Political Wire

Select Committee Must Decide on Calling Trump or Pence

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“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has interviewed nearly 1,000 people. But the nine-member panel has yet to talk to the two most prominent players in that day’s events — former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence,” the AP reports.

“As the investigation winds down and the panel plans a series of hearings in June, members of the committee are debating whether to call the two men, whose conflict over whether to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win was at the center of the attack.”

How Mark Meadows Tried to Keep Trump in Power

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Washington Post: “Meadows granted conspiracy theory-peddling activists direct access to the Oval Office and personally connected some with the president… He pressed the Justice Department to investigate spurious and debunked claims, including a bizarre theory that an Italian operation changed votes in the United States — an allegation a top Justice official called ‘pure insanity,’ … He also pushed the Justice Department, unsuccessfully, to try to invalidate the election results in six states through federal court action.”

“Now Meadows’s actions are at the center of investigations by both the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack and the Justice Department, which is examining whether to press contempt-of-Congress charges against him as well as its own inquiry into the events surrounding the insurrection.”

USA Today: Panel faces dilemma in coaxing defiant GOP.

Putin’s ‘Doomsday Plane’ Fails to Make Appearance

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“Its flyover was much-hyped, but Vladimir Putin’s ‘Doomsday Plane’—a specially equipped jet from which the Russian elite can allegedly run a nuclear war—was conspicuous by its absence at Russia’s Victory Day parade in Moscow on Monday,” the Daily Beast reports.

“It was reported that the flyover of the plane was canceled because of bad weather, however footage showed Moscow enjoying a pleasant and sunny spring day and weather services suggested there was wind of just 3 mph.”

New York Times: Putin defends his Ukraine invasion, invoking World War II, but does not signal an escalation.

Providers Commit to Low-Income Broadband Program

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“Twenty internet providers, including AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., have agreed to help offer high-speed internet to millions of unconnected households through the bipartisan infrastructure law,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The program has run up against an early hurdle because the people who need it most are the hardest to reach because they aren’t online.”

Trump ‘Weirded Out’ by Madison Cawthorn Scandals

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Rolling Stone: “Just a month after he invited Cawthorn to speak at a North Carolina rally, Trump has grown increasingly annoyed and disappointed with his MAGA apprentice. The twice-impeached former president has described some of what he’s heard about Cawthorn’s latest woes — and the online sexual imagery associated with it — as ‘gross.’”

One source “said that lately Trump had voiced bewilderment and disgusted confusion about what he’d been told of the flood of leaks and footage, asking at one point in recent days if one of the allegations was that Cawthorn was ‘fucking his cousin?’”

Said another: “President Trump is completely weirded out by the allegations.”

Is Same-Sex Marriage Next to Fall?

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“When the Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the fate of the constitutional right to abortion, it was already clear that other rights, notably including same-sex marriage, could be at risk if the court overruled Roe v. Wade,” the New York Times reports.

“The logic of that legal earthquake, Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted, would produce a jurisprudential tsunami that could sweep away other precedents, too.”

“The logic of the opinion left plenty of room for debate. It said a right to abortion cannot be found in the Constitution or inferred from its provisions. The same could be said, using the draft opinion’s general reasoning, for contraception, gay intimacy and same-sex marriage, rights established by three Supreme Court decisions that were discussed at some length in the argument in December.”

Supreme Court Majority Still Backs Overturning Roe

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As of last week, when the draft Supreme Court opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade first leaked, five justices were still on board with the gist of what Justice Samuel Alito had drafted back in February, the Washington Post reports.

Chief Justice John Roberts has backed an incremental approach to banning abortions, but also to keep in place key tenets of Supreme Court precedent on abortion rights.

The History of Mother’s Day

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Heather Cox Richardson: “If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But Mothers’ Day—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage.”

“Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.”

About Political Wire

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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