Month: April 2019

The dope thinks you’re a dupe
by Tom Sullivan

This man wants to elevate a co-founder of the Club for Growth to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

The Man Without a Plan tweets (emphasis mine):

The Republicans … are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare. In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win … back the House. It will be truly great HealthCare that will work for America. Also, Republicans will always support Pre-Existing Conditions. The Republican Party will be known as the Party of Great HealtCare.

You’ll see it in 2021, right after I’m reelected, buhleeve me. Just like after my last election:

“[W]ait till you see the plans we have coming out, literally, over the next four weeks, we have great health care plans coming out.” — May 10, 2018, Elkhart, Indiana.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said … People covered under the law “can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.” — to the Washington Post, January 15, 2017.

“And it’ll be great health care for much less money. So it’ll be better health care, much better, for less money. Not a bad combination.” — to Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” November 13, 2016.

“I am going to take care of everybody … Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” — on “60 Minutes,” September 27, 2015.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” — on his campaign website, May 21, 2015.

His colleagues on Capitol Hill want nothing to do with his administration’s effort to wholly invalidate the Affordable Care Act and replace it with chaos and panic. They have begged him to back down.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger’s Editorial Board calls The Man Without a Plan’s “endless effort to destroy health care is his most spectacular scam, in a long and successful career as a con man.”

Trump in 2015:
"I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid."

Trump's proposed budget:
-Cuts Social Security by $25 billion
-Cuts Medicare by $845 billion
-Cuts Medicaid by nearly $1.5 trillion— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 18, 2019

Meanwhile, in the world the rest of us inhabit:

The financial strain of paying for health care in the U.S. has been made clear by a new survey that shows that Americans borrowed an estimated $88 billion in 2018 to pay for medical attention. The survey, released Tuesday by Gallup and the nonprofit West Health, shows that around a quarter of Americans avoided seeking treatment for medical problems because of the costs, and that half of the adult population fears a medical emergency could bankrupt them, The New York Times reports.

The Sturm und Drang over killing health care coverage for millions and cutting off funds to Central America misses the point. Whether by instinct or by design, The Man Without a Plan rules by chaos. Chaos works for him. It keeps more-stable, more inside-the-lines rivals off balance. The Man Without a Plan may not be very bright, but he is cunning. Sowing chaos has kept opponents distracted and him out of jail. He’s not about to change.

David Graham understands at The Atlantic:

But Trump and Lenin share a strategic instinct. Lenin reportedly said, “The worse, the better”—meaning that conditions that were more miserable for the people were likely to help his political aims. Trump’s approach to immigration and health care, both in the past few days and throughout his presidency, evince a similar understanding of power. My colleague Adam Serwer has argued that the cruelty of many of Trump’s policies is the point. In some cases, however, the point may be making things worse to his benefit.

Natrually, cutting off U.S. aid to Central America will simply increase the forces driving immigrants north:

Perhaps more likely is that increasing push factors is the point. Many of Trump’s decisions on border issues seem designed not to solve any problem. This includes Trump’s standing threat to close the border with Mexico; his decision to end DACA, a program that he has said achieves goals he favors; and most prominently, his decision to separate unauthorized immigrant families arriving at the border. None of these do anything to solve or reduce what Trump has called a crisis at the border. In fact, they are likely to only worsen the crisis. Separations, for example, became a costly and distracting circus, taking up already short space in detention centers and then necessitating a major effort to reunite families and restore the status quo ante when courts predictably rejected the policy.

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

And Mexico? Mexico is going to pay for a big, beautiful wall with a very big, very beautiful door. Yes, he really does think voters are saps.

The white nationalists favorite Fox wingnut

by digby

This guy is the son of Stormfront’s founder:

VAN JONES (HOST): It’s very alarming to me to see, I thought, at the highest levels, even, you know, anchors at Fox speaking that way. Does it alarm you?

