The Rapidly Receding Red Rout

Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade notes that out of the 241 House Republicans who took office along with Donald Trump in January 2017, more than a third of them are gone or will be gone by the end of next year.  Michigan's Paul Mitchell is the most recent departure this month, announcing his retirement a few weeks ago.

Mitchell is among a growing list of House Republicans — 18 to date — who have announced plans to resign, retire or run for another office, part of a snowballing exodus that many Republicans fear is imperiling their chances of regaining control of the House in the 2020 elections.

And the problem for the GOP is bigger than retirements. Since Trump’s inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows, nearly 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 are gone or leaving because of election losses, retirements including former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), and some, such as Mitchell, who are simply quitting in disgust.

The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP — and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him. Former congressman Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost his June 2018 primary after challenging Trump; he’s now a Republican presidential candidate. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), the only Republican to accuse Trump of impeachable acts, quit the GOP in July citing the “partisan death spiral.” His political future is uncertain.

Mitchell, who hails from a Republican-leaning district that Trump won easily in 2016, simply decided he had enough. He has a 9-year-old son with a learning disability, and remaining in a highly polarized Washington just wasn’t worth the trade-off, he said.

“Did any member of this conference expect that their job would start out every morning trying to go through the list of what’s happening in tweets of the day?” Mitchell asked, referring to Trump’s Twitter habits. “We’re not moving forward right now. We are simply thrashing around.”

The retirement numbers are particularly staggering. All told, 41 House Republicans have left national politics or announced they won’t seek reelection in the nearly three years since Trump took office. That dwarfs the 25 Democrats who retired in the first four years of former president Barack Obama’s tenure — and Republicans privately predict this is only the beginning.
Most of the departing Republicans publicly cite family as the reason for leaving. But behind the scenes, Republicans say the trend highlights a greater pessimism about the direction of the party under Trump — and their ability to win back the House next year. 

The president has doubled down on an all-base strategy for his reelection campaign, making some Republicans ask whether Trump has put his own political future ahead of the long-term viability of the party of Abraham Lincoln.

“If the party doesn’t start looking like America, there will not be a party in America,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), the only black House Republican, who announced his retirement in August.

That's staggering.  We're talking more than 90 of those same 241 Republicans retired in the last 32 months, lost in 2018, or are retiring before 2021.

More retirements are coming, I guarantee that.  They're not getting the House back anytime soon.  The Senate remains a much different story, but I expect after 2020 redistricting in favor of Democrats at the state level, you're going to see a very solid House Democratic majority for some time.

Well, unless the Dems find a way to blow it.

Doing "Something" About Trump

Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty suggests that while the impeachment debate rages on, the Trump/Ukraine perfidy is worth an unprecedented and historic House censure resolution by Democrats.

This argument will continue, with new fuel being added by the administration’s refusal to turn over a whistleblower’s complaint regarding the Trump-Zelensky conversation. It is hard to see how it could possibly be resolved before we are well into the 2020 campaign season. But there is something the House could do right now, an idea that I have raised before: censure the president. 

The procedure for doing so is pretty straightforward, as spelled out in a recent report by the Congressional Research Service: 

Should a House committee report a non-Member censure resolution, the full House may consider it by unanimous consent, under the Suspension of the Rules procedure, or under the terms of a special rule reported by the Committee on Rules and adopted by the House. 17 If widespread support exists for the censure resolution, unanimous consent or the Suspension of the Rules procedure may be used. Otherwise, the resolution could be brought to the floor under a special rule reported by the Committee on Rules. All three of these parliamentary mechanisms require, at a minimum, the support of the majority party leadership in order to be entertained. 

In other words, a censure resolution could be brought to the House floor with support from Democrats alone, and it would not require any action on the part of the Senate. 

This would not sate the appetite of the pro-impeachment forces, or end the debate over whether that step is warranted. But it could be done quickly, with the evidence at hand, and would have the benefit of forcing Republican members to go on record stating whether they do or do not find this behavior on the part of the president acceptable. While many would argue that censure is a symbolic gesture, it is a disgrace that Trump would share with only one other president in American history — his purported idol, Andrew Jackson. Jackson was censured by the Senate in 1834 as the result of a little-remembered dispute over the Second Bank of the United States; it was expunged a few years later when his pro-Jackson Democrats gained a majority in the chamber, which showed that they regarded a censure as more than a slap on the wrist. 

None of this would end the argument over impeachment, but it would prove to the American people that at least part of their government sets a higher standard of behavior than our current president does. It also, finally, would force Republicans to answer a question that they have been dodging: Is there anything this president does that you will not tolerate?

 Censure of Trump and five bucks will get you a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks.

Look, at this point Pelosi doesn't have the votes for censure, let alone impeachment. Tumulty admits it won't accomplish anything even if it did happen.  And Trump will simply say -- correctly for once because no Republican would risk getting Amashed over voting for it -- that there's a purely political Democratic "witch hunt" going on against him.

Not even Paul Ryan and John Boehner censured Barack Obama.  Censure resolutions were introduced against Nixon but he resigned, and the censure resolution against Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky failed because Newt Gingrich didn't have the votes for it.

House Democrats did vote to condemn Trump over his racist remarks against Reps. Omar, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley earlier this year, but it fell short of official censure.

And like the condemnation vote, censure is not going to fix a damn thing, and Tumulty should know better.  If censure was a real option, it would have been used already for precisely the reasons Tumulty laid out.

But that of course leaves us in the same position we've been in since January: Democrats control the House, and Nancy Pelosi controls House Democrats, but so far the votes aren't anywhere close to being there in order to be able to impeach Trump.

The Ukraine situation may change all that in the near future, however.

With Pelosi unwilling to impeach Trump, Democratic rank-and-file members are frantically looking for something to fortify their investigations. On Friday, Judiciary members pressed Nadler to invoke Congress’s long-dormant inherent contempt authority that would allow Congress to jail or fine people for defying subpoenas.
The power hasn’t been used in more than 100 years. Pelosi, leadership and other House lawyers were dismissive of the idea when investigators first floated it last spring. But Judiciary members are once again trying to force the issue.

“Our side says it's ‘legally questionable,’ ‘it hasn't been used in forever,’ and ‘blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the panel, who argues Trump’s legal team frequently has used last-ditch efforts and bogus explanations to block testimony — and the House should do the same. 

“I say do it,” he continued. “Let them argue in court that they take the position that it's legally questionable. We back off of everything! We’ve been very weak.” 

The frustration with the Democratic approach extends to members of Pelosi’s leadership team. 

“We need to develop other tools because our tools are not working,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Judiciary panel member who is co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. “We cannot allow the administration to simply continuously stonewall Congress with no consequences.” 

Lieu is pushing for the use of inherent contempt. 

Even Schiff, who came to Congress in part by defeating a Republican who voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, said on Sunday that relying on the courts may not work for Trump, Ukraine and the undisclosed whistleblower complaint.

“We cannot afford to play rope-a-dope in the court for weeks or months on end,” Schiff said. “We need an answer if there’s a fire burning it needs to be put out, and that's why we're going to have to look at every remedy . . . we're going to have to consider impeachment, as well, as a remedy here.”

Ostensibly the next step in this drama is Thursday, when Acting DNI Joseph Maguire goes before the House Intelligence Committee. This whole mess started because Maguire refused to turn over the transcript of Trump's call and the whistleblower complaint as required by law. Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff then issued a subpoena for Maguire to do so, and that showdown comes later this week.

If Maguire doesn't comply, Pelosi has hinted that the resulting "grave new chapter of lawlessness" would lead to a "whole new stage of investigation" into the Trump regime.  That gives me some small measure of hope at least, but there's not a reason to believe that Trump won't try to call that bluff between now and Thursday.

And if it is a bluff by Pelosi, well, like I've been saying, if Democrats keep walking down the middle of the road on impeachment, they're going to get hit by the bus in the 2020 elections and it won't be a question any longer, because Trump will be re-elected.

