Politics

It started Friday morning. Just about an hour before Ted Cruz addressed religious conservatives gathered for the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner — one of the renegade Texas Senator’s nemeses in the Washington establishment — called it quits.

And Cruz was nimble, adjusting his speech to give the activists he was speaking to credit.

Ted Cruz knows how to work this room. His supporters were out in force with T-shirts and buttons, building on the great reception of his speech.

Their work paid off yesterday, when Cruz won his third straight Values Voter Summit straw poll.

Another winner at the summit was Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who was jailed for blocking same-sex marriages in her jurisdiction. She was given the “Cost of Discipleship” award on Friday night.

When Kim Davis was released from jail last month, Cruz was there. But it was former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who was with her on stage. Cruz was left on the sidelines.

Cruz could feel a little vindication this weekend, as Huckabee came in third in the straw poll.

A Limited Victory

The reality is that winning the Values Voter straw poll has never led a candidate to the GOP nomination the following year — or even a victory in Iowa, with a strong base of evangelical voters.

Cruz sees the evangelical wing of the party as his best hope of staying in the fight. But it’s not just Huckabee that he has to contend with. The same forces that are shaping the GOP race broadly are present among evangelicals.

In a Quinnipiac poll of likely GOP primary voters released on Thursday, Cruz came in fourth among white evangelicals. Political outsiders Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina were the favorites.

Cruz pitches himself as an outsider, too. He’s the guy who pledged to take on Washington, who hasn’t assimilated into the “mushy middle” and is a huge thorn in the establishment’s side. But Republican voters still prefer the candidates who have never held any kind of office.

That’s why you’ve seen Cruz buddy up with Donald Trump. They co-headlined a big rally earlier this month in front of the U.S. Capitol to oppose the Iran nuclear deal. Cruz is trying to position himself to inherit Trump supporters if their candidate falters. But even if that happens, they may stick with another true outsider.

The Hangover

Cruz’s weekend of triumph at the Values Voter Summit began with Boehner’s surprise resignation. But Boehner isn’t gone yet; he’ll be there when Cruz gets back to his day job on Capitol Hill this week for the big showdown over Planned Parenthood.

The threat of a government shutdown has loomed as Cruz and his allies pledge to hold the line on funding the government past Wednesday, unless federal funding for Planned Parenthood is zeroed out.

But the victory they see in Boehner’s fall could spell defeat on this issue, which was sparked by a series of sting videos that enraged and energized conservatives.

That’s because Boehner is liberated. After years of taking heat from the same members of the House who have pitched the battle against Planned Parenthood, he can defy them and not worry about any fallout.

That means Boehner can bring a bill to the floor this week that will keep the government open — including funds for Planned Parenthood — and keep his eye on that ride into the sunset next month.

It would be another loss for Cruz at the hands of the establishment. Another reason, he’ll tell conservatives, to keep fighting. But at this point it still looks unlikely that Republicans will send him into the ring in 2016.

There’s a great irony to John Boehner’s resignation — once upon a time, he was involved in an attempt to oust a speaker himself. The official bio on the speaker’s website puts it this way: he was, back in the day, “a reformer who took on the establishment.”

But when one becomes speaker, one becomes, by definition, part of the establishment. And these days, the conservative base just doesn’t like the establishment.

Here’s another irony: Boehner has become more conservative over the last 25 years — and the Ohio Republican remains more conservative than the average GOP congressman. But he hasn’t kept pace with the hard-liners, and that’s important in this era of record polarization.

Those are two big reasons Boehner’s job as speaker was such a struggle. Let’s examine:

1. Voters (Republicans especially) really don’t trust Washington

Americans have grown increasingly distrustful of government in the last few decades, and the feeling is particularly strong among Republicans, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

And that distrust has increasingly been reflected in election results, with voters willing to knock out party stalwarts in favor of outsider newcomers (a lesson Eric Cantor learned last year). In a recent paper explaining Boehner’s leadership troubles, UCLA Political Science Professor Barbara Sinclair wrote that that distrust in Washington, widespread among party activists, showed up in the newer members of Congress.

Because election victories were often attributed to the tea party and other activist groups, she wrote, they “did not enhance Boehner’s reputation; members did not consider him a political genius. Rather, Boehner was seen as a pragmatic politician and part of the Washington establishment, representative of everything that GOP activists distrusted and disliked.”