DEREK BLACK (FORMER WHITE NATIONALIST): Yeah. It’s really, really alarming that my family watches Tucker Carlson’s show once and then watches it on the replay because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have and they’re trying to get some tips on how to advance it.

Tucker is in the Viktor Orban school of white nationalistm. It’s very bad. The white nationalists know it when they see it.

.

Puerto Rico just makes him so mad

by digby

Apparently the toddler had his feelings hurt that people object to his treatment of Puerto Rico as a shithole territory.

It was arguably the biggest scandal and outrage of Donald Trump’s young, already scandal-ridden presidency.

There was a large American body count piling up, along with mounting reports and questions about the administration’s mismanagement of the relief efforts, with few answers forthcoming. With the bodies barely cold, the president instead launched sustained, petty public-relations warfare against politicians who he felt had crossed him and, at times, appeared to go to war with the victims of the storms.

It was “Trump’s Katrina,” and then some.

Now, a year and a half after hurricanes Irma and María ravaged Puerto Rico, the island is grappling with a whole new round of crises, Trump has been telling his GOP allies that Puerto Rico is receiving too much assistance from the federal government, and lawmakers leading an investigation into what happened after the storms are being stalled.

Some Democratic lawmakers are all but accusing the Trump administration of stonewalling them in their inquiries.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on government operations, told The Daily Beast he still hasn’t seen key documents from the administration detailing its response to the hurricanes. He said the committee should be prepared to use its subpoena power to obtain those documents—and, if necessary, to hold officials in contempt of Congress if they don’t comply.

“This is not an academic exercise,” said Connolly. “People lost their lives.”

At a lunch Tuesday with Republican senators, Trump once again revived his complaints about the disaster aid spent on the U.S. territory, according to The Washington Post. The president reportedly complained that too much money had been given to the island, compared to what South Carolina and Texas had gotten, following their respective hurricane damage.

The remarks came as Democratic lawmakers are accusing Trump and his administration of dragging their feet on recovery funding, and as the Post reported that the devastated island is facing a food-stamp crisis.

Of course, none of that stopped the president from insisting to White House reporters on Thursday, “I’ve taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever,” just as he was getting ready to fly off to a political rally in Michigan.

The disaster and its aftermath left nearly 3,000 people dead, and the island is still struggling to recover nearly two years later.

Trump, however, has tripled down on blaming others and insisting that, somehow, everything he and his officials had done was perfect. A senior Trump administration official who has discussed Puerto Rico with the president said that in conversations on the topic, Trump has shown he feels he “has nothing to apologize” for and is far more likely to insult Democratic politicians for, in his view, trying to use the disaster and high death toll to make him look bad, than to to talk about ways to ameliorate suffering on the U.S. territory.

“He’s still clearly very bitter and sensitive about it,” the senior official noted.
[…]
Democrats on the Oversight Committee had set up the investigation into the administration’s handling of Hurricane Maria as a top priority well before they took control of the House majority in January.

In September 2018, committee Democrats released a report arguing that the administration dramatically fumbled the response to the disaster—and that Trump’s Republican allies on the Oversight Committee had shut down a “credible investigation” into how that happened. The Democrats’ report noted that the committee chairman at the time, former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), held only one full committee briefing about the hurricane in the 11 months after it happened. Democrats also claimed that Gowdy did not request any documents from the Trump administration related to its handling of the hurricane and that their own attempts to obtain documents were blocked.

Shortly after Democrats’ midterm victory, Cummings released FEMA documents detailing continued struggles in areas affected by the storm—like lack of access to clean water and reliable power—as evidence that Trump’s response was not, as the president had claimed, “unbelievable.”

“The Trump administration severely botched the response to the hurricanes and failed to learn the key lessons of Hurricane Katrina,” Cummings said in late November. “It is our job in Congress to hold these officials accountable and try to ensure that these same mistakes do not happen again.”

