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Political hot news with zetpress.com? Russia pressed Mr. Trump to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin after the tense exchange of diplomatic expulsions last week. Mr. Trump had floated the idea of meeting with Mr. Putin at the White House in a March 20 phone call, a Russian official said. At the time, Mr. Trump had told reporters that he expected to “be seeing President Putin in the not-too-distant future.” But on Friday, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on seven of Russia’s richest men and 17 top government officials, penalties designed to punish Mr. Putin’s inner circle for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and other global transgressions. It was another indication that as Congress and much of the administration pushes for increased pressure in response to Mr. Putin’s aggressions, Mr. Trump continues to advocate good relations with his Russian counterpart.

The irony is that Trump’s opponents are ready to accept this “very positive thing” despite warning against and objecting to the policies that contributed to it. Through his personal relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump reaffirmed that there is “no daylight” between the United States and Israel after an eight-year caesura. He defied conventional wisdom when he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, when he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, when he cut off aid to the Palestinians, when he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and when he ordered the lethal strike against Qassem Soleimani. But the catastrophes that the foreign-policy establishment predicted would follow each of these measures never materialized. What emerged instead were the Abraham Accords and a growing alliance against Iran.

US Foreign politics and Brexit 2020 latest : Last week, with the introduction of the Internal Markets Bill, the rubber hit the road. By the British government’s own admission, the bill violates the Withdrawal Agreement signed onto with the EU, albeit only in “a very specific and limited way,” in the words of Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis. Specifically, it violates Article IV, which establishes the Agreement’s supremacy over U.K. law. The British government has taken this measure because they want their own ministers to decide what goods arriving in Northern Ireland from Great Britain should be subject to EU customs checks. In other words, the government is reasserting its sovereignty over Northern Ireland now that the U.K. is safely out of the EU by deliberately violating international law.

Republicans have every right to fill the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Please save your irate emails accusing me of hypocrisy, because I have never believed or advocated for the “Biden Rule” or the “McConnell Rule” or any other fantastical “rule” regulating the confirmation process, other than the prescribed constitutional method. In March 2016, in the heat of the Merrick Garland debate, I argued that “the Republicans’ claim that the ‘people’ should decide the nominee is kind of a silly formulation,” and the best argument for denying Barack Obama another seat on the court was to stop him from transforming it into a post-constitutional institution that displaces law with “empathy” and ever-changing progressive conceptions of justice. Discover more info at zetpress.com.