Rene Boucher was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison for assaulting Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), WKYT reports.
“Rene Boucher pleaded guilty in March to a federal charge of assaulting a member of Congress. Boucher says the attack was triggered by Paul stacking yard debris near his property line. Paul suffered broken ribs in the November attack.”
Stan Greenberg: “Mr. Trump’s base strategy brands the Republican Party as sexist, racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant, which magnifies the anti-Trump reaction among Democrats. But it also leaves a tenth who are conservative Catholics and a fifth who are nonreligious conservatives more tentative in their support of the Republican Party — and it pushes away the quarter of Republicans who remain ideologically moderate.”
“The harder the president bangs these drums, the more Democrats become enraged and a segment of Republicans gets demoralized. The more he trashes and defeats his Republican opponents in primaries, the more these voters may contemplate different political options.”
ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing as an agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.”
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“Top aides to President Trump are planning additional crackdowns on immigration before the November midterms, despite a growing backlash over the administration’s move to separate migrant children from parents at the border,” Politico reports.
“Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and a team of officials from the Justice Department, Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget have been quietly meeting for months to find ways to use executive authority and under-the-radar rule changes to strengthen hard-line U.S. immigration policies.”
A new Quinnipiac poll finds that American voters oppose the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America by a wide margin, 66% to 27%.
However, Republican voters support the separation policy 55% to 35%, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support it.
American voters also support 79% to 15% allowing immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, so-called “Dreamers,” to remain and ultimately to apply for citizenship.
A new CNN poll finds 67% of Americans opposed the policy while just 28% approve.
President Trump “remained resistant on Monday in the face of growing public outcry over his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, repeating the false assertion that Democrats were the ones to blame for it, and suggesting that criminals — not parents — were toting juveniles to the United States,” the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “They could be murderers and thieves and so much else. We want a safe country, and it starts with the borders, and that’s the way it is.”
Politico: “The defiant posture comes amid a torrent of criticism as stories and images have emerged of young children being ripped from their immigrant parents’ arms and put in detention facilities akin to prisons.”
A new Monmouth poll finds that Democrats hold a 7 point lead over Republicans in the generic House ballot, 48% to 41%. This is similar to the 49% to 41% edge Democrats held six weeks ago in Monmouth’s polling.
The poll also finds that just 34% of the public approve of the tax reform plan passed by Congress last December and 41% disapprove.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross failed to keep his promise to divest from his company holdings upon entering government, Forbes reports.
“Ross reportedly kept his stakes in companies co-owned by the Chinese government, a firm linked to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, and a Cyprus bank caught up in the Robert Mueller investigation.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen pushed back Monday at the growing condemnation of her agency’s practice of separating migrant families at the border, telling a gathering of law enforcement officers, “We will not apologize for the job we do,” the Washington Post reports.
“In a speech at the meeting of National Sheriffs’ Association in New Orleans, Nielsen drew rousing applause when she directed her remarks at ‘a selected few in the media, Congress and the advocacy community’ whom she accused of mischaracterizing the Trump administration’s border crackdown.”
She added: “This department will no longer stand by and watch you attack law enforcement for enforcing the laws passed by Congress. We will not apologize for the job we do, or the job law enforcement does, or the job the American people expect us to do.”
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) said he will not send the Massachusetts National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border due to the “cruel and inhumane” decision by the Trump administration to separate children from their parents as families arrive at the border, NBC Boston reports.
Said Baker: “We told the National Guard to hold steady and to not go down to the border —period. We won’t be supporting that initiative unless they change the policy.”
“The Pentagon has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups,” the New York Times reports.
“In the spring, as the Pentagon elevated the command’s status, it opened the door to nearly daily raids on foreign networks, seeking to disable cyberweapons before they can be unleashed, according to strategy documents and military and intelligence officials.”
Politico: “Republicans on Capitol Hill are giving up on what might be their last best chance to overhaul Medicare, just as they’re losing their leading champion on the issue, House Speaker Paul Ryan. The quiet surrender on a subject that’s energized GOP fiscal hawks for the better part of a decade comes as new projections show Medicare’s trust fund in its worst shape since the recession, partly because of Republicans’ other chief obsession: their sweeping tax cuts.”
“That’s left conservatives unsure how to agitate for a politically unpopular Medicare overhaul — one that President Trump detests — and raises new questions about who will take up the entitlement reform mantle as Ryan heads for the exits.”
Politico: “‘Believe me, everybody wants to work in the White House,’” President Trump told reporters in March – but as staff continue to depart without being replaced, that doesn’t seem to quite be the case.”
“Rather, the president’s top allies and loyalists, including many of those responsible for helping Trump ascend to the West Wing in the first place – people like Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie and Jason Miller – are hanging on to their roles as outsiders.”
Karen Tumulty: “The first lady’s decision to step into the debate makes the silence of another Trump family member all the more telling. Where is Ivanka Trump, who is actually an official adviser to her father — and the one who claims that family issues are her portfolio?”
“All those photos of crying children don’t look so great on Instagram. Still, Ivanka, there is time to step up. You can do it. Be best.”
“The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a decision on when partisan gerrymandering goes too far, ruling against the challengers of a Republican-drawn map in Wisconsin, and a Democratic redistricting in Maryland,” the Washington Post reports.
“The decisions in the separate cases once again puts off a decision on when courts can find that partisan efforts to keep parties in power goes so far as to be unconstitutional.”
President Trump “doubled down on his controversial policy of separating children from parents when families illegally cross the border, while also calling on Congress to change laws to end it,” The Hill reports.
“In a series of tweets, Trump appeared to justify the strategy by claiming criminals are using children in a Trojan Horse-style operation to cross the U.S. border.”
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A new Ipsos/Daily Beast poll finds 19% of Republicans indicated they had a favorable view of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with 68% saying they had an unfavorable view.
That compared slightly better than the perception of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who had a 17% favorable, 72% unfavorable rating among self-identified Republicans.
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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