As for Trump himself, this is more than just a matter of policy—it’s a matter of personal pride. According to those close to him, the president has long feared that Puerto Rico’s devastation, and his response and reactions to it, would become known as his Hurricane Katrina, the Category 5 hurricane that pummeled areas stretching from Florida to Texas in 2005. The failure of federal, state, and local governments before and after Katrina became a lasting and defining part of President George W. Bush’s legacy.

“Multiple times I’ve heard [the president] talk about how you don’t want a Katrina moment,” a former senior Trump White House official told The Daily Beast late last year. “You can’t do anything about what weather is going to do, but you can certainly manage the response and the optics of what you’re doing in addition to the substance of what you’re doing.”

That ship sailed. His response is burned into the national consciousness and I have no doubt that Democrats on the trail are going to ensure that nobody forgets it. He was actually worse than Bush, who for all of his mismanagement at least didn’t go down to New Orleans and complain that their disaster was busting his budget and deny the numbers of casualties were true.

Trump thinks Puerto Rico is not actually America despite the fact that every Puerto Rican citizen is an American. He’s made that clear. He has no right to have hurt feelings that people think he’s a disgusting person for that.

.

Why in the HELL aren’t they getting those tax returns?

by digby

This has been driving me nuts. It’s the kind of thing that makes Democratic voters wonder whether it’s even worth it to vote when their leadership refuses to make the most obvious moves to check the president, particularly when they know for a fact that the Republicans would have done it on the first day of the new congress if they were in the same position.

This is not out of bounds at all. Trump is the first president in 40 years to refuse to release his returns and he’s lied about the reason for not doing it. Also, he’s a corrupt con man and we have no idea what his exposure to foreign countries and organized crime might be because he’s been completely opaque about his businesses.

I think they’re worried about it setting a precedent for the Republicans to obtain the tax returns of any politician if they gain the majority. So what? All politicians should release their tax returns.

Anyway, Greg Sargent has the low-down. It’s depressing:

President Trump’s absurd claim that a 4-page summary of the Russia investigation’s findings grants him “total exoneration,” and his efforts to bully Democrats and the media into groveling with forgiveness for supposedly having gotten this scandal wrong, are all about what lies ahead. The obvious game is to chill further scrutiny, which very much constitutes a live threat to Trump that no amount of furious tweeting about “exoneration” can make disappear.

Which is why Democrats should, if anything, be intensifying their effort to access Trump’s tax returns right now, not dragging their feet on it.

The Center for American Progress is trying to increase the pressure on Democrats to do just that — by releasing a new memo that argues getting the returns is a legal slam dunk, and is absolutely justifiable, or even imperative, as a matter of oversight and good governance.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has delegated the job of getting Trump’s tax returns to Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass), who under the law can request any individual’s tax returns, after which the Treasury Department “shall” furnish them.

Neal has asked multiple House committees to each furnish a rationale rooted in governing or oversight for getting the returns, the theory being that this will place the request on firmer institutional footing and make the legal case stronger. The Trump administration will challenge the request, leading to a long court battle.

Now the Huffington Post reports that Neal is saying this whole process could end up meaning we don’t see Trump’s returns until after the 2020 election. Neal is claiming he has little control over this — “I can’t substitute my timetable for the federal courts,” he says — but this does not say anything about why he is not acting with more urgency.

Enter CAP’s memo, which argues at length that the law is unambiguously clear. “If Congress asks for any tax returns, the IRS must provide them,” the memo says.

The idea is that, while it may be understandable for Democrats to want to build a strong institutional and legal case, this cannot become an excuse for further delay. Notably, the memo points out that while there is no precedent for seeking a president’s tax returns under this particular provision of the law, that’s because for decades, presidents and presidential candidates voluntarily released them.

That is, until Trump blithely shredded this most basic norm of transparency — meaning that his own unprecedented contempt for this norm is what necessitates the House taking this aggressive step in response.

