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The implications of Senator Feinstein's passing
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics:
What are the implications of the death of US Senator Dianne Feinstein?
Senator Dianne Feinstein died this week at age 90. She was the longest serving female senator in history and a former mayor of San Francisco who was a trailblazer for women in politics in the United States. She had been sick for a little while, leading to calls from fellow Democrats for her to step down from her seat and allow somebody younger to take over both the Senate seat from California and her coveted seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And after she announced her intention to retire this year, a number of California Democrats stepped up and said they were going to run for her seat. Governor Gavin Newsom, who clearly has national ambitions beyond California, has said he wants to fill her slot with an African-American and has said he intends to stay out of the primary race, which has caused some challenges for him, given that one of the candidates in the race is hoping to get a little benefit from being appointed to the seat.
One of the biggest questions is who will get her slot on the Judiciary Committee, which is now evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. If the slot isn't filled, then none of Biden's judicial nominees will be able to get out of the committee and get on to the floor. And while some Republicans have indicated that they are inclined to allow Democrats to fill the seat, not every Republican wants to do so because by blocking that seat from being filled, they can block all of Biden's judges.
So this could be an impasse that lasts for potentially a few weeks until there's likely to be a floor vote which would then appoint somebody new. But that could be one of the controversies coming out of this death.
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U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who announced she will not be seeking re-election, leaves the Senate floor after a vote on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., February 14, 2023.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein dies at 90
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein passed away at age 90 late on Thursday, family members confirmed Friday. She was the oldest sitting US senator and a titan of politics in the state boasting the country’s largest economy.
Feinstein came to national prominence following the tragic double assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and LGBTQ+ rights icon Harvey Milk, then a city supervisor. Named acting mayor, she embarked on an “emotional reconstruction” of the city, in her words. Her resilience paved the way for her to serve two terms as San Francisco’s mayor before winning a Senate seat in the 1992 California special election.
She built a legacy in the Senate of championing progressive causes, introducing the bill that effectively banned assault rifles between 1994 and 2004, and campaigning for abortion rights and higher fuel efficiency standards. She played a pivotal role in the 2018 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as the conduit for Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her decades earlier.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he will appoint a Black woman to replace Feinstein, though one of the most promising candidates, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), is probably out of the running. Since Feinstein announced she would retire at the end of her current term before she passed, Lee has been campaigning against other California Democrats for the seat. The concern is that appointing Lee to finish the term would give her something of an incumbency advantage in the 2024 Democratic primary that her opponents would decry as unfair.
There’s one more potential complication: Feinstein was the tie-breaking vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she played a crucial role in confirming federal judges appointed by President Joe Biden. Her replacement won’t automatically take her place. Democrats can try to appoint a new Senator to the committee, but a GOP senator could — and probably will — filibuster the motion, thereby blocking Biden’s appointments indefinitely.
Ukraine's Deputy of Defence Minister Hanna Maliar addresses during a media briefing of the Security and Defense Forces of Ukraine in Kyiv, Ukraine on 13 April 2023, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hard Numbers: Ukraine’s housecleaning continues, China outdoes itself over Taiwan, California sues Big Oil, US loses its wings, Nobody gets to see Cristiano Ronaldo play in Iran
6: The big fall cleaning at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense continues, as President Zelensky fired six deputy ministers over the weekend. No reason was given, but the move comes just weeks after his office sacked the Defense Minister on allegations of corruption.
103: China set a new record for aerial aggression against Taiwan, sending a total of 103 warplanes towards the island in a mere 24 hours from Sunday to Monday. The move is part of Beijing’s carrot-and-stick approach to influencing Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election. Read more about that here.
135: The state of California, AKA the world’s fifth largest economy, has filed a 135-page lawsuit against the leading American oil companies and lobbying groups, arguing that the industry systematically misled the public about the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change.
80 million: Uh, you lost a what now? The US government is asking for help to locate an $80 million fighter jet that went missing after its pilot ejected somewhere over South Carolina on Sunday. On the plus side, if the US can’t find the state of the art f-35 warplane, chances are the Chinese or Russians can’t either, right? Right?
