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A different era.
And
THIS JEEP MATTERS: President Reagan's 1962 Willys 'Jeep' CJ-6 - YouTube
Finally: Pelosi looked like a chump herself.
What really blows my mind is The Black Coalition could not even express satisfaction when Trump mentioned the lowest level of unemployment among their own. Obviously if their own constituents improve under a Republican Administration this would be difficult to explain since white Republicans are racists along with their President Eve an Hiispanic Representative was flummoxed by the same statement for his own and he looked bewildered.
I have said , time and again, blacks are pawns and owe much of their plight to bad education and welfare. These are policies that Democrats favor because they have to pay off their education union friends who pour millions into their coffers. Democrats oppose education choice etc. and offer welfare which saps self-respect which creates another form of social slavery.
Because Blacks are being duped and poorly educated it will be a long time before they awake to how they have been played for suckers by the likes of their rabble rousing leaders who enrich themselves at the expense of their own people. What a sad tragedy but then that is the same game played by Palestinian leaders, The U.N and a host of corrupt African "dictators."
Keep them uneducated and poor and you can accomlpish miracles for yourself.
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Things get murkier by the minute,(See 1 and 1a below.)
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Do Democrats really want to solve the immigration issue? (See 2 below.)
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Democrats may win and take over The House in 2018, if recent history is an index .The election is a ways off but if last night was a demonstration of who Democrats think they are they have no idea how pathetic they looked. Their sour demeanor, their childish sitting on their hands and looking at each other to see whether they should stand and applaud made them look like the fools they are.
Americans have short memories and if Republicans cannot nominate reasonable candidates and stand up to scurrilous attacks in defending Trump, they certainly can lose The House. Then they will watch Trump get impeached because that is the goal of the radicals within the party.
Power drives many politicians to make decisions that may not be logical and/or good for the nation but irrational aspirations are often driven by the desire for power, to win at any cost.
In listening to Trump last night I thought his speech covered a variety of important issues. I wished he had said something about education and supported Sec. Betsy DeVos.
That said, his orchestration of special attendees was artful and effectively drove home aspects of his speech in a powerful manner.
Trump's ratings have risen, way above the press and Congress. Go figure.
In England members of Parliament are rowdy and boisterous. They stamp their feet and are disruptive in order to show their objections. In other nations fist fights are a not uncommon occurrence.
Governing, making laws and sausage can often make for a pitiful sight. The author of "Animal Farm" had it about right.
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In England members of Parliament are rowdy and boisterous. They stamp their feet and are disruptive in order to show their objections. In other nations fist fights are a not uncommon occurrence.
Governing, making laws and sausage can often make for a pitiful sight. The author of "Animal Farm" had it about right.
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Ross, Rants! (See 3 below.)
And Gowdy goes! (See 3a below.)
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Dick
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1) What the FBI Fight Is About
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Dick
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1) What the FBI Fight Is About
A reckoning is inevitable when electorate and elite are so out of sync.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
To journalists, the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” is anything but a curse.We live to live in interesting times. At least you would hope so.
On the “PBS NewsHour” the other night we heard a panelist explain: “The idea, Judy, that the FBI, made up of professional law enforcement people, is a hornet’s nest of bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberal lefties, which is what Trey Gowdy and these people are selling, is that somehow there is a great cabal, left-wing.”
If you think this is what’s going on with the Trump-FBI fight, you’ve lost the plot in the most interesting story of our time. To the extent that top leaders of the Obama FBI or intelligence agencies were hostile to Donald Trump, it was not on partisan or ideological grounds, but because they thought him singularly unsuited to be president. This view, by the way, they would have shared with millions of Americans, including a healthy chunk of the national political and media elite.
Mr. Trump is not a conservative, hardly even a Republican. At the same time, no candidate was so well known before he entered the political arena. Donald Trump, for 40 years, deliberately peddled an image of himself as the garish, high-living playboy-businessman. What a colleague once said of his fellow Manhattan swashbuckler Ron Perelman seemed doubly true of Mr. Trump: “His basic value is making money, money, money and collecting women.”
