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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called on President Biden to get his “ass” out of the White House and go to the U.S. southern border, Fox News reports.
Said Graham: “It is so unconscionable for him not to go to the border and listen to the agents and people trying to control the border, what life is like along the southern border. The fact that he doesn’t go shows to me that he’s disconnected and he does not give a damn.”
David Corn: “Trump’s refusal to follow tradition and release his tax returns was both a symbolic act of imperiousness and a sign of crookedness. Some of you might recall that, for years, I tweeted this message practically on a daily basis: ‘Today would be a good day for Donald Trump to release his tax returns.’ He had promised to do so before entering the presidential contest in 2015. Then he stubbornly resisted, using the phony excuse that he couldn’t because his tax returns were being audited.”
“This break with common practice was—or should have been—disturbing. It was a tell. It signaled that Trump could not be trusted to abide by the normal rules of politics and governance. This showed he viewed himself above it all.”
“White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had a telling slip of the tongue earlier this month when she briefly referred to ‘Majority Taylor Greene’ during a press briefing,” the Washington Examiner reports.
“Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has gone from pariah to kingmaker, poised to play a major role in the narrowly GOP-controlled House come January, less than two years after being stripped of all her committee assignments.”
Cook Political Report: “Republicans picked up nine seats to win a 222-213 majority, a mirror image of Democrats’ prior edge. But they wouldn’t be in the majority if not for razor-thin wins by five of their candidates: Lauren Boebert in CO-03 (546 votes), John Duarte in CA-13 (564 votes), John James in MI-10 (1,600 votes), Mike Lawler in NY-17 (1,820 votes) and Zach Nunn in IA-03 (2,145 votes).”
“That’s an effective margin of just 6,675 votes out of 107.6 million votes cast in House races nationwide (0.0062%), about a fifth of the 31,751-vote margin by which Democrats won the House in 2020.”
Politico: “A whopping 166 members of the House voted by proxy on Thursday, roughly 39 percent of the chamber… It’s probably a solid bet that the number increases today as lawmakers make the choice to head home for the holidays instead of sticking around for votes.”
“What a swan song for proxy voting, which Republicans have pledged to eliminate in the new Congress.”
Ron Brownstein: “The committee zoomed in so tightly on the culpability of Trump and his inner circle that it largely cropped out the dozens of other state and federal Republican officials who supported or enabled the president’s multifaceted, months-long plot. The committee downplayed the involvement of the legion of local Republican officials who enlisted as fake electors and said almost nothing about the dozens of congressional Republicans who supported Trump’s efforts—even to the point, in one case, of urging him to declare “Marshall Law” to overturn the result.”
“With these choices, the committee likely increased the odds that Trump and his allies will face personal accountability—but diminished the prospect of a complete reckoning within the GOP.”
“That reality points to the larger question lingering over the committee’s final report: Would convicting Trump defang the threat to democracy that culminated on January 6, or does that require a much broader confrontation with all of the forces in extremist movements, and even the mainstream Republican coalition, that rallied behind Trump’s efforts?”
New York Magazine: “Since then, he has barely set foot outside the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago. For 28 days, in fact, he has not left the state of Florida at all.”
“He is sensitive about this. He does not like what it suggests. So he does not accept the premise. ‘Sometimes I don’t even stay at Mar-a-Lago,’ he told me. What do you mean you don’t stay there, I asked. Where do you stay? ‘I stay here,’ he said, ‘but I am outside of Mar-a-Lago quite a bit. I’m always largely outside of Mar-a-Lago at meetings and various other things and events. I’m down in Miami. I go to Miami, I go to different places in Florida.'”
“What he means when he says ‘Miami’ is that his SUV rolls down the driveway, past the pristine lawn set for croquet and through the Secret Service checkpoint at the gate, for the two-hour trip to another piece of Trump real estate, the Trump National in Doral, about eight miles from the airport in Miami-Dade County. There, he meets regularly with an impressive, ideologically diverse range of policy wonks, diplomats, and political theorists for conversations about the global economy and military conflicts and constitutional law and I’m kidding. He goes there to play golf.”
Said one adviser: “He just goes, plays golf, comes back, and fucks off. He has retreated to the golf course and to Mar-a-Lago. His world has gotten much smaller. His world is so, so small.”
“Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old activist who leads Turning Point USA and a network of conservative affiliates, wrote with a warning,” the Washington Post reports.
“In a Monday email to the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, he told them that donors and activists would desert the party unless it changed. The result, he said, would be colossal failure in the 2024 presidential election.”
“The extraordinary message came in the midst of a bitter GOP leadership contest, with incumbent RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel seeking to beat back a challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney and committee member from California who has been paid for legal consulting by former president Donald Trump’s political action committee, among numerous clients.”
Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and media mogul, is interested in acquiring either Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones or The Washington Post, Axios reports.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell deferred to Donald Trump’s handpicked candidates in competitive midterm races but promised in a NBC News interview to not to let that happen again, insisting he will “actively look for quality candidates” to promote in the 2024 primaries.
Said McConnell: “Here’s what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has diminished.”
He added: “We can do a better job with less potential interference. The former president may have other things to do.”
If you haven’t had time to read the 800+ pages of the January 6 Committee final report, Just Security has an excellent review of the highlights.
Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) told Politico that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) “is not a conservative” and speculated that he delayed organizing decisions until January because he’s promised “multiple people the same thing.”
Eighteen Republican Senators ignored Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) threat and voted for the omnibus spending bill anyway, the Washington Examiner reports.
The GOP leader is expected to push back against the package today using his “magic minute” of unlimited speaking time.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) apparently started his retirement from the U.S. Senate early.
Washington Post: “No U.S. president has ever been charged with a crime, and experts say any classified-documents prosecution involving a former commander in chief would be more complicated and fraught than the average case. But they also say past cases illustrate the potential legal exposure facing Donald Trump, who is under investigation for keeping thousands of government papers, some highly sensitive and more than 300 marked classified, at his Florida residence and popular private club.”
“The criteria for prosecuting people who improperly handle classified documents are clear: Prosecutors must prove a person deliberately flouted rules for how to store the material securely, while knowing it was classified or secret national defense information. They do not need to establish evidence that the person tried to sell the classified material or shared it with others.”
Meanwhile, Punchbowl News reports special counsel Jack Smith has irked leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee by blocking access to information related to the probe of Trump’s handling of classified documents.
“I think I’ve always been relevant. Like, I’ve been relevant from a very young age. I’ve been in the mix, to be honest.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by New York magazine, on his need for attention.
New York Times: “It took the efforts of a bipartisan group of 15 senators, months of intense negotiations, the endorsement of outside experts aligned with both parties and a stark realization that the outdated law could again be misused if changes weren’t made. And the results the next time could be worse.”
Theodore Schleifer: “Among the many lingering mysteries of the Bankman-Fried saga is how exactly these effective altruist, S.B.F.-employed operatives were spending so much money on Democratic politics in the first place. Sure, operatives can stack their income with consulting work, but enough to donate $100,000-plus in one campaign cycle? That is indeed peculiar.”
“But, as several friends of the people in question have noted, effective altruists are, well, peculiar. They donate more money to charity than average people, and they donate more money to aligned politicians too. Like lobbyists, they are also professionally in the business of cultivating relationships. So if an effective-altruist operative was making $400,000 a year in salary as a strategist (for S.B.F. and other clients), could they set aside, say, 25 percent of that money for political donations?”
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone notes Democrats are scouring their books for donations linked to Bankman-Fried.
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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