“Senate Republicans have strategically revved up their attempt to convince President Trump to not withdraw from NAFTA. Some senators and aides say he may not have understood how popular it was with the caucus until recently, and are encouraging him to focus instead on improving it,” Axios reports.
“This is Congress’s clearest shot at saving the trade agreement. If Trump decides to withdraw, Congress probably couldn’t stop him, and both the legal and economic consequences are extremely unclear.”
Washington Post: “For months, Sessions has asked senior White House aides to make sure the president knows what he is doing at the Justice Department, two White House advisers said, and has told allies he hopes policy decisions that garner news coverage will please Trump.”
“But Sessions, who was one of Trump’s earliest backers and gave up a safe Senate seat to join the administration, has, by all accounts, been unable to repair his relationship with the president. Trump has dismissed praise of Sessions… as he continues to rage about the Russia investigation and Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the probe into Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election and whether there was any coordination with the Trump’s campaign.”
Bret Stephens: “Guess what? Donald Trump is a raving idiot. Every sentient person knows this, and if Michael Wolff is to be believed, so does most everyone in the White House. So why are we talking about Wolff’s book Fire and Fury as if it’s the news sensation of the decade?”
“The answer lies in that timeless definition of the word ‘gossip’: Hearing something you like about someone you don’t. Fire and Fury is catnip for everyone who detests this president… But gossip isn’t journalism. And Wolff’s book is Exhibit A in how not to damage Trump’s presidency, much less his chances of re-election.”
“The net result is that Fire and Fury has so thoroughly succeeded in lowering public expectations for Trump that it makes it that much easier for him to exceed them.”
The Wall Street Journal reports Wolff sold one million copies of his book in four days.
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“Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R) and his wife, Sheena Greitens, issued an extraordinary statement late Wednesday acknowledging that he had an extramarital affair in the past and that the couple ‘has dealt with this together honestly and privately,'” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
“The statement came as a St. Louis television station aired a segment alleging that, during that affair, Greitens took a compromising photograph of the woman and threatened to publicize it if she exposed him.”
“The woman claims in the audio that they went into Greitens’ basement, where he bound her to a piece of exercise equipment with some kind of tape, put a blindfold on her and began partly undressing her and touching her. That part of the encounter was consensual, she indicates in the audio, but the alleged taking of the photograph wasn’t. She said in the audio that she wasn’t aware he was doing it until she saw a flash of light through the blindfold, followed by his alleged verbal threat.”
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]Prior to this report, Greitens, a 43-year-old former Navy SEAL and Rhodes Scholar, had been seen by many Republicans as an aspiring presidential candidate.[/alert]
Washington Post: “The number of House Republicans planning to forgo reelection bids this year is on track to outpace majority-party retirements in any recent election where control of the chamber flipped — an ominous sign fueling GOP fears of a political wave that could shift power to Democrats in November’s midterm elections.”
Politico: “The 44 House members not seeking reelection this year — 29 in Republican-held seats and 15 in Democratic-held seats — puts 2018 in the company of past wave-year elections when control of the House changed hands.”
“In 1994, 49 House members retired and Republicans netted 54 seats, according to Brookings Institution’s Vital Statistics on Congress. In 2006, 28 lawmakers retired and Democrats picked up 30 seats. And in 2010, 32 members retired and Republicans won 63 seats.”
David Wasserman: “I don’t think people have fully priced in how much worse things could get for House Republicans in the next 300 days.”
Associated Press: “In the past year, at least 14 legislators in 10 states have resigned from office following accusations of sexual harassment or misconduct, according to the AP’s review. At least 16 others in more than a dozen states have faced other repercussions, such as the voluntary or forced removal from legislative leadership positions. Some others remain defiant in the face of ongoing investigations into sexual harassment complaints.”
Mike Allen: “Early in my career, I covered state legislatures in Richmond and Hartford. All winter, up-and-coming lawmakers are thrown together with young staff and ambitious lobbyists for weeks at time of boozy nights far from home. That’s a lot of bad behavior.”
“The Trump administration issued guidance to states early Thursday that will allow them to compel people to work or prepare for jobs in order to receive Medicaid for the first time in the half-century history of this pillar of the nation’s social safety net,” the Washington Post reports.
“The new rules come as 10 states are already lined up, waiting for federal permission to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults in the program. Three other states are contemplating them. Health officials could approve the first waiver — probably for Kentucky — as soon as Friday, according to two people with knowledge of the process.”
“Prominent House Republicans stepped forward with a vision of immigration policy that clashed fiercely with President Trump’s recent overtures of bipartisanship and highlighted how difficult it will be for Congress and the president to reach accord in the coming weeks,” the New York Times reports.
