“Tax reform is going to make health care look like a piece of cake.”
— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), quoted by ABC News.
“Tax reform is going to make health care look like a piece of cake.”
— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), quoted by ABC News.
A new Christopher Newport University survey in Virginia finds Ralph Northam (D) leading Ed Gillespie (R) in the governor’s race, 47% to 41%.
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Jonathan Chait: “The Republican Establishment has suffered through the Trump presidency, filling the news with a constant stream of caustic, mordant, off-the-record comments attesting to their sense of regret. The presidency is exactly the chaotic shambles the Trump campaign was, and the legislative results are much less than his party hoped to win when it made its pact with the devil. The nomination in Alabama of Roy Moore for U.S. Senate offered the party a chance to reconsider whether the prospect of supporting the team, and the incrementally higher prospects of enacting some tax cuts and social spending rollbacks, is worth the cost of elevating a dangerously unhinged demagogue for public office. The entire party, without any apparent hesitation, is leaping at the chance to make the same deal again.”
“Moore is hardly a carbon copy of Trump. He is religious where Trump is secular, fanatical where Trump is cynical. But he shares the president’s two most pertinent attributes. First, Moore is a purveyor of paranoid conspiracy theories, such as the belief that Sharia law has taken hold in American communities, or that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Second, and more distinctly, he is not a small-d democrat.”
“Republicans on Wednesday will propose slashing tax rates for the wealthy, middle class and businesses, while also preserving popular tax deductions that encourage buying homes and giving to charity,” according to a 9-page document obtained by the Washington Post.
“But the document… leaves many key questions unanswered. In it, the White House and Republican congressional leaders do not identify the numerous tax breaks that they say will be removed in order to offset some of the trillions of dollars in revenue lost by cutting tax rates.”
For members: Who Knew Tax Reform Could Be So Complicated?
A new CNN poll finds that only 20% of registered voters want most members re-elected while 70% would rather the majority of members not return to Congress.
Also interesting: Just 30% of Republican voters say they want to see most members reelected.
Jonathan Bernstein: “Sure, Trump is the least popular president of the polling era in terms of his first 250 days. But Republicans were always going to be hesitant to dismiss the president’s popularity — especially in Republican primaries — in part because Trump’s nomination and election was such a surprise, and in part because Trump did it with awful poll numbers.”
“Trump’s utter inability to move the polls despite being very visible in his support for Strange will remove some, and perhaps quite a bit, of the belief among Republican elites that Trump has some sort of special connection with their constituents. Indeed, Moore won by a larger margin in the runoff than he did in the first-round election. Which means they’ll be less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt when deciding whether to do what he wants.”
“I bet the walls of the Oval Office are filled with dozens of tiny little fist holes today.”
— Jimmy Kimmel, in his monologue on the GOP failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act once again.
First Read: “While most eyes were on Alabama’s Senate runoff last night, two state special elections last night shouldn’t be overlooked — and they held good news for Democrats. In the Miami area, Democrat Annette Taddeo beat state representative (and former Apprentice candidate!) Jose Felix Diaz to pick up a closely-contested state Senate seat. The area was carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the seat was last won by a double-digit margin by Republican Sen. Frank Artiles, who was forced to resign after making racist remarks. (Republicans did hang on to Diaz’s House seat, which he had to vacate to run against Taddeo.)”
“More surprising than the Florida win, however, was Democrats’upset in a New Hampshire House race, where first-time candidate Kari Lerner snagged a formerly GOP-held seat in an area won by Donald Trump by nearly 20 points in 2016. The victories make a total of eight state legislative seats flipped from red to blue this cycle.”
For members: A double-digit swing towards Democrats since November.
Mike Allen: “In private, President Trump has taken to physically mocking M&M: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (slumped shoulders; lethargic body language) and Sen. John McCain (imitating the thumbs-down of his historic health-care vote).”
“Trump is venting about his frustration with what he considers failed leadership by Senate Republicans as he takes his lumps this week in wars with, well, everyone… All this has left Trump isolated inside his White House at a time when he needs muscle with the Hill and juice with the public to try to pass tax reform.”
“With his stoking of the culture war and bombastic style amid national and global turbulence, Trump continues to make every issue about himself — at the very time that he most needs friends.”
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 57% of Americans disagree with President Trump’s assertion that football players should be fired for kneeling during the national anthem, even though most say they would personally stand during the song.
“President Trump is expected to tout the Republicans’ new tax blueprint as one of the biggest tax cuts in recent American history at a Wednesday rally in Indiana – but Republican lawmakers, lobbyists and others are worried about exactly what he’ll say,” Politico reports.
Said one person close to the discussions: “He’s the one guy left in Washington who still wants a 15% corporate rate. They could put 20% down on paper and he could go out and say 15% anyway. He goes to these tax meetings and people just hammer him but he still wants 15%.”
“After enthusiastically endorsing an Alabama senator’s campaign for re-election, President Trump distanced himself on Tuesday night from the candidate’s loss in the most Trumpian way possible: He deleted his supportive tweets,” the New York Times reports.
“Hours after Senator Luther Strange, a Republican from Alabama, lost in Tuesday’s primary runoff, Mr. Trump excised at least three favorable Twitter posts, including one sent Tuesday morning.”
Washington Post: “The Kentucky Republican had to abandon, again, an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act amid an uprising from the more moderate wing of the GOP caucus. Then he learned that one of his most influential Republican chairman would not run for reelection next year, setting up a potentially divisive race to succeed the senator.”
“Finally, before 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, McConnell suffered the final indignity: His preferred candidate in Alabama, Sen. Luther Strange (R), lost the GOP nomination in embarrassing fashion to a conservative insurgent who vowed that his victory would send a message that McConnell and his allies should ‘run scared for a while.'”
Mike Allen: “The Republican establishment is so weak that even when it has Trump on its side, as it did in Alabama, is can’t beat the Trumpers.”
Politico: “For Mitch McConnell, Tuesday was about as bad as it could get.”
USA Today: “Trump will make the announcement alongside Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat planning to travel with the president, and in tandem with the plan’s release by Republican negotiators on Capitol Hill. Donnelly is considered one of the most endangered Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018; he will make the trip unless he is needed in Washington for Senate votes.”
“Trump told dinner attendees that he thought a previous event in North Dakota, where he was accompanied by that state’s Democratic senator, Heidi Heitkamp, was a success and that he wants to model future events off it. Yet one Democrat who attended the Tuesday meeting with Trump said Democrats haven’t been consulted on a plan that will favor the wealthy, create more incentives to ship jobs overseas and force cuts to Medicare and Social Security.”
“When Donald Trump’s campaign chairman offered private briefings to a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin last year, he wasn’t only appealing to a superpower, he was pursuing a personal mission: the end to a costly dispute over a failed business deal,” Bloomberg reports.
“The campaign’s chairman, Paul Manafort, wanted a meeting in hopes of resolving a long-simmering dispute with the Russian, said two people familiar with the offer.”
“The stunning defeat of President Trump’s chosen Senate candidate in Alabama on Tuesday amounted to a political lightning strike — setting the stage for a worsening Republican civil war that could have profound effects on next year’s midterm elections and undermine Trump’s clout with his core voters,” the Washington Post reports.
“The GOP primary victory by conservative firebrand Roy Moore over Sen. Luther Strange could also produce a stampede of Republican retirements in the coming months and an energized swarm of challengers.”
Axios: Sen. Bob Corker, a mainstream Republican, announced his retirement today, and several other sitting Republicans are facing primary challengers from the right. So will there be a populist surge in 2018 GOP primaries?”
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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