As we learned earlier today, Mexico just isn’t going to pay for any wall anytime ever, so taxpayer dollars have to be coughed up for the project. Thus, Republicans are considering allocating that money for the wall in the must-pass government spending bill due in April. But there’s a problem—Democrats can filibuster it. And they should. Which presents a conundrum to the GOP. Is this really a hill worth dying on? So, of course, they’re trying to scare Democrats into early submission:

GOP lawmakers and aides believe they could win a public relations war over the matter by daring Democrats — particularly vulnerable red-state senators up for reelection next year — to shutter the government over one of Trump's most popular campaign pledges.

1) Donald Trump lost. There was nothing “popular” about Donald Trump. He lost, if by “losing” we consider the traditional democratic definition of losing—getting fewer votes. He has zero mandate.

2) Republicans need eight Democrats to break filibuster. There are 10 red-state Democrats up for reelection in 2018: Jon Tester (MT), Joe Donnelly (IN), Sherrod Brown (OH), Claire McCaskill (MO), Debbie Stabenow (MI), Bill Nelson (FL), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Bob Casey (PA), Joe Manchin (WV), and Tammy Baldwin (WI). Republicans won’t get Brown or Baldwin, or probably Stabenow. I’d be surprised if Nelson played along. So this is a tall order under any circumstances. 

3) But most importantly, Trump didn’t just promise to build a wall, THIS is what he promised:

So by asking the American taxpayers to foot the bill, he is explicitly breaking his promise. 

If that’s the argument Republicans want to make, bring it on. We won’t have to worry too much about who wins the public relations war on that one.

Rather than distract Donald Trump from the critical business of wreaking vengeance on local officials and tweeting about ratings, the House has moved to make it easier for them to handle all that tedious deregulating everything. The Koch-promoted REINS Act doesn’t futz around with going after one thing at a time, it’s goes after everything, all at once.

REINS dictates that a “major rule shall not take effect unless the Congress enacts a joint resolution of approval” and won't become law if Congress does not pass that resolution by “70 session days or legislative days, as applicable.”

The idea of a bill that effectively North Carolina’s the power of the executive, squelching action of agencies unless they get the mother-may-I from Congress, may actually seem attractive in the Age of Trump. But of course REINS isn’t constructed to stop the wholesale stripping away of rules and guidelines that has the Trump team so eager get their torches on the rulebooks. Deregulating slips right on past without a word. It’s anything new that has to get permission. The House is focused on keeping agencies crippled, ineffective, and, of course, ridding the system of anything that was created under President Obama.

Executive branch agencies will be able to set any rule they want, but only those that pass the scrutiny of Republicans in the House will be enacted. 

Trump, having spoken directly to the Koch team about the bill, has already promised to sign it. After all, a bill that keeps him from wasting time on items that don’t generate funds for the Trump Organization is a big win.

What horrors have the Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity” specifically identified as targets of the REINS Act? Net Neutrality, the Clean Power Plan, and voting rights. Why these three? Because if the Koch brothers can regulate what Americans see on the Internet, and make it hard enough for people to express their will at the polls, it helps them make their money the old-fashioned way—burning the dirtiest fuel available. 

Blah. Blah. Blah. Donald Trump was quick to lash out after reporting made clear that the current plan for building his precious wall involves Republican lawmakers allocating taxpayer dollars to fund it.

Caitlin McNeal writes:

Under Trump's current plan for building a border wall, Congress will use existing legislation authorizing border fences to appropriate funds for additional building along the border, according to the Associated Press. Congress would not pass a new bill authorizing a wall.

Trump surrogate Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) also told CNN Friday morning that Trump will negotiate reimbursement with Mexico.

Yeah, we'll believe that when we see it. Just one more lie they’re spinning in hopes that the American people will forget about it. Like that press conference Trump promised proving that his wife, Melania Trump, didn't evade immigration laws. Never happened. Or that press conference detailing how he'll cut ties with his businesses so he can focus on the presidency. Still waiting. Or how about a look at those tax returns so we know the full breadth of his conflicts of interest? Never gonna happen.

Can’t wait for that “foolproof” plan to defeat ISIS.

#MAGA

Sign if you agree: Donald Trump, not taxpayers, should pay for the wall!

This is a challenge to Republicans President Obama probably doesn't think he'll have to answer. But he's game, if Republicans ever manage to come up with a plan.

President Barack Obama on Friday told Republicans they should be willing to present a replacement plan for Obamacare before they vote to repeal it.

And Obama said he'd be willing to support killing his own landmark health-care law if the GOP offers one that is demonstrably better.

"I am saying to every Republican right now, if you can in fact put a plan together that is demonstrably better than what is Obamacare, I will publicly support repealing Obamacare" and replacing it with the GOP's plan, Obama told Vox during a livestreamed interview from Washington, DC.

"But I want to see it first."

That's the rallying cry for everyone right now: "Show us the plan, Republicans." In a more formal setting, the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine, Obama lays out the dangers of repealing his namesake law without a replacement.