Shutdown Countdown, Con't

The government shuts down Friday night at midnight, just days before Christmas, and Republicans not only seem to lack any actual plan to keep the government open, they may not have enough people actually physically in DC right now to pass a vote in either chamber without support from Democrats.

Just days before a deadline to avert a partial government shutdown, President Trump, Democratic leaders and the Republican-controlled Congress are at a stalemate over the president’s treasured border wall. But House Republican leaders are also confronting a more mundane and awkward problem: Their vanquished and retiring members are sick and tired of Washington and don’t want to show up anymore to vote.

Call it the revenge of the lame ducks. Many lawmakers, relegated to cubicles as incoming members take their offices, have been skipping votes in the weeks since House Republicans were swept from power in the midterm elections, and Republican leaders are unsure whether they will ever return.

It is perhaps a fitting end to a Congress that has showcased the untidy politics of the Trump era: Even if the president ultimately embraces a solution that avoids a shutdown, House Republican leaders do not know whether they will have the votes to pass it.

The uncertainty does not end there. With funding for parts of the government like the Department of Homeland Security set to lapse at midnight on Friday, Mr. Trump and top Republicans appear to have no definite plan to keep the doors open. It is clear that as Democrats uniformly oppose the president’s demand for $5 billion for his border wall, any bill that includes that funding cannot pass the Senate, and might face defeat in the House, too.

“That’s me with my hands up in the air,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters last week, in case there was any confusion about the meaning of the exaggerated shrug he offered when asked how the logjam might be broken. “There is no discernible plan — none that’s been disclosed.”

In the final moments of complete Republican control of government before Democrats assume the House majority in January, Republicans find themselves once again trapped between Mr. Trump’s messaging and their own political reality.

The president’s declaration in the Oval Office last week that he would be happy to take sole responsibility for a shutdown undercut Republican leaders who had hoped to blame Democrats for any unresolved spending impasse — a point that Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, reiterated Sunday morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“They just have to have the guts to tell President Trump he’s off on the deep end here,” Mr. Schumer said of Republican leaders, “and all he is going to get with his temper tantrum is a shutdown. He will not get a wall.”

While Mr. Trump insisted that he had the votes to push $5 billion in wall spending through the House, Republican leaders in the chamber are keenly aware that their rank-and-file members are in no mood to return to Washington days before Christmas to battle over his long-unfulfilled signature campaign promise.

Republicans who were beaten by the blue wave last month have no reason to save Trump or to help the party that allowed him to destroy their political careers.  They deserved the drubbing for enabling the party of racist bigotry and fearmongering, not to mention criminal activity of course, but it doesn't mean that they're going to be graceful losers as they burn those bridges behind them.

Trump doesn't exactly inspire loyalty, you know.  Trump wanted that shutdown, all indications are that he's going to get it.

Parting thought:  A shutdown on Friday night would be the capstone on Paul Ryan's reign as Worst House Speaker Ever™, a man so completely inept at the job that he let his members skip town without securing a vote to keep the lights on.

Last Call For Heading Towards The Cliff

Republicans have now lost 40 House seats, and were destroyed in suburban districts across the country, but they have no plans to change a thing.  It's not like they can however, as they're all aboard the Trump train, heading for a cliff, and there's nothing they could do to stop it.

With a brutal finality, the extent of the Republicans’ collapse in the House came into focus last week as more races slipped away from them and their losses neared 40 seats.

Yet nearly a month after the election, there has been little self-examination among Republicans about why a midterm that had seemed at least competitive became a rout.

President Trump has brushed aside questions about the loss of the chamber entirely, ridiculing losing incumbents by name, while continuing to demand Congress fund a border wall despite his party losing many of their most diverse districts. Unlike their Democratic counterparts, Republicans swiftly elevated their existing slate of leaders with little debate, signaling a continuation of their existing political strategy.

And neither Speaker Paul D. Ryan nor Representative Kevin McCarthy, the incoming minority leader, have stepped forward to confront why the party’s once-loyal base of suburban supporters abandoned it — and what can be done to win them back.

The quandary, some Republicans acknowledge, is that the party’s leaders are constrained from fully grappling with the damage Mr. Trump inflicted with those voters, because he remains popular with the party’s core supporters and with the conservatives who will dominate the caucus even more in the next Congress.

But now a cadre of G.O.P. lawmakers are speaking out and urging party officials to come to terms with why their 23-seat majority unraveled so spectacularly and Democrats gained the most seats they had since 1974.

“There has been close to no introspection in the G.O.P. conference and really no coming to grips with the shifting demographics that get to why we lost those seats,” said Representative Elise Stefanik, an upstate New York Republican who is planning to repurpose her political action committee to help Republican women win primaries in 2020. “I’m very frustrated and I know other members are frustrated.”

Ms. Stefanik said there had been “robust private conversations” but she urged Republicans to conduct a formal assessment of their midterm effort.

The G.O.P. response, or lack thereof, to the midterm backlash stands in stark contrast to the shake-ups and soul-searching that followed its loss of Congress in 2006 and consecutive presidential defeats in 2012.

House officials indicate that they will pursue an after-action report, but it is unclear how far it will go in diagnosing why they lost the popular vote by more raw votes than any time in history.

Many of the lawmakers who lost their races or did not run again say the party has a profound structural challenge that incumbents are unwilling to fully face: Mr. Trump’s deep toxicity among moderate voters, especially women.

With most of the Republicans who lost hailing from suburban seats, those who remaining represent red-hued districts where the president is still well-liked.

“Now the party is Trump,” said Representative Tom Rooney of Florida, who at 48 decided to retire, “so we follow his lead.”

Right off the cliff, into oblivion.  The next two years will decide the fate of America, whether we finally decide to purge the country of Trumpism and the GOP, or head off the cliff with them.

Time to pick a side, folks.

The Revenge Of The Son Of Austerity Hysteria, Con't

As I predicted time and again, after it became clear that the 2017 GOP tax cut scam was going to skyrocket the deficit and add trillions of the national debt over ten years to give tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest one percent, Republicans were going to insist Democrats had to cut Social Security and Medicare, and Medicaid and make them take 100% of the blame for it.

We've reached that stage of the con now.

Republicans have removed all doubt: When it comes to the federal deficit, the problem is Medicare and Social Security — not their own tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Fresh off the news that the deficit is increasing under President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Bloomberg News that Congress should target Social Security and Medicare for cuts to address the growing federal debt.

The federal deficit grew by nearly $800 billion over the first fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, during which the Republican Congress passed a tax cut targeted mostly to corporations and the wealthy, which is projected to add more than $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

The White House and GOP leaders promised that despite all projections to the contrary, the tax cuts would pay for themselves. That hasn’t materialized so far.

But, of course, a growing federal deficit hasn’t caused Republican leaders to reconsider their tax policy. Instead, they argue that entitlement reform — Republican-speak for cuts to popular social safety net programs — is what’s really needed to address the federal deficit.

From McConnell’s interview with Bloomberg this week:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

Republicans were actually signaling during the tax debate, before the bill ever passed, that this was their strategy: pass a deficit-exploding tax cut and then argue that the real problem is federal spending on health and retirement benefits.

Massive, massive cuts are coming, and Republicans are going to blame Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats when they come. The fact that the GOP tax scam bill exploded the deficit?  Irrelevant, it only serves as proof that Democrats aren't serious about budgets when they refuse to cut spending, and our media will play dumb like they always do.

Even worse, Republicans will simply say "Democrats will raise taxes on tens of millions of middle-class Americans" unless they go along, setting up Trump for his key issue in 2020.  And should the Dems be dumb enough to capitulate, they'll take 100% of the blame, and the Myth of the Fiscally Responsible GOP will continue to be the truth for the majority of voters and pundits.

