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To me, at least, that's a shocking headline. Because for the life of me, I can't remember this stunning proposal ever before being seriously considered on Capitol Hill. Some Republicans in Congress are now saying that they should all forgo their monthlong August vacation period and actually work instead. Stunning!
After tomorrow night's special House election results in the sixth congressional district in Georgia ("GA-6") are known, there will be a bumper crop of political commentary attempting to explain "what it all means going forward." No matter what the outcome, dire consequences will be predicted for one side of the aisle or the other. Sweeping conclusions will be drawn and confident predictions made by pundits far and wide. In the end the GA-6 election may deserve all of this attention, but then again there's an equal chance that it may not. But deserved or not, there will be real political consequences in the medium-term, as one party or the other may radically shift its campaign strategy for the 2018 midterms based on tomorrow night's results. So it will wind up being a consequential election, even if all of the fulminating about "what it all means" turns out to be incorrect.
President Donald J. Trump turned 71 years old this week. He held a party and invited all his cabinet members, who were all allowed to sing his praises in a manner one reporter summed up as: "honestly this is like a scene from the Third World." The internet, of course, had a field day afterwards. But it's pretty easy to understand why Trump felt the need to hold a public ass-kissing event to celebrate. After all, pretty much all of his other birthday presents were stinkers.
The news media and Robert Mueller brought the news (tied up with a bow) that Trump's biggest fear already came true a month ago -- he is now officially under investigation for obstruction of justice. When you consider how much time and energy Trump put into getting the word out that he was not under investigation, you begin to see what an enormous blow this news must have been to the birthday boy. He's been grumpily tweeting about it ever since, and leaking that he might just fire Mueller. Because, you know, what could possibly go wrong with that?
With a near-unanimous vote, the Senate just issued a rather strong rebuke to President Donald Trump, telling him that they simply do not trust him to handle sanctions against Russia. If the bill clears the House with a similar overwhelming majority, then Congress will assume control over America's foreign policy towards Russia and leave both the president and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with a very limited ability to change the situation. That's a pretty stunning rebuke to a sitting president. Especially by a Congress controlled by his own party.
This all happened quickly, considering the glacial pace most legislation moves through Congress, for rather obvious reasons (see: Trump, numerous investigations of). With almost-daily revelations about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, even Republicans had to have been getting a little nervous about trusting Trump to have any say in sanctions against the country. In the midst of all the investigations, the Trump administration let it be known that they were considering letting the Russians back in to the two facilities President Obama kicked them out of at the end of his term in office. So the fear that Trump won't be tough enough on the Russians has already proven to be very real.
Today, there was a terrorist attack at a Virginia baseball field. That's a pretty simple sentence, but so far I haven't seen a whole lot of media reports which start by so clearly identifying what just took place. But the word cannot be shied away from in this fashion, because what just took place was indeed terrorism. The only other possible term would be "guerrilla warfare against the United States," but that doesn't really seem to fit a lone individual.
Members of the United States government were shot at, with the clear intent to kill them (thankfully, as of this writing the only person who is reported dead is the shooter). If we were currently facing a rebellious movement in the country (such as the guerrilla warfare the Irish Republican Army waged on Britain) then a case could be made that members of the government are military targets. But there is no guerrilla warfare currently being waged, so that argument is not even possible. This was a lone-wolf attack, plain and simple.
It was an attack launched by a terrorist. It was the use of violence to further political goals, which is a pretty functional definition of the term. The gunman reportedly worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign and asked if the ball team practicing was made up of Republicans or Democrats. If it had been a Democratic team, perhaps the outcome would have been different. Or perhaps not. The gunman is dead, so he won't be offering up any sort of explanation for his violent behavior, one way or another. But, as reported, it is impossible not to call the gunman a terrorist.
This is going to be a disappointing column for some, since I'm not really going to get into my thoughts on the testimony Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered up this afternoon to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Before I feel ready to comment on that particular subject, I've got some research into the history of executive privilege to do (and I suspect I am not alone in that, I might add).
