Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R) responded to a top vaccine scientist’s tweets about vaccination exemptions by accusing him of ‘sorcery,'” The Hill reports.
Said Strickland: “Parental rights mean more to us than your self enriching ‘science.’”
He continued: “Make the case for your sorcery to consumers on your own dime. Like every other business. Quit using the heavy hand of government to make your business profitable through mandates and immunity. It’s disgusting.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) “said he will sign a bill that would require ex-felons in the state, who were granted the right to vote in a referendum last fall, to pay all financial obligations before they can head to the polls,” CNN reports.
Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. denied to Fox Radio asking Michael Cohen to intervene in a case where someone reportedly claimed to possess racy “personal” photos that were potentially embarrassing to Falwell and his wife.
Falwell insisted that “no compromising or embarrassing photos” of himself existed.
He added: “While we have a long-standing friendship with Michael Cohen, we never engaged or paid Cohen to represent us in any legal or other professional capacity, and Cohen did not ever resolve any legal matter on our behalf.”
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Playbook: “Consider what’s going on in the oversight realm — the back and forth between the administration and Congress, lawsuits in the offing and impeachment looking incrementally more likely — and ask yourself this question: What can Congress possibly get done?”
“Here’s what needs to be acccomplished in the coming months: finalizing a disaster aid package, lifting the debt limit and, in less than five months, passing a government funding bill. Will the oversight wars affect Democrats’ ability to do basic business with the president? We suspect they will.”
“Remember what people want to accomplish: Infrastructure — but that seems unlikely, two weeks before the president is meant to lay out how he plans to pay for the $2 trillion plan. President Trump wants a drug pricing reform bill. And the White House still has designs on replacing NAFTA with the USMCA. The mood and the vibe on the Hill is as bad as it has been in some time.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) broke the “home state rule” and endorsed Joe Biden over fellow Californian, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), the Washington Examiner reports.
Said Feinstein: “I’ve known Joe Biden for 20 years. When he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he made me the first woman. We have a longstanding relationship that dates way back. I love Kamala, I appreciate her, but she has known about this for some time. But that’s what I’m going to do. I feel very loyal to him.”
A new Pew Research survey finds that 47% of white Republicans say it would bother them “some” or “a lot” to “hear people speak a language other than English in a public place.”
Just 18% of white Democrats said they would be similarly bothered.
Amy Walter: “While political pros and cable TV talkers are debating the ‘electability’ game, they are mostly making it more than it really is. The debate over ‘electability’ at this stage of the game is still based on what happened in the last one. A lot of Democrats look at Biden and think he would’ve won in 2016 and as such see him as the safest choice for 2020. If however, Biden starts to look like a risky bet (he stumbles in a debate, bumbles on the trail, etc) the rationale on which is campaign is based collapses.”
“The winner of the 2020 primary will be the candidate who can prove he/she is best suited for the unique challenges of the upcoming campaign, not the one who is still fighting over what they should do the same/differently from 2016.”
“The Senate on Wednesday confirmed President Trump’s pick for an influential circuit court despite neither home-state senator returning a blue slip,” The Hill reports.
“The confirmation of Joseph Bianco marks the third circuit court judge to ever be confirmed without a blue slip, a sheet of paper that indicates if a home-state senator supports a nominee… The blue-slip rule — a precedent upheld by Senate tradition — has historically allowed a home-state senator to stop a lower-court nominee by refusing to return the blue slip to the Judiciary Committee.”
Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends that the New York Times report showing President Trump losing $1.2 billion over ten years was “pretty impressive” and showed how much he had accomplished.
Said Earhardt: “If anything, you read this and you’re like, wow, it’s pretty impressive, all the things that he’s done in his life. It’s beyond what most of us could ever achieve.”
Added co-host Brian Kilmeade: “I can’t imagine having that much money and spending that much money and being in debt. For him, it makes sense, he’s buying now, building it up because he had confidence… That’s what he has done through his entire life.”