We've seen this game before, we saw it coming for over a year, and Dems still don't know how to counter it.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

House Republicans are now fully drowning with five weeks to go before midterms, and we've now reached the point where vulnerable Republicans are being cut loose to drown in districts where the GOP no longer wants to waste money on seats they no longer feel they can save.  This week, Paul Ryan cut the throats of Colorado GOP Rep Mike Coffman and Michigan GOP Rep. Mike Bishop and is leaving them to bleed out on the beach as the blue wave comes to wash them away.

Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House GOP leadership, is cutting off support for two Republican incumbents, Michigan Rep. Mike Bishop and Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman, according to a person familiar with the group's plans.

The super PAC will cancel its planned TV advertising for both members, a move that comes as the party refocuses its funds on races that leaders feel confident they can win — and away from those it sees as out of reach. The organization had $1 million in TV advertising reserved for Coffman and $2.1 million for Bishop, dollars that will now be redistributed elsewhere.
Party officials say both incumbents are trailing Democratic challengers ahead of the midterm elections, and both are expected to be significantly outspent during the final weeks of their campaigns.

“CLF will continue to run strong field operations in these districts and will continue to conduct polling and evaluate races across the country as we do everything we can to protect the Republican majority,” said Courtney Alexander, a spokeswoman for the group.

There is not complete agreement in the party, however, about Coffman’s prospects. Following the super PAC’s announcement, the National Republican Congressional Committee said it would add $600,000 to its TV reservation in the district, according to a person familiar.

Republicans are waging an uphill battle to protect their 23-seat House majority. In recent weeks they have begun a painful round of political triage, with party officials racing to determine which seats can still be saved. Privately, GOP strategists concede that as many as a dozen of the party’s seats are no longer winnable — half of the margin Democrats need to take back the House.

Among the seats that the party feels increasingly pessimistic about are those held by Minnesota Reps. Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, and Iowa Rep. Rod Blum.

Party officials say additional incumbents will likely need to be cut off in the weeks to come.

Even if you don't believe the polling, news like this always makes the situation worse.  It's one thing to stop ads in a district where you're up by 15 points in order to refocus some national money down the line to help somebody in a tighter race.  It's entirely something else to stop ads when you're down by that much, or worse, when you're still relatively close.

Coffman is a dead man walking, he's down big and Cook Political Report has his district rated as Likely Dem at this point as Dem challenger Jason Crow has pulled substantially ahead.  But Bishop is still a Toss-Up in his race against Democrat and Iraq War veteran Elissa Slotkin, and pulling the plug on him means things are far, far worse than the GOP is letting on right now.

And like I said, Coffman and Bishop are far from the only House Republicans being cut off at the knees.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has canceled more than $1 million in planned advertising aimed at helping Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) in the coming weeks.

The decision to cut advertising, described to The Hill by a source familiar with the NRCC's strategic thinking, is a hint that Republicans are pessimistic about Yoder's chances of holding his Kansas City-area district.

Yoder has had significant help from outside groups already. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the largest super PAC backing Republican candidates, has spent about $1.8 million on television advertisements on his behalf. The group still has $750,000 booked in the Kansas City media market for the election's final four weeks.

But the NRCC, which faces a huge battlefield in a political environment in which Democrats have an edge, will use its money elsewhere. The committee was slated to spend $1.2 million on ads beginning Oct. 9.

Yoder has represented the district since winning election in 2010, when he replaced Democrat Dennis Moore. Yoder has never faced a particularly stiff challenge from a Democrat, though he only took 51 percent of the vote in 2016.

This year, he faces Sharice Davids (D), an attorney and first-time candidate who worked as a White House fellow in the Obama administration. She would be the first Native American woman to serve in Congress if she wins.

Yoder too is firmly in the Cook Toss-Up category.  This should be a winnable race for them and they've already put close to two million on keeping his seat.  It's not going to be winnable though.  Republicans are giving up. 

Again though, the blue wave only happens if voters show up.  If you live in any of these districts of have family who does, get engaged and let's finish these guys off.

Shutdown Countdown, Con't

Republicans in Congress are scrambling to get funding bills passed ahead of midterm elections, and that apparently means dispensing with the usual months of shutdown threats and grandstanding and actually passing a funding bill with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The Senate is racing to avoid the third government shutdown of the year ahead of a looming end-of-the-month deadline.

Senators on Tuesday voted 93-7 to pass a sweeping $854 billion spending bill that includes funding for the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor and Education, which make up the lion’s share of total government spending.

Six Republicans, Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.), David Perdue (Ga.), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.), joined Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in voting against the bill, which also includes a short-term stopgap bill to fund the rest of the government through Dec. 7 and prevent a shutdown that would start Oct. 1.

Passage of the sweeping package of defense and domestic spending marks a significant victory for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who has dedicated weeks of floor time to government funding and avoiding another catch-all omnibus bill less than two months before the midterm election, where control of Congress hangs in the balance.

It’s the first time the Senate has approved funding for Labor, HHS or Education outside an omnibus bill since 2007, though even then the package was not completed on time. The bills normally get bogged down by fights over partisan riders, but Senate negotiators agreed early on to avoid attaching them to their legislation and were able to keep them out of the final House-Senate version of the minibus.

“These milestones may sound like inside baseball, but what they signify is a Senate that is getting its appropriations process back on track; a Senate that is attending to vital priorities for our country,” McConnell said.

Despite containing only two appropriations bills, the package represents roughly two-thirds of Congress’s 2019 spending. Of the $854 billion, $785 billion fell under agreed-upon budget caps, and the rest came from off-budget funds such as Overseas Contingency Operations.

It includes provisions for military pay raises, defense research, increases for Pell grants and the National Institute of Health, and workforce development training, among others.

The House is out this week but expected to take up the funding legislation next week, ahead of the September 30th deadline to keep the government funded.

Of course all this mess does is punt the countdown well into the holiday lame duck session, but by then it won't be Paul Ryan's problem anymore...and it may not be Mitch McConnell's problem either.

Goes to show you just how terrified Republicans are right now.

The Revenge Of The Return Of Shutdown Countdown

Donald Trump apparently really wants the GOP to lose control of Congress, threatening once again over the weekend to shut down the government right before midterm elections unless he gets funding for his border wall boondoggle.

Congressional Republicans, already facing a difficult election landscape, confronted a prospect on Sunday they had worked feverishly to avoid: a threat by President Trump to shut down the government over funding for a border wall. 

“I would be willing to ‘shut down’ government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Must get rid of Lottery, Catch & Release etc. and finally go to system of Immigration based on MERIT! We need great people coming into our Country!” 

Last week, Republican leaders thought they had reached a deal with Mr. Trump to delay a confrontation on funding for the wall until after the November midterm elections, according to a person familiar with their discussion. 

But Mr. Trump’s shutdown threat, in which he also demanded several pieces of a comprehensive immigration overhaul that is stalled in Congress, has opened the door to a politically bruising spending fight as the fiscal year ends in September.

With the election coming just weeks later, the party can ill afford a disruption that voters — already disgusted by Washington dysfunction — may hold the president accountable for.
A shutdown would also distract from Senate Republicans’ main business in September: their push to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

You would think by now that House and Senate GOP folks would have realized that Donald Trump is a lying sack of incontinent yak dung who would gladly sacrifice each and every single Republican in DC in order to stay in power, but I never said Republicans were smart (just crafty and wholly evil.)  Trump of course has done this before.

Trump repeated his threat today during a press briefing with Italian PM Giuseppe Conte.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday again threatened to shut down the federal government if Congress does not pass the immigration reforms he seeks as part of a spending package that must be passed by the end of September.

“If we don’t get border security, after many, many years of talk within the United States, I would have no problem doing a shutdown,” Trump said during a news conference with visiting Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. 

Asked if he required the full $25 billion the White House has requested to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, as well as his other immigration priorities, in order to avert a shutdown, Trump replied, “I always leave room for negotiation.”

