Tag: GOP congress

Trump’s DHS purge floors Republicans

Even GOP allies of the president are distressed by the chaos unleashed on federal immigration policy.

President Donald Trump’s congressional allies are alarmed by his purge at the Department of Homeland Security — urging him not to fire more top officials and warning him how hard it will be to solve twin crises at the border and the federal agencies overseeing immigration policy.

The president’s frantic four days of bloodletting at DHS and other agencies blindsided senior Republicans who are already fretting about difficult confirmation battles ahead. Some are worried about the rising influence of top White House aide Stephen Miller. And after November elections in which suburban voters rejected Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda, the president is once again making it the centerpiece of the GOP’s platform.

“It’s a mess,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said, summing up the dynamic on the border and in Washington.

View the complete April 8 article by Burgess Everett, John Bresnahan and Melanie Zanona on the Politico website here.

GOP fears Trump return to family separations

President Trump will be picking a new fight with Senate Republicans if he decides to renew his past policy of separating families detained at the border as a way of stopping the wave of immigrants.

Trump is expected to select a hard-liner to replace Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was ousted on Sunday — reportedly after she resisted returning to the policies that led to children being taken from their parents at the border.

The family separations created deep unrest among congressional Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, and Senate GOP sources warn that if Trump taps a hard-liner to replace Nielsen, it could lead to a brutal confirmation battle.

View the complete April 8 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Republican Brushes Off White House Approval Of ‘Serious’ Security Risks

On Monday morning, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chair of the House Oversight Committee, revealed allegations from a White House whistleblower who said at least 25 individuals received security clearance despite disqualifying issues involving foreign influence, conflicts of interest, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct.

The whistleblower, Tricia Newbold, is an 18-year veteran of both Republican and Democratic administrations who reached out to Congress in order to “address the national security risks she has been witnessing over the past two years.”

Jordan, the committee’s ranking Republican, isn’t disputing Newbold’s allegations. In a nine-page memo released by the Republican committee staff Monday afternoon, he whines about behind-the-scenes process issues, but says he takes the “allegations at face value,” despite not being able to independently verify them.

View the complete April 1 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

Trump says GOP senators are working on an Obamacare replacement and it will be ‘spectacular’

President Trump Credit: Win McNamee, Getty

President Trump announced Thursday that a team of GOP senators is ready to give health care another shot after nearly a decade of promising and failing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

But he added the caveat that he is in no rush to get it done.

Trump resurrected the issue this week after the Justice Department, in a court filing Monday, said it supported the full elimination of President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement. The president’s assertion that Republicans would become “the party of health care” surprised some Republicans, who thought they had missed their chance to replace the law.

View the complete March 28 article by Colby Itkowitz on The Washington Post website here.

GOP faces tough battle to become ‘party of health care’

Republicans face an uphill battle in their bid to fulfill President Trump‘s prophecy that the GOP will become “the party of health care.”

The presidential directive, handed down in a tweet on Tuesday, came at an inopportune time for Republicans, less than a day after the Trump administration called for the courts to invalidate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in its entirety.

Taken together, that announcement and Trump’s ambitious call to resurface a campaign promise that has eluded Republicans for years underscores the political peril facing the GOP in 2020, as well as the long road the party faces if it hopes to, in fact, become “the party of health care.”

View the complete March 29 article by Max Greenwood on The Hill website here.

Faster Tax Cuts Could Be Backfiring on Republicans

Polling shows those getting smaller refunds are less likely to view the tax overhaul favorably, even if their take-home pay grew.

When President Trump signed a large package of tax cuts into law in 2017, the Internal Revenue Service moved to make sure the savings showed up quickly in paychecks. Doing so probably lifted consumer spending last year, but it may have hurt Republicans politically, new polling suggests.

Administration officials, it appears, underestimated Americans’ love of tax refunds.

Nearly four in five people say they would rather overpay their federal income taxes and get a refund every spring — effectively making an interest-free loan to the government — than underpay and owe money come tax season, according to a poll for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey.

View the complete March 21 article by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley on The New York Times website here.

The government set a record with a $234 billion deficit in February

The U.S. government posted the largest monthly budget deficit in American history in February, hitting a dramatic milestone as tax revenue lags and spending levels continue to skyrocket.

The government spent $234 billion more than it brought in through tax receipts last month, much more than the deficit levels hit during the global financial crisis.

Senior Treasury Department officials said the ballooning deficit was largely due to huge spending increases that the White House and Congress agreed to in the past two years, as defense spending and money for other programs went up sharply. But tax receipts are effectively flat since last year, an unusual phenomenon in a growing economy.

View the complete March 22 article by Damian Paletta and Erica Werner on The Washington Post website here.

GOP wants Trump to back off on emergency

Senate Republicans are sending a pointed message to President Trump to back off from his national emergency declaration, arguing that he has $6 billion currently available from multiple funds — more than he requested — to build border barriers.

The eleventh-hour effort to persuade Trump to rescind his declaration will probably not work, but it reveals the growing anxiety within Republican ranks about a looming vote to rebuke the president’s move. It’s a tough spot for many Republicans who both don’t want to publicly cross Trump and also believe the emergency sets a bad precedent.

Republicans in the upper chamber argue the administration will have an additional $4 billion in fiscal 2020 to redirect to building border barriers when Congress replenishes a drug interdiction fund under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department.

View the complete March 6 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Rants aside, Trump scores big with Congress

The latest edition of CQ’s study of congressional voting comes out in CQ Magazine on Feb. 25 and the authors, CQ reporters John Bennett and Jonathan Miller, explain that Congress voted as Trump wanted at record levels in 2017 and 2018, while representatives and senators who crossed party lines more than their peers paid at the ballot box. Laura Weiss, who profiled Larry Hogan for the magazine, discusses what is prompting the Maryland governor to consider challenging Trump in the 2020 GOP primaries.

View the February 22 post by Shawn Zeller on The Roll Call website here.

Republicans Hope to Sway Voters With Labels That Demonize Democrats

WASHINGTON — In the 116th Congress, if you’re a Democrat, you’re either a socialist, a baby killer or an anti-Semite.

That, at least, is what Republicans want voters to think, as they seek to demonize Democrats well in advance of the 2020 elections by painting them as left-wing crazies who will destroy the American economy, murder newborn babies and turn a blind eye to bigotry against Jews.

The unusually aggressive assault, which Republican officials and strategists outlined in interviews last week, is meant to strangle the new Democratic majority in its infancy. It was set in motion this month by President Trump, who used his State of the Union address to rail against “new calls to adopt socialism in our country” and mischaracterize legislation backed by Democrats in New York and Virginia as allowing “a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth.”

View the complete February 17 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times website here.