“He encouraged people to lie for him. He lied. I think he obstructed justice. I think there’s a compelling case that he has, in fact, engaged in conduct that would be better for him to leave office than to stay in office.”
— Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), on C-SPAN in 1999, on President Bill Clinton.
“He doesn’t have to say ‘let’s obstruct justice’ for it to be a crime.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham, quoted by Now This in 1999, on impeaching President Bill Clinton.
“If the report indicates no collusion found by Mueller, done, over, for me.”
— Graham, in 2019, after the release of the Mueller report.
When President Trump paid a visit to Mount Vernon in April 2018 with French President Emmanuel Macron, Politico reports Trump questioned why George Washington didn’t name the place after himself: “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it. You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”
When his guide pointed out that Washington actually did pretty well considering the nation’s capital was named after him, Trump laughed and said, “good point.”
Former Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) died on Saturday, The State reports. He was 97.
“Better known as ‘Fritz’ Hollings, the South Carolina Democrat served in the state’s House of Representatives before becoming Lieutenant Governor in 1954. He was elected governor of the state in 1958. He won a special election for one of South Carolina’s U.S. Senate seats in 1966 where he served until 2003.”
Charleston Post & Courier: “In a career that spanned more than half a century, Hollings steered South Carolina through the civil rights era, established a program to feed poor pregnant women, enacted legislation to protect the environment and brought home millions of dollars as he also fought to balance the federal budget. No recent history of the state could be written without him in it.”
“After Watergate, it was unthinkable that a president would fire an F.B.I. director who was investigating him or his associates. Or force out an attorney general for failing to protect him from an investigation. Or dangle pardons before potential witnesses against him,” the New York Times reports.
“But the end of the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, made clear that President Trump had successfully thrown out the unwritten rules that had bound other chief executives in the 45 years since President Richard M. Nixon resigned under fire, effectively expanding presidential power in a dramatic way.”
“The chill between First Ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush was no secret, but USA Today‘s D.C. bureau chief Susan Page found fascinating new evidence for a biography, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, out April 2,” Axios reports.
“The draft guest list for one of the biggest social events of the Reagan presidency — the White House dinner during a 1985 royal visit by Prince Charles and Lady Diana — shows that Nancy Reagan personally struck Vice President George H.W. Bush and his wife from the guest list.”
Former President Jimmy Carter became America’s longest-living president ever on Thursday, surpassing former President George H.W. Bush, The Hill reports.
As of March 21, Carter is 94 years and 172 days old, a day older than Bush was when he died last November.
“I don’t know what is going to be said in the next few days about John McCain by whomever is going to say it or what is going to be done, but anybody who in any way tarnishes the reputation of John McCain deserves a whipping because most of those who would do the wrong thing about John McCain didn’t have the guts to do the right thing when it was their turn. We need to remember that.”
— Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), quoted by The Bulwark, calling out President Trump for his continued disparagement of the late Sen. John McCain.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) told CNN the Electoral College was “conceived in sin” and originally designed to effectively perpetuate slavery.
Said Cohen: “The slave states wanted equal representation in the Senate because they wanted to keep slavery. The slave states wanted to have an Electoral College to where the members that they had in Congress counted towards the vote of president, where the slaves counted as two-thirds and in the popular vote they would count as zero. So the slaves states didn’t want a popular election because their slaves wouldn’t count towards voting and the slaves states would have less votes.”
Philip Bump: Democrats calling to abolish the electoral college should not be surprising.
“The whole time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been alive, Republicans have won the popular vote exactly one time. Despite that, they have control of the presidency, control of the Supreme Court, control of the Senate, and until recently, control of the House.”
Sean McElwee, co-founder of Data For Progress, quoted by NBC News.
“Even without seeing Robert Mueller’s report, or knowing what prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have unearthed, or what congressional investigators will find, we already have witnessed the biggest political scandal in American history,” Axios reports.
“Historians tell Axios that the only two scandals that come close to Trump-Russia are Watergate, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, and the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s, in which oil barons bribed a corrupt aide to President Warren Harding for petroleum leases.”
“Mueller has already delivered one of the biggest counterintelligence cases in U.S. history… Watergate yielded more charges than Mueller has so far… But historians say that both Watergate and Teapot Dome were more limited because a foreign power wasn’t a central player, and a much narrower band of potential offenses was under investigation.”
With a new election called in North Carolina due to fraud allegations, Ally Munick points out that last redo of a congressional election was in January 1975 in Louisiana’s 6th congressional district.
The New York Times reports Henson Moore (R) led Jeff LaCaze (D) led by 44 votes on Election Night 1974, but it was determined that “a malfunctioning voting machine could have changed the outcome.” After a state court ordered a new election, Moore won easily.
““With their second summit fast approaching, speculation is growing that President Donald Trump may try to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to commit to denuclearization by giving him something he wants more than almost anything else: an announcement of peace and an end to the Korean War,” the AP reports.
“Such an announcement could make history. It would be right in line with Trump’s opposition to ‘forever wars.’ And, coming more than six decades after the fighting essentially ended, it just seems like common sense. But, if not done carefully, it could open up a whole new set of problems for Washington.”
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that veteran North Korean diplomats “are being sidelined from nuclear talks ahead of a second summit with the United States as recent defections and allegations of spying undermine the trust of leader Kim Jong Un.”
“President Trump on Friday pointed to nearly five dozen previous instances in which presidents of both parties have declared emergencies as justification for his invocation of extraordinary powers to build his border wall. But there is no precedent for what he has just done,” the New York Times reports.
“None of the times emergency powers have been invoked since 1976, the year Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act, involved a president making an end run around lawmakers to spend money on a project they had decided against funding.”
Washington Post: How Trump came to declare a national emergency to fund his border wall.
The Nixon Foundation distanced itself and the disgraced former president from Roger Stone, who was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller earlier today.
Said the statement: “This morning’s widely-circulated characterization of Roger Stone as a Nixon campaign aide or adviser is a gross misstatement. Mr. Stone was 16 years old during the Nixon presidential campaign of 1968 and 20 years old during the reelection campaign of 1972… Mr. Stone, during his time as a student at George Washington University, was a junior scheduler on the Nixon reelection committee. Mr. Stone was not a campaign aide or adviser.”
“Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”
— Ann Coulter, on Twitter.
Jeff Greenfield: “The Constitution does require the president to report ‘Information of the State of the Union’ to Congress, but there’s no requirement that it be a speech — it was delivered in writing until Woodrow Wilson showed up in person in 1913 — and we’ve long passed the time when it contained any useful ‘information’ at all.”
“So maybe Pelosi has done all of us—including the president—a favor by postponing (if not canceling) an address that this year promises to be even more of a sham than usual. And maybe, given the dreary ritual that such speeches offer, Trump might want to take the unsolicited advice I offered a year ago: Return to the tradition established by Thomas Jefferson, have everyone stay home, and just deliver the thing in writing.”
“We’ve really never had ― and if we have, it’s classified and lost to history at least so far ― a president of the United States who is considered to be possibly an asset of a foreign government. This is what the founders were worried about in the 1790s.”
— Historian Jon Meacham, quoted by the HuffPost, commenting on last night’s bombshell report revealing the FBI had investigated whether President Trump was working as a Russian agent.
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.
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