If Trump wins re-election and Republicans are able to hold the Senate and take back the House, Trump will essentially have free rein to do whatever he wants in his second term.
Winning back the House majority is also the best insurance policy against additional attempts to impeach him.
Can you believe this is what we talk about now? He wants to take back the Houe so he won’t be impeached again? Good lord.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Axios that Trump is “going to travel for us. If you look at where we’re playing, he’ll be going. He’s already made that commitment to me.”
Trump has indicated to aides that he is committed to winning back the House this year, a senior administration official tells Axios — largely because McCarthy has told him it’s possible.
A second administration official said Trump wants revenge on Democrats for putting him through “months of hell” with impeachment and a flurry of investigations.
Imagine that.
Republicans privately admit that the chances of winning back the House are pretty slim so they’re obviously just trying to keep Dear Leader happy by telling him that he can get it back. Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t like to play in small venues so he won’t be going to individual districts but Kevin McCarthy says he’s sure Trump will attend some dinners so that will be helpful.
It occurs to me that the Trump party is entirely dependent on Trump to do everything now. The rest of the party is merely there to serve him and protect him. Luckily for them Trump is incredibly generous and always puts the greater good ahead of his own needs so they can count on him to go the extra mile to help their campaigns.
House Democrats, recovering from their failed push to remove President Trump from office, are making a sharp pivot to talking about health care and economic issues, turning away from their investigations of the president as they focus on preserving their majority.
They’ve decided not to call John Bolton but I guess they’re hoping Bill Barr will actually show up at the end of next month. But if he doesn’t, well …
Senators are reviving the fight over the whistleblower complaint at the center of the months-long impeachment effort against President Trump.
With Trump’s trial in the rearview mirror, the Senate Intelligence Committee is quietly shifting its attention back to its investigation into the complaint process after hitting pause on the inquiry as the impeachment effort consumed Washington.
The probe will force senators to decide if, and how, they speak with the whistleblower — a controversial call that could test the bipartisan reputation the Intelligence panel has maintained even amid deeply partisan fights in Congress.
Asked by The Hill if he was willing to formally compel and subpoena the whistleblower to testify, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) didn’t rule out the possibility.
“I think you can rest assured that I’m prepared to do whatever we have to to interview the whistleblower,” Burr said.
Meanwhile, rest assured that they are following up on the all-important Hunter Biden scandal:
The New York Times reported that Senate Republicans on the Finance Committee and Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had requested documents related to Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine last year, a request that the Treasury Department has complied with.
The request suggests Republican senators are looking into Hunter’s finances using standard protocols for Senate investigations. But some Democrats are accusing the administration of complying with this investigation in a way that it refused to in the impeachment inquiry.
The Senate Finance Committee chair, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, pushed back on this allegation, according to the New York Times:
“It’s unfortunate that Democrats whom we’ve kept in the loop on our investigations would recklessly seek to interfere with legitimate government oversight,” said his spokesperson; Grassley also reportedly confirmed the investigation is ongoing.
The former Judiciary Committee chairman Grassley is sadly suffering from an advanced case of Fox News brainrot:
Prosecuted by DOJ 4 lying 2 investigators: Flynn Stone Papadopoulos Accused of lying/leaking but never prosecuted: Comey McCabe Agent who changed FISA Many others at DOJ/FBI When did laws stop applying 2law enforcement?? DOJ/FBI shld b held 2same standard as rest of us
So we needn’t fear that the scandals will fade as we move into the exciting electoral terrain of government health care financing mechanisms. The Republicans are now on the case. We might even get some back yard watermelon shooting if we’re lucky.
This segment on Crowdstrike and “the server” was excellent:
Even after the acquittal of the president, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is pursuing allegations of corruption in Ukraine. This past week, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department would “carefully scrutinize” what Giuliani finds. Last July, President Trump made the phone call to Ukraine that led to impeachment. He asked the president of Ukraine to investigate a mysterious Democratic National Committee computer server that Mr. Trump said was hidden in Ukraine. We have found that odd request is a story that has grown over the years and was influenced by Moscow. You may have wondered how the president was impeached over Ukraine of all places. The answer is in the story of the mystery server, a reminder that the U.S. and Russia have been on opposite sides of a war in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in 2014.
