Biden to block all future oil drilling in 625 million acres of US oceans
Mario Tama/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden is making a sweeping move to ban all future offshore oil and natural gas drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs. It is not worth the risks,” Biden said in a statement announcing the decision.
According to the White House fact sheet, this move blocks drilling in more than 625 million acres of U.S. oceans.
The fact sheet adds that Biden took those actions under “Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act” and adds that his actions “have no expiration date, and prohibit all future oil and natural gas leasing” in the designated areas.
“We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low. Those are false choices,” Biden added.
The fact sheet says that after this sweeping move, “Biden will have conserved more lands and waters than any other U.S. president in history.”
The action comes as President-elect Donald Trump continually made his “drill, baby, drill” promise on the campaign trail, vowing to unlock America’s drilling capabilities in an effort to lower energy costs for Americans.
But the law Biden used, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, was written so a presidential action under its authority is permanent, differing from other executive actions. If the Trump administration were to attempt to reverse Biden’s actions, Congress would likely have to change the law.
ABC News’ MaryAlice Parks contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday called for a halt in confirming judges until he takes office, accusing Democrats of “trying to stack the courts.”
“The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, urging Republican senators to “show up and hold the line.”
“No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!” Trump wrote.
The directive from the president-elect comes as Senate Democrats are expected to dedicate hours of floor time in the coming weeks as part of a last-minute effort to confirm as many of President Joe Biden’s nominees to the federal judiciary before Trump takes over in January. Senate Republicans thwarted their efforts late Monday night, a plan from their soon-to-be leader Sen. John Thune and a reversal from his previous stance on blocking confirmations of qualified judicial nominees.
Senate Republicans rebelled late Monday night, dragging out the floor process by forcing Democrats to hold time-consuming votes on procedural motions that are usually routine and otherwise mundane. Actions that should have taken minutes on the floor instead took hours.
Thune, who takes over as Republican leader of the Senate in January, took credit for the rebellion saying in a statement that Republicans would not “roll over” to appoint Biden’s nominees to the federal bench in the “final weeks of the Democrat majority.”
“If Sen. Schumer thought Senate Republicans would just roll over and allow him to quickly confirm multiple Biden-appointed judges to lifetime jobs in the final weeks of the Democrat majority, he thought wrong,” Thune said in a statement to ABC News.
Thune’s statement vowing to obstruct the judicial confirmation process in the final hours of the Biden presidency is a departure from comments he made just a few years ago toward the end of Trump’s administration. At the time, Thune touted the importance of confirming judges to the bench, saying it was “one of our most important responsibilities as senators” and one of the main reasons he ran for the Senate.
“Mr. President, confirming good judges is one of our most important responsibilities as senators. And it’s a responsibility I take very seriously,” Thune said during a floor speech on Nov. 18 2020 — after Biden won the election.
“After George W. Bush’s election, Democrats decided that the president’s judicial nominees might not deliver the results Democrats wanted. And so, they decided to adopt a new strategy — blocking judicial nominees on a regular basis,” Thune said during his remarks in 2020. “I was one of the many Americans upset by the blockade of talented, well-qualified nominees. And it was one of the main reasons I ran for the Senate. I promised South Dakotans that if they elected me, I would help put outstanding judges on the bench.”
“In fact, one of the main reasons I was first elected to the Senate was to make sure outstanding judicial nominees were confirmed to the federal bench. It’s hard to imagine now, but confirming judges used to be a pretty bipartisan affair,” Thune said at the time.
His comments from 2020 are a notable reversal from his comments this week, as Senate Republicans look to obstruct Democrats as they attempt to do the same for Biden.
Schumer though, doubled down on his efforts Tuesday, and said he expects the Senate to work late into the night again this Wednesday to get the nominees through. Senate Democrats are hoping to confirm as many judges to lifetime appointments as they can while Biden is still president.
“Members should be prepared for another late night on Wednesday to vote on the nominations I filed last night,” Schumer warned.