Surprise, Trump doesn't think your deal is worth crap, boys.  And these clowns never seem to understand that there is no such thing as a deal with Trump.

I hope Democrats have gotten this through their heads already.  Republicans certainly have not.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Two weeks ago I talked about how House GOP Freedom Caucus leaders Rep. Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan were considering articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General (and Mueller probe boss) Rod Rosenstein, a doomed effort that could nevertheless provide the political cover Trump needed to start mass firings in the DoJ.

Last week I noted that GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan and House GOP Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Trey Gowdy were blocking that effort in the wake of the double-barreled blast of Trump's disastrous trip to Finland to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the indictment of suspected Russian agent and NRA enthusiast Maria Butina.

That brings us to this week, where Trump, battered by economic news by US corporations blaming his trade war for lost profits and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen unleashing recordings of his conversations with Trump about buying off mistresses, needs something to rally his base, and that something is Meadows and Jordan making their move against Rosenstein official.

A group of Republican lawmakers on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment to remove Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, escalating a fight over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Representatives Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, who belong to the conservative House Freedom Caucus, joined nine other House members in accusing Rosenstein of hiding investigative information from Congress, failure to comply with congressional subpoenas and other alleged misconduct.

Rosenstein, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, has become a frequent punching bag for supporters of President Donald Trump for appointing Mueller to investigate whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton. The president has denied such collusion took place.

“The DOJ is keeping information from Congress,” Jordan said, referring to the Department of Justice. “Enough is enough. It’s time to hold Mr. Rosenstein accountable for blocking Congress’s constitutional oversight role.”

A Justice Department official said the agency had no comment.

So we're in a for a long summer fight, right?

Not really.

Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said on Twitter the articles of impeachment “were filed in bad faith and show extraordinary lengths to which House Republicans will go to protect Trump.”

The House is scheduled to leave on Thursday on a recess that extends until the first week of September.

A House Republican aide said the two lawmakers were not attempting to force quick action on the articles of impeachment.

Oh yeah, the August recess where lawmakers give themselves a six-week vacation to go campaign.  So no, this isn't going anywhere until after Labor Day.  And even then, it's not going anywhere.

But it sure gives House Republicans something to talk about when they campaign and fundraise for the next month and change back home, huh.  Yes, this is a stupid publicity stunt on the part of the House GOP, only 11 House Republicans signed on and there's no real way Paul Ryan is even going to let this come up for a vote, much less Mitch McConnell holding a trial in the final month or two of the midterm campaign.

Ahhh but what about the fact that House members can force an impeachment vote if they truly want to?

A Meadows spokesman said the North Carolina Republican was leaving open the option of making the resolution privileged to force a vote. But such a move isn't likely to occur until after the House returns in September. 

"Information has been hidden, efforts have been stonewalled," Meadows said during an appearance on Fox News Wednesday night. "I guess for us, it's all about transparency so the American people can judge for themselves. They may be able to ignore Congress but they can't ignore the American people." 

Later in the Fox News interview, Meadows hinted he may try to force a vote on the House floor about the articles of impeachment against Rosenstein as soon as Thursday. Meadows said he doesn't want to bring the motion to the floor without Ryan's permission but that it's possible it can happen. 

"But starting tomorrow, we can bring it up as a privileged motion," he said. 

He added, "It really means it would require a vote on the House floor within two days and that's something that any member of Congress, Jim or I, can do. And quite frankly, it's either we hold him in contempt or we get the documents or we impeach him, and the only thing we have control over is the ability to bring impeachment straight to the floor."

So this is really just a threat they are leaving open for at least six weeks, and probably forever.  Meadows could have made this a privileged motion and to call on a vote, but specifically chose not to do so.  In other words, as I said above, this is a campaign publicity stunt and nothing more, something Jim Jordan desperately needs back home in Ohio as he faces voters on his past assistant coaching role in the Ohio State wrestling abuse scandal.

That doesn't mean however that Trump isn't going to use the impeachment articles as cover to fire Rosenstein outright while Congress is out campaigning.  And Mitch has already said that while the House will be in recess, the Senate has the Kavanaugh confirmation to deal with, not to mention Mitch wanting to keep Senate Democrats in DC and from being able to campaign at all, so Dems will be on hand if it looks like Trump gets an itchy trigger finger.

Anyway, we'll see.  My gut tells me Trump will try to fire some people, he has in the past and was only talked down because WH lawyer Don McGahn threatened to quit if he did.   I think as Mueller keeps making his life worse, Trump will be more and more incensed until he finally loses his temper.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For The Party Is Over

I keep pounding the gavel on this point, but it remains valid: Trump was the inevitable metastasized symptom of a broken, cancerous Republican party that has aided and abetted his perfidy and really has been broken all my life. The Nation's David Klion nails them to the wall for it.

It’s rarely recalled now, but back in May 2017, The Washington Post published the transcript of a conversation from June 2016 among the House Republican leadership, in which House majority leader Kevin McCarthy made clear that he was aware “the Russians hacked the DNC and got the opp research that they had on Trump” and speculated “there’s two people, I think, that Putin pays: [Representative Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” Amid laughter, House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted that the conversation remain off the record, adding, “What’s said in the family stays in the family.” Ryan would later claim he and McCarthy were joking.

The point here isn’t necessarily that Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, solicited illegally obtained documents from Russian officials. There are other plausible candidates who might have done that. The point is that Russiagate, which is widely understood to be a scandal surrounding Donald Trump’s close associates like Paul Manafort, may go wider and deeper, and could implicate at least one member of Congress. 

Moreover, it seems that the Republican leadership was at the very least aware of this possibility, amused by it, and did nothing whatsoever to alert the public or any relevant authorities. They were happy to enjoy the benefits of Russian interference and said so openly among themselves. Similarly, as the Post reported, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was informed of Russian interference in September 2016 in a meeting with President Obama and other senior officials, he threatened to cast any public announcement of the threat as partisan politics. It’s not a stretch to say McConnell deliberately undermined national security for partisan advantage, a decision that has paid off with the signing of a massive tax cut for the wealthy and the looming establishment of a durable right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. 

In other words, Russiagate isn’t just the narrow story of a few corrupt officials. It isn’t even the story of a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt political party, the one currently holding all the levers of power in Washington. After Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans in Washington proclaimed their solemn concern, just as they did when the president expressed his sympathy for the white supremacists in Charlottesville last year. But all of them are fully aware that they are abetting a criminal conspiracy, and probably more than one.

I can't stress this enough.  While it's still reasonable to argue whether or not Trump is a willing Russian ally or compromised asset (or both), there's no question that the rest of the GOP is covering for him out of fear of legal consequences and the toxic base that dredged them all out of the swamp and put them in charge of the country.

Shortly after the Trump-Putin press conference, federal prosecutors announced the indictment of Maria Butina, a Russian national in Washington, DC, who, unlike the 25 Russians the special counsel has so far indicted, was arrested over the weekend. Butina, who in 2016 attempted to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin, is accused of operating as a foreign agent to gain influence in Republican political circles and advance the interests of the Russian Federation. Working on behalf of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank, she appears to have brokered ties with the National Rifle Association and conservative religious organizations, which she herself accurately identified as the financial backbones of the Republican Party in Congress. 

Butina is a colorful example of an increasingly common phenomenon in Washington: foreign nationals, not only from Russia but from dozens of other countries, who blur the line between lobbying and spying until it’s imperceptible. This is what the evisceration of campaign-finance laws has yielded: a capital where American corporations and foreign governments see every official as being for sale. 

Mueller, who knows more than anyone in the media about the extent of the Russiagate scandal and never leaks, isn’t telling us that Trump colluded and obstructed justice—we already know that, because we literally saw Trump request on camera, in the summer of 2016, that Russia hack the Clinton campaign, just as we later saw him bluntly admit to the world that he fired James Comey to end the Russia investigation. 