Related for members: Fox News Has Saved Donald Trump
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “structures her stump speech around two themes — truth and justice — meant to evoke her career as a barrier-breaking prosecutor and cultivate a reputation as a fearless public advocate,” the New York Times reports.
“But when Ms. Harris swept into Detroit to address an NAACP banquet on Sunday night, she added something new… she replaced her usual recitation of Democratic policies with an attack on President Trump, accusing him of enabling bigotry and divisiveness.”
“With that, Ms. Harris was nodding to a political truth: She is attempting to reset her campaign after stagnating in Democratic primary polls, using her strengths as a prosecutor — which were on display during a recent face-off with Attorney General William Barr — to mount a sharp indictment of Mr. Trump.”
President Trump’s campaign won’t respond “to numerous inquiries about whether it has implemented a policy about foreign interference — including the use of information stolen or hacked by a foreign power and whether aides must formally report outreach from foreigners,” Politico reports.
Daily Beast: “When former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz first declared that he was entertaining the idea of running for president, he was ubiquitous on the political scene, sitting for interviews with major outlets, appearing at buzzy conferences, and making various stops for a book tour across the country in which he’d persistently tease his White House ambitions.”
“But in the past two weeks, Schultz has largely disappeared, leaving the impression that the presidential campaign he was flirting with won’t actually come to fruition.”
“The White House has asserted executive privilege over the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, in its latest confrontation with Congress,” the Washington Post reports.
New York Times: “The assertion, Mr. Trump’s first use of the secrecy powers as president, came as the House Judiciary Committee is expected to vote Wednesday morning to recommend the House of Representatives hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena for the same material.”
A new JMC Analytics survey in Louisiana finds Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) is leading his Republican gubernatorial challengers by several points in a new poll, but is still well short of the 50% needed to win re-election.
Edwards leads with 38%, followed by Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-LA) at 23% and Eddie Rispone at 7%. Another 32% are still undecided.
Edwards is also leading Abraham and Rispone in runoff scenarios, which pollster John Couvillon deems likely.
ABC News: “In 2016, with 100 days until Election Day, the Trump campaign’s ground game in Florida was virtually nonexistent: Zero offices were up and running in the key swing state and little to no strategy was in place to maximize voter turnout. Nevertheless, thanks in part to major last-minute shifts in approach, the president flipped the state red, for the first time since George W. Bush won it in 2004, with just 1.2% more votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.”
“This time, the reelection team is getting a head start to ensure Florida, the president’s second home, isn’t such a nail biter. The campaign has key staff already in place nearly a year and half before voters head to the polls in 2020 and thousands of volunteers ready to hit the pavement for the president.”
The consensus electoral map shows Florida is a Toss Up once again.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that President Trump is building his own case for impeachment by continuing to stonewall lawmakers in their demand for testimony and documents from the White House, Politico reports.
Said Pelosi: “He’s becoming self-impeachable in terms of some of the things he’s doing.”
She added: “Every single day, whether it’s obstruction, obstruction, obstruction, obstruction of having people come to the table with facts or ignoring subpoenas. Every single day, the president is making a case.”
“President Trump’s aggressive trade policies are running headlong into his campaign for reelection,” the Washington Post reports.
“As Trump prepares to run on the economy, his threat to increase tariffs on imports from China has sent the stock market diving and undercut a stretch of positive economic news. U.S. farmers and exporters, already bearing the brunt of China’s retaliatory tariffs, now face the prospect of an escalated trade war in which states that Trump needs to win reelection will be in the crosshairs.”
“The trade war has also exposed a rift inside the White House and among the president’s allies — with some officials pushing for a quick resolution to calm the markets ahead of 2020, and others warning the president that a weak deal with China could leave him politically vulnerable.”
“What Leader McConnell did today on the floor was nothing short of despicable, to say it’s over, case closed, when we haven’t even begun to investigate the report.”
— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), in a MSNBC interview.
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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