Mumbai: The Congress on Monday demanded Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari, who has expressed the desire to quit, be sacked by the President and not allowed to quit while the Shiv Sena (UBT) faction took a dig saying “better late than never”.
The Congress and NCP, both members of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) along with Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) faction, also said Koshyari should have written to the President to discharge him of all responsibilities if he believed the position of the governor is Constitutional and not political one.
Koshyari, who has been in the line of Opposition fire over his remarks on Chhatrapati Shivaji and shared a tumultuous relationship with the Opposition, on Monday said he has expressed a desire before Prime Minister Narendra Modi to quit the post.
Maharashtra Congress president Nana Patole alleged when MVA was in power (from November 2019 to June 2022), Koshyari’s conduct and mentality as the governor was to break the Constitutional order.
“Instead of writing a letter to the President to whom the position of governor is connected, Koshyari wrote a letter to the Prime Minister. He should not be relieved of his responsibilities but sacked from the post,” Patole told reporters.
He alleged Koshyari made objectionable statements against icons like Chhatrapati Shivaji, Savitribai Phule, Jyotiba Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar and has turned the Raj Bhavan into a Bharatiya Janata Party office.
He said the Congress has been insisting on the removal of the governor over his controversial statements but the BJP was in agreement with the governor’s opinion.
“We request the President that the governor should be expelled. Do not let him go voluntarily,” he added.
Shiv Sena (UBT) leader and spokesperson Arvind Sawant said Koshyari cannot be absolved of his extra-Constitutional acts.
Sawant questioned the basis on which the governor had administered the oath to an “extra-Constitutional” chief minister, a reference to CM Eknath Shinde, last June.
“It is better late than never,” Sawant said.
NCP spokesperson Clyde Crasto tweeted, “Hon’ble Governor of Maharashtra Mr. Bhagat Singh Koshyari ji surely knows that the position of a Governor is constitutional and not political. If he believed so, he would have written to the Hon’ble President of India to discharge him of all his constitutional responsibilities”.
Truck horns blasted and red dust billowed beneath the blue Arizona sky as surplus army trucks sped up and down a road along the US-Mexico border, hauling shipping containers out of the Coronado national forest.
Piles of dirt and oak trees, bulldozed by construction crews, dotted the grassland of the San Rafael valley, south-east of Tucson, known as a vital wildlife corridor.
According to @DEMAArizona 1,700 shipping containers will be removed from the walls in Cochise County and Yuma that AZ Gov. @DougDucey built during his final months in office. The cost $76.5 million. I passed a few of them last week as I headed south to report on the removals. pic.twitter.com/AGeBxjFQwF
Former governor Doug Ducey had planned to build 10 miles of border “wall” made up of double-stacked old shipping containers through the federally protected forest.
But local residents and environmental groups occupied the construction site, running out the clock in December on Republican Ducey’s waning days in office.
Ducey, under threat of litigation from the Department of Justice, finally agreed to remove the rusty hulking barriers installed near Yuma in the west and Sierra Vista in the south-east of the state.
Environmentalists are now warning that the damage already done to the areas will require a huge recovery effort.
Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator for the environmental organization Sierra Club, said a lack of accountability over the project means more destruction.
“We just want to make sure that no further damage is done to the land due to the reckless operation of heavy machinery in a fragile desert ecosystem that will take decades to recuperate,” he told the Guardian this week.
Now two related lawsuits between Ducey and the federal government are on hold as Arizona’s new governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, negotiates the project’s end.
In early January, approximately 130 shipping containers near Yuma came down in less than a week.
But the nearly 3.5 miles of barrier running across Coronado national forest land could take at least another month to dismantle, according to environmentalists monitoring the removal and damage.
On 3 January, the US Forest Service closed off the area, citing concerns over public health and safety. It did so as AshBritt, the Florida-based company that installed the makeshift wall, worked to remove it, outside the gaze of the public or the press.
Only five designated monitors from environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Wildlands Network and the Center for Biological Diversity, were allowed into the site, with permits issued by the US Forest Service.
The five set about documenting environmental damage and sharing videos, images and notes with Forest Service officials, who will be tasked with restoring the wildlife corridor.
It is one of the last on the Arizona border, where endangered jaguar, ocelots and other animals can migrate between Mexico and the US.
Late last week, however, the Forest Service canceled those permits, citing safety issues, according to monitors Erick Meza; Kate Scott, who runs the nonprofit Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center; and Russ McSpadden, of the Center for Biological Diversity. They said they were approached by a law enforcement officer from the Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, who said their permits were no longer authorized.
AshBritt continues to illegally damage Forest Service lands with new spur roads & damages to plants/wildlife during wall removal. The FS gave me a permit to document removal but earlier this week revoked it while I was in the field. A FS Ranger told me I was illegally on site… pic.twitter.com/CQxMP4QoiS
The day before, Scott said, an armed security guard working for AshBritt had told her to leave. She showed him her permit and the guard, Scott recounted, told her it “didn’t mean shit to him” and warned her that “the Forest Service is coming to kick you out”.