Instead, in all the run-up to Sessions testifying, one particular story caught my eye. Jeff Sessions has been avoiding talking to the congressional committees (both House and Senate) about the Department of Justice's budget, having now missed two scheduled chances to address the committees involved. A few weeks back, he just outright cancelled his appearance. Today, he sent his second-in-command to testify for him. Perhaps he's just leery of facing Senator Al Franken again, who knows? In his answer to Franken's question about Russia, Sessions offered up a sweeping statement that turned out to be a lie, after all. For all his strenuous explanation today, Sessions both lied to Congress about his contacts with the Russians, and reportedly lied on his security clearance application as well. So maybe he's right to be fearful of what Franken's going to ask as a followup.
In any case, the hearings Sessions has been skipping out on deal with his department's budget. Which is what makes this story so germane. Sessions sent a letter a few weeks back to Congress, objecting to what is known as the "Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment." This legislation was enacted by Congress in 2014 as a rider to the budget process, and has been in force in the three years since. But it must be renewed with each year's budget. President Trump has already signed one partial budget (for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year) with the amendment attached. But Sessions is still fighting hard against it.
There are three separate court cases which are making news today, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to take a quick look at all of them, to see the potential impact they might have. The three cases are in very different stages of completion. One was just filed in federal court. One got a just got a ruling from the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. And one is about to be ruled on by the Supreme Court. So let's take them one at a time.
Maryland and D.C. sue Trump
This is the case which was just filed today. The state of Maryland and the District of Columbia are suing President Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. This case is interesting in a number of ways, and has the potential to have a big impact on Trump's presidency almost irrespective of which side eventually wins in court.
President Donald Trump and former F.B.I. chief James Comey engaged this week in an extended game of "Liar, liar!" Or, more properly: "Liar!" "No, you're a liar!" Yes, it was "Super Bowl" week in Washington, folks!
For the first time in quite a few years, all the big broadcast television networks carried the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with Comey live from start to finish. That's pretty extraordinary, but then so was the testimony.
Comey began -- within the first 10 or 15 minutes -- by explaining that he wrote notes after meetings with Trump for three reasons. The third was the "nature of the person" he was talking to:
I was honestly concerned [President Trump] might lie about the nature of our meeting. I knew that there might come a day where I might need a record of what happened, not just to defend myself and F.B.I. and the integrity of our situation, and the independence of our function.
I don't know why Comey would think that of Trump... unless, of course, it is related to the 623 documented times Trump has lied to the public, in just his first 137 days in office. Come to think of it, that might just have something to do with it!
On a day chock full of breaking news from Washington, it's rather extraordinary that one of the biggest stories was about something which didn't happen. Not unlike Sherlock Holmes noting the significance of the dog which did not bark in the night, one of the most astonishing things about this morning's congressional testimony by fired F.B.I. director James Comey was that President Donald Trump did not angrily tweet about it while it was happening. Yes, this is precisely where we now find ourselves as a nation -- it's a big story that the president didn't fly off the handle publicly, in reaction to seeing something he didn't like, on television.
The temptation for Trump to do so must have been intense. Comey, in answer to one of the first questions asked of him this morning, straight-up called the president a liar. He repeated this more than once, in reference to both the announced White House story for why Trump fired Comey and also to Trump's smearing Comey's reputation within the F.B.I. in an interview with Lester Holt (which Comey called "lies, plain and simple"). To me, at least, that was one of the biggest takeaways from Comey's testimony. Comey suspected immediately that Trump was going to lie, which is what prompted him to take notes covering all of their meetings; and then Trump proved Comey's suspicions correct when he did lie, after the firing. It's an old Washington game called "Cover Your Ass," and Comey clearly played it in expert fashion.
The Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) always differed from other radical Islamist movements in their willingness to create a "caliphate," or a geographical state of their own. At their strongest, they swept through large portions of Iraq and Syria, taking over and holding territory that at one point reached almost to the outskirts of Baghdad. But we are now at the point where the end is in sight for the group's territorial holdings. The opponents of the Islamic State have been rolling back their borders and soon will liberate all of the Islamic State's territory. The aftermath, both for the Islamic State and for the territories involved, is going to be even more complicated than the fighting has so far been. But it's now time to consider what will happen when the Islamic State no longer has a state.