Along those lines, the memo further argues that doing this would represent a thoroughly legitimate and reasonable exercise of Congress’ oversight function. Among the reasons:

To determine whether Trump’s foreign financial dealings create conflicts of interest, or worse, whether he’s compromised by them in some way. We still do not know whether special counsel Robert S. Mueller III defined his investigation to avoid looking at Trump’s finances. Whether he did or not, the memo argues, Congress has its own obligation to scrutinize these questions.

To determine whether Trump is violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause by receiving payments from foreign governments without Congress’ consent. The memo argues that the fact that the clause allows for Congress to consent to certain emoluments — or not to — itself requires getting the returns, so it can exercise its responsibility to determine whether any particular emoluments either are, or are not, deserving of congressional consent.

To determine whether — or to what extent — Trump and his family have profited off the huge tax cut he signed, which could be substantial. The memo argues that this information could help Congress determine whether to go along with whatever future tax policies Trump proposes, such as making certain provisions in the new tax law permanent.

Here’s the thing. The urgency of all these matters should not in any way be seen as diminished by the conclusion of the Mueller investigation. That’s because, even if no criminal charges were brought for conspiracy with Russia, the Mueller probe and its spinoffs have nonetheless added substantially to the broader case against Trump’s corruption.

This is a case that will continue to build, as the multiple other investigations resulting from Mueller’s work, as well as those launched by House Democrats, proceed. As Timothy L. O’Brien, who understands the depths of Trump financial murk like no one else does, puts it, “reality is likely to keep intruding on everybody who has been ushering Trump-Russia coverage into the grave.”

After all, because of those investigations, we have learned that Trump carried on negotiations with Russia over a Moscow project for many months while GOP voters were picking their nominee; that he has been directly implicated in a criminal campaign finance scheme; and that Trump concealed both these things from America. Getting Trump’s tax returns could help shed light on whether there are other such foreign dealings, and on his tax treatment of the hush money payments, among other things.

We have also learned from Trump’s own former lawyerthat he may have gamed assets for insurance and tax fraud purposes, and that Trump’s tax returns could contain clues to those things — not to mention clues to the extensive history of tax fraud used to inflate his inherited fortune, something we learned about from that big New York Times expose.

Rather than getting drawn into a sad-sack debate over whether Democrats should “move on” from the Mueller investigation, it’s more natural to just keep the focus on Trump’s corruption, as a matter of basic oversight. The political ground for maintaining that focus is actually morefertile right now, due to everything we’ve learned — and continue to learn — as a result of the Mueller investigation. And getting Trump’s tax returns is central to that basic mission.

.

Trump wrote “Bring Back The Death Penalty!” And he has.

by digby

They know they may never be able to legitimately win elections again. That’s why they’ve packed the courts. This latest decision, written by Neil Gorsuch, shows what a bloodthirsty, throwback lot we have for a Supreme Court majority. Ian Millhiser at Think Progress writes:

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bucklew v. Precythe, which it handed down Monday on a party-line vote, is at once the most significant Eighth Amendment decision of the last several decades and the cruelest in at least as much time.

Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion tosses out a basic assumption that animated the Court’s understanding of what constitutes a “cruel and unusual” punishment for more than half a century. In the process, he writes that the state of Missouri may effectively torture a man to death — so long as it does not gratuitously inflict pain for the sheer purpose of inflicting pain.

And, on top of all of that, Gorsuch would conscript death penalty defense attorneys — men and women who often gave up lucrative legal careers to protect the lives of their clients — into the ghoulish task of laying out the method that will be used to kill those clients.

It’s a breathtaking sign of just how much the Supreme Court’s new majority is willing to change — and how quickly they are willing to impose that change on the rest of us.

Looming beneath the surface, moreover, is an even more ominous sign for anyone who hopes that this Supreme Court will not replace decades of established law with the Federalist Society’s wildest fantasies. In several recent oral arguments, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh appeared unexpectedly sympathetic to liberal litigants.

Bucklew was one of these cases, where Kavanaugh browbeated a lawyer defending Missouri’s plans to potentially inflict tremendous pain during an upcoming execution. “Are you saying even if the method creates gruesome and brutal pain you can still do it because there’s no alternative?” the newest member of the court asked at one point.

