The Senate on Wednesday confirmed a controversial federal circuit court pick who backed a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act.
Senators voted 52-47 on Chad Readler’s 6th Circuit nomination, with GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) siding with Democrats to oppose him.
Readler, who previously worked as an assistant attorney general for the Civil Division at the Department of Justice, ran into controversy over a brief he filed last year supporting a lawsuit filed by Texas and other states seeking to strike down the Affordable Care Act.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says he has yet to determine whether President Trump’s emergency declaration to build border barriers is legal.
Asked for his legal opinion after meeting with a Department of Justice lawyer at a Tuesday luncheon of the GOP conference, McConnell said, “I haven’t reached a total conclusion.”
McConnell said while he graduated from law school, he’s not an expert on constitutional questions of separations of power.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) isn’t going to use political capital to fight a Democratic-sponsored resolution disapproving of President Trump’s emergency declaration for the U.S.-Mexico border.
Instead, the GOP leader will bide his time and pick his battles carefully, avoiding a confrontation with fellow Republican senators who think Trump’s use of the emergency declaration to build border barriers is a policy mistake that sets a bad precedent.
At the same time, McConnell isn’t sitting on the sidelines for what’s shaping up as one of the biggest fights of the 116th Congress. He has briefed Trump on what to expect when the Senate takes up the disapproval resolution and has warned the president that he is likely to lose the simple-majority vote in the upper chamber, according to a source familiar with McConnell’s advice.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff at the Capitol on Wednesday. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite, AP
This is a moment of great peril for our democracy. Our country is deeply divided. Our national discourse has become coarse, indeed, poisonous. Disunity and dysfunction have paralyzed Congress.
And while our attention is focused inward, the world spins on, new authoritarian regimes are born, old rivals spread their pernicious ideologies, and the space for freedom-loving peoples begins to contract violently. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, the prevailing sentiment among our closest allies is that the United States can no longer be counted on to champion liberal democracy or defend the world order we built.
For the past two years, we have examined Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its attempts to influence the 2018 midterms. Moscow’s effort to undermine our democracy was spectacularly successful in inflaming racial, ethnic and other divides in our society and turning American against American.
Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat, represents California’s 28th Congressional District in the House and is chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Drama is building around the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation after the panel’s top Republican and Democrat clashed over what their findings reveal two years after they opened their inquiry.
The Senate probe is viewed as the most bipartisan congressional investigation into Russian interference, with committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) walking in lockstep on most matters.
However, fractures have emerged recently after Burr publicly stated that none of their evidence indicates the Trump campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Senate will hold a vote on the Green New Deal, an environmental and energy plan touted by progressives, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Tuesday.
McConnell told reporters after a meeting of the Senate Republican caucus that he has “great interest” in the plan, which would spell an end for coal, a key economic driver in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, while promising new jobs for out-of-work miners and other workers.
“We’ll give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal,” McConnell said.
As survey data continues to show that raising taxes on the wealthy is extremely popular among the U.S. public, new research by inequality expert and University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman found that the richest 0.00025 percent of the American population now owns more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent.
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved William Barr’s attorney general nomination on Thursday, voting along party lines to send Barr’s nomination to the full Senate.
The 12-10 vote sets up a floor fight over Barr’s confirmation for later this month. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority and Democrats cannot block the nomination on their own, so there is little doubt right now about Barr’s confirmation.
Barr, who previously served as attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, was expected to easily clear the Judiciary Committee, where Republicans have a majority.
Senate Republicans joined Democrats in offering a direct rebuke Thursday of the administration’s Syria policy, marking the first time during the new Congress that the GOP caucus has formally broken with President Trump.
Senators voted 68-23 to end debate on an amendment that warns Trump against drawing down troops in Syria and Afghanistan. Senators still need to hold a second vote to add the amendment to the foreign policy bill, which will likely take place next week.
The vote is the latest sign of fracture between congressional Republicans and Trump on foreign policy. The president caught lawmakers off guard when he announced last month that he would yank troops from Syria. He further rankled Republicans this week when he lashed out at top administration intelligence officials after they publicly contradicted him on Iran.
President Trump is facing congressional members eager to assert themselves on matters of foreign policy and oversight. Credit: Jabin Botsford,, The Washington Post)
Senior Republicans are warning him away from a national emergency declaration to build a border wall. The top Senate leader is directly rebuking his national security policy in Syria and Afghanistan. And Democratic committee chairs are threatening subpoenas for his top officials.
For an administration that had largely been accommodated by Republican lawmakers during its first two years, President Trump is facing an increasingly adversarial Congress eager to assert itself on matters of foreign policy and oversight.
Senate Republicans — fresh off a bruising fight over the longest government shutdown in history — are sending fresh signals of discontent, challenging the administration on foreign policy and imploring it to stay out, for now, of talks to avert another shutdown next month.
The Senate on Wednesday confirmed a controversial federal circuit court pick who backed a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act.
