Free-trade Pacts Held Up For Years Near Passage

“Senate Republicans are preparing over the break to launch a quick party-line border funding bill in the new Congress,” Semafor reports. “Everything is fluid, but the Senate Budget Committee may move a budget resolution in early- to mid-January; a very aspirational goal could put the budget resolution on the Senate floor before Donald Trump is sworn in.

Just after President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners on death row, President-elect Donald Trump pledged “to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters.” He added: “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”

“The Biden administration is weighing new, harsher sanctions against Russia’s lucrative oil trade, seeking to tighten the squeeze on the Kremlin’s war machine just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House,” Bloomberg reports. “Details of the possible new measures were still being worked out, but President Joe Biden’s team was considering restrictions that might target some Russian oil exports, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.”

New York Times: “Iran is suddenly far more brittle than it was during his first administration, its leadership more uncertain, its nuclear program more exposed and vulnerable to attack. That new reality has touched off an internal debate about how his administration should approach Tehran: with an openness to negotiations, or with an attack on its nuclear enrichment program — overt or covert, or perhaps initiated by Israel.” “Or, as many suggest, a round of ‘coercive diplomacy’ that leaves Tehran to choose either a negotiated disassembly of its nuclear capability, or a forced one.”

Colorado lawmakers are set to introduce a pair of bills in the next legislative session that would bar municipal courts from imposing more severe sentences than state courts for the same crimes, as well as limit city courts from criminalizing missed hearings.  The first bill, sponsored by Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat, seeks to address disparities in sentences between state courts and their lower-level municipal counterparts. Legislative reforms in 2021 significantly reduced maximum penalties for a host of low-level, nonviolent crimes in Colorado’s state courts.

It’s about time, and I want to be reimbursed.