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@ISIDEWITH submitted…16hrs16H
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Monday that he would nominate former Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”Mr. Trump added that Mr. Zeldin would “set new standards on environmental review and maintenance that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”Perhaps more than many other federal agencies, the E.P.A. has been a particular target for Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.During his run for governor, Mr. Zeldin pledged to reverse New York’s 2015 ban on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock that environmental advocates say can contaminate groundwater. He also called for construction of more gas pipelines and a suspension of the state gas tax.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…4hrs4H
Melania Trump declined an offer to head to the White House Wednesday and meet with Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of the federal government’s investigation into classified documents.“She ain’t going,” a source familiar with Melania’s decision told The Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said.“Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet,” the source added.Melania’s husband, President-elect Donald Trump, will sit with President Biden in the Oval Office Wednesday for a traditional post-election meeting.Typically, the first lady hosts her successor for tea in the White House.Melania visited the White House following her husband’s 2016 election win and received a tour from then- first lady Michelle Obama.After Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, he failed to invite the Bidens to the White House before the Democrat officially assumed office, breaking the decades-old tradition, according to reports at the time.The Post has reached out to the Trump campaign and the White House about Melania’s decision to skip the meeting.The FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 in its probe of the 45th president’s withholding of classified White House documents.Melania, 54, has previously voiced her displeasure over the raid at their Palm Beach, Florida, mansion.“Yeah, it made me angry,” she said on “Fox & Friends” in a September interview, calling it an “invasion of privacy.” FBI agents scoured Melania’s wardrobe, combed through her 78-year-old husband’s office and even reportedly searched one of her son Barron’s rooms.
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Filibuster for me, but not for thee. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), an outspoken critic of the Senate filibuster, indicated Monday that she will not support axing the procedural hurdle as long as Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. “Am I championing getting rid of the filibuster now when the Senate has the trifecta? No,” the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. “But had we had the trifecta, I would have been, because we have to show that government can deliver,” Jayapal added. The Senate filibuster rule, which requires a 60-vote threshold to end debate and pass most types of legislation in the upper chamber, is seen as the best chance Democrats have at blocking the adoption of President-elect Donald Trump agenda – with Republicans taking a 53-47 seat advantage in the Senate and expected to retain a slim majority in the House. Jayapal, as recently as September, was pushing to “abolish” what she called the “Jim Crow filibuster.” “The filibuster was originally created *by mistake* in 1806,” she wrote on X. “Every day we don’t abolish it is just as big a mistake.”The Washington Democrat dislikes that the procedural tool makes it difficult for progressives to ram their agenda through Congress. “It’s the filibuster OR an assault weapons ban. It’s the filibuster OR codified abortion access. It’s the filibuster OR raising the minimum wage. It’s the filibuster OR protecting voting rights. The choice is clear. Abolish the Jim Crow filibuster,” Jayapal tweeted. The progressive rep argued Monday that passing a liberal agenda would’ve “built some trust with the American people.”“If we had had control of the trifecta and gotten rid of the filibuster to pass minimum wage, to pass paid sick leave, to pass many of these things that are passing – abortion access – that are passing on ballot measures that are so popular … then I think we would have built some trust with the American people,” Jayapal argued.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…3hrs3H
Trump transition team officials are considering retail brokerage Robinhood's top lawyer, as well as bank regulators and corporate attorneys, for a short list of key financial agency heads they expect to present to the president-elect soon, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.Among those being considered for chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission is Dan Gallagher, a Republican SEC commissioner from 2011 to 2015 who is currently chief legal and compliance officer at Robinhood, the people said.Gallagher, who is a popular pick among cryptocurrency executives who donated millions of dollars to Donald Trump's Republican campaign, is the front-runner at this point, although the discussions are fluid, two of the people said.Also in the mix for SEC chair is Paul Atkins, another former Republican SEC commissioner and CEO of consultancy Patomak Global Partners. Atkins served on Trump's transition team in 2016, when he was also a contender for the SEC chair role, Reuters reported at the time.Robert Stebbins, a partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher who served as SEC general counsel during Trump's first administration, is also being discussed for the SEC short list.Trump transition team officials are compiling a short list of a handful of individuals for each financial agency which they will present to Trump, said two of the people. The process could take a few weeks, and it was still too early to say who would ultimately win the top jobs, the people said.Gallagher and Atkins did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Stebbins declined to comment.In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, Trump's national press secretary, said: "President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration soon. Those decisions will be announced when they are made."Trump's campaign courted crypto industry cash with promises to promote bitcoin and overhaul the SEC, whose Democratic chair, Gary Gensler, has cracked down hard on the industry, saying it has flouted SEC rules. Crypto companies have been pushing for an SEC chair who will quickly end his crackdown and tear up other unfriendly policies,.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has taken to Instagram to listen to split-ticket voters from last week’s election, posting a question box asking “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why” on her story. She received a variety of responses from her 8.1 million followers and beyond, citing reasons ranging from Trump and Ocasio-Cortez’s “care for the working class” to the war in Gaza. “I’m LISTENING,” she wrote. “Sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt! Even if it makes you want to barf.”“I support you and did this. Felt like I didn’t have a choice after Biden’s administration,” one reply said. “You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” another said.“This is why I say that we should be signing up to knock on doors and be on the phones,” Ocasio-Cortez said in another story in response to a comment that said responses were “blowing [their] mind. “If you’re only tuning in to [mass media], you will think that most people fall along this spectrum, and a lot of people don’t.” She added that door knocking and phone banking are not a “junior thing” that politicians should grow out of. She also posted stories also asking about where leftists and Trump-supporting voters get their news from and shared some of those responses as well. Ocasio-Cortez glided to victory in her reelection race in New York last week, and will continue to represent the state’s 14th Congressional District.
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TOM COTTON is slated to be the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, putting “I think mass deportation is just talk, but the era of open borders will be over,” Scott McConnell, a co-founder of The American Conservative, wrote on X. In July a Mexican-born Trump backer told The Times, “Last time, he didn’t even finish the wall. What’s he going to do this time?”Now the answer is taking shape: He’s going to oversee a militarized mass roundup of the undocumented. On Sunday, Trump named Tom Homan, his former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as “border czar.”In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.
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