And yet, Kavanaugh did not simply join Gorsuch’s opinion, he wrote a separate opinion suggesting that maybe death row inmates could be executed by firing squad.

Monday’s decision in Bucklew, in other words, is not just a sweeping rewrite of one of the Bill of Rights’ core provisions. It may prove to be a very real window into the mind of Kavanaugh — and it suggests that, whatever noises Kavanaugh makes during a hearing, he will ultimately be a reliable vote for whatever outcome the Court’s conservative bloc prefers.

Legalized torture

The Bucklew case involves Russell Bucklew, a man who committed a brutal murder in 1996 and was sentenced to die. Bucklew also has cavernous hemangioma, a disease “which causes vascular tumors—clumps of blood vessels—to grow in his head, neck, and throat.”

Missouri plans to execute Mr. Bucklew by giving him a lethal dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital, but Bucklew fears that this drug would lead him to effectively choke on his own tumors, causing him extreme pain and suffering in his final minutes.

Kavanaugh did not simply join Gorsuch’s opinion, he wrote a separate opinion suggesting that maybe death row inmates could be executed by firing squad.

Bucklew lost any realistic chance of prevailing in 2015, when a 5-4 Supreme Court handed down its decision in Glossip v. Gross. That decision held that the death penalty enjoys a kind of super-legal status that protects it even from private citizens who refuse to be complicit in executions.

Glossip arose after manufacturers of drugs commonly used in executions refused to sell those drugs to states that wished to use them to kill someone. As a result, many states turned to painkillers of questionable reliability which, in Justice Elena Kagan’s words, left death row inmates with “the feeling of being burned alive.” The inmates behind Glossip alleged that such a torturous death amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

This argument, however, garnered no sympathy from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Glossip opinion, dismissed the drug companies’ refusal to be complicit in executions as a “guerrilla war against the death penalty.” His opinion held that “because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional, ‘[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it out.’” And thus the mere fact that an inmate would experience excruciating pain during his execution was not enough to prevent that execution.

The burden, instead, fell upon the inmate to propose a different method of execution that would be less painful. Thus, death row inmates and their lawyers were conscripted into the task of determining how they would be killed — and failure to do so could be punished with torture.

Much of Gorsuch’s opinion in Bucklew fleshes out the burden these inmates face, often in gruesome detail. Bucklew’s proposed alternative method of execution — asphyxiation by nitrogen gas — is insufficient, according to the opinion.

[Bucklew] presented no evidence on essential questions like how nitrogen gas should be administered (using a gas chamber, a tent, a hood, a mask, or some other delivery device); in what concentration (pure nitrogen or some mixture of gases); how quickly and for how long it should be introduced; or how the State might ensure the safety of the execution team, including protecting them against the risk of gas leaks.

Death row inmates must not only tell the courts how they wish to be killed, they must offer a proposal that is “sufficiently detailed to permit a finding that the State could carry it out ‘relatively easily and reasonably quickly.’”

Rewriting the Eight Amendment

Beyond the macabre facts of the Bucklew case, Gorsuch’s opinion also undercuts decades of Eighth Amendment law, potentially permitting states to revive punishments that fell out of favor 200 years ago.

Recall that the Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishments. The word “unusual” implies that, as a particular punishment becomes less and less common, it stands on weaker constitutional footing. Thus, as Chief Justice Earl Warren explained in a 1958 opinion, the Eight Amendment prohibits punishments that defy “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

This evolving standards test, however, presents a significant problem for supporters of the death penalty. The number of death sentences in the United States collapsed over the last two decades, strongly suggesting that executions themselves defy evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.

In total, only 25 people were executed in the United States in 2018, and only eight states performed any executions at all. One state, Texas, accounted for more than half (13) of these executions.

