President Trump will speak to Americans from the Oval Office at 9 p.m. ET to address what he says is a crisis along the nation’s southern border. Trump is trying to pressure congressional Democrats to give him $5.7 billion to build a border wall and end a government shutdown.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will give the Democratic response after the president speaks.
Leave your reactions in the comments.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) joined calls today to reopen the rest of the federal government before the funding fight over the border wall is resolved, CNN reports.
Said Murkowski: “I am one who is amendable to a process that would allow for those appropriations bills that have concluded some time ago that they be enacted into law — whether it’s the Department of Interior or the IRS. I’d like to see that.”
Beto O’Rourke “is leaning toward running for president, according to four people who have spoken with him or his advisers in recent days,” Politico reports.
“But for a presidential contender, his radio silence is becoming increasingly awkward.”
“In Iowa and New Hampshire — where Democrats are accustomed to being courted aggressively by presidential contenders — calls from Democratic Party organizers to O’Rourke’s advisers go unreturned. And a report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday that O’Rourke won’t make any decision before February and is preparing for a solo road trip — but avoiding early nominating states — bewildered even his supporters.”
“Long before accusations of absentee ballot fraud in a small North Carolina county cast doubt on the results of a heated 2018 congressional race, a state elections investigator spent weeks probing whether the man at the center of the current scandal was among a group buying votes,” the AP reports.
“That 2010 investigation was one of at least a half dozen instances over the last nine years that prosecutors and elections officials received complaints of serious elections irregularities in Bladen County, a rural locale of 35,000 people that has long had a statewide reputation for political chicanery by both Republicans and Democrats.”
CBS News: “Eight congressional representatives serve the districts that line the 2,000-mile southern border. They are men, women, freshman politicians and Washington veterans. The Democrats among them span liberal ideologies, while one of them is a Republican.”
“But they all have one thing in common: each is against President Trump’s border wall.”
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that only 35% of American adults support a congressional spending bill that includes funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall and only 25% support Trump’s decision to keep the government closed until Congress approves funding for the wall.
“The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a mysterious subpoena fight apparently involving a foreign-government-owned company and special counsel Robert Mueller,” Politico reports.
“The unknown firm had asked the high court to block a federal judge’s contempt order and financial penalties for refusing to comply with the subpoena, arguing that the company is immune from U.S. grand jury subpoenas.”
Washington Post: “The entity that is the subject of the cloaked legal battle — known in court papers simply as a ‘Corporation’ from ‘Country A’ — is a foreign financial institution that was issued a subpoena by a grand jury hearing evidence in the special counsel investigation.”
Rick Hasen: “In a short unpublished opinion so far garnering only slight media attention, the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit decided on Monday what may be one of the most consequential cases poised to affect the 2020 elections. The circuit upheld a district court decision ending a court order in effect since 1982 barring the Republican National Committee from engaging in ‘ballot security’ measures designed to intimidate minority voters from voting at the polls.”
“With Trump having taken over the RNC for the 2020 elections and with this consent decree no longer standing in his way, we should be concerned about a new wave of voter suppression coming from the Republican Party during the upcoming election.”
“Special counsel Robert Mueller has accused former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort of sharing polling data with an alleged Russian spy during the 2016 presidential campaign, a new court filing by Manafort’s criminal defense lawyer has accidentally revealed,” CNBC reports.
“The alleged spy, Konstantin Kilimnik, is a former business associate of Manafort’s who is criminally charged with working with him to try to tamper with potential witnesses against Manafort before his scheduled federal criminal trials last summer.”
“Manafort’s lawyers meant for those accusations by Mueller to be sealed from public view. The sections containing the accusations are blacked out in an otherwise public document filed in federal court… But those sections are easily viewable when the sections are copied in a word processing file, and then pasted into a new document.”
Washington Post: “The apparently inadvertent revelation indicates a pathway by which the Russians could have had access to Trump campaign data.”
Billionaire Tom Steyer will make an announcement tomorrow in Iowa “concerning his political plans for 2019 and beyond” amid speculation that he could run for president in 2020.
“While Democrats have been bracing themselves for him to make that declaration on Tuesday night, administration officials who had seen a draft copy of his speech said the president was not preparing to do so.” the New York Times reports.
Playbook: “If they go the national emergency route, it will become quite clear the White House is not looking for a way out of the 18-day government shutdown. Going the national emergency route isn’t going to put Democrats into dealmaking mode.”
Charles Sykes: “Over the weekend, the New York Times suggested that the whole idea for the wall was originally concocted by his brain trust of Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg as a way to get the notoriously undisciplined Trump to remember to talk about immigration… The mnemonic device became an applause line at his rallies (along with the claim that Mexico would pay for it) and, most fatefully, an idée fixe with Ann Coulter & Co. who were enchanted by its blunt force crudity.”
“So here we are; facing a genuine crisis because of Trump’s non-crisis. The dangers of his impulsive decision to shut down the government continue to rise, and acolytes like Lewandowski are cheering on the notion of a wall by presidential fiat. That could include what the president calls the ‘military version of eminent domain,’ which means … God knows what? Armed soldiers seizing private property from American citizens?”
“All of that suggests that the ‘crisis’ in not at the border, but sits in the Oval Office.”
Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) “has filed for divorce from his wife, Maureen, his one-time co-defendant in a tawdry corruption trial that exposed their marital woes and tarnished his political legacy before the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out his conviction,” the Washington Post reports.
“In a private meeting with aides at Camp David on Sunday, Mr. Trump said he wanted them to come up with a resolution without him appearing to have capitulated to Democrats,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“White House officials disputed that account and said the president didn’t make such a statement.”
NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN said they will air the Democrats response after they and other networks agreed Monday to air the president’s prime time address on the “humanitarian and national security crisis” at the U.S.-Mexico border, USA Today reports.
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who in 2016 met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower, was charged in a separate case that showed her close ties to the Kremlin, the New York Times reports.
“Ms. Veselnitskaya was charged by federal prosecutors in New York with seeking to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud investigation into money laundering that involved an influential Russian businessman and his investment firm.”
“The case was not directly related to the Trump Tower meeting. But a federal indictment returned in Manhattan seemed to confirm that Ms. Veselnitskaya had deep ties to senior Russian government officials.”
After North Carolina congressional candidate Mark Harris (R) finished addressing Mecklenburg County Republicans, he tried to avoid questions from WSOC-TV by running out of a fire exit.
After the bizarre exit, in a tweet to the reporter, Harris said he had to get home to watch the college football National Championship game.
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.