has complicated Ireland’s trade with Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K. That’s caused larger political dysfunction and fears of the collapse of the Good Friday accord and a return to bloody conflict.
The U.K. and EU have sought to resolve the issue with a proposed settlement called the Windsor Framework. But Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, have opposed the framework in defiance of the U.K. It’s protesting the proposal by refusing to form a government in Northern Ireland under power-sharing rules that require it to jointly run the legislature with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin.
The terror threat is now considered “severe,” after the British government upgraded its assessment in late March. And there appears no imminent end to the political standoff that has already dented Northern Ireland’s finances and social services.
“No one wants to return to the period of the Troubles,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior State Department official. “But it’s not completely settled, there are still huge challenges, and you don’t want to play with fire here. And in some ways, that’s what Brexit has done.”
Biden has endorsed the Windsor Framework as an even-handed compromise. In a further show of support, he’s slated to meet Wednesday with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who clinched the deal in February but has struggled to sell it to Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party.
Yet even in a region where many fondly regard Biden as the most Irish U.S. president since John F. Kennedy, aides and experts say Biden is likely to avoid wading too deeply into the details of the ongoing dispute. Even as it coaxed the U.K. toward a post-Brexit compromise that kept the Good Friday Agreement intact, the White House held off on confirming that Biden would visit Northern Ireland until it was clear an agreement had been reached.
In a speech scheduled for Wednesday, Biden is expected to broadly hail the Windsor Framework while delicately skirting the underlying stalemate that’s paralyzed its government. In a further sign of the administration’s desire to limit the chance of any diplomatic blunders, Biden will steer clear of Northern Ireland’s parliament building and spend less than a day in Belfast before skipping south across the border. Even his meeting with Sunak has been scaled back, from the typical bilateral session to just a morning coffee.
“Biden’s role is to provide encouragement to all the parties in Northern Ireland to move forward,” said Daniel Mulhall, a longtime diplomat and Ireland’s former ambassador to the U.S. “I have no doubt that his speeches, when he appears in Belfast and Dublin and around the country, will be well attuned to the sensitivities.”
The trip could have served as a reprieve of sorts from domestic matters, ahead of Biden’s anticipated announcement that he will seek reelection. Instead, a pileup of high-profile issues is likely to follow him overseas.
Biden has yet to weigh in on the unprecedented arrest of Donald Trump, his former and possibly future chief rival for the presidency. His administration faces another adverse court ruling over abortion access, which Biden has vowed to protect despite his own complicated feelings on the issue. And the day before his departure came news of another mass shooting — this time in Kentucky, hours north of the Tennessee state capital where Republicans just finished expelling two Black lawmakers over their participation in gun violence protests.
Those developments could make it impossible for Biden to keep the focus on the imagery and sentimentality of his surroundings.
Biden is expected to make stops in Ireland’s County Louth and County Mayo, where he has distant relatives and had previously traced his family tree. He’s also slated to meet with Ireland’s president as part of a stay in Dublin highlighted by a speech to the country’s parliament.
A descendant of Irish immigrants mostly on his mother’s side, Biden frequently invokes his heritage as shaping his beliefs and setting him on his career path — accompanied as well by a sizable chip on his shoulder he’s acknowledged is tied to his upbringing in “an Irish Catholic neighborhood where it wasn’t viewed as being such a great thing.”
“Their values have been passed down, generation to generation,” Biden said of his ancestors during a St. Patrick’s Day event alongside Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar last month. “Growing up Irish American gave me the pride that spoke to both sides of the Atlantic, heart and soul that drew from the old and new.”
Though Biden has long been invested in Ireland’s politics — and the image of him as a departed but not forgotten son — he is relatively new to direct diplomacy with the country. Biden was not a central player in the talks leading up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement and has made only one prior trip to Belfast, in 1991.
He was an early member of the Friends of Ireland caucus that was founded in Congress more than 40 years ago to support peace efforts in Northern Ireland. His most prominent involvement came in the 1980s, when Biden helped lead opposition to a Reagan administration effort to make it easier for Britain to extradite members of the Irish Republican Army from the U.S.
Savage, who has written extensively about Irish political dynamics, said there’s no expectation Biden’s personal affection for Ireland will tilt America’s studied neutrality when it comes to the fraught U.K.-Ireland relationship. But in a nation that traditionally holds special admiration for American presidents, Biden represents a particularly welcome return to normal in the wake of the more turbulent, Brexit-sympathetic years of the Trump era.
“Biden’s seen as a stalwart, somebody that’s stuck by Ireland over the difficult years,” Savage said. “There’s a feeling that sanity has returned in Washington.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
As a Fed governor, Brainard voted along with the rest of the board for the series of interest rate hikes that helped push two weak banks to failure in March. And though she has long been a vocal champion of strong bank oversight, financial reform advocates — and even some White House allies — are asking whether she will be tagged with any responsibility herself for the Fed’s failure to spot problems at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank before they imploded in March.
“All of the failure of supervision stuff for the last six to nine months implicates the Fed,” said a person close to the White House, who requested anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive personnel topic. “And all the investigations will focus on the Fed. There is just no way that can’t be awkward both for Lael and for the White House, even if there is nothing specific she did wrong.”
Behind the scenes, Brainard has been taking a lead role in the administration’s efforts to deal with the failed banks and reassure depositors that their money is safe, according to half a dozen senior administration officials and several others close to Brainard outside the White House. And in an extraordinary move driven by Brainard, the White House recently called on the Fed to undo many of the deregulatory steps that it took during the Trump administration — actions that Brainard had opposed while she was there.
Her role in mapping out a policy to deal with the turmoil underscores how quickly the administration realized it was facing a potential crisis for the economy and Biden’s re-election chances.
But some of the people inside and outside the administration say her association with the Fed — the main regulator of the nation’s banks — leading up to the meltdown of the two lenders is also limiting her ability to publicly challenge the central bank’s actions, given the tradition in which former Fed officials refrain from criticizing onetime colleagues.
“There is a social, institutional, and reputational cost to being viewed as violating Federal Reserve norms of clubbiness,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. “Being perceived as `politicizing the Fed’ would likely cause members of the Fed club to view her as disloyal. It’s also likely that even as Brainard was perhaps the best dissenter ever at the Fed, that nonetheless she felt pressure to pull some punches.”
The White House declined to make Brainard available for an interview.
White House officials rejected the idea that she is shying away from criticizing the Fed. Instead, they argue that her dissents at the central bank speak for themselves and that when the crisis hit, Brainard simply dug deep into the work of helping organize the response while keeping Biden and new White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients briefed on developments.
