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Sen. Mitt Romney told Axios that he believes Republican lawmakers stay quiet on their Trump criticisms for fear of losing the Senate or the presidency to Democrats, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Said Romney: “They don’t want to do something which makes it more likely for Elizabeth Warren to become president or for us to lose the Senate. So they don’t want to go out and criticize the leader of our party because they feel that might have the consequence of hurting our country longer term.”
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Sunday her campaign will release a plan to pay for the Medicare-for-all health proposal she’s backed ‘in the next few weeks,’ but she continued to deflect questions about whether middle-class taxes would go up,” the Washington Post reports.
“That promise comes after weeks of attacks from other Democratic candidates in the presidential race, who say Warren is not being honest with voters about how she would fund the massive health-care plan.”
“The lag in unveiling a payment plan speaks to the difficult position Warren is in: She can either offer some kind of large tax above her wealth tax on the very rich or be pegged as evasive about a major element of her platform. Both carry political risks.”
Sen. Mitt Romney told Axios he opposes cutting the capital gains tax rate for the rich.
Said Romney: “I believe in low tax rates. I also don’t think that higher-income people should have a lower tax rate than lower-income people. I don’t believe in continuing to cut capital gains tax rates, even though people say, ‘Well, that’ll encourage the growth of the economy.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, but it also puts more money in the wealthiest Americans, and that’s simply not fair.'”
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“The Justice Department confirmed Sunday that President Trump’s son Donald Jr. and former White House Counsel Don McGahn were never called before a grand jury that heard witnesses called by Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” Politico reports.
“The disclosure was set in motion by U.S District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s ruling last week that Justice Department attorneys had deleted too much information from a court filing last month in an ongoing legal dispute over Attorney General Bill Barr’s refusal to share with House lawmakers grand jury-related information in Mueller’s final report.”
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a surprise congressional visit to Jordan over the weekend, highlighting her sharp disagreement with President Trump over policy in a Middle East roiled by Trump’s abrupt removal of U.S. troops from northern Syria and Turkey’s subsequent attacks on Kurdish enclaves,” the Washington Post reports.
“The professional future of Indiana’s attorney general is at stake with a disciplinary hearing that threatens his law license after allegations that he drunkenly groped four women at a bar last year,” the AP reports.
“A former state Supreme Court justice will open a perhaps weeklong hearing Monday on the professional misconduct complaint against Republican Curtis Hill. Hill disputes the claims from a state lawmaker and three legislative staffers that he inappropriately touched their backs or buttocks during a party at an Indianapolis bar celebrating the end of the 2018 legislative session.”
Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon told New York Post that impeachment is a “mortal threat” to Donald Trump’s presidency and the White House needs to start taking it more seriously.
Said Bannon: “This is serious. As sure as the turning of the earth, he is going to be impeached by Pelosi in the next six weeks. Nancy Pelosi is very focused.”
He added: “The problem we have is that the president needs a team around him and somebody has got to step up and make a play. Trump can’t do everything. There is just no coordination with the team.
Wall Street Journal: “The U.K. Parliament’s decision on Saturday to postpone a final vote on the country’s exit from the European Union marks the latest geopolitical development likely to swing financial markets, highlighting the extreme levels of uncertainty that some investors worry isn’t being properly accounted for with U.S. stocks near all-time highs.”
Politico: “Trump constantly brags about his properties around the globe when he speaks with foreign leaders in person or by phone, even more than the public instances witnessed out in the open, according to three people familiar with Trump’s conversations with foreign officials. The remarks are permeating every membrane of his presidency so much that they’ve left aides and allies mastering verbal jiu-jitsu to defend his unprecedented approach to fusing personal business interests with his position in high office.”
“The interactions have led House Democrats — who have already launched an impeachment inquiry into whether Trump is illegally profiting off the presidency — and sometimes even his own staff to question whether his namesake businesses are influencing U.S. foreign policy.”
Ron Chernow: “President Trump has described the impeachment proceedings as a ‘coup,’ and his White House counsel has termed them ‘unconstitutional.’ This would come as a surprise to Alexander Hamilton, who wrote not only the 11 essays in The Federalist outlining and defending the powers of the presidency, but also the two essays devoted to impeachment.”