As any grade-schooler who’s studied the Constitution can tell you, the United States Senate is an abysmally unrepresentative body. California, the largest state, has 66 times the population of Wyoming, our smallest, yet both are entitled to the same number of senators: two. It’s a statistic that you’re already familiar with, on an intuitive level.

But here’s another way of thinking about the same problem that illustrates it even more vividly. The 48 members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, in their most recent respective elections dating back to 2012, collectively earned 78.4 million votes on their way to victory. Republicans, by contrast, won just 54.8 million votes—even though there are 52 of them.

In other words, Senate Democrats have gotten more than 23.5 million more votes than Republicans. In a head-to-head election, that would amount to a crushing 59-41 margin in percentage terms. But due to a grave injustice designed to perpetuate the power of slave-holders that’s been perpetrated down the generations, the party that’s earned a massive majority of support from the American public is in the minority in the Senate.

Yes, the Constitution was designed this way, but it’s a bad design—one that leaves the country hostage to the views of a tyrannical minority. Combined with the similarly unrepresentative Electoral College and a House that’s been gerrymandered beyond recognition by Republicans, the GOP has an undemocratic hammerlock on America.

But, as you dig deep for the strength to fight this inequity each and every day, remember these numbers. For one thing, they drive Republicans absolutely nuts. Just as Donald Trump hates hearing about how he lost the popular vote, Republicans can’t stand being reminded that their hold on the Senate is due to a series of historical accidents that’s left them with a fraction of the public support Democrats enjoy.

And that’s the other thing to bear in mind: We’re the popular ones. We have to fight against an unjust system to make sure our voices are given their due, but there are more people on our side than theirs—and the votes prove it.

Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown made clear Friday that he would not be complicit in approving GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions as the nation's top law enforcement officer. Sueng Min Kim writes:

Brown appears to be the first Democratic senator to explicitly say he will oppose Sessions to lead the Justice Department, although several Democrats have signaled concerns about the Alabama senator’s conservative views on voting accessibility, immigration, civil rights and a myriad other issues.

But the liberal Brown is in a group of 10 Senate Democrats who are up for reelection this cycle in a state that Donald Trump won — prime targets for Republicans working to find bipartisan backing for Sessions and other high-profile Cabinet nominees.

“I have serious concerns that Senator Sessions’ record on civil rights is at direct odds with the task of promoting justice and equality for all, and I cannot support his nomination,” Brown said in a statement Friday. “Now, more than ever, we need leaders who can bring Americans together to improve police-community relations, ensure that all Americans have access to the ballot, and reform our criminal justice system.”

Now that's a senator standing up for what he believes even as some question whether it will hamper his reelection prospects. That's known as backbone—something we see far too little of from elected officials.

Kudos to Sherrod Brown.

Rep. Tom Price, popular vote loser Donald Trump's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has a little bit of an ethics problem in his background: the bunch of money he made trading in medical companies' stocks while he was in Congress writing and voting on legislation that could affect those companies. And their stock prices. Senate Democrats want to know a lot more about that before the Senate even holds hearings on his nomination.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, asked for an investigation of Price by the Congressional ethics office. "We don't know if he broke the law, but there are certainly enough, serious questions to warrant an investigation before any hearing is held on Congressman Price to become secretary of HHS," Schumer said at a news conference on Capitol Hill Thursday morning. […]

Schumer, flanked by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, are calling for Price's confirmation hearing to be postponed until the investigation is complete, a process that could take months.

Murray, a member of the Health, Education and Labor Committee, which holds hearings on Price's nomination, met with Price on Wednesday. She wouldn't detail how he responded her questions about his stock market activity but said it reinforced her belief that an investigation is necessary.

"It's part of why I believe so strongly today this needs a serious investigation by the OCE," Murray said.

As of now, the hearing is tentatively scheduled for January 18. Since the Office of Congressional Ethics still exists, thanks to a public revolt against Republicans trying to kill it, investigating Price seems like a really good thing for it to be doing.

An intelligence report prepared for President Obama includes intercepts of Russian officials cheering Donald Trump's win. 

Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.

The 50-page report hit President Obama’s desk on Thursday, and should be handed to Donald Trump at his briefing on Friday (if he gets back from his important errand in time). A declassified version will be made available to the public.

From the early reviews, the report is much more definitive than previous versions, not just in accusing Russia of working for a Trump victory, but in placing the blame on a particular desk.

U.S. officials who have reviewed the new report said it goes far beyond the brief public statement that Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued in October, accusing Russia of having “directed” cyber operations to disrupt the U.S. election, and concluding, in a reference to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Trump will have to go on Twitter overtime to counter the contents of the report—as soon as he checks in with Putin and Assange. But at least he won’t have to check with adviser, James Woolsey, since the former CIA director quit the Trump team.

It wouldn’t be a story about Donald Trump if it didn't start with “in a break with precedent.” In this case, it’s a break with decades of precedent: Trump has told all politically appointed U.S. ambassadors around the world that they must return home by Inauguration Day, full stop, end of story, consequences be damned.

