Tag: U.S. Congress

Trump administration threatens furloughs, layoffs if Congress doesn’t let it kill personnel agency

The Trump administration is threatening to furlough — and possibly lay off — 150 employees at the federal personnel agency if Congress blocks its plan to eliminate the department.

The Office of Personnel Management is preparing to send the career employees home without pay starting on Oct. 1, according to an internal briefing document obtained by The Washington Post. The employees could formally be laid off after 30 days, administration officials confirmed.

The warning of staff cuts is the administration’s most dramatic move yet in an escalating jujitsu between Trump officials and Congress over the fate of the agency that manages the civilian federal workforce of 2.1 million.

View the complete June 19 article by Lisa Rein on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s ‘executive privilege’ battle proves how little he knows about Congress and the Constitution

I get that Donald Trump is annoyed by a Congress, by a Democratic House that wants to investigate his administration’s policies and decision-making.

While I may not agree with him, I certainly can understand that he wants things his way and his way only. His way, these days, is simply to say No to anything that House Democrats say they want to see.

But I just can’t quite get my head around why Trump would declare documents about adding a question to the U.S. Census subject to “executive privilege” and held private.

View the complete June 16 article by Terry Schwadron from DC Report on the AlterNet website here.

Supreme Court decisions could affect makeup of Congress for years

Redistricting, census questions among big-ticket items left on docket

The Supreme Court faces decisions during its last two weeks of the term that could influence congressional districts for the next decade and make the justices an even larger topic in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The court left its most consequential and politically contentious opinions for the end of the term, as it tends to do every year. The justices on Monday will release some of the 24 decisions yet to come before the end of June.

During that same period, the justices will announce which additional cases it will hear next term, which could include challenges to the Trump administration decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and whether the socially contentious LGBT rights issue about whether bakers who claim religious objections can refuse to make cakes for same-sex weddings.

View the complete June 17 article by Todd Ruger on The Roll Call website here.

Dem committees win new powers to investigate Trump

The House voted Tuesday to grant new legal powers to a key committee investigating the Trump administration, handing Democrats another tool in their battle to bore deeper into Robert Mueller‘s report on Russia’s election meddling and potential obstruction by President Trump.

The 229-191 vote broke down strictly along partisan lines with no defectors from either party, highlighting the entrenched divisions on Capitol Hill between Democrats accusing Trump of conducting a “cover-up” related to Mueller’s findings, and Republicans fighting to protect their White House ally from what they consider a political “witch hunt” heading into 2020.

The resolution empowers the House Judiciary Committee to go before a federal court in seeking the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) compliance with subpoenas for disputed materials and witness testimony. Two figures are named explicitly in the text: Attorney General William Barr, who has refused to release some parts of Mueller’s report and the underlying documents; and Don McGhan, the former White House counsel who has defied a Democratic subpoena to appear before the committee.

View the complete June 11 article by Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

GOP divided over how to stop Trump’s trade wars

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill desperately want to convince President Trump to back off his plan to impose tariffs on Mexican imports but disagree over the best strategy moving forward.

Some, such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) leadership team, want to persuade the president to change course through private dialogue.

Others, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley(Iowa) and Sens. Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Rob Portman (Ohio), are talking about passing legislation to curtail Trump’s tariff authority.

View the complete June 3 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Trump antagonizes both parties on trade

President Trump is facing fire from all sides following his decision to impose new tariffs on exports from Mexico unless that country curbs illegal immigration into the United States.

Republicans caught off guard by the surprise move said it went beyond Trump’s authority and warned it would imperil the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade that the White House is pressing Congress to approve.

“Following through on this threat would seriously jeopardize passage of USMCA, a central campaign pledge of President Trump’s and what could be a big victory for the country,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said shortly after the announcement on Thursday.

View the complete May 31 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.

Mueller departs with warning: Don’t forget Russia’s election meddling

Congress has been divided over how to address weaknesses in U.S. election system

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who stepped down from his position Wednesday, had a stark warning for Americans: pay attention to what Russia did to interfere in U.S. elections.

Most of the political wrangling and fallout over Mueller’s report has focused on whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice — the report, and Mueller on Wednesday, specifically said he did not exonerate the president on that score — and whether Congress should begin impeachment proceedings. Mueller himself pointed to an aspect of his office’s findings that hasn’t been challenged by either political party.

“I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments — that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election,” Mueller said Wednesday at the Justice Department, his first public remarks since taking over the nearly two-year investigation. “That allegation deserves the attention of every American.”

View the complete May 29 article by Gopal Ratnam on The Roll Call website here.

As he exits, Mueller suggests only Congress can ‘formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing’

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III said Wednesday that his office could neither clear nor accuse President Trump of obstructing justice, leaving room for Congress to make a call where he would not and fueling impeachment demands among some Democrats.

In his first public remarks on the case since he concluded his investigation, Mueller said that if his office “had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” and noted that the Constitution “requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”

But if Mueller was trying to suggest that Democrats could initiate impeachment proceedings, he also seemed to dash any hopes they might have had that he would be their star witness, ready and willing to detail new and unflattering information his office had uncovered about Trump.

View the complete May 29 article by Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett and Felicia Sonmez on The Washington Post website here.

McConnell says he would help Trump fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2020 — after blocking Obama in 2016

When President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to consider him, blocking the nominee until after that year’s presidential election.

He said then that “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.” The tactic cost Garland his spot on the court, and Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017.

With his party now in the White House, McConnell said Tuesday he would try to push through any nomination that President Trump might make to the high court — even if it comes during an election year. Some saw that stance, which McConnell has signaled before, as hypocritical.

View the complete May 29 article by Reis Thebault and Kayla Epstein on The Washington Post website here.

Did Congress read the Mueller report? More than a quarter of these key lawmakers won’t say.

Rep. Justin Amash broke ranks with fellow Republicans when he said special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report shows that President Trump took actions that “meet the threshold for impeachment,” arguing that the stark partisan divide over the findings was because “few members of Congress have read the report.”

While it’s common for politicians to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts, the Michigan congressman’s suggestion in several tweetstorms this past week is bolder — that most lawmakers simply ignored Mueller’s report.

So how many lawmakers actually read the entire 448-page, redacted report released on April 18?

View the complete May 24 article by Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Kevin Uhrmacher on The Washington Post website here.