NBC News: “The election saw a dramatic rise in registration and voting by some 18.7 million Latinos, so that about 1 in 10 voters was Latino.”
“Before 2020, the percent of Latinos eligible to vote who actually voted had never surpassed 50 percent.”
“But it hit 53.7 percent in November to help Democrat Joe Biden unseat then-President Donald Trump, a Republican. That compares to 47.4 percent in 2016, when Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.”
Jeff Flake: “On Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney will most likely lose her leadership post within the House Republican Conference, not because she has been untruthful. Rather, she will lose her position because she is refusing to play her assigned role in propagating the ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Cheney is more dedicated to the long-term health of our constitutional system than she is to assuaging the former president’s shattered ego, and for her integrity she may well pay with her career.”
“No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.”
Liz Mair: “When Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race, he was dismissed early on as a RINO — a Republican in Name Only — by Republicans across the spectrum.”
“But now that Trump is the Republican lodestar, heresy isn’t measured in terms of conservatism, but fealty to him. And the term RINO may as well refer to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) — whose solid conservatism is out of step with today’s GOP.”
“A federal judge dismissed the National Rifle Association’s bankruptcy case on Tuesday, in a blow to its embattled chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, that cast further doubt about his ability to remain at the helm,” the New York Times reports.
“The N.R.A. had filed for bankruptcy in January in an attempt to circumvent regulatory action in New York by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, who is seeking to shut down the group amid a corruption investigation. Ms. James had challenged the validity of the bankruptcy filing.”
Washington Post: “The nation’s oldest president in history has yet to get a checkup — or release an update to the three-page medical summary that was last provided to the public some 17 months ago. The White House has said more up-to-date information will be released ‘soon’ and, when pressed, said he would do so by the end of the year.”
New York Times: “The Biden administration on Tuesday will announce its final approval of the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, a major step toward President Biden’s goal of expanding renewable energy production across the United States, according to two people familiar with the matter.
“The Vineyard Wind project calls for up to 84 turbines to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Together, they could generate about 800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 400,000 homes.”
Gerald Seib: “When the tea party movement emerged in 2009, Republican leaders assumed they could humor its followers and capture their intensity, while keeping them under control.”
“They were wrong. Instead, the party’s leaders were consumed by the movement they tried to corral, and by the grass-roots anger they thought they could use to their advantage.”
“The question facing Mr. McCarthy and other party leaders is whether they are again mistaken in assuming they can channel the energy and anger of a grass-roots movement without being overtaken by it.”
“Ultimately, the tea party movement was defined mostly by its distrust of that establishment; it was less about ideology and more about attitude. And eventually, of course, it bucked off the Republican leaders who tried to ride it.”
Associated Press: “For 50 years the Minuteman missile has been armed and ready, day and night, for nuclear war on a moment’s notice. It has never been launched into combat from its underground silo, but this year it became the prime target in a wider political battle over the condition and cost of the nation’s nuclear arsenal.”
“Minuteman was not intended to last half a century, so it’s overdue to be replaced or refurbished. Some see this as a moment to push for scrapping it altogether, abandoning one leg of the traditional nuclear ‘triad’ — weapons that can be launched from land, sea and air. Most in Congress favor keeping the land-based leg by replacing Minuteman with a new missile; President Joe Biden’s position is not yet clear.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) joked during a meeting with President Biden and other governors that state residents should “go get vaccinated so you’re alive to vote against me in the next election,” The Hill reports.
Said Walz: “My message to folks is there’s a lot of good reasons to get vaccinated, but for some of them, you know, if you need another one, go get vaccinated so you’re alive to vote against me in the next election. I don’t care. I just want to get it done.”
“Politically, U.S. Jews on the whole tilt strongly liberal and tend to support the Democratic Party,” Pew Research reports.
“When the new survey was fielded, from late fall 2019 through late spring 2020, 71% said they were Democrats or leaned Democratic. Among Jews of no religion, roughly three-quarters were Democrats or leaned that way.”
“But Orthodox Jews have been trending in the opposite direction, becoming as solidly Republican as non-Orthodox Jews are solidly Democratic. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, 75% of Orthodox Jews said they were Republicans or leaned Republican, compared with 57% in 2013.”
CNBC: “A New York real estate tax lawyer — who did work for former President Donald Trump decades ago — in 2011 purchased a shell company whose creators later became key investors in a mystery $100 million company that owns just a small New Jersey deli, records show.”
Another nugget from Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig, via The Guardian: “The president did repeatedly seek to remove Secret Service staff he deemed to be overweight or too short for the job.”
Said Trump: “I want these fat guys off my detail. How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”
Washington Post: “Biden is hosting Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) at the White House on Tuesday in the latest meeting with individual lawmakers as he continues negotiations over his $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure package.”
Playbook: “The meeting comes just a day after Biden huddled with Manchin on the same topic — a sign that Biden is employing a charm offensive to woo the two moderates who have expressed reluctance about using reconciliation to pass infrastructure spending. Perhaps the president is trying to butter them up before making the pivot to a Democrats-only strategy? Remember: Due to the Senate’s 50-50 split, the Dems can’t do much of anything without both Sinema and Manchin on board.”
Washington Post: “Last week, The Fact Checker revealed that the ‘room’ that McCarthy rented from prominent pollster Frank Luntz for at least two months was in a 7,000-square-foot space — a combination of four penthouse apartments.”
“It turns out that the bylaws of the condo building, Clara Barton at Penn Quarter, specifically prohibit condo owners from renting anything less than the entire space — and for not less than six months.”
Slate: “Hundreds of cybersecurity companies have grown up to handle (these attacks). But the government’s power to set and enforce security measures is still weak. Private companies aren’t even required to report intrusions when they take place; many of them are hesitant to do so, lest consumers stop buying their products or their stock prices tank.”
“The question, for…others trying to put serious policies into place, is: Can they make CEOs, like those running companies like Colonial Pipeline, care?”
Axios: The ransomware pandemic.
“We all learned early in life if you can write the rules you can win the game.”
— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted by HuffPost, discussing his opposition to Democrats’ election reform and voting rights legislation known as the For the People Act.
“Two Trump family members got ‘inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close’ to agents protecting them while Donald Trump was president,” The Guardian reports.
The claims are made in a new book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig.
Leonnig writes that Vanessa Trump, the wife of Donald Trump Jr, “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family.”
She also writes that Tiffany Trump broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail.”
Dan Balz: “The British results in the working-class constituency election were a reminder that cultural and economic issues resonate in what was once Labour territory and that urban elites have difficulty connecting in those places. Republicans are counting on cultural issues to help pave the way to victories in the 2022 midterm elections, one reason they have seized on immigration and the southern U.S. border. Democrats should take notice.”
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.