In Brief: February 20, 2021

Back in Paris pact, US faces tougher climate steps ahead

WASHINGTON — World leaders welcomed the United States’ official return to the Paris climate accord Friday, but politically trickier steps lie just ahead for President Joe Biden, including setting a tough national target in coming months for cutting damaging fossil fuel emissions.

And even as Biden noted the country’s first day back in the climate pact, the globe’s dangerous warming was just one of a long list of urgent problems he raised in a video speech to European leaders on Friday, a month into his administration. Before bringing up climate issues, he touched on the global pandemic, sputtering national economies and tense relations with China, among other matters that threaten to impede and delay tackling the nation’s status as the world’s top carbon polluter after China.

Despite all the other challenges, Biden said, speaking to the Munich security conference, “we can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change. This is a global existential crisis, and all of us will suffer if we fail.”

Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office reversing the pullout ordered by President Donald Trump. Trump said soon after he took office that he would start the process of pulling the U.S. from the Paris accord, but it didn’t take effect until Nov. 4, 2020, because of provisions in the agreement.

Officially, the United States was only out of the worldwide global climate pact for 107 days. It was part of Trump’s withdrawal from global allegiances in general and his oft-stated but false view that global warming was a laughably mistaken take by the world’s scientists.

Inspector general reviews Trump relocation of Space Command

DENVER — The Department of Defense’s inspector general announced Friday that it was reviewing the Trump administration’s last-minute decision to relocate U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama.

The decision on Jan. 13, one week before Trump left office, blindsided Colorado officials and raised questions of political retaliation. Trump had hinted at a Colorado Springs rally in 2020 that the command would stay at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

But the man with whom Trump held that rally, Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, lost his reelection bid in November, and Colorado, unlike Alabama, voted decisively against Trump. The Air Force’s last-minute relocation of command headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama — home of the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal — blindsided Colorado officials of both parties, who have urged the Biden administration to reconsider the decision.

On Friday, the inspector general’s office announced it was investigating whether the relocation complied with Air Force and Pentagon policy and was based on proper evaluations of competing locations.

Colorado officials of both parties were thrilled. “It is imperative that we thoroughly review what I believe will prove to be a fundamentally flawed process that focused on bean-counting rather than American space dominance,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican whose district includes Space Command.

Will voters remember? Cruz trip tests durability of scandal

WASHINGTON — Ted Cruz’s political career already featured many surprise twists before a jaunt to Mexico this week brought him a new level of notoriety.

The Texas senator was once the biggest threat to Donald Trump capturing the 2016 presidential nomination. During a particularly bitter stretch of that year’s Republican primary, Cruz called Trump a “coward” and “pathological liar.” By last month, however, Cruz was one of Trump’s staunchest allies and a leader in the former president’s baseless attempt to overturn the November election.

Such shifts are intended to keep Cruz in a strong position with the GOP base if he runs for the White House again in 2024. But they’ve also turned him into one of Washington’s most villainized figures, someone willing to take any politically convenient position if it keeps his future ambitions alive.

Cruz is under further attack for traveling to Cancun while his constituents suffered through a deadly winter storm that left hundreds of thousands without power and running water. His explanation — that his daughters pushed for the getaway because they were out of school — was particularly panned.

The optics of the trip are hardly ideal. But the question is whether, three years before he faces voters again, the political fallout will last.

From wire sources

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US unwinds Trump policy making asylum-seekers wait in Mexico

SAN DIEGO — The Biden administration moved to restore the asylum system to the way it worked for decades Friday by releasing a group of asylum-seekers into the United States, ending their long wait in Mexico and unraveling one of former President Donald Trump’s signature immigration policies.

The 25 people who arrived are the first of an estimated 25,000 asylum-seekers with active cases in the “Remain in Mexico” program who will now wait in the U.S. for their court hearings instead of south of the border. Wary of a surge of migrants, American officials are warning people not to come to the border and to register on a website that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees launched Friday.

The new arrivals were taken to San Diego hotels to quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic before they travel to their final destinations in the U.S. to stay with relatives, friends or sponsors.

President Joe Biden is making good on his promise to end a policy that Trump said was critical to reversing a surge of asylum-seekers, which peaked in 2019. The program, known officially as “Migrant Protection Protocols,” changed the way people traditionally had been treated by the U.S. government as they sought protection from violence and persecution. It exposed them to violence in Mexican border cities and made it difficult to find lawyers and communicate with courts about their cases.

There were unanswered questions about Biden’s changes, including how Central Americans who returned home will get back to the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s also unclear how long it will take to work through all the cases, with the oldest going first.

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Biden defends progress on COVID as weather delays 6M shots

PORTAGE, Mich. — President Joe Biden toured a state-of-the art coronavirus vaccine plant Friday, intent on showcasing progress even as extreme winter weather across the U.S. handed his vaccination campaign its first major setback, delaying shipment of about 6 million doses and causing temporary closures of inoculation sites in many communities.

While acknowledging the weather is “slowing up the distribution,” Biden said at the Pfizer plant in Michigan that he believes “we’ll be approaching normalcy by the end of this year.” His speech melded a recitation of his administration’s accomplishments in its first month confronting the pandemic, a vigorous pitch for his $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and criticism of his predecessor.

The disruptions caused by frigid temperatures, snow and ice have left the White House and states scrambling to make up lost ground as three days’ worth of vaccine shipments were temporarily delayed. Even the president’s trip to see Pfizer’s largest plant was pushed back a day due to a storm affecting the nation’s capital.

Before the trip, White House coronavirus response adviser Andy Slavitt said the federal government, states and local vaccinators are going to have to redouble efforts to catch up after the interruptions. The setback comes just as the vaccination campaign seemed to be on the verge of hitting its stride. All the backlogged doses should be delivered in the next several days, Slavitt said, still confident that the pace of vaccinations will recover.

Biden has set a goal of administering 100 million shots in his administration’s first 100 days, and he said Friday that’s still on track and it’s only a beginning.