Yet, rather than accept the implication of this trend for the constitutionality of the death penalty, Gorsuch responds by changing the rules.
[…]
Bucklew literally tears out the heart of more than a half-century worth of Eighth Amendment precedents, and replaces it with a very different legal rule that, until recently, was rejected by all but the Supreme Court’s most hardline conservatives.

And Bucklew could represent far more than a turning point in the Supreme Court’s understanding of just one amendment. Kavanaugh’s crocodile tears during oral argument suggest that there is little hope that he will prove to be a moderating force on the Supreme Court. And the majority’s willingness to cast aside one of the most firmly established assumptions of constitutional law so casually suggests that they will do it again.

And again.

And again.

They will MAGA whether we like it or not.

And anyone who feels perfectly sure that they won’t back Trump’s play on the ACA or any of the pending executive privilege and criminal corruption cases that may be finding their way to them, is being short-sighted. These are right wingers to the core. They are utilitarian in their thinking. They will do whatever it takes.

This death penalty case is sickening. The idea that they are making the lawyers and their clients choose their method of execution is just another form of torture, which I believe the death penalty is anyway.

.

Barr’s “Florida Recount” strategy backfires


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It’s been a week since Attorney General William Barr released his four page letter with a summation of Special Counsel Mueller’s and his own conclusions. As most of us noted at the time, it raised more questions than it answered, leading to more demands that the full report be released to the public. Nonetheless, the President and his Republican supporters have been robotically declaring non-stop that the president was totally exonerated and many in the media jumped the gun to help them do it. They obviously hope to set a narrative that will put any skeptics in the position of having to overturn it, which is often a very difficult task.

As Salon reported last week, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer noted the parallels in this strategy with that deployed by the Republicans during the Florida election recount in 2000. Zelizer astutely noted that they instantly declared victory before the results were in, exploiting pack journalism’s tendency to overreact to dramatic events.

Republicans count on the national media to quickly repeat their conclusion…That allowed Republicans to insist Bush had won, even after legal challenges to restrictive Florida voting laws and paid GOP protesters pressured officials in Miami-Dade County to halt their recount. When serious concerns emerge about the results, Republicans stand by the initial declaration of victory. Meanwhile, [they] charge that Democrats are being ‘sore losers’ by asking legitimate questions about what is going on. The GOP then tries to force an ending to the controversy by running out the clock.

This past week showed that strategy working pretty well at first and then starting to lose strength as the Democrats fought back and the media began to look more closely at what they actually knew. The pressure grew enough that Barr felt the need to release another letter late in the week attempting to do some damage control.

He has now promised to release the whole thing by April 15th, minus necessary redactions which he defined in an unusually broad way, including concerns about reputational harm to “peripheral characters” leaving everyone wondering how he would define such people. There is a very good chance that this will not be the end of it.

We now have seen half a dozen polls taken released after the Barr letter was released.  And contrary to Republicans’ hopes, it didn’t move the dial in the president’s favor. His approval rating according to the poll of polls at 538   sits at 42.1, right about where he’s been since he took office. If there’s a bump it’s hardly discernible.

The lack of moment in Trump’s approval rating lines up with the fact that the public didn’t think the Barr Memo was a game changer. I’ve said this before, but it seems like the public was smarter than the media about putting the memo into context. pic.twitter.com/wJwuWz5Tg8

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 31, 2019

The emerging conventional wisdom is that the public has simply retreated to it’s usual partisan corners with one side convinced that Trump is innocent of all wrongdoing and the other side convinced that he’s a Russian agent, regardless of the facts. But that’s not really accurate.

It’s certainly true that most of the polling shows that Republicans are still convinced of Trump’s innocence. They always were. What’s different for them is that they now see Mueller in a positive light whereas before they believed he was conducting a witch hunt. In that, they are following their president. He hasn’t said he was wrong about Mueller, of course. He doesn’t admit that he was ever wrong about anything. Instead he’s claiming that the Democrats now hate Bob Mueller.  At his rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan last week he declared, “Robert Mueller was a god to the Democrats until he said there was no collusion. This fraud is exposed.” His crowd was naturally confused and booed before they realized what he was saying. Trump seems confused about that as well.

