Tag: Bill Clinton

Neutralize industry opposition At the start of the health care fight, Obamacare architects faced challenges from across the political spectrum. The Green New Deal faces a steeper challenge, and some energy companies will fight it hard. Control the narrative One early challenge for the Obama administration was dealing with the false claim that its health care plan would lead to "death panels." One is finding out "who in the climate debate people trust the most" and putting them out front, she said. It's a vacuum that some of ACA's designers regret. The Green New Deal includes several far-reaching pillars that might take time to get working, like a jobs guarantee or 100 percent renewable energy generation. Quickly getting those checks into people's hands could make it harder for opposition lawmakers to dislodge the program, Spiro said. Design a backdoor plan to fix mistakes Democrats had planned to polish their health care bill until the final roll calls, but then-Sen. Scott Brown's (R-Mass.) "It was one-and-done because Republicans weren't going to do anything," Slavitt said. The Green New Deal might benefit from building in a way to fix those kinds of hiccups without going back to Congress, he said.

Several of the President's political advisers, preparing for a re-election campaign focused on boosting turnout among the President's base of supporters, have looked to the possibility of Trump's impeachment as an opportunity to cast Trump as a victim of Washington politics and overzealous Democrats, three sources close to the White House and the campaign said. "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country." The comments amounted to Pelosi's strongest to date on the prospects of impeaching Trump and while she did not entirely close the door on the possibility, her comments indicated that she is loath to hand the President a deeply divisive issue to rev up his base and drive the conversation away from policy issues. "I think it was really smart on her part," a senior Republican operative close to the campaign said of Pelosi. "Why go through a lengthy drawn out fight over something that's going to be divisive and energize the President's base when there's an election coming up and you can win that?" Republican and Democratic operatives alike are looking to the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton as an important reminder: Clinton, who was impeached on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, saw his approval rating rocket to the highest level of his presidency during the impeachment proceedings. Right now, we have neither one," a senior House Democratic aide told CNN. Even without impeachment, Democrats will continue to pursue investigations into Trump and his administration and, while the findings could prove damaging, the President has already begun to fashion those investigations into his latest boogeyman, accusing Democrats of zealous political overreach. And so while some of Trump's advisers took Pelosi's comments as a sign she is trying to move her caucus away from impeachment, others saw it as a set up. "She has 100% intent of impeaching this President," said David Bossie, an outside political adviser of the President's who worked as the House oversight committee's chief investigator in the lead-up to Clinton's impeachment.

“Mr Chairman, here we go,” the congressman from Ohio spat out in front of a packed committee chamber, having stripped down to his white shirt and yellow tie to signal he meant business. “Your first big hearing, your first announced witness, Michael Cohen … a guy who is going to prison in two months for lying to Congress.” Jordan adopted a strategy in Wednesday’s high-profile grilling of Cohen that closely echoed Trump’s own stance towards the multiple investigations that now besiege him: bully your assailant into submission. You didn’t get brought to the dance.” Jordan proved himself not just to be Trump’s bully-in-chief for the purposes of congressional hearings, he also matched the US president’s affection for conspiracy theories. He accused the Democratic leadership of the oversight committee of taking orders from Lanny Davis, Cohen’s current attorney who is a figure of hatred among rightwing Republicans, having been Bill Clinton’s special counsel in the 1990s. “Lanny Davis choreographed the whole darn thing, the Clintons’ best friend,” he said. Republican congressman denies he ignored Ohio State sexual abuse claims Read more Jordan’s pugnacious performance lit up social media, though not for reasons he would have liked. The representative for Ohio’s fourth congressional district trended on Twitter as users posted articles reporting allegations that he had failed to take action against the sexual molestation of students while working as assistant wrestling coach at Ohio state university from 1986 to 1994. Several former wrestlers have come forward to allege that Jordan knew about what was being done to them but did nothing to stop it. Michael Cohen: key takeaways from the former Trump lawyer's testimony Read more “That’s either a failure of the Republicans on the Hill or of the White House: they knew what was coming with Michael Cohen,” Christie said. “Shame on you, Mr Jordan,” he said, after the ranking member had told the hearing that Cohen displayed “non-existent” remorse.

