A new Quinnipiac poll shows that just 16% of Americans want Congress to repeal all of Obamacare, while 51% say it should repeal only parts and 30% say it shouldn’t repeal anything.
More important: When asked if they would be more likely or less likely to vote for a senator or member of Congress who votes for repeal, voters said “less likely” by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.
President Trump proposed getting rid of the Electoral College in a meeting with congressional leaders, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“During the gathering, the talk turned to campaigns, elections and voter fraud. Mr. Trump then told the group that he was interested in getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote, say people who attended. Mr. Trump lost the popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a fact that has irritated the president to the point that he has called for a national probe of alleged voter fraud.”
“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, spoke up, pointing him to the 2000 recount in Florida that lasted more than a month until it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Imagine what a nationwide recount would look like. Mr. Trump demurred, and said he was fine to leave the current system in place.”
Jon Meacham: “The biggest distinction is experience. Jackson came to the presidency as a former judge, general, senator and presidential candidate. Despite his rabble-rousing image — opponents worried Jackson would become an ‘American Bonaparte’ — Jackson was in fact at home in the precincts of power because he’d been around the capital a good deal before becoming president.”
“The other key difference is that Jackson knew how to manage his own weaknesses. He wasn’t always successful at it, but a Jacksonian temper tantrum or threat was often calculated, not unhinged. We don’t yet know whether Trump can pull off the same feat of compensating for — and even leveraging — his hypersensitivity, for instance, and his weakness for hyperbole and chaos. I hope he can do what Jackson did and turn these vices into means for virtuous ends. To me, that’s perhaps the greatest question about Trump and temperament.”
Meacham’s book, American Lion: Andrew Jackon in the White House, is highly recommended.
“Republican lawmakers aired sharp concerns about their party’s quick push to repeal the Affordable Care Act inside a closed-door meeting Thursday,” according to a recording of the session obtained by the Washington Post.
“Senators and House members expressed a range of concerns about the task ahead: how to prepare a replacement plan that can be ready to launch at the time of repeal; how to avoid deep damage to the health insurance market; how to keep premiums affordable for middle-class families; even how to avoid the political consequences of defunding Planned Parenthood, the women’s health-care organization, as many Republicans hope to do with the repeal of the ACA.”
Said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA): “We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created. That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”
For members: Will the GOP Simply Rebrand Obamacare?
“What amazed me is that I was vicious to him in statements, he was vicious to me in statements, and here we are getting along, we’re riding up Pennsylvania Avenue talk — we don’t even mention it. I guess that’s the world of politics.”
— President Trump, in an interview on Fox News, on the letter Barack Obama left for him in the Oval Office.
President Trump “will not attend the annual Alfalfa Club dinner Saturday night, an exclusive black-tie dinner — and White House roast — that every president since Ronald Reagan has attended,” Politico reports.
“The swanky event gathers various elements of the Washington elite to toast the new administration — as well as fire a few barbed jokes at the new president. The event is closed off to reporters so the ribbing tends to be more biting.”
President Trump filed papers with the Federal Election Commission for his re-election in 2020 last Friday — on Inauguration Day.
In contrast, Barack Obama filed for re-election in April 2011.
Wall Street Journal editorial: “Some six million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Mexico. But the much larger risk is that Mexicans will sour on progress toward joining their North American neighbors as prosperous free-market democracies. This is the moment that Mexico’s left—dormant but not dead—has been waiting for as anti-American Andrés Manuel López Obrador prepares to run for President again in 2018.”
“Mr. Trump is a foreign-affairs neophyte, but he is already learning that nations can’t be bullied like GOP candidates or CEOs. They have their own nationalist political dynamics and when attacked they push back. Mr. Trump said as a candidate that he’d treat America’s friends better than Mr. Obama did, but his first move has been to treat Mexico like Mr. Obama treated Israel. On present course he may get comparable results, or worse.”
Sarah Palin has officially shut down Sarah PAC as of the end of 2016, the Washington Post reports.
“What the closure of Palin’s PAC — and the remarkably small amount of spending on actual candidates for office — makes clear is that a) her time as a national leader for Republicans is over and b) Palin’s prime interest was never really anything other than promoting her own political brand.”
Playbook: “The Arizona Republican has been relishing his role as Trump’s tormentor. Over the past several days, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman has publicly broken with Trump over his voter fraud claims and reports that Trump was considering reinstating torture and panned his OMB pick over military spending and votes to shut down the government. And while some of his colleagues are giving Trump latitude on building a wall on the Mexico border, McCain said Thursday he won’t support it without seeing more details and continues to have concerns with Trump’s relationship with Putin.”
“Not a lot of Republicans are willing to go toe to toe with Trump for fear they’ll end up battered and bullied by the president and his loyal army of followers. But the 80-year-old former Republican presidential nominee just got re-elected. He clearly doesn’t like Trump or his policies and isn’t afraid to tell everyone about it.”
President Donald Trump “is betting big that he can harness U.S. strategic and economic heft to press other countries into one-on-one trade deals, a sharp reversal from recent U.S. policy to negotiate sprawling regional agreements that cover broad swaths of the global economy,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The strategy reflects the view of a confident deal maker that trading partners will come to the table ready to make enough concessions to Washington to justify meaningful bilateral deals — and that other economic blocs won’t seize the moment to expand and integrate further, crowding out the U.S.”
Playbook: “Republicans didn’t come out of their retreat in Philadelphia with a grand plan — they really never do. But they feel like they’ve notched one big victory: President Trump seems generally supportive of a key element of their tax plan. Border adjustment is a plan that taxes imports instead of exports. Republicans haven’t had an easy time explaining it. Trump nodded toward it in his speech to the GOP and then, later, Sean Spicer suggested it would be the mechanism to pay for the wall with Mexico. He later backed off of that, saying there are many ways to pay for the wall. But that doesn’t mean that this plan won’t be part of overall tax reform.”
“The fact remains: Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) — through lots of backchannel chats with Trump — seems to have succeeded in bringing the Hill and White House together on tax reform. For now.”
“One of President Donald Trump’s choices for a senior position in the White House is beginning work while facing a criminal charge after he allegedly tried to bring a handgun onto an airliner last year,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Sebastian Gorka, a national security and terrorism analyst, was stopped at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Virginia last January by an officer with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, who detected a 9mm caliber handgun using X-ray equipment as it passed on a conveyor belt.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump “will speak by telephone on Saturday, the Kremlin said, a first step towards what Trump has billed as a normalization of relations after three years of tensions sparked by the conflict in Ukraine,” Reuters reports.
“From the time Donald Trump became their candidate until he took the oath of office, congressional Republicans treated his policy pronouncements — largely out of step with Republican dogma — as essentially a distraction. He would talk. They would drive the policies,” the New York Times reports.
“But now, the question of whether congressional Republicans would change President Trump or Mr. Trump would change them has an early answer. Mr. Trump cheerfully addressed the group here at their policy retreat on Thursday, and they responded with applause to many proposals they have long opposed.”
Ivanka Trump’s Instagram account is helping her cultivate a Trump version of Camelot, CNN reports.
“She has almost six million followers — 2.7 via Instagram, 3.01 via Twitter. With the advent of a social media-savvy first daughter, the opportunity for the public to be voyeurs into the personal moments of the younger generation of Trumps is more available than ever before.”
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.