Apr. 03

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Donnelly Backs Gorsuch

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN), who is facing a very tough reelection campaign in 2018, has announced that he will vote for SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch. Donnelly is the third Senate Democrat to announce his support for Gorsuch. To break the expected Democratic filibuster, Republicans need to peel off five more Democrats. A whip list compiled by The Hill shows 3 Democrats/Independents who oppose a filibuster, 37 who support it, with 8 who are undecided or whose position is not 100% clear. Here is the list of senators in the latter group:

McConnell would have to get five of the eight, which nearly everyone on the Hill agrees would be a tall order. Only four (Cardin, Feinstein, King, and Menendez) are up for reelection in 2018, and none of the eight come from states that Donald Trump won. If fewer than 60 senators vote for cloture, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may decide to go nuclear and change the Senate rules to forbid filibustering Supreme Court appointments. Whether he can muster the 50 votes for changing the rules is not clear yet. Some Republicans fear that at some point in the future, the shoe may be on the other foot and they may need the filibuster. (V)

Trump Says U.S. Can Handle North Korea Alone

Yesterday, Donald Trump said: that if China is not willing to help the U.S. bring North Korea to heel, the U.S. will do it alone. The message was probably intended for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who will meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago later this week. Trump hopes that China will turn the screws on North Korea, but China is not likely to do the U.S. any favors without something in return. A promise not to impose a tariff on Chinese imports might be a nice gesture, but Trump is not likely to offer it, so trying to convince Xi that his help really isn't all that important might simply be a ploy to get him to help without getting much in return. Xi is not stupid, though. He knows very well that short of a nuclear attack on North Korea, Trump has very little leverage over them and he desperately needs China's help, specifically to cut off North Korea's oil supply. But it is Trump's negotiating style to belittle his adversaries and get them to beg for crumbs. It is doubtful that Xi will fall for this. After the meeting is over, we may have a better idea of what, if anything, was agreed to. (V)

Kasich Is Acting Like a Candidate While Claiming He Is Not

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) will be term limited and out of office in January 2019. He has said he will not run for the White House again, but somehow or other he is doing all the things candidates do at this point in the election cycle. He wrote a book about his vision for the country and is going on a book tour. He will speak at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, the site of one of the 2016 Republican debates. He has criticized various aspects of the presidency of Donald Trump, such as the Muslim travel bans. Unlike Trump, he has defended journalism and journalists. He has appeared on television a number of times. These are all the things that candidates do, not people who are permanently retiring from politics. Will he challenge Trump in a primary in 2020? In politics, a week is a long time, and two years is forever. He will certainly want to wait until after the 2018 elections to make a decision. If Trump is popular then and the Republicans hold Congress, Kasich had better find a new project, but if the Republicans are bloodied, Kasich will be front and center saying: "I told you so" and may decide to formally challenge Trump. (V)

Rooting for Failure

Thirty or forty years ago, bipartisan compromises in Congress were common. Politicians talked to each other across the aisle. Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill got along famously and could do business together. Now, bipartisanship has gone the way of the Whigs. No Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act and no Democrat was going to vote for the American Health Care Act had it come to a vote. What happened?

Kyle Kondik at Sabato's Crystal Ball has a plausible explanation. Prior to 1980, the Democrats had held majorities in the House and Senate for nearly the entire time during the previous five decades. They also held the White House most of that time. The Republicans had no realistic expectation of capturing either chamber and certainly no illusions that they would ever win all the marbles, so their best strategy was to work with the Democrats and try to make legislation they actually hated somewhat less bad.

That changed in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won the White House and the Republicans took over the Senate. For the first time in the memory of any living Republican, controlling the whole government was a realistic possibility. To fire up supporters, it made sense for Republicans to fight the Democrats everywhere they could, rather than work with them. Since then, both chambers of Congress and the White House have changed hands multiple times, so both parties now see opposing the other one to get their own supporters riled up as the best strategy from a political point of view, public policy be damned.

