Daily Archives
39 posts · Wednesday
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) introduced the “Stable Genius Act” in the House, The Hill reports.
The act would require all presidential candidates to file a Federal Election Commission report “certifying that he or she has undergone medical examination by the medical office under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Navy.”
A new ABC15/OHPI poll in Arizona shows a right race in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
Martha McSally leads with 31%, followed by Joe Arpaio at 29% and Kelli Ward at 25%.
Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance (R) “is now seriously considering a U.S. Senate campaign in Ohio and discussing the prospect with Republicans in Washington, following overtures from party donors and leaders who believe he would be their best candidate,” BuzzFeed News reports.
“President Trump’s companies sold more than $35 million in real estate in 2017, mostly to secretive shell companies that obscure buyers’ identities, continuing a dramatic shift in his customers’ behavior that began during the election,” a USA Today review found.
“The trend toward Trump’s real estate buyers buyers obscuring their identities began around the time he won the Republican nomination, midway through 2016, according to USA Today‘s analysis of every domestic real estate sale by one of his companies. In the two years before the nomination, 4% of Trump buyers utilized the tactic. In the year after, the rate skyrocketed to about 70%. USA Today‘s tracking of sales shows the trend held firm through Trump’s first year in office.”
“The IRS is facing its first big challenge implementing the new tax law: deciding how much in taxes to withhold from millions of Americans’ paychecks,” Politico reports.
“The agency is under pressure to take as little as possible so people will see big increases in their take-home pay ahead of this year’s midterm elections… How the IRS — which is supposed to be apolitical — decides to implement withholding could go a long way toward shaping public opinion on the controversial law.”
Face the Nation host John Dickerson’s move to CBS This Morning effectively setts off “a horse race for one of television’s most influential political roles,” the New York Times reports.
“Likely contenders include Major Garrett, CBS’s chief White House correspondent, and two of the network’s Washington reporters, Margaret Brennan and Nancy Cordes.”
Kansas City lawyer Craig O’Dear “could shake up one of the most competitive Senate races in the country as he seriously considers running as a centrist independent against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and her eventual Republican challenger,” the Kansas City Star reports.
“O’Dear could play a significant role in the Missouri election because early polls show McCaskill and Josh Hawley (R) locked in a tight race.”
Jonathan Chait: “Faced with the accusation that he is a half-wit, the president and his defenders have formed two rebuttals. The first is that the mere fact Trump won the presidency and has approved conservative policies proves his wisdom… The second defense holds that the questioning of Trump’s mental capacity is no more than liberal snobbery.”
“Both defenses have something in common. Rather than segregate questions about Trump’s brain away from the broader partisan debate, they dissolve the former into the latter. They believe that Trump’s being called dumb by the intellectual elite is intimately connected to his political identity. This belief is largely correct. As it has moved farther and farther right, the Republican Party has grown increasingly anti-intellectual. Trump’s base adores him, not despite his obvious mental limitations, but because of them.”
“Two caveats are in order. First, many intelligent people have conservative values, and rationally support the Republican Party. Second, while Trump’s lack of mental aptitude may be similar to that of previous Republican leaders in kind, it is very different in degree. That said, Trump’s flamboyant ignorance and disdain for intellectual standards are very much in keeping with modern conservative politics.”
“The House Rules Committee said Tuesday it would hold two hearings next week on whether to restore earmarks in what GOP aides characterized as a long-delayed fulfillment of Ryan’s promises,” the Washington Post reports.
“But years after their abolishment, the subject of earmarks generates a fierce split that does not fall along party lines. Appropriators from both parties bristle, arguing that Congress has essentially ceded authority to the executive branch and lost the grease that kept their bills moving across the Hill.”
“The Trump administration told Florida’s governor it won’t consider new oil and gas drilling off the state’s coast, backtracking on plans to expand offshore drilling all around the U.S. and bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans in the state,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
First Read: “Exempting Florida — but not other states — appears to be the kind of transactional favoritism that many good-government observers worried about when Trump became president. Bottom line: The Trump administration has invited lawsuits if it doesn’t extend the same kind of exemption to other states that want it.”
Nate Silver: “It’s not that I’m pessimistic about the Democrats’ overall position next year. To the contrary, I think most political observers had, until recently, been slow to recognize just how bad things had gotten for Republicans. But the Senate map is really tough for Democrats, with 26 Democratic seats in play next year (including a newly opened seat in Minnesota after Al Franken announced his intention to retire) as compared to just eight Republican ones. Moreover, five of the Democratic-held seats — the ones in West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Indiana — are in states that President Trump won by 18 percentage points or more.”
“Just how bad is this map for Democrats? It’s bad enough that it may be the worst Senate map that any party has faced ever, or at least since direct election of senators began in 1913. It’s bad enough that Democrats could conceivably gain (for example) 35 or 40 seats in the House … and yet not pick up the two seats they need in the Senate.”
Washington Post: “With just 10 days before he finishes his first year as president, Trump has made 2,001 false or misleading claims in 355 days, according to our database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of more than 5.6 claims a day.”
“Among the most memorable quotes from a new tell-all book about the Trump White House is Steve Bannon’s prediction that President Trump’s oldest son would be hauled before Congress and grilled on live television about his contacts with Russians,” Politico reports.
“But frustrated Democrats now say they’ve all but given up on their past vows to question the younger Trump before a national audience. The same goes for several other key Trump insiders whom, Democrats complain, Republicans have hidden from the klieg lights in order to protect the president.”
Washington Post: “A year after losing the presidency, Democrats are facing an uncomfortable question: Are they willing to force a government shutdown to extract political victories — a hardball tactic for which they have long blasted Republicans?”
“The dilemma comes as a Jan. 19 funding deadline approaches and bipartisan negotiations over immigration and other issues have so far failed to produce an agreement. The thorniest issue is the fate of ‘dreamers’ — roughly 2 million young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, some of whom had gained legal status under a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that President Trump canceled.”
New York Times: “Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election fits into a nearly two-decade pattern of meddling with governments around the world, and the United States’ response to its brazen attack is being hindered by President Trump, a new report prepared by Senate Democrats concludes.”
“The report, which is to be released on Wednesday, is one of the most extensive to date on foreign interference by Russia and President Vladimir Putin. It tracks Russian efforts in 19 countries, chronicling misinformation campaigns, the funding of far-right political causes and the manipulation of energy supplies long before 2016 in an attempt to glean lessons for American officials considering how to counteract similar efforts here.”
“Mitt Romney’s comeback on the national stage, through the byway of his probable bid for the Senate in Utah, has prompted a sharp debate among Republicans over whether traditional political figures are still welcome as leaders of a party dominated by President Trump,” the Washington Post reports.
“Those arguments have intensified amid the rush of speculation in recent weeks over Romney’s next steps, with the looming presence of the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee on the ballot in this year’s midterm elections seen as a new front in the civil war that has gripped the party.”
“Many establishment voices, eager for a resurgence in the Trump era, have seized on the prospect of Senator Romney as a clean-cut Republican counterweight to the unorthodox and chaotic Trump presidency. Trump-aligned conservatives, meanwhile, have recoiled and said the party’s base voters have moved on and would shun the former Massachusetts governor as an elite relic of the sort of conventional politics they rejected by embracing the reality television star-turned-president.”
A new WBUR poll finds that 74% of Massachusetts voters approve of the job Gov. Charlie Baker (R) is doing.
It’s a much different story for President Trump, who remains strikingly unpopular in the state: Just 29% of voters approve of the job he’s doing.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.