Whether or not FBI leadership did anything improper, its behavior could not help but be conditioned by the presumption that Mr. Trump was unacceptable to most Americans, that he was likely to lose, and that Hillary Clinton would be the next president.
But 63 million Americans disagreed; with an assist from our quirky electoral system, they made him president anyway. And now we’re having the inevitable reckoning. Simply because of the way the chips have fallen, the FBI is at the center of that reckoning.
Its leadership would have been far from human if its perceptions of Mr. Trump didn’t color its response to a succession of inherently thorny decisions about the Clinton email “matter” and about allegations of Trump-Russia connections. The text messages and memos you’ve been reading about go straight to the key questions: Did the FBI soft-pedal its Clinton investigation because it saw her victory as inevitable and necessary? Was the agency a little too eager to exploit questionable Russian intelligence as an excuse to intervene in her case? Was it a little too keen to find grounds to suspect Trump associates of playing footsie with Vladimir Putin ?
The word we have used is not conspiracy, but cascade—a cascade of awkward decisions that amount to the FBI playing a much bigger role in the election than it possibly could have wanted. These culminated in the comeuppance that fate often reserves for the too-clever: James Comey’s pressured decision to reopen the Clinton case when the Anthony Weiner laptop surfaced, a thunderclap that inadvertently may have pushed Mr. Trump over the top.
Somewhere in her voluminous writings, the German Freudian with the unfortunate name, Karen Horney, describes the logic of neurosis as meaning that the professions attract some who are least suited to them—lawyers who are cynical about justice, doctors who enjoy suffering. That also includes journalists who constantly seek to reduce our interesting world to partisan banality.
Personally, I’ve given up trying to predict how the Trump presidency will play out, but his rise provides an opportunity to think in new ways about presidential competence. There are as many ways to be president as there have been presidents. With his big mouth, lack of discipline, and momentous baggage, it’s easy to imagine Mr. Trump not finishing his term. It’s also possible to imagine him, because of his showmanship, mercurial nature and lack of partisan conviction, becoming the antic midwife of one compromise after another to move the country forward on longstanding stalemates—its dysfunctional corporate tax system, its dysfunctional immigration system.
In any case, you are not a partisan to realize that partisan opportunism, more than any real evidence of a Trump conspiracy with Mr. Putin, drives the Russia narrative. Every president, including Donald Trump, has a duty to fight for his political existence. In our two-party system, where the parties serve as a check on each other, Republicans have a duty to help him mount a defense against those who would destroy him, at least until they decide the partisan cost of Mr. Trump exceeds the benefit.
America is a happy, prosperous, low-crime country right now by historical standards, yet something curious and transformative is happening in our politics. You are living in interesting times. Don’t miss out. Don’t make the mistake of relying too much on clap trappy, ratings-driven media institutions whose limitations become most apparent just when the story gets most interesting.
1a) CLINTON'S STROBE TALBOTT LINKED TO 2ND RUSSIA DOSSIER?
Exclusive: Jack Cashill asks if ex-State Dept. official helped with Trump hit piece
The Guardian UK has broken the story, one echoed breathlessly by others in the major media, that the FBI is assessing still another Trump-Russia dossier, this one authored by an international man of mystery named Cody Shearer.
“The Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the ‘Shearer memo’ and is pursuing intriguing leads,” write reporters Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins hopefully.
“One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on it suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously.”
This new dossier has the potential, however, to be an even greater embarrassment for Democrats and the Clintons than does the Steele Dossier.
In 2015, the National Review’s Brendan Bordelon served up a useful review of Shearer’s past shenanigans. When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Shearer’s brother-in-law Strobe Talbott helped ease Shearer into the presidential orbit.
Bordelon discussed Shearer’s sinister work with Clinton enforcer Terry Lenzner to silence the “bimbos” then erupting all over the southeast as well as his absurd “intelligence gathering” efforts, first in Bosnia and later with Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal in Libya.
Bordelon did not, however, make a point of Talbott’s Russian background. At the time, it had no particular relevance. It obviously does today.