“Voting on the president’s judicial nominees is a core function of the Senate. It’s one of our basic responsibilities, and we’re going to carry out that responsibility as long as this majority continues. I’m very proud of the judges we’ve confirmed over the past four years under this administration, they have all been highly qualified individuals, and together, they represent a wide range of experiences and areas of expertise.”
Schumer touted the quality of judges the Senate has passed under his leadership, noting their many backgrounds and cultures and identities. He said under his watch, the Senate has confirmed a record number of women and people of color to the federal bench.
Republicans have Democrats’ record on judicial confirmations beat.
Republicans confirmed 234 of Trump’s nominees to the federal courts during his four years in office, and so far the Democrat-controlled Senate has confirmed 216 under Biden’s administration.
“We’re not done,” Schumer said on the floor Tuesday. “There are more judges to consider and confirm.”
Schumer vowed to spend the rest of the week — and the year — confirming more judges. Every judge confirmed in this lame-duck session of Congress is one fewer vacancy Trump can fill come January.
(WASHINGTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrives on Capitol Hill on Monday to kickstart several days of private meetings with more than two dozen senators and their staff in a bid to become the nation’s next health secretary.
Among the senators on Kennedy’s list is Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the GOP’s pick to become the next Senate majority leader.
Kennedy’s chances of getting confirmed by the Senate aren’t clear. His past comments questioning vaccine science and the food industry could lose — and gain — votes on either side of the aisle depending on how he talks about his plans for the incoming administration.
Here are three questions surrounding his nomination:
Would he try to limit access to certain vaccines like the polio shot or encourage schools to drop vaccine mandates?
Kennedy has said he’s not opposed to all vaccines. He says he’s fully vaccinated, with the exception of the COVID-19 shot, and that he has vaccinated his children.
Kennedy also has falsely claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, even though the study claiming that link has been retracted and numerous other high-quality studies have found no evidence that vaccines are tied to autism.
Kennedy also has questioned the safety of the polio vaccine and enlisted the help of a longtime adviser and anti-vaccine advocate, Aaron Siri, to vet potential job candidates for the incoming administration.
Siri petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2022 to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine on behalf of an anti-vaccination advocacy group.
Dr. Richard Besser, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an ABC News contributor, said senators should ask Kennedy if he would consider using his new post to discourage local school districts from requiring vaccinations.
While state — not federal — laws establish vaccination requirements for local schools, they rely heavily on the recommendations by the CDC and FDA, which Kennedy would oversee as health secretary, if confirmed. Currently, all 50 states and Washington, D.C. have laws requiring vaccines to attend schools, although some offer exemptions.
“What will you do to make sure that parents can feel comfortable sending their children to school protected from measles, whooping cough and other vaccine-preventable diseases if vaccines are no longer required?” Besser said senators should be asking Kennedy.
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history and a polio survivor, said last week that anyone seeking Senate confirmation would “do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
Will Kennedy use ‘confirmation bias’ to review government data
Confirmation bias is the idea that people often seek out information that supports their own deeply held beliefs, rather than be open to accepting new information that might challenge their ideas.
When it comes to the polio vaccination, Kennedy has said he’s willing to say that he’s wrong but that he has yet to see information that would convince him.
“If you show me a scientific study that shows that I’m wrong… I’m going to put that on my Twitter and I’m going to say I was wrong,” he said in a podcast last year with Lex Fridman.
It’s likely several senators will ask Kennedy whether he’d be willing to change his mind on vaccines based on data, or if he’s already convinced that the data is wrong or manipulated.
Critics say Kennedy is willfully ignoring the information that’s out there already. In a letter obtained by The New York Times, more than 75 Nobel Prize winners urged U.S. senators to block his nomination, citing the his “lack of credentials or relative experience” in matters of medicine, science and public health.
“In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of [the Department of Health and Human Services] would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors,” the laureates wrote.
How would he try to change what Americans eat?
Kennedy finds the most political consensus when he talks about America’s obesity crisis and blames the high levels of sugar, sodium and fat in ultra-processed foods. A longtime environmental advocate, he’s also taken aim at the use of additives pushed by food companies — earning him kudos from some Democrats.
