The political and legal earthquake that emanated Monday from the Tampa chambers of U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle provided the latest example of how an individual jurist — and a single lawsuit, seemingly filed in the right place at the right time — can alter the course of public policy. It is a practice that became more common at the end of the Obama administration and accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Sen. Mike Lee says the text messages he sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election don’t signal advocacy for overturning the results in favor of Donald Trump.

President Biden will reportedly order government agencies on Earth Day on Friday to take new action to protect old-growth forests, which are central to his agenda of mitigating climate change. The order will direct the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to inventory the nation's mature forests to inform new policies to protect them. 

Biden prioritized forest protection during his trip to the U.N.'s COP26 climate change conference in November, where he pledged billions of dollars over the next decade to support the conservation of global forests. He called the effort an "indispensable" piece of his climate agenda. Forests serve as "carbon sinks" for their maintenance of carbon dioxide and are integral to policymakers' strategies for slowing climate change.

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