Talbott met Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, and the two stayed close. At Oxford, Talbott translated Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs into English.
Talbott’s first job in Clinton’s State Department was to help oversee the break-up of the former Soviet Union. He was later appointed deputy secretary of state.
In his 2008 book “Comrade J,” respected journalist Pete Early made a very strong case that Talbott had been compromised by the former Russian Foreign Intelligence (SVR).
Early’s source was former SVR operative Sergei Tretyakov who was cooperating with the FBI. Tretyakov claimed that the SVR “targeted Talbott, and ran a carefully calculated campaign to manipulate him.”
According to Tretyakov, the SVR used Russia’s deputy minister of foreign affairs Georgiy Mamedov “to deceive and manipulate Talbott, in part by massaging his ego.”
Tretyakov claimed also that Mamedov often did the bidding of Soviet intelligence. In this case, Mamedov used his personal relationship with Talbott “to glean information from Talbott that the SVR considered helpful to Russia.”
Before his book went to press, Early showed Talbott the claims Tretyakov had made and asked for a response. Talbott offered the rather lame one that Tretyakov’s “interpretation of events” was “erroneous and/or misleading.”
That said, the FBI took Tretyakov’s claims seriously. In 1999, FBI agents asked Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “not to share information with Talbott” about an espionage investigation then in progress for fear Talbott would expose it.
In 2018, Talbott’s brother-in-law surges into the headlines with news about a dossier he was alleged to have compiled. The question has to be asked whether Talbott helped Shearer gather information.
Last week, producer Joel Gilbert and I broke a story that should have been broken a long time ago: Christopher Steele did not write the dossier that almost everyone in the media claims he did. Gilbert alerted me to the Shearer dossier as well.
This new dossier has real potential. It has the potential to move beyond embarrassing the Democrats and to open the mother of all Clinton cans of worm.
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2) Do Democrats Even Want a Compromise on Immigration?
Schumer and Durbin act as if they’d rather have an issue to use against the Republicans in November.
By Jason L. Riley
First, we had Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, stroll out of a private meeting with the president and share with the media Mr. Trump’s crude remarks about immigrant homelands. Mr. Durbin had to know that by publicizing the alleged comments, he was jeopardizing any potential deal. His intent was to sabotage the discussions, not advance them.
A few days later, after the White House released an immigration framework detailing the president’s priorities, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected it out of hand as a “wish list” for “anti-immigration hard-liners.” Given that those hard-liners dismissed the very same White House framework as a sop to Democrats like Mr. Schumer, the senator’s criticism seems rather curious.
The administration’s proposal includes a multiyear path to citizenship for Dreamers, an end to the Diversity Visa lottery, a reduction in family-based migration, an increase in merit-based visas, and funding for additional barricades along the Mexican border. None of those provisions, mind you, come out of the blue. All of them were included in a bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013, with support from Messrs. Schumer and Durbin, before dying in the House. At least the immigration restrictionists are being consistent.
Nor are these political theatrics limited to Democrats in Washington. Progressives at the state and local levels are just as keen on undermining the Trump administration whenever possible. Last week New York Mayor Bill de Blasio described the Justice Department’s crackdown on sanctuary cities as a “racist assault on our immigrant communities” and then refused to meet with the president. Meanwhile, California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, has threatened to prosecute employers who help federal immigration officials identify people in the country illegally. Mr. Becerra said businesses that share employee information with immigration agents will face fines of up to $10,000. In other words, California is promising to punish people for obeying federal law.
The Democrats don’t sound like a party that wants to tackle immigration reform and help productive people who find themselves in America illegally through no fault of their own. They sound like they’re looking for an issue to run on in the November midterm elections. For a taste of what’s coming, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, called the White House immigration proposal an effort “to make America white again.”
Everyone knows that Donald Trump made The Wall a central plank of his campaign, and Democrats are now feigning shock that additional border security is a precondition of broader immigration reform. They’re also playing down Mr. Trump’s willingness to compromise.
Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, explained on “Fox News Sunday” that the administration initially planned to extend protection only to the 690,000 Dreamers who received work permits under the Obama -era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Democrats, however, wanted to include a larger number of people who were eligible for DACA but too afraid to apply.
