“The president’s ability to nominate judges to lifetime appointments on the federal courts never came up during the two nights of debate this week involving the Democratic candidates,” the Washington Post reports.
“Over those same two days, the Senate confirmed 13 of President Trump’s judicial nominees, giving Republicans a remarkable 144 judicial appointments since his inauguration, allowing him to reshape the courts and their decisions for decades.”
Ron Brownstein: “After two nights of spirited debate in Detroit, many Democrats may be feeling anxious: Their 2020 front-runner didn’t entirely mollify concerns about his political skills, and his three major rivals positioned themselves in ways that could leave the party vulnerable in the general election.”
“Joe Biden, under fire from virtually every other candidate on the stage, delivered a more vigorous performance… With only a few exceptions, Biden also held to his moderate positioning on the major issues dividing the field. But he served up enough rhetorical stumbles and moments of stammering uncertainty to sustain the concerns of those who worry about his capacity to handle a demanding general-election campaign against Donald Trump.”
“Meanwhile, over the two debate nights, the three candidates closest to Biden in the polls — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris — reaffirmed their commitment to progressive positions, on issues from health care to immigration, that surveys show face opposition from a clear majority of Americans.”
President Trump said he will impose new tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese imports starting next month, ending brief ceasefire in trade war, the Washington Post reports.
“The 10 percent import penalty will start September 1, a cost that would mean almost all goods sent to the United States from China would face tariffs. The tariffs could push the cost of many consumer products higher in the second half of the year.”
The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.
“The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).”
Corey Lewandowski is considering a 2020 run for a U.S. Senate seat in New Hampshire now held by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Reuters reports.
“Lewandowski ran Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 for a time and has remained close to Trump throughout the president’s first years in office.”
“The Senate voted 67-28 to pass a $2.7 trillion budget deal Thursday that would suspend the debt ceiling through 2021, sending the package to President Trump’s desk after the House passed it last week,” Axios reports.
“The Congressional Budget Office projected that the national debt would reach ‘unprecedented levels’ in the next 30 years should laws remain the same. It exceeded $22 trillion in February, and the federal deficit has grown 23% this fiscal year.”
“Facebook said it had found evidence of something cyber security and national security experts have long suspected: people tied to the government of Saudi Arabia have been running covert campaigns on Facebook and Instagram in a bid to prop up support for the kingdom and attack its enemies,” CNN reports.
“Thursday’s announcement is Facebook’s first public disclosure of its having found and taken down a covert influence campaign linked to the Saudi government. The people behind the campaign — who Facebook did not name but said were linked to the Saudi government — ran an expansive operation involving hundreds of Facebook pages and accounts.”
New York Times: “That Survivor state of things — a desperate contest among a crowded field to avoid elimination — was not wholly of CNN’s making. It was created in part by the party’s decision to set the bar for the early debates at ankle height, and by the ability of a couple dozen Democrats to imagine themselves in the Oval Office, or at least imagine themselves imagining it.”
“And now, they were facing a mass group culling, since the tighter rules for the September debates will likely leave half or more of them out. Inevitably, people would act out to stand out.”
“That’s reality TV, but it’s also the hard reality of the race.”
Tax Policy Center: “The US economy grew robustly in late 2017, perhaps partly due to expectations for a coming tax cut (which Congress passed in late December of that year). But the rate of growth peaked in the second quarter of 2018 and has been slowing ever since. Last Friday, the government estimated that, after adjusting for inflation, the economy grew at an annual rate of about 2.1 percent in the second quarter.”
“Indeed, the growth rate in the April to June 2019 period was below the 2.3 percent average annual rate over the past decade.”
“President Trump’s pick for managing federal lands doesn’t think the federal government should have any,” the Washington Post reports.
“This week, Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed an order making the Wyoming native William Perry Pendley the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management… By placing Pendley in charge of the agency, Bernhardt has installed a longtime crusader for curtailing the federal government’s control of public lands.”
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has written a memoir that will describe his role in the accumulation of metadata and the “crisis of conscience” that led him to steal a trove of files in 2013 and share them with reporters, the AP reports.
Snowden, who faces U.S. charges that could land him in prison, is currently living in exile in Moscow.
Former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn told the BBC that President Trump’s trade war with China is backfiring and hurting the U.S. economy.
Said Cohn: “When you build plant equipment, you’re buying steel, you’re buying aluminium, you’re buying imported products and then we put tariffs on those, so literally the tax incentive we gave you with one hand was taken away with the other hand.”
He added: “So we are not seeing the manufacturing job creation.”
Filmmaker Michael Moore told MSNBC that there is only one candidate up to the challenge to “crush” President Trump in 2020.
Said Moore: “In fact, it is Obama — Michelle Obama. Everybody watching this right now knows she is a beloved American and she would go in there and she would beat him.”
“The question is no longer whether the House should vote to proceed with a formal impeachment inquiry. The inquiry has already begun.”
— Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), announcing his support for an impeachment inquiry in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
First Read: “So if the first round of Dem debates underscored how far to the left the party has moved since Barack Obama left office, the second round highlighted how willing they are to attack one another, even when they agree on the vast majority of issues.”
“Of course, politics ain’t beanbag. And presidential debates are supposed to produce conflict and disagreement.”
“But play out seven or eight more months of these same kinds of debates, and you can see why an incumbent president — especially one who gets to avoid a real primary challenge — has a significant advantage.”
Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren suggested in a tweet that Sen. Kamala Harris “slept her way to the top” when she had a relationship in the mid-1990s with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
Daily Beast: “Lahren was swiftly condemned for invoking Harris’ personal relationship to dismiss the 2020 candidate’s long record in elected office, rising from San Francisco district attorney to California’s attorney general before being elected to the U.S. Senate. But while the tweet attracted its share of liberal critics, some of Lahren’s own colleagues at Fox News openly expressed disgust at her comments.”
Politico: “More than half of House Democrats say they would vote to launch impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, a crucial threshold that backers say will require Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reconsider her steadfast opposition.”
“Though Pelosi has given no indication that even a majority of Democrats embracing impeachment proceedings would shift her view, supporters of an inquiry argue that crossing the halfway mark among Democrats will be a symbolic boost that could shift the political dynamic.”
For members: The Five Realities of Impeachment
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.