These people say that public communication was rightly limited to principal players including the president, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg and Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The new NEC director will eventually play a more visible role, they say.
Brainard played the most critical part inside the White House in selling Biden on the need to designate SVB and Signature as risks to the financial system, opening them up to a federal rescue of their depositors, according to the people.
Biden, bruised by the political blowback over Wall Street bailouts when he served as vice president, entered the March weekend of SVB’s collapse wary of anything that could be seen as rescuing the well-heeled tech executives and investors who made up much of SVB’s deposit base.
It fell to Brainard to explain why such a big federal move — which could be taken as an implicit guarantee for all deposits of any failing FDIC-insured institution — was the only option to avoid a much longer and more brutal crisis.
White House colleagues praise Brainard’s work under pressure the weekend SVB collapsed.
“She knows how the Fed works, she knows how Treasury works and how the entire bank regulatory system works,” said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy NEC director and former senior staffer for Sen. Elizabeth Warren who was a candidate for the top NEC job before it went to Brainard.
Ramamurti and other senior administration officials said Brainard quickly delegated her staff to assess market conditions and the likely impact of various possible solutions proposed by other agencies. Then she organized it all into concise briefings for Zients and Biden.
“Communication was clear, tasks were well-assigned and it never felt like we were just spinning around,” Ramamurti said of the wild March weekend when White House, Fed, Treasury and FDIC officials conducted nearly nonstop video calls to get to a solution before markets opened in Asia.
As for her previous role at the Fed, Brainard’s many defenders across the ideological spectrum say that not only did she not do anything wrong while serving as vice chair, but that she strongly and publicly dissented from efforts to roll back regulations — often acting alone. She repeatedly warned that they could lead to just this kind of crisis.
“Lael fought an incredible rearguard action against all the nonsense,” said MIT Professor Simon Johnson, a proponent of tougher banking rules. “There was no one else left in the room. I have no idea how she did it. But thank goodness she stuck it out.”
Still, as the banking crisis saga moves further into the phase of hearings, blame-casting and calls for change, Brainard’s years at the Fed will likely get a closer look from Congress.
Republicans say the collapse of SVB and Signature was the result of both mismanagement at the banks and the failure of regulators, primarily the Fed, rather than the result of all the Trump-era rule relaxation. They contend that Fed governors should have known that their interest rate hikes could topple weak banks.
At a recent hearing, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the ranking member on the Banking Committee and a likely 2024 GOP presidential contender, said the Fed “should have been keenly aware of the impact interest rate hikes would have on the value of securities, and it should have been actively working to ensure the bank and supervisors were hedging their bets and covering their risk accordingly.”
In a letter to Powell and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, Scott wrote of the “apparent failure of SVB’s regulators, including the Federal Reserve, the primary federal regulator responsible for examining and supervising SVB, to ensure that the bank operated in a safe and sound manner.”
The Fed itself is looking for answers.
Michael Barr, the vice chair of supervision who is conducting an internal review of rules on bank capital and oversight issues, acknowledged that everyone who worked at the Fed in the years leading up to the bank failures would probably come under scrutiny.
“We expect to be held accountable,” he told lawmakers last month.
Some Democrats also ripped into Fed regulators both in California and Washington for failing to escalate warnings about SVB’s rapid deposit growth and ballooning balance sheet problems into earlier action.
“It’s just a complex moment for Lael because most of the ballgame is around the Fed and most of the discussion now is about investigating potential supervisory failures,” the person close to the White House said. “It’s a tough spot for her.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“Of course, this is playing out on many of the networks here on a daily basis for hours and hours,” Jean-Pierre said. “So, obviously, he will catch part of the news when he has a moment to catch up on the news of the day, but this is not his focus for today.”
The White House has stuck to a “no comment” script since the news broke that Trump had been indicted Thursday.
Jean-Pierre said that when the White House first learned about the indictment, the president was not given a heads up.
The press secretary also said that the White House is prepared for any unrest that may happen in relation to Trump’s indictment. Biden on Monday said he has faith in New York City’s police ahead of potential unrest in the city.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again so there is no confusion: Congress will not, under any circumstance, forfeit our constitutionally mandated oversight responsibility of all trade matters,” Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), chair of the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee, said in a statement Friday. “This is unacceptable and unconstitutional, and I intend to use every tool at my disposal to stop this blatant executive overreach.”
According to a proposed rule the U.S. Treasury Department released Friday, the term “free trade agreement” as it applies to the Inflation Reduction Act includes deals in which the U.S. and other countries reduce, eliminate or refrain from imposing tariffs and export restrictions, and aim to raise standards in areas such as labor rights and environmental protection. That’s a broader definition than has traditionally been used.
Under those criteria, a critical minerals agreement the Biden administration signed with Japan this week, as well as the one the U.S. and EU soon hope to sign, will qualify as “free trade agreements,” even though they have not received congressional approval. That would clear the way for electric vehicles made with minerals from Japanese and European companies to receive additional U.S. tax breaks.
Members of Congress are likely to protest that interpretation in their comments to Treasury, and some have hinted they may take legal action or attempt to pass new legislation in response.
In the U.S., the negative reaction wasn’t limited to one side of the aisle. Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the administration has an obligation to obtain congressional consent on any critical minerals agreements.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means trade subcommittee, said the proposed rule “contradicts congressional intent and adds to a troubling pattern of this Administration disregarding Congress’ constitutional role on international trade.” He added that he hopes the administration would “reconsider their course.”
“The Administration is proposing more than guidance around a clean vehicle tax credit, it is redefining a Free Trade Agreement,” Blumenauer said.
The tug of war between the White House and Congress over trade policy is not new, but it has become more acute under the Biden administration, said Kathleen Claussen, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in international economic law. She anticipates the administration’s definition of “free trade agreement” could wind up in court.
“At stake is the sort of future of how we think about what a trade agreement is,” said Claussen, a former associate general counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. “It’s important for Congress to decide sooner rather than later where it is going to draw the line.”
The Inflation Reduction Act — a crucial element of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda — provides a tax credit worth up to $7,500 for consumers who purchase electric vehicles produced in North America, which members of Congress who voted for the law say is critical to spurring the domestic clean tech manufacturing sector.
“We intentionally structured tax credits to not just decarbonize the U.S. economy, but to erase the lead that China and other countries have in manufacturing green infrastructure,” Democratic Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Sherrod Brown of Ohio wrote in a letter to the Treasury Department sent Thursday.
To qualify for the full IRA tax credit, the vehicle must include a battery made with critical minerals from the U.S. or a “free trade agreement” partner.