Long story short, public distrust of government translated into elected officials distrusting establishment figures, said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. Outsiders distrusted the long-time leaders, and those leaders suffered for it.

“They’re elected to represent your views. … And a lot of Republicans just did not feel (lawmakers) were making the progress that they should,” O’Connell said. “Boehner was the symbol of that inaction.”

2. The most polarized Congress in more than a century

In a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with GOP voters’ growing distrust, Congress grew increasingly polarized over the years.

If you look at that chart of government trust again, you might notice that people are way more likely to trust the government when their guy is in the White House. The GOP trusted Washington much more when George W. Bush was president, for example. But they deeply distrust Democrat leaders, and that distrust has helped to cement and even deepen polarization.

“When you see your adversaries — Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nanc Pelosi, etc. — as the devil, those on the extreme end of your party start looking pretty good to voters, especially primary voters, who are more committed,” writes Marc Hetherington, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, in an email to NPR “These characters run on the notion that they won’t give the other side an inch.”

And that rejection of compromise makes Boehner’s job even harder, Hetherington adds, as Boehner had a reputation of being a dealmaker.

Interestingly, it’s not that the rest of the party was far to Boehner’s right. To the contrary, Boehner was still slightly more conservative than the rest of his party when he became speaker, according to DW-NOMINATE first dimension scores (a common measure of lawmakers’ ideology — the higher the score, the more conservative, as shown in the chart).

But during his time in Congress, as the party quickly swung right, Boehner steadily found himself closer to the middle of the party, putting more Republicans further to the right than him. (It wasn’t just Republicans, either — Democrats moved further to the left.)

That made it harder to get even the most basic things done, like keeping the government from shutting down or preventing the nation from hitting the debt ceiling. Trying to corral an increasingly extreme party has been one of Boehner’s biggest — if not the biggest — challenges as speaker.

After one of the most litigious rounds of redistricting in recent history, movements have popped up in at least five states to take the power to draw legislative and congressional maps away from legislators and put it in the hands of commissioners.

The task of redistricting, done every 10 years after the U.S. Census counts the population, falls on state legislators in most states. But over the last five years, maps drawn by legislators in 40 states have been challenged in court amid accusations of gerrymandering or attempts to dilute minorities’ voting power. And the idea of a commission doing the mapping, even if it still required legislative approval, is attracting new interest.

Legislators in Florida and Wisconsin are considering bills that would establish commissions to draw the lines. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland has created a task force to examine the state’s redistricting process and how it can curb gerrymandering. Indiana, Nebraska and North Carolina also considered bills this year but they did not pass.

Twenty-three states have some sort of commission involved in redistricting. But they are a relatively recent development in the history of redistricting and their makeup varies widely, which leads some political scholars to say it’s unclear whether commissions do a better job than state legislators.

Who Draws Better Maps?

“The jury is still out, but there is a growing consensus that commissions are not any worse and are perhaps better,” said Michael Li, redistricting counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Where you have commissions there seems to be a lot less contentious and protracted litigation, you often have more competitive districts, and you tend to have more moderate people get elected.”

But Bruce Cain, a political science professor at Stanford University, said his research suggests that commission plans tend to fair equally in court when it comes to whether the maps they draw are rejected or upheld.

Proponents of independent commissions say legislators have a conflict of interest and too much political know-how to avoid drawing maps in their favor—something they say results in representatives picking their voters instead of voters picking their representatives. As Stateline has reported, the large number of recent court cases suggests accusations of gerrymandering have been on the rise.

Many legislators balk at the idea of being stripped of redistricting power. That was the case in Arizona, where the Legislature challenged the independent redistricting commission approved by voters in a 2000 referendum. Arizona House Speaker David Gowan, a Republican, said the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 4) gives state legislatures redistricting power.

Although four members of the five-member Arizona redistricting commission are chosen by legislators, an independent fifth member, the commission’s chairman, is selected by the four commissioners.

Gowan questioned whether the commission’s chairman, or for that matter the other members, should be given such an important task without first being vetted by the voters. “Those people are appointed and therefore not held accountable,” he said. “I have to get elected every two years.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, earlier this year upheld the constitutionality of the Arizona commission.