You may have wondered why the President was impeached over Ukraine, of all places. The answer lies, in part, in his belief in a mysterious server. Tonight on 60 Minutes pic.twitter.com/GoClFjgKtU
In July, the story Mr. Trump first adopted as a server the FBI was blocked from seeing, then became a server investigated by a Ukrainian company, finally morphed into a server he says was in Ukraine. The first favor Mr. Trump asked of the Ukrainian president was to look into it. pic.twitter.com/ZNGTwzxmGF
We’ve been talking about the danger Trump presents to democracy since the day after the election in 2016. But this past week has really brought that concern into high relief.
CNN’s Brian Stelter’s newsletter on Sunday featured the following:
Quoting the watchdog group Freedom House: “Trump has assailed essential institutions and traditions including the separation of powers, a free press, an independent judiciary, the impartial delivery of justice, safeguards against corruption, and most disturbingly, the legitimacy of elections.” With that in mind, consider the headlines of the past week:
— Separation of powers: Trump has been challenging the legislative branch’s power of the purse by diverting Pentagon $$$ to build more border wall.
— Free press: His newest budget proposal would cut funding for PBS, NPR, and the military’s iconic Stars and Stripes newspaper.
— Independent judiciary: Via Twitter he attacked a federal judge, the same woman who will be sentencing his friend Roger Stone.
— Safeguards against corruption: He has been smearing the Ukraine whistleblower and those who testified about the scheme to the House.
— Harvard professor Stephen M. Walt has been keeping a “dictator” checklist since 2016. He revisited the list for Foreign Policy mag a few days ago. He wrote that “after impeachment, the president has been passing most of the checkpoints on the way to authoritarianism.”
— The Guardian has an excerpt from the 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
I think it’s important to recognize just how feverishly the Trump cult is working to erase the Russia investigation and create the illusion that it really was a hoax. It would be one thing if he were just using his twitter feed and Fox news to do this. But he isn’t.
Seven months after Mueller’s marathon testimony brought finality to the Russia investigation, Trump is actively seeking to rewrite the narrative that had been meticulously documented by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials, both for immediate political gain and for history.
Turbocharged by his acquittal in the Senate’s impeachment trial and confident that he has acquired the fealty of nearly every Republican in Congress, Trump is claiming vindication and exoneration not only over his conduct with Ukraine — for which the House voted to impeach him — but also from the other investigations that have dogged his presidency.
This includes lawsuits filed against Trump by the state of New York over his finances as well as alleged misuse of charity funds by his nonprofit foundation. Trump sought last week to turn the page on these probes, declaring on Twitter ahead of a White House meeting with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) that “New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment.”
Still, Russia is foremost on Trump’s mind. Since even before he was sworn in as president, Trump has viewed the FBI’s Russia investigation as a dark cloud over his administration that threatened to delegitimize his claim on the office. And more than three years in, Trump remains haunted by all things Russia, according to advisers and allies, and continues to nurse a profound and unabated sense of persecution.
As his reelection campaign intensifies, Trump is using the powers of his office to manipulate the facts and settle the score. Advisers say the president is determined to protect his associates ensnared in the expansive Russia investigation, punish the prosecutors and investigators he believes betrayed him, and convince the public that the probe was exactly as he sees it: an illegal witch hunt.
“The whole Mueller investigation was a shakedown and a disgrace. It probably should be expunged,” Trump said in an interview last week with radio commentator Geraldo Rivera, a longtime friend.
Referring to Mueller, Trump added: “I don’t call him special counsel because special counsel is not an accurate term. It’s a special prosecutor, because what he and his 13 angry Democrats — all horrible, just horrible people — what they did to destroy the lives of people that you know, but to destroy the lives of many, Geraldo, should never be forgiven, should never be forgotten, and something has to be done about it.”
He cannot succeed in this, of course. The people who try to do this never do. But it’s stunning that we are dealing with a president who is doing it openly in 2020 and there’s a chance he’s going to be re-elected in a few months.
Last week alone, Trump called the Russia investigation “tainted,” “dirty,” “rotten,” “illegal,” “phony,” a “disgrace,” a “shakedown,” a “scam,” “a fixed hoax” and “the biggest political crime in American History, by far.”
He argued that the probe into Russian election interference was based on false pretenses, despite a recent report from the Justice Department’s inspector general stating the opposite even as it criticized the FBI’s surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide. And he claimed, again without evidence, that Mueller, a former FBI director regarded for his precision with facts, lied to Congress — which happens to be one of the charges Stone was convicted of by a jury last November.