That creates a semantic imperative for the U.S. and EU to call any minerals deal a “free trade agreement,” even though such pacts would traditionally require the approval of Congress and, in the European Union, its member countries as well as the European Parliament.
“This is procedurally just very, very complicated,” said one EU diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing deliberations. “We want to call it a non-binding instrument, but we have to think about the American domestic context as well. So, it’s better to call it an FTA-light.”
The view from Washington
American presidents have long negotiated “free trade agreements,” but the term is not technically defined in U.S. law. It is commonly understood to be a pact designed to lower tariffs and open foreign markets after winning the approval of Congress, a concept that has been forged through decades of practical experience.
The Biden administration appears to be breaking from that tradition. While the Trump administration did not seek congressional approval for trade deals it brokered with China and Japan, stoking the ire of lawmakers, it did not attempt to define those pacts as equivalent to comprehensive free trade agreements.
USTR has inked sector-specific agreements in the past without seeking the approval of Congress. And the Treasury Department asserts it has the authority to designate a “free trade agreement” in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act because Congress did not define the term when it wrote the text. The definition Treasury released Friday is slated to take effect April 18.
But this week, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office updated its online roster of U.S. free trade agreements to include a new category of deals. There are the “comprehensive free trade agreements” that already exist with 20 other countries, and then there is the new “agreement focusing on free trade in critical minerals” with Japan, which USTR signed earlier this week. Both are designated as “free trade agreements.”
U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle flatly condemned the pact with Japan, not only for the terms of the deal but for how the administration went about negotiating it.
Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who also happens to have been U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s former boss when she was a congressional staffer, declared the agreement “unacceptable” in a joint statement.
“It’s clear this agreement is one of convenience,” the two senior Democrats said. And they warned that Tai had exceeded the power given to her by Congress. “The administration does not have the authority to unilaterally enter into free trade agreements.”
Wyden and Neal’s Republican counterparts, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), were also quick to skewer the deal. Smith offered perhaps the most colorful language, saying the administration is “distorting the plain text of U.S. law to write as many green corporate welfare checks as possible.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the key negotiators on the IRA, threatened legal action over the Treasury Department’s interpretation of the electric vehicle tax credit on Wednesday. But he also suggested partners like Japan and the EU should qualify for the perks. His office declined to clarify his position.
In response to lawmaker criticism over the process for finalizing a similar critical minerals deal with Japan, a USTR spokesperson pointed to Tai’s recent congressional testimony in which she said “further enhancements” would make it easier for congressional staff to review negotiating text, make text summaries available to the public and hold more meetings with the public.
The view from Brussels
In Brussels, four EU diplomats, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak freely, told POLITICO they are increasingly nervous about the critical minerals negotiations because the legal format of the final deal remains unclear.
The EU’s trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis said at an event earlier this week that “we are currently discussing with the U.S. the exact content and the potential legal procedures.”
Two EU officials, who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unfinished deal, insist the European Commission needs to secure a mandate from member countries for any free trade agreement, even if it’s limited in scope. What’s more, such deals typically require the approval of the European Parliament and EU countries, a process that usually takes several months.
Miriam García Ferrer, a spokesperson for the European Commission, declined to say whether the deal requires a mandate from EU countries. “This will be a specific and targeted arrangement to ensure that EU companies are treated the same way as the U.S. companies under the IRA,” García Ferrer said.
Not all EU members share the same concerns about a mandate. Some EU countries in Brussels are keen to move quickly and avoid distractions that tend to arise in trade negotiations, saying it’s best to keep the end goal in sight of getting concessions from Washington on the Inflation Reduction Act.
Three of the EU diplomats said it would make more sense to wait until the end of the negotiations to determine the legal process on the EU side. “It’s too soon to discuss this,” one diplomat said. “Let’s wait and see what the Commission actually comes up with.”
Another diplomat added that “form should follow substance” and that most EU countries just want the European Commission to come up with a good result.
Moens reported from Brussels. Jakob Hanke Vela and Sarah Anne Aarup also contributed reporting from Brussels.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
On Tuesday night, Biden said Israel had gotten itself into “a difficult spot” and that he hoped Netanyahu “walks away from it.”
Netanyahu, however, released a rather defiant statement indicating he would press ahead with some form of judicial change and that Israel “makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”
Underlying the fear inside the White House was a sense that the Netanyahu-led far-right coalition now governing the once-stable democracy in the Middle East has authoritarian leanings. Those concerns have deepened as Washington tries to hold together a democratic alliance against dictatorships in places including Russia, China and Iran, an archrival of Israel.
There are domestic considerations as well. The turmoil in Israel has given Biden a foreign policy headache right in the run-up to the 2024 presidential race. A longstanding public backer of Israel, Biden now heads a party in which a growing number of members are openly critical of the country.
Some of those Democrats say Biden needs to set aside his affection and go beyond rhetoric to pressure Israel on everything from safeguarding democracy to establishing a Palestinian state.
“Joe Biden has personally made clear repeatedly that there’s going to be no consequences, so why should Netanyahu change his behavior based on anything the United States says?” said Matt Duss, a leading progressive voice and Middle East analyst who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on foreign policy.
Despite Netanyahu’s push for the judicial overhaul, Israel was invited to participate in the summit, the second of which Biden has convened since taking office. But the Israeli leader was not expected to attend the leader-level meetings that Biden will helm on Wednesday, White House aides said. A person familiar with the issue said that Netanyahu was instead slated to speak on a panel during the week, but it was not clear if even that was finalized.
The White House tried to tamp down tensions with Israel on Tuesday. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, said Netanyahu would at some point be invited to Washington, although a White House spokesperson said no meeting had been decided. Aides said that while they were encouraged Netanyahu paused his plan for the judiciary, they were still in “wait and see” mode about whether he would return to them in the next session of the Knesset. Allies do not expect Biden to be hurt politically by his handling of the matter.
“Where he has expressed differences with Israel — on West Bank settlements and on a judicial overhaul that could weaken Israel’s democratic foundations — he is on solid ground with the vast majority of Americans, and those in his party,” said Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel under then-President Barack Obama. “I suspect any rival, from any side, would find this issue to be hardly worth taking on.”
Even before the judicial overhaul plan was introduced, the Biden administration had grown alarmed by Netanyahu’s coalition government, which includes several figures with racist, homophobic, misogynist and religiously extreme ideologies.
For Netanyahu, a veteran Israeli pol, it was a means of getting back into the prime minister’s office as he tries to evade corruption charges in Israel’s courts. But inside Biden world, it appeared to be more than just an alliance of convenience. Some of Netanyahu’s allies back legislation making it harder to remove him from office, and his statement Tuesday suggested he was worried that his coalition might fracture if he is seen as kowtowing to Washington.
