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Trump Appointments Tag

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday morning that he picked Robert C. O'Brien as his new national security adviser. He currently serves as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. The move comes a few days after Trump dismissed John Bolton as his national security adviser. Trump said the two of them had too many disagreements on foreign policy.

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta told reporters, with President Donald Trump by his side, that he will resign from his post effective in one week. Acosta has come under fire recently over the way he handled the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 as US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump famously put out a list of judges he would consider for the Supreme Court if he were elected. The list served both to assure conservatives and also to motivate Republican voters. It's widely agreed that the Supreme Court specifically, and the federal judiciary more generally, were key factors in Trump's victory.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned on Sunday after butting heads with President Donald Trump over policy and border control issues. He recently asked her "to close the ports of entry along the border and to stop accepting asylum seekers, which Ms. Nielsen found ineffective and inappropriate." Trump has chosen US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan as acting DHS secretary, but will he have the toughness Trump desires in the role? Some officials told CNN that they don't consider McAleenan "an ideologue or fire breather" when it comes to immigration.

Much focus the past week has been on the anti-Semitic accusations of dual and disloyalty from Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar, backed by the progressive wing of the party, particularly Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Democrats not only have been unable to deal with it, they connived to water down a planned resolution condemning the recent anti-Semitic outbursts of Omar. This Corbynization of the Democrat Party got all the attention, but but there was other news mostly under the media radar: Republicans in the Senate continued to confirm judicial nominees over Democrat protests, and the pace may pick up.

There has been a fair amount of conservative frustration that the Trump administration was slow to get off the mark to renominate and start the confirmation process for judicial nominees held over from the last Congress. Particularly as to vacancies on the 9th Circuit, there were fears that the administration was cutting a bad deal with Democrats.

Neomi Rao is the nominee to fill the vacancy created on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals created when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court after a vicious campaign against him. Rao's Judiciary Committee hearing is Tuesday, February 5. Senate Democrats and liberal interest groups are trying to attack Rao in order to damage her prospects for a future Supreme Court nomination and to serve as a warning that if she is nominated, they will Bork and Kavanaugh her.