General Mattis gone. Markets tanking. Shutdown chaos. Whitaker refuses to recuse.
And that was yesterday. Behind it all is the Trump scandal steamroller.
David A Graham/Atlantic:
James Mattis’s Final Protest Against the President
The defense secretary, who resigned on Thursday, was one of the last senior officials in the government who could constrain Donald Trump.
The question now facing both U.S. and foreign leaders is plain: Who will constrain Trump? Mattis was one of the few remaining officials who seemed able to twist the president’s arm out of his most rash and unwise decisions and impulses.
“Mattis is the last brake on a president that makes major life-and-death decisions by whim without reading, deliberation, or any thought as to consequences and risks,” said a senior U.S. national-security official on Thursday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk freely. “The saving grace is that this president has not been tested by a major national-security crisis. But it will come, and when it does, we are fucked.”
Garret Graff/Wired:
A COMPLETE GUIDE TO ALL 17 (KNOWN) TRUMP AND RUSSIA INVESTIGATIONS
WHILE POPULAR MEMORY today remembers Watergate as five DNC burglars leading inexorably to Richard Nixon’s resignation two years later, history recalls that the case and special prosecutor’s investigation at the time were much broader; ultimately 69 people were charged as part of the investigation, 48 of whom pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial.
After three weeks of back-to-back-to-back-to-back bombshells by federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller, it’s increasingly clear that, as 2018 winds down, Donald Trump faces a legal assault unlike anything previously seen by any president—at least 17 distinct court cases stemming from at least seven different sets of prosecutors and investigators. (That total does not count any congressional inquiries, nor does it include any other inquiries into other administration officials unrelated to Russia.)
WaPo:
A tailspin’: Under siege, Trump propels the government and markets into crisis
Trump has been isolated in bunker mode in recent weeks as political and personal crises mount, according to interviews with 27 current and former White House officials, Republican lawmakers and outside advisers to the president, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments.
“There’s going to be an intervention,” one former senior administration official said speculatively. “Jim Mattis just sent a shot across the bow. He’s the most credible member of the administration by five grades of magnitude. He’s the steady, safe set of hands. And this letter is brutal. He quit because of the madness.”
Matt Fuller and Anthony Delaney/HuffPost:
And What Can You Say About Paul Ryan?
How much time do you have?
It’s all part of the fiction that Ryan chooses to live in ― a fiction in which Trump is restoring honor to the presidency and his behavior is to be downplayed, dismissed or outright ignored. And it’s that blithe fiction, contrasted with our graphic, Trump-y reality, for which Ryan should be remembered.
When Ryan leaves office in January, he will not have balanced the budget or fixed Congress or solved poverty or left our politics smarter or less divided. Instead, during his three-year tenure as speaker, the deficit has nearly doubled. The procedural problems in Congress are more daunting. Poverty isn’t much different. And our politics are more partisan, less ideological, than maybe ever before.
The version of Paul Ryan that he and his staff tried to project for years ― the image of a squeaky-clean numbers guy, rolling up his sleeves, solving tough policy problems ― is a sham. According to a number of polls, many people now recognize him as a monumental partisan, a politician who won a reputation as a wonk because he was able to memorize a few lines from an actuarial table and then promptly ignore his own pledges to balance the budget when he had the chance. Ryan is the man who, perhaps more than anybody else, normalized Trump, who led reluctant Republicans back to Trump, who went along with the president even when he knew he shouldn’t and traded his dignity for a tax cut.
Nicholas Bagley and Richard Primus/Atlantic:
To Save Obamacare, Repeal the Mandate
Giving Republicans a symbolic victory could allow Democrats to preserve the ACA.
In declaring invalid the entire Affordable Care Act, Judge Reed O’Connor claimed he was respecting congressional intent. Didn’t Congress say the individual mandate was “essential” when it first adopted Obamacare? So if the mandate is now unconstitutional because it can no longer be sustained as a tax, O’Connor reasoned, Congress must have wanted the entire law to fall with it.
The reasoning is specious—but set that aside. If congressional intent is the key to O’Connor’s decision, Congress can intervene. And the best way for it to do so is not to enter the litigation, as the incoming speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said she’ll do. It’s to legislate.
Congress could fix the problem by saving, severing, or sinking the mandate. First, Congress could make the mandate constitutional again by raising the penalty for not having insurance from zero dollars, where Congress set it in 2017, to one dollar. Second, Congress could declare the individual mandate severable from all other parts of the ACA. Third, it could repeal the mandate—something that might once have wrecked the ACA but that now would have little or no effect on the rest of the regulatory framework.
Kelly Weill/Daily Beast:
Third Dylann Roof Fan Arrested in Past Week for Threatening to Kill
The white supremacist murderer has inspired people across the country to take up his cause. This time, a neo-Nazi with an arsenal is accused of threatening to massacre Jews.
Don’t forget this one:
Reuters:
Aluminum plunges, Rusal shares soar as U.S. to lift sanctions
The U.S. Treasury said it will lift sanctions on the core empire of Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, including aluminum giant Rusal and its parent En+, watering down the toughest penalties imposed since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.