Absent from the president’s many public comments about the Russia investigation, however, was a warning to Russia not to interfere in the next election, or even an acknowledgment that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to do so.
Of course he hasn’t. He needs all the help he can get and he knows it.
The vicissitudes of the tourism industry drive the economy here. Post-Valentine’s tourism, someone told me, accounted for the traffic jam downtown on Saturday. Meanwhile, housing costs are up. Hotel and apartment block construction is up. But the joke circulating when I arrived 30 years ago still works: There are lots of good jobs around here. I know people who have two or three. Locals are being priced out. People in their 30s still have roommates.
But that’s not just a local problem, writes Eric Levitz. It is why an Economist/YouGov poll found that “60 percent of Democrats younger than 30 support either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.” Younger voters in the U.S. are not alone in wanting left-wing reform. Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain’s Labour party won support from 55 percent of voters under 30 in 2019. Younger voters drove the surprise victory in Irish parliamentary elections this month by leftwing Sinn Féin, becoming “the first party in almost a century other than Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael to win the popular vote in an Irish General Election.”
Even at (supposedly) full employment, recent college U.S. graduates find themselves working jobs below their training or unemployed while saddled with loan debt.
To see why, consider three remarkable data points from this column by Bloomberg’s Alexandra Tanzi and Katia Dmitrieva: (1) The unemployment rate among recent college graduates in the U.S. is now higher than our country’s overall unemployment rate for the first time in over two decades, (2) More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are working jobs that do not traditionally require a bachelor’s degree (while one in eight are stuck in posts that pay $25,000 or less), and (3) the median income among the bottom half of college graduates is roughly 10 percent lower than it was three decades ago.
Bloomberg illustrates the problem with a chart entitled “Losing Out.” This economy has a glut of aspiring white-collar workers for which there is insufficient demand, Levitz continues:
Put differently: Even as the price of a college diploma has risen nigh-exponentially (thereby forcing the rising generation of college graduates to saddle themselves with onerous debts), the value of such diplomas on the U.S. job market has rapidly depreciated. And there is little reason to believe that this state of affairs will change, no matter how long the present boom is sustained. According to the Labor Department’s estimates, the five fastest-growing occupations in the United States over the next ten years will be solar-panel installers, wind-turbine technicians, home health aides, personal care aides, and occupational therapy assistants. Not a single one of those jobs requires a four-year college diploma. Only occupational therapy assistants need an associate’s degree.
The promise since WWII that a college degree was a ticket to a comfortable middle-class or better life is in tatters. As the stock market boomed in the Clinton years, politicians promoted the “knowledge economy,” as Levitz calls it (the “information economy” promoted under Ronald Reagan). Now, that too has fizzled.
Rising inequality? Pish posh. Not a failure of metastasized capitalism, no. Simply the product of a “skills gap,” not the “middle-class squeeze” Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren warned of in 2004 and lectured on in 2008. Now that squeeze is tighter than ever, the inequality more stark, the environment more unstable, and the promises more obviously hollow.
Arrayed against those lefty kids and flagging democracy is a growing, worldwide movement towards authoritarianism. Time is running out to stop it:
“The system is enabling Trump,” Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who wrote “How Fascism Works,” told Insider.
“There need to be mass protests,” he said. “The Republican Party is betraying democracy, and these are historical times. Someone has got to push back.”
Celebrated by supporters for his consistency, to those who lived through the 1960s Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” rhetoric feels as dated as tie-dye, nehru jackets, and day-glo daisies. But old things have a way of coming back into fashion. Sanders never changed as times did. Half a century later, a new generation seems to wants his revolution. Perhaps Sanders should put supporters in the streets as in the 1960s, not just knocking doors.
… as societies have grown more liberal on social issues during the last half-century—more open to diversity and LGBTQ rights, more egalitarian about gender roles and racial equality, more expansive in democratic representation, more secular, more cosmopolitan, more global—that transformation has triggered a deep and intense reaction among traditionalists who feel threatened, marginalized, and left behind. Those traditionalists, whom she identifies as older, whiter, more rural, and less well educated, have tended to turn toward forceful leaders promising to hold back the rising tide.
