“Collins has been named the most moderate U.S. senator and has irked conservatives before. If she stays in the Senate through her term’s end in early 2021, this may be little more than a flashpoint, since she regularly registers approval ratings above 65 percent here. But if she runs for governor in 2018, several active Republicans told the Bangor Daily News that they would expect a tough primary fight.”
Daily Archives
August 7, 2017
31 posts · Monday
Rex Tillerson Is a Micromanager
New York Times: “Even skeptics of Mr. Tillerson’s foreign policy credentials thought the State Department, an agency of 75,000 employees, could use some of the management skills he had picked up as the head of a major corporation… Instead, he has failed to nominate anyone to most of the department’s 38 highest-ranking jobs, leaving many critical departments without direction.”
“Almost from the time of his arrival, Mr. Tillerson has said the department needed to be reorganized, and he has embarked on a wholesale rethinking of its structure. … [But] his reorganization effort has contributed to the paralysis. He has not wanted to appoint under secretaries and assistant secretaries until he understands the new structure.”
Trump Has So Far Failed to Unite Republicans
First Read: “Every new president has the golden opportunity to unite his political party — especially when that party has been out of the White House for eight years. But six and a half months into Donald Trump’s time in office, the Republican Party seems as divided as it was a year ago right before Trump’s nomination.”
“Of course, the GOP divisions in 2016 didn’t stop Trump from winning the presidency; in the end, the Republican Party and its voters joined hands to defeat Hillary Clinton. But less than seven months into his presidency, Trump’s biggest missed opportunity during this honeymoon phase very well might be his inability to unite his own party, especially inside Congress.”
“Trump took to Twitter this morning to argue that his base is bigger and stronger than ever… But if Republicans are truly united, then why have they struck out (so far) on health care? Why are they at odds over what to do about the debt ceiling? And why are prominent GOP senators already publishing books criticizing their own president? After all, there’s a difference between Trump’s base and the Republican Party.”
Trump Slams Blumenthal Over Vietnam Service
President Trump was apparently watching Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on CNN this morning and lashed out on Twitter:
Interesting to watch Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut talking about hoax Russian collusion when he was a phony Vietnam con artist! … Never in U.S.history has anyone lied or defrauded voters like Senator Richard Blumenthal. He told stories about his Vietnam battles and…. conquests, how brave he was, and it was all a lie. He cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness like a child. Now he judges collusion?
Democrats Must Overcome a Massive GOP Bias
David Wasserman: “Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.”
“This is partly attributable to the nature of House districts: GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation. Part of it is bad timing. Democrats have been cursed by a terrible Senate map in 2018… But there’s a larger, long-term trend at work too — one that should alarm Democrats preoccupied with the future of Congress and the Supreme Court.”
“In the last few decades, Democrats have expanded their advantages in California and New York — states with huge urban centers that combined to give Clinton a 6 million vote edge, more than twice her national margin. But those two states elect only 4 percent of the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans have made huge advances in small rural states — think Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia — that wield disproportionate power in the upper chamber compared to their populations.”
Quote of the Day
“There has always been a section of the left, which I call the whiny party — the party that doesn’t really wanna win, they just wanna be pure, and if they go down swinging purely, then that’s fine.”
— Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean, quoted by The Hill.
U.S. Will Respond to Russia’s Expulsion of Diplomats
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the Trump administration “has yet to decide how to respond to Russia’s move to expel hundreds of American diplomats, but plans to deliver a response to Moscow by Sept. 1,” the AP reports.
“A day after sitting down in the Philippines with Russia’s top diplomat, Tillerson said he’d asked ‘clarifying questions’ about the Kremlin’s retaliation announced last month following new sanctions passed by Congress and signed by President Trump. The Trump administration has struggled to determine how the move will affect the U.S. diplomatic presence in Russia, as well as the broader implications for the troubled relationship between the nuclear-armed powers.”
New Yorker: The U.S. has more to lose than Russia in spy expulsions.
