The chief law enforcement officer of the United States is in a perilous position. Undermined in recent days by President Donald Trump – who appointed him as attorney general – Jeff Sessions finds himself now under pressure to resign.
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New sanctions punishing Russia for its interference in last year’s US presidential election cleared a key step Tuesday as the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill expanding Congressional checks on President Trump’s ability to ease those penalties. VOA’s Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
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Following a lack of agreement at the U.S. China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington last week, analysts say they expect the Trump administration to impose stiff penalties on Chinese steel and other imports. They are also predicting the U.S. might go a step further and start questioning some of the rules of the World Trade Organization, which it regards as being unduly favorable to Beijing.

“It appears that not much was accomplished. Negotiations were deadlocked,” said Charles W. Boustany Jr., a retired U.S. Congressman and Counselor at The National Bureau of Asian Research. “I believe the Trump Administration is intent on imposing tariffs and other restrictions on steel imports”.

The dialogue mechanism was created last April after talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping as a means to resolve old sticking points, including a huge trade imbalance of $347 billion that favors Beijing. But the first meeting, which was co-chaired by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang, merely helps to highlight the stiff differences between the two sides.

At the heart of the differences were Chinese steel exports and the massive trade deficit. The U.S. feels cheap steel exports are resulting in job losses, a view echoed regularly in Europe.

Boustany said the Trump administration would impose controls on steel imports using national security as the reason. Similar views are being expressed by several experts.

” I do expect in some point in the near future for the Trump administration to impose penalties on steel imports from China and perhaps a few other countries justifying those limits on national security grounds,” Scott Kennedy, Deputy Director, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Washington based Center for Strategic & International Studies, said.

Rejecting WTO rules

He said the U.S. government may go further and start reviewing its commitment to some rules of the World Trade Organization.

“I think during the last five years, China’s economic policies, the level of innovation by the government in different industries, its promotion of high-tech in a discriminatory way has widened the gap between Chinese practices and its commitments (to WTO). And given China’s size, that had a big affect on the global economy, including on the U.S. and its high-tech industries,” he said.

Kennedy also said, “I think that has generated anxiety and doubts in the United States about the WTO’s rules and whether those rules were good enough to constrain Chinese trade practices.”

After the talks, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said the world’s two biggest economies need to cooperate and warned that “confrontation will immediately damage the interests of both.” U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin blamed the trade gap between the two countries on “Chinese government intervention in its economy.”

Trump’s surprise

“The Chinese basically wanted to bring Trump and his team back on the mainstream of U.S.-China bilateral dialogue on economic and trade cooperation the way it used to be during the Obama period. Even Bush did the same thing,” said Sourabh Gupta, Institute for China – America Studies in Washington. “Trump came with so much radicalism on trade issues that they just want to maintain a workable format, which is productive and result oriented.”

Paul T. Haenle, Director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, said Trump’s approach to trade has completely thrown China’s long-term economic plans off the rails. He added that Beijing is not being helped with signs of rising protectionism in Europe.

“I think the Chinese side has been somewhat surprised by the toughness of the Trump administration, particularly on White House priority areas like trade (steel) and North Korea,” he said.

China recently began importing U.S. beef and took other measures to placate Washington. But these items are not enough to placate the new administration in Washington, Haenle said.

“The new U.S. administration has come away with a more realistic sense of the limits of Chinese cooperation, particularly in the lead up to the 19th Party Congress,” he said.

Analysts said the ruling Communist Party is unlikely to make too many concessions and appear weak in its negotiations with Washington ahead of the crucial Communist Party meeting later this year.

 
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Gov. Jerry Brown is set to sign legislation Tuesday keeping alive California’s signature initiative to fight global warming, which puts a cap and a price on climate-changing emissions.

The Democratic governor will be joined by his celebrity predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the 2006 bill that led to the creation of the nation’s only cap and trade system to reduce greenhouse gases.

The program has become closely watched around the world, promoted by Schwarzenegger and Brown alike a successful way to reduce emissions that hasn’t taken the steam out of California’s thriving economy. 

Brown’s signature will add 10 years to the program, which had been scheduled to expire in 2020. It follows a frenetic push by Brown and his legislative allies to craft a plan that businesses and environmentalists would both find acceptable.

In the end, the extension was supported by a wide range of business and environmental groups that said it’s the most cost-effective way to combat climate change. But it met fierce opposition from environmental justice groups that said it’s riddled with giveaways to the oil industry, including too many free pollution permits.