“There seems little doubt, given his writings on the presidency, that Hamilton would have been aghast at Trump’s behavior and appalled by his invitation to foreign actors to meddle in our elections. As a result, he would most certainly have endorsed the current impeachment inquiry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Trump embodies Hamilton’s worst fears about the kind of person who might someday head the government.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC News that he never saw the kind of quid pro quo that acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney referred to on Thursday with regard to the decision-making process he was involved in.
Said Pompeo: “I’ll leave to the chief of staff to explain what it is he said.”
New York Times: “On any given day, the Trump campaign is plastering ads all over Facebook, YouTube and the millions of sites served by Google, hitting the kind of incendiary themes — immigrant invaders, the corrupt media — that play best on platforms where algorithms favor outrage and political campaigns are free to disregard facts.”
“Even seemingly ominous developments for Mr. Trump become fodder for his campaign. When news broke last month that congressional Democrats were opening an impeachment inquiry, the campaign responded with an advertising blitz aimed at firing up the president’s base.”
Tatiana Stanovaya: “As impeachment proceedings loom over President Trump, some observers have speculated that Russia, actively enjoying sowing chaos in the United States, is delighted by the dysfunction tearing apart the U.S. government. Nineteen Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signed a joint letter to the Wall Street Journal that was published on the paper’s op-ed page last month with the headline, ‘Impeachment Is What Vladimir Putin Wants.’ The GOP members of Congress wrote, ‘His goal, now and before the 2016 election, has been to pit Americans against one another and erode confidence in our democratic process.'”
“That might be true up to a point. But the impeachment investigation might be a bit too chaotic, even for Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
“There are many ways in which the Ukraine affair is terrifying the Kremlin, because it threatens to unwind what little progress Russia has made in recent years and undercuts its wider goals. Putin’s long-term goal is pretty clear: He wants the United States to conclude a ‘big deal’ that would revise the outcome of the Cold War and limit the strategic threat that he believes the West poses to Russia through its military expansion, double standards in foreign affairs and liberal values.”
McKay Coppins: “In the nine years I’ve been covering Romney, I’ve never seen him quite so liberated. Unconstrained by consultants, unconcerned about reelection, he is thinking about things such as legacy, and inheritance, and the grand sweep of history. Here, in the twilight of his career, he seems to sense—in a way that eludes many of his colleagues—that he’ll be remembered for what he does in this combustible moment.”
Said Romney: “I do think people will view this as an inflection point in American history.”
He added: “I don’t look at myself as being a historical figure, but I do think these are critical times. And I hope that what I’m doing will open the way for people to take a different path.”
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney insisted he never said the Trump administration never demanded a quid pro quo between U.S. military aid and Ukraine launching investigations into Joe Biden during an absolutely brutal interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.
Mulvaney continued making this point even after Wallace showed video of him doing so.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper told the Wall Street Journal that all of the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops ordered to leave northeastern Syria will move to western Iraq and will conduct U.S. operations against the Islamic State extremist group from there.
However, Esper said the Pentagon had yet to work out exactly how it would conduct its campaign outside of Syria.
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News that President Trump was “honestly surprised” at the level of pushback he received from the decision to choose his own Doral resort in Miami as the site of next year’s G7 summit, which he walked back on Saturday night.
Josh Kraushaar: “Buried in the Washington drama of impeachment, corruption, and foreign policy chaos this past week was a ground-shaking bit of news: New polling and fundraising figures show that Mitch McConnell’s hold on the Senate majority is looking awfully precarious. Indeed, the pathway for a narrow Democratic takeover of the upper chamber is looking clearer than ever.”
“Four Republican senators were outraised by their Democratic challengers in the third fundraising quarter, with three of them representing battleground states (Iowa, Maine, and Arizona) that Republicans will need to win to maintain power. And in North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis raised only $1.2 million, an underwhelming sum for a senator facing a credible primary threat and an expensive general election ahead. All four swing-state senators also are viewed unfavorably by their constituents according to new quarterly Morning Consult polling, underscoring the sudden shift in support away from Republicans.”
CNBC: Key incumbents losing the money battle.
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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