Tag: George W. Bush

As the second year of the Trump administration comes to a close, here are five moments from this year's political news that everyone can find something to smile about, no matter your political leaning. Michelle Obama and George W. Bush's friendship Since President Barack Obama took office, protocol has placed these two next to each other during official events. Tammy Duckworth's baby on the Senate floor In April, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth gave birth to a baby girl, making her the first U.S. senator ever to give birth while in office. Weeks later, after Davidson shared a troubling Instagram post indicating he may have been feeling suicidal, Crenshaw reached out. "I told him everyone had a purpose in this world," Crenshaw said. On Elizabeth Warren's 38th wedding anniversary, her husband Bruce brought home a golden retriever named Bailey. "A few weeks ago, Bruce said, 'We're getting a dog,'" the senator wrote on Instagram. Bush enlisted the help of a new family member in his final months -- a yellow Labrador retriever service dog named Sully. Sully was set to go back into service to help other veterans at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, according to a post on Instagram by former President George W. Bush. High Election Day turnout Voters turned out in record numbers this year, with an estimated 118 million people casting their ballots in the 2018 midterms.

But examination of presidential Cabinets over the past 50 years reveals that both parties maintain similar levels of connections with elite corporate actors. Yet the Trump administration has taken this relationship to new heights. What is more, Freitag found that little difference existed between Republican (78 percent) and Democratic Cabinet members (73 percent) when it came to corporate affiliations. This new cohort of social scientists reshaped the conversation concerning the intersection between corporate and political power, bringing in a much more critical perspective on U.S. politics. The power elite has continued to shape American politics. Since the Nixon administration, more than 70 percent of both Republican and Democratic Cabinets have been filled by either corporate veterans or by people who decamped to corporate America after serving in the Cabinet. George W. Bush (100 percent), Nixon (90 percent), and Ford (82 percent) possessed the highest percentage of these elite appointments, while the Carter (71 percent) and George H.W. Bush (71 percent) administrations had the lowest. And yet, Trump has taken this tradition to a new level. His administration has featured more individuals coming from the corporate sphere than any recent administration (72 percent).

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has found himself at the intersection of the Supreme Court’s conservative and liberal wings. Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON — In his first 13 years on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s main challenge was trying to assemble five votes to move the court to the right, though there were only four reliably conservative justices. At the same time, he has taken Justice Kennedy’s place as the swing vote at the court’s ideological center, making him the most powerful chief justice in 80 years. Controlling the pace of change on a court whose conservative wing is eager to move fast will be the central problem of the next phase of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Chief Justice Roberts’ political leanings were Republican but he has stressed that judging is wholly separate from politics. A week after Justice Kavanaugh took his seat on the court, Chief Justice Roberts made rare public comments on “the contentious events in Washington of recent weeks,” referring to his new colleague’s brutal confirmation hearings, and then last month publicly tangled with Mr. Trump. Chief Justice Roberts is too smart and too steeped in history to believe that politics plays no role in judicial decision making. But other administration initiatives will soon reach the court, and Chief Justice Roberts’s legacy will be shaped by how he addresses them. While Chief Justice Roberts may be inclined to avoid politically charged issues and quietly rebuild his court’s authority, it takes only four votes to add a case to its docket. Even if he wants to avoid major controversies for now, his more conservative colleagues may not let him.

Christians are called to avoid both. Maybe we should just drop out of the whole political system? But after 8 years of effort, he saw little change in the overall social and political climate, especially when it came to abortion in our country. I wanted to understand, since, from my perspective, a committed Christian cannot vote for a pro-abortion candidate. This would parallel my understanding of a Christian’s voting responsibility in the days of slavery. Reagan didn’t change things. It’s up to the church to change the abortion laws.” Now, you might disagree with his perspective, as I do. If we don’t cast our votes, we will quickly lose our voice – not just politically but in other ways. !” Well, I hate to break the news to you, but if we don’t vote and get involved politically, we won’t even have the ability to fight things like this. In the closing chapter of Donald Trump Is Not My Savior: An Evangelical Leader Speaks His Mind About the Man He Supports as President, I lay out seven principles to help us navigate these difficult waters.