Instead, we are being told something much more frightening: that Russiagate doesn’t end with Trump and his inner circle, that some members of Congress may be implicated, and that the Republican leadership therefore has a personal stake in preventing anyone beyond Manafort and a few other flunkies from being held accountable. Mueller and the FBI are giving everyone a glimpse at the scale of official corruption in Washington, and they’re warning us that they aren’t going to be able to rein it in all by themselves.

As I've said, there will be no legal solution to Trump.  There may not even be a viable Constitutional solution.  It will be 100% political.  The GOP that created Trump as its avatar has to be shattered and its power along with it, and until that happens, we are all in dire trouble.

How Much SUV Could A Woodchuck Chuck...

...if a woodchuck could chuck Paul Ryan's SUV?

Winter in Wisconsin is tough.

So tough, in fact, that living creatures might go searching for shelter in unlikely places.

House Speaker Paul Ryan explained Thursday that a family of woodchucks moved into his Chevy Suburban recently, eating the wiring, and rendering the car useless.

"My car was eaten by animals," Ryan said, to laughs from an audience at an event hosted by the Economic Club of Washington D.C. "It's just dead."

The car was parked at his mother's house in his hometown in Wisconsin, and when she came back from her annual trip to Florida for the winter, it wouldn't start. As a top congressional leader Ryan has a security detail and hasn't been allowed to drive in three years.

"So I towed it into the dealer, they put it up, and they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban," Ryan said.

Ryan told the story after giving a speech about how he feels Republican policies, like last year's tax overhaul, have helped the economy. He disagreed, however, with President Trump's decisions to impose tariffs on a number of nations, most recently on China.

"The rule book for the global economy of the future is being written right now," Ryan said. "The question is whether the United States will be holding the pen."

Much like Paul Ryan's SUV, the United States has an vicious orange rodent underbody problem.  Besides, the only pens these clowns deserve to get are the federal kind with the decidedly substandard housing options.  For right now, he's too busy running interference for Trump and the rest of the GOP's vast stable of serial sexual abusers.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday indicated he opposed a congressional ethics probe into fellow Republican Rep. Jim Jordan after numerous former Ohio State University wrestlers alleged the lawmaker ignored reports of sexual misconduct when he was an assistant coach at the school in the 1980s and 1990s.

The House Ethics Committee, Ryan said, "investigates things that members do while they’re here, not things that happened a couple of decades ago when they weren’t in Congress."

Ryan said he called Jordan over the weekend to discuss the allegations, as well as to "check in on" the Ohio Republican following news that his nephew had been killed in a car accident.

"I have always known Jim Jordan to be a man of honesty and a man of integrity," Ryan said during a weekly press conference alongside other GOP House leaders.

The retiring speaker's remarks came after President Barack Obama's ethics czar, Norman Eisen, and another government watchdog filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics calling for a "preliminary inquiry" into whether Jordan's response to the allegations.

"If Rep. Jordan’s recent statements — that he had no knowledge that student wrestlers under his supervision were being sexually abused — are false, his present conduct in connection with this serious matter would fail to 'reflect creditably on the House'" in violation of House rules, their letter to the OCE says.

But Ryan will certainly land on his feet somewhere in the vast Right-wing Noise Machine come 2019.  There's no way a former House Speaker doesn't cash in on K Street or FOX News, and he'll have plenty of money to buy a new SUV or six.

The rest of his former constituents in Wisconsin, well, not so much.

Last Call For Animal Farm

Paul Ryan's plan to wreck SNAP and gut food assistance for women and children in the yearly farm bill ran into an insurmountable force on Friday, that force being Ryan's own party, who went into full revolt basically because the hardliners didn't get their vote on immigration mass deportation .

House conservatives tanked a GOP farm bill on Friday over an intra-party feud over immigration, delivering a stunning blow to Republican leaders as they try to find a path forward on immigration. 

In a 198-213 vote, GOP conservatives essentially joined Democrats in rejecting the measure, which would have introduced tougher work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP] that were a priority for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). 

The whip count remained in question in the hours leading up to the dramatic vote, despite GOP leaders expressing confidence just minutes before hand that they would have enough support to pass the bill.

Ryan and other GOP leaders frantically tried to flip members of the House Freedom Caucus from no to yes during the amendment vote series leading up to final passage.
At one point, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a chief deputy whip, was seen working Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) while Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was locked in an intense conversation with Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.)

Ryan, McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) huddled with House Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.) earlier as lawmakers voted on amendments to the bill. 

Leadership made an offer to the Freedom Caucus that they could pick any date they wanted in June for a floor vote on a hardline immigration bill crafted by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), according to a source familiar with the discussion.
In the end it, it wasn’t enough. Meadows said his members needed more of a commitment from leadership on the Goodlatte bill.

House Republicans desperately want to save their jobs by putting an immigration bill in front of the Senate and forcing Senate Republicans to save them, so the Freedom Caucus is now apparently ready to scuttle the farm bill in order to get their way. 

I've talked about how horrible the Goodlatte immigration bill is before, and it's essentially the end of legal immigration as well as setting the stage for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.  The House passing it would be pretty lethal to Senate Republicans, and they know it.

But not passing a farm bill would be worse (and the Freedom Caucus can blame Democrats, they figure.)  We'll see who wins, but no matter what, Americans lose.

We can fix that in November.

Whatsoever You Do To The Least Of My People

Departing GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan has gotten himself into yet another major mess as it appears he has driven out the House Chaplain over philosophical differences.

The chaplain of the House said on Thursday that he was blindsided when Speaker Paul D. Ryan asked him to resign two weeks ago, a request that he complied with but was never given a reason for.

The sudden resignation of the chaplain, the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy, shocked members of both parties. He had served in the role since he was nominated in 2011 by Speaker John A. Boehner, a fellow Catholic. In an interview, Father Conroy was categorical: His departure was not voluntary.

“I was asked to resign, that is clear,” Father Conroy said. As for why, he added, “that is unclear.”

“I certainly wasn’t given anything in writing,” he said. “Catholic members on both sides are furious.”

Father Conroy said he received the news from Mr. Ryan’s chief of staff. “The speaker would like your resignation,” Father Conroy recalled being told. He complied.

“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” Father Conroy wrote in a letter to Mr. Ryan several days later. “I wish all the best of the House of Representatives, and for your upcoming search for a worthy successor in the office of the chaplain.”

His final day will be May 24.

Father Conroy’s resignation is all the more contentious in Catholic circles because Mr. Ryan is a Catholic conservative, whereas Father Conroy is a Jesuit, a branch that is viewed by some as more liberal.

Asked whether differences in politics were a factor in his ouster, Father Conroy said: “I do not want to politicize this. I have thoughts about it, but I am not contributing to that.”

But, he said, Capitol Hill is an inherently political place. “There are Catholics who are Republicans and there are Catholics who are Democrats,” he said. “I don’t know if there is a religious divide; there certainly is a political one.”

Though Father Conroy said he did not know whether politics were behind his departure, he pointed to a prayer he had given on the House floor in November, when Congress was debating tax overhaul legislation.

“May all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle,” he prayed. “May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

About a week later, Father Conroy said, he heard from the speaker’s office. “A staffer came down and said, We are upset with this prayer; you are getting too political,” he said. “It suggests to me that there are members who have talked to him about being upset with that prayer.”

Shortly after, when he saw Mr. Ryan himself, Father Conroy said that the speaker told him, “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.”

The road of my faith has long taken me away from the Catholic Church I grew up with as a kid 30 years ago, but to basically fire a Jesuit because he suggested that Congress should be nicer to "the least of my people" is insane.

Why do Republicans hate Christians so much?

Last Call For Saving Privatization Ryan

GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is retiring and his Wisconsin district is up for grabs, but Ryan may not make it until the end of his term before the Langoliers in the GOP fall upon his rotting political corpse and devour him.

