New York Times: “In a significant breakthrough in the case, investigators have now pinpointed a person seen on video of the riot who attacked several officers with bear spray, including Officer Brian Sicknick.”
“And video evidence shows that the assailant discussed attacking officers with the bear spray beforehand.”
Playbook: “Three people close to Trump tell me that he’s stewing anew over Kevin McCarthy. It’s become so frequent that his advisers think the House minority leader may be in for a public reprimand. That’s even after the powwow at Mar-a-Lago where McCarthy tried to patch things up after he denounced Trump for the violence on Jan. 6.”
“The reason for Trump’s displeasure: an emboldened Cheney.”
“Each time Cheney criticizes Trump from her leadership post as the No. 3 House Republican, he’s reminded that it was McCarthy who pleaded with his conference to keep her on as chair — despite her vote to impeach Trump.”
Washington Post: “Over meals and many Diet Cokes, Trump has already started building his post-White House political operation and cementing his role as the party’s de facto leader. He has begun to formalize a structure of political advisers around him and made plans to start a new super PAC — capable of raising donations of any size — to support candidates he favors. His team is looking to formalize a process for vetting endorsement prospects, assessing what candidates have said and done for Trump in the past.”
“He has also discussed drafting a new ‘America First’ agenda — like the 1994 ‘Contract with America,’ but focused on issues such as border security and trade — to steer the party’s direction.”
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“Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010 — a big deal, in the (sanitized) words of Vice President Joe Biden — Democrats have itched to fix its flaws,” the New York Times reports.
“But Republicans united against the law and, for the next decade, blocked nearly all efforts to buttress it or to make the kinds of technical corrections that are common in the years after a major piece of legislation.”
“Now the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress hope to engineer the first major repair job and expansion of the Affordable Care Act since its passage. They plan to refashion regulations and spend billions through the stimulus bill to make Obamacare simpler, more generous and closer to what many of its architects wanted in the first place.”
Washington Examiner: “Within the sunny confines of the Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s as if former President Donald Trump did not fail to win reelection in November. He is simply not the president right now.”
“It has been nearly four weeks since President Biden evicted Trump from the White House. Prominent Republicans who addressed conservative activists Friday at CPAC acknowledged as much, delivering a series of stirring calls to action to oppose the Democratic agenda in Washington, D.C. But missing from the program was any reassessment of Trump’s defeat and any role he played in the loss the GOP’s majority in the Senate in two subsequent runoff elections in Georgia.”
Wall Street Journal: “Backed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), two committee chairmen are working on a new, more limited proposal that would use the tax system to prod employers to raise wages.”
“The plan would impose tax penalties on large companies that aren’t paying the higher wage Democrats seek and create tax incentives for small companies to do so. Democrats hope the chamber’s parliamentarian would allow them to include the modified plan in the coronavirus relief package.”
Harry Enten: Why Democrats should still fight for a $15 minimum wage.
“States should maintain Covid-19 restrictions such as mask wearing and capacity limitations as case numbers halt their decline, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday, citing the circulation of new variants and infection rates that remain alarmingly high,” Bloomberg reports.
“The early ambitions of Joe Biden’s presidency are quickly running into the guardrails of archaic Senate rules, testing his willingness to remake an institution he reveres to fulfill many of the promises he has made to Americans,” the AP reports.
“It’s a wonky, Washington dilemma with real-world implications for millions of people, determining everything from the future of a minimum wage hike to voting access. It will also shape Biden’s ability to keep two restive wings of the Democratic Party united: swing state moderates wary of the appearance of effectively giving up on bipartisanship and more progressive Democrats who argue that Republicans aren’t coming along anyway.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, told the CPAC crowd that former President Donald Trump “from his desk as Mar-a-Lago will accomplish more for America in the next four years than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could ever dream of.”
BuzzFeed News “spoke with more than three dozen people, including more than two dozen former students, their friends, and their relatives, who described or corroborated instances of sexual harassment and misconduct on campus, in Cawthorn’s car, and at his house near campus.”
“House Republicans were furious over the summer when the House made unpresented changes allowing lawmakers to designate a proxy and vote on their behalf amid traveling concerns due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” USA Today reports.
“They held news conferences. They lobbied their members against using the proxy function. House Republican leadership even led a lawsuit over the change, calling it unconstitutional.”
“But now it appears quite a few members of the GOP have changed their tune. And a host of Republicans designated proxies, each citing the ‘ongoing public health emergency,’ to travel to Florida for the Conservative Political Action Conference.”
“The House passed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package early Saturday morning almost entirely along partisan lines,” CBS News reports.
“The bill now goes the Senate, although it included a minimum wage hike that the Senate parliamentarian ruled on Thursday cannot be included if Congress uses the budget reconciliation process.”
Axios notes two Democrats — Reps. Jared Golden (D-ME) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR) — joined Republicans in voting against the bill.
Politico: The GOP’s anti-stimulus rallying cry: What happened to the unspent $1 trillion?
“Ben Sasse is about to be censured by the Nebraska GOP for his antagonistic stance toward Donald Trump — again. But he doesn’t care,” Politico reports.
“As Sasse’s fellow Republican critics of Trump fret over blowback from a base that demands loyalty to the ex-president, the senator isn’t even trying to dissuade those seeking to punish him.”
Sasse conceded in an interview: “I assume I’m going to be censured on Saturday, but I haven’t spent any time to talk anybody out of it.”
John Durham, the federal prosecutor who Attorney General William Barr assigned to investigate possible criminal wrongdoing in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, announced he was resigning.
Donald Trump Jr. told Fox News that there are “plenty” of Republican lawmakers who should get primary challengers.
Said Trump: “I don’t think we have to blindly support, you know, establishment candidates that don’t do anything. I think that’s a mistake and I think we’ve seen too much of that from the establishment where they blindly throw cash, time, money and energy to help failing candidates who have no charisma, no personality, no political chops, get over the line simply because they’ve been there a few years.”
He added: “That’s the kind of nonsense that has to go, and I think it will.”
“One month after Donald Trump left office, thousands of his conservative allies and other far-right leaders on Friday began trying to center the Republican Party around the grievances of his presidency, pushing false claims about the American voting system, denouncing what they called liberal cancel culture and mocking mask-wearing,” the New York Times reports.
“Gathering at the first major conference of pro-Trump conservatives since his defeat, the politicians and activists sought to affirm their adherence to a conservatism as defined by Mr. Trump, and the need to break with many of the policies and ideas that had animated the American right for decades.”
Associated Press: At conservative conference, Trump is still the golden boy.
Washington Post: “In less than two months, lawmakers in at least eight states have taken formal steps to support or oppose D.C. becoming the 51st state, an unprecedented nationwide response to a once-fledgling movement now surging with momentum in Washington.”
Minnesota Public Radio: “North Dakota has lots of coal. It also has strong and consistent winds. It might be the perfect spot to showcase the long-awaited ‘energy transition’ from climate-warming fossil fuels to climate-saving renewables.”
“Yet that transition has hit a snag. Two counties in the state have enacted drastic restrictions on new wind projects in an attempt to save coal mining jobs, despite protests from landowners who’d like to rent their land to wind energy companies. It’s a sign of how difficult that transition can be for communities that depend on coal for jobs and tax revenue.”
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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