Biden and Netanyahu have known each other for decades and share a personal warmth and familiarity. “Hey man, what’s going on?” is Biden’s standard greeting to Netanyahu, aides said.
But they also have had sharp differences.
Their ties were strained by Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to Congress in which he castigated the Iran nuclear deal worked on by the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president. And Biden has expressed private dismay that Netanyahu became such a fawning acolyte of ex-President Donald Trump and that Israel has largely stayed on the sidelines during Russia’s war on Ukraine.
White House aides arranged a call between the two men earlier this month with the hopes that Biden could nudge the prime minister toward abandoning his judicial overhaul.
Despite firm words from Biden, Netanyahu proceeded with the plan, rattling many American Jews concerned about Israel’s future. Administration officials, keenly aware of the importance of America’s security relationship with Israel, proceeded carefully, both publicly and privately warning Netanyahu that he should seek a compromise with those who oppose the overhaul.
Over the weekend, Netanyahu fired his defense minister for criticizing the judicial plan. The White House released a statement that echoed its past ones, reminding Netanyahu that “democratic societies are strengthened by checks and balances, and fundamental changes to a democratic system should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.”
Yet the huge protests were what appeared to have forced Netanyahu to back down, at least temporarily.
Ahead of the Summit for Democracy, White House aides say that Netanyahu’s decision to relent on the judicial reform push was proof that Israel’s democracy was responsive and worked.
But the push itself still raises questions about the future of Israeli politics and injects more uncertainty into an already unstable region.
Israel is hardly the only country invited to the summit facing internal strife. India, for example, has seen serious democratic backsliding under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Poland, too, is facing questions about its democratic strength, as are countries such as Mexico and Brazil. The United States’ own democracy has been tested in the wake of the Trump presidency.
But the tension with Israel is the one with the most direct ties to Biden’s own political future as he eyes a re-election decision and possible rematch with Trump.
Biden has long been a traditionalist on U.S.-Israel relations. He has remained close to reflexively pro-Israel advocacy organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He has declined to return the U.S. Embassy to Tel Aviv after Trump relocated it to Jerusalem. And he has refused to impose conditions on the billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance the United States provides to Israel.
Those moves by the president — who has also received the backing of the more progressive pro-Israel advocacy group J Street — has run counter to the budding sentiment within the Democratic Party.
A growing number of liberal voices are critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians. And a Gallup poll released this month showed that Democrats’ sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49 percent versus 38 percent
These are shifts that could prove an annoyance to Biden on the campaign trail.
“At the end of the day, this issue is not a voting issue for 99.999 percent of people, right?” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street. “But I don’t think the majority of the Democratic Party is going to be okay if Israel takes steps that provoke tremendous outbreaks of violence and lots of people are getting hurt. I don’t think they’ll be okay as Israel undoes its judicial independence and the underpinnings of its democracy.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hi, China Watchers. Today we look at the fraught politics of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s U.S. visits, do a deep dive into TikTok’s tangled web of government lobbying and check in on President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy. And with President Tsai in New York City today, we point her in the direction of Brooklyn’s unofficial culinary diplomatic outpost for the self-governing island and profile a book that renders a street-level exploration of its woefully underreported “out-of-bounds artistic creativity.”
Let’s get to it. — Phelim
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will arrive in New York today | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
WELCOME TO AMERICA, PRESIDENT TSAI. PARDON OUR BICKERING
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen lands in New York today for the first of two layover visits in the U.S. as she travels to and from Latin America. She’ll be in New York for one day Thursday to receive a leadership award from a conservative think tank and will meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on April 5.
Tsai’s presence in the U.S. puts the administration of President Joe Biden in a bind. Biden needs to roll out a warm but unofficial diplomatic welcome mat to Taiwan’s leader without unduly infuriating the Chinese government which interprets any U.S.-Taiwan contacts as an affront to Beijing’s claim of sovereignty over the self-governing island.
Beijing is already signaling that Tsai’s presence in the U.S. will further damage already frosty U.S.-China ties. Tsai’s visit “could lead to another serious, serious, serious confrontation in the China-U.S. relationship,” the chargés d’affaires in the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., Xu Xueyuan, told reporters on Wednesday. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xu warned.
Biden’s thornier dilemma is balancing the demand of GOP China hawks wanting deeper and more official military, economic and diplomatic links to Taiwan — starting with engagement with Tsai — to discourage Beijing from considering a military invasion of the island.
Read my full story here.
POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas
HOW TIKTOK BUILT A ‘TEAM OF AVENGERS’ TO FIGHT FOR ITS LIFE
TikTok finds itself under siege in the U.S. and in Europe. Congressional calls for a TikTok ban are picking up steam. Influencers have descended on Washington as part of a last-ditch effort to save the company, paid for by TikTok. And the company’s CEO met bipartisan denunciations before a Congressional committee last week.
TikTok’s battle for survival has become a vivid study in how a wealthy, foreign-owned corporation can use its financial might to build an impressive-looking network of influence. It also provides some insight into the limitations of what lobbying can do to protect a company at the center of a geopolitical firestorm. Beyond closed doors, an army of operatives have been preparing for this moment. Former members of Congress — including a former member of Democratic House leadership — helped the CEO get meetings on the Hill ahead of the hearing. Former aides to Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi helped prepare him.
SKDK, a firm that worked for the Biden campaign, has been assisting with policy communications. But the preparations for TikTok’s fight date back years, to at least 2018. With more than two dozen sources, we paint a picture of how TikTok amassed a network of operatives that connect the company to power centers across the world.
POLITICO’s Hailey Fuchs, Clothilde Goujard and Daniel Lippman have the full story here.
BEIJING SNEERS AT BIDEN’S DEMOCRACY SUMMIT
Today marks the conclusion of President Biden’s three-day Summit for Democracy.
Biden said the gathering — to which he invited the leaders of 120 countries — was a testament to his vision of democracies “getting stronger, not weaker.”
Biden put his money where his mouth is by announcing that his administration will channel — if Congress cooperates — $9.5 billion over the next three years to fund “efforts to advance democracy across the world.” And he’s creating a Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Governance operating out of USAID to allocate that cash.
Beijing is unimpressed. The U.S. insists that “only American and Western democracy is good and right, which is in itself at odds with the spirit of democracy,” the Chinese embassy’s Xu told reporters on Wednesday. That made Biden’s summit “much more about group politics than democracy,” Xu said.
