Donald Trump vowed on Christmas Day to replace the Affordable Care Act with his own “much better” alternative program, reviving his push to slash the now-popular health care option used by millions of Americans, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “Obamacare is too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare.”
“Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer is expected in Washington on Tuesday for meetings at the White House and State Department about Israel’s plans for eventually scaling down the war and transitioning to a low-intensity operation in Gaza,” Axios reports.
“The U.S. said it struck three drone facilities used by a Shiite militant group and other groups in Iraq in response to a series of attacks by the groups on American positions in Iraq and Syria, including an attack Monday in northern Iraq in which three U.S. troops were wounded, including one critically,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“It’s hard to have a truly great Christmas when you have a Crooked and Incompetent President who wants to put his Political Opponent in jail, and who has been working hard (for a change!), illegally using all of the levers of Law Enforcement, to do so. We are in the fight of our lives to save our Country from MADNESS & DOOM.”
— Donald Trump, on Truth Social.
Our boys are home for the holidays and it’s greatest gift Sara and I could ask for. Roscoe loves when his boys come home too!
Whatever you celebrate, I wish you a very peaceful holiday.
And thank you for gifting me some of your precious attention each day.
I truly love having you here.
There’s just a few hours left, but you can give your friends and family the gift of Political Wire this holiday season at 20% off an annual membership.
The celebrations traditionally enjoyed in Bethlehem are canceled this year, as the war in Gaza and violence in the occupied West Bank continue to devastate Palestinian communities, Axios reports.
New York Times: “Federal records show that, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, the DeSantis campaign is on pace to spend significantly more on private jets — the governor’s preferred mode of travel — than on airing television ads.”
“Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is working to pull together her biggest and most difficult bipartisan deal yet. It also could be her last,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The centrist Arizona senator, who still aligns with Democrats despite leaving the party a year ago, has helped shape major laws related to infrastructure, climate, same-sex marriage and guns. Now, she is one of a handful of negotiators working to change U.S. immigration law, which lawmakers of both parties acknowledge is politically fraught, maddeningly complicated—and newly urgent, because Republicans made it a condition for backing new aid to Ukraine.”
“This latest test of Sinema’s deal-making abilities comes just as the senator is also closing in on a deadline on whether to run for re-election, this time as an independent.”
Key takeaway: “Sinema declined to say whether she plans to run again. Asked by a reporter if a successful immigration deal would affect her decision on whether to seek re-election, she responded: ‘Dumb question.’”
“I’ve never been more concerned about a terrorist attack on our homeland… After October the 7th, jihadist groups all over the world are calling on their members to attack America as payback for us helping Israel. So, the threat levels are at all-time high. October the 7th put gasoline on a fire. And we need to get our border secure and up our game.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by Politico.
New York Times: “In the 32 years since Justice Thomas came through the fire of his confirmation hearings and onto the Supreme Court, he has assembled an army of influential acolytes unlike any other — a network of like-minded former clerks who have not only rallied to his defense but carried his idiosyncratic brand of conservative legal thinking out into the nation’s law schools, top law firms, the judiciary and the highest reaches of government.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith has a more “sprawling” case against Donald Trump than previously thought, CBS News reports.
Said reporter Robert Costa: “The special counsel has phone records. He has memos and diary entries from key witnesses, like former Vice President Mike Pence, key eyewitness testimony from people who are inside the Oval Office with Trump.”
He added: “But they had something in the special counsel’s office the January 6th Committee never had, which is subpoena power to really go deep with witnesses and not just get public testimony and some depositions. They’ve gone deep. And I’ve talked to people who participated in this investigation as lawyers, sometimes even as witnesses. And it’s evident to me, based on my conversations with sources, that Jack Smith has a sprawling case against former President Donald Trump.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) padded the city payroll with 293 “special assistants” during his first full fiscal year in office — a more than 20% increase over his predecessor Bill de Blasio, the New York Post reports.
Two of them tied for the largest salaries out of any of Adams’ aides, earning $246,898 each.
“Members of Congress have headed home for the holidays — and some will come back having decided they don’t want to re-up for more terms in the nation’s capital, buffeting an already volatile fight for control of the House next year,” NBC News reports.
“Retirement announcements often come after the holidays, as lawmakers discuss their next steps with their families and weigh whether to continue in an increasingly dysfunctional Congress. And because Democrats need a net gain of just five seats to take control of the House in 2024, every seat is going to matter, and the dynamics can shift if a race suddenly becomes an open contest.”
New York Times: “Boxed in by a base enamored with Mr. Trump that has instinctively rallied to the former president’s defense, Mr. DeSantis has struggled for months to match the hype that followed his landslide 2022 re-election. Now, with the first votes in the Iowa caucuses only weeks away on Jan. 15, Mr. DeSantis has slipped in some polls into third place, behind Nikki Haley, and has had to downsize his once-grand national ambitions to the simple hopes that a strong showing in a single state — Iowa — could vault him back into contention.”
“For a candidate who talks at length about his own disinterest in ‘managing America’s decline,’ people around Mr. DeSantis are increasingly talking about managing his.”
“Ryan Tyson, Mr. DeSantis’s longtime pollster and one of his closest advisers, has privately said to multiple people that they are now at the point in the campaign where they need to ‘make the patient comfortable,’ a phrase evoking hospice care. Others have spoken of a coming period of reputation management, both for the governor and themselves, after a slow-motion implosion of the relationship between the campaign and an allied super PAC left even his most ardent supporters drained and demoralized.”
“Local and federal law enforcement officials say they are investigating a surge in threats that justices on Colorado’s Supreme Court are facing after their decision this week to bar Donald Trump from running in the state’s presidential primary,” the Washington Post reports.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, the AP reports.
“President Biden said that he did not ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to negotiate a cease-fire in the country’s war with Hamas during a call Saturday, despite rising pressure to do so,” The Hill reports.
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.