Tag Archives: Capitol Hill

national news, political news

Anger will get POTUS nowhere — in a hurry

Presidents of the United States usually manage to cultivate friendships in the least-expected places.

Democrat Lyndon Johnson had strong alliances with Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen; Republican Ronald Reagan had a marvelous after-hours social friendship with Democratic House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill; Democrat Bill Clinton worked with Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich to produce a balanced federal budget; Republican George W. Bush and Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy worked hand-in-glove to craft education reform legislation.

They all sought each other out in the search for common ground. It worked. The government found a way to get things done. The outreach extends in both directions.

That’s how good government works.

Donald Trump’s approach? Bash ’em all. Democrats and Republicans alike all feel the sting of Trump’s Twitter tirade. Criticize the president on policy differences? You’d better don your hard hat to avoid getting your bell rung by rhetorical abuse delivered — of course! — via Twitter.

Trump is at it again. He calls for “national unity.” Then unleashes yet another Twitter broadside.

The president is an angry man. His anger is threatening to stall everything in Congress. He has impugned the very people he needs: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain … and on and on it goes.

Everyone has his or her limits to their level of anger. How far is Donald Trump going to take his myriad feuds with members of both parties in Congress?

I’m going to presume we’ll know when it occurs when Trump’s anger hits the proverbial wall.

political news

It helps to know what you don’t know

One of the gazillion things that have been said of Donald John Trump is that the president of the United States “doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”

He seems to be the Bubble Boy of American politics, insulated from the effects of the barbs and boulders tossed at him. Or so he thinks.

Now comes former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich to offer a bit of specificity, which is that Trump doesn’t realize just how “isolated” he has become.

Critics of this blog will recall that I’ve dismissed Newt in the past as a know-nothing has-been, a philanderer who in the late 1990s made a big case against former President Clinton over his, um, philandering. 

On this one, though, Newt might be on to something. He said on Fox News: “On the Hill, he has far more people willing to sit to one side and not help him right now, and I think that he needs to recognize he’s taken a good first step with bringing in Gen. (John) Kelly (as chief of staff), but he needs to think about what has not worked.”

Trump’s term as president is in trouble. He has declared open warfare on fellow Republicans. Democrats detest him already, so they need zero push to resist every single thing he proposes. He cannot fill key deputy Cabinet posts, or senior White House staff jobs. The roster of federal judgeships remains largely vacant.

The president’s legislative agenda has high-centered. It has no traction. Tax reform is likely to get stalled. He won’t get the money he wants to build that wall along our southern border. Congressional leaders are going to increase the budgetary debt ceiling despite what the president says.

Trump once boasted that “I, alone” can fix what’s wrong.

No, Mr. President. You cannot. It is impossible.

He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know … which is dangerous not just for him, but for the country.

national news

It’s a ‘team sport,’ Mr. President

Donald John “Tweeter in Chief” Trump Sr. posted this little gem today via Twitter: The only problem I have with Mitch McConnell is that, after hearing Repeal & Replace for 7 years, he failed!That should NEVER have happened!

Let me remind the president once again that winning and losing political battles are shared responsibilities. Normally.

The president and the Senate majority leader, both Republicans, own the failure of the GOP members of the Senate to approve an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act. Again, normally.

Trump is the head of the Republican Party. He is the nation’s top Republican officeholder. He won the 2016 presidential election and took with him to the White House the hopes and dreams of his party faithful. He carried them on his back.

They wanted the ACA repealed and they looked to the president to push that load over the finish line.

He failed. Right along with the Senate, and the House, and the rest of the nation that wanted to see the ACA repealed and replaced with something else. I was not one of those Americans, by the way … as if readers of this blog needed reminding.

Governance is a team sport, Mr. President. It involves the legislative and executive branches of government working together for the common good. The country depends on everyone involved.

Trump and McConnell reportedly are estranged politically. McConnell is reported to have stated privately that he doubts Trump can “salvage” his presidency. Why? Trump lacks the political knowledge and skill required to do the job to which he was elected.

Yes, Sen. McConnell and the GOP members of both congressional chambers deserve a lot of the blame for what Trump believes went wrong with repealing and replacing the ACA.

But not nearly all of it.

national news

GOP silence is getting louder

You can understand that Democrats are angry with Donald J. Trump.

The president won an election he was supposed to lose to the Democratic Party nominee. Congressional Democrats haven’t gotten over it … yet!

Republicans, though, are demonstrating their angst and anger at Trump differently than their colleagues on the other side of the chasm.

They are staying quiet. More or less. A few congressional Republicans are speaking against the president, namely over his stated reaction to the Charlottesville mayhem. However, except for a few on the far right wing of the party, one is hearing damn little comment that even remotely resembles support for the president’s equating of Nazis and Klansmen to those who protested their march in Charlottesville.

If I were Donald Trump — and I am so glad to be far away from this guy — I would be worried to the max about the GOP silence. Trump has demonstrated already he doesn’t give a damn about Democrats; nor do Democrats, to be fair, give a damn about him. Now, though, he is providing evidence that he doesn’t care about Republicans, either; the GOP silence suggests to me the feeling is increasingly mutual.

