Tag: Jimmy Carter

The Story: As the days tick down to the end of the single Presidential term of Donald Trump, speculation has become rampant about what pardons...

President Trump is right about one thing: He shouldn’t have to publicly release his tax returns. In Sacramento, a Democratic bill is advancing that would require presidential candidates to publicly release their tax returns for the last five years. Candidates who refused to release their taxes wouldn’t be allowed on the California ballot. McGuire also argues that every major presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 — except for Trump in 2016 — has publicly released tax returns voluntarily. Today we require tax returns, but what would be next? I asked McGuire. The law also allows, under certain circumstances, for a committee to insert the returns into the public record. So he’s going to win this victory.” What California’s huge Democratic congressional delegation should be doing is fighting to resurrect all our state and local tax deductions on federal returns. Trump is the best example. And it certainly won’t matter whether Trump is allowed on the California ballot.

From time to time, I will pluck from our NBC News video archives moments that have shaped our political culture today. By now, we're used to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has announced that he'll make a second run for the presidency, dominating the headlines. Most polls show him near the top in the Democratic race, and it seems at least possible he'll be able to enlarge his coalition enough to actually win the nomination this time. It can be easy to forget just how far into the political mainstream Sanders has journeyed over the course of his career. Paquette demanded a recount, which shaved a dozen votes off Sanders' margin but not enough to reverse the outcome. Sanders' victory brought him into the national spotlight for the first time. "I think everyone's scared right now," the chairman of the state Democratic Party told The Associated Press at the time. The passing of Pat Caddell, who wrote 'the memo' When political strategist Patrick Caddell died recently, commentators noted the unlikely arc of his career: The same man who'd helped George McGovern take over the Democratic Party and Jimmy Carter win the White House had ended up, as the Washington Post put it, writing "the instruction manual" that put Donald Trump in the White House. In more recent decades, though, Caddell migrated to the right (or, he would say, the Democratic Party migrated away from him). On the Sep. 6, 1979, edition of the "NBC Nightly News," anchor John Chancellor introduced this segment on "a very important young man named Pat Caddell, whose memo had changed the course of the Carter administration."

Music to my ears. Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist at Yale, has provided some useful insights into the relationship between presidents and political parties over the course of American history. In what he called the "politics of political time," he noted that such surprising pairings as Carter and Reagan could help us see deeper patterns in the development of American politics. Individual presidencies exist within a matrix of ambition, opportunity and strategic constraints. I found it pretty useful for thinking about the relationship between presidents and judges and the contours of American constitutionalism as well. Some presidents, which Skowronek called reconstructive, are able to significantly remake American politics, reorganizing ideological commitments, political interests and public policy in ways that leave a lasting impression on the political landscape. The politics that characterize other presidencies are defined, in part, by their relationship to those reconstructive moments. Corey Robin, Julia Azari, and Jack Balkin have pointed out that the Donald Trump presidency looks much like the politics of disjunction. Trump happily casts aside some of the intellectual, electoral and political constituents of the old Reagan coalition while trying to draw in his own set of Trump Democrats. They may well be right that the Republican Party that emerges from the present moment will bear the mark of Donald Trump rather than that of Ronald Reagan.

Living former presidents have denied President Donald Trump's claim that they had commended him for his commitment to build a wall along the nation's southern border. CNN's Erin Burnett examines the growing scrutiny of Trump's plan for the border. #CNN…

Former President Jimmy Carter reflects on the Camp David Accords 40 years later, which Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed on Sept. 17, 1978. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier destination…

I’d like to talk about heroes – and mine are people who defend human rights. Human rights are individual rights; they are not the rights of a group. This sounds obvious, yet it seems to get increasingly drowned out in the way we react to crises or events, and not least in the way politics is framed. Grossman’s Life and Fate took me three weeks to read – and three to recover | Linda Grant Read more But what also feels worryingly distant is the very notion that human rights hinge first and foremost on the protection of the individual, not of the group. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a state are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. What tends to get lost in all of this is the sacredness of the individual as opposed to the community or group they belong to – or are ascribed to. “In my experience,” he recently said, “the victims of human rights violations know full well that human rights are universal. Only those who violate human rights look for excuses in traditions, cultures, circumstances.” And he added: “human rights defenders defend the rights of each individual. Others defend the rights of a specific community. After all, that’s what the opening articles of the 1948 universal declaration keep telling us.

President Jimmy Carter speaks to Neil Cavuto in a wide-ranging interview. Carter discusses his work with Habitat for Humanity, Trump's handling of the economy, McCain, midterm elections. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering…

Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter expressed condolences after the passing of Senator John McCain.

Still, it is not easy to speed up a $20tn economy, even by running a budget deficit of nearly $1tn, as Trump’s administration is doing. | Hans-Werner Sinn Read more In a cantankerous political environment, it is not easy to think about the long term. Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cuts in the 80s helped restore US growth in the ensuing decades – but also exacerbated inequality trends. And Barack Obama’s efforts (and before him George W Bush’s) to contain the damage from the 2008 financial crisis underpin the strong economy for which Trump wants to take full credit. What will be the cumulative effect of Trump’s economic policies on the economy 10 years from now? The end-of-2017 corporate tax reform was one of those rare instances where the US Congress comprehensively streamlined and improved the US’s byzantine tax system, though the corporate tax rate should have been set at 25%, not 21%. Trump’s efforts to scale back regulation, particularly on small and medium-size businesses, are probably also a plus for long-term growth, reversing some excesses that crept in at the end of Obama’s term (though Trump is throwing out good regulations with bad ones). Many of the regulations that Trump is targeting ought to be strengthened, not eliminated But while the Trump administration has strengthened the US economy’s long-term growth potential in some ways, the other side of the ledger is rather grim. Recovery from the damage Trump is inflicting on institutions and political culture in the US may take years; if so, the economic costs could be considerable. On the other hand, neutering existing legislation without putting anything adequate in its place sets the stage for another financial crisis.