Senate Majority Leader John Thune just dumped cold water all over President Donald Trump’s latest demands to pass his SAVE America Act.“If somebody can show me how we get an outcome, how we get a result, how we get an answer to this, I’m all for it,” Thune told reporters Monday afternoon. “But if we are going to be sitting here in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest.”Earlier Monday, Trump had directed Thune to keep the Senate in session in order to pass a “full and deep throated” SAVE America Act (whatever that means). But the majority leader has maintained that the president’s signature voter suppression bill just doesn’t have the support it needs. “We could stay here til Christmas, Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you,” Thune said. “And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”Thune told reporters that the White House had already sat down with 20 Republican lawmakers to discuss scrapping the filibuster—and 15 of them said no. “So, I mean this is not an open question. It’s just a fact, and the facts don’t change,” he said. “Now, if [Trump] can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are no’s into yeses, then we have a different conversation,” Thune added. This is the second time Thune has snapped back over Trump’s ham-fisted pressure. Last week, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s patience with Thune was “running out,” the senator retorted, “Well maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?”Thune is currently attempting to pass his third budget reconciliation bill that would contain $10 billion for election-related reforms, but even Republicans remain divided on the president’s sweeping bill.
The White House wants to get rid of a radiation safety rule that is over 50 years old and has been adopted by other countries.The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is looking at eliminating the “as low as reasonably achievable” principle, which mandates that hospitals, nuclear plants, and other facilities keep radiation levels at an absolute minimum, even when they are already below legal limits. The rule would be replaced with a “graded approach” that puts different safety measures in place based on expected radiation exposure levels.The legal limits for workers and the public would stay the same, and the NRC said that the public would not be any less safe.“We’re just removing the ambiguity,” NRC Chair Ho Nieh said. “But the standard for exposure to workers and the public, those are not changing. We’re just putting in place greater clarification.”The nuclear industry is in favor of the move, with its main trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, claiming that safety is still a priority.“We will always continue to look at what we can do to reduce the dose to workers, and maintain our doses to the off-site public as low as possible,” Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the NEI, said to the Associated Press. “It’s not like we’re just going to throw open the doors and let everything run up to the limits.”But other experts are concerned about what will happen given that the new rule raises permissible radiation limits. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the AP that the new proposal could raise radiation doses.President Trump wants four times as much domestic nuclear energy production to satisfy the growing electricity demand from new data centers powering artificial intelligence. He issued four executive orders in May last year to boost government funding for nuclear power and overhaul nuclear regulations. In doing so, though, the president may get rid of some guardrails that protect Americans from the downsides of nuclear energy.
Most of Us Don’t Have a Strategy for Power The truth is, most of the groups and organizations that make up our movements do not have a strategy for winning. They might think they have a strategy. They might tell themselves they have one. They certainly tell their funders or dues-paying members they do; and [...]