Tim Storey, who studies redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), said the makeup of some commissions can be as political as that of legislatures, though commissioners’ motives may not be as transparent.

“If the goal is to regulate the partisan influence of redistricting, do you need a commission or do you need tougher rules?” Storey said. “Is it who does it or how they do it? It’s better to focus on the criteria.”

That’s a question being raised after Florida instituted tougher rules for legislators with a voter-approved constitutional amendment in 2010, which bars them from drawing districts to favor an incumbent or a political party.

However, legislators did not follow the rules. Florida’s Supreme Court threw out the state Senate and congressional maps, and the Senate later admitted to drawing lines with partisan intent.

State Rep. Evan Jenne said the constitutional amendment clearly wasn’t sufficient to take the partisanship out of redistricting. Jenne and other Democrats in the GOP-controlled Legislature are backing a bill that would create an advisory commission charged with drafting maps, which the Legislature would then approve.

Jenne Pamela Goodman, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, which helped sponsor the amendment, said it may be time to explore whether a commission would be a good addition to the tougher rules.

“We would need to start doing research on commissions in other parts of the country, how big they are, who serves on them, how they are selected, what are their qualifications,” Goodman said.

Commission vs. Commission

Commissions now in place vary widely in their composition and power. And their recent arrival makes it difficult to assess their effectiveness or which form of commission works best.

Some have over a dozen members, while in Arkansas, the commission consists of the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state. In New Jersey, the leaders of the General Assembly and of the Senate choose members to serve on a map-drawing commission, while in California, legislators’ influence on the selection of commissioners is much more limited.

And in some states, the commission does not bear all the responsibility for redistricting. Many states, including Maine, have advisory commissions design the maps, which are later approved by the legislature. In Iowa, nonpartisan legislative staff draft maps for review by the Legislature. There are also backup commissions, as in Texas, which only come into play if the legislature fails to produce a map.

“Those backup commissions are partisan creatures,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida, adding that they are usually made up of a small group of elected officials who can make a map without going back to consult the legislature.

Among the commissions that have primary responsibility for drawing a map, there are politician commissions, on which elected officials can serve, and independent commissions, on which they cannot serve but may play a role in selecting commissioners. Even with independent commissions, the process is not apolitical. They usually require a specific number of seats for Democrats, Republicans and independents.

“Generally, model reformers like commissions where the people are vetted, it acts independently from the legislature, they act in sunlight and have well-established criteria to meet to approve a map,” McDonald said.

Arizona and California are often touted as the states that best fit that model.

“California has the most robust set of methodology, and it’s probably about the most neutral you can get,” in terms of removing legislators from the process, Storey said.

California’s citizen commission began operating after the 2010 census. An initial pool of almost 30,000 applications was narrowed significantly by the state’s auditor, and further trimmed by legislators. Once eight commissioners were selected, six more were picked from the remaining applicant pool to form a 14-person commission comprising five Republicans, five Democrats and four independents.

Karin Mac Donald, who heads up California’s redistricting database, stored at the University of California Berkeley and used to draw the lines, said redistricting since the 2010 census differs substantially from when the Legislature had been in charge.

“When the Legislature does it, they tell the line drawer what they want to see in a district. It’s tailor-made to be incumbent-friendly. This was definitely incumbent-unfriendly. We didn’t even know where they lived,” Mac Donald said.

Mac Donald said she thinks California’s model proved successful because it attracted skilled and knowledgeable commissioners—one is a former Census Bureau director—and avoided the conflict of interest present in the Legislature.

But Storey, of NCSL, said it’s impossible to completely avoid conflicts of interest in an inherently political process.

“It’s a very small number of people drawing these maps,” he said, “so you’ve got to hope they’re very independent and that their motives are very clear.”

Read Original Article – Published September 23, 2015
Amid Court Fights, Some States Consider Redistricting Commissions

A strong showing during the Sept. 16 debate has put Carly Fiorina at the top of a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates. But in the corporate world, another debate remains: Fiorina’s business record.

Donald Trump says as a businesswoman, Fiorina would be unqualified to lead one of his companies.

“The head of the Yale business school, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, wrote a paper recently (calling it), ‘one of the worst tenures for CEOs that he has ever seen,'” Trump says.

Sonnenfeld’s actual title is senior associate dean, but he says the rest is true: “Her business record is a colossal failure.”

