TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody sued the Biden Administration on Thursday seeking to prevent the federal government from carrying out its latest immigration plan when the Covid-era Title 42 rules soon expire.

In the latest scrap between Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Joe Biden over immigration, Florida officials are asking a federal judge to postpone the policies that the state argues are “unquestionably cynical.”

With the Biden Administration set for a massive influx of asylum seekers arriving at the southern border Friday, a federal judge in Pensacola pressed them to respond by Thursday afternoon — only partially granting a time extension for responding to the lawsuit.

“It is inconceivable that [the Biden administration] waited until yesterday to formulate this policy, particularly since they have known for quite some time that the Title 42 Order was going to expire tonight,” U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell wrote in an order Thursday.

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When JOHN PODESTA delivered a speech Wednesday laying out the administration’s priorities for reforming the federal government’s permitting process, some Republicans in Congress saw it as a sign of the White House moving their way in the negotiations tying up the debt ceiling being lifted.

Podesta is President JOE BIDEN’s senior adviser tasked with implementing his climate agenda. So his comments carry serious weight. But the White House noted that the remarks were scheduled long before the debt limit discussions had reached this phase. And Podesta did not deviate from the administration’s position that raising the debt limit is not negotiable.

“The threat of default should never be used in policy fights,” he said during his speech at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “If you want to talk about permitting, we should talk about permitting.”

Still, two sources familiar with the ongoing spending negotiations over the debt limit increase confirmed that permitting reform is on the table — and viewed within the White House and on Capitol Hill as, potentially, a key piece of an eventual agreement that could give House Speaker KEVIN MCCARTHY enough political cover to agree to a revised debt ceiling increase.

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Donald Trump’s CNN town hall on Wednesday night was viewed as a gift from the political gods inside Biden world.

But within broader Democratic circles it fed a nagging and growing concern. Is the president’s team a touch too confident about a Trump-Biden rematch?

For more than a year, White House aides and Joe Biden allies have beat the same drum about the coming election: The world doubted us before and we’ll prove them wrong again. That conviction has only been fortified by the last two years, in which major legislative strides and a better-than-expected midterm came in the face of routine skepticism.

But as the campaign gears up, other Democrats are warning that the past cannot be considered prologue. Top officials privately have expressed anxiety about the state of the president’s reelection operation. There was internal debate among party luminaries about launching the campaign in April, with fears that the pieces were not yet in place and that the White House needed more time for the transition. Chief of staff Jeff Zients had wanted Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the incoming campaign manager, to stay for an additional month in her current role as director of the White House’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, but was talked out of it, a White House official confirmed.

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President Joe Biden and top congressional leaders have delayed their planned Friday meeting to discuss the debt ceiling, according to a White House spokesperson.

The group has instead agreed to meet next week. The postponement comes as the White House and GOP leaders have just weeks before a June 1 deadline to strike a deal that raises the nation’s borrowing limit. But several people familiar with the discussions characterized it as a positive development, and a sign that talks between White House and Hill staffers are gaining momentum.

Congressional and White House staff plan to meet again on Friday, when both the House and Senate are scheduled to be out of session, according to another person close to the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"There have been very good discussions over the last few days at the staff level. And I think the decision was collectively made, led by the White House, to allow those staff conversations to continue," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a brief interview.

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President Joe Biden's administration on Thursday proposed powerful new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from the nation's coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, the nation’s second-largest source of climate pollution.

The rule, which covers existing fossil fuel plants as well as future ones, clocks in at 681 pages. Here's what to know about the proposal, which Environmental Protection Agency chief Michael Regan said will “protect people from harmful pollution and safeguard the planet for future generations.”

Wait, didn’t EPA do this before?
Yes — you have a great memory. The agency has tried twice before to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants. And both efforts ended up on the scrap heap.

First was the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan in 2015. It set emissions reduction goals for each state based on how much EPA calculated they could achieve. It allowed the states to pursue several strategies to cut their carbon pollution, including shifting away from coal and toward cleaner-burning natural gas or greenhouse-gas-free renewables.