Trump has gone after the Senate majority leader; he’s attacked GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona; he lashes out at Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; he even attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, and a good friend of many in the Senate — on both sides of the aisle.

GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine now says she isn’t even sure Trump will be the party’s presidential nominee in 2020.

The Republican Party’s relative silence may deliver more damage to the president than the howling we’re getting from the other side.

national news

GOP senators lose patience with RINO in chief

Donald John (RINO in chief) Trump’s lack of any association with the Republican political machine may be starting to take its toll on the man’s presidency.

Actual Republican senators are standing up to the man who bills himself as a member of the GOP, but who in reality is a Republican In Name Only.

GOP U.S. senators are now tweeting, writing essays and saying things out loud that suggest that the president’s “agenda,” whatever the hell it is, appears to be teetering on the brink of oblivion.

The president keeps attacking his “fellow Republicans.” He called Sen. Jeff Flake, author of a new book that tears into Trump, a “toxic” lawmaker; moreover, Trump has hailed the GOP primary challenger who has emerged to take on Flake.

The president’s attack on the Arizonan has prompted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stand squarely behind Flake.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said publicly at a Rotary meeting in Chattanooga that he wonders if Trump is “competent” to continue as president.

Senate GOP gangs up on Trump

Then we have the usual cast of Trump critics within the GOP — Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — continuing to oppose him on policy matters as well as chastising him for his hideous conduct in the wake of the Charlottesville riot.

This is what happens when you get a president with no political history, no public service record on which to draw, no demonstrable commitment to understanding how government works.

It’s as if — as some have suggested — that we have formed a third major political party: We have Democrats, Republicans and the Trump Party, which feeds off the cult of personality developed by the “party” leader, Donald John Trump Sr.

If the president is going to insist that he’s a real, actual Republican, then I am among those who will wait with bated breath for the Goldwater Moment to arrive. As the late Sen. Barry Goldwater was able in 1974 to deliver the sobering news to President Nixon that the president had no support in the Senate and that impeachment would surely result in his removal from office, is there someone to deliver the same kind of news to the current president?

Donald Trump needs to shape up, get rid of the white supremacists/alt-right clowns remaining in his administration and start acting like the Leader of the Free World.

If he doesn’t, his presidency is going nowhere but straight into the trash heap … which wouldn’t be a bad outcome. I fear the collateral damage this RINO in chief is going to inflict along the way.

State news

This Senate campaign could be a scream … really!

Go, Dan, go!

Dan McQueen is running for the U.S. Senate now held by Ted Cruz, aka the Cruz Missile.

McQueen is not exactly new to politics. He was mayor of Corpus Christi for all of 37 days. Then he quit amid a huge splash of bad publicity, a social media feud via Facebook with constituents and the media.

Now he’s decided to go after Cruz, who’s going to seek a second Senate term in 2018.

Read Texas Monthly’s report of McQueen’s candidacy.

McQueen was new to politics when he was elected mayor in 2016.

Then questions emerged about his academic credentials and his business expertise. He fought with the media and with city council members. McQueen got entangled in a clean water dispute. Then came questions about a relationship he was having with a business associate.

He had enough. So he walked away from his mayor’s job after a little more than month.

Is he the right person for Republicans to nominate next spring when he runs against Cruz? I have no clue.

But a guy who couldn’t stand the heat at City Hall now wants to step straight into the white-hot fire of Capitol Hill. How in the world is he going to withstand the scrutiny he is going to get as he campaigns against Cruz?

But you know what? The more I think about it, the more Dan McQueen sounds like he’d be a good fit in that zoo we call Congress.

medical news, national news

Trump is right: GOP blew it on ACA repeal/replacement

I hope you’re sitting down as you read this next sentence: Donald Trump is correct — to a point — in criticizing the congressional Republican caucus for failing to replace the Affordable Care Act.

The president, who has opened a new front in his all-out war against the Washington political establishment, tore into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the GOP’s failure to have a replacement ready for enactment when Trump took office.

Do I wish the Republicans had done such a thing? No. I do not like the idea of total repeal of the ACA; I would prefer mending it, fixing it, repairing what’s wrong with it.

My point about the president’s criticism is that the congressional GOP caucus had many years to come up with a replacement plan. It didn’t. It dawdled and twiddled. It didn’t have the wisdom to come up with a reasonable alternative to the ACA. It instead chose to fight with the President Barack Obama on all manner of issues.

Then came Donald Trump to the scene. He won a presidential election while making some grossly overstated promises. He pledged to take Washington by the back of its neck and shake, rattle and roll it to do his bidding.

That didn’t happen, either.

The president was right to at least expect to have a starting point on this repeal-and-replace effort regarding health care insurance. There was nothing waiting for him when he took office.

To the extent that GOP members of Congress were at fault, then the president is correct. They didn’t deliver the goods.

However, the president’s anger at the GOP breaks down because of his refusal to accept any personal responsibility for his party’s failures. It might have been better for Trump to say something like this: “The Republicans in Congress had seven years to replace ‘Obamacare,’ but they didn’t. It’s not entirely their fault, though. As the leader of the Republican Party, I must share in this disappointing outcome. I am the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch of government, which shares power with Congress. I also must share the blame. That’s part of the deal.”

