Politics, Government & Public Policy: July 2017 Archives
For the past seven years we've been hearing promises from Republicans that if we'd just elect them they'd roll back the leftist takeover of America. First we put them in the House, then the Senate, and finally the Presidency (not to mention 33 governors and numerous state legislatures), but even with total control of the government Republicans are apparently powerless.
A Republican Senate could not muster even 50 votes for the full repeal of Obamacare's taxes and spending. Six Republican senators who had voted for repeal in 2015, when the party was merely pretending it was possible, flipped on Wednesday rather than deliver.Five of the six represent states President Trump won in November. The sixth hails from a state Trump lost by less than 3 points.
An argument can be made that repealing these parts of Obamacare while leaving its regulatory structure largely in place is a bad idea. But we are discussing a law that Republicans spent seven years campaigning against. Every GOP senator except one either voted for repeal in the past or campaigned on it in a recent election cycle. Their leader was said to have a "secret plan" to repeal Obamacare "root and branch."
There was ample time for a contingency plan or even a better approach to replacing the healthcare law.
No amount of time ever seems to be enough.
They reason they were voting on such a poor repeal plan is because it was the best they could almost agree on. They were too incompetent to write a good plan, and too bumbling to even pass an incremental half-measure.
Humiliating.
Says Joe Biden about Hillary Clinton. But Mrs. Clinton's upcoming book will set the record straight on who's to blame for her loss to Donald Trump.
While the book will zero in on Russia and Comey -- which Clinton believes are the two biggest contributing factors to her loss -- it will also examine other factors she blames for a role in her defeat, including sexism and misogyny. ...At a Recode tech conference in May, Clinton said, "I take responsibility for every decision I make -- but that's not why I lost" -- a sentiment she has also told allies.
Everyone got it? She takes responsibility for her decisions, but the buck stops with Russia, Comey, sexism, and misogyny.
My opinion on the Trump Jr.-Russia thing is that everyone does it, but the Trump campaign wasn't shrewd enough to keep it at arms length. I don't think this is good or right, but I also don't believe the shocked, shocked responses I'm reading in the media.
Regarding the use of opposition research obtained in distasteful ways:
For his part, Carney, writing via email, offered ways a campaign might have handled such a situation, had it arisen. "If the emails did show up, most serious campaigns would not touch them directly -- legalities and all. But friends of the campaign would strongly encourage the turncoat to dump them to reporters. Easier not to have fingerprints on questionable documents.""Foreign governments would always use high-level U.S. third parties, not any direct campaign contacts, and most likely they would end up in the media," Carney continued. "So YES -- campaigns would seek the emails, but not directly if they were not legally available or the sources were questionable."
Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was unseemly, but does it better serve America for campaigns to perform such distasteful activities through deniable intermediaries?
This discussion of the ethics of opposition research is very high-minded, but I believe the crux is here:
JUDY WOODRUFF: Right, but even if -- Christina, even if the campaign says, we're not going to do this, there are other tabloids and others out there who may be engaging in this kind of research.CHRISTINA REYNOLDS: Sure.
"Everyone in politics would have taken that meeting," says Jeff Berkowitz, a veteran Republican opposition researcher, but:
the task instead should have fallen to a lower-level campaign researcher or paid consultant, rather than the candidate's son. Berkowitz, a former White House official who worked as research director for the Republican National Committee and Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign, said the revelations about the younger Trump's meeting with the Russian also serve to underscore the bare-bones nature of his father's unorthodox political operation.The senior Trump, a novice to politics, defied convention by running his 2016 presidential campaign aided by a core group of family members and a few dozen staffers and consultants, compared to the hundreds on Clinton's campaign workforce.
"You didn't have gatekeepers to handle these things and decide whether it was something useful," Berkowitz said of advance vetting of the Veselnitskaya meeting.
"Everyone in politics would have taken that meeting. This is the nature of politics," he said. But, he added: "It just should have been someone other than Donald Jr."
It seems to me that Trump Jr.'s primary offense was failing to sufficiently distance himself and his candidate from the Russian source.
Says Senator Pat Toomy by way of explaining why Congressional Republicans are floundering.
No kidding. I too can report that, from June 16, 2015, to November 8, 2016, the feeling among the elected officials, party functionaries, consultants, strategists, and journalists in our nation's capital was that Donald J. Trump stood no chance of becoming president of the United States. And because the political elite held this view with such self-assurance, with all the egotism and snobbery and moral puffery and snarkiness that distinguishes itself as a class, it did not spend more than a second, if that, thinking through the possible consequences of a Trump victory.Among those consequences: The expectation that Republicans might actually try to keep the promises they've made to voters over the last eight years.
Congress needs to get its act together fast or people will rightly conclude that Republicans aren't capable of governing.
