The Senate will soon have a chance to vote on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to be a Supreme Court justice.  There will be much debate about the nominee’s credentials and judicial philosophy.  Senators will muse about whether she is sufficiently faithful to the Constitution and whether she will be overly activist.  They will probe her past decisions and her judicial temperament.  But the process is for show.  Almost all Republicans knew how they would vote on Biden’s nominee, even before he announced it would be Jackson.  The aim of Republican research will be constructing plausible justifications for opposing her, rather than seriously considering her merits.... Read More

The European Union recently released its latest review of the EU version of the Cardin-Lugar legislation that requires oil, gas and mining companies to report their payments to governments. The bottom line: the reporting requirements, which have been in place now for five years, have imposed no competitive harm on the companies and pose no threat to European energy security.... Read More

More than a month out from the U.S. Senate’s acquittal of former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, a vote in which seven Republican senators joined all fifty Democrats in finding Trump guilty of inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the path forward for the GOP seems unclear. Will they continue to be the party of Trump, the first president in nearly three decades to lose his reelection bid, or are they capable of charting a new path, away from the former president?... Read More

Two influential Democratic Senators, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Ben Cardin of Maryland, are calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission to strengthen the weak regulation it approved late last year implementing the Cardin-Lugar anticorruption amendment, which requires oil and gas companies to report publicly their payments to governments.... Read More

A core belief at The Lugar Center is that “when properly administered, development assistance remains a bargain for U.S. national security and for our own economic and moral standing in the world.”  Apparently, President Joe Biden and his team are in complete, even enthusiastic, agreement!... Read More

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the health and health systems of countries around the world and taken a serious toll on economies and societies. The World Bank estimates that an additional 100 million people have been pushed into poverty due to the economic impact of the pandemic. 130 million people in three dozen countries including Syria and Yemen are on the brink of starvation, and according to the United Nations 200 million children globally – disproportionately girls – continue to remain out of school. (This number is above the already 258 million who were not in school before the pandemic.) The needs are massive. So how can the U.S. government be as effective as possible at this critical moment?... Read More

With just two days to spare, the United States and Russia agreed this week to extend the New START nuclear arms control treaty, the last remaining arms control pact between the two nuclear superpowers.... Read More

The Lugar Center’s annual Bipartisan Index (BPI) has proven to be a reliable measure of a lawmaker’s proclivity to act in a bipartisan manner in the day-to-day business of the House and the Senate. By focusing on bill sponsorships and co-sponsorships, the BPI is able to render a statistical judgment based on a broad swath of a member’s legislative activities. Its validity comes from its reliance on objective data and a single formula equally applied to all members.  ... Read More

Is the Securities and Exchange Commission preparing a big fat Christmas present for the oil industry?... Read More