President Trump “blamed Senate Democrats for the dearth of experts at the State Department, ignoring the department’s high turnover and the number of positions for which there is no nominee,” Politico reports.
Said Trump on Twitter: “The Democrats continue to Obstruct the confirmation of hundreds of good and talented people who are needed to run our government… A record in U.S. history. State Department, Ambassadors and many others are being slow walked. Senate must approve now.”
“The White House on Sunday vowed to help provide ‘rigorous firearms training’ to some schoolteachers and formally endorsed a bill to tighten the federal background checks system, but it backed off President Trump’s earlier call to raise the minimum age to purchase some guns to 21 years old from 18 years old” the Washington Post reports.
“Responding directly to last month’s gun massacre at a Florida high school, the administration rolled out several policy proposals that focus largely on mental health and school safety initiatives. The idea of arming some teachers has been controversial and has drawn sharp opposition from the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers lobby, among other groups. Many of the student survivors have urged Washington to toughen restrictions on gun purchases, but such measures are fiercely opposed by the National Rifle Association, and the Trump plan does not include substantial changes to gun laws.”
“There’s a reason Trump said hardly anything about Republican candidate Rick Saccone during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night that was supposed to promote his candidacy,” Jonathan Swan reports.
“Trump thinks Saccone is a terrible, ‘weak’ candidate, according to four sources who’ve spoken to the president about him. Trump held that opinion of Saccone before leaving for the rally, and I’ve not been able to establish whether his time on the ground with the candidate changed his mind.”
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“Imagine this year’s ballot with no Utah candidates listed as Republicans,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
“Or, alternatively, the ballot listing only those Republicans who gathered signatures, while others who went through the GOP convention are shut out.”
“Republicans say those scenarios are a growing possibility now that the Legislature failed to pass a bill designed to fix problems caused by a recent bylaw change adopted by the Republican State Central Committee.”
Lawyers associated with President Trump are considering legal action to stop 60 Minutes from airing an interview with Stormy Daniels, BuzzFeed News reports.
“It was not immediately clear what legal argument the lawyers would be making to support the considered litigation, and Trump and his legal team often have threatened litigation without following through on those threats in the past.”
“The legislative blitz that rocketed the $1.5 trillion tax cut through Congress in less than two months created a host of errors and ambiguities in the law that businesses big and small are just now discovering and scrambling to address,” the New York Times reports.
“Companies and trade groups are pushing the Treasury Department and Congress to fix the law’s consequences, some intended and some not, including provisions that disadvantage certain farmers, hurt restaurateurs and retailers and could balloon the tax bills of large multinational corporations.”
“While Treasury can clear up uncertainty about some of the murky provisions, actual errors and unintended language can be solved only legislatively — at a time when Democrats seem disinclined to lend votes to shoring up a law they had no hand in passing and are actively trying to dismantle.”
Maureen Dowd: “Stormy Daniels’s real name is Stephanie Clifford, but she was called Peggy Peterson, or ‘P.P.’ (shades of the dossier!), and Trump was referred to as David Dennison in the 2016 legal agreement Trump lawyer Michael Cohen drew up to buy her silence before the election for $130,000.”
Stan Collender: “The State Department and its secretary, Rex Tillerson, so far have gotten all the criticism for not spending the $120 million appropriated to it to investigate Russian interference in the U.S. elections, but the Republican majority in Congress is equally as guilty for the Trump administration’s failure to use these funds…”
“The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act requires Congress to approve a request by the president not to spend a previously enacted appropriation, that is, an ‘impoundment.’ The act was put in place in the early 1970s in large part because President Richard Nixon was refusing to spend appropriations and Congress had no way to force the White House to do it…”
“Trump’s refusal to spend the previously enacted $120 million appropriation is pure Nixonian in its audacity. There is one big difference between what Trump is doing now and Nixon did then, however. This time, the Republican-controlled Congress has the ability to force the president to spend the appropriation and so far has refused to do so. That makes Congress a co-conspirator.”