Schwarzenegger signed a bill in 2006 that authorized state environmental regulators to create a cap and trade program, but the authorization would have expired in 2020 without action from lawmakers.

After the extension passed, Schwarzenegger highlighted the support from eight Republican lawmakers, saying they’ve shown that the GOP can get behind free-market solutions to climate change.

Schwarzenegger’s bill required the state to reduce its carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – a target the state is on track to meet. Legislation approved last year set a new, much more aggressive goal to reduce emissions another 40 percent by 2030.

Cap and trade puts a limit on carbon emissions and requires polluters to obtain permits to release greenhouse gases. Some permits, known as allowances, are given away while others are auctioned, generating billions of dollars in revenue for the state. The money is a key funding source for a high-speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, one of Brown’s top priorities.

The governor’s office said he’ll sign separate legislation tied to the cap and trade extension later this week. That includes a bill that could give Republicans more say in spending the money and another to improve efforts to monitor and clean up the air around some of the dirtiest sources of pollution, such as oil refineries.
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The U.S. Senate is due to vote Tuesday on whether to open debate on the latest Republican initiative to overhaul the health care system put in place under former president Barack Obama.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is leading the push to move away from the Affordable Care Act, also commonly known as Obamacare, but over the course of the past month he has been forced to take a step back when it became clear there were not enough votes to pass two different versions of the bill.

In a series of tweets Tuesday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump said the day has arrived for Republican senators to begin dismantling Obamacare, which he said is “torturing” Americans, and applauded ailing Senator John McCain for returning to Capitol Hill to cast his vote on the health care bill.

Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate.  With unified Democratic opposition to repealing the ACA, Republicans can only lose two dissenting votes, with Vice President Mike Pence casting a vote in the event of a 50-50 tie.

McCain announced he would be returning to work Tuesday after a short absence during which he announced he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

What is not clear is which bill will be voted on. The House of Representatives passed its own repeal-and-replace legislation in May, a bill Trump applauded at a White House rally after its passage and then later described as “mean.” He instead called for the Senate to approve legislation with more “heart.”

Senator John Cornyn said Monday that Republicans will discuss the various health care bill options at a lunch Tuesday before the procedural vote.

Democratic Senator Al Franken called the lack of clarity about which bill would be considered “deeply troubling.”

“This is reckless. This is irresponsible,” he said.  “The American people deserve better. But let’s be clear. A vote for the motion to proceed is a vote to move forward with conceivably any one of these bills, and all of these bills are terrible.”

President Donald Trump continued pressuring Republicans to act on an issue that was part of his campaign, saying Monday there has been “enough talk and no action.”

“Any senator who votes against starting debate is telling America you are fine with the Obamacare nightmare,” said Trump, who was surrounded by several families the White House referred to as “victims of Obamacare.”

“For senate Republicans, this is their chance to keep their promise,” the president said. “Over and over again they said, ‘Repeal and replace, repeal and replace.’ They can now keep their promise to the American people.”

Fresh attacks

Trump also tore into Obama’s health care law with fresh intensity, calling it a “government takeover” of health care and “big, fat, ugly lie” that had “wreaked havoc” on American families.

“They run out and say, ‘Death! Death! Death!'” Trump said, referring to critics of the Republican health care proposals. “Well Obamacare is death. That’s the one that’s death. And besides that, it’s failing so you won’t have it anyway,” Trump said.

The ACA has been in place since 2010 and national survey show Americans view it more favorably than Republican proposals to replace it.

Several Republican lawmakers, despite Trump’s campaign vow to upend Obamacare, have announced their opposition to starting debate on the repeal effort, either because they contend that the changes do not go far enough to undermine the law or go too far and would curb health insurance coverage for millions of people, particularly impoverished Americans.

About 20 million people gained insurance coverage under the law, which prevented insurance companies from denying coverage to people based on pre-existing medical conditions and required insurers to include a range of medical services in their plans.

During Obama’s remaining years in office, Republicans dozens of times attempted to repeal the law and once succeeded in passing repeal legislation, which Obama quickly vetoed. He told Congress that if it sent him something that improved the law or the health system, then he would support it.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that if Obamacare is repealed without a replacement, 17 million Americans would lose their health insurance next year and 32 million by 2026.

Under a Senate Republican repeal-and-replace proposal, the CBO said 22 million would lose their coverage in the next decade, but the plan would save the government $420 billion.
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