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The Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders have a warning for lawmakers fighting over the government's borrowing limit: a default would be a win for China, and would endanger troops' pay.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley on Thursday told the Senate Defense Appropriations panel that breaching the debt limit would significantly damage U.S. standing in the world and call into question the country's global leadership.

"China right now describes us in their open speeches, etc., as a declining power," Milley said. "Defaulting on the debt would only reinforce that thought and embolden China and increase risk to the United States."

Austin added that a default would mean a "substantial risk to our reputation" that China could exploit.

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President Joe Biden’s environmental chief pitched his agency’s new proposal Thursday to crack down on planet-heating gases from power plants as delivering on the president’s promise to combat climate change — even as Republicans and industry opponents disparaged it as a recipe for economic ruin.

The rule would bring benefits to all Americans by reducing the effects of climate change, curbing pollution and providing better-paying jobs, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan told a crowd at the University of Maryland in College Park.

“It’s not about party affiliation. It’s not about politics,” said Regan, speaking alongside Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a labor union member and a student activist. “It's about uniting as a society, as a nation, as a people, for the greater good of humanity. It's about recognizing and acknowledging that we may not exactly agree on the how, but we must agree on the what.”

Regan sought to simultaneously minimize growing angst from young voters worried about some of Biden’s recent moves on the environment ","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/29/greens-bashing-biden-climate-energy-00093929","_id":"00000188-0db2-d53d-abaf-3ff69d6b0008","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000188-0db2-d53d-abaf-3ff69d6b0009","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}">worried about some of Biden’s recent moves on the environment — such as approving a major oil project in Alaska — and deflect criticism from industry that the EPA was going too far with its proposal.

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When Sen. Joe Manchin upbraided EPA on Wednesday for requiring power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, he didn't mention that the agency's rules could threaten his personal income.

The West Virginia Democrat vowed to oppose President Joe Biden's EPA nominees because the agency's rules being proposed Thursday could push coal- and gas-fired power plants "out of existence," he said.

The risk to one plant, in particular, could jeopardize a lucrative source of money for Manchin. His family business Enersystems Inc. delivers waste coal to the Grant Town power plant, a financially struggling coal facility near Manchin's hometown that he has spent much of his political career protecting.

The Grant Town plant has repeatedly threatened to shut down. Now, with the release of EPA rules that are expected to push many power plants into installing expensive technology to capture their carbon emissions before the pollution escapes into the sky, the plant faces an increasingly troubled future. Many coal plants might shut down rather than comply with the stringent new climate rules.

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President Joe Biden’s pick for chief economist, Jared Bernstein, is one step closer to Senate confirmation to a post that will be key to White House efforts to steer the economy away from recession.

Bernstein cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 12-11 vote on Thursday, putting him on track to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers at a time when Biden is running for reelection, growth is slowing and inflation remains persistently high.

The longtime Biden aide has already been an important voice in the administration’s economic messaging, including on legislation passed last year that boosted spending on infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing and climate initiatives.

Republicans criticized Bernstein — who is currently a member of the CEA — for being part of the chorus, both in and outside of the administration, predicting in 2021 that inflation would be merely a transitory phenomenon. Though price spikes have steadily cooled since June 2022, inflation is still hovering just under 5 percent. They are also critical of the president’s energy policies.

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The Biden administration is announcing a climate rule that would require most fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 — or shut down.

The highly anticipated regulation being unveiled Thursday morning is just the latest step in President Joe Biden’s campaign to green the U.S. economy, an effort that has brought a counterattack from Republicans and coal-state Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s on top of efforts by Biden’s agencies to promote the use of electric cars, subsidize green energy sources like solar and wind and tighten regulations on products including gas stoves and dishwashers.

The draft power plant rule from the Environmental Protection Agency would break new ground by requiring steep pollution cuts from plants burning coal or natural gas, which together provide the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity. To justify the size of those cuts, the agency says fossil fuel plants could capture their greenhouse gas emissions before they hit the atmosphere — a long-debated technology that no power plant in the U.S. uses now.

As an alternative, utilities could hasten their decisions to shut down their aging coal plants, a trend that has already gathered speed in the past two decades. The rule allows plants that agree to close in the first half of the 2030s to avoid most or all of the pollution-reduction mandates.