Xu may be half-right. “The problem with the summit is it’s an issue of ‘who’s in, who’s out’ — who gets chosen and who doesn’t and that’s an unfortunate way it’s been organized,” said Derek Mitchell, former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar and the president of the National Democratic Institute. But Beijing’s criticism “shows China’s vulnerability and insecurity on the issues of real democracy,” Mitchell said.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Zelenskyy to Xi Jinping: Come to Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday invited Xi Jinping to Ukraine, for what would be the first direct communication between the two leaders since the beginning of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine. “We are ready to see [Xi] here,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Associated Press on a train to Kyiv, adding, “I want to speak with him.” POLITICO’s Nicolas Camut has the full story here.
TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
— DOJ: SURVEILLANCE NEEDED TO ‘FIGHT’ CHINA: Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Justice Department’s surveillance authority — known as Section 702 — as an essential weapon against Chinese espionage. “This is what we need in order to fight the Chinese — we’re getting information about their cyber attacks, about their efforts to export our military information … [and] about their efforts to control dissidents who have fled China and now are in the United States,” Garland told a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday.
— SULLIVAN, WANG YI TALK BILATERAL RELATIONS: National security adviser Jake Sullivan called China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, last Friday, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment and the Chinese embassy said in a statement that it had “no information” regarding the reported call. But if accurate it suggests that the Biden administration is on a diplomatic outreach spree given that deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan, Rick Waters, made a low-key visit toHong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing from March 18-26 (a State Department spokesperson confirmed the details). The visit was devoted to “internal discussions with the U.S. embassy and consulates in China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Wednesday.
— RICHARD GERE DEFENDS TIBET IN D.C.: The actor Richard Gere lent some star power to a congressional hearing on Tuesday with sharply-worded criticism of China’s policies in Tibet. CCP control of Tibet has been “characterized by cruelty, collective violence and extreme persecution,” Gere told a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. The committee timed the hearing — whose panelists included Uzra Zeya, the State Department’s special coordinator for Tibetan issues, and head of the Tibetan government in exile, Sikyong Penpa Tsering — to coincide with the 64th anniversary of the CCP’s overthrow of the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government. Gere has asserted that China-leery Hollywood studio executives placed him on a blacklist due to his blamed his advocacy for Tibet over the past three decades
— TAIWAN REP SLAMS HONDURAS’ DIPLOMATIC DEFECTION: Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry announced on Saturday — and Beijing confirmed on Sunday — that the government of Honduras had broken diplomatic relations with the self-governing island in favor of Beijing ties. Honduras’ decision followed Taiwan’s refusal to provide $2.45 billion in aid to the Central American country, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters. Honduras’s new ties with Beijing will render “nothing but empty promises and malign influence,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the U.S., Bi-khim Hsiao, tweeted on Saturday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning shot back by accusing Taiwan’s government of “dollar diplomacy.”
TRANSLATING EUROPE
EU’S HARD-HITTING SPEECH TO CHINA: Europe needs to be “bolder” on China, which has become “more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,” according to the president of the European Commission.
Von der Leyen, who will be visiting China next week together with French President Emmanuel Macron, warned Beijing not to side with Moscow in bringing compromised peace to Ukraine, saying: “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward.”
She implied, for the first time, that the EU could terminate pursuing a landmark trade deal with China, which was clinched in 2020 but subsequently stalled by the European Parliament when its members were sanctioned by Beijing authorities. “We need to reassess CAI [agreement] in light of our wider China strategy,” she said. Read our full story here.
ANTI-COERCION: EU negotiators have reached a major breakthrough in new rules that will allow the bloc to retaliate when foreign governments (read: China) try to use economic blackmail against one of its members (read: Lithuania). In the early hours of Tuesday, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU struck a deal on the anti-coercion instrument, after 11 hours of negotiations.
The instrument is “not a teeth-less tiger; it’s a tiger with teeth. It’s not a water pistol, it’s a gun,” said Bernd Lange, the lead lawmaker on the file. “Sometimes, it’s necessary to put a gun on the table, even knowing it is not used day by day.” Camille Gijs has the full story here.
LONDON SEALS DEAL: Britain will today be welcomed into an Indo-Pacific trade bloc called CPTPP (the successor to the one from which the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out), as ministers from the soon-to-be 12-nation trade pact meet in a virtual ceremony across multiple time zones, Graham Lanktree reports.
Meanwhile, the opposition Labour Party of the U.K., which is hoping to return to power after next year’s general elections, will pursue legal routes toward declaring China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims a “genocide,” according to the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy. Here’s the report by Eleni Courea.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
Apple CEO Tim Cook gladhands with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao on Monday | China’s Ministry of Commerce
— APPLE CEO GETS ‘OPENING UP’ EARFUL: Apple CEO Tim Cook got a whack of Chinese government sweet talk about the country’s rosy investment climate in Beijing on Monday.
China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao told Cook that China has “steadfastly pushed forward a high level of opening up … and is willing to provide a good environment and services for foreign-funded enterprises, including Apple,” said a statement posted on the ministry’s website on Monday. That rhetoric echoed pledges that the Chinese government has been making for more than two decades — with questionable follow-through. Cook is one of a gaggle of U.S. senior corporate executives who have converged on Beijing this week for the 2023 China Development Forum to try to revive in-person business ties effectively suspended for three years due to China’s now-defunct zero-Covid policy.
TRANSLATING CHINA
The Taiwanese General Store in Brooklyn has become an East coast outpost of Taiwanese culinary, cultural and political identity | Lanna Apisukh
— BROOKLYN’S TAIWAN CULINARY CULTURE OUTPOST: Don’t be surprised if visiting Taiwan President Tsai’s motorcade makes a detour to Brooklyn during her layover in New York today. The likely destination: The Yun Hai (雲海 — “sea of clouds”) Taiwanese General Store. Since the online specialty store opened its brick and mortar location in 2022 it has become an East coast outpost of Taiwanese culinary, cultural and political identity. It led an initiative to support Taiwanese farmers during a 2021 Chinese import ban on Taiwanese pineapples and has become the Lunar New Year snacks supplier of choice for Taiwan’s unofficial diplomatic outpost in the Big Apple. China Watcher spoke to Lillian Lin, who co-owns Yun Hai with Lisa Cheng Smith, about the tasty intersection of Taiwanese food and politics.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What was the idea behind Yun Hai?
There are still a lot of people who don’t know what Taiwan is and confuse it with all sorts of other places. Including Thailand. Through the lens of food we’re shedding light on Taiwan’s history and bringing an awareness of Taiwan as a distinct place versus just some other random place they might have heard of in Asia.