Stopping that movement towards retrenchment will take out-organizing and out-voting neighbors energized in support of an authoritarian strongman. It will take more than songs and chants and visualization. This is not political theory. For the 60s generation, Vietnam was life and death. Trumpism may be as well.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Last night on Fox Business, Corey Lewandowski looked so drunk that even the host asked him, "did you have a little Merlot with dinner?" pic.twitter.com/cvsBDztNUn
Media critic Eric Boehlert has a new newsletter that everyone should sign up for right away. It’s called Pressrun and it’s very good.
This piece takes on the press for its reaction to the DOJ scandal, which really should be a turning point in the coverage of the Trump administration. We’re in J. Edgar Hoover territory.
It’s worth reading the whole thing. I’ll just excerpt this:
The sub-headline for a New York Times article on the Vindman controversy announced that Trump’s move represented, “one sign of how determined the president is to even the scales after his impeachment.” Even the scales, what?? That suggests the “scales” were ever tipped against him. The Nation’s Joan Walsh suggested a more accurate headline for the Times story: “Trump’s reign of lawlessness enters new stage.”
But that exactly the type of bold, factual language the Beltway press doesn’t use in its news coverage of Trump, and specifically the context about authoritarian lawlessness. Indeed, most American journalists have no experience covering creeping authoritarianism.
We have a POTUS dictating sentencing recommendations in regards to a jury trial that involved his political ally convicted on charges of obstructing justice, making false statements and witness tampering in a case connected to the president’s election, and we’re going with “unusual” and “suspicious? (Dan Froomkin rounded up some examples of more admirable, forceful coverage this week, here.)
Keep in mind that this is the same press corps that treated as a Very Big Deal when Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch exchanged greetings on an airport tarmac during the 2016 campaign. The media claimed it all looked bad considering the DOJ was investigated Hillary Clinton’s emails at the time. Today, Trump basically ordered the DOJ to help protect his felonious associate and the news media reaches for “unusual.”
The media is covering this. But there is a sense that it’s just “business as usual for the Trump administration” which isn’t the case. Barr’s behavior is actually a dramatic escalation which is so egregious that it’s actually making the GOP legal community queasy. And that’s not easy.
Update:
By the way, in case you thought the House Democrats were going to help the press frame this by holding hearings, I wouldn’t count on it. They are making it clear that they have done their duty and now they’re going to finally be able to do what they have always wanted to do which is campaign against him as a regular, middle of the road Republican on the economy and health care.
Senior White House Adviser Ivanka Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump, arrived in the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. president's daughter is in the UAE ahead of the Global Women's Forum, where she will give a keynote address.
I don’t know if she was doing a photoshoot or what but that has to be the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. If it was a meeting of some sort, that outfit is downright bizarre. Gold lamé? Really? She looks like she’s in a summer stock revival of “Kismet.”
I have become more and more convinced that these people really are vampires. There really isn’t any better explanation for their particular brand of weirdness:
Shhhh, Joanie. You aren’t supposed to say this stuff out loud until Trump’s second term:
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa told donors at a fundraiser in Washington, D.C. last March that federal spending on non-discretionary programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is “out of control” and will require “changes” in the future.
That’s according to a 55-second audio clip published Wednesday by Iowa Starting Line. In the recording, Ernst is asked by an attendee whether she is on board with Sen. David Perdue’s (R-Ga.) call for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
“I think we all are because we understand that our non-discretionary spending is growing like this,” replied Ernst, who is up for reelection in 2020. “Everyone focuses on discretionary spending because that is what we can control in Congress. The rest is on autopilot and is out of control. We have to figure out ways to honor the commitments that have been made, but make changes for the future. How we do that, I don’t know.”
Progressive advocacy group Social Security Works tweeted that “changes” is “code for massive cuts.”
Kimberly Graham, one of five Democrats vying to unseat Ernst in November, tweeted Thursday that “we barely invest in the health and well-being of our people as it is, and Joni Ernst thinks even that is too much.”
“Joni doesn’t work for Iowans,” added Graham. “Joni works for the wealthy donors that fill her campaign coffers.”
The audio clip comes months after the Democratic super PAC American Bridge posted a video of Ernst telling a town hall audience in August that members of Congress should negotiate changes to Social Security “behind closed doors” to avoid scrutiny from advocacy groups and the press.
“The minute you say we need to address Social Security, the media is hammering you, the opposing party is hammering you — ‘there goes granny over a cliff,'” said Ernst, who has in the past expressed support for privatizing Social Security.
The deficit zombie is reanimating as we speak. Just wait.
