Texas Tribune: “Bryant Young and Autumn Lanning grew disillusioned with O’Rourke and convinced he was not the true progressive they had imagined.”
“From oil policy to health care, these two young Beto exes said they never took the time to pore over votes and policy positions. Once they did — and O’Rourke went from Senate hopeful to presidential wannabe — they abandoned him and are now supporting reliable liberal Bernie Sanders in the race for the White House.”
“Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), one of the most vulnerable Republican senators in 2020, raised more than $1.1 million in itemized contributions during the first three months of the year. But less than 1 percent of that money came from her home state,” Roll Call reports.
Just 13 Maine residents gave Collins more than $200 in contributions.
CBS News: “With less than a week of tax season to go, plenty of taxpayers are still sorting through the new regulations signed into law by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But middle-class homeowners who live in high-tax areas are finding themselves particularly hard-hit. Many owe thousands this year, rather than the refunds they usually received.”
“Their problem sits with the new deduction cap on state and local taxes, which the law caps at $10,000. Before 2018, taxpayers were allowed to deduct their total combined state and local taxes from their federal taxes, softening the blow of high property and income taxes in states like New Jersey and California.”
“One of the GOP senators from Kris Kobach’s home state said Tuesday that the Senate would not be able to confirm the Kansas Republican if President Trump tapped him for a cabinet post,” the Kansas City Star reports.
“Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, has been mentioned as a potential candidate for an array of immigration-related positions after President Trump pulled his nominee for the director of Immigration Customs Enforcement and announced the departure of his secretary of Homeland Security.”
Said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS): “Don’t go there. We can’t confirm him.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) signaled that he won’t help Michael Cohen delay the start of his three-year prison sentence, even after the president’s former lawyer claimed he discovered troves of new records that could be useful to investigators, CNN reports.
Said Schiff: “I don’t get involved in sentencing matters as a practice. I never have in Congress and that’s been my policy.”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Congress that Treasury Department lawyers “consulted with the White House general counsel’s office about the potential release of President Trump’s tax returns before House Democrats formally requested the records,” the Washington Post reports.
“Mnuchin had not previously revealed that the White House was playing any official role in the Treasury Department’s decision on releasing Trump’s tax returns… The process is designed to be walled off from White House interference, in part because of corruption that took place during the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s.”
Larry Summers: “The appropriate response of the treasury secretary is very clear: Under a long-standing delegation order, the secretary does not get involved in taxpayer-specific matters and has delegated to the IRS commissioner… So for the secretary to seek to decide whether to pass on the president’s tax return to Congress would surely be inappropriate and probably illegal.”
Dana Millbank: “Nobody debased herself quite as often as Nielsen did in her quest to keep the job, defending Trump after the ‘shithole countries’ and Charlottesville scandals, enduring frequent rebukes from Trump and leaks about her imminent firing, embracing his incendiary language and enduring his extralegal instincts, swallowing her moral misgivings to embrace the family-separation policy (while denying any such policy existed), and implausibly claiming that children weren’t being put in cages.”
Michael Gerson: “The ouster of Nielsen — the implementer of some of the most unjust immigration policies since the internment of citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II — is further proof of President Trump’s ratchet-wrench theory of loyalty.”
“But the separation of crying migrant children from their parents as a deterrent, and the housing of children in prisonlike conditions, will be some of the most enduring political images of the Trump era. It says something about Nielsen that she took part in such practices. It says something about Trump that such actions were apparently too moderate and restrained for his taste.”
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces what is likely to be a tough re-election fight on Tuesday, his Likud party has confirmed reports that it hired and gave cameras to 1,200 polling-station observers in what it said was an effort to expose voter fraud, the Jerusalem Post reports.
Attorney General Bill Barr told the House Appropriations Committee that he would be in a position to release special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “within a week,” and that it would be color-coded and contain explanatory notes for redactions, Axios reports.
Tim Miller: “In a convergence of the tribalistic crazy that has infected our politics, the former vice president has managed to find himself a target of hungry, outraged opportunists across the spectrum who have had just about enough of his hair sniffing. Defenders of an unapologetic serial sexual assaulter, and the pussy-grabber-in-chief himself, spent last week gleefully pretending that they thought Biden was the real creep.”
“And certain socialist-curious Democrats were quick to call the Cancel Cops, obviously hoping that the fallout would knock Biden off his perch atop the Democratic primary polls.”
“But here’s the thing about these critics, left and right: Vanishingly few of them seem to sincerely believe that Biden’s enthusiastic shoulder rubbing would inhibit him from being a successful president.”
First Read: “Today’s election represents more than Benjamin Netanyahu trying to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister – and certainly more than President Trump trying to get his preferred choice (Netanyahu) to win.”
“At stake is arguably the future of the West Bank – after Netanyahu promised to extend sovereignty to parts of it if he’s re-elected.”
The Washington Post notes that final polls gave “an edge to the party led by Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief Benny Gantz.”
“While the polls suggest that Gantz’s party will win the most seats in parliament, Netanyahu still seems to be in a stronger position to assemble a governing coalition, which is what ultimately matters.”
Associated Press: “During a meeting with senior aides on the last Thursday in March, Trump demanded drastic action to make good on the threat he’d tweeted that morning: Shut the southern border. Curbing illegal immigration was his signature issue, he railed. Why couldn’t he deliver?”
“Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen urged the president to reconsider. Her agency had already diverted hundreds of border agents away from certain crossings to process migrant families elsewhere, creating what would soon become considerable bottlenecks. Closing ports completely, she reasoned, would only encourage migrants to cross elsewhere — illegally.”
“Trump wasn’t having it. Shut the ports at El Paso, Texas, at noon tomorrow, he ordered. End of meeting.”
“The directive set off a frantic behind-the scenes push to get Trump to change his mind, and he ultimately relented. But the episode launched a turbulent 12-day stretch that would lead to the eventual resignation of Nielsen, the potential dismissal of much of her agency’s top leadership and the beginning of a new phase in which immigration hard-liners at the White House are determined to wield considerably more influence over Homeland Security.”
“President Trump’s congressional allies are alarmed by his purge at the Department of Homeland Security — urging him not to fire more top officials and warning him how hard it will be to solve twin crises at the border and the federal agencies overseeing immigration policy.” Politico reports.
“The president’s frantic four days of bloodletting at DHS and other agencies blindsided senior Republicans who are already fretting about difficult confirmation battles ahead. Some are worried about the rising influence of top White House aide Stephen Miller. And after November elections in which suburban voters rejected Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda, the president is once again making it the centerpiece of the GOP’s platform.”
“National Democrats are ratcheting up their Texas offensive yet again ahead of 2020,” the Texas Tribune reports.
“The chairwoman of U.S. House Democratic campaign arm announced Tuesday morning that her committee will open a new satellite office in Austin. The move replicates the committee’s 2018 California playbook, when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had a substantive, on-the-ground presence in the Golden State and flipped seven U.S. House seats there.”
“Former FBI Director James Comey was a witness in the Mueller investigation and his meeting records on President Trump were of interest in the probe,” Axios reports.
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing a hotly contested bid for a fourth term, tweeted on the eve of the election that the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization at his request,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
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.