As whites began to feel the costs of the civil rights revolution — affirmative action, busing, urban violence — Republicans recognized the potential of race to catalytically interact with the broader rights revolution and the anti-tax movement to drive working and middle class voters out of the Democratic Party. Utych found that a core premise of both political operatives and political scientists — that “moderate candidates should be more electable in a general election than ideologically extreme candidates” — is no longer true. In an email, Utych pointed out that racial views are extremely significant in the trends he describes: The importance of racial attitudes, and how intertwined with politics they’ve become, can go a long way to explaining polarization. Tesler calls this phenomenon “two sides of racialization”: Obama performed particularly poorly among racially resentful whites, but garnered more votes from African Americans and white racial liberals than a similarly situated white Democratic candidate. That year, Tesler wrote, the American public saw a much wider gulf between Clinton and Trump’s positions on issues like immigration and federal aid to African Americans than they had perceived between prior Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Across several different racial attitude measures in a number of different surveys, views about race and ethnicity were more strongly related to vote choice in 2016 than they were in Obama’s elections. By contrast, Gallup trends show a nine-point rise in the percent liberal among Hispanic Democrats, from 29 percent to 38 percent, and an eight-point increase among black Democrats, from 25 percent to 33 percent. (Of course, the percentage of white voters who identify as Democrats is much lower than it is for African-America or Hispanic voters.) Despite differing ideologies and opposing views on some issues, on average last year, 82 percent of conservative Democrats, 91 percent of moderate Democrats and 96 percent of liberal Democrats disapproved of the job President Donald Trump was doing as president. In “The Distorting Effects of Racial Animus on Proximity Voting in the 2016 Elections,” Carlos Algara and Isaac Haley, political scientists at the University of California at Davis, show how powerful race has become in mobilizing support for Republicans: “Not only did Trump’s frequent invocations of race in the 2016 campaign prime voters with high levels of racial animus to evaluate the presidential contest in racial terms,” they write, but the increased salience of race in the 2016 campaign “percolated to relatively low-information congressional contests as well.” The result, Algara and Haley show, is that voters liberal on issues other than race defect “to Republican candidates up and down the ticket when they harbor racial animus.” Racial animosity, they write, hurts both black and white Democratic candidates: “Racial animus (at least when salient) harms Democratic candidates across the board.” I began this column with a pair of quotes from my 1992 book, “Chain Reaction.” Here is another pair: As the civil rights movement became national, as it became clearly associated with the Democratic Party, and as it began to impinge on local neighborhoods and schools, it served to crack the Democratic loyalties of key white voters.

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed President Trump's nominee to be a judge on the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a party-line vote -- and, in a historic snub, the White House ignored the input of the judge's two Democratic home-state senators in the process. Miller was one the 51 federal judicial nominees left over from the previous Congress whom the White House re-nominated last month. Miller, currently the appellate chairman of the high-powered law firm Perkins Coie, will replace Judge Richard Tallman, a Bill Clinton appointee who assumed senior status March 2018. Miller represented the government before the Supreme Court when he served from 2007 to 2012 as an Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. Among those objecting to Miller's nomination were Washington State's two Democratic senators, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. Aides say Miller's confirmation marks the first time the Senate has strayed from tradition and confirmed a judicial nominee over the dissent of both home-state senators. “This is wrong. The White House has previously signaled it will also plow ahead with other 9th Circuit nominations in other states without using the "blue slip" consultation process. “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country,” Trump tweeted. “It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an ‘independent judiciary,’ but if it is why are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned,” Trump continued.