7: For the first time in 7 years, a Saudi football club will visit Iran, as Al-Nassr, home of living football legend Cristiano Ronaldo, arrives in Tehran. The trip comes amid a thaw between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but fans will have to catch a glimpse of “CR7” anywhere but the pitch, because Al-Nassr’s match against Tehran’s Persepolis isn’t open to fans. The Asian Football Federation reportedly hit Persepolis with a one-game crowd ban after the team goaded an opponent in Goa with a post about Iran’s 18th century invasion of India.
Jeff Larsen, left, and Robbie Jones watch cars drive on flooded streets during Tropical Storm Hilary in Palm Springs, Calif., on Sunday.
Out of the fire and into the flood
Just two years ago, the state of California suffered a record number of wildfires, the hottest summer in its history, and severe drought. In 2023, it’s facing the opposite: a deluge of rain and flooding from the first tropical storm to slam the state in 84 years.
Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall Sunday afternoon in the Baja California peninsula of Mexico, leaving a trail of devastation and killing at least one. A man drowned when a car was swept away by floodwaters in the town of Santa Rosalia; four other people were saved.
Despite being downgraded from a category 4 hurricane, Hilary still posed a risk of “life-threatening” floods. Californians were taking it seriously: Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in the southern part of the state, airlines canceled 1,000 flights, and even the actors’ strike was paused.
Up to nine million people from San Diego to Los Angeles were on alert for the storm's high winds and flooding, with some areas getting more than half a year's worth of rainfall in just one day. (For context, the average August rainfall in southern California is zero.) A 5.1-magnitude earthquake also struck Sunday afternoon near Ojai, about 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles. By early Monday, the storm had toppled trees and caused landslides around San Diego, and 65,000 Californians were without power.
Then there’s the political fallout. US President Joe Biden was already criticized for his “no comment” remarks when asked about the devastating fires in Maui last week, and for not cutting short his vacation in Delaware as the tragedy unfolded. While he was on the phone daily with officials and issued a written statement of condolence early on, he only made his first public remarks about the fires five days later. He is scheduled to visit the Aloha state on Monday.
This time, Biden issued a statement on Tropical Storm Hilary as it hit Sunday afternoon. “As soon as [the storm’s] path became clear, my Administration took immediate action to prepare,” it read. Biden’s support included deploying federal personnel and supplies and prepositioning Coast Guard aircraft for rapid response and search-and-rescue missions. We will be watching to see whether Californians think he’s done enough.The Graphic Truth: The rising (insurance) costs of climate change
State Farm, the largest homeowner insurance company in California, recently announced that it’s halting new insurance sales across the Golden State. This is part of a nationwide trend of insurers raising rates, restricting coverage, or pulling out of areas altogether. Why? Because they’re tired of losing money to natural disasters.
In the 1980s, for example, the US averaged three or four annual disasters with costs in the billions. But those numbers started to tick up significantly after 2010, and in 2021, 18 disasters cost $175.2 billion in damages.
Increasingly frequent natural disasters, in turn, are wreaking havoc on the insurance market and turning it into a system where, in some places, only the most affluent will be able to afford coverage. In 2021, FEMA, which had provided taxpayer-backed flood insurance nationwide, had to start setting rates equal to the flood risk. This change caused the average cost of flood insurance to jump from $888 a year to $1,808, with prices being exponentially higher for those in flood zones.
Florida is on the verge of an insurance crisis thanks to consecutive years of bad storms. Twelve private insurers in Florida have gone out of business since 2020, six in the last year alone, and 30 more are being monitored by state regulators over their risk of insolvency. Meanwhile, severe storms in the Midwest, droughts and wildfires in the Southwest, and flooding in Kentucky and Missouri have priced hundreds of thousands out of the system in the last year alone.
In Louisiana, the insurance market has been buckling since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. After the last few years of bad storms, the state government has had to borrow $600 million to prop up insurers and rescue homeowners who have been abandoned by the broken system.
