“If you’re going to be Andrew Jackson, there will be consequences, but he will be called ‘the great disrupter.’ He gets up every morning and thinks, ‘What can I disrupt?’ He’s not going to back off.”
— Newt Gingrich, quoted by the Washington Post, on President Trump.
President Trump lashed out at the media for publishing “numerous phony stories.”
Tweeted Trump: “The LameStream Media had a very bad week. They pushed numerous phony stories and got caught, especially The Failing New York Times, which has lost more money over the last 10 years than any paper in history, and The Amazon Washington Post. They are The Enemy of the People!”
He added: “The Fake News Media nowadays not only doesn’t check for the accuracy of the facts, they knowingly make up the facts. They even make up sources in order to protect their partners, the Democrats. It is so wrong, but they don’t even care anymore. They have gone totally CRAZY!!!”
“So many people seem to think that judges are just like politicians with robes. Rubbish.”
— Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, quoted by the Salt Lake Tribune.
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Dan Balz: “America’s democratic system, the world’s oldest, is said to be resilient, with institutions strong enough to defend against runaway actors and with checks and balances designed to prevent too much power from building up in any one place or with any one person. Earlier in Trump’s presidency, that appeared to be the case. Right now, however, that is in question.”
“When the president asserts executive privilege to prevent testimony before Congress by a private citizen who never was on the government payroll — as happened this past week when Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee — it is clear how much Trump is prepared to test his belief that his powers are unlimited. ‘I have the right to do whatever I want as president,’ Trump once said, and that appears to be the basis upon which he is operating.”
“Three years into his presidency, Trump has helped to reveal the weaknesses of the system. In the executive branch, and especially in the White House, there are few if any officials willing to challenge and check the president. To the extent that administration officials could do that, those who tried are gone. He has also demonstrated the degree to which Congress is dependent on a president who operates with some respect for the norms of the system created by the Founding Fathers.”
Elizabeth Warren has surged in Iowa, narrowly overtaking Joe Biden and distancing herself from fellow progressive Bernie Sanders, the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows.
Warren leads with 22%, followed by Joe Biden at 20%, Bernie Sanders at 11%, Pete Buttigieg at 9%, Kamala Harris at 6%, Amy Klobuchar at 3% and Cory Booker at 3%.
Polling at 2% are Tulsi Gabbard, Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang. Eight others are polling at 1% or less.
Said pollster Ann Selzer: “This is the first major shakeup. It’s the first time we’ve had someone other than Joe Biden at the top of the leader board.”
She added: “The data in this poll seem to suggest the field is narrowing, but my sense is there’s still opportunity aplenty. The leaders aren’t all that strong. The universe is not locked in.”
Bernie Sanders has parted ways with one of his deputy field directors in Iowa, Politico reports.
Lata’s departure is the latest in a series of staff shakeups in the critical early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Joe Biden accused President Trump of an “overwhelming abuse of power” over reports that he pressured Ukraine to open an investigation into him, CNN reports.
Said Biden: “Trump’s doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum and is using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.”
President Trump slammed Democrats in Congress for launching another “Witch Hunt” against him after reports that he urged Ukraine’s president to launch an investigation into Joe Biden.
Tweeted Trump: “Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone ‘bust’ on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it the Ukraine Witch Hunt, while at the same time trying to protect Sleepy Joe Biden. Will fail again!”
Sean Spicer launched a “campaign ad” for “Dancing with the Stars” votes.
Tom Nichols: “Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.”
“Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.”
“If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.”
Sen. Cory Booker must raise nearly $2 million in the next 10 days or the presidential candidate has no “legitimate long-term path forward,” according to a memo to staff from the campaign manager obtained by NBC News.
“The struggling candidate’s campaign manager, Addisu Demissie, warned that after weaker-than-expected fundraising in the early part of September, the campaign needs to rake in another $1.7 million before the last day of the financial quarter on Sept. 30.”
Washington Post: “That’s one of the key findings of an intensive report by Third Way, a center-left think tank that analyzed all 235 districts held by House Democrats to look at where the fault lines were not just for the House but also the Senate majority and the presidency in next year’s elections.”
“The result is a portrait of the Democratic coalition, from the rural edge of Kind’s western Wisconsin district to the inner-city neighborhoods of Tlaib’s Detroit-based district, that shows the path to victory at every level of power in Washington.”
Lenore Taylor: “I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.”
“I’d understood the dilemma of normalizing Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalize his full and alarming incoherence.”
“A president is sitting in the Oval Office, right now, who continues to commit crimes. He continues because he knows his Justice Department won’t act and believes Congress won’t either. Today’s news confirmed he thinks he’s above the law. If we do nothing, he’ll be right.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on Twitter.
George Conway and Neil Katyal: “It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. Given how Trump seems ever bent on putting himself above the law, something like what might have happened between him and Ukraine — abusing presidential authority for personal benefit — was almost inevitable. Yet if that is what occurred, part of the responsibility lies with Congress, which has failed to act on the blatant obstruction that Mueller detailed months ago.”
“Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean’s haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow. Congress bears the duty to use the tools provided by the Constitution to remove that cancer now, before it’s too late. As Elbridge Gerry put it at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” By now, Congress should know which one Trump is.”
Washington Post: “Much as he did three years ago — when he asked Russia to hack the emails of his Democratic rival — President Trump on Friday seemed to make a similar request of Ukraine, all but urging the Eastern European nation to investigate Joe Biden, his potential Democratic opponent.”
“For Trump, controversial public disclosures have became almost routine, with the president saying the potentially scandalous part aloud. It is a form of shamelessness worn as a badge of protection — on the implicit theory that the president’s alleged offenses can’t be that serious if he commits them in full public view.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi told NPR that she has not changed her mind on pursuing impeachment but is ready to change the law to restrain presidential power and make it clear that a sitting president can, in fact, be indicted.
Said Pelosi: “I do think that we will have to pass some laws that will have clarity for future presidents. A president should be indicted, if he’s committed a wrongdoing — any president. There is nothing anyplace that says the president should not be indicted.”
She added: “That’s something cooked up by the president’s lawyers. That’s what that is. But so that people will feel ‘OK, well, if he — if he does something wrong, he should be able to be indicted.'”
“The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again.”
— Hillary Clinton, on Twitter.
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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