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — America is moving on from Covid-19. Ron DeSantis can't stop talking about it.

With the Covid-triggered national health emergency set to expire Thursday, DeSantis has been crisscrossing the country touting his handling of the virus. DeSantis criticized “lockdown politicians” during a visit to California and called Florida a “refuge of sanity” amid pandemic closures when he was in South Carolina last month. At Liberty University in Virginia two weeks ago, the governor said he bucked the political and medical establishment to keep Florida open.

DeSantis, who is expected to announce a presidential bid in the coming weeks, has gone even further in his home state. The governor this year pressed Republicans in the Legislature to pass a series of Covid-19-related bills, including measures that permanently ban mask mandates in schools and prohibit businesses from firing employees who don’t get vaccinated.

“It's purely political,” said state Sen. Tina Polsky, a Democrat from Boca Raton, of the legislation to ban pandemic-era mandates forever.

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Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s office on Wednesday clarified statements he made about white nationalists serving in the military.

“Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?” the Alabama senator was asked during an interview on WBHM that was posted online on Monday. “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans,” Tuberville said.

On Wednesday, Tuberville’s office clarified those remarks to a publication in his home state, telling AL.com that Tuberville’s comment “shows that he was being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military,” and that the senator believes members of the military are “patriots.”

During the radio interview, Tuberville, a member of the Senate Arms Services Committee, also decried lagging recruitment in the military, blaming Biden-administration policies.

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VALHALLA, N. Y. — President Joe Biden took his debt ceiling appeal to the road on Wednesday, part of an effort to more aggressively utilize the bully pulpit as default inches closer.

Speaking just one day after an Oval Office meeting with congressional leadership led to little progress in striking a deal to ward off default as the deadline rapidly approaches, the White House’s choice of venue was deliberately chosen: a suburban GOP-held New York state district within commuting distance of Wall Street. The area also is home to a Republican lawmaker who narrowly captured a district last year that broke for Biden in 2020.

Biden made the case that Republicans were “holding the economy hostage” in their unwillingness to pass a clean debt ceiling raise. And the GOP’s budget proposal, the president argued, would also devastate the economy.

“Republican threats are dangerous and they make no sense,” Biden said to a crowd of roughly 300 people at SUNY Westchester Community College.

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NEW YORK — President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has dropped New York City Mayor Eric Adams as a national surrogate following his public criticism of the White House’s approach to the migrant crisis.

Adams is among several lawmakers who were initially named to the president’s National Advisory Board in March but no longer appear on a roster of 50 prominent Democrats released by the campaign Wednesday.

But his case stands out.

The outspoken mayor of the nation’s largest city has in recent weeks pointedly criticized Biden over the White House’s response to the asylum-seeker crisis. New York City has projected billions of dollars in costs to provide shelter, food and other services to over 60,000 migrants. Adams has called for more funding from the federal government, an organized resettlement strategy at the border and expedited work permits to help him manage the influx. And as the expiration of a key border policy set for later this week grew closer, Adams amped up his rhetoric, most recently lumping the sitting Democratic president in the same boat with the congressional Republicans.

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President Joe Biden made waves Tuesday when he acknowledged he was considering using the 14th Amendment to end the debt standoff — before saying he feared it would get caught up in courts.

On Wednesday, the politically active constitutional scholar who warmed Biden to the idea called the president's concerns misplaced.

“I don’t think there is any litigation to fear,” said Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, adding that he “hopes” Biden realizes a court challenge is not something to worry about.

Tribe’s response to Biden represents his latest effort to try and persuade the president to utilize novel legal arguments as a way through the increasingly thorny debt ceiling standoff. Tribe’s push for the 14th Amendment first got on Biden’s radar vis-a-vis a May 7 New York Times op-ed, in which he said the debt ceiling must be ignored in order for the president to execute other laws enacted by Congress.

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The Biden administration is expected to plunge Thursday into a transformation of the U.S. power industry — by requiring utilities to either reduce or capture their planet-warming pollution.

The release of the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rules for power plants will answer a slate of questions about how it plans to maximize carbon reductions from gas- and coal-fired electricity, the nation's second-largest source of greenhouse gases.