We’re trying to share specific foods and dishes from Taiwan that have a holistic story about the people that are making it. It’s inevitable that when we talk about the history of where it all comes from, it acknowledges Taiwan as something that has its own identity. And that in itself should not be political, but unfortunately it is. We explain the history of Taiwanese foods and why it is Taiwanese and how you can’t find this stuff in China anymore.
What do Americans need to know about Taiwan?
All the politics make people question whether Taiwan is a country or not. But there’s a president, there’s a telephone country code, there’s a Taiwan website domain. It’s really a country, but that’s shrouded in the politics. And people are surprised when I tell them how progressive Taiwan is. Taiwan has gay marriage and press freedom that a lot of people don’t usually associate with Asia. And Taiwan is the only Mandarin-speaking democracy out there. So it’s a place where you can access Chinese history in a very open way and that’s of huge value.
How did Yun Hai get involved in the Chinapineapple export dispute?
When Taiwan’s pineapples got banned by China, there was a huge “freedom pineapple” movement where everybody in Taiwan was trying to eat as many pineapples as possible to help offset that canceled trade. In the U.S., there was a lot of interest in helping with that, but there wasn’t really an easy way to do that. So we thought — why don’t we try doing dried fruits instead? The goal was to create a new export channel for Taiwanese farmers so that they can diversify their export options and not solely rely on China. So we did a Kickstarter, raised about $110,000, bought 14 tons of fruit and now we’ve reordered from the farmers three times and are growing the quantity every time.
HEADLINES
WNYC:Rep. Jamaal Bowman Says Republicans Are Scapegoating TikTok. Agree?
Associated Press:Amid strained US ties, China finds unlikely friend in Utah
New York Times: How China Keeps Putting Off Its ‘Lehman Moment’
HEADS UP
— CHINA’S BOAO FORUM FLAGS ‘UNCERTAIN WORLD’: The annual Boao Forum for Asia opens today in Hainan’s Boao city and its organizers are channeling the global zeitgeist by making “an uncertain world” its central theme. The four-day event — Beijing’s attempt at a regional Davos — will host world leaders including Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
ONE BOOK, THREE QUESTIONS
Formosa Moon | Tobie Openshaw
The Book: Formosa Moon.
The Authors: Joshua Samuel Brown is a former journalist and author of more than a dozen Lonely Planet guides. Stephanie Huffman is an artist who earned her masters in Asian studies from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the most important takeaway from your book?
That cross-strait tension doesn’t define Taiwan. Despite the precariousness of its geopolitical situation, Taiwan’s zeitgeist isn’t one of anxiety and endless preparation for a conflict that’s been called various stages of “imminent” since 1949. Taiwan’s story is infinitely more complex and nuanced than the boilerplate — and historically dubious at best — “breakaway island” narrative that’s been dutifully copy-pasted into nearly every article published about Taiwan over the last 30 years.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this book?
The out-of-bounds artistic creativity of the Taiwanese. We encountered dozens of strange, wonderful and highly improbable venues seemingly willed into existence by folks with the energy, enthusiasm — and capital — to bring their dreams to life. From an inland hotel boasting an indoor scuba diving tank to a tourist village based entirely on the concept of cats, from the nearly endless array of colorful temples and food streets in every conceivable configuration to dozens of absolutely bonkersannual festivals that oversaturate the senses in every way.
What insights does your book offer about Taiwan that can’t be found in travel guides?
Travel guides generally stick to where to go, how to get there and what things should cost. There’s a bit of pragmatic logistics in the book — old habits die hard because I spent 10 years writing guidebooks for Lonely Planet. But we focused more on the 人情味 (rén qíng wèi: human warmth, friendliness) we experienced. By taking a more experiential travelogue approach, we hope to inspire readers to visit Taiwan, make their own discoveries and come to their own conclusions about the nation.
Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at [email protected].
MANY THANKS TO: Heidi Vogt, Christian Oliver, Matt Kaminski, Jamil Anderlini, Stuart Lau, Hailey Fuchs, Clothilde Goujard, Daniel Lippman, Nicolas Camut, Josh Gerstein, Camille Gijs, Graham Lanktree, Eleni Courea, and digital producers Tara Gnewikow and Jeanette Minns.Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at [email protected].
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
That’s in addition to the Pentagon promotions being stalled by a Republican senator and the judicial appointments delayed due to a senior Democratic senator’s extended absence.
Underlining the tension between the narrowly divided Senate and the administration was the Saturday evening withdrawal of Phil Washington, tapped to lead the Federal Aviation Administration. Democrats blamed a GOP campaign against him, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), but the reality is that Biden’s own party could have saved Washington had they kept their own side united and put up a simple majority.
In Washington’s case, Commerce Committee member Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) had communicated her concerns to the Biden administration. And Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) stayed undecided ahead of the committee vote, right up until Washington bowed out.
“That’s a better question for the president,” Tester, who faces a reelection campaign this cycle, said of the FAA imbroglio. Asked if he supported the nominee, he responded: “Never had to make that vote.”
Washington’s implosion comes at a crucial inflection point for the Biden White House’s confirmation operation. On Monday night, some Democrats were still digesting the news that he had withdrawn over the weekend.
“He had the vast majority of supportive people in our caucus, whether from the left to the moderate wings of our caucus, so I’m very sorry that the misrepresentations of his record … resulted in his having to withdraw,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).
At Washington’s nomination hearing, Sinema said it was important to confirm a permanent FAA chief. But while noting Washington’s military experience as well as his job as CEO of the Denver International Airport, she said that the agency needed someone with aviation experience at the top — a strong hint that she was not convinced that Washington was right for the role, since that was the main line of attack against Biden’s pick.
Sinema said in a statement on Monday that “the administration should quickly nominate a permanent FAA administrator with the necessary, substantial aviation safety experience and expertise.”
Commerce Committee Democrats and Biden administration “knew from the beginning she was concerned” about Washington’s level of experience and little effort was made to assuage Sinema, said a person familiar with Sinema’s interactions who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A Biden administration official, who would also only address the flap on condition of anonymity, said they “fought hard for Phil” and denied that they had dropped the ball.
“If someone at the end of the day decides not to vote a certain way, that’s the senator’s decision, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we did everything we could to fight for him,” the official said.
The Commerce Committee in particular has given Biden’s nominees a rough ride. FCC nominee Gigi Sohn withdrew earlier this month after being twice nominated by Biden for a position on the commission. That’s on top of several other tough confirmation fights consuming the early days of this Congress.