Trump told McConnell that he needs to “get to work.”

Yes. So should the president.

national news, political news

Now for Main Event: The Donald vs. Mitch

It’s a rare event indeed when a president beset with unanimous opposition from the “other party” decides to declare virtual political war on someone who’s aligned with him in the same political party.

Donald John Trump Sr. is now tweeting his angry thoughts about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Here’s the best part: McConnell offered a perfectly reasonable, rational critique of the president’s difficulty in enacting legislation, while the president responds with a typically juvenile tweet.

I’m shaking and scratching my head at the same time.

McConnell noted that Trump is “new” to the political process, and said he set “excessive expectations” about how quickly he could enact his legislative agenda. The president’s newness is an honest assessment; the man had zero public service experience prior to running for president. He doesn’t understand government and doesn’t grasp the notion that effective governance is a team sport, that it requires the executive branch of government to work hand-in-glove with the legislative branch. It also requires pols from both parties to compromise while searching for common ground.

Good grief! McConnell could have said it much more harshly than he did. He sought instead to be the diplomat.

Trump fired back with that tweet reminding us that Congress had seven years to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but still hadn’t gotten the job done. Trump’s allies in the right-wing media — namely Fox News commentator Sean Hannity — weighed in, calling for the Senate majority leader to resign.

The utterly ridiculous aspect of this is that Trump and McConnell supposedly are on the same team. The president needs McConnell to assist him in furthering his agenda. Is this how he intends to harvest that help, by continuing these attacks?

Meanwhile, the loyal opposition on the other side of the political chasm — congressional Democrats — are remaining quiet.

Smart.

national news

With ‘friends’ like these …

Donald John Trump Sr. needs all the friends he can find on Capitol Hill.

Why, then, does the president of the United States insist on waging rhetorical war with the leader of the U.S. Senate’s Republican majority? Why is he picking a fight with Mitch McConnell, a master Senate parliamentarian and a guy known as one who can move legislation?

That’s what Trump is doing.

I’m going to put my money on McConnell getting the better of this battle of wits.

McConnell was mildly critical of the president for setting “excessive expectations” for his legislative agenda. Trump then fired back — via Twitter, of course! — this message: “Senator Mitch McConnell said I had ‘excessive expectations,’ but I don’t think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?”

You see, this is another demonstration of what the president fails to acknowledge. He is the leader of the Republican Party. He’s the head of the executive branch of government. He owns the GOP’s failure to enact an Affordable Care Act replacement bill as much as the congressional Republican leadership.

Except that he refuses to take ownership on that failure. Or any failure, for that matter.

This deteriorating relationship is going to bring great harm to the president’s ability to enact any kind of legislative agenda. The more he fights with members of his own party, the weaker he appears across the land.

Democrats, meanwhile, should follow the time-honored credo of refusing to butt in when principals of the other party are fighting so openly.

What’s more, if the special counsel’s investigation into that “Russia thing” gets any hotter, and it produces actionable results, the president is going to seriously need friends on his side of the aisle. This intra-Republican squabbling isn’t going to help him.

This might be where I should say: Awww, cry me a river.

International news, national news

That’s it: Blame Congress now

Here, dear reader, is a tweet that came from the president of the United States. It is just another in an endless litany of shocking pronouncements from Donald John Trump Sr.

Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can’t even give us HCare!

There you have it. The president has blamed Congress for enacting a tough sanctions bill against Russia. He didn’t say a word in that tweet about his signing the bill into law. Lawmakers approved the bill with overwhelming majorities and they undoubtedly would have overridden any presidential veto.

Indulge me for a moment.

The U.S.-Russia relationship has tanked because the Russians have been caught — and please pardon the somewhat dated description here — red-handed in their effort to attack the U.S. electoral process. The Russians sought to meddle in our 2016 presidential election. Intelligence analysts have concluded the Russians did it. Members of the Trump administration have drawn the same conclusion.

The only high-ranking U.S. official to equivocate is the highest-ranking of them all: the president.

Congress acted as it should have acted by imposing new sanctions on the Russians — and by assuring that Congress has the final say on any effort to lessen or eliminate them.

Yet the president continues to hold tightly to this notion that he can “negotiate” better deals with Russians than Congress.

I should add that Trump signed the sanctions bill without the usual fanfare associated with high-profile bill signings. No TV cameras were present; the president didn’t hand out pens to officials as he etched his signature to the document. The signing was carried in the proverbial dead of night. Why is that?

Now he’s going after Congress yet again for doing what it is entitled to do.

Just suppose for a moment that Donald Trump finds himself in grave political trouble down the road. Suppose special counsel Robert Mueller concludes that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian effort to sway the election; let’s also suggest that Mueller might find evidence of obstruction of justice stemming from Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.

All of this well might bring the president to the brink of impeachment by the House of Representatives. It is at that point that the president is going to need every friend he can find on Capitol Hill to save his backside.

Is this how he nourishes those relationships, by blaming Congress for the deterioration in U.S.-Russia relations?