EPA has tried and failed to do this twice before. Both times, federal courts threw out the rules — rejecting the Obama administration’s attempt to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, while faulting the Trump administration for doing too little to confront climate change.

This time, the agency will push utilities to capture a share of their carbon pollution before it escapes into the sky, according to four people granted anonymity to discuss their private briefings on the rules. The proposal will face scrutiny for whether it complies with the realities of the power industry and Supreme Court restrictions on the agency’s authority.

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The political calculations facing President Joe Biden’s newest big climate rule come down to one question: How much have voters changed since 2010?

That year, Republican charges that Barack Obama was waging a “war on coal” helped yield an electoral beatdown for Democrats in the midterm elections, wiping out their House majority just months after the collapse of legislation aimed at slashing greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels.

On Thursday, Biden’s regulators are expected to return to that fight with a major regulation aimed at coal- and gas-burning power plants. And Republicans plan to seize on it as the newest evidence that the president is bent on eliminating fossil fuels, despite the risk of worsening inflation and lessening the reliability of the electric grid. That message, they warn, will jeopardize Democratic senators in states such as West Virginia, Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“With energy prices continuing to go up and reliability continuing to go down, Joe Biden is going to pay a price for all these poor decisions,” said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

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The White House wants the proposals to overhaul federal infrastructure permitting rules jettisoned from the high-stakes negotiations with Republicans to raise the debt limit and avoid a potentially catastrophic blow to the global economy, White House senior adviser John Podesta said Wednesday.

Podesta reiterated President Joe Biden’s call for a clean debt ceiling bill from Congress, pushing back against Republican efforts to tie those negotiations to Republican energy priorities and permitting reforms included in their energy legislation, H.R. 1., since the two parties remain far apart on what type of energy infrastructure — fossil fuels or electricity — permitting updates should focus on.

“We think everything needs to be delinked from the debt ceiling fight,” said Podesta, who unveiled the White House's permitting priorities at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “If you want to talk about the budget, we should talk about the budget. If you want to talk about permitting, we should talk about permitting.”

The two parties have both made permitting reform a centerpiece of their policy and political efforts, but they remain far apart on specifics. The fight threatens to further complicate negotiations over lifting the debt ceiling given that House Republicans included permitting reform in their list of demands for passing legislation that would agree to pay money the United States owes its creditors.

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President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are still very much in the finger-pointing stage of the economy-rattling debt crisis. Yet some possible signs of life have begun to emerge.

Senior Hill aides have agreed to start more in-depth talks on government spending — though Democrats insist those are on a separate track from raising the nation's debt limit. Biden has said he'd take a “hard look” at unspent Covid aid money in the talks. A top White House adviser is laying out ideas for energy permitting reform — one of the GOP’s biggest debt limit priorities.

It’s all far short of a compromise to bridge the mile-wide gap between party leaders, who have retreated to their corners since their Oval Office sit-down on Tuesday. Top Democrats are still refusing to entertain the GOP’s spending cut demands, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer castigating McCarthy in a bid to split him from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And Republicans are complaining that Biden is running out the clock.

So the minor signs of progress that are visible in the Capitol are leaving some lawmakers to wonder whether they're meaningful or more of a mirage as the deadline to avoid a full-blown economic crisis draws nearer.

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President Joe Biden is wading into the high-stakes negotiations over the farm bill, amid growing concerns the debt limit stand-off could knock that must-pass piece of legislation off track.

Biden has invited a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers to the White House Thursday to discuss the upcoming farm bill reauthorization, according to four people familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Congress is aiming to write and pass what is expected to be a $1 trillion-plus bill, which will authorize U.S. food and agriculture spending for the next decade, by this fall. But even senior Senate Republicans are increasingly wary that the mounting debt crisis could derail the traditionally bipartisan farm bill.

The group of invitees include House Agriculture Committee Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) and John Boozman (Ark.), the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senate Agriculture Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who is a member of Democratic leadership, and Rep. David Scott (Ga.), the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is also expected to attend, according to the people.

Stabenow confirmed she was planning to attend the meeting with Biden, which she described as a “general overview” of the farm bill process.

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