Paul Ryan’s farewell tour is going about as well as you might imagine. The retiring speaker of the House, who made a career out of promoting his aw-shucks humility, has presided over the revealing of not one but three painted portraits of himself. In less-controlled settings, his interviews with media outlets have, rather than provide a victory lap, only served to highlight the emptiness of Ryan’s words and the failures of his time in office. Speaking of those empty words, Ryan was also set to leave us with a formal farewell address at the Library of Congress earlier this week ? until George H.W. It was yet another reminder that history has rarely been on Ryan’s side. Not surprisingly, that’s not Ryan’s own assessment of his time in public life. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Ryan threw his sermonizing into overdrive, appearing nonstop on Fox News and other conservative outlets to warn about how the new president’s budget plans would drive the economy into a ditch, as if he hadn’t helped Bush do just that for the previous eight years. Instead, Ryan rolled over for Trump, allowing and even protecting his worst abuses of office. Too bad that throughout his career, Paul Ryan showed he was not so much a policy genius as he was a political hack. It’s just that in the eyes of a Republican Party that has capitulated to Trump at almost every turn, those are one and the same.

(CNN)While most of the nation's attention was focused on honoring former President George H.W. Bush this week, the gears of government slowed, but by no means did they grind to a halt. Here are a few things you might have missed. This moment between George W. Bush and Michelle Obama was reminiscent of a moment the duo shared at Sen. John McCain's funeral earlier this year. Friends are the family you choose, y'all. Now that the 2018 election is (mostly) in the rear-view mirror, we're focusing in on 2020. It's less than 700 days away, after all! Former Florida gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Gillum met with former President Barack Obama on Tuesday, amid speculation that he might be considering a 2020 presidential run. The band's getting back together! And he's going to have plenty of time on his hands for lawsuits, seeing as he's decided not to join the Democratic 2020 field.

“What I want to have people know I stood for were ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ and, yes, as Dad taught us, ‘service.’” The deaths this year of Mr. Bush and Senator John McCain have been described as the passing of an era, the demise of pragmatic Republicanism. And accommodations on issues were often made (and as often regretted) in order to win or stay in office. They also came of age at a time when military service was common; wartime bonds and shared cultural touchstones often trumped partisan differences; and zeal was not required for elected office. Mr. Bush was a naval aviator during World War II. Senator John McCain was a naval aviator during the Vietnam War. That crusade led him toward a greater willingness to confront his own party, and he ran to the left of George W. Bush in the 2000 primary before occupying a similar place on domestic issues during the younger Mr. Bush’s presidency. “They both had an understanding that politics was something that’s imperfect but the idea was that you do the best you can and the most important thing is that you govern and work things out,” said former Senator John C. Danforth, a Missouri Republican who served with Mr. McCain while Mr. Bush was vice president and president. “He was saying, ‘I was your friend in the House, I’m still your friend and we’re going to do stuff together,’” Mr. Danforth said. But these are different times. Jesse Jackson, who twice sought the presidency in the same era that the political careers of Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush took flight.

Former President George H.W. USA TODAY's Susan Page takes us back through key moments. USA TODAY At a White House news conference in January 1990, then-President George H.W. That's because he kept calling me "Ann," an error of no importance. He was the president. He showed steel in his determination to repel Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, patiently building an international coalition against Iraq. He called criticism of his son "grossly unfair" and added emotionally, his eyes welling with tears, "That's a father caring about his son and his president." The 2016 campaign was the 10th presidential race I've covered, first for Newsday, then for USA TODAY. George Bush was the first presidential hopeful I ever interviewed, in January 1980 on a commercial flight from Chicago to Philadelphia, sitting three across in coach. When he was vice president, I interviewed him in his office in the Old Executive Office Building, across from the White House.

AUSTIN (Nexstar) — Many Texas Republicans credit George H.W. The 41st President died Nov. 30, 2018 at age 94. “He was just a great person because really, in many counties, they didn’t even have a Republican Party,” Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, said. Back then, Texas was a deeply Democratic state. “As he said, you could have chapter meetings for the Republican Party in a phone booth,” Mark Updegrove, president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, said. He helped to make Republicanism a more acceptable party for Texans, so in so many ways, he was a pioneer.” When former President Bill Clinton defeated Bush in the 1992 election, Jeff Eller remembers the how welcoming Bush and his team were towards incoming former President Bill Clinton. “They were unbelievably gracious,” Eller, who served in the Clinton White House as deputy assistant to the president and director of media affairs, said. Updegrove, who is also the author of The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. There are a lot of rumors about how there’s great competition between the two of them and great tension, but in fact, that’s not the case at all.” Updegrove says Bush’s ways weren’t forced onto his son when he entered office.

Democrats have committed to investigating the Trump administration when they take control of the House in 2019. Ari Melber breaks down how the Trump administration could ultimately refuse to cooperate and in that scenario, there will be a key legal…