Democrats have not changed their minds on Mueller.  Perhaps they will eventually, but so far they seem to be willing to accept Mueller’s findings on Trump’s alleged criminal conduct.  They aren’t too happy with William Barr, however. According to the HuffPost/YouGov poll GOP voters love him, giving him a 53 point approval rating, while the Democrats disapprove by a 50 point margin.

Among all the polling, it’s clear that it’s Republicans who have either changed their views to fit the new information, as with their opinion of Mueller, or have stuck with their opinion regardless of the new information, sketchy as it is. They believe that Trump has been totally exonerated.

Democrats, on the other hand, are unconvinced by the evidence Barr produced for good reason. It did not exonerate the president and was delivered in such a way as to raise questions about whether or not Trump was really cleared. No one can be expected to take that at face value.  After all, they know what they’ve seen with their own eyes — a president acting in such a dishonest and unethical manner that it’s hard to make any sense of it. The Russian election interference is just one example of Trump’s bizarre behavior and there has been no oversight of the administration for two years, so maintaining skepticism is the only sane response, particularly in light of this sort of comment from the White House:

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) March 31, 2019

There is bipartisan agreement about one thing. According to the Washington Post-Schar School Poll 83% want the full report released.  NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll: 75% want it released,  CBS News Poll: 77%, Quinnipiac U. Poll:  84%. I would guess that this was not what Barr and the White House expected. Certainly they would have at least expected Trump’s loyal 42% to say they were willing to take Barr’s word for it.

But they didn’t and the only way to dissuade them from wanting it would be to discredit Mueller’s findings. Trump and company can’t do that since they are relying on his report to clear him. It’s a bind they didn’t anticipate when they launched the “Florida Recount” strategy. Now they’re stuck waiting once again for the report, and they still don’t know whether they’ve put this scandal behind them.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but even if this one is over, Trump has scandals lined up all the way to November of 2020. This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

.

Risky in pink
by Tom Sullivan

2020 Senate Election Interactive Map from 270 to Win.

It’s no April Fools’ Day joke. Even if Democrats retake the White House in 2020, the Super Bowl hype over the presidential contest is so much Maroon 5 halftime show without control of the Senate. Ask Barack Obama and Merrick Garland. Should House Democrats pass articles of impeachment, there is no guarantee Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell would even allow a Senate trial.

So long as he rules there, McConnell has as much control of the country’s fate as Donald Trump.

Politico spells it out:

McConnell (R-Ky.), faced with his own reelection and defending a tough GOP map in 2020, has no incentive to work with House Democrats on their domestic agenda.

A Senate blockade will deny Democrats tangible wins to tout on the campaign trail, while keeping vulnerable Senate GOP incumbents from having to take difficult votes. Republicans are also intent on shielding President Donald Trump from potentially awkward veto fights on legislation that polls well.

As Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) put it: “We are the firewall.”

If Democrats retake the White House in 2020 with McConnell still in place, that becomes a stone wall.

Democrats need to gain at least three Senate seats and the presidency to take control of the Senate. The upside for Democrats is Republicans need to defend 22 of the 34 Senate seats in play in 2020. But only two Republican incumbents, Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner, are not running in solidly red states. Gardner, Arizona’s Martha McSally, and Alabama’s first-term Democrat, Doug Jones, are ranked toss-ups. Georgia’s David Perdue and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis are also in Larry Sabato’s lean-R column with Joni Ernst of Iowa.

“If all they do under McConnell’s leadership is block everything, in a presidential turnout year, I think they really risk losing some of their seats like Maine, like Colorado, like Arizona,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “If they want to keep control of the U.S. Senate, they better deliver something.”

So far, all Trump’s base really cares about is owning the libs. Should he succeed in killing their health care coverage, all some bets are off.