Here’s a selection of articles the Federal Relations team is enjoying this week.
Next Battle Front – As discretionary spending declines, the federal government has used its oversight authority with increasing regularity to intrude in the affairs of colleges and universities well beyond federal aid compliance and basic tax and regulatory concerns — it has begun looking at endowments. Read more in the Huffington Post.
Divvying Up the Delegates – Senator Marco Rubio lost the primary in his home state of Florida this week, and with that, Rubio suspended his campaign. Meanwhile, Rubio has already collected nearly over 150 delegates and the bulk of them are up grabs to vote for someone else at the convention. How could that impact the convention? Read more in Roll Call.
Top 10 – The Economist has come out with it’s Global Forecast Risk Assessment for April, and the Trump presidency made the list. A potential Trump presidency is a 12 on a scale of 1 to 25—classifying it as slightly less of threat to the world than a new cold war between Russia and the West and slightly more of one than an armed conflict in the South China Sea. See the Forecast here, and get an overview from Slate.
New Nominee – Judge, and Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland has tutored Northeast D.C. students for 20 years. He paid for Harvard Law School by taking a summer job as a shoe stock clerk, selling his comic book collection, and counseling undergraduates. He was also valedictorian of his public high school. At his graduation, a group of parents pulled the plug on another student giving a speech that railed against the Vietnam War. When it came time for Garland to give his speech, Garland ditched what he had prepared and instead delivered an impassioned defense of free speech and First Amendment rights. Read more about Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee in the New York Times.
Courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel Live.
More of a Limping Duck – While Senate Republicans have declared they would not confirm any Supreme Court nominee from Obama, Judge Merrick Garland has been a hit and the Senate has communicated that, while they will not confirm before the election, they will confirm Garland after the election in the lame duck session — depending on who wins the Presidency. Read more in Roll Call.
Hail the New King – John King was confirmed by the Senate last week. When Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced he would leave the post in October, Obama chose King, then Duncan’s deputy and advisor, to succeed him. At the time, the Administration had no plans to seek his confirmation. With out cry from Congress, the Administration moved forward with the nomination. Here’s a few things you might know about King. Read them in the LA Times.
Oh, There’s Trouble – The House passed its budget out of the House Budget Committee this week. All but two Republicans on the panel voted to send the bill to the floor, where it is likely doomed because of resistance from fiscal hawks in the House Freedom Caucus. The final vote was 20 to 16 — all Democrats opposed the measure. Without support from the 40-member House Freedom Caucus, the trillion-dollar budget proposal will come up short on the House floor. The House GOP can only afford to lose 28 votes to ensure a bill’s passage without Democratic support. Read more in The Hill.
Higher Ground – Last fall, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken’s decision allowing college football and men’s basketball players to be paid up to $5,000 per year in deferred money. But the Ninth Circuit upheld that the NCAA’s rules restricting payments to players violate antitrust laws. Ed O’Bannon lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to take NCAA case. Read more at CBS Sports.
Going Rogue – Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication. Read more in The New York Times.
Smart Then Big – When the first tyrannosaurs evolved, about 170 million years ago, they lived in the shadows of larger meat-eaters like Allosaurus. For tens of millions of years, tyrannosaurs remained small. The evolutionary jump of tyrannosaurs from people- and horse-size to behemoths has remained a mystery. A recent fossil finding in Uzbekistan is providing paleontologists with a missing link in the lineage. They have discovered a tyrannosaur with many of the giant’s characteristics — but not its stature or heft, meaning first it got smart, then it got big. Read more in The New York Times. Plus, scientists in Montana have found a pregnant T-Rex, including preserved soft tissue, which is highly unusual. Read more in The Washington Post.
Iconic – If you’ve been to DC recently with Federal Relations, it’s been hard not to notice that the Capitol Dome is surrounded by scaffolding. The renovation started in 2014, and is finally coming to a close — the scaffolding is currently coming down. See a video about the renovation at Roll Call.