Julie Su’s nomination to head the Labor Department is expected to draw most of the GOP’s attention in the coming weeks; she had no Republican support in the vote to confirm her as deputy Labor Secretary in 2021, and moderate Democrats will face pressure to oppose her even though she won Democratic support back then.
When asked about Su’s chances of making it to the Cabinet, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said only: “I’m looking forward to the hearing and looking forward to her confirmation.”
Tester said he’d made no decision on Su, while Sinema has a policy against previewing her votes in public. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he’d supported Su in her current role because of his confidence in former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh.
“My vote for her last time was all predicated on Marty,” Manchin said. When asked if there was a pattern to the White House’s vetting with nominees, he replied that it was “not my job” to identify. “My job is to review who they send.”
The administration official said the White House was confident that she will get confirmed and that “organized labor is showing up in a big way for her and advocating for her confirmation.”
Manchin made waves earlier this month when he opposed Sohn, but according to two Democratic aides the FCC hopeful already had several other Democratic senators opposed to her — leaving her nowhere close to winning confirmation. In his capacity as Energy Committee chair, Manchin also will not move on Laura Daniel-Davis’ bid to serve as an assistant Interior secretary.
In addition, judicial nominee Michael Delaney, is in limbo on the Judiciary Committee due to absences, but his nomination also may not have the votes to proceed anyway on Biden’s pick for the First Circuit Court of Appeal. Broadly speaking, Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said that given Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) absence, “I can’t consider nominees … A tie vote is a losing vote on the committee.”
On top of that, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has instituted a blockade of quick confirmation and promotion of Pentagon nominees after the Defense Department moved ahead with policies that would ease access to abortion and other reproductive care for troops.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he agreed with Tuberville’s opposition to the policy but that “we’re trying to work out a mutually satisfactory solution.”
“Well, if this was about enlisted personnel, people who actually do the fighting, it might be different. But this is about three- and four-star generals. We got too many as it is,” Tuberville said.
The administration’s nominee problems pale in comparison to those that plagued former President Donald Trump, who was unsuccessful on several Federal Reserve nominees and multiple Cabinet picks. Republicans also sank or criticized some of his judicial nominees.
“Sometimes administrations don’t do a good job of vetting their nominees. And when they don’t, then things like this happen,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the whip during two years of Trump’s presidency, referring to Washington’s withdrawal.
Biden’s first two years as president also saw some intraparty opposition: Senate Democrats opposed Saule Omarova’s nomination to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and sank David Weil’s bid to head the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. Manchin also singlehandedly spiked Neera Tanden’s nomination to be Biden’s budget chief.
“We have successfully confirmed over 800 nominees, including many in a 50-50 Senate last session. An onslaught of unfounded Republican attacks on Mr. Washington’s service and experience irresponsibly delayed this process,” said a White House official.
The official added: “As of last week, we have nominated agency leaders on pace with Obama and confirmed 100 more than Trump had at this time in his administration.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
On the other hand, Nolen would not represent the clean break from industry dominance at the FAA that Biden had promised with his original nominee, Denver airport CEO Phil Washington. Washington withdrew his nomination on Saturday, following attacks from Cruz and other critics who called him too inexperienced.
The questions about Washington’s successor offer Biden a fundamental choice in what direction to take the FAA, an agency that has presided over an era of unprecedented safety in air travel but has also faced doubts about its oversight of companies such as Boeing, whose 737 MAX jetliner killed 346 people in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019.
The White House hasn’t announced any plans for a new FAA nominee and did not respond to a request for comment Monday. On Saturday, the White House said it would move quickly to nominate another candidate.
Cruz led the opposition to Washington as the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, which vets FAA nominations. But Washington had also faced doubts from non-GOP lawmakers on the panel.
Those include Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who said in a statement Monday that Biden “should quickly nominate a permanent FAA Administrator with the necessary, substantial aviation safety experience and expertise.” Sinema and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) had both declined to declare a stance on Washington before Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) postponed a committee vote on his nomination last week.
Cantwell, who gave a tepid reaction to Washington’s nomination when it was first announced, spent months avoiding taking a position on him. She finally came out in support of him early this year, arguing that the FAA needed a fresh, independent voice.
Now, if Nolen gets the nod, Cantwell would face the possibility of advancing a new nominee who is ingrained in the aviation industry.
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), who was a major backer of Washington’s nomination, said Monday he wants to see the White House nominate someone from outside FAA for the permanent role.
“I think Billy Nolen’s done a great job. I think they would be better served to get someone from the outside but Billy Nolen is certainly a very talented public servant,” Hickenlooper said, adding that he was frustrated that Washington’s nomination was stalled in part by Democrats.
Besides being a pilot, Nolen spent time at the aviation industry’s trade group Airlines for America after a long career at American Airlines before joining the FAA in early 2022.
Nolen, like Washington, would be the first Black person to serve as the FAA’s permanent administrator if confirmed.
Cruz endorsed Nolen during an aviation safety hearing earlier this month, asking Democrats on the panel: “Do you think Phil Washington could come anywhere close to acting Administrator Nolen’s knowledge? I think the answer is no.”
Cruz said in his podcast on Monday that his endorsement of Nolen “was an audible” called in the middle of the hearing.
“I turned back to my staff and said, ‘What do you think about Nolen? Would it be crazy for me to suggest right now that they should withdraw Washington and nominate Nolen?’” Cruz said. “And my guys were like ‘No, that’s fine.’”
Cruz added that a former Biden White House official reached out afterward to say his remarks had caught the administration’s attention.
Aviation industry consultant Robert Mann also said Nolen would be an obvious choice.
“We have a very competent acting administrator in Mr. Nolen,” said Mann, who works with airlines operators to make their flight operations more efficient. “He’s been doing the job and he’s been responding to issues.”
In contrast, Mann said Washington’s lack of knowledge about aviation showed itself during his confirmation hearing this month, where Cruz asked him detailed questions about technical issues such as the 737 MAX’s “angle of attack” sensors. While conceding that “I’m not a pilot,” Washington contended that his career as an Army officer and his leadership of transit agencies had shown his ability to manage large organizations.
Still, “I don’t know why he was proposed, to be perfectly honest,” Mann said of Washington. “At the end of the day you have to actually understand something about the business.”
On the other hand, Nolen’s nomination would not win unanimous support.
Michael Stumo, who helped draft a letter in support of Washington from family members of people killed in the 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia, said Nolen probably disqualified himself from winning their support after telling senators this month that the plane is safe. Nolen was responding to questions from Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) about recent, nonfatal incidents involving Boeing’s jet, which returned to service in late 2020.