Historically, the president's party loses seats in the House and Senate in the midterm elections and when the president is very unpopular, the losses are especially bad. So it is clearly in the Democrats' interest to avoid working with Donald Trump on anything and to blame him for everything. In essence they are rooting for the Republicans (and the country) to fail, just as the Republicans did during the Obama administration. A stock market crash and a deep recession in 2017 or 2018 would be manna from heaven for the Democrats. It's a sad state of affairs, but the truth: No matter which party occupies the White House, all the politicians from the other party are quietly, but fervently, rooting for the country to fail. It's just that it is bad politics to say that out loud. (V)

Why Can't Republicans Find Massive Voter Fraud?

In 2000, then-senator John Ashcroft lost his reelection bid to a dead man, Mel Carnahan, who had been killed in a plane crash three weeks earlier. Ashcroft never got over this. When George W. Bush nominated Ashcroft to become attorney general, detecting and prosecuting voter fraud became his passion. He instructed all 93 U.S. attorneys to make voting fraud their top priority. Six years later, they had indicted 119 people and convicted 86 of them, out of several hundred million votes that had been cast in the intervening years. Further, most of the fraud was in two states, Kentucky and West Virginia, and it was mostly about keeping local politicians in office. All in all, Ashcroft tried very hard to find large numbers of people to convict of voter fraud and he found only this handful of cases. The clear conclusion is that there is no massive voter fraud, just a couple of pockets of it in poor counties in Appalachia.

Here we go again. Donald Trump has claimed that 3 million illegal votes were cast but has failed to present even a shred of evidence to back up his claim. He did assign Vice President Mike Pence the job of finding all the fraud, but most likely Pence won't be able to find any more than Ashcroft did, despite years of trying. Nevertheless, despite any evidence that more than a handful of cases exist nationwide, Pence is likely to recommend that states adopt strict voter ID laws, knowing full well that these primarily affect minorities and poor people, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic. (V)

Far-Right Sharks Are Circling the White House

Katie Walsh was, until last week, deputy chief of staff in the White House. She was also a frequent target of Breitbart and other right-wing media; they accused her of being a Reince Priebus loyalist (true) and a fifth columnist who was selling Donald Trump out to the New York Times (probably not true). Walsh was re-assigned last week, leaving the White House and taking up a position with a Trump-affiliated SuperPAC.

Although Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Preibus all sang Walsh's praises as she exited stage right, this has not stopped the right-wing media from concluding that (1) She was actually fired, and (2) They were responsible. Consequently, they are now eagerly deciding on who their next target(s) will be, from the list of White House "traitors" that they have identified. Priebus is already being targeted with both barrels; White House senior aide Sean Cairncross is likely to feel the wrath soon, as well. In any case, it's another example of how the GOP is responding to its newfound power by tearing itself apart. (Z)

How Much Does Trump's Security Cost?

Presidential security is not cheap, and the more often the president leaves the White House, the more expensive it gets. Even by the standards of the modern, jet-setting presidency, however, Donald Trump is really racking up the bills. First, because the First Lady lives in New York and not the White House. Second, because the President heads to Mar-a-Lago almost every weekend. Third, because he's got several jet-setting kids who also demand protection.

Figuring out exactly how much all of this costs is not easy. For example, some sources peg the cost of each Mar-a-Lago trip at $3.5 million; others say it's less than $2 million. Similarly, the price for protecting Melania Trump in New York city has been tabbed as high as $1 million a day and as low as $200,000. A further complication is that we cannot know how the first nine weeks of the Trump presidency speak to what is going to happen going forward. Melania says she will move to Washington once the school year is over (believable), Donald says he will stop traveling to Mar-a-Lago in the summer months (less believable). Depending on which assumptions and which figures are used, however, we end up with a ballpark figure as low as $150 million for four years, or as high as $1 billion. That's over and above the normal costs of paying for the U.S. Secret Service. And even if we go with the low number, it's more than enough to pay for an array of agencies and programs that Trump has targeted for elimination in the name of budget austerity. (Z)


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