Washington Post: “Key House campaigns reported massive fundraising hauls for this early stage of the campaign cycle, according to federal disclosures filed this past week by congressional campaigns, with all Democratic freshmen but one outraising their declared Republican challengers and several GOP incumbents lapped by Democratic opponents.”
“All told, Democratic House candidates raised $17.6 million more than Republicans between April and June.”
New York Times: “In the first Obama term, which included a large government stimulus package to jump-start job creation in the depths of the recession, discretionary spending on military and domestic items rose by about 3 percent per year, on average. In his second term, such spending declined by an annual average of nearly 2 percent.”
“Mr. Trump is currently on pace to increase discretionary spending by an average of nearly 4 percent per year.”
Playbook: “Capitol Hill has reached a budget deal. We say it like that because we do not yet have definitive evidence that President Trump is supporting this agreement. He tweeted that he was ‘pleased to announce that a deal has been struck’ and said it was a ‘real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets!'”
“But the tweets from Trump did not explicitly say he supported it — and in this era of governing, that matters, because one person speaks for the president, and that’s him. (You might notice that press releases from folks like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did not say they would support the bill — a nod to the fact that Trump could change his mind.) The leadership in both parties had expected a more forceful endorsement from Trump, several sources told us.”
“We asked the White House for clarification Monday — was the president in favor of this bill? They didn’t answer, but many others in the White House conceded to us that, indeed, the president needed to see how this all played in the public sphere.”
Gideon Rachman: “It struck me as significant that we had both been reading about the 1930s to try and make sense of 2019. Neither of us believe that Mr Johnson or Donald Trump are reincarnations of Hitler or Mussolini. But we had both found Haffner’s memoir interesting for another, more subtle, reason. It provides an extraordinary insight into what it feels like to live through a period of political turmoil.”
“Haffner’s memoir was written in 1939 — just before the outbreak of the second world war and the Holocaust. He was seven at the start of the first world war in 1914 and left Germany to go into exile in 1938. His book (which was only discovered by his son in 1999, as he cleared up his father’s papers after his death), provides a contemporary sense of what it felt like to watch the Nazis rise to power — and the fears, doubts and moral dilemmas that are thrown up as a new and disturbing kind of politics emerges.”
India has denied that PM Narendra Modi asked President Trump to mediate in the longstanding Kashmir conflict with Pakistan, the BBC reports.
“Trump’s claim that he had been asked came as he hosted Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan at the White House.”
“No, I don’t regard myself a racist. The real racists are the ones who call other people racists.”
— Former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, on Face the Nation in 1968.
“President Trump recently spoke to top House Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes about replacements for the country’s intelligence chief — the latest sign that Dan Coats’ tenure may be short-lived,” Politico reports.
“Nunes, who grabbed national attention with his controversial allegations of Obama administration surveillance abuses, met with Trump and other senior White House officials last week to discuss who could take over for Coats at the Office of Director of National Intelligence.”
New York Times: “Mr. Trump’s history of remaining glued to television news — especially when the coverage is about him — suggests that he is certain to be tuned in as Democrats on Capitol Hill use Mr. Mueller’s appearance to amplify the damning report about the president and the people in his orbit.”
“But ahead of the congressional hearings, Mr. Trump and his aides sought to dismiss them as nothing more than a desperate attempt to elicit from Mr. Mueller something that could justify impeachment proceedings.”
Politico: “With a new bipartisan budget deal that does nothing to cut federal spending, Trump is on track for another $1 trillion deficit this year. And there’s no reason to believe the following fiscal year will be any different, with ballooning deficits from higher spending, the 2017 tax cuts — Trump’s signature legislative achievement, which slashed revenue — and none of the entitlement reforms long preached by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill.”
“Candidate Trump bragged that he would pay off the entire federal debt in eight years, but President Trump is governing as if deficits don’t matter.”
Former Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), “who resigned amid ethics investigations in 2011, finalized a divorce from his wife of 31 years last week,” the Las Vegas Review Journal reports.
“Ensign’s political career started to unravel after revelations that he’d had an affair with Cindy Hampton, the wife of his Senate administrative aide, Doug Hampton. Ensign dismissed Doug Hampton from his Senate office after the affair came to light, and Ensign’s parents made a $96,000 payment to the Hampton family that Doug Hampton said was a severance payment.”
President Trump announced that Congress and the White House had reached a two-year budget deal after days of furious negotiating, The Hill reports.
“It’s a significant win for Mnuchin and Pelosi, who have spoken several times over the past two weeks as well as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who took a back seat in the talks but has been pushing the White House to accept a two-year deal.”
Vice President Mike Pence abruptly canceled a trip to New Hampshire this month to avoid shaking hands with an alleged interstate drug dealer, Politico reports.
White House officials have declined to explain why Pence aborted the July 2 trip, saying only that the reason would eventually become known.
“Justice Department officials have communicated to Robert Mueller that the department expects him to limit his congressional testimony this week to the public findings of his 448-page report,” Politico reports.
“In extensive discussions since the former special counsel was subpoenaed to testify on June 25, department officials have emphasized that they consider any evidence he gathered throughout the course of his investigation to be ‘presumptively privileged’ and shielded from public disclosure.”
“The Trump administration on Tuesday will significantly expand its power to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who have illegally entered the United States within the past two years, using a fast-track deportation process that bypasses immigration judges,” the Washington Post reports.
“Officials are calling the new strategy, which will take effect immediately, a ‘necessary response’ to the influx of Central Americans and others at the southern border. It will allow immigration authorities to quickly remove immigrants from anywhere they encounter them across the United States, and they expect the approach will help alleviate the nation’s immigration-court backlog and free up space in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails.”
Wall Street Journal: “Advocates for immigrants have vowed to challenge the Trump initiatives in the courts.”
President Trump insisted that he wouldn’t be watching former special counsel Robert Mueller’s upcoming congressional testimony, then conceded he might watch “a little bit,” USA Today reports.
President Trump touted a secret plan to win the war in Afghanistan “in a week” at a tremendous cost to life, but insisted he would rather work with regional partners to “extricate” U.S. troops and bring to a close the nearly two-decade-long military conflict, Politico reports.
Said Trump: “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.”
He added: “I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone. It would be over in — literally in ten days. And I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go that route.”
President Trump’s reelection campaign has sold more than 140,000 plastic straws in just a few days, The Hill reports.
The campaign first promoted the plastic straws last week in response to what the campaign website calls an alternative to “liberal paper straws.”
See Green That Life for why plastic straws are a much bigger problem than you might think.
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.