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Republicans To Overturn Coal Regulations Protecting Streams Patch.com Republican legislators also voted to repeal regulations requiring companies involved in drilling and mining to report payments made to foreign governments. And just around the time Ryan was signing the resolution overturning the stream protection rule, ... Republicans Move to Block Rule on Coal Mining Near StreamsNew York Times House Republicans move to scrap Obama rule on gun background checksFox News Republicans Launch Push to Undo Several of Obama's Federal RegulationsWall Street Journal Washington Times -Reuters -Office of Surface Mining all 264 news articles »

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Republicans To Overturn Coal Regulations Protecting Streams - Patch.com

Which Country Is America's Strongest Ally? For Republicans, It's Australia New York Times Comparing the new survey with a nearly identical YouGov survey conducted about three years ago, the scatterplot below shows the shifting in Democratic and Republican views. In the previous survey, for example, Democratic and Republican views on ...

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Which Country Is America's Strongest Ally? For Republicans, It's Australia - New York Times

In a 52-47 vote, the Republican-controlled Senate approved a resolution to eradicate a rule requiring companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp. to publicly state taxes and other fees paid to foreign governments like Russia.

The House of Representatives already passed the measure. President Donald Trump is expected to sign it within days. On Thursday, the Senate repealed a rule that would have limited coal companies from dumping waste into streams.

After a number of legal battles, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2016 completed the regulation, which supporters said could help expose questionable financial ties U.S. companies may have with foreign governments.

Senate Democrats raised concerns that Exxon's chief executive during those legal fights was Rex Tillerson, who was recently confirmed as U.S. secretary of state and has worked extensively in Russia.

"It should be lost on no one that in less than 48 hours, the Republican-controlled Senate has confirmed the former head of ExxonMobil to serve as our secretary of state, and repealed a key anti-corruption rule that Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute have erroneously fought for years," Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland said, referring to the oil industry's trade group.

Exxon and other major energy corporations fought for years to block the rule, required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

Cardin, the senior Democrat on the foreign relations committee, wrote the Dodd-Frank section on the payments to foreign governments with Richard Lugar, a former Republican senator.

Critics of the rule said it duplicated existing regulations, was too costly and burdensome for companies to implement and that it put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage with state-owned companies in other countries that do not have to divulge such information.

The change could give American companies an edge over Canadian and European companies that face some of the toughest transparency rules in the world.

Republicans have taken advantage of a seldom-used law known as the Congressional Review Act to overturn recently enacted rules with simple majorities in both chambers, denying senators the opportunity to filibuster and stall a vote.

Democrats said Republicans were using the review act to help companies not the public.

"When it comes to giving public resources to private interests and gutting our nation's health, environmental and financial standards, the Republicans can't seem to act fast enough," said Rep. Raul Grijalva. "Whoever they're doing this for, it isn't the American public."

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Republicans ax disclosure, emissions rules on energy - Grand Forks Herald

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Donald Trump has only been president for two weeks. In that time, he has created untold chaos with hyper-aggressive use of executive authority, and seriously destabilized relations with several nations, including at least one very close ally, Australia. He's unstable, incompetent, and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the world.

Donald Trump must be impeached and removed from office. Not because his policy is bad, though that is very true, but because he is so erratic and unstable as to be a threat to all life on Earth. And it will be up to Congressional Republicans to do it.

They are the only ones with the power to impeach Trump at this point (which requires a majority vote in the House to impeach and a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict and remove from office). The reason they should is not to advance liberal political goals if anything Vice President Mike Pence would be a more effective policymaker and a more formidable candidate in 2020 but because of Trump's actual danger to American society.

Let's roll the tape.

Trump, on the close counsel of Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller (who are, it seems, the real power behind the throne), has rammed through a probably illegal order banning Muslim immigration from seven countries, even for people with legitimate visas and desperately ill refugees; he reportedly directed federal law enforcement to ignore federal court orders staying the act, creating an instant constitutional crisis. Over the weekend, Trump and his national security team ordered a raid in Yemen which was epically botched, killing at least 30 people including one U.S. soldier and 10 women and children among them an 8-year-old American girl.

This week, Trump reportedly threatened to invade Mexico to deal with "bad hombres" (though the constantly bullied Mexican government later denied it); and he got in a bizarre, heated argument with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over an agreement to take in some refugees. On Wednesday night, after a handful of anti-fascist protesters disrupted a Milo Yiannopolous event at the University of California, Berkeley, Trump threatened to withdraw all federal funding from the entire school:

On Thursday, Trump put Iran "ON NOTICE" because they carried out a ballistic missile test. That same day, it came out that Trump had hired Michael Anton, author of a widely-read pseudonymous essay supporting Trump, to work in national security. His article is overtly racist and authoritarian in its reasoning; it casts any Democratic victory as presumptively illegitimate because "the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle."

In related news, Trump is also reportedly considering altering a Department of Homeland Security anti-terrorism program to focus solely on Islamist terrorism mere days after a white nationalist terrorist shot up a mosque in Quebec City. Oh, and Bannon says we'll be at war with China within 10 years.

I wrote many articles predicting that Trump was a racist and an incipient fascist, that he would be the worst president in American history, and on and on. But I did not think it would get quite so bad this fast. If you ever wanted to see a presidency run by an unstable numskull who gets 100 percent of his news from Fox News broadcasts, here we have it.

And all this doesn't even touch the background issue of Trump's immense network of business ties which he was already exploiting for his own enrichment before he was inaugurated. That alone a clear-cut violation of the Emoluments Clause is probably grounds enough for impeachment, if we needed any more.

Trump is popular among Republican voters. But he is very unpopular overall, and his antics are creating a massive popular backlash. And while congressional Republicans are hawkish on Iran, they weren't much for war with China last time I checked. Trump has been president for literally two weeks and he has already caused one major international crisis and several serious diplomatic flaps for no reason at all. What will happen when he faces a real problem? The United States has about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads that can be fired anywhere on the sole discretion of the president. The man is quite literally a threat to human life on this planet. He has to go.

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Republicans: You must impeach President Trump - The Week Magazine

Congressional Republicans: We will not form a select committee to investigate Russian interference in the election. That can be handled through existing committees, no need to create one centralized body for it.

Also congressional Republicans: Oh no, too many different committees are investigating Russian interference in the election.

The jurisdictions pretty fragmented, and thats kind of a problem, Senate Majority Whip [John] Cornyn said, so I think there needs to be sort of a concerted effort, and I think most of thats going to be coming through the Intelligence committee. The Texan, who is second in Republican Senate leadership, said the other committees might not have access to the necessary classified information.

You know what would deal with fragmented jurisdiction and the need for a concerted effort? A select committee.

What apparently spurred this round of fretting is that Sens. Lindsey Graham and Sheldon Whitehouse announced theyd be using theSenate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism to investigate. Since Graham is one of the few Republicans who seems to actually want to know what happened and to be disturbed by the prospect that Russia influenced the U.S. elections to help get its preferred candidate elected, you can see why Republicans who prefer a little bit more of a sham investigation would be concerned. (Though lets not oversell Grahams effectiveness, here.) The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr, can deliver that image of an investigation without too much uncomfortable reality.

But anytime a Republican suggests its a problem that there are too manyfragmented investigations, theres the answer: Why not a select committee?

Also, did you think there were too many Benghazi investigations? Because Russian election hacking has to pick up a few more committee investigationsanda select committee before its at Benghazi levels.

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Republicans worry about too many investigations of the Russian hacking that hasn't been investigated - Daily Kos