And the consequences are plenty. For starters, it means that America won’t have diplomats in place in many countries by the time Trump is sworn in. That's a situation that would endure for months, since the Senate has to actually confirm each new ambassador, one by one. It's also liable to frighten our allies and embolden our not-so-allies, though if anything, that’s probably to Trump's liking.

But it’s for exactly these reasons that past presidents have always made exceptions, even for political appointees from the other party, to ensure continuity in our diplomatic relations, and also just not to be raging dicks to people who’ve gone overseas to serve our country. Lots of them, for instance, have families and young children abroad with them—children who are in the middle of their school year. Without visas, these people can’t remain in their host countries and are scrambling to either find a way to stay, or to uproot their kids and place them in new schools back home.

It’s fucking obnoxious, is what it is:

In Costa Rica, Ambassador Stafford Fitzgerald Haney is hunting for a house or an apartment as his family—which includes four school-age children and his wife, who has been battling breast cancer—struggles to figure out how to avoid a move back to the United States with five months left in the school year, according to the diplomats.

Some anonymous Trump apparatchik claimed “there was no ill will in the move,” so of course that means there was. And you can be doubly sure, because you know who didn’t have to uproot her child in the middle of his school year when her husband suddenly had to leave town? Oh right!

At a White House farewell reception that Mr. Obama held on Wednesday night for noncareer ambassadors, many of them commiserated, attendees said, comparing notes about how to handle the situation.

Some expressed dismay that Mr. Trump, whose wife, Melania, has chosen to stay in New York to avoid moving the couple’s 10-year-old son, Barron, to a new school midyear, would not ensure that such allowances were made for American ambassadors.

Yeah, her. But none of Obama’s ambassadors. Who needs ambassadors, right? Not Donald Trump. He has a very good brain, uses the best words, and knows more than the generals, so he definitely knows more than our ambassadors do—I mean, he's obviously terrific at diplomacy.

This is yet another reason why Senate Democrats need to grill the living daylights out of Rex Tillerson, the oilman who’s Trump’s nominee for secretary of state and would be in charge of our diplomatic corps. Does Tillerson think it’s a good idea to leave our embassies leaderless for an indefinite length of time, and to send a message to future diplomats that you’ll be treated like shit once your term is over? And if not, what does he plan to do about it?

If he doesn’t have good answers—and he won't—Chuck Schumer & Co. need to do everything in their power to thwart Tillerson’s nomination. We’ll be watching.

Leading Off

● Pres-by-CD: We arrive in Texas for our project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide. You can find our complete data set here, which we're updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available. You can also click here to learn more about why this data is so difficult to come by.

Texas's GOP-drawn congressional map was designed to create 24 safely red seats and 11 safely Democratic districts, with only the 23rd District in the western part of the state being truly competitive. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried the state 57-41 and won those 24 red seats by double digits, while Barack Obama easily carried the 11 Democratic districts; the 23rd backed Romney 51-48.

Things were a lot more interesting in 2016, with Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton by a smaller 52.5-43.5 margin, the closest presidential election in Texas in decades. Clinton won all the Obama districts, as well as the 23rd and two solidly Romney seats, the 7th and 32nd. However, the GOP still holds all the districts that Romney won in 2012, while Democrats have all the Obama/Clinton districts. The map at the top of this post, which shows each district as equally sized, illustrates all this, with the three Romney/Clinton districts standing out in pink.

We'll start with a look at Texas's 23rd District, which stretches from El Paso to San Antonio and went from 51-48 Romney to 50-46 Clinton. However, the swing wasn't quite enough for Democrats downballot. Republican Will Hurd narrowly unseated Democrat Pete Gallego in the 2014 GOP wave, and he won their expensive rematch by a similarly tight 48-47 margin.

The government reported Friday that the U.S. economy generated 156,000 new non-farm jobs in December. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report arrived at those numbers from analysis of the Current Employment Survey, a survey of 146,000 business establishments and government agencies. Of the total new jobs created in December, 144,000 were in the private-sector, 12,000 in the public sector.

The headline unemployment rate—which the BLS calls U3—rose to 4.7 percent in December. The rate is calculated from another report, the Current Population Survey of 60,000 households.

Nominal wages for private-sector workers were up over the 12-month period since December 2015 by 2.9 percent, somewhat ahead of inflation. 

The job count includes both full-time and part-time jobs. The December gain marked the 75th consecutive month of overall job gains. But the figure fell short of expert forecasts by Econoday (175,000) and The Wall Street Journal (183,000).

The BLS revised its previous calculations for November from 178,000 jobs to 204,000 and in October from 142,000 to 135,000. That puts the average monthly gain for the year at 180,000. This is the lowest average since 2011.

All figures are seasonally adjusted by means of a formula that changes month to month and over longer time periods as new data are collected. 

An alternative gauge—U6—also derived from the CPS, measures both unemployment and underemployment. It fell  0.1 point to 9.2 percent. The last time it was below 9.2 percent was March 2008. U6 continues higher than has been the case at this stage of previous recoveries. One key element of U6 are Americans who are working part-time jobs who would like to work full time but cannot find full-time positions.