Back to the Future

Jekyll and Hyde:  The first polls out since the Sunday release of Attorney General Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, the one that Trump insists totally exonerates him even though it doesn’t, show that voters haven’t been moved very much, Trump’s approval ratings remain where they’ve been all along, hovering in the high thirties to low forties, depending on the pollster with the usual outlier showing him a little higher.  Those who think that Trump is great still think he is, others who don’t approve of him still don’t like him and despite Trump’s assertion that he was fully exonerated a few more think that he did engage in obstruction.  As to obstruction, no one, including the so-called experts, understands the rationale behind Mueller’s lack of a conclusion on that point but most agree that by deferring to Barr he allowed what was supposed to be an apolitical report to get politicized.  Additionally, a whopping 86% of respondents want to see the Mueller report released in its entirety.  It’s doubtful that the entire report will ever be released to the public but the Justice Department reports that it should be able to release an “appropriately” redacted one in a few weeks, a timetable that goes way beyond the Democrat’s early April demand but since no one in the White House seems to care about Democratic demands, it’s probably the best that can be hoped for. Similarly, Barr has already committed to testify before the Lindsey Graham chaired Senate Judiciary Committee sometime in April, presumably he’ll also be called to the House Committee where Chairman Nadler unlike his Senate counterpart is likely to also seek a Mueller appearance.  Despite calling him and his team out as a bunch of angry Democrats for the past two years, Trump now says that Mueller is an honorable guy but Trump’s lawyer/fixer Giuliani disagrees, he says that since he was in the trenches more, he saw the real Mueller and he believes that the investigation was a “Jekyll and Hyde” thing, good when it refuted bad things said about Trump but bad when it didn’t and especially bad because of the way former campaign manager Paul Manafort was treated, a possible nod to Manafort that a pardon, or at least a federal pardon is in his future.  George Papadopoulos the “coffee boy” who pleaded guilty to lying and actually served some time in prison, is now seeking to change his plea if that is even possible and reports that he has applied to Trump for a pardon.  And why not, more curious things have happened, for some inexplicable reason and over the objections of Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city’s police commissioner, prosecutors have dropped all charges against Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor who the Mayor and police chief still believe orchestrated his own take down.  

The Basics are Back:  Voters might not be all that influenced by the Mueller outcome but one thing we learned from the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections is they do care a lot about their health care, which is why the Trump administration’s decision to ask the courts to invalidate all of Obamacare is so baffling.  Politico reports that the decision to go that route was made over the objections of the two cabinet members who know the most about the subject:  Secretary of Health and Human Services Azar and Attorney General Barr.  Azar argued against overturning Obamacare, specifically citing the Republican party’s lack of any alternative health care plan with Barr skeptical about the legal basis for seeking to have all of Obamacare invalidated.  Despite their concerns, they were overruled, mostly because of the efforts of Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney, who as a former Tea Party Congressman has a long history of opposing Obamacare.  His position is that the only way to get a new plan in place is to kill the current one and he isn’t all that concerned about disrupting health care coverage for millions of Americans especially if he can achieve a decrease in Medicaid spending and permanently eliminate any Obamacare related subsidies. Additionally, facing an out of control budget and increasing deficits, a result of the tax cuts implemented last year, Mulvaney just wants to cut social spending and doesn’t really care much about where those cuts take place.  Trump, the spin master in chief, is now saying that the GOP is the “party of health care” which given his history of saying the opposite of what he means, is fairly ominous for anyone who thinks that health care is a right, and maybe even more ominous for Republicans seeking reelection in 2020.  One of those Republican politicians, Senator Susan Collins, wants us all to know that she is really concerned about Trump’s decision to again target Obamacare, or at the very least is very upset about the decision to put it back under the Klieg lights so she’s writing a letter expressing her opposition and we all know how effective she can be, after all she did vote for the tax cut plan only after extracting a promise from Senate Majority Leader McConnell that he would support legislating a fix to the Obamacare subsidy payments.  That turned out well, didn’t it?  Also on the budgetary front, yesterday Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made a feeble attempt to defend the administration’s decision to cut her budget by ten percent by pushing back at concerns about the elimination of Special Olympics funding.  The billionaire DeVos wants us all to know that she donates all of her $199,700 salary to the Special Olympics, an amount that should go far in offsetting the $17 million cut, right?  When asked by Wisconsin Congressman Pocan whether she knew how many children would be affected by the elimination of federal funding to the Special Olympics, DeVos said she did not know.  He responded “Okay, I’ll answer it for you, it’s 272,000 kids that are affected."  DeVos wasn’t the only Republican in trying to defend the indefensible.  Yesterday, Majority Leader McConnell put the Green New Deal up for a procedural vote, his attempt to weaponize climate control politics rather than to address the problem.  All but two Democrats responded by voting present instead of for or against and that in and of itself should have been the story.  However, Senator Mike Lee managed to steal away some of the attention that McConnell wanted focused on what he believes is the “folly” of the aspirational Green New Deal so he proposed his own solution to climate change saying: “You know where the solution can be found, in churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity wards across the country and around the world… this is the real solution to climate change: babies.” He added “The planet does not need us to think globally so much as think family and act personally. The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution that we’re considering this week in the Senate but rather the serious business of human flourishing. The solution to so many of our problems at all times and in all places is to fall in love, get married and have some kids.”  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the sponsor of the Green New Deal, slammed back, tweeting “Like many other women + working people, I occasionally suffer from impostor syndrome: those small moments, especially on hard days, where you wonder if the haters are right. But then they do things like this to clear it right up. If this guy can be Senator, you can do anything.”  She has a point.

Other News:  At a not so off the record luncheon for Republican Senators Trump went on one of his anti-Puerto Rico tirades, telling the audience that he doesn’t want to spend another dime helping the island, the one that he still refuses to acknowledge is part of the country.  He erroneously claimed that Puerto Rico had received $91 billion in disaster relief, an amount that he said was four times as much as it would cost to buy the whole island.  For the record that figure is an estimate of Puerto Rican hurricane damage, the amount of aid that has been allocated to the island is far less, somewhere in the range of $20 billion.  A number of politicians from both sides of the aisle, including Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader McConnell attended this week’s AIPAC convention. In an effort to push back at Trump’s newest rallying cry, that Democrats hate Jews and Israel,  Pelosi said “Israel and America are connected now and forever. We will never allow anyone to make Israel a wedge issue.” Senate Majority Leader McConnell spoke too but despite his pro-Israel message received a fairly “tepid” response.  He criticized Democrats, particularly the presidential contenders who weren’t there and also made some remarks meant to criticize those who tweet anti-Semitic and anti-Israel memes. Apparently McConnell doesn’t know or more likely has chosen to ignore that some of his Republican colleagues, including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, fall into that category alongside his intended targets Democratic Congresswoman Tlaib and Omar.