Leah Millis/Reuters Sarah Isgur Flores, a Republican spokeswoman who worked most recently for the Justice Department, has been hired by CNN to help with the network’s political coverage, propelling a Trump administration official directly into a news role for a top cable network. Her hiring as a “political editor,” not a commentator, led to internal and external criticism of CNN for placing a Republican political operative in a position to help guide daily political coverage, including 2020 presidential campaign news. In an internal memo on Wednesday announcing the hire, CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, said Ms. Isgur would spend the first few months getting to know CNN, and then “play a coordinating role” in covering politics. She previously worked as a deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina, a Republican who ran for president during the 2016 election. And years ago she retweeted a comment from a conservative news outlet that referred to her new employer as the “Clinton News Network.” Mr. Feist’s memo on Wednesday came after a flurry of concern — and in some cases, deep frustration — voiced by members of the network’s political staff, according to two people familiar with the complaints. CNN has previously showed a willingness to hire employees from conservative-leaning news outlets and organizations, arguing that ideological diversity is helpful in ensuring robust coverage. Some prominent journalists have forged careers in news after working in politics, including George Stephanopoulos, who was hired as a contributing correspondent for ABC News in 1996 after serving as one of President Bill Clinton’s closest advisers. His move from the Clinton White House to ABC News — initially as a partisan member of a Sunday political panel, who would also do some reporting — raised hackles inside and outside the network at the time. David Axelrod, the chief political strategist for both of President Barack Obama’s campaigns, was hired by NBC News as an analyst in 2013, and has since moved to CNN. But Ms. Isgur is joining the network as a political editor, not a pundit, and departing an administration in which the president routinely criticizes the news media, including CNN.

In a special report, MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent, Ari Melber, breaks down a central question in modern American politics: Can a sitting President be indicted? Melber examines how the constitution’s core remedy for a President who commits “high crimes or…

The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid pro quo between the State Department and the FBI -- in which the FBI would agree to effectively hide the fact that a Clinton email was classified in exchange for more legal attache positions that would benefit the FBI abroad, and allow them to send more agents to countries where the FBI's access is ordinarily restricted. Despite claims by top FBI officials, including Strzok, several of those emails were determined to contain classified information. "I received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back," then-FBI General Counsel James Baker wrote to the agency's top brass, including Comey, Page and Strzok, in an email. However, at least 18 classified emails sent from Abedin's account were found by the FBI on the Weiner laptop. “It is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the infamous Weiner laptop emails,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?” Separately, another email from Page, apparently sent in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, discussed an apparent attempt by the State Department to pressure the FBI to downgrade the classification level of a Clinton email. Fox News has previously reported, citing FBI documents, that a senior State Department official proposed a quid pro quo to convince the FBI to strip the classification on an email from Clinton’s server – and repeatedly tried to “influence” the bureau’s decision when his offer was denied, even taking his plea up the chain of command. "Prior to the initiation of the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server, the FBI was asked to review and make classification determinations on FBI emails and information which were being produced by the State Department pursuant to FOIA [a Freedom of Information Act request]. A senior State Department official requested the FBI re-review that email to determine whether it was in fact classified or whether it might be protected from release under a different FOIA exemption," the FBI said. "The FBI official subsequently told the senior State official that the email was appropriately classified at the Secret level and that the FBI would not change the classification of the email.

President George W. Bush is believed to have partaken in illicit drugs in his youth, though he always played coy about it. Now, less than 30 years after Clinton felt the need to qualify his drug use, presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is not only unabashedly owning up to her own personal marijuana use, but is in full support of making it legal nationwide. “Half my family is from Jamaica, are you kidding me,” Harris said laughing, during a radio interview Monday. Whereas once policymakers decried marijuana as a gateway drug, Harris defended its use by saying, “it gives a lot of people joy.” “And we need more joy in the world,” she said. Like the legalization of gay marriage in the last decade, there’s been a swift societal reversal. The first states, Colorado and Washington, only changed their laws in 2012. When Clinton was in the White House, just about 25 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be legal for recreational use. With that much public support for it, candidates for president, especially on the Democratic side, all but have to come down on the side of legalization. And Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., whose state’s economy has benefited from legalization, is pushing legislation to ensure the federal government doesn’t interfere in states’ individual decisions. Trump even said last summer that he’d be likely to support Gardner’s legislation lifting the federal ban on pot.

The Story: The US Supreme Court, on February 7, 2019, granted a request from the managers of an abortion clinic to block the execution of...