Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Thursday that the country should apply to join NATO “without delay.”
Thursday’s announcement is the strongest sign yet that Finland will make a formal application to join NATO. Membership would be historic for the Nordic country, which has had a decades-long policy of military neutrality.
“Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.” the leaders said in a joint statement, adding that they hoped that “the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.”
“NATO membership would strengthen Finland’s security” and that Finland’s membership would in turn “strengthen the entire defence alliance.”
The government will debate the issue over the weekend and the Finnish parliament is expected to give its final approval to the application as early as Monday.
President Navasto said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had changed Finland’s security situation although there was no immediate threat.
Soon after Finland’s announcement, fellow Nordic country Denmark said it would push for the quick NATO admission of Finland.
“Denmark will do everything for a quick admission process after the formal application,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Twitter.
There is a risk the move from Helsinki could spark aggression from Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has expressed his opposition against NATO’s enlargement.
Finland shares a 830-mile border with Russia; if it joins the military alliance, the land border that Russia shares with NATO territories would roughly double (Russia has land borders with 14 countries and five of them are NATO members: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway).
Finland has been reviewing its security policy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which showed the Kremlin is willing attack a neighboring nation. Finland has been invaded in the past — in 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland in what became known as the Winter War.
NATO — or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — was founded in 1949 by the U.S., Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against modern Russia’s forebear, the Soviet Union.
Ever since its foundation, the alliance has had a thorny relationship with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and following its collapse in 1991, the Russian Federation.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated shortly.
WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) – Liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer plans to retire, lawmakers said on Wednesday, giving President Joe Biden the opportunity to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the nation’s top judicial body.
The retirement of Breyer, who is 83 and has served on the court since 1994, gives Biden a first chance to shape the court, whose 6-3 conservative majority has shown an increasing assertiveness on issues including abortion and gun rights. Biden’s Republican predecessor Donald Trump was able to choose three justices during his four years in office.
Biden’s fellow Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate, which under the U.S. Constitution confirms Supreme Court nominees. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Biden’s nominee to replace Breyer will receive a “prompt hearing” and will be considered and confirmed with “all deliberate speed.”
The Democrats have reason for speed. Republicans are seeking to regain control of the Senate in the Nov. 8 congressional elections. The chamber’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, has made clear he would block any Biden nominations to the court if his party regains the majority.
A Biden appointee to replace Breyer, who is set to step down after the court’s current term that runs through June, would not change its ideological balance, but would enable him to refresh its liberal wing with a much younger jurist who could serve for decades in the lifetime post.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden will honor his presidential election campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman to fill any Supreme Court vacancy. Neither the White House nor the Supreme Court confirmed Breyer’s retirement plans.
Breyer and Biden are scheduled to make a public appearance on Thursday where the justice is set to formally announce his retirement, a CNN reporter wrote in a tweet, citing a source familiar with the matter.
Democrats aim to confirm Biden’s pick for the vacancy in a time frame similar to the one-month process that McConnell and the Republicans used in 2020 to confirm Trump’s third appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, according to a source familiar with planning.
White House counsel Dana Remus is likely to help spearhead the process for Biden.
The Senate’s filibuster rule that requires 60 of the 100 members to agree to advance most legislation does not apply to judicial nominations, meaning Democrats could confirm a Biden pick with just their 50 members and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer at Capitol Hill in Washington May 20, 2010. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Two centrist Democrats who have blocked some Biden legislative priorities, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have so far supported most of his judicial nominees.
Breyer, the Supreme Court’s oldest member, was appointed to his lifetime post by Democratic President Bill Clinton. He authored important rulings upholding abortion rights and healthcare access, helped advance LGBT rights and questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty. He often found himself in dissent on a court that has moved ever rightward.
POTENTIAL NOMINEES
Potential Biden nominees include Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer law clerk who was confirmed by the Senate last June to serve on an influential U.S. appellate court, and Leondra Kruger, who serves on the California Supreme Court.
Only conservative Justice Clarence Thomas has served longer than Breyer among the current justices, joining in 1991. Thomas is one of two Black men to have served on the high court, alongside Thurgood Marshall who served from 1967 to 1991.
Trump’s three appointees all are young enough to serve for decades. The Senate, then under Republican control, confirmed Barrett in 2020 after the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
After Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, some liberal activists urged Breyer to step aside while Democrats control the Senate, concerned that if he did not do so Republicans could block confirmation of his successor or a future Republican president could name his replacement and tilt the court even further to the right.
The court is due to rule by the end of June in cases giving its conservative majority a chance to curtail abortion rights and widen gun rights. The justices this week took up a case to be decided in their next term that could doom university policies considering race as a factor in student admissions and cripple affirmative action policies despised by the American right.
Breyer last year authored a ruling rejecting a Republican bid to invalidate Obamacare, preserving the landmark healthcare law formally called the Affordable Care Act for the third time since its 2010 enactment.
He authored two important abortion rulings in 2016 and 2020 that struck down restrictions on clinics in Texas and Louisiana. He also was in the majority in the landmark ruling in 2015 that legalized gay marriage. Breyer has become a persistent critic of the death penalty and wrote that it was “highly likely” that capital punishment violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
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