Paul Ryan said he plans to remain as speaker and not call an early leadership election, but well-wired Republicans tell Jonathan Swan and me that Ryan may be forced out sooner. 

What we're hearing: One source close to leadership told us: "Scuttlebutt is that Paul will have to step down from speakership soon. Members won’t follow a lame duck, he’ll have no leverage to cut deals, and the last thing they need in this environment is 6 months of palace intrigue and everyone stabbing everyone else in the back."

A senior GOP House member predicted this about Ryan’s future: “He will be gone by the end of July.” 

Some big donors, who have given millions to Ryan this cycle, may not want him to stay on as speaker if the entire party is taking on water. 

This is not because he’ll struggle to raise money. Enough donors from the old Romney-Ryan world will write checks to Ryan to try to save the majority. 

It’s more about certainty and stability. Members need certainty and they don’t want to operate until November in a climate where every move from every member of leadership is viewed through the prism of jostling for the speakership. 

Our sources say that could pull an already divided conference even further apart. 

So we wouldn’t be surprised if Ryan reverses himself before August, setting an early election for the next speaker...

Two observations here.

One, I think the real issue is what happens in the next month with Syria and Mueller.  If Trump makes a major military push against Assad and/or fires Robert Mueller or Rod Rosenstein, you'll see the House GOP fall in line very, very quickly and Ryan will remain as the lightning rod. Trump's capricious petty vengeance has the added effect of focusing the mind of the problem of self-preservation for everyone around him. As long as Ryan stays around, the rest of the House GOP is off the accountability hook, and this could very well be why Ryan made the announcement now and is falling on his sword to preserve the gains the GOP has made so far.

Two, this is all dependent on somebody actually wanting to replace Ryan before the November election.  Does Steve Scalise or Kevin McCarthy want to be the new captain of the Titanic with the twin icebergs of Trump's unpopularity and the Democratic wave  in sight, or do they wait until the House GOP self-destructs so they can blame Ryan and start fresh in 2019 as the minority party?  Believe me, if Scalise or McCarthy take over the job now, they'll be the goat staked out for the T-Rex of Failure to come feast upon when the January election for leadership rolls around.

It's possible, but I'm betting the remaining players in House GOP leadership are going to suddenly discover that keeping Paul Ryan around as a human shield is much, much more preferable than drawing active fire from both the base and the Democrats, not to mention Trump spraying and praying.

We'll see.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Millenials say they are heading to the voting booth in the annual Harvard Institute of Politics poll in higher numbers than the 2010 or 2014 midterms, which is good because they frankly couldn't get much worse.

More young voters say they’ll definitely vote in November than have in the last two midterm elections and they increasingly would rather have Democrats than Republicans in control of Congress, a poll released Tuesday by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics shows.

The survey of adults ages 18 to 29 also reveals younger Americans have greater trust in Amazon and Google than Facebook and Twitter. Those findings come as Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify at the Capitol on Tuesday and Wednesday to answer questions about data privacy, fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech.

More than a third of young Americans eligible to cast ballots in November -- 37 percent -- say they’ll “definitely be voting” in the elections seven months from now that will decide control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That’s higher than the poll recorded at about the same point in 2010 and 2014, the two most recent midterm elections, when 31 percent and 23 percent answered that way.

“This generation of young Americans is as engaged as we have ever seen them in a midterm election cycle," said John Della Volpe, the institute’s polling director.

The good news: it's Democrats who are energized.

Young, self-identified Democrats are driving almost all of the increased enthusiasm, the survey found, with 51 percent saying they’ll “definitely” vote. That’s a 9 percentage point increase since November 2017 and is significantly larger than the 36 percent of Republicans who say the same.

At this point in the 2014 election, midway through Obama’s second term, 28 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans indicated that they would “definitely” be voting, while 35 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans held a similar interest in voting in the spring of 2010. In that election, Republicans took control of the House from the Democrats.

Millenials didn't show up at all in 2014 and it was brutal for the Dems.  The numbers are much, much better this time around, and I'm hoping it will pay off in a big way.

If 51% of Millenial Dems really do show up in November, the Republicans are screwed. I'm holding out hope here that Trump has turned a lot of people younger than myself into voters that show up.

But one thing I do know come January:  Paul Ryan won't be Speaker of the House, because he's bugging out, if Politico 2.0 is to be believed.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has told confidants that he will announce soon that he won't run for reelection in November, according to sources with knowledge of the conversations. 

Why it matters: House Republicans were already in a very tough spot for the midterms, with many endangered members and the good chance that Democrats could win the majority.

One of Washington’s best-wired Republicans said: 

“This is a Titanic, tectonic shift. … This is going to make every Republican donor believe the House can’t be held.” The announcement will help Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in his fundraising because “the Senate becomes the last bastion," the Republican said.

If this is a trial balloon, Ryan does have time to work with. Wisconsin's primaries are among the latest in the country (August 14th) and the candidate filing date is June 1st.  But as Axios's source says, if the most prolific fundraiser in the House GOP is hanging it up, then the money people absolutely are going to shift resources to the Senate.

Ryan was the most feckless Speaker in modern history, hands down.  And he'll be remembered most for enabling Trump, and then cutting and running in two years like a punk.  He won't go down as the worst however, compared to Newt Gingrich's fall from grace, Tom DeLay who went down on money laundering and conspiracy charges (later overturned by a Texas court) and oh yeah, convicted pedophile Denny Hastert.  Hey, at least Ryan made John Boehner look competent by comparison, right?

Maybe we should stop having Republicans in charge of the House?  Just saying.

Of course there's there theory that Ryan had a comfortable lead and bailed on not only the House Speaker's gavel but the House GOP as well, and that's because he knows something massive is coming.  After all, the best way to prevent any impeachment proceedings is to remain as Speaker and prevent anything from coming to a vote.  He's only 48, the guy had years ahead of him in the House.

He's looking for the exits though.

There's more to this story.

Stay frosty.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Don't look now, but Beto O'Rourke just might actually be able to beat Ted Cruz in November in Texas, and now we know O'Rourke already has got the money to do it.

U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso, raised over $6.7 million for his U.S. Senate bid in the first quarter of 2018, according to his campaign, a staggering number that poses a new category of threat to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. 

The haul is easily O'Rourke's biggest fundraising quarter yet, more than double his next-closest total for a three-month period. It also is more than any Democratic Senate candidate nationwide took in last quarter, O'Rourke's campaign said. 

Cruz has not released his first-quarter fundraising numbers yet, but O'Rourke's $6.7 million total is on a different level than his previous hauls, which ranged from $1.7 million to $2.4 million. Those alone were good enough to outraise Cruz for three of the last four reporting periods. 

Furthermore, the $6.7 million total came from more than 141,000 contributions — another record-busting number for O'Rourke.

Ted Cruz has got to be terrified at this point.  He knows that he's in for the fight of his life, and he could actually lose.

"Campaigning in a grassroots fashion while raising more than $6.7 million from 141,000 contributions, we are the story of a campaign powered by people who are standing up to special interests, proving that we are more than a match and making it clear that Texans are willing to do exactly what our state and country need of us at this critical time," O'Rourke said in a statement.

O'Rourke's campaign released the fundraising statistics Tuesday morning ahead of the April 15 deadline to report it to the Federal Election Commission. Cruz has not offered any numbers for the full quarter, though he disclosed raising $803,000 through the first 45 days of the year — a fraction of O'Rourke's $2.3 million for the same timeframe. 

On Tuesday morning, O'Rourke's team did not volunteer its cash-on-hand figure, but the $6.7 million raised is likely to go a long way toward closing his deficit with Cruz in money to spend. As of mid-February, O'Rourke had $4.9 million in the bank to Cruz's $6 million. 

O'Rourke unveiled the $6.7 million figure on the second day of a three-day, 12-city trip by Cruz to mark the official start of his re-election campaign. O'Rourke is also hitting the road — he plans to hold town halls in 15 cities over the next six days.

