The comeback attempt by ex-con Michael Grimm on Staten Island came up way short.
Longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) is trailing his 28-year-old challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 57-43 with 74 percent of precincts reporting.
Stay tuned.
At a speech in Los Angeles this afternoon Attorney General Jeff Sessions cracked a joke about family separation to laughter and applause. The speech was to the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
Jeff Sessions cracks joke about family separation to laughter and applause at speech in Los Angeles. https://t.co/319jARULTx pic.twitter.com/FT3zwOBIzy
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 27, 2018
Be certain to read Tierney Sneed’s article on this broad attack against the Mueller probe from the judge in one of the two Manafort prosecutions. I react very negatively at some level simply because I think the Mueller probe is a critical, righteous, essential investigation. Beyond this, the independence and integrity of the probe are really beyond reproach. In part this is because of the reputations and conduct of the key players, particularly Robert Mueller. But we always have to remember that this is an entirely Republican affair. A Republican Deputy Attorney General appointed by President Trump choosing a Republican former Director of the FBI. The idea that this probe is infected by partisanship is simply absurd.
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Okay, I got some further detail on how exactly subpoenaing/getting the President’s tax returns would work if the Democrats get run at least one house of Congress next year. We’ll write it up later this evening.
Let me flag your attention to something. The President has now repeatedly claimed that Harley Davidson is lying about the reason for shifting motorcycle production overseas. He is focused on the closure of a plant in Kansas and opening one in Thailand. The company seemed to be talking about something different from that. On its own this isn’t terribly surprising. President Trump accuses people of things all the time. But there’s something specific about this. This wasn’t a comment from the CEO or a press release. It was an 8-K filing. Read More
Remarkable moment in the President’s discussion of tariffs today when he suggested that his tariffs may be able to fund the government in place of income taxes. He references the McKinley era when this was the case, prior to the enactment of a federal income tax. Of course federal expenditures are roughly 10 times (2.2% versus 23% or 24%) higher today as a percentage of GDP. So this is basically insane.
Trump appears to suggest that revenue from his tariffs may be able to replace the federal income tax, referencing McKinley when federal spending was 2.2% of GDP as opposed to 23% or 24% https://t.co/4y9qDZKhwy pic.twitter.com/Z18GF1Zlzn
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 26, 2018
We just recorded this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast. The subject was congressional oversight – specifically, that congressional oversight is perhaps the central issue on the ballot in November. People underestimate just how important real oversight is – both in terms of substantive good government and in bringing corruption and misrule to heel. The in many ways unwritten story of the early Trump administration is just how deep and pervasive the venal corruption seems to be – and venal corruption isn’t the only kind of corruption. We know what we know because of powerful, aggressive journalism. But there’s only so much you can ferret out without subpoena power. As much as we shouldn’t be, I think people will be stunned at just what is happening and now allowed to happen because Republicans don’t do oversight. Read More
Here’s what I take as the crux of today’s majority decision and one which I suspect may come up again in subsequent decisions given President Trump’s behavior …
For our purposes today, we assume that we may look behind the face of the Proclamation to the extent of applying rational basis review. That standard of review considers whether the entry policy is plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes. See Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Fritz, 449 U. S. 166, 179 (1980). As a result, we may consider plaintiffs’ extrinsic evidence, but will uphold the policy so long as it can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds.5