The lack of insurance makes extreme weather events even more costly. It slows economic recovery, increases the likelihood of cascading financial consequences, and can leave people in financial ruin, especially in low-income communities, which are increasingly being left at the mercy of Mother Nature as natural disasters become more intense.
Many of these vulnerable communities are being blue-lined, whereby banks or mortgage lenders designate neighborhoods that are more susceptible to climate risk and have less access to affordable insurance premiums.
Earlier in 2023, the Biden administration released a report detailing the economic challenges a warming planet posed to the US. It argued that bailing out homeowners after natural disasters incentivizes them to reside in riskier areas, increasing costs on taxpayers and slowing down climate change adaptation.
While the report is not legislation, it identifies how climate change has upended the nature of risk across the American economy and how the federal government will bear significantly higher costs in the future if it does not correct where it is creating market distortions. Two examples of distortions: paying more for healthcare for victims of heat stroke and paying to rebuild coastal homes flooded by hurricanes.
The government wants climate change risk factored into Americans’ decisions, and insurance companies want it factored into their prices. But inevitably, those paying the biggest price will be low-income Americans with fewer resources to relocate.
Grading President Biden's first 100 days; 2020 US Census helps Sun Belt states
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
How would you grade President Biden's performance in his first 100 days?
Well, Biden's done pretty well in this first 100 days. He's done a good job on what's the number one most important issue facing his administration and that's the coronavirus response. He hit his goal of 100 million vaccinations within the first month or so of his administration. And they increased that to 200 million vaccinations, which they hit on day 92. So that's a pretty successful start. They inherited a lot of that from President Trump to be fair. Operation Warp Speed set the US up for success and Biden delivered after he came into office. And of course, the second thing is his COVID relief package, which the US has taken advantage of a favorable funding environment to borrow trillions of dollars and get them into the hands of American small businesses and families and has really helped the economy through what has been a very bad year but could have been a lot worse if the government hadn't intervened. The bill has been very popular, and it set the stage for a follow on bill that Biden wants to deliver for big priorities for democrats later this year, potentially as much as $4 trillion in spending.
Less good are kind of the external challenges that he's been facing. He changed his mind on his refugee policy. He's got a major problem with a flood of immigrants at the southern border. That's really unsolvable. And there's been a rash of high-profile shootings that it's going to be really, really hard for the federal government to do anything about because of polarization and the lack of 60 votes in the Senate. So overall, I think you've got to give them a solid A, A- for his first 100 days and now is probably the time when it starts getting tougher as he starts planning even bigger long-term things.
Who are the winners and losers from the 2020 US census results?
Well, there's been a population shift over the last 10 years from kind of declining Rust Belt states to booming Sun Belt states. And you saw states like Texas, Arizona, Florida gain seats, but not as many as expected. Texas was thought to get three, but they only got two. California lost a seat for the first time ever. And because of this, you're going to see a steady shift of power to these southern Sun Belt states, which are largely controlled by Republicans who will, again, as they did in 2010, have the advantage in the redistricting process that will determine who controls Congress, gives them an edge up in the 2022 midterm elections, and really puts the Democrats' are already very thin majority in peril.
The Graphic Truth: COVID deaths — US states vs countries
Back in March and April, the most severe COVID-19 outbreaks were in Europe — specifically Italy, Spain, and France — as well as the Northeastern United States. In the months since, these areas have managed to flatten their curves through strict social distancing policies, but now the epicenter of the coronavirus in the US has shifted to some Southern states that resisted lockdown measures. Consider that the United States recorded an average of 744 COVID deaths in the seven days leading up to July 16, compared to 74 in the UK and 13 in Italy during that same period. Meanwhile, Latin American countries are now also facing some of the biggest outbreaks in the world. Here's a look at where COVID-19 deaths are rising fastest, broken out as a comparison between US states and other hard-hit countries.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this graphic mistakenly labeled the y-axis as rolling 7-day average of deaths per 100,000 people. In fact, the y-axis refers to the rolling 7-day average in deaths from the coronavirus (not per 100,000 people). We regret the error.