Finance

With the U.S. government reporting this week that inflation has hit a four-decade high and the Fed cranking up its efforts to drive down prices, President Joe Biden’s economy faces a dizzying array of risks. Growth was already expected to slow this year after 2021’s blistering 5.7 percent expansion, as both Congress and the central bank pull back support for the economy. But the hits keep coming — higher energy prices, a slowdown in China and the possibility of a Fed-induced recession.

“One way or another, we need to overturn that decision,” Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado told POLITICO. Lamborn is the top Republican on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces panel, which oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other leaders have said what the Russians are doing in Ukraine amounts to war crimes. Last month, the U.S. embassy in Kyiv called it a war crime to attack a nuclear plant.

But practically, it is hard to envision that a criminal referral would matter much one way or the other.

Overthrowing a personalist autocrat is not easy. Because individual elites can rarely remove a dictator on their own, they need a party, business organization, tribe, or military to stand behind them and assure that others will follow their lead. Recognizing this threat, personalist autocrats weaken organizations that enable elites to coalesce against them. The lack of organizations also makes it difficult for the masses to mobilize against the regime. Once a ruler is able to create a personalist autocracy by eliminating other centers of power, they are especially hard to dislodge. Research by Milan Svolik at Yale University has shown that the longer personalist autocrats stay in office, the less likely they are to be removed from power by either a coup or an uprising.

“Democrats are on the defensive on violent crime, but they have a built-in trust advantage on gun violence prevention policies,” said Peter Ambler, executive director for the gun safety group Giffords. “If we’re worried about whether or not Democrats just rented the suburbs, or if we’ve made real substantial progress, if those are sort of top political concerns for Democrats, they need to look at gun safety, gun violence prevention, taking on the gun lobby as core parts of the strategy in advance of the midterms.”

A study by Way to Win, a network of progressive political donors that I helped start and which has moved over $200 million to grassroots efforts, media, candidates and research since 2018, found that in 2020, congressional Democrats spent three times more than Republicans on television ads touting bipartisanship. By contrast, Republicans went on offense, spending upwards of 10 times more than Democrats on ads with the words “extremist” and “radical.” The result? Democrats lost 12 seats in a cycle where they were projected to gain as many as 15. While Democrats handled the GOP with kid gloves, Republicans told a clear story with a clear villain, and it paid off.

But this means that, in the competition for commissioner time and support, the food program is a second-class citizen within FDA — a problem compounded in 2009 by Congress giving FDA the politically contentious responsibility to regulate the tobacco industry. Put simply, no commissioner has the bandwidth to provide strategic leadership and management accountability to a set of programs that combined regulate 20 percent of U.S. consumer spending in such large, rapidly changing and technologically complex industries. The result is that food gets lost in the shuffle.

Here are five endgame scenarios the committee must confront before going public:

Most liberals think they already know the answer — yes. Yet Republicans say they haven’t discussed the matter as a conference and, judging by their comments this week, they don’t have a unified position.

But a federal inquiry isn’t deterring Republicans from pursuing broader allegations against Hunter Biden. The House GOP’s eagerness promises to test whether next year’s likely new majority can conduct legitimate oversight without falling down a rabbit hole of politically motivated allegations that have a murky provenance. Russian disinformation touching on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, for example, emerged during former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment.