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Top CEOs and their companies are pledging to donate millions of dollars to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, as they seek to get on his good side and make inroads before he takes office.

Some of the planned donations reportedly include $1 million each from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Facebook parent company Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg. Others include $2 million from Robinhood Markets and $1 million each from both Uber and its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Ford is reportedly coupling its own $1 million donation with a fleet of vehicles.

Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also said he plans to give $1 million to the tax-exempt inaugural committee, Bloomberg reported. Other donations from finance leaders are reportedly in the works.

Empowered by a decisive electoral victory, Trump has vowed to revamp U.S. economic policy in a way that could have outsized benefits for a few favored industries, like fossil fuels.

At the same time, he has telegraphed the value, both personal and political, that he places on face-to-face meetings and public praise from chief executives of the world’s largest companies.

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote Thursday in a post on Truth Social, the social media app run by his own tech company.

Many of those CEOs have already made, or are planning to make, trips to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, resort and de facto transition headquarters, as they seek to gain influence with and access to the incoming administration.

To that end, Trump’s inaugural committee presents a “unique opportunity,” said Brendan Glavin, director of research for the money-in-politics nonprofit OpenSecrets, in an interview.

Inaugural committees, which are appointed by presidents-elect, plan and fund most of the pomp and circumstance that traditionally surrounds the transition of power from one administration to the next.

While the money is ultimately benefiting a recent political candidate, it doesn’t carry the same connotation as a donation to, say, a super PAC, which can fund partisan political activities that risk stoking controversy.

And unlike a direct contribution to a candidate’s campaign, there are no limits on how much an individual — or a corporation or labor group — can give to an inaugural committee.

Moreover, since Trump already won the election, an inaugural contribution carries no risk for a high-profile executive of backing a losing candidate.

“It really is a great opportunity for them to curry favor with the incoming administration,” Glavin said.

While it’s nothing new for corporations and power brokers to shower big money on inaugural committees, experts told CNBC the Trump factor changes the calculus.

“It’s all heightened now,” Glavin said. “None of these people, they don’t want to be Trump’s punching bag for four years.”

Trump’s inaugural committee and his transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raked in about $107 million, by far the most of any in U.S. history. The previous record had been set in 2009 during the first inauguration of Barack Obama, whose committee raised $53 million.

Trump’s second inauguration is on pace to shatter that record, with pledged contributions already surpassing a $150 million fundraising goal, ABC News reported.

President Joe Biden’s inaugural committee, by comparison, raised nearly $62 million.

“One of the oldest adages in Washington is that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, and the price of admission to have a seat at the table keeps going up,” said Michael Beckel, research director of Issue One, a political reform advocacy group.

The boost in funding for Trump’s second inaugural committee comes in part from tech giants, many of whom largely steered clear of supporting his first inauguration.

Other than GoDaddy.com founder Robert Parsons, who gave $1 million, few other leaders in Big Tech donated to Trump’s 2017 committee.

Trump once openly clashed with some of them, including Zuckerberg and Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, a frequent target of the president-elect’s ire.

Not so this time around. As Trump vows to tear up reams of federal regulations, but also continues to accuse Big Tech of stifling competition, industry leaders could have more riding on their relationship with the White House than ever before.

“I’m actually very optimistic,” Bezos said of a second Trump presidency in a Dec. 4 interview at The New York Times’ DealBook conference. “I’m very hopeful. He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him. Because we do have too much regulation in this country.”

The comments came in the wake of a scandal at The Washington Post in October, when the paper reported that Bezos decided not to publish its editorial board’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump. Bezos in an op-ed defended the paper’s decision to no longer endorse presidential candidates, but the reversal spurred an exodus of subscribers and prompted numerous staffers to resign in protest.

Nowhere is Trump’s newfound friendliness with the tech world more pronounced than in his blossoming relationship with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who spent more than $250 million helping elect Trump.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has frequently appeared by Trump’s side before and after his election victory, and has reportedly been involved in all aspects of Trump’s transition planning. He and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to lead an advisory group tasked with cutting government costs.

This could put OpenAI’s Altman, who is currently embroiled in a breach-of-contract lawsuit brought by Musk, in an awkward position.

Along with his million-dollar inaugural donation, Altman heaped praise on Trump earlier this month. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” he said.

Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for the progressive nonprofit Public Citizen, told CNBC that these figures “very much fear that Donald Trump may take retribution against them.”

“So they’re throwing money” at his feet “in order to curry favor,” Holman said.’

Four days after the presidential election, Trump announced the formation of the “Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc.,” a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. It is co-chaired by real estate investor Steve Witkoff and former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who is also Trump’s pick to lead the Small Business Administration.

Reince Priebus, who was one of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff during his first term, said in an X post that he has been tapped to serve as the committee’s finance chair.

Priebus also shared a screenshot of an invitation that listed the names of other finance chairs. They include Miriam Adelson, the GOP megadonor who spent $100 million this year on a pro-Trump super PAC, and billionaire Trump donor Diane Hendricks.

Inaugural committees are required to publicly disclose the names of donors who give $200 or more, but those filings aren’t due until 90 days after the inaugural ceremony.

If the committee has a surplus after all the festivities, finding out just how much is left can be a challenge.

Trump’s 2017 inauguration was a smaller affair than Obama’s in 2009, although Trump raised more than twice as much money for his as Obama had. As a result, Trump’s committee was widely expected to have tens of millions of dollars left over after it paid for balls and hotels.

But years after the fact, it was unclear what happened to much of that money.

Federal filings show that roughly a quarter of all the funds raised, $26 million, were paid to a newly created firm that was run by an advisor to first lady Melania Trump.

“We take a look through the history of the financing of inaugurations, and clearly it comes from very large donors, wealthy special interests and corporations, almost all of whom have business pending before the federal government,” said Holman, of Public Citizen.

He added, “This is a real cesspool of buying favors.”

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

A Dutch court sentenced five men on Tuesday for charges related to violence that broke out after a soccer match in Amsterdam last month.

The clashes unfolded after a soccer game between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and Amsterdam’s Ajax.

Multiple social media videos showed Maccabi fans chanting anti-Arab slurs, praising Israeli military attacks in Gaza and yelling “f**k the Arabs” in the run up to the match. After the game, Maccabi fans were violently attacked in the streets. Social media video showed people shouting antisemitic slurs and setting off fireworks inside a tram.

Of the men sentenced on Tuesday, three were found guilty of committing violence and two were found guilty of aiding and abetting violence, a statement from the Dutch court said. One of the men was also found guilty of making offensive remarks against Jewish people.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Haiti’s online media association said two reporters were killed and several others were wounded in a gang attack on Tuesday on the reopening of Port-au-Prince’s biggest public hospital.

Street gangs have taken over an estimated 85% of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and they forced the closure of the General Hospital early this year. Authorities had pledged to reopen the facility Tuesday but as journalists gathered to cover the event, suspected gang members opened fire in a vicious Christmas Eve attack.

Robest Dimanche, a spokesman for the Online Media Collective, identified the dead journalists as Markenzy Nathoux and Jimmy Jean. Dimanche said an unspecified number of reporters had also been wounded in the attack, which he blamed on the Viv Ansanm coalition of gangs.

Haiti’s interim president, Leslie Voltaire, said in an address to the nation that journalists and police were among the victims of the attack. He did not specify how many casualties there were, or give a breakdown for the dead or wounded.

“I send my sympathies to the people who were victims, the national police and the journalists,” Voltaire said, pledging “this crime is not going to go unpunished.”

A video posted online by the reporters trapped inside the hospital showed what appeared to be two lifeless bodies of men on stretchers, their clothes bloodied. One of the men had a lanyard with a press credential around his neck.

Radio Télé Métronome initially reported that seven journalists and two police officers were wounded. Police and officials did not immediately respond to calls for information on the attack.

Johnson “Izo” André, considered Haiti’s most powerful gang leader and part of a gang known as Viv Ansanm, which that has taken control of much of Port-au-Prince, posted a video on social media claiming responsibility for the attack.

The video said the gang coalition had not authorized the hospital’s reopening.

Haiti has seen journalists targeted before. In 2023, two local journalists were killed in the space of a couple of weeks — radio reporter Dumesky Kersaint was fatally shot in mid-April that year, while journalist Ricot Jean was found dead later that month.

In July, former Prime Minister Garry Conille visited the Hospital of the State University of Haiti, more widely known as the General Hospital, after authorities regained control of it from gangs.

The hospital had been left ravaged and strewn with debris. Walls and nearby buildings were riddled with bullet holes, signaling fights between police and gangs. The hospital is across the street from the national palace, the scene of several battles in recent months.

Gang attacks have pushed Haiti’s health system to the brink of collapse with looting, setting fires, and destroying medical institutions and pharmacies in the capital. The violence has created a surge in patients and a shortage of resources to treat them.

Haiti’s health care system faces additional challenges during the rainy season, which is likely to increase the risk of water-borne diseases. Poor conditions in camps and makeshift settlements have heightened the risk of diseases like cholera, with over 84,000 suspected cases in the country, according to UNICEF.

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Volunteers helping to clean up the oil spill on Russia’s Black Sea coast are appealing to Russian President Vladimir Putin for more assistance, as they grapple with environmental havoc across more than 35 miles of coastline.

Two Russian tankers carrying thousands of tons of fuel were badly damaged in stormy weather near the Black Sea earlier this month, leading to an oil spill, according to Russian state media. The tankers were carrying more than 9,000 tons of oil, according to TASS, much of which spilled into the Kerch Strait between mainland Russia and annexed Crimea.

Putin last week labelled the spill an “environmental disaster.”

At least 3,700 tons of heavy oil were spilled, though the actual volume may be higher, according to Greenpeace Ukraine. Video from the scene showed blackened waves washing the heavy fuel oil known as mazut onto rocky shores. In one video, a bird – its wings thick with oil – could be seen squawking in distress as it was pummeled by waves, unable to lift its wings and fly away.

In a video message addressed to the Russian president and prime minister on Tuesday, volunteers said that local authorities in Russia’s Krasnodar region did not have the means to clean up the oil spill.

“Local authorities are not coping, they do not have the resources for this. The only resource is ordinary people with shovels, such a catastrophe cannot be defeated with shovels!” one volunteer said in the video, as they requested federal resources and specialists to be sent to the area. They also appealed for foreign specialists to be sent, warning that the scale of the pollution will have an international impact.

“It was recently announced that 5,000 volunteers and rescuers are working to eliminate the consequences. We believe that in such a vast disaster area, even 50,000 people with shovels are not able to solve the problem and save the situation,” the volunteer added.

On Thursday, Putin suggested the captains of the vessels were to blame for the incident. “Why am I saying that this is a big disaster and a catastrophe? Because almost 40% of the fuel has leaked,” he said, adding that efforts to recover the vessels were hampered by the ongoing storm.

Russia’s Investigative Committee will open a criminal case into the incident, Russian state media TASS reported.

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Egyptian authorities have arrested two men for attempting to steal hundreds of ancient artifacts from the bottom of the sea, the country’s interior ministry said in a Monday statement.

The men took the artifacts from the sea floor of Abu Qir Bay, near the port city of Alexandria, the ministry said. When confronted by authorities, the men said that had planned to traffic the items, according to the ministry. The men obtained all of the antiquities by diving to the bottom of the sea, it said.

Some 448 objects were taken by the men, the ministry statement said, including 305 coins, 53 statues, 41 axes, 14 bronze cups, 12 spears, and three statue heads.

The items date back to Greek and Roman Antiquity, a period that lasted about 900 years, from around 500 BCE to 400 CE.

Photographs released by Egypt’s interior ministry show the items after they were seized.

The artifacts, turned turquoise by layers of patina, depict objects and people from the era they are from. Some statues depict ancient soldiers in uniform, while others appear to be people draped in fabric.

The coins are also intricately carved, featuring depictions of animals including lions, elephants, turtles, dolphins, and scorpions. Two coins appear to show the immortal winged horse Pegasus from Greek mythology.

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Brazilian authorities are investigating after a bridge collapsed Sunday, killing at least four people and sending trucks loaded with sulfuric acid and pesticides plunging into a river, raising concerns about water contamination.

More than a dozen people are missing after the 533-meter-long Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira bridge – which connects the northeastern cities of Estreito and Aguiarnópolis – gave way. Four trucks, three cars, and three motorbikes fell into the Tocantins River, according to the state-run Agencia Brasil news agency.

Three women and one man died in the collapse, Agencia Brasil reported, citing the Maranhão Fire Department.

The trucks were carrying about 25,000 liters of pesticides and 76 tons of sulfuric acid, according to the National Agency for Water and Basic Sanitation, raising concerns about environmental damage. Authorities warned residents not to drink or bathe in the river’s water.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sent his condolences to the families of the victims in a post to social media Monday, and said his government will support local authorities in dealing with the emergency.

Brazil’s National Department of Transport Infrastructure has opened an investigation into the cause of the collapse, the government said in a statement.

The Navy will also deploy equipment and boats to continue the search for the 13 people who are missing, the government said.

The government also said it will hire a new company for the design and construction of a new bridge that will be ready in about a year.

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A passenger plane crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau on Wednesday, local authorities said, without specifying the number of people on board.

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Emergency Situations said its teams found the aircraft on fire upon arrival on the scene.

“Rescue units began extinguishing the fire. Currently, information about the victims is being clarified, and according to preliminary information, there are survivors,” the ministry said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

This post appeared first on cnn.com

Russia launched aerial attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector “on a massive scale” overnight into Wednesday, local authorities said, with explosions reported across the country amid intensified bombardments that have left Ukraine in a precarious position while the war grinds into a third winter.