The White House complied, said Mr. Short, and the resulting proposal went “further than many people thought [the president] would in providing not just permanent residence but also a pathway to citizenship for roughly 1.8 million people.”
More fencing along the Southwest border is not likely to have much impact in itself on unlawful entries. According to the Department of Homeland Security, illegal border crossings, which peaked in 2000, fell by another 24% last year to their lowest level since 1971—and that’s with some physical barriers already in place. Border security is not immune to the law of diminishing returns.
Whether or how long these trends continue probably has more to do with the U.S. economy than anything else. The most troubling aspect of the White House plan is the attempt to reduce legal immigration at a time when economic growth has quickened and more industries are reporting job shortages even after offering higher wages. Adjusting the mix of high-skill, low-skill and family-based immigration to match the labor demands of a modern economy is fine and perhaps overdue. But it would be a mistake for the administration to insist on antigrowth immigration policies that undermine pro-growth tax reform in hope of appeasing restrictionists who mistakenly view labor markets as a zero-sum game.
For their part, Democrats must decide if it’s worth keeping the Dreamers in limbo for the sake of opposition to a wall in particular and Mr. Trump generally. The president seems to understand that he’s not going to get everything that he wants on immigration. When will Democrats reach the same realization?
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3) The Mystery of Trump’s Lousy Polls
If he’s so persuasive, why is his approval so low? Well, Michael Jordan missed a lot of baskets.
For years I’ve been arguing that Donald Trump is a world-class persuader. So why is his job-approval rating so low? The short answer is that the old rules about presidential approval no longer apply.
Do you remember a few decades ago when one of the main complaints about politics was that Democrats and Republicans were not so different? Not anymore. The news industry has found that polarization is a strong business model. The first group of pundits claim many times a day that Republicans are right about nearly everything and Democrats are stupid and evil, while the second group do the reverse. Voters tend to consume news that agrees with their opinions, thus reinforcing them. In this environment, you can’t reasonably expect the folks who voted for the losing candidate to warm up easily to the winner. In the past the differences between victor and vanquished in the political arena were mostly questions of policy. To partisans today, Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump are a lying, cheating murderer and a crazy, impulsive, lying, racist, homophobic, sexist narcissist. That’s a big gap.
And it’s not as if Mr. Trump’s opponents are eager to close it. Michael Jordan missed about half of the shots he attempted. That isn’t because he lacked skill, but because the opposing players were highly capable at defending. Likewise, the political and media professionals who oppose the president are playing unusually strong defense, and that works against his job-approval ratings.
Example: Anti-Trumpers take it as a given that this president is a racist. As evidence, they point to a series of news stories and quotes that seem to support that position. Your common sense tells you that even if some of the claims are exaggerated or taken out of context, there are so many of them that they can’t all be wrong.
But as any cognitive scientist will tell you, they can all be wrong, and that wouldn’t be unusual. Confirmation bias looks exactly like a mountain of evidence. If that sounds crazy, consider how much solid evidence the press gave us in 2016 that Mr. Trump could never get elected. Let’s consider three bits of so-called evidence about Mr. Trump’s alleged racism to illustrate my point:
• Birtherism. Critics of Mr. Trump point to his questioning of President Obama’s birth certificate as obvious evidence of racism. But imagine if Hillary Clinton’s birth certificate had been questionable in any way. Do you seriously think Candidate Trump would have ignored that easy line of attack because she was white? In 2016 he did make an issue of Ted Cruz’s Canadian birth.
Mr. Trump has attacked every white male who opposed him, including Republicans, on a daily basis, using every persuasion tool at his disposal. But the birther issue still feels racist because you see it in the context of all the other evidence of his alleged racism.
• Charlottesville. Critics believe Mr. Trump took sides with the torch-carrying racists who were chanting anti-Semitic slogans in Charlottesville, Va., and called them “fine people.” The implication is that he publicly betrayed his Jewish daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren—while also inexplicably recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. That doesn’t make sense.
