#foreign-policy + #politics

The family of independent UN investigator Francesca Albanese has sued the Trump administration over US sanctions imposed on her last year for her criticism of Israel’s policies during the war with Hamas in Gaza, saying the penalties violate the first amendment.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the US district court in Washington, Albanese’s husband and minor child outlined the serious impact those sanctions have had on the family’s life and work, including the ability to access their home in the nation’s capital.

Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, is a member of a group of experts chosen by the 47-member UN human rights council in Geneva. She has been tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories and has been vocal about what she has described as the “genocide” by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States, which provides military support to its close ally, have strongly denied the genocide accusation. Washington had decried what it has called Albanese’s “campaign of political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel before imposing sanctions on her in July after an unsuccessful US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post.

When it comes to his handling of foreign affairs, most do not trust Donald Trump to make the right decisions about international military action (56%) or the use of nuclear weapons (59%). The public is similarly skeptical when it comes to his handling of relationships with both U.S. allies and adversaries, with 56% and 55%, respectively, expressing little to no trust.

Trust in Trump’s decision making on international issues is starkly divided along partisan lines with Republicans more likely than Democrats or independents to have faith in the president’s judgment. Ninety-two percent of Democrats and 65% of independents have little or no trust in Trump’s ability to make the right decisions on the use of nuclear weapons compared with 20% of Republicans. There are similar partisan divisions when it comes to use of military force abroad and relationships with other countries.

In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. In 2023, the court relied on the “major questions” doctrine to strike down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. In that case and others like it, Roberts observed, it might have been possible to read the federal law at issue to give the executive branch the power it claimed. But “context” – such as the constitutional division of power among the three branches of government – and “common sense” “suggested Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”

In cases like this one, Roberts continued, in which the Trump administration contends that Congress has delegated to it “the core congressional power of the purse,” considerations like context and common sense “apply with particular force.” “[I]f Congress were to relinquish that weapon to another branch, a ‘reasonable interpreter’ would expect it to do so ‘clearly.’” And indeed, Roberts said, “[w]hen Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.

The bipartisan war powers resolution, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), aims to reassert Congress’s authority to wage war by requiring Trump to win congressional approval before launching any strikes against Iran.

But Massie, so far, is the only House Republican to say he’s supporting the resolution. And a small handful of Democrats — all of them close allies of Israel — are already lining up to oppose it. The combination sets the stage for the measure to fail in the Republican-controlled House, which would give Trump what amounts to a tacit authorization to conduct unilateral strikes as the president and other top officials signal that such an attack could be imminent.

Khanna, Massie and other supporters of the check on executive war powers maintain that they’re merely firming up the use-of-force authorities delineated by the Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the power “to declare war.”

Last summer, after Trump launched strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan resolution limiting Trump’s use of force in that country.

Over the last three months, the lower chamber has voted on three separate war powers resolutions — two related to military actions in Venezuela, and the third governing the Pentagon’s strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean region. All resolutions were defeated by Trump’s GOP allies.

“We were told that the nuclear program in Iran had been completely and totally obliterated. Not my words, Donald Trump’s words. And so now we’re to believe that there’s an exigent circumstance where Donald Trump may need to strike militarily in order to prevent Iran presumably from achieving its nuclear ambitions,” Jeffries said Tuesday.

Day one actions of his presidency included restoring U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement, revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and halting funding for the Mexico–United States border wall.[3] On his second day, he issued a series of executive orders to reduce the impact of COVID-19, including invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950, and set an early goal of achieving one hundred million COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States in his first 100 days.[4] The first major legislation signed into law by Biden was the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that temporarily established expanded unemployment insurance and sent $1,400 stimulus checks to most Americans in response to continued economic pressure from COVID-19.[5] He signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a ten-year plan brokered by Biden alongside Democrats and Republicans in Congress to invest in American roads, bridges, public transit, ports and broadband access.[6]

Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court—the first Black woman to serve on the court. In response to the debt-ceiling crisis of 2023, he negotiated and signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which restrains federal spending for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, implements minor changes to SNAP and TANF, includes energy permitting reform, claws back some IRS funding and unspent money for COVID-19, and suspended the debt ceiling to January 1, 2025.

The foreign policy goal of the Biden administration was to restore the U.S. to a "position of trusted leadership" among global democracies in order to address the challenges posed by Russia and China. Biden signed AUKUS, an international security alliance together with Australia and the United Kingdom. He supported the expansion of NATO with the additions of Finland and Sweden. Biden approved a raid which led to the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, the leader of the Islamic State, and approved a drone strike which killed Ayman Al Zawahiri, leader of Al-Qaeda. He completed the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, declaring an end to nation-building efforts and shifting U.S. foreign policy toward strategic competition with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

He responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Russia and providing Ukraine with over $100 billion in combined military, economic, and humanitarian aid.[19][20] During the Gaza war, Biden condemned the actions of Hamas and other Palestinian militants as terrorism, and announced American military support for Israel; he also sent humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and brokered a four-day temporary pause and hostage exchange in 2023 followed by a three-phase ceasefire in January 2025.

About 55% less fentanyl was seized by September 2025 than by September 2024.