At least three people were injured in the northeastern city of Kharkiv – less than 20 miles from the Russian border – Ukraine’s national police said, adding that residential buildings and civilian infrastructure were damaged in the attack. At least seven missile strikes targeted the city, regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said.

Russia attacked “the energy sector again on a massive scale,” Ukraine’s energy minister German Halushchenko said on his Facebook page. Ukraine’s energy operator imposed emergency blackouts in several parts of the country, the minister added.

Poland scrambled fighter jets in response to a Russian missile threat in western Ukraine, according to the Polish Operational Command.

Wednesday’s attack follows a deadly Russian strike on the city of Kryvyi Rih on Christmas Eve. At least one person was killed and 17 others were injured after a Russian missile struck a residential building in the city – the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

And last Friday, at least one person was killed and several embassies were damaged in a Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. That attack came a day after Russian leader Vladimir Putin challenged Ukraine to a “duel” in his end-of-year conference, prompting Zelensky to call the Russian leader a “dumbass.”

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Amid negotiations to forge a hostages-for-cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and as the truce with Hezbollah in Lebanon mostly holds, Jerusalem has an opportunity to direct additional military resources to cut Yemen’s Houthi leadership down to size, according to former Israeli officials.

‘Israel has to accelerate and expand attacks [in Yemen], not only on national infrastructure but also on the political leadership,’ retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli Military Intelligence and president of MIND Israel, told Fox News Digital. 

‘Targeted killings are an option if there is good intelligence to enable such operations. The leaders of the Houthis should meet Sinwar and Nasrallah and the sooner the better,’ he added.

An Israel Defense Forces strike killed Hezbollah terror master Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon, on Sept. 28, while Israeli ground troops eliminated Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Oct. 17, and Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh in Iran last summer.

Houthi terror leaders:

The Houthis are led by Abdul Malik Badruddin Al-Houthi (Abu Jibril), whom the U.S. State Department designated as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2021.

According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), other top officials include Abdul Khaliq Badruddin Al-Houthi (Abu Yunis), commander of the Republican Guard (Presidential Reserve), whom the U.S. also blacklisted in 2021; Muhammad Ali Al-Houthi (Abu Ahmad), a member of the Supreme Political Council; and Abdul Karim Amiruddin Husayn Al-Houthi, interior minister and director of the executive office of Ansar Allah.

Joe Truzman, a research analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal, told Fox News Digital that intel-based assassination operations take time and that, to date, the Israelis have been preoccupied with Gaza and Lebanon.

‘But it can be done. We’ve seen Israel target nuclear scientists and military personnel in Iran. This can be replicated in Yemen. If the Houthis continue these attacks, more of Israel’s focus turns to them,’ Truzman said.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser in Israel and a senior fellow at the Washington-based JINSA think tank, outlined to Fox News Digital the intricacy of such attempts.

‘You have to be sure that a target is in the place that you bomb. If he has three houses, how do you know which one he’s in? You need real-time intel,’ said Amidror, who noted that it was relatively easy for Israel to hit Nasrallah from the moment his exact location was known.

‘It took 15-20 minutes to strike [the Hezbollah headquarters] in Beirut because it is so close to Israel,’ he said. ‘Yemen is a huge logistical operation, it requires refueling jets, let alone the tactical issues on the ground. A totally different sort of intelligence is needed.

‘Both Nasrallah and Sinwar were known enemies and we amassed information on them over many years, but the Houthis were not a priority,’ continued Amidror. ‘The way forward is to begin intensifying the collection of intelligence by building bridges with those who can provide it.’ 

Overnight Wednesday, the IAF struck targets some 1,200 miles away in Yemen, after a Houthi missile hit an elementary school in Ramat Gan, just east of Tel Aviv.

The pre-dawn strikes were conducted in two waves, targeting the Ras Isa oil terminal on the Red Sea, the Hodeidah and Salif ports, as well as the D’Habban and Haziz power stations in Sana’a, according to reports.

In July, a Houthi drone killed a civilian in Tel Aviv, prompting the IAF to strike Yemen’s Hodeidah Port. Israeli jets also conducted dozens of strikes in the area of Hodeidah in September.

Overall, the Houthis have launched over 200 missiles and 170 drones at Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people. Since then, the Houthis have also attacked more than six dozen commercial vessels – particularly in the Bab-el-Mandeb, the southern maritime gateway to Egypt’s Suez Canal.

