“We’re not voting in any way to help raise the debt ceiling. As a group we are all together.”
— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), quoted by Bloomberg, making clear he will filibuster legislation to lift the debt ceiling tomorrow.
“We’re not voting in any way to help raise the debt ceiling. As a group we are all together.”
— Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), quoted by Bloomberg, making clear he will filibuster legislation to lift the debt ceiling tomorrow.
“The son and namesake of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was toppled in a 1986 revolt, announced Tuesday that he would seek the presidency in next year’s elections in what activists say is an attempt to whitewash a dark period in the country’s history marked by plunder and human rights atrocities,” the AP reports.
Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) friend, Joel Greenberg, a former local tax collector who pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a minor, asked a judge to further delay his sentencing because he is still cooperating with federal authorities as part of his plea deal, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
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“National security officials at the White House were recently issued a warning: move away from the immediate area as soon as possible if you ever feel the acute onset of pressure, sound or heat in the head,” McClatchy reports.
“The U.S. government is sending a message to diplomats, national security staff and intelligence officers that ‘anomalous health incidents’ — also known as ‘Havana syndrome’ because it was first detected in Cuba — are serious, widespread and pose real danger to their health at home and abroad.”
“President Biden met Tuesday with nearly a dozen vulnerable House Democrats as he and party leaders race to adopt his massive economic agenda before month’s end,” The Hill reports.
“Democrats consider enactment of Biden’s two-piece domestic plan crucial to the party’s chances of keeping control of the lower chamber in next year’s midterm elections — a cycle that’s historically difficult for the party of the incumbent president. And leaders in both chambers are scrambling to unite their clashing factions behind both the bipartisan infrastructure component and a larger, more controversial package of climate and social safety net programs.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) signaled he is open to a budget reconciliation bill in the ballpark of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion, above the limit he set just last week of $1.5 trillion, The Hill reports.
Ron Brownstein: “Anger is peaking among a wide range of Democrats toward Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema over their resistance to President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, but the Democrats’ struggle to pass Biden’s sweeping plan is rooted in more than the personal idiosyncrasies and electoral calculations of two individual senators.”
“It also illustrates the structural challenge of passing big legislation through a Senate that is more closely and deeply divided than in earlier generations.”
“Compared with most of the 20th century, it has become much more rare since 2000 for either party to accumulate a comfortable Senate majority of 55 seats or more. And yet, even as each party is operating with fewer Senate votes of its own, it has also become more difficult for the majority to win votes from senators in the opposition party for its key initiatives.”
R. Marshall Brandt: “All 50 Republicans in the Senate voted not to raise the debt ceiling and therefore willfully default on America’s debt. That vote was just as antithetical to a functioning democracy as was the votes to decertify the election results on January 6.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News the media’s focus on the January 6th inssurection is a distraction intended to “demean” millions of Trump supporters.
Said Pence: “They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020.”
“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every CIA station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed,” the New York Times reports.
“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the CIA’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was booed by Republican activists after he suggested they should consider taking the coronavirus vaccine, the Daily Beast reports.
As Graham was heckled loudly he clarified: “I didn’t tell you to get it, you ought to think about it.”
New York Times: “Mr. McConnell has long used the periodic need to raise the government’s borrowing limit as a moment of leverage to secure a policy win, as have leaders of both parties.”
“But two weeks before a potentially catastrophic default, Mr. McConnell has yet to reveal what he wants, telling President Biden in a letter on Monday, ‘We have no list of demands.'”
“Instead, he appears to want to sow political chaos for Democrats while insulating himself and other Republicans from an issue that has the potential to divide them.”
Hillary Clinton told The Atlantic she can draw a straight line from her duels with conservative media and Republican politicians in the 1990s to the January 6 insurrection—and she fears worse is coming.
Said Clinton: “There’s always been a kind of paranoid streak in American politics. But it never was given such voice, such a platform, or had so much money behind it until we saw the rise of the right-wing radio voices like Rush Limbaugh and we saw the rise of Fox News. And then, of course, the internet just put it on steroids.”
Clinton added that not enough Americans are taking the danger of a constitutional crisis seriously: “It’s like the frog dropped into the water. It’s boiling. People are still arguing about stuff that is important, but not as fundamental as whether or not our democracy will be broken and then taken over and minority rule will be what we live under.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dismissed the idea of minting a $1 trillion coin to bypass the debt limit as nothing but a “gimmick,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Yellen: “It compromises the independence of the Federal Reserve and instead of showing Congress and the administration can be trusted to pay the country’s bills, it does the opposite.”
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“A New York mother and son have been charged with theft in aiding the disappearance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop during the Jan. 6 insurrection after the FBI initially raided a home 4,500 miles away in Alaska, looking for the computer,” the AP reports.
The son “also faces a charge of possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun.”
“Russia has reported a record number of Covid deaths for four of the past six days, as the country experiences a devastating fourth wave caused by the Delta variant and a low vaccination rate of under 30% of the adult population,” The Guardian 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.
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