At this point, Cruz's seat is in play.  It's something the Democrats absolutely need to win if they have any chance of taking the Senate in a year where they need two pickups while having to defend ten Trump state Senate seats, and again, tens of millions of dollars are going to be spent by the GOP to knock out Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill, Joe Manchin, and Joe Donnelly.

But guess what?  Ted Cruz is far from the only big name Republican in trouble whose Democratic challenger is raising big bucks to take them on.

The top Democrat challenging Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) raised $2.1 million during the first quarter of 2018, his campaign announced on Monday. 

Randy Bryce’s campaign said it has raised $4.75 million since last June and has nearly $2.3 million in cash on hand. 

The campaign also said it added 45,000 new donors since the beginning of the year.

Bryce’s bid to unseat Ryan in Wisconsin's 1st District began last June with a fundraising campaign that netted more than $100,000 in its first 24 hours. 

The ironworker raised $1 million in the third quarter of 2017 and had raised approximately $2.7 million by the end of 2017, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Randy Bryce has a much tougher battle than O'Rourke does, if you can believe that a Democrat in Texas has a better shot of winning than a Wisconsin one.  But Paul Ryan is the most prolific fundraiser in DC.  He raised an obscene $44 million last year and gave most of it to the RNC.  He's fighting Bryce with his pocket change and leftovers, and that's still tens of million of dollars.

Randy's going to need your help too. 

It's great if they win, but it can't come at the expense of the seats we already have in hand.  If we can hold the line here, we can finish off the GOP in 2020 and 2022.  Let's make sure we can keep the seats we do have in the House and Senate.

The Return Of The Revenge Of Shutdown Countdown

It's that time of year again as the six-week punt by Republicans in February still means that without a spending bill by the end of the week, the government shuts down again (and Mitch McConnell definitely hasn't met his promise on DACA funding.)  The catch is both sides know election season is imminent and the GOP can't have this mess around their necks, which means Democrats are holding a lot of leverage this time.

The House and Senate need to pass their massive 2018 spending bill before the government shuts down on Friday. Senior sources from both parties on Capitol Hill tell me they expect they'll get the deal done — though there's plenty of last minute haggling.

The big picture: This spending bill will cost more than $1 trillion and will further add to the deficit, which is likely to reach at least $800 billion for the 2018 fiscal year. Republican leaders and Trump will sell the spending package as a much-needed boost to military spending. House defense hawks, led by House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, campaigned aggressively for this boost. And Democrats will rightly be thrilled that they've forced Republicans to capitulate to fund so many of their domestic priorities.

But fiscal conservatives are furious. "[Leadership is] going to say we funded our defense," one conservative House member told me. "And they will ignore the fact they've bankrupted our country in the process."

"People will start to say 'Why does it matter who's in power'?" added the member, who asked for anonymity because the bill has not been published yet.

Behind-the-scenes: During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week, a deeply frustrated conservative House member said he wanted to introduce a motion to rename this week's spending bill the "2018 base voter suppression bill," according to a source in the room. We expect that the ultra conservative House Freedom Caucus members will vote against the bill, and that the deal will ride through with Democratic votes. (A common view within leadership and the administration is that the Freedom Caucus was never going to vote for the bill anyway.)

Which would mean that in the end, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats beat the House GOP Freedom Caucus.

Again. 

Republicans are going to have a really tough sale on a budget that starts at the point where we start at an $800 billion deficit a year and those massive, massive cuts that Paul Ryan wanted?  He'll get some, but nowhere near what he wanted.  And with the very real likelihood that Ryan will no longer be Speaker come January, he knows he has lost his last chance.

Maybe Pelosi's good at her job, guys?  Just saying.  

A Deal With The Devil

It seems that both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate want to settle this budget mess and get back to the most important task: fundraising for reelection campaigns.

Senate leaders, disregarding President Trump’s threats to shut down the government, struck a far-reaching agreement on Wednesday to set spending levels on military and domestic spending for the next two years, breaking the cycle of fiscal crises that have bedeviled the Capitol since last summer. 

The accord between Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Chuck Schumer of New York, his Democratic counterpart, would raise strict caps on military and domestic spending that were imposed in 2011 as part of a deal with President Barack Obama that was once seen as a key triumph for Republicans in Congress. 

The deal will cause federal budget deficits to grow even larger, on top of the effects of the sweeping tax overhaul that lawmakers approved in December. 

The deal includes commitments to dedicate billions of dollars to areas like infrastructure, the opioid crisis, V.A. hospitals and health research, according to a person briefed on the agreement. It also includes disaster relief for areas hit by last year’s hurricanes and wildfires.

We'll see if the deal passes, but my guess is Trump blows it up, especially when he hears stuff like this:

The budget deal would be paired with a stopgap spending measure that would keep federal agencies open past Thursday, when the current funding measure is set to expire.
It was not immediately clear if enough Democrats would oppose the bill to imperil its passage in the House, given the likely opposition from at least some fiscal conservatives. If lawmakers cannot pass a temporary funding measure by the end of Thursday — either by itself or tied to a budget pact — the government would shut down for the second time this year. 

The budget agreement would also negate the president’s demands to broadly reorder government with deep cuts to domestic programs like environmental protection, foreign aid, and health research that were to offset large increases in military spending. Mr. Trump is to release his second budget request on Monday, but the deal — sealed by members of his own party — would effectively render many of his demands null and void. 

If the deal passes, lawmakers would put together a long-term spending package over the coming weeks that would fund the government through September, granting a measure of peace to Washington as attention turns to the midterm elections in November. By setting overall spending levels through September 2019, the deal would ease passage of spending bills in the next fiscal year as well.

Trump will never, ever tolerate a bill that can be described as one that "would effectively render many of his demands null and void" either.  It means this bill would not only have to pass the Senate and the House but do so with two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override an assured Trump veto.

That's certainly possible, but it won't be easy.

Also, please note the swiftness with which Republicans are willing to completely blow up their own sequestestration spending cap limits put in place to hamstring Barack Obama, back when the GOP actually gave a damn about "deficits" and stuff.

We'll see.

Trump Cards, Con't

The Washington Post editorial board wastes little time pinning the blame for the Nunes memo fiasco on the proper parties: mainly House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has all the leadership qualities of bread mold.

“WHAT THIS is not is an indictment of our institutions, of our justice system,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday about the now infamous “Nunes memo.” “It does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general,” the speaker insisted. Is this cynicism or naivete?

Discrediting law enforcement is the memo’s transparent purpose and why it has been embraced by President Trump. Written mainly by the staff of Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the loose-cannon chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the memo reportedly makes the case that the FBI abused spying authorities as it sought permission to surveil a former Trump adviser. The Justice Department called its potential release, which Mr. Trump reportedly intends to approve, “extraordinarily reckless.” The FBI released its own startling public statement citing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Adam Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wrote in a Post op-ed that the Nunes memo “cherry-picks facts, ignores others and smears the FBI and the Justice Department.”

As we’ve said before, we are not in the business of opposing the release of information of potential public value. But if the Nunes memo were truly about fair congressional oversight of law enforcement, as Mr. Ryan claims, Republicans would allow the simultaneous release of a Democratic memo on the same subject. But they are not, though Mr. Ryan’s staff says the speaker supports releasing the Democratic memo after giving it more scrutiny. That leaves only unsettling possibilities for why Mr. Nunes, a longtime Trump ally, is pushing to disseminate his version as the president’s ire about the Russia investigation crests and speculation swirls about his desire to fire senior law enforcement officials, including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. CNN reported Thursday that Mr. Trump believes the Nunes memo “could discredit the agency” by exposing “bias within the FBI’s top ranks.”

Mr. Ryan bears full responsibility for the deterioration of congressional oversight of intelligence operations. Once a bipartisan responsibility that lawmakers treated soberly — as they still do in the Senate — oversight under Mr. Nunes has become another front in Mr. Trump’s assault on the law enforcement institutions investigating the president and his associates. House Republicans are poisoning the committee’s relationship with the intelligence community and distracting from real issues demanding attention. 