President Trump “got business out of the way quickly Saturday night – urging voters to elect Republican congressional candidate Rick Saccone, who’s locked in an unexpectedly tough special election battle in Pennsylvania – before turning to the main subject of the night: himself,” Politico reports.
“Returning to top campaign form, Trump made fun of Washington and congratulated himself for maintaining his iconoclastic style in office, despite critics who have called for him to take his job more seriously—including in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called out by Trump.”
Said Trump: “Don’t forget, this got us elected. If I came like a stiff, you guys wouldn’t come here tonight.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren told CNN that she isn’t running for president in 2020.
Said Warren: “For the people of Massachusetts, and for the people across this country. This government is working better and better and better for a thinner and thinner slice at the top. I am in these fights, and I am in this fight to retain my Senate seat in 2018. That’s where I’m focused. That’s where I’m going to stay focused. I’m not running for president.”
“A bloc of Senate Republicans is readying legislation to halt Donald Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, in the most provocative step yet taken to thwart the president on trade,” Politico reports.
“Senate Republicans discussed the matter in depth on Thursday, just hours before Trump announced he would go through with his crackdown on imported metals. And they are gearing up for an open clash with Trump over economic policy, with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) telling reporters that he will introduce legislation to block the tariffs.”
“President Trump is in discussions with a veteran Washington lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during the impeachment process about joining the White House to help deal with the special counsel inquiry,” the New York Times reports.
“The lawyer, Emmet Flood, met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office this past week to discuss the possibility… No final decision has been made.”
Key detail: “Mr. Flood would not replace Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who since last summer has taken the lead role in dealing with the special counsel, Robert Mueller. But Mr. Cobb has told friends for weeks that he views his position as temporary and does not expect to remain in the job for much longer.”
“Some 1.6 million people tune in to Fox & Friends every morning, but when Kristian Saucier told the network why he believed he should be pardoned for his national-security-related felony conviction, he clearly had one very specific, very powerful fan of the show in mind: the viewer-in-chief,” the Washington Post reports.
“Less than a week after making that plea, Saucier had his pardon from a man who has uttered very similar words and happens to be the leader of the free world: President Trump.”
Washington Post: “Republicans and their outside allies have thrown almost everything at Conor Lamb, the 33-year-old Democrat who’s running against Rick Saccone, a Republican veteran of Pennsylvania’s state legislature. They tried to tar Lamb as a clone of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), as a liberal who would raise their taxes and, lately, as a former federal prosecutor who was soft on illegal immigration.”
“But those messages have not done the damage Republicans had been hoping for — Lamb and Saccone are running neck and neck. It should have been a cakewalk in a House district President Trump won by 20 percentage points in 2016.”
“The Democratic Party’s hierarchy on Saturday acknowledged the ‘perceived influence’ of insiders over voters in picking a presidential nominee, but don’t know yet how to settle an issue that bedeviled the bitter nomination fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016,” the AP reports.
“At issue is the role of Democratic National Committee members, elected officials and other party dignitaries — known collectively superdelegates. They overwhelmingly favored Clinton, who won the nomination, though her wide advantage among this group ultimately saddled her with charges of favoritism.”
“Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”
— Former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, quoted by ABC News, speaking to French far-right politicians.
“President Trump is strongly considering Christopher Liddell, a White House official who was an executive at Microsoft and General Motors, to succeed his departing top economic adviser, Gary Cohn,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Trump has not made a firm decision, those briefed on the process said. But Mr. Liddell, the White House’s director of strategic initiatives, is currently seen as a front-runner to replace Mr. Cohn as the director of the National Economic Council.”
“Five and a half hours after testifying before a grand jury in the Russia probe, a former political adviser to Donald Trump told ABC News exclusively that he believes the investigation is ‘warranted.’”
Said Sam Nunberg: “No, I don’t think it’s a witch hunt. It’s warranted because there’s a lot there and that’s the sad truth.”
”Nunberg declined to say whether he’d be back in front of the special counsel’s attorneys or the grand jury. A source close to him said he is scheduled to testify five more times.”
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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