“We’re prioritizing corporations feeding us unhealthy products instead of family farmers growing fresh, healthy foods – and we let too many dangerous chemicals flood our food system,” said Sen. Cory Booker last month after Kennedy’s nomination was announced.
“We all must come together to build a system that works for all,” he added.
But one big question many senators will likely ask is how Kennedy plans to turn around America’s eating habits in a way that doesn’t hurt U.S. farmers or heavily regulate agricultural businesses that are key political supporters of President-elect Donald Trump. During Trump’s first administration, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue rolled back Obama-era rules that sought to limit sodium and sugar in children’s school lunches that accept federal subsidies.
FDA Administrator Robert Califf, who will step down when Trump takes office in January, testified recently before a Senate committee that there’s a lot we still don’t know about food science and safety. When the FDA does move ahead with regulation, he said the rule is often challenged in court.
“What sounds simple, given the current state of judicial affairs, First Amendment rights, [is] the fact that corporations have the same rights as individuals — every little thing we do, unless specifically in detail instructed by Congress — it’s not just that we lose in court, but we lose years,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Democratic National Committee on Saturday is launching a new ad campaign targeted at rural voters to boost turnout in two southern battlegrounds in the final days of the presidential election.
The effort, backed by a six-figure media buy, comes as Democrats are especially concerned that early vote turnout is low among Black voters in rural areas. The effort will span 15 counties that are part of the “Black Belt” in Georgia and North Carolina.
The ads, which will run on multi-media billboards and on radio stations in the area, will feature DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison, a Black South Carolinian who has spoken extensively of his upbringing in rural Orangeburg. The effort will promote policies that Democrats say will help rural voters, including expanding rural infrastructure, making health care more affordable and ensuring rural hospitals can remain open.
“In the final days of this election, Democrats are not taking our foot off the gas as we communicate our plan for rural America. From affordable and accessible health care, to lower costs, and economic opportunities, the Democratic Party will fight for the policies that make a tangible difference for rural Americans,” Harrison said in a statement provided first to ABC News.
“Growing up in a rural town, I know how important it is to show up and truly meet rural voters where they are. The DNC’s latest rural ‘I Will Vote’ initiative does exactly that, ensuring that the final message rural voters in the critical battlegrounds of Georgia and North Carolina receive in this election is Democrats’ commitment to fight for them.”
The ad buy comes as Democrats grow concerned that Black rural voters are not participating in early voting at the rate that the party needs.
Democrats hope to be competitive in Georgia and North Carolina, where Black rural voters are key. Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to clean up in urban areas, but she’ll have to keep former President Donald Trump’s rural margins down enough to stop him from offsetting her advantage in cities like Atlanta and Raleigh.
In Georgia, 41% of early voters are Republican, and 42% are Democrats, according to 538 analysis of voter data from L2, a non-partisan political data company. In 2020, early voting was 41% Republican – 46% Democrat.
It’s the same story in North Carolina, where 34% of early vote ballots have been cast by Republicans, and 33% by Democrats. In 2020, early voting was 32% Republican – 35% Democrat.
Of voters who voted early in 2020, only 66% of Black voters have cast an early ballot this time around so far. That number drops to 63% of Black voters in rural areas.
The drop is likely explainable in part by this year’s election not taking place in the middle of a pandemic, whereas in 2020, many voters leaned on early and absentee voting to avoid long lines and possible COVID-19 exposures.
Still, both states remain highly competitive. Polling averages from 538 show Trump up 1.6 points in Georgia and 1.3 points in North Carolina.
Early voting has also had some promising signs for Democrats, including high female turnout, particularly as polls show a widening gender gap, with women leaning toward Harris and men toward Trump.
And while operatives said Democrats were not hitting their marks with Black rural voters early on, that trend has begun to be mitigated, with veteran North Carolina Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson conceding that while “they had started early vote a little low,” the turnout has “picked up pretty substantially.”
“My suspicion is by Saturday’s close, they’ll be at parity with where they were four years ago,” added Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College in North Carolina who is tracking the early vote numbers.