“I can say categorically that the 737 MAX … is safe,” Nolen said during that hearing, while adding that he “would want to know more” about the incidents Vance was citing.
That was troubling, said Stumo, who lost his daughter Samya in the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019.
“He said the MAX qualified as safe but he didn’t know about the [most recent] incidents,” Stumo said. “That is … probably disqualifying in my view.”
Vance, in an interview on Monday, said Cruz’s call to elevate Nolen permanently was an “interesting suggestion” but said he is not set on supporting Nolen himself yet.
“He clearly knows his stuff, that’s one thing I’d say,” Vance said. “He knows a lot about the aviation industry, which is unfortunately something I wouldn’t say for Mr. Washington.”
Groups speculating about potential leaders for the FAA in the past have floated names including C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger, the retired US Airways pilot who safely landed a passenger jet on the water during the January 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson.” Sullenberger left his Senate-confirmed role as U.S. ambassador to the International Civil Aviation Organization last July after five months on the job, and didn’t give a reason for his departure.
One union coalition that supported Washington’s nomination was at a loss Monday on who should get the nod now.
“From my perspective, it’s not like we have been asked about potential backups at this point,” said Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department. “I think there was the full commitment to try to get him across the finish line. Phil had their full trust and support. I think there’s a little bit of urgency here with how they move next.”
Burgess Everett contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Cardona advocated for tighter gun laws after last year’s killings at Robb Elementary and has warned that the country risks failing students in Covid-19’s wake. Yet his newly public exasperation with school-centered partisanship comes as the Republican-controlled House approved sweeping “Parents Bill of Rights” legislation that captures broad strokes of pandemic-era conservative education wars.
“When we talk about politicization, when we talk about book banning, when we talk about Black history curriculum being picked apart — I think there are deliberate attempts to make sure that our public schools are not functional so that the private option sounds better,” the education secretary said. “I don’t doubt that’s intentional.”
Elections are also at play.
Nearly 30,000 school board seats are on the ballot this year across the country.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a likely 2024 Republican presidential candidate who weighed in on school board races last year — has tapped conservative energy with a range of education issues. He signed one measure restricting how gender identities are discussed with schoolchildren, launched a feud over an Advanced Placement African American history course, and is primed to sign major private school voucher legislation.
Biden’s other potential challengers also frame their education concerns with a distinct culture war bent.
Conservatives say they’re the ones on the defensive. Many Republican governors and lawmakers argue their restrictions on classroom lessons, curriculum, and LGBTQ students are meant to blunt diversity initiatives run amok or what they see as the misapplication of legal protections to include transgender people.
Some Republican groups are also looking to combine a longstanding push for expansive school choice programs with renewed efforts to harness more power on local school boards.
“Many school board members are intertwined with biased political ideologies and are controlled by special interests groups like the teachers unions,” said Laura Zorc, the education reform director at the conservative FreedomWorks organization, after Florida lawmakers sent their school choice bill to DeSantis.
“The only way parents can ensure that their children receive a high quality education is if state educational dollars, traditionally earmarked for local school districts, are directed to parents who want the very best for their children,” Zorc said in a statement.
Cardona’s public frustration dovetails with a growing political counteroffensive from White House allies.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently denounced DeSantis during an Orlando rally, and Weingarten is scheduled to deliver an address “in defense of public education” in Washington this week.
The Democratic Party of Illinois last week unveiled what it called an unprecedented effort to endorse dozens of candidates in nonpartisan local school and library board races. It also plans to funnel nearly $300,000 into an advertising and organizing campaign surrounding those elections.
Amid all this tension, Cardona has wielded recent op-eds in Newsweek and the Tampa Bay Times to accuse Republicans of “hiding behind the guise of ‘parents’ rights’” to defund public schools and trying to “hijack” classroom discussions.
And the secretary met last week with school superintendent and teacher representatives, who, he said, “feel the same way.”
“It just seems like it’s a constant attack on what I know as a dad, and what I know as an educator, is happening in our schools,” Cardona said in the interview. “Education being used to divide communities is the challenge that we face now as leaders.”
That challenge, he told state superintendents assembled in Washington last week, “is even harder than what we had in 2020” when Covid-19 first shuttered schools.
“Our students are as [emotionally] dysregulated as they ever have been in the last twenty years. The surgeon general reminded us that we’re in a youth mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years,” Cardona told POLITICO. “I’m tired of folks looking to get political points by attacking vulnerable students, vulnerable communities and attacking our schools.”
He added: “If we’re not standing up for our students, who will? I feel it’s time.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Pressure has been growing for the FAA to have a confirmed leader, as the aviation system continues to show signs of strain — in particular with an uptick of near-collisions on runways.
Washington’s decision comes just days after the Senate Commerce Committee, which is vetting his nomination, postponed a vote to advance Washington to the Senate floor. Two senators who caucus with Democrats on the panel, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) have been undecided on his nomination — and the committee only has a one-vote majority.
A White House official defended Washington’s qualifications and blamed an “onslaught of unfounded Republican attacks” that “irresponsibly delayed this process, threatened unnecessary procedural hurdles, and ultimately have led him to withdraw his nomination.” The official said the administration will swiftly move to nominate another candidate.
Reuters first reported that Washington was withdrawing his nomination.
Washington has faced a steady drumbeat of criticism, mostly from Republicans, because his only experience in aviation is the now nearly two-year stint leading the Denver airport. Prior to that, Washington had a background in leading transit agencies following a career in the Army. Washington also had been named in a politically-tinged corruption probe in Los Angeles County that the California Attorney General eventually stepped in front of.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has led the opposition, and most recently has insisted that Washington also needs a waiver from Congress to serve in the position because, by law, the FAA’s administrator must be a civilian. Democrats have insisted that the statute does not apply to him.
In a statement, Cruz said “this wasn’t the time for an administrator who needed on-the-job training,”
“The Biden administration must now quickly name someone to head the FAA who has an extensive aviation background, can earn widespread bipartisan support in the Senate, and will keep the flying public safe,” Cruz said.
Washington’s withdraw came two days after Buttigieg voiced public support for the nomination, vowing to “persuade anyone who needs persuading” after the delayed committee vote.
Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said Washington “has the qualifications and experience to lead the FAA.”
“The FAA requires strong and independent leadership from someone who will focus on safety,” Cantwell said in a statement. “Republicans chose to drum up falsehoods rather than give the flying public and the aviation industry the leadership needed now.”
Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen will continue to lead the agency until the Senate confirms a permanent leader. Cruz has argued that Nolen, a former pilot, could be swiftly confirmed to the top job but recently Nolen has publicly voiced support for Washington’s nomination.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