Fiorina, the daughter of a law professor-turned-judge, rose quickly at AT&T, becoming its first female senior vice president, then later president of its spinoff, Lucent. Lucent was a business supernova; it burned bright, then faded soon after she left. Part of its downfall lay in questionable-but-legal accounting that boosted revenues by loaning money to its customers.

Still, Sonnenfeld, along with many others, say Fiorina’s biggest misstep was the expensive and unprofitable merger with Compaq. He says the highly controversial, strategically misguided deal she muscled through dragged the company and its stock down.

“Stapling together the carcasses of failing businesses is not a successful track record,” Sonnenfeld says.

Still, Sonnenfeld says, executives often fail.

“Leaders go through adversity and we benefit from their failures because they come back from it and tell us how to get through it. But she doesn’t, because she doesn’t acknowledge it,” Sonnenfeld says.

He believes that instead of accepting criticism, she shoots the messenger. It’s a failure of character and leadership, he says.

“I get shot at as a result,” Sonnenfeld says.

Former Compaq-turned HP senior vice president Bill Mutell bucks the critics.

“She was the right leader at the right time,” he says.

Mutell, who has not contributed to her campaign, calls Fiorina a leader with character, courage and conviction. He argues the merger was a success that shored up both companies.

“Had that merger not occurred, I’m almost certain that [neither] company wouldn’t be here today,” Mutell says.

Much of the debate over her corporate performance boils down to two disparate views of HP’s woes. Her critics attribute them to her decisions and leadership; her supporters — and Fiorina herself — blame the times.

“I led Hewlett-Packard through a very difficult time, the worst technology recession in 25 years,” Fiorina says.

Tom Perkins is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former HP board member who, at the time, voted to fire Fiorina. But in a full-page ad in the New York Times paid for by a PAC supporting Fiorina, he defended her record and leadership.

Much of the political criticism of Fiorina’s career stems from the 30,000 layoffs soon after the Compaq merger.

Her eventual successor at HP, Meg Whitman — who, like Fiorina, has run for office in California — has defended that decision.

“When Carly made those reductions it was probably — I wasn’t here, but I suspect she was trying to do in some ways what I have tried to do, which is to make this company more competitive,” Whitman told CNN Money in June.

She says the price of inaction would’ve been far greater.

Is Fiorina facing more flack as a female running for office? Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld points to other strong female contemporaries, saying gender was not Fiorina’s issue. She was fired by HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn. Sonnenfeld argues her contemporaries — now IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy — have better records.

“I do think that there are some added challenges that women CEOs have had, but it doesn’t seem to be relevant in the particular case of Carly Fiorina,” Sonnenfeld says.

But that, like everything else, is likely still up for debate.

Lawmakers have been expecting a special session on the state’s mammoth, $55-billion proposed project to build a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope to Nikiski.

But when Gov. Bill Walker called for the special session on Thursday, it came with a surprise – a proposed tax on the natural gas reserves held by the very companies the state is trying to partner with.

Walker started his press conference on Friday with a history lesson:  “Gov. Hickel – a bold move – he threatened the producers on the North Slope: you drill or we will,” Walker said. “They drilled. We have Prudhoe Bay today.”

The moral of the story? Sometimes, getting Alaska’s oil and gas out of the ground requires a governor willing to carry a big stick.

At least, that seems to be what Walker is thinking as he proposes a natural gas reserves tax. Walker has been clear that he doesn’t think the state’s partners in the massive Alaska LNG pipeline project are moving fast enough. Those partners include ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips — all with major natural gas reserves on the North Slope. A reserves tax would hit undeveloped natural gas, as an incentive not to leave it in the ground.

“This isn’t about trying to penalize anybody, put a gun to anybody’s head,” Walker said. “We have a gun to our own head, on our fiscal situation. It’s time to monetize our resources.”

It’s not entirely clear how the reserves tax would accomplish that, in part because the bill itself hasn’t been released yet. The governor said the legislation has to be reviewed by the Departments of Law and Revenue.

But in a report on the project that the governor also released Thursday, he made it clear that he isn’t satisfied with progress on the project so far. One major issue, the report says, is that Alaska, with its massive budget deficit, needs the project more than its partners — and so it needs more leverage at the negotiating table.