The more ordinary explanation is that Mr. Trump spoke about the protests without having all the details about who attended and why. It was reasonable for him to assume some people were there because they agreed with his position that toppling Confederate statues is more about political correctness than racism. (For the record, I regard those statues as offensive decorations we can live without.) In any event, Mr. Trump later disavowed the Charlottesville racists in clear terms.
• “S—hole countries.” If you don’t think Mr. Trump is a racist, you probably interpreted his scatological reference as applying to Third World countries that are not producing as many educated citizens as economically advanced places like Norway. If you think he is a racist, you probably believe he was calling the people in those countries a nasty word.
Now consider these three bits of evidence combined. I just offered compelling rebuttals to each, but when partisans weave them together in a quilt of confirmation bias, they feel deeply persuasive.
Candidate Trump offered his own explanation for his offensive statements. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he said in the first Republican debate in August 2015. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness.” When he proves it time and again, critics cleverly reframe his offensiveness to “he’s a racist!” With that sort of persuasion working against him, even his supporters are likely to be wary of admitting it to pollsters.
Moreover, much of the public understands “job approval” to include liking Mr. Trump’s style in addition to his accomplishments. A better measure of presidential approval might be the National Federation of Independent Business’s Small Business Optimism Index. That captures a lot of variables: growth, jobs, foreign policy, domestic risks. The NFIB index’smonthly average hit an all-time high in 2017, even as Mr. Trump’s job-approval ratings hovered around 40%.
Anyway, 40% is better than the press’s approval rating, and a lot better than Congress’s. That sounds about right for the best persuader in the world. He’s very talented, but he isn’t magic—and the other team is playing too.
Mr. Adams is the creator of the comic strip Dilbert and author of “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.”
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3)
3)
Ross Rant
The upside will take care of itself now for the economy. Left to itself, GDP will rise 3.5%, or possibly 4%. The issue is inflation. Many think labor shortages will lead to wage pressures which will in time create the inflations increases that will lead to rate rises by the Fed and in the market for the ten year. I am not so sure that will be the case. At least not to the extent we would see in what had been normal economic theory and the past. Here is why. Today it is easy to have many jobs done offshore by digital means. Financial modeling, legal research, billing, and even Google using foreign labor to process searches. So the labor shortages we would have seen here in the past are not as bad as they otherwise would have been had it not been for the worldwide web, and the ability to easily communicate directly with workers offshore, including shared screens. Many who would have been an immigrant to the US in the past to provide this staffing, have voluntarily chosen to stay home and do the work there at much lower wages. However, they expand the US labor pool by tens of thousands. In the past couple of years, and in no way at all related to Trump and immigration, (starting under Obama), many Indian and Chinese kids choose to stay at home where there are now top quality universities providing similar technology education as they could get here. In India they then go to Bangalore and start a business, or go to work for a US company like Google of Facebook. They have no reason to come here. This is becoming a critical problem for the US, because we are short of the creative talent in computer science and Indians and Chinese are very good at these skills. The Chinese now have these people to work for the state in ways that are detrimental to the US. This has nothing to do with US immigration policy, but it is what drives Silicon Valley into fits and leads them to attack Trump on the H-1B visa issue. It is not immigration, it is that there are now highly competitive educational and job opportunities at home for the people Silicon Valley used to hire.
Second is AI. Every major company now has orders from their boards to figure out how to use AI to improve the business. However, very few people in regular management positions have any idea what AI really means, or how to utilize it. So, for now they have meetings, but not much yet gets accomplished. Based on what I know from the AI company I am involved with, this will change slowly over time. The knowledge and technology is here, but as usual in many large companies and organizations, the internal people in IT or in management don’t really understand the subject, so they just stall, or do not get the help they need out of fear of looking stupid. Very typical in many companies. In the not distant future, they will not be able to hide any longer, and they will invite the experts in with the AI software solutions. As opposed to those who think AI is going to wipe out millions of jobs, I think it may simply recharacterize jobs, and help grow the economy. There will be jobs eliminated and that is already happening. For example, modern warehouses have few human employees. Robots do most things. There will eventually be driverless trucks. This does not mean there will be no truck drivers. There will simply be more trucks to deliver the growing flood of products to homes and businesses, and they will not all be robots doing that. So the driverless trucks will more likely expand the available pool of over the road drivers who are in desperately short supply now. It will be many years, and maybe a decade or more, before robots drive UPS trucks and deliver your Amazon package. The point being, AI and robotics will help ease labor shortages and materially increase productivity in ways that would previously have led to increased labor component cost increases.