“The proposal, championed by the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees, would crack down on illegal immigration and sharply reduce the number of legal immigrants to the United States. Coming one day after Mr. Trump held an extraordinary meeting in which he laid out the parameters for a bipartisan immigration deal, the House proposal highlighted the uncertainty surrounding negotiations that are supposed to coalesce before the government runs out of money on Jan. 19.”
Politico: “Early last year as an Obamacare repeal bill was flailing in the House, top Trump administration officials showed select House conservatives a secret road map of how they planned to gut the health law using executive authority. The March 23 document, which had not been public until now, reveals that while the effort to scrap Obamacare often looked chaotic, top officials had actually developed an elaborate plan to undermine the law — regardless of whether Congress repealed it.”
““The blueprint, built off the executive order to minimize Obamacare’s ‘economic burden,’ that Trump signed just hours after taking the oath of office, shows just how advanced the administration’s plans were to unwind the law — plans that would become far more important after the legislative efforts to repeal Obamacare failed.”
“Democratic leaders are facing a potential revolt within their ranks as they edge toward a deal with Republicans that would protect Dreamers from deportation but also include concessions to conservatives that many Democratic lawmakers say are unacceptable,” Politico reports.
“Many Democrats, particularly in the House, are horrified that their leaders would even agree to discuss issues beyond legal status for Dreamers and limited measures to curb illegal immigration. The concerns span multiple factions of the Democratic conference, and, combined with opposition from Republican immigration hard-liners, they could put passage of a DACA deal at risk.”
“Some Democratic House members are planning to invite victims of sexual assault to President Trump’s State of the Union address later this month to highlight the issue,” NBC News reports.
“Republican leaders are considering skipping passage of a GOP budget this year — a blow to the party’s weakened fiscal hawks that would squash all 2018 efforts to revamp entitlements or repeal Obamacare,” Politico reports.
“White House and Hill GOP leaders discussed the possibility of forgoing the painful budget process during last weekend’s Camp David legislative summit… Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has argued that he cannot pass controversial deficit-reduction legislation using powerful budget procedures with his new 51-vote majority — and wasn’t even sure he could find the votes for a fiscal blueprint in the first place.”
“But more importantly, it would mean the GOP’s 2018 agenda would be sharply limited: Only with passage of a joint House-Senate budget can Republicans deploy reconciliation tools, which allow them to circumvent the Senate filibuster and bypass Democrats, as they did on last year’s successful tax bill and failed Obamacare repeal push.”
“There was genius displayed yesterday in the meeting. It’s sort of a rare genius up here — it was actually listening and being flexible.”
— Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), quoted by ABC News, on President Trump’s immigration meeting at the White House yesterday.
Republicans have four convicted criminals running for Congress, the HuffPost reports.
They are: Joe Arpaio, Don Blankenship, Michael Grimm and Greg Gianforte.
“Three of these men — Arpaio, Blankenship, and Grimm — have suggested that their convictions show they were persecuted by the Obama administration for their political beliefs. The actual evidence suggests otherwise.”
White House chief of staff John Kelly issued a memo to staff outlining the administration’s new ban on personal cell phones within the West Wing complex of the White House, ABC News reports.
The policy goes further than originally expected and is not just limited to personal cell phones. It also includes laptops, smartwatches and “devices with WiFi, Bluetooth, radio, or cellular capabilities” and “any portable device that emits an electric signal and was not issued by the White House Communications Agency.”
“I would also say this, it smacks of what we never want to see in politics which is: Is it self-serving? I mean you can’t say, ‘I don’t want to see an oil rig from Mar-A-Lago’ as you look out from the waters of Palm Beach, but it’s okay to look at an oil rig out from Hilton Head or Charleston, South Carolina.”
— Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), quoted by Business Insider, on President Trump’s decision to exempt Florida from expanded coastal oil drilling.
President Trump declined to say whether he would grant an interview to special counsel Robert Mueller and his team, deflecting repeated questions on the topic by saying there had been “no collusion” with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign and attacking his former opponent Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “We’ll see what happens.”
Trump then questioned why he would be interviewed, arguing again there had been “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia: “It seems unlikely you’d even have an interview.”
Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney told viewers that he isn’t convinced that restaurant workers making a higher $15 minimum wage still deserve the standard 15% to 20% tip for their services.
Said Varney: “If I walk into a restaurant and I know the waiter or waitress is making $15 an hour, way more than they used to make the previous year, I am going to say, ‘wait a minute am I going to give you 20%, 15% or whatever?'”
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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