Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “At long last, the 2022 U.S. House map is complete. So it’s a good time to take stock.”
“The new House landscape is fairly similar to the old one… However, there is a notable increase in the number of super-safe Republican seats — and a modest decline in the overall number of competitive districts.”
Most Americans expect inflation to get worse in the next year and are adjusting their spending habits in response to rising prices, according to a new Washington Post-Schar School poll.
Edward Luce: “The ironic outcome is nostalgia for the Watergate era. Watergate proved that the American republic could withstand assault by a popular and very effective sitting president. The system worked. January 6 shows that an unpopular former president can wield a veto over the fate of democracy. The irony stems from the fact that declining trust in government began during Watergate and is now at rock bottom. Apart from a couple of interludes during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s and Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s, trust in government to do the right thing some or all of the time has been on the slide since Watergate. It is now at a record low of 20 percent.”
“Part of the cure for today’s partisan mutual loathing would be a display of the admirable objectivity shown by the Watergate committee. But the America that was stunned into forcing Nixon’s resignation seems almost as lost in time as the royal tyranny that it expelled. The past is another country, as the saying goes. America’s present feels like two different nations that are barely on speaking terms.”
“Facebook prohibits gun sales on its service. But buyers and sellers can violate the rule 10 times before they are kicked off the social network,” the Washington Post reports.
Polish President Andrzej Duda has slammed the leaders of France and Germany over their phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying it was like having talks with Adolf Hitler during World War II, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Said Duda: “Did anyone speak like this with Adolf Hitler during World War II? Did anyone say that Adolf Hitler must save face? That we should proceed in such a way that it is not humiliating for Adolf Hitler? I have not heard such voices.”
“As then-President Donald Trump left a rally with his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, he appears to have held out hope until the last minute — even as chaos unfolded — that he’d be able to join them at the Capitol,” Politico reports.
“Trump even raised the prospect privately with the head of his Secret Service detail at the time, Robert Engel.”
“Colorado isn’t viewed as a prime Republican Senate pickup opportunity this fall — not yet at least,” Politico reports.
“In the hopes of keeping it that way, Democrats are aggressively advancing the campaign of a hardline MAGA Senate candidate in a last-ditch effort to elevate him over a moderate Republican who is viewed as a more serious threat to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.”
“Shanghai and Beijing went back on fresh Covid-19 alert on Thursday after parts of China’s largest economic hub started imposing new lockdown restrictions while the most populous district in the Chinese capital shut entertainment venues,” Reuters reports.
“Both cities had eased widespread Covid curbs recently after a decline in new cases. However, the country has stuck with a ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ policy aimed at shutting down transmission chains as soon as possible.”
Financial Times: China digs in for permanent zero-Covid with testing and quarantine regime.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) joked that because of gas prices, it would be cheaper in his state “to buy cocaine and just run everywhere” rather than drive, the Washington Examiner reports.
“You really can’t win an election with a bumper sticker that says: ‘Well, we can’t do much, but the other side is worse.’”
— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), quote by Politico, urging a massive course correction for Democrats.
Playbook: “Committee aides are staying coy on the actual structure of the hearings but told reporters there will be a multimedia component (much like the impeachment hearings in January 2021) with unseen video and audio that the committee has obtained.”
“The biggest challenge for the committee is connecting the dots their investigators have spent months gathering, hoping to make the case to the American people that our constitutional democracy came close to collapsing — and that the threat is not over. Moreover, the committee will need to make that case in a way that breaks through the day-to-day concerns of Americans — ranging from high gas prices to empty formula shelves — and makes them care about an event from a year and a half ago.”
Politico: “Coordination remains underway between aides to former President Donald Trump, GOP allies on Capitol Hill, and the Republican National Committee. But aides in those circles say that with the Jan. 6 committee having not yet revealed its witness list or the content to be unveiled, their actual plans for pushback remain TBD.”
“Among Trump allies, there is also a sense that the public’s opinions on Jan. 6 are already baked in place and that even expertly produced hearings won’t materially change that.”
Leaked audio shows House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supported a congressional inquiry into the January 6 insurrection — just five days after it happened — the opposite to the opinion he later argued in public.
Said McCarthy: “We cannot just sweep this under the rug. We need to know why it happened, who did it and people need to be held accountable for it. And I’m committed to make sure that happens.”
In the weeks after the riot, McCarthy completely reversed his position.
“More than 1,000 interviews and 140,000 documents later, the House committee that has spent nearly a year investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol will begin to present its findings to the American public with a hearing Thursday night,” the Washington Post reports.
“The hearing, which broadcast networks will clear their prime-time schedule to air, is the first in a series this month that will together lay out evidence not only of what happened on the day of the attack, but also in the two months that preceded it as then-president Donald Trump led an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”
Associated Press: “Thursday’s prime-time hearing will open with eyewitness testimony from the first police officer pummeled in the mob riot and from a documentary filmmaker who recorded the melee, and it will feature the committee’s accounts from Trump’s aides and family members of the deadly siege that put U.S. democracy at risk.”
Axios: What to expect from tonight’s prime time hearing.
CEOs of more than 220 U.S. companies on Thursday will release a letter calling on the Senate to “take immediate action” to reduce gun violence, Axios reports.
“Progressive Democrats were knocked on the defensive in their own party over crime and homelessness on Wednesday after voters in two high-profile California races delivered a stark warning about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022,” the New York Times reports.
“The landslide recall of a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, and the strength of a Republican-turned-Democratic mayoral candidate in deep-blue Los Angeles, Rick Caruso, who ran relentlessly as a crime-fighter eager to clean up the streets, showed the extent to which voter anxieties about public safety have taken hold — even in some of the most progressive corners of the nation.”
Washington Post: Worries over crime haunt Democrats ahead of the midterm elections.
David Brooks: “Using the events of Jan. 6 as campaign fodder is small-minded and likely to be ineffective. If you think you can find the magic moment that will finally discredit Donald Trump in the eyes of the electorate, you haven’t been paying attention over the last six years. Sorry, boomers, but this is not the Watergate scandal in which we need an investigation to find out who said what to whom in the Oval Office. The horrors of Jan. 6 were out in public. The shocking truth of it was what we all saw that day and what we’ve learned about the raw violence since.”
“We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. We need a committee to locate the weaknesses in our democratic system and society and find ways to address them.”
“The core problem here is not the minutiae of who texted what to chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 last year. The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter.”
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.