Rep.-elect Bob Good (R-VA) called COVID-19 a “phony pandemic” at a rally Saturday.
Said Good: “This looks like a group of people that gets it. This is a phony pandemic. It’s a serious virus, but it’s a virus. It’s not a pandemic.”
Rep.-elect Bob Good (R-VA) called COVID-19 a “phony pandemic” at a rally Saturday.
Said Good: “This looks like a group of people that gets it. This is a phony pandemic. It’s a serious virus, but it’s a virus. It’s not a pandemic.”
The surge of COVID-19 cases in Mississippi has left no intensive care unit beds available across the state and prompted the need for restrictions, the Jackson Clarion Ledger reports.
A federal judge in Milwaukee on Saturday tossed out President Trump’s latest effort to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, dismissing the case and ruling that it had failed “as a matter of law and fact,” the New York Times reports.
You are reading the free version of Political Wire.
“Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, which was authorized for emergency use on Friday night, is expected to arrive throughout the U.S. by Monday to administer to health care workers,” Axios reports.
“The administration green-lighting shipments and distribution this weekend comes as the U.S. topped more than 3,000 deaths a day — more than 9/11 or D-Day.”
Washington Post: “For the past six weeks, Trump has staged the ultimate loyalty test for the party faithful as he forced Republican officials to opt between siding with him and the nation’s democratic process. Through public displays of support and lengthy silences, the vast majority of elected Republicans chose to back Trump.”
“Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans and 18 state attorneys general signed their names to the failed Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to have justices overturn the will of voters in multiple states. Others have gone on television to parrot the president’s baseless conspiracy theories about vote-rigging. Some are using rhetoric reminiscent of the Civil War to express their fealty to the president’s cause.”
“Thousands of protesters, including many not wearing face masks despite a citywide mandate, rallied in Washington, D.C., Saturday, refusing to accept President Trump lost the 2020 election,” Axios reports.
“President Trump was enraged by a Wall Street Journal scoop that Attorney General Bill Barr worked “for months” during the campaign to conceal the federal investigation of Hunter Biden,” Axios reports.
“The president is re-exploring options for replacing Barr, and Saturday morning tweeted this rebuke: ‘Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth to the public, before the Election, about Hunter Biden?'”
“The fact that the Journal article was single-sourced made people close to the president suspect, despite not knowing, that it came directly from Barr — or from a sanctioned representative as a way to burnish his reputation with legal peers post-Trump.”
New York Times: Trump castigates Barr for not publicly disclosing Hunter Biden investigation.
“The national Democratic Party ‘aggressively interjected itself’ into the 2020 Iowa caucuses, slowing down and complicating the development of a reporting app that crashed on caucus night and delayed the tallying of results, an audit of the process found,” the Des Moines Register reports.
“The Iowa Democratic Party commissioned the audit shortly after the Feb. 3 caucuses, hiring a pair of Democratic lawyers to examine the technical and procedural failures that prevented it from announcing a caucus winner for days after the high-profile contest ended.”
President-elect Joe Biden’s search for the next attorney general is increasingly focused on Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) and former deputy attorney general Sally Q. Yates, the Washington Post reports.
“Joe Biden’s Justice Department-to-be has a Hunter Biden problem. The ongoing federal investigation into the president-elect’s son is already fueling debate among DOJ veterans about extraordinary steps Joe Biden’s yet-to-be-named attorney general may have to take to insulate the department from the appearance of political bias,” Politico reports.
“In addition to the Hunter investigation, Joe Biden’s attorney general will confront tricky questions about how to handle lingering probes of President Donald Trump and his associates, as well as navigate the landmines left by the outgoing administration — including a special counsel probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.”
“President Trump’s campaign plans to buy ads on unspecified cable television networks to promote his effort to overturn the election he lost, highlighting claims that have been refuted by elections officials and dismissed by judges across the country,” Bloomberg reports.
“Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has invited former independent counsel Ken Starr and attorneys in key battleground states to testify at a controversial hearing next week where he plans to probe the 2020 election that President-elect Joe Biden won,” CNN reports.
“The hearing, which has prompted sharp criticism from senators in both parties over concerns that Johnson is peddling in debunked conspiracy theories, is moving ahead despite calls from Democrats that he scrap it.”
Former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, a Lincoln Project founder, reached out to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) last night:
“We disagree on many issues and that is ok in our view. Btw, we don’t look down on waitresses. We admire them. We are all the types of guys who always tip at 50% or more.”
“I have an idea. Let’s approach each other and our points of view with good faith. We say the following with respect and seriousness Ma’am. Our hand is open and we need to work together or we are going to lose America. The fight will last for many years.”
“Here is the unexpected part. A democratic-socialist and former waitress who knows what it is to actually work combined with the Lincoln Project and many others is going to hold the line together. We will not yield and we will never break. We are the side opposed to autocracy.”
“President-elect Joe Biden’s team is feverishly working to get a messaging plan in place to sell a skeptical public on the first FDA-backed coronavirus vaccine, believing the Trump administration has set the effort back significantly,” Politico reports.
“Biden implied on Friday that he’s not going to wait until he takes office to start counteracting Trump’s mixed messaging on the vaccine, which includes downplaying the public health threat of the coronavirus while hailing the unprecedented speed at which a shot was developed.”
“The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election,” the New York Times reports.
“The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast on Election Day.”
Playbook: “This presidency has been filled with hard-to-believe split screens, but we’re seeing perhaps the starkest display of dissonance yet. Congress has been working around the clock to cut a series of end-of-year deals, and President Trump is on an unending tear of falsehoods, suggesting that he is the rightful winner of the election, which, of course, he’s not. He’s losing support — Republicans are sick of the gripes, the Supreme Court is summarily dismissing his arguments, and the nation’s governing apparatus is preparing for Joe Biden’s presidency.”
“Congress, meanwhile, has spent this week and will spend next week trying to put in place a series of policies to help America bounce back from the coronavirus. It avoided a government shutdown, with the intent of giving itself more time to cut a bipartisan deal. Yet Trump has been absent — a bit player in a government he’s meant to be steering and a country he’s meant to be leading.”
“Twitter on Saturday prevented users from liking and replying to a series of tweets from President Trump in which he repeated false claims that he won the election and that the race was ‘stolen’ from him,” The Hill reports.
President Trump blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to reject his bid to overturn the election results in Texas, calling it a “disgraceful miscarriage of justice.”
Said Trump: “The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!”
In his Saturday morning tweet storm, Trump also retweeted a post that called for Attorney General Bill Barr to be fired, adding his own comment: “A big disappointment!”
Washington Post: Trump’s spin on his Supreme Court failure is as bad as his legal case.
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.