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(Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Monday halted the Trump administration’s policy of sending some asylum seekers back across the southern border to wait out their cases in Mexico, stopping a program the government planned to expand to stem a recent flood of migrants.

The ruling is slated to take effect on Friday, according to the order by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco. The preliminary injunction will apply nationwide.

In a late night tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “A 9th Circuit Judge just ruled that Mexico is too dangerous for migrants. So unfair to the U.S. OUT OF CONTROL!”

The program was launched in January and was one of many policies aimed at slowing rising numbers of immigrants arriving at the border, many of them families from Central America, that swelled last month to the highest in a decade.

Because of limits on how long children are legally allowed to be held in detention, many of the families are released to await U.S. immigration court hearings, a process that can take years because of ballooning backlogs.

The Trump administration said last week it planned to expand the program of sending some migrants to wait out their U.S. court dates in Mexican border cities under a policy known as Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP.

The government argued MPP was needed because so many asylum seekers spend years living in the United States and never appear for their court hearings before their claim is denied and an immigration judge orders them to be deported.

Seeborg said the Immigration and Nationalization Act, however, does not authorize the government to return asylum seekers to Mexico the way the government has applied it.

He also said the policy lacks safeguards to protect refugees from threats to their life or freedom.

Justice Department data show that while the percentage of immigration court cases completed “in absentia” – when the foreign citizen fails to show – has risen in recent years, the majority of immigrants show up for their hearings.

A U.S. Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment on Monday’s ruling. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Mexican foreign ministry considers the ruling “an internal decision” of the United States, a spokesman said.

Seeborg said the government shall permit the 11 plaintiffs in the case to enter the United States beginning on Sunday. He said the government still retained the right to detain the asylum-seekers pending the outcome of their case.

The ruling can be appealed, and the government could seek a stay of the injunction until the appeals process runs its course.

LAWYERS, MIGRANTS GRATIFIED
Still, lawyers for migrants were gratified by the decision.

“This is a great ruling,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which was one of the groups that brought the case.

“This is what they were planning on implementing on a large scale. That would have been a complete game changer in the way our asylum system works,” she said.

Rabinovitz said the groups that brought the lawsuit needed to discuss what could be done for the hundreds of refugees who are awaiting their cases in Mexico.

She said as their cases are heard, they will be returned to the United States, but that could take months.

The plaintiffs include legal service organizations and migrants who fled Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to escape what they said was extreme violence, rape and death threats.

Gabriela Orellana, 26, an asylum seeker from El Salvador who was scheduled to have her first hearing on Tuesday, was delighted by news of the judge’s ruling.

“I’m crying from happiness,” she told Reuters. She is not one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Orellana said she fled El Salvador with her 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son after she was shot by a gang member. She has been in Tijuana since January and has waited nearly two months for her first interview with U.S. immigration authorities.

Others in Tijuana were more cautious.

“Will I be allowed to go or do I have to stay?” asked Veronica Galdames, who said she fled San Salvador in 2018 after gang members stole her food cart and, pointing a gun at her, told her she had 24 hours to get out of the city.

“I feel real happiness, but also uncertainty, because I don’t know if this applies to me,” Galdames said.

MPP was based on a decades-old law that says migrants who enter from a contiguous country can be returned there to wait out their deportation case, although the provision had never been used in the way the administration has applied it.

Civil rights groups sued, arguing the policy violated U.S. and international law by returning refugees to dangerous border towns where they would be unable to get legal counsel or notices of hearings.

Kirstjen Nielsen resigned as Secretary of Homeland Security, the department that oversees immigration, on Sunday.

A congressional official familiar with the matter said some in Congress believe Trump forced out Nielsen in part because she was trying to obey laws on treatment of refugees, granting of amnesty and separation of families.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. officials are “not satisfied yet” about all the issues standing in the way of a deal to end the U.S.-China trade war but made progress in talks with China last week, a top White House official said on Monday.

The United States and China have been embroiled in a tit-for-tat tariff battle since July 2018, roiling global financial markets and supply chains and costing both of the world’s two largest economies billions of dollars.

U.S. officials are pressing China to make changes to address longstanding concerns over industrial subsidies, technology transfer and intellectual property rights.

The two sides wrapped up the latest round of talks in Washington late last week and will be resuming discussions this week remotely.

“We’re making progress on a range of things, and there’s some stuff where we’re not satisfied yet,” Clete Willems, a top White House trade official, told Reuters on the sidelines of a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event on Monday.

He declined to get into specifics on which issues remained unsettled. Last week, President Donald Trump said a deal could be reached in about four weeks.

Willems also declined to specify a timeline for the pact, noting: “It should be a good sign for people that we’re not rushing into this we want to get it right and we need to nail down specifics.”

Willems said that the two sides were still trying to settle on how to handle existing tariffs. The United States has slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods, and the Trump administration sees those as leverage to ensure Beijing keeps any promises made in the deal. Chinese officials want the levies removed.

The United States and China have agreed on an enforcement structure that would give Washington the right to retaliate if Beijing was not honoring the terms of the agreement, Willems said.

European Union leaders did not take issues with Chinese trade policy as seriously as they should have in the past, but the United States and the EU are now “working hand in hand” at the World Trade Organization on China’s non-market economic policies, Willems said earlier in remarks at the Chamber of Commerce.

The United States and the EU want to work together on joint projects that provide market-based alternatives to state-led initiatives “that can come with strings attached,” he said.

This month China is hosting its second summit for its Belt and Road initiative, which envisions connecting China with Asia, Europe and beyond with massive infrastructure spending, but the United States will not be sending high-level officials to the event.

Washington views Beijing as a major strategic rival. The United States has said it views the initiative as a way of spreading Chinese influence overseas and saddling low-income countries with unsustainable debt using opaque projects.

Willems, who has been a key figure in negotiations with China, said last month he will be leaving the White House in the coming weeks to spend more time with his family after the birth of a new baby.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – John Murante, a conservative Nebraska senator, last year introduced a bill to prevent non-citizens from being counted when the state redraws its voting maps.

He said the effort aimed to ensure each election district contained similar numbers of voters, but opponents argued it intended to undermine the political power of immigrant communities.

Murante’s bill died after its critics pointed out a lack of granular data on where the state’s non-citizens live.

That data may soon be available.

The Trump administration believes its proposed question about citizenship on the 2020 Census will help states that want to draw citizens-only voting districts in the next round of redistricting by providing the first comprehensive data on non-citizens in about 70 years, according to a Reuters review of court and federal register documents and interviews with more than a dozen state lawmakers.

Such a change would provide a new opportunity for Republican-controlled states – those most likely to adopt citizens-only redistricting – to redraw their voting maps in a way that could help their party win more state-level elections.

Currently, state and federal voting districts are drawn to be roughly equal in population, regardless of how many residents can legally vote. That means tallies for district-drawing purposes include non-citizens, such as green-card holders and undocumented immigrants.

Democrats and immigrant rights activists say this system ensures elected leaders represent everyone in their district who depends on public services such as schools and trash pickup, regardless of voting eligibility.

Republicans argue that districts should be the same size so each vote carries the same weight. If one district has far fewer eligible voters than another, each vote there has more influence on election outcomes.

That’s a problem for Republicans because the eligible voters in immigrant-heavy districts tend to support Democrats.

Trump administration officials have been considering the merits of citizens-only redistricting since 2017 – well before announcing their intention in March 2018 to add the citizenship question to the decennial survey, according to court documents filed as part of litigation over the citizenship question.

And in December, the Census Bureau issued a notice in the Federal Register saying that if any states “indicate a need for … citizenship data” to use in redistricting, it would “make a design change” to provide it.

Republican lawmakers in Texas, Arizona, Missouri and Nebraska told Reuters they would consider making use of the citizenship data if it became available.

The tactic is prohibited at the federal level by past U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have interpreted the U.S. constitution as requiring that U.S. House districts be based on total population. But the court, in a 2016 case known as Evenwel v. Abbott, left the door open for state-level districts to use other metrics.

The Commerce Department, which includes the Census Bureau, declined to comment on whether redistricting was part of the motivation for proposing the citizenship question.

James Whitehorne, the chief of the Census Bureau’s Redistricting & Voting Rights Office, called the federal register notice routine. “We’re supposed to provide states with what they identify as needing,” he said.

U.S. voting districts are drawn at the state level, most often by state legislators, giving the party in power control over how the lines are redrawn.

While both Republicans and Democrats frame the debate over citizen-only districts around fairness, demographic experts point out that both sides have a lot at stake politically.

Data from the nonpartisan APM Research Lab showed that 95 of the 100 U.S. congressional districts with the highest foreign-born populations are represented by Democrats. Similar data for state-level seats was not available.

Redrawing such districts with citizen-only populations would give Republicans a better shot by expanding the districts into more conservative areas, said Albert Kauffman, a professor at St. Mary’s School of Law in San Antonio who has studied redistricting and opposes excluding non-citizens.

In Texas, a citizens-only map could strip Latino voters of majorities in two or three state senate seats and six or seven state representative seats, Kauffman said, pointing out that Hispanic voters traditionally lean left.

“Democrats know they would probably lose seats at every level,” Kauffman said.

SUPREME CHALLENGE
Immigrant rights activists and Democratic-led cities and states have sued the Trump administration to prevent it from asking census respondents about their citizenship, and the Supreme Court will decide by June if the question can remain.

Opponents argue the administration aims to use the question to intimidate immigrants out of responding to the census, which would cost their communities political representation and a share of about $800 billion in annual federal aid allocated based on population.

The administration disputes that. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said his decision to add the question was aimed at getting the Justice Department the comprehensive citizenship data it needs to better enforce Voting Rights Act provisions that protect minorities from discrimination.

Ross has not publicly commented on how citizenship data might be used in redistricting. But Census records, as well as emails released during the litigation over the citizenship question, showed he was thinking about citizens-only redistricting well before he announced plans to add the question.

In April of 2017, at the behest of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Ross spoke with former Kansas Secretary of State and noted immigration hawk Kris Kobach, according to the emails. One topic of discussion was “the problem that aliens … are still counted for congressional apportionment,” according to a subsequent email from Kobach to Ross describing their conversation.

The following month, Ross asked Commerce Senior Policy Advisor David Langdon to look into whether non-citizens, including illegal immigrants, are included in voting maps, according to Langdon’s deposition in the litigation over the citizenship question.

Kobach and Langdon did not respond to requests for comment.

ATTRACTING INTEREST
A handful of states will likely request the census data on citizenship if the question survives its legal challenges, state lawmakers and a Republican strategist told Reuters.

Lawmakers and state officials from Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas said in interviews they are considering citizen-only districts. Republicans in Tennessee also voiced support for citizens-only redistricting in court papers filed in the Evenwel Supreme Court case. Reuters reached out to several of the Tennessee lawmakers who signed the court brief, but all declined to comment.

Missouri Representative Dean Plocher, a Republican who sponsored unsuccessful legislation last year to base Missouri’s voting districts on citizen population, said the effort is aimed solely at equalizing the power of all votes in the state. He said he hadn’t considered how such changes might affect his party’s chances in elections.

Nebraska’s Murante – the former senator behind his state’s failed citizens-only redistricting bill and now the state’s treasurer – said he supports citizens-only maps because the state’s constitution requires that “aliens” be excluded from voting districts.

Immigrant rights activists counter that citizens-only districts could be forced to expand in ways that weaken the political influence of immigrant communities.

The effect could be particularly pronounced in places such as south Texas, where immigrants make up more than a quarter of the population, said Juan Hinojosa, a Democratic state senator.

Hinojosa’s district includes areas known as colonias — informal communities of poor, largely Hispanic families. Citizen-only redistricting would make it more likely that anti-immigration Republicans would win elections in the border region, Hinojosa said.

The question of how to count non-citizens in voting districts may end up at the Supreme Court, said Kel Seliger, a Republican Texas state senator, who told Reuters that lawmakers there would explore citizen-only maps.

“You’ve got be careful,” he said, “that the Republican bias doesn’t get us on the wrong side of the Constitution.”

LONDON (Reuters) – British voters want a strong leader who is willing to break the rules and force through wide scale reform after three years of Brexit crisis pushed confidence in the political system to a 15-year low.

The 2016 referendum revealed a United Kingdom divided over much more than EU membership, and has sparked impassioned debate about everything from secession and immigration to capitalism, empire and what it means to be British.

Yet more than a week since the United Kingdom was originally supposed to leave the EU on March 29, nothing is resolved: it remains uncertain how, when or if it ever will.

Research by the Hansard Society found that 54 percent of voters want a strong leader who is willing to break the rules while 72 percent said the system needs “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of improvement.

Confidence in the system at the lowest level in the 15-year history of the survey, lower even than after the 2009 expense scandal when lawmakers were shown to have charged taxpayers for everything from an ornamental duck house to cleaning out a moat.

“Opinions of the system of governing are at their lowest point in the 15-year Audit series – worse now than in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal,” according to the Hansard Society.

“People are pessimistic about the country’s problems and their possible solution, with sizeable numbers willing to entertain radical political changes.”

Just a quarter of people had confidence in lawmakers’ handling of Brexit.

The survey was conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 12 by Ipsos MORI.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The March floods that punished the U.S. Midwest have roiled the ethanol industry, hammering prices and trapping barrels in the country’s interior while the U.S. coasts suffer from shortages of the biofuel.

The historic March floods have dealt a series of blows to large swaths of an ethanol industry that was already struggling with high inventories and sluggish domestic demand growth. And the ethanol shortages are one factor pushing gasoline prices in Los Angeles and Southern California to the highest in the nation and they could top $4 a gallon for the first time since 2014, according to tracking firm GasBuddy.

Benchmark price for ethanol used in most supply contracts initially jumped on news of the floods but has been hobbled by rising waters around the Chicago hub that have halted barges and sales. That stands in contrast to prices on the coasts, which rose dramatically – drawing in heavy imports from Brazil, the main U.S. ethanol competitor.

The floods inflicted billions of dollars in damage to crops and homes in the U.S. Midwest, and knocked out roughly 13 percent of ethanol capacity.

U.S. ethanol is made from corn and required by the government to be blended into the nation’s fuel supply to reduce emissions.

While some ethanol plants were flooded, the primary effect of the rising waters was to shut rail lines that serve as the main arteries for corn and ethanol deliveries.

Ethanol prices on the coasts spiked due to shortages, but Midwest producers have been unable to take advantage because of washed-out rail lines, market sources told Reuters.

“Unfortunately for anyone who was impacted by logistics issues it was a double whammy. You couldn’t capture the rally,” said one trader.

At Chicago’s Argo terminal, the nation’s main ethanol pricing hub, the cash price for ethanol fell for an eighth straight session last week to $1.29 a gallon, the longest downward skid since April of last year, according to Oil Price Information Service, which does daily assessments.

Initially, fears of widespread plant outages boosted that benchmark, but plants proved more resilient than expected, continuing to produce despite logistical challenges.

U.S. ethanol inventories were at 24 million barrels for the week ended March 29, just off a record hit a week earlier, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

Chicago’s price acts as the benchmark for millions of barrels bought and sold via longer-term supply contracts each day. While that price faltered, ethanol prices at the coast have surged, helping plants owned by Pacific Ethanol Inc and White Energy in California and Texas to take advantage of higher prices.

Ethanol delivered into Los Angeles typically trades at 20 cents a gallon higher than Chicago, but that premium rose to as high as 50 cents a gallon, traders said. The price in New York Harbor was at roughly double normal levels, traders said.

The tight ethanol supplies, along with refinery outages, boosted retail gasoline prices and led to some gas station shutdowns in the West as blenders there lacked the ethanol needed to blend with gasoline to make fuel that meets government regulations.

Gas prices in Arizona averaged $2.88 per gallon on Sunday, 17 percent higher than last month, according to the American Automobile Association. Prices were even steeper in California at $3.78 a gallon, well above the national average of $2.74 a gallon.

“Ultimately, Los Angeles could get close to seeing that average at $4 a gallon,” Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis at tracking firm GasBuddy, said, adding that much of that increase will come because of refinery outages in the state.

At least one county in California has already surpassed $4 a gallon. The highest recorded average price for the state was $4.67 a gallon, in October 2012, according to AAA.

The high coastal prices attracted barrels from the biggest U.S. competitor: Brazil. Overall ethanol imports to the United States totaled 558,279 barrels in March, the most seasonally since 2013, according to Refinitiv Eikon ship tracking data. Most of the imports during the month came from Brazil, according to the tracking data.

MEXICO CITY/OTTAWA (Reuters) – More than six months after the United States, Mexico and Canada agreed a new deal to govern more than $1 trillion in regional trade, the chances of the countries ratifying the pact this year are receding.

The three countries struck the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) on Sept. 30, ending a year of difficult negotiations after U.S. President Donald Trump demanded the preceding trade pact be renegotiated or scrapped.

But the deal has not ended trade tensions in North America. If ratification is delayed much longer, it could become hostage to electoral politics.

The United States has its next presidential contest in 2020, and Canada holds a federal election in October.

The delay means businesses are still uncertain about the framework that will govern future investments in the region.

“The USMCA is in trouble,” said Andres Rozental, a former Mexican deputy foreign minister for North America.

Though he believed the deal would ultimately be approved, Rozental said opposition from U.S. Democrats and unions to labor provisions in the deal, as well as bickering over tariffs, made its passage in the next few months highly unlikely.

Canada’s Parliament must also ratify the treaty and officials say the timetable is very tight. Current legislators only have a few weeks work left before the start of the summer recess in June, and members of the new Parliament would have little chance to address ratification until 2020.

Trump, a Republican, has shown frustration with the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives for failing to sign off on the USMCA. He has threatened to pull out of the old pact, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), if Congress does not hurry up.

If Trump did dump NAFTA, the three nations would revert to trade rules in place before it came into effect in 1994.

TARIFFS
Canada and Mexico are seeking exemption from U.S. tariffs on global metal imports imposed last year.

The metals tariffs were not included in the USMCA and Mexico and Canada are impatient to resolve the issue. Mexico has repeatedly threatened to target new U.S. products by the end of April in retribution if tariffs are imposed.

Meanwhile, Trump on Thursday threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican auto exports unless Mexico does more to stop drug traffickers and illegal immigration.

Mexico’s government is in the final stages of completing a new list of potential U.S. imports to be targeted, said Luz Maria de la Mora, a Mexican deputy economy minister.

“There’s going to be a bit of everything,” she told Reuters, declining to give details of how the list – originally encompassing products such as bourbon, cheese, motor boats, pork legs, steel and apples – could be modified.

De la Mora would not be drawn on whether Mexico could refuse to ratify USMCA if steel tariffs are not withdrawn, saying only: “All options are on the table.”

In Ottawa, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said this week her government was “constantly” looking at its own retaliation list, noting that Trump’s tariffs left the country over C$16 billion worth of space to strike back.

Freeland did not say when that list could change, and a government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it might not be necessary. Still, Freeland said Canada was coordinating with Mexico about its options.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who faces a tough re-election battle, on Thursday rejected accepting quotas on Canadian steel and aluminum in exchange for U.S. tariffs being dropped.

Trudeau was criticized during the USMCA negotiations for giving ground to Trump on access to Canada’s dairy sector.

WORKERS
U.S. Democrats have threatened to block the USMCA unless Mexico passes legislation to improve workers’ rights, a demand shared by the Canadian government.

A bill already in Mexico’s Congress to strengthen trade unions should be approved this month, the government says.

Trump blamed NAFTA for millions of job losses in the United States as companies moved south to employ cheaper Mexican labor. Trump is running for re-election in 2020, and his ‘America First’ policy will likely feature prominently in the campaign.

Forcing Mexico and Canada to rework NAFTA was one of Trump’s signature pledges during his shock win in 2016, and Democrats are pulling out the stops to avoid losing again.

“The closer the election gets, the harder it will be for Democrats to grant Trump a victory” by ratifying the USMCA, said Sergio Alcocer, a former deputy Mexican foreign minister.

Some Democrats are pushing to change the deal – an idea that both Canadian and Mexican officials resist.

“People need to be very careful around opening up what could really be a Pandora’s box,” Freeland said on Thursday.

Canadian officials say they fear that if one part of the treaty were reopened, it could spark clamor for other sections to be renegotiated as well.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Opponents of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are lining up in Alaska and in Washington, calling the White House’s efforts to open up the land “ecologically unsound.”

Those against oil development in the ANWR coastal plain say the territory deserves protection from oil rigs, pipelines and roads that crisscross the rest of Alaska’s North Slope. ANWR had been off-limits to drilling for more than four decades before a Republican-passed tax bill in 2017.

The Trump administration has said it wants to hold a lease sale by year-end, which would meet the administration’s aim of speeding up environmental review before drilling.

Drilling opponents spoke at a March 25 hearing before the Democratic-led U.S. House Natural Resources Committee.

The opponents include Alaska Natives, environmentalists and scientists who say the varied terrain is a poor fit for industrial travel on ice roads needed for development, and that the refuge has taken on increased importance due to sea ice loss that has caused polar bears to migrate inland.

“We believe such development is ecologically unsound and cannot be accomplished while also harboring the original purposes for which the Arctic Refuge was established and is still managed today,” a group of more than 300 scientists and resource managers wrote in a March 7 letter to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of ANWR leasing.

The Trump administration has made energy dominance a key plank of economic development and foreign policy influence. U.S. oil production has surpassed 12 million barrels of oil a day, making it the world’s biggest crude producer.

Alaska’s production has dwindled to about 500,000 bpd from a peak of 2 million bpd in 1988. Industry interest in ANWR is unclear; it has been tested only once for the potential to extract fossil fuels.

The area is important for wildlife, most notably as the calving grounds for the Porcupine Caribou Herd, which roams northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada. Canadian governments and tribes oppose ANWR development in large part because of threats to the herd, the subject of a 1987 U.S.-Canada treaty.

“If you drill in this sacred place it will destroy the caribou and therefore destroy the Gwich’in,” Dana Tizya-Tramm, chief of the Vuntut Gwitch’in First Nation in Canada’s Yukon Territory, told the House committee. Gwich’in Athabascans live along the Alaska-Canada border, and their culture is tied to the caribou.

However, the Inupiat of the North Slope, another indigenous group, supports ANWR development. The tax base from development is needed for “running water, reliable power, local education and improved health care,” said Richard Glenn, vice president of the Inupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corp, at the House hearing.

The U.S. Department of the Interior came under fire for continuing to plan for ANWR meetings during the government shutdown in January – an example, opponents say, of the White House rushing the process.

Republican U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a longtime proponent of ANWR drilling, told Reuters she does not think the process is being rushed.

“We have a lot of process to go through,” she said. “We’ve got a ways to go and some time to do it, and I think we’ll do it right.”

LONDON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May wrote to European Council President Donald Tusk on Friday asking for a delay of Brexit until up to June 30, but said she aims to get Britain out of the EU earlier to avoid it participating in European elections.

An EU official signalled that Donald Tusk, the chairman of EU leaders, could be willing to offer even longer: up to a year for Britain’s feuding politicians to agree and ratify a plan.

France, however, indicated it was not yet ready to accept an extension unless the British presented a clear plan which would justify such a delay.

“We’re not there today,” a source close to French President Emmanuel Macron told Reuters.

Britain is now due to leave the EU in a week, but May has been forced to seek more time after Britain’s parliament failed to approve a withdrawal agreement.

Her Conservative Party is deeply divided, as is the main opposition Labour Party, leading to an extraordinary series of inconclusive votes in parliament that have stretched Britain’s centuries-old unwritten constitution to its limits.

Scenarios that run the gamut from abandoning the EU abruptly with no exit deal to cancelling Brexit altogether have all gone down to defeat.

Obscure parliamentary procedures have been resurrected from the rulebooks providing daily drama from the House of Commons, but the future of Britain’s biggest change in generations has become no clearer.

After finally recognising that her minority Conservative government could not push through a Brexit deal on its own, May started talks this week with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the hope of coming up with a cross-party solution.

But that means accepting the need for more time, including the prospect that Britain might have to hold European Parliament elections on May 23, which May has long said she hoped to avoid at all cost.

“The United Kingdom proposes that this period should end on 30 June 2019,” May said in the letter.

“The government will want to agree a timetable for ratification that allows the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union before 23 May 2019 and therefore cancel the European Parliament elections, but will continue to make responsible preparations to hold the elections should this not prove possible.”

Tusk, who convenes a summit of EU leaders next week, is likely to offer Britain a flexible extension of up to a year, with the possibility of leaving sooner, a senior EU official said.

“The only reasonable way out would be a long but flexible extension. I would call it a ‘flextension’,” the official said.

As in May’s proposal, the extension could be terminated early if Britain ratifies the withdrawal agreement.

“It seems to be a good scenario for both sides, as it gives the UK all the necessary flexibility, while avoiding the need to meet every few weeks to further discuss Brexit extensions,” the official said.

PREMATURE?
Any extension must be agreed by all 27 of the other EU countries. France in particular has signalled that it would not automatically give Britain whatever May sought.

“If we are not able to understand the reason why the UK is asking for an extension, we cannot give a positive answer,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters in Bucharest.

The French diplomatic source called the extension idea premature and “clumsy”.

However, other European politicians have signalled they would be happy to give Britain time to rethink.

Armin Laschet, the premier of Germany’s biggest regional state, North Rhine-Westphalia, tweeted: “If Britain asks for an extension to avoid a chaotic exit from the EU with incalculable risks for hundreds of thousands of jobs, we

He added: “The longer the better. That means the Brits take part in the European elections too.”

BRITISH PARTIES DIVIDED
May offered to quit last week to get her deal passed but it was defeated for a third time last Friday, the day Britain was originally due to leave the EU. The EU had given her an extension until April 12 and said it could be extended to May 22, but only if parliament agreed the withdrawal deal.

Her latest gamble on talks with the Labour Party has infuriated the pro-Brexit wing of her Conservatives and divided her cabinet.

Labour too is divided. It is officially committed to leaving the EU but with closer ties than May has sought, including a customs union, which May has so far ruled out.

Many Labour members and lawmakers also want to put any agreement to a second public vote – potentially opening a path for Brexit to be rejected altogether. Party leader Corbyn has been difficult to pin down on whether this would still be necessary if May agrees to a customs union.

Corbyn’s deputy Tom Watson, who supports a second referendum, said it would be difficult for Labour to back any agreement without it.

“We’re genuinely going in with an open mind, but if it comes out of that process without the idea of a confirmatory ballot, I think we would have a bit of difficulty with our parliamentary party,” Watson told BBC radio.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump may feel he is “stuck” with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom he has blasted for engineering four interest rate hikes since Trump appointed him, but none of Trump’s other Fed appointees has stood in the way of the tightening campaign and at least one has said even higher rates may be necessary.

The voting records and public statements of Trump’s Fed appointees, who now form a solid majority of the Fed’s Washington-based board of governors, show not only consensus around the recent increases, but no support so far for the rate cuts Trump has demanded.