Robin Silver, cofounder of the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, said he believes the permits were canceled because of the environmental harm, and that the federal agency did nothing to stop the construction even though it was illegal.
“It’s highly embarrassing for the US Forest Service because of all of the damage that’s now being exposed,” he said.
The center filed two lawsuits against Ducey and AshBritt, citing violations of the federal Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. The latter is now moot because the barrier is being removed, but the Clean Water Act lawsuit is still active, so ongoing monitoring is needed, Silver explained.
He added that damage done by excavators and trucks is “going to take a huge restoration effort”.
In August, Ducey cited an “invasion” at the border by migrants seeking haven in the US as the reason for granting AshBritt an emergency no-bid contract to install the containers.
Judy Kioski, public information officer for Arizona’s department of emergency and military affairs, said 1,700 shipping containers will now be removed at a cost of $76.5m. “The containers are being transported to state facilities in Yuma and Tucson until a plan for them is determined,” she said via email.
AshBritt’s original contract with the state included $123.6m to install the shipping container walls in Yuma and the Coronado national forest, and the company is now being paid to take them down.
The Florida-based disaster remediation firm has given millions to both Democratic and Republican campaigns. The company’s founder and director, Randal Perkins, paid a $125,000 fine in August 2021 for illegally donating $500,000 to the America First Action Super Pac, one of many fundraising political action committees supporting Donald Trump or Trump-like candidates.
At the time of the donation AshBritt had a $40m contract with the Department of Defense, and under federal law government contractors are prohibited from donating to political committees. Trump’s Super Pac refunded the money.
Meanwhile, sheriff David Hathaway of Santa Cruz county had refused to allow the shipping container barrier in his county, so Ducey turned to nextdoor – and sympathetic – Cochise county instead.
“They were violating the law by building on national forest land, they were tearing apart the hillsides,” Hathaway told the Guardian. “And it’s surprising to me that the federal government wasn’t willing to do anything about it. I told them if they entered my county to build it, I’d arrest them for illegal dumping.”
It’s unclear how much the federal government will have to spend to repair the environmental damage, or even if it will.
“What good are they [the Forest Service] if they’re not going to protect it? It’s still just us out here. We shut down the construction, and now we’re documenting the damage because no one else is,” said Scott.
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#ExArizona #governors #illegal #makeshift #border #wall #torn #cost
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
“>Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, cast his state as the place “where woke goes to die,” to which Murphy, in his State of the State address, responded, “I’m not even sure I know what that means.”
House speaker amid hardline opposit…
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It’s not just the nation’s highest-profile chief executives getting in on the crowing, either. It may be news to most, but Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, is aware of “jealousy” about his state, “because now, all of a sudden, we’re the diamond in the rough that they missed.”
“We’re in a never-before-seen era of contrast between red and blue states,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “What state you live in has become a subtext for what your politics must be, and I don’t think that was ever really true until the last six years or so.”
Covid, he said, “has thrown an accelerant on the way governors have presented their states. It became more a point of contrast – open or closed, mandate or no mandate, pro-vaccine or vaccine skeptic. There were very few governors who played it down the middle.”
The governors’ addresses have not been without some introspection about what could improve within their geographic boundaries. In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, pointed last week to the relatively high rates of smoking and obesity in his state, where “our life expectancy in Indiana has declined in recent years.” In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the newly-elected Democratic governor, warned of “potential catastrophe that will happen in just a few months” if lawmakers do not address an education funding cap, while noting the state is facing a “drought unlike anything in modern times.”
In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, after a closer-than-expected election, warned that inflation was harming Empire Staters. “And on top of that,” she added, “how do you pay the monthly rent, or the mortgage? It’s just so overwhelming for our families.”
(This news/post has been generated from www.politico.com and its was posted in their category. CT is not responsible for the above information.)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, cast his state as the place “where woke goes to die,” to which Murphy, in his State of the State address, responded, “I’m not even sure I know what that means.”
It’s not just the nation’s highest-profile chief executives getting in on the crowing, either. It may be news to most, but Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, is aware of “jealousy” about his state, “because now, all of a sudden, we’re the diamond in the rough that they missed.”
“We’re in a never-before-seen era of contrast between red and blue states,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “What state you live in has become a subtext for what your politics must be, and I don’t think that was ever really true until the last six years or so.”
Covid, he said, “has thrown an accelerant on the way governors have presented their states. It became more a point of contrast – open or closed, mandate or no mandate, pro-vaccine or vaccine skeptic. There were very few governors who played it down the middle.”
The governors’ addresses have not been without some introspection about what could improve within their geographic boundaries. In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, pointed last week to the relatively high rates of smoking and obesity in his state, where “our life expectancy in Indiana has declined in recent years.” In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the newly-elected Democratic governor, warned of “potential catastrophe that will happen in just a few months” if lawmakers do not address an education funding cap, while noting the state is facing a “drought unlike anything in modern times.”
In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, after a closer-than-expected election, warned that inflation was harming Empire Staters. “And on top of that,” she added, “how do you pay the monthly rent, or the mortgage? It’s just so overwhelming for our families.”
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#Governors #voters #state #nation #bleak
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