GOP Lawmakers Face the Heat at Home
“Congressional Republicans plan to use the next four weeks away from Washington making a public case for a sweeping rewrite of the tax code, an ambitious legislative undertaking they hope will heal divisions that opened when the party’s signature health-care bill collapsed,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“But at home in their districts, they face pressures that could make it hard to focus on taxes. Many of their constituents and party activists blame Congress, more than President Donald Trump, for the health-care stalemate and are pressing them to find a resolution. And before they can do anything, lawmakers face a load of time-sensitive fiscal business: hashing out a budget, funding the government and raising the federal debt limit. The result is a party sent home for a month-long recess to face mixed messages from voters and an uncertain path forward in the fall.”
Continued Obamacare Focus May Imperil Tax Reform
Politico: “Republicans acknowledge that the aggressive timeline they have set up for overhauling the tax code this fall leaves them little room for error. There could be one problem with that: Obamacare isn’t going away.”
“That’s left key Senate tax writers frustrated that there’s potentially another issue to take precious time away from their tax reform efforts. Senators left Washington on Thursday for a monthlong recess and will return to a September already overloaded with legislative deadlines. With key Trump administration officials and some congressional leaders having said they want to get a tax revamp signed into law this year, tax writers believe they’ll need to make serious progress starting next month.”
Lawmakers Lured by Chance to Be Governor
“Fully half of the 18 members leaving the House next year jumped in order to run for governor in their states, looking to trade in legislative gridlock for executive orders — and the chance to play a dominating role in redrawing their colleagues’ districts in four years,” Politico reports.
“But most of the aspiring governors are vacating the comfy confines of safe congressional districts for what, historically, has been a bad bet. The last time this many sitting representatives ran for governor, in 2006, twice as many lost as won. Lawmakers are motivated partly by the quest for more power – being one in a village of 435, especially in the Democratic minority, only gets you so far. They are also seeking the chance to assist or resist the Trump administration, depending on their party, in implementing new policy throughout the states. For Democrats in particular, the choice between another term in the House minority or the chance to lead their home states can be an easy one.”
Obama Loyalists Operating ‘Shadow’ Science Office
“The network, described to STAT by officials from the previous administration who are involved, is informal yet organized, allowing for a far-reaching if largely inconspicuous effort to continue advocating for the Obama science agenda.”
“Participants have provided counsel to Democratic lawmakers and their staffs on Capitol Hill, and they have held group-wide strategy sessions much in the same fashion as they did when they worked out of a fourth-floor wing in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent the White House.”
Exurbs Begin to Turn Away from Republicans
Wall Street Journal: “Data from Gallup show 45.5% of adults in exurban communities self-identified as Republican in the second quarter of 2017, down from 49.6% in the first quarter of 2017 and 51.6% in the fourth quarter of 2016. It was also the lowest quarterly number for self-identified Republicans in the exurbs since 2013, the earliest numbers available.”
“The data also showed an increase in self-identified Democrats in exurban counties to 40.5% from 37.3% in the first quarter of 2017 and 36.8% in the fourth quarter of 2016. The 40.5% was the highest number recorded from Democrats since 2013.”
The Art of the Lie
New York Times: “Fabrications have long been a part of American politics. Politicians lie to puff themselves up, to burnish their résumés and to cover up misdeeds, including sexual affairs. (See: Bill Clinton.) Sometimes they cite false information for what they believe are justifiable policy reasons. (See: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.)”
“But President Trump, historians and consultants in both political parties agree, appears to have taken what the writer Hannah Arendt once called ‘the conflict between truth and politics’ to an entirely new level.”
“From his days peddling the false notion that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to his inflated claims about how many people attended his inaugural, to his description just last week of receiving two phone calls — one from the president of Mexico and another from the head of the Boy Scouts — that never happened, Mr. Trump is trafficking in hyperbole, distortion and fabrication on practically a daily basis.”