The tax bill allows companies to pay bonuses and increase wages without raising prices. The reason is there is now an added 14% cash flow due to the tax reform, or some percentage that allows the payments to be made out of profits and not higher prices. Despite Nancy and Chuck and the Dems claiming it is crumbs etc, the reality is tax reform is creating material income or 401K contribution increases for workers without increasing inflation.
Thanks to online shopping, you can now buy almost anything from anywhere on the planet, and you can price and quality compare before buying. Think of it like the hotel online sites. You now can price shop and read reviews. Even if you are not buying from Amazon, Wal Mart or Alibaba, you are able to price compare virtually anything, which keeps retailers from being able to make large price increases. They are much more able now to do buying from offshore without the old need to spend months or years setting up vendors and distribution channels. This saves huge costs. Instead of having to get on a plane constantly, retailers here can maintain relationships, and manage supply chain issues digitally, or by teleconferences online. UPS, Fed Ex and others have created very efficient supply channels and logistics worldwide now, keeping costs and time to a minimum. As the US is now vastly more competitive as a place to manufacture, this will help make logistics and coordination even easier. All of this keeps costs lower.
Steve Wynn was my fraternity brother at Wharton. He stood out as a complete AH when there. He was always gambling in the fraternity house at sizable stakes, (I had no money so could never join in), and went to Vega often. When he was a pledge I was one of his biggest harrassers because he was such an arrogant jerk. Back then we could paddle and do all sorts of things I am sure they will not allow these days of snowflakes. Steve was the son of the mob’s Bingo guy in Maryland, which is how he got the shot to own and run Golden Nugget, and start his career in Vegas. Like Trump, who is also from Wharton, Steve is smart and driven. He is one who also lives large like Trump, and just bulls his way ahead regardless if it is fully compliant. I give Steve a lot of credit for remaking Vegas and changing it from the mob controlled gambling and prostitution town, to what it is today- a major city with over 1 million real residents. I have no doubt that whatever I read, he has done, and the extravagant lifestyle are all true. That is the same Steve I knew in school.
The entire play by Obama and the Dems on immigration was to bring in millions of illegals, and when they controlled all arms of government, to make them legal citizens and voters. In the meantime, Holder sued any state that required voter ID so illegals would get the vote one day. They had a strategy based on the turn of century i900’s when the Jews were streaming into New York and Philadelphia, and the Jews had great influence in New York City government, and controlled the Lower East Side where the Jews all congregated. So the Jews came to believe the Dems were their savior, and since then it was ingrained in Jewish culture that you had to vote Democratic. My mother was shocked and mortified when I told her I was a Republican. A similar story played out for blacks who came north to the big Democratic controlled cities. They also now have a cultural bond with Dems despite the fact that the Dems have kept them in entitlement bondage, broke up families with welfare for mothers, and kept them in poverty to keep them needing the Dems. In both cases it is extremely hard to break this cultural bond of Jews and blacks to the Dems, despite logic, and despite Obama dong things that were plainly anti-Israel, and maybe anti-Semitic. If you want to understand Dacca for the Dems, this is the same exact game to get millions of new voters. That is why they will die on the sword for this, and why they want chain migration. It has nothing to do with the immigrants and their families, or caring, and if you think it does you are astoundingly naïve.
According to someone very close to the top levels of the administration, Jared and Ivanka have taken away his cell phone three times to try to stop the tweets, but he just gets another one.