The natural gas reserves tax would give the state that leverage, Walker said.

ExxonMobil and BP both issued statements opposing the idea of a gas reserves tax. In an emailed statement, ConocoPhillips wrote, “We haven’t seen any legislation on a gas reserves tax so we will have a more specific response when that happens.”

And judging from the reaction of key lawmakers, the proposal will have a tough time in the legislature. Senator Cathy Giessel, the Anchorage Republican who chairs the Senate Natural Resources Committee, said she is looking forward to seeing the bill. But her immediate response isn’t positive.

“I don’t believe you can tax a project into existence,” she said.

Giessel added that she was caught off guard by the proposal. She said it didn’t come up during two briefings in recent months or at a meeting with the governor on Monday.

Walker also wants lawmakers to consider buying out a fourth partner, pipeline builder TransCanada. Giessel said that item will be contentious enough.

But on one point, at least, she agrees with the governor: with the price of oil so low and so little of it flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Alaska needs the gas line.

“Financially our state is at a place that we need new income, we need new development of our resources,” Giessel said. “That’s what we’re attempting to achieve here, we are striving to work with the governor, but it does require communication, coordination, collaboration.”

And for the moment, at least, the project seems short on all three.

The pontiff told the United Nations General Assembly that it is critical that thet international community act now to solve problems ranging from climate change to poverty and inequality of opportunity.

We have included a video of the speech above. You can view the full transcript here.

This is our live blog of the address …

Updated at 10:45 a.m. ET

In conclusion: “Upon all of you, may God bless you all.”

Updated at 10:44 a.m. ET

International community needs to act now:

“We cannot permit ourselves to postpone ‘certain agendas’ for the future. The future demands of us critical and global decisions in the face of world-wide conflicts which increase the number of the excluded and those in need.”

Updated at 10:43 a.m. ET

“El Gaucho Martín Fierro, a classic of literature in my native land, says: ‘Brothers should stand by each other, because this is the first law; keep a true bond between you always, at every time — because if you fight among yourselves, you’ll be devoured by those outside.’ ”

Updated at 10:41 a.m. ET

“The common home of all men and women must continue to rise on the foundations of a right understanding of universal fraternity and respect for the sacredness of every human life, of every man and every woman, the poor, the elderly, children, the infirm, the unborn, the unemployed, the abandoned, those considered disposable because they are only considered as part of a statistic.”

Updated at 10:40 a.m. ET

” … the danger comes neither from progress nor from science; if these are used well, they can help to solve a great number of the serious problems besetting mankind. … Among other things, human genius, well applied, will surely help to meet the grave challenges of ecological deterioration and of exclusion.”

Updated at 10:37 a.m. ET

“… I would mention another kind of conflict which is not always so open, yet is silently killing millions of people. Another kind of war experienced by many of our societies as a result of the narcotics trade. A war which is taken for granted and poorly fought. Drug trafficking is by its very nature accompanied by trafficking in persons, money laundering, the arms trade, child exploitation and other forms of corruption.”

Updated at 10:35 a.m. ET

On international inaction:

“Human beings are easily discarded when our only response is to draw up lists of problems, strategies and disagreements.”

An apparent reference to ISIS:

“I must renew my repeated appeals regarding to the painful situation of the entire Middle East, North Africa and other African countries, where Christians, together with other cultural or ethnic groups, and even members of the majority religion who have no desire to be caught up in hatred and folly, have been forced to witness the destruction of their places of worship, their cultural and religious heritage, their houses and property, and have faced the alternative either of fleeing or of paying for their adhesion to good and to peace by their own lives, or by enslavement.”

And further …

“Not only in cases of religious or cultural persecution, but in every situation of conflict, as in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, South Sudan and the Great Lakes region, real human beings take precedence over partisan interests, however legitimate the latter may be.”

Updated at 10:32 a.m. ET

On weapons of mass destruction:

“An ethics and a law based on the threat of mutual destruction — and possibly the destruction of all mankind — are self-contradictory and an affront to the entire framework of the United Nations, which would end up as ‘nations united by fear and distrust.'”

“There is urgent need to work for a world free of nuclear weapons, in full application of the non-proliferation Treaty, in letter and spirit, with the goal of a complete prohibition of these weapons.”

