Under House rules
, the Speaker has “general control” of facilities in the chamber, giving Johnson the authority to issue the policy surrounding bathrooms.
“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”
“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he added.
It seems worth noting that the private restrooms in Congressional offices are in other buildings, not in the US Capitol.
And to add insult to bigotry:
Johnson’s statement — which was made on Transgender Day of Remembrance, recognized annually to memorialize trans people who died due to anti-trans violence — comes days after Rep. Nancy Mace
(R-S.C.) introduced a bill to bar transgender women from facilities on Capitol Hill that match their gender identity, a response to the election earlier this month of Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.).
The Texas General Land Office is offering President-elect Donald Trump a 1,400-acre Starr County ranch as a site to build detention centers for his promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a letter
the office sent him Tuesday.
Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham
said in the Tuesday letter that her office is “fully prepared” to enter an agreement with any federal agencies involved in deporting individuals from the country “to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”
The state recently bought the land
along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley and announced plans to build a border wall on it. The previous owner had not let the state construct a wall there and had “actively blocked law enforcement from accessing the property,” according to the letter the GLO sent Trump.
AP
(“Biden authorizes Ukraine to use US-supplied longer range missiles for deeper strikes inside Russia“):
President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied missiles to strike deeper inside Russia, easing limitations on the longer range weapons as Russia deploys thousands of North Korean troops to reinforce its war, according to a U.S. official and three other people familiar with the matter.
The decision allowing Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMs, for attacks farther inside Russia comes as President Vladimir Putin positions North Korean troops along Ukraine’s northern border to try to reclaim hundreds of miles of territory seized by Ukrainian forces.
Biden’s move also follows the presidential election victory of Donald Trump, who has said he would bring about a swift end to the war and raised uncertainty about whether his administration would continue the United States’ vital military support for Ukraine.
The official and the others knowledgeable about the matter were not authorized to discuss the U.S. decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s reaction Sunday was notably restrained.
“Strikes are not made with words,” he said during his nightly video address. “Such things are not announced. The missiles will speak for themselves.”
Zelenskyy and many of his Western supporters have been pressing Biden for months to allow Ukraine to strike military targets deeper inside Russia with Western-supplied missiles, saying the U.S. ban had made it impossible for Ukraine to try to stop Russian attacks on its cities and electrical grids.
Zelenskyy’s statement came shortly after he posted a message of condolence on Telegram following a Russian attack on a nine-story building that killed at least eight people in the northern city of Sumy, 40 kilometers (24 miles) from the border with Russia.
Russia also launched a massive drone and missile attack, described by officials as the largest in recent months, targeting energy infrastructure and killing civilians. The attack came as fears are mounting about Moscow’s intentions to devastate Ukraine’s power generation capacity before the winter.
NYT
(“Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia With Long-Range U.S. Missiles“) adds:
The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said.
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Allowing the Ukrainians to use the long-range missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, came in response to Russia’s surprise decision to bring North Korean troops into the fight, officials said.
[…]
While the officials said they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war, one of the goals of the policy change, they said, is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.
[…]
Some U.S. officials said they feared that Ukraine’s use of the missiles across the border could prompt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to retaliate with force against the United States and its coalition partners.
But other U.S. officials said they thought those fears were overblown.
[…]
Mr. Trump has said little about how he would settle the conflict. But Vice President-elect JD Vance has outlined a plan that would allow the Russians to keep the Ukrainian territory that their forces have seized.
The Ukrainians hope that they would be able to trade any Russian territory they hold in Kursk for Ukrainian territory held by Russia in any future negotiations.
If the Russian assault on Ukrainian forces in Kursk succeeds, Kyiv could end up having little to no Russian territory to offer Moscow in a trade.
WaPo
(“Biden approves Ukraine’s use of long-range U.S. weapons inside Russia, reversing policy“) adds:
The White House wants to put Ukraine in the best possible place ahead of peace talks that the new U.S. president is expected to spearhead early in his term, U.S. officials said. Even before the election, Biden had committed to surging aid to Ukraine in an effort to cement his legacy on his way out of office.
“President Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20th,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday in Brussels, where he was meeting with European counterparts to discuss how to support Ukraine in the wake of Trump’s win.
[…]
U.S. officials have said that their concerns about Russian escalation in response to Western military aid have diminished over time as one weapons system after another has been provided to Ukraine without significant retaliation in response. Ukraine is already using U.S. equipment inside Kursk to attack Russia.
But Putin has been explicit that he considers the use of ATACMS a red line. In September, he declared that a strike by the missiles into Russian territory, which would probably involve U.S. targeting assistance, “changes the very essence, the nature of the conflict,” warning that his country would retaliate.
The Biden administration is in a better position than I am to assess the risks of escalation here. Still, they’re non-zero.
That this rather significant change in policy is happening during the lame duck period between presidential transitions is concerning, especially since the President-Elect has signaled a new direction. That an administration that has been voted out of office still makes foreign policy—potentially including getting the country involved in foreign wars—for more than two months* is a curious aspect of our system of governance.
*Indeed, until the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1933, they had until March 4.
Like Kennedy, Oz has no experience running a massive bureaucracy. CMS operates Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the federal Healthcare.gov ObamaCare exchange.
Between all four programs, CMS oversees health coverage for more than 150 million people.
“The husband of a wonderful woman, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a STAR on Fox News, and the father of nine incredible children, Sean knows how important it is for families to be able to travel safely, and with peace of mind,” the president-elect said.
Before beginning his career in public service, Duffy was a prosecutor and a reality TV star, appearing on several shows including The Real World: Boston, and Road Rules: All Stars.
In 2011, he was elected as a Republican to represent Wisconsin in the US House of Representatives, where he served until 2019.
The good news is that these aren’t the kind of picks that put a pit in my stomach, so there’s that, I guess. But that is just a comparative metric to things like Tulsi Gabbard for DNI.
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