Rising rates have caused the stock market to decline. Just hang in, it is not a major crack. It is just the anticipated adjustment to a race up that has been historic. Rising rates just mean investors believe the economy is rising very fast. I have not seen this kind of optimism, confidence, and enthusiasm by businessmen in over a decade. Animal spirits are revved up since the tax bill and deregulation in ways we have not seen since the nineties. The Dems are lying about the tax bill and the economy. They are getting desperate in advance of November. By spring the polls will show voters are happy, and the edge the Dems had will have eroded to nil. It is the economy stupid. After the memo and more text messages are released the Dems will be on defense.
3a)
Trey Gowdy IsRetiring.WhatDoes
It Mean? Six Takeaways.
By Dan McLaughlin
Today’s big Capitol Hill bombshell: the retirements of South Carolina’s Trey Gowdy and powerful Philadelphia Democrat Bob Brady, bringing the total number of House retirements into the 50s (two-thirds of them Republicans). What does it all mean? Here are six takeaways:
First, of course, House Republican retirements are both a cause and effect of declining odds of the GOP retaining control of the House, although seats such as Gowdy’s (and probably Brady’s on the Democratic side) are likely to stay safe. More open seats removes the advantages of incumbency and will spread thin Republican resources defending seats that may be held but with a lot more effort than usual, and incumbents without the stomach for a tough race are looking for the exits.
Second, term limits for committee chairs matter. Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, Chair of the Appropriations Committee, retired Monday; Gowdy becomes the ninth of 21 committee chairs to step down from the House, many of them term-limited by internal caucus limits from continuing to run their committees even if Republicans keep control of the House. The days of chairmen who ruled their fiefdoms for decades are over (at least as long as Republicans are in charge), and it turns out that term limits for committee chairs are pretty effective at forcing steady turnover without the heavier-handed resort to banning voters from continuing to re-elect long-term Representatives.
Third, redistricting matters, too. A court threw out Pennsylvania’s congressional map last week, and retirements have been running particularly high in the Pennsylvania delegation (six so far out of 18 seats), as even safe (if scandal-plagued) veterans like Brady look at the challenges of running on a new map for 2018 that will then be replaced by another new map by 2022 – one that, in Pennsylvania’s case, is likely to have one fewer House seat to go around. Even Representatives who may think they can ride out the storm of 2018 may decide that reintroducing themselves to new voters in the next few years — or, for that matter, throwing their weight into behind-the-scenes redistricting fights to keep their districts from getting carved up — are more trouble than they are worth.
Fourth, being a Republican in Congress under Trump is just not much fun. Typically, the out-party gets to raise their profile with investigations and fights with the White House (few congressmen did this more aggressively under Obama than Gowdy), while the in-party gets to actually govern. But Republicans have struggled to settle on a legislative agenda that can pass anything through the Senate, and defending the Trump administration from various investigations and public relations disasters is wearying work. Republicans who don’t want to publicly cross Trump may still not want to have to defend him anymore, either. So a number of these retirements may be delayed reactions to Trump’s nomination and then surprise 2016 victory.
Fifth, everybody is focused on how all these retirements — over 50 in the House, four so far in the Senate, and 17 governors — will affect the balance of power between the parties. But they also represent a huge opportunity to test the balance of power within the parties, as we could see a blizzard of contested primaries just for open seats, even leaving aside challenges to incumbents. On the Republican side, that will test both the relative strength of the party establishment and the question of whether the Trump/Bannon populist wing has permanently supplanted the conservative/Tea Party wing as the main challenger to the establishment. On the Democratic side, the progressive-populist insurgency that backed Bernie Sanders will be chomping at the bit to flex its own muscles — as indeed, Brady was facing a primary challenge on his left. A year from now, we may know a lot more about who comes out on top of these battles.
Sixth, don’t cry yet for Gowdy, a former prosecutor who cited in his statement his desire to return to the judicial system. Judge Dennis Shedd of the Fourth Circuit — a federal appeals judge from South Carolina, appointed by George W. Bush — retired effective yesterday, and no nominee has yet been announced. Don’t be surprised if Gowdy is Trump’s pick to replace Shedd for a life-tenured position (and maybe an outside shot someday at the Supreme Court).
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