“The recent agreement reached on the nuclear question in a sensitive region of Asia and the Middle East is proof of the potential of political good will and of law, exercised with sincerity, patience and constancy. I express my hope that this agreement will be lasting and efficacious, and bring forth the desired fruits with the cooperation of all the parties involved.”

Updated at 10:27 a.m. ET

“War is the negation of all rights and a dramatic assault on the environment. If we want true integral human development for all, we must work tirelessly to avoid war between nations and between peoples.”

Updated at 10:24 a.m. ET

More on the destruction of the environment:

“The ecological crisis, and the large-scale destruction of biodiversity, can threaten the very existence of the human species. The baneful consequences of an irresponsible mismanagement of the global economy, guided only by ambition for wealth and power, must serve as a summons to a forthright reflection on man.”

Updated at 10:23 a.m. ET

“At the same time, government leaders must do everything possible to ensure that all can have the minimum spiritual and material means needed to live in dignity.”

They are: lodging, labor and land.

Updated at 10:18 a.m. ET

“Our world demands of all government leaders a will which is effective, practical and constant, concrete steps and immediate measures for preserving and improving the natural environment and thus putting an end as quickly as possible to the phenomenon of social and economic exclusion, with its baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labour, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism and international organized crime.”

“Such is the magnitude of these situations and their toll in innocent lives, that we must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism which would assuage our consciences.”

Updated at 10:14 a.m. ET

More on climate change and inequality:

“The poorest are … cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the abuse of the environment. They are part of today’s widespread and quietly growing ‘culture of waste.'”

Updated at 10:11 a.m. ET

On climate change:

“…. it must be stated that a true “right of the environment” does exist, for two reasons. First, because we human beings are part of the environment. We live in communion with it, since the environment itself entails ethical limits which human activity must acknowledge and respect.”

“Any harm done to the environment … is harm to humanity.”

“Man is not authorized to abuse it [the environment], nor is he authorized to destroy it.”

Updated at 10:08 a.m. ET

On international justice:

“To give to each his own, to cite the classic definition of justice, means that no human individual or group can consider itself absolute, permitted to bypass the dignity and the rights of other individuals or their social groupings.”

Updated at 10:05 a.m. ET

In an apparent reference in part to the International Monetary Fund, he said to applause from the delegates:

“The need for greater equity is especially true in the case of those bodies with effective executive capability, such as the Security Council, the Financial Agencies and the groups or mechanisms which were specifically created to deal with economic crises. This will help limit every kind of abuse or usury, especially where developing countries are concerned. The International Financial Agencies are should care for the sustainable development of countries and should ensure that they are not subjected to oppressive lending systems which, far from promoting progress, subject people to mechanisms which generate greater poverty, exclusion and dependence.”

Updated at 10:03 a.m. ET

The pope’s speech started a bit early. After opening remarks, he said:

“An essential response, inasmuch as technological power, in the hands of nationalistic or falsely universalist ideologies, is capable of perpetrating tremendous atrocities. I can only reiterate the appreciation expressed by my predecessors, in reaffirming the importance which the Catholic Church attaches to this Institution and the hope which she places in its activities.”

“Certainly, many grave problems remain to be resolved, yet it is clear that, without all those interventions on the international level, mankind would not have been able to survive the unchecked use of its own possibilities. Every one of these political, juridical and technical advances is a path towards attaining the ideal of human fraternity and a means for its greater realization.”

And here’s our original post …

Pope Francis began a busy day in New York by heading to the United Nations, where at 10:20 a.m. ET., he will become the fourth pontiff to address the world body.

As he’s done in front of Congress and in speeches throughout Washington, Francis is expected to address climate change and the migrant crisis in Europe.

We’ll update this post throughout the day with the latest. Via The Washington Post, we’ve also embedded live video of the events at the top of this post.

Update at 8:34 a.m. ET. Schedule For The Day:

Pope Francis begins his day at the United Nations. He’s scheduled to speak at 10:20 a.m. ET.

At 11:30 a.m. ET., he will attend a multi-religious service at the Ground Zero memorial.

At 4 p.m. ET., he visits Our Lady Queen of Angels School in Harlem, where he will meet third- and fourth-grade students from Catholic schools in Harlem.

At 6 p.m. ET., he will celebrate mass at Madison Square Garden.