‘The distance to Yemen is about the longest range the IAF has ever flown, but they could expand that with more refueling,’ Brig. Gen. (res.) Relik Shafir, a former IAF pilot who took part in Operation Opera, the attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981, told Fox News Digital. 

‘It’s uncomfortable for a pilot to sit in an F-15, F-16 or F-35 for seven hours. You need to be fully aware and at your top level of concentration,’ he continued. ‘Israel can strike far enough for any existing enemy and the air force uses guided missiles that fire at a precision of two or three feet.’

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a warning to the Houthis, ‘We will strike their strategic infrastructure and decapitate their leaders. Just as we did to [former Hamas chief Ismail] Haniyeh, Sinwar and Nasrallah, in Tehran, Gaza and Lebanon – we will do in Hodeidah and Sanaa.’ 

Jerusalem had previously refrained from taking responsibility for the July 31 killing of Haniyeh, who traveled to the Iranian capital for the inauguration of the country’s president.

On Friday, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder stated that the Israelis ‘certainly have a right to defend themselves.’ 

The Houthis ‘are a danger to everybody in the Middle East,’ former Mossad head Efraim Halevy told Fox News Digital. ‘In the end, most countries in the region will be interested and willing to cooperate in efforts to bring about the end of these attacks, which have no justification whatsoever.’

Halevy insisted that ‘terrorist activity of every kind is a challenge that has to be met with an appropriate response. The Houthis have incurred losses and if they continue to provoke us, we will have to do more.’

In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition launched a military intervention against the Houthis at the request of then-Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who had been ousted from Sana’a the previous September. Yemen’s civil war remains stalemated, with the internationally recognized government, led by the Presidential Leadership Council since 2022, based in Aden, in the country’s south, since February 2015.

A source close to that government told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster on Saturday that Jerusalem should initiate assassinations of Houthi leaders, while the Saudi outlet Al-Arabiya reported that senior Houthi officials had fled Sana’a out of concern they would be targeted.

‘We need to understand more deeply what it is that would cripple the Houthis’ ability to operate,’ former Israeli national security adviser Eyal Hulata told Fox News Digital. ‘For this, we need more intelligence, more assessments and coordination between the different parties.’

The big question, Hulata posited, is whether the Houthis will continue to pose a threat if Israel and Hamas agree to a cease-fire.

‘If they become a major enemy, Israel will need to address this by directing resources it was hoping to avoid – and maybe is still hoping to,’ he said.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Israelis to be ‘patient’ while intimating Jerusalem was preparing to up the intensity of its campaign against the Houthis.

‘We will take forceful, determined and sophisticated action. Even if it takes time, the result will be the same,’ he vowed. ‘Just as we have acted forcefully against the terror arms of Iran’s axis of evil, so too will we act against the Houthis.’

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President Biden on Monday vetoed a bill that would have added 66 federal district judgeships over a span of more than a decade, a once-bipartisan effort designed so that neither political party would have an advantage in molding the federal judiciary. 

Three presidential administrations, beginning with the incoming Trump administration, and six Congresses would have had the opportunity to appoint the new trial court judgeships, according to the legislation, which had support from organizations representing judges and attorneys.

Despite arguments from the organizations that additional judgeships would help with cases that have seen serious delays in resolution and ease concerns over access to justice, the White House said that Biden would veto the bill.

In a statement, Biden said he made his decision because the ‘hurried action’ by the House of Representatives left open questions about ‘life-tenured’ positions.

‘The House of Representative’s hurried action fails to resolve key questions in the legislation, especially regarding how the new judgeships are allocated, and neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate explored fully how the work of senior status judges and magistrate judges affects the need for new judgeships,’ Biden said.

‘The efficient and effective administration of justice requires that these questions about need and allocation be further studied and answered before we create permanent judgeships for life-tenured judges,’ Biden added.

He said the bill would also have created new judgeships in states where senators have not filled existing judicial vacancies and that those efforts ‘suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now.

When Biden’s plan to veto the legislation surfaced earlier this month, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told ‘America’s Newsroom’ that the act is ‘the last spasm of a lame-duck.’

‘President Biden and his team don’t want to allow it to become law simply because a Republican administration would get to appoint some of the judges,’ Kennedy said. 

‘I wish they’d put the country first,’ the senator added.

The legislation was passed unanimously in August under the Democratic-controlled Senate, though the Republican-led House brought the measure to the floor only after Donald Trump was reelected president in November, creating an air of political gamesmanship.

Biden’s veto essentially shelves the legislation for the current Congress. 

Overturning Biden’s veto would require a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, and the House vote fell well short of that margin.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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