A possible upcoming nominee to the Fed, economic commentator Stephen Moore, has said he agrees with Trump that rates should be cut and had earlier called for Powell’s ouster. Trump has mulled whether he could fire Powell, but in a March 8 phone call, reported by the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged he was “stuck” with the Fed chair for Powell’s full four-year term that runs to February 2022.

If Moore does take a seat alongside Trump’s appointees at the Fed, at this point he would be the outlier.

“I am comfortable with the current stance of our policy,” Trump’s newest appointee, Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, said in February in her only comments about monetary policy to date.

Bowman joined the Fed in November, when the administration was growing agitated about rising volatility in financial markets. She voted for the December rate increase that has become a particular target of Trump’s ire and point of blame for, in his view, holding back the economy.

The White House on Tuesday announced Bowman would be renominated for a full 14-year term to follow the end next January of the short, partial term she was appointed to fill.

Trump’s hand-picked vice chair, Richard Clarida, voted for the December increase and the one before it in September, which was approved shortly after he joined the Fed board.

Randal Quarles, who was the first appointment Trump made to the Fed as his presidency took shape in 2017, voted for five rates hikes from December of that year to December 2018, and his most recent comments show the wide and sometimes paradoxical gap between the president’s view of what the Fed should be doing, and those of the people he has chosen to oversee the central bank.

In what amounted to a bullish defense of where the economy is heading, Quarles last week said in fact that rates may need to move higher precisely because Trump’s tax cuts and policies may produce a “persistent” boost to productivity and growth.

“Further increases in the policy rate may be necessary at some point, a stance I believe is consistent with my optimistic view of the economy’s growth potential and momentum,” Quarles said in remarks at the Manhattan Institute last week.

For now the Fed intends to hold rates steady, a position it reached both as Trump publicly called for a halt to rate increases, but also – and what Fed officials say mattered to them – as economic and financial data globally indicated a broad slowdown from the faster-than-expected growth of 2018.

Trump blames the weaker data on what he called in a tweet on Thursday the Fed’s ‘destructive’ rate hikes. Others see a number of causes, including Trump’s trade policies, and feel growth is likely to continue though at a tepid pace.

“We had this synchronized acceleration of growth a couple of years ago. Now it is synchronized deceleration and a slowing momentum across the spectrum,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in Washington on Tuesday. “Nobody wins a trade war.”

RULE BY CONSENSUS
Unanimity among Fed board members is largely the norm. The Fed strives to be a consensus-driven organization, led, but not dictated to, by a chair whose job is to canvas and shape opinion among as many as 18 other policymakers split between the seven-member board based in Washington and 12 regional bank heads.

The regional bankers, five of whom each year have a formal vote on interest rates even as all 12 participate in Fed debates, are part of a now century-old system meant precisely to guard against too much power residing with the board and the chair in Washington.

There are currently two open board seats.

Even as Fed officials have begun to speak more frequently and openly in public, formal dissents against any given policy action have in general declined since the 1970s. The last one by a board member was in 2005 by then Governor Mark Olson against a rate increase.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean conformity inside the room when the Federal Open Market Committee meets every six weeks. Opposition to some of the extraordinary policies put in place to fight the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis, for example, led former Governor Kevin Warsh to resign even though he never dissented, maintaining a unified face for the Fed during a treacherous time.

Yet with the current group of appointees there is little sense of the sort of behind-the-scenes warfare that occurred, for example, when a group of governors tried to revolt against the recession-inducing steps pushed by 1980s-era Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to curb runaway inflation.

Transcripts of recent Fed meetings won’t be released for five years, but the summary minutes of sessions last fall show the central bank sifting through data, coming to grips with developing risks, and shifting their stance as a result.

By January, “all participants expressed the view that it would be appropriate for the Committee to maintain” the existing interest rate, the minutes stated.

“Several” said continued growth might warrant higher rates eventually.

There was no mention of support for a rate cut.