It's nice of WaPo to notice what anyone with a modicum of sentience would have picked up on.  As I've been saying for months now on the subject of the Mueller investigation, the question was never about Trump's guilt, the question was what the congressional GOP's response to Trump's cartoonishly obvious malfeasance would be. 

The answer is clearly "nothing, also did you know Hillary Clinton's a real bitch?"

The idea that the GOP in Congress would keep Trump's worst autocratic impulses in check rather than openly aiding and abetting him was laughable 15 months ago and remains a dark comedy today. The "Never Trump" movement of "principled Republican opposition" to Trump was always a joke, and too many American's fell for it.

Too bad we're all the punchline.

It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Cave" Is

The Democrats' promise to demand DACA legislation or block a continuing resolution to keep the government open lasted less than 72 hours, with no actual DACA legislation, but a promise of one in the next three weeks. A promise from...Mitch McConnell, the guy who happily stole Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat and got away with it.  There are two schools of thought on this: one, OBAMA SCHUMER FAILED US, two, we took what we can get.

There are an awful lot of people in school one right now.

“It’s morally reprehensible and political malpractice. It’s [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer’s job to keep his caucus together and stand up for progressive values and he failed on both fronts,” Ezra Levin, a leader of the Indivisible Project, told TPM shortly after the vote. “We’re going to be holding the Democrats accountable who caved.”

Levin’s group was among those on a conference call late Monday morning encouraging Democrats to stand strong on the vote. When TPM informed them during the call that Senate leaders had decided against doing so, the news was met with a stunned silence. After a few seconds Frank Sharry, the head of the pro-immigrant America’s Voice, weighed to say he had “a lot of concern” about its details.

“They grew a pair on Friday night and they couldn’t find them today,” Sharry told TPM in a follow-up conversation after the vote. “Friday night, Democrats stood together and said ‘we’re going to take on this racist bully.’ … By Monday morning they were climbing down for very little in return. Come on, Democrats.”

Sharry said he and other advocates wanted Democrats to stare down President Trump and the GOP for the next few days to let the pressure build and try to force them to the negotiating table once again. Instead, Trump refused to negotiate — and Democrats were the ones to crumble.

“What were Democrats thinking?” he said. “We’re pissed.”

He’s not the only one.

“Enough is enough. We cannot rely on empty promises from those who have already proven to play politics with the lives of Dreamers. Today, Republicans — and too many Democrats — in Congress betrayed our American values and allowed bigotry and fear to prevail,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lorella Praeli said in a statement. “We will be watching, and will make sure voters this November know if their representatives stood for Dreamers or for their deportation.”

“The Democrats need to stand strong,” said Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden.

Outside groups weren’t the only ones who were furious. A number of Senate Democratic offices felt that their leadership had led them into a situation where they had no good options, hurting moderates by forcing a shutdown and then hurting the entire party with its base by capitulating so fast.

More than a dozen Senate Democrats broke with party leaders to vote against the bill, including a number of potential presidential candidates, a sign they know exactly where the base is. While most of them declined to take shots at their leaders, they clearly weren’t happy with the sudden about-face, warning not to trust McConnell’s promises.

“I don’t believe he made any commitment whatsoever and I believe it would be foolhardy to believe he made a commitment,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) told reporters after the vote.

 Erik Loomis talks us down and gives us the case for school two.

1) CHIP is a huge policy win for Democrats. You might say that Republicans had to deal with this anyway. No they didn’t. It’s a party of nihilists who don’t care if children die. Taking CHIP off the table for 6 years is a positive win.

2) Taking CHIP off the table undermines Republican leverage for the next battle. They have no policy position that Democrats must vote for going forward.

3) The deal is only for a few weeks. On February 8, if the Republicans have not dealt with Dreamers, then Democrats can shut the government down again, this time with the very clear narrative that Mitch McConnell is a liar and that they gave Republicans a chance to fix the problem and they are all lying liars who lie.

4) Despite the incredibly inhuman injustice of our immigration policy, no Dreamers will be deported before February 8.

Now, if February 8 comes and Democratic senators back off of a confrontation to protect Dreamers, that’s really bad. But this gives another few weeks to ratchet up the pressure on them and on Republicans to get this done.

And I hate to have to correct Erik here.  The CHIP funding wasn't a huge win, and it's still on the table because while the CR bill did fund the CHIP program, Jonathan Capehart discovered that the CR eliminated funding for the community health centers that provide CHIP services.

"In their effort to continue dismantling Obamacare, the Republican continuing resolution does not include funding for community clinics and private hospitals that care for large numbers of low-income patients,” Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) told me. The impact of this budgetary slight was made plain by one of her constituents in an email she shared with me.

Wanted to touch base about CR that doesn’t include health Center funding. St. John’s will lose 10% of our budget ($8.4 million a year). We’ll have to close 6 of our 15 clinics in your district. 

It’s also self defeating to fund CHIP but not health centers since most kids with CHIP receive their care at community health centers. So they may have CHIP but they won’t be able to access services because their Health Center is closed.

That message came from Jim Mangia, president and CEO of St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Los Angeles. When I got him on the phone, he told me that his community health center serves 100,000 “unduplicated” patients, 48,000 of whom are children. “About half of them would lose access to health care services,” Mangia said. “Where are those kids going to go for health care? They have CHIP, but their doctor has been laid off. It’s so cynical, their argument. And disingenuous.”

So what do I think?  I think the Democrats got screwed badly, and there's not much they can do about it.  The notion that Dems got a win on CHIP is pretty much garbage here, but they took the deal anyway.  So no, I don't trust the Republicans, and I don't trust the competence of Dems.  They should have seen this poison pill coming and they didn't.

So now, if I'm Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, I use those three weeks I just got to put in the screws and finish the job. My plan would be to put the House GOP's utterly repugnant Securing America's Future Act to a vote and pass it. I put that legislation in the Senate and when the Dems say no, I say "Well, we put a DACA bill on the table and the Dems rejected it.  All bets are off."  Then I tinker around the edges of the SAF bill and include it in the CR and see how long the Dems last before they pass it.  As a reminder of what SAF entails:

Republicans are essentially asking Democrats to trade the legalization of 700,000 unauthorized immigrants for the criminalization of all others, banning 2.6 million legal immigrants over the next decade, the elimination of almost all family sponsorship preference categories and the diversity visa lottery, deporting tens of thousands of asylum seekers, huge increases in border security spending, a massive new regulatory program that applies to every employee and employer in the country (“E-Verify”), and so much else. This bill has no chance of becoming law, but it is a remarkable illustration of how far apart the parties are on this issue.

That's where I see this fight going.  I hope I'm wrong and the Dems smell this trap coming from a mile off and demand a clean DREAM Act bill up front...and the restoration of community health center funding.

But they've already folded once on that demand.  It's difficult to see them standing too long on it again.  The best outcome may be another series of punts heading toward the end of March, but who knows what the GOP will sneak into the CR bills in the interim, and that deadline squeezes Democrats too.  I don't know, it's possible that the House GOP could go rogue and trash the whole deal themselves and save the Democrats here, forcing a clean CR plus DACA protections with Pelosi's help (oh, and health center funding back too.)  That's the win for Democrats.

It depends on which two of the scenarios we get to first, the SAF bill or the DACA bill, and both of those actually depend on the House, not the Senate.

We'll see.  Again, I said the Dems were in a bad position for a reason, and they have little leverage when the GOP has already shown they're more than happy to take health care away from millions and deport millions more. The best solution is to take the House and Senate back of course.  But between now and January 2019 when a new Congress would be sworn in, a lot of damage can still be done.

It probably will be.  Whether or not America will still make the choice to vote the GOP out, I don't know.  We certainly didn't in 2016.