Dana Milbank at The Washington Post looks back that the ADA and points out that such a compromise bill would be impossible to pass with today's Republican party:
There are several reasons for the decline in Washington’s functionality, including the growing polarization of both parties and the obvious reality that Dole’s Republican Party has gone particularly bonkers. Dole, joined in the Capitol complex by other veterans of the 1990 ADA effort —Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), former senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and former congressman Steve Bartlett (R-Tex.) — spoke with disdain of the 50-odd Republican members of the House who refuse to compromise on anything: “I don’t know what they are,” he said.
Catherine Rampell looks a a new IRS proposal:
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and still expecting a different result.
We will soon find out whether our senators are truly insane.
Tucked into a dusty corner of the Senate’s Highway Trust Fund bill — legislation that must pass before the fund runs dry on July 31 — is a zombie proposal to hire private debt-collection agencies to hound delinquent taxpayers on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.
The IRS has actually tried outsourcing tax collection activities to private debt collectors before, at Congress’s behest. Twice, in fact, over the last two decades.
Both times, the experiment was a disaster.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Matthew Dickerson at US News examines "maximum Trump":
To be sure, Republicans view Trump in somewhat better terms than do voters as a whole but even among them he has high negatives. In the YouGov poll, 18 percent of Republicans describe Trump as strongly unfavorable and another 21 percent somewhat unfavorably. The Morning Consult poll reports similar results, with Trump's favorable/unfavorable ratio among Republicans at 49 percent/41 percent. Only Chris Christie among the Republican candidates, at 40 percent, had such high unfavorability ratings within his party. Bush's favorable/unfavorable ratio in the Morning Consult poll, by comparison, stands at 63 percent/27 percent.
The combination of high name recognition and high unfavorability suggests that barring some dramatic change in opinion, Trump doesn't have much room to grow his support, particularly as voters begin to scrutinize the candidates in terms of electoral viability. Note that only 10 percent of registered Republicans surveyed in the YouGov poll thought Trump would win the Republican nomination, compared to 36 percent who thought Bush would be the eventual nominee. The Washington Post survey shows that 62 percent of respondents "definitely would not vote for" Trump for president, compared to only 44 percent indicating they would not vote for Bush. This suggests that as the public's choice of whom to vote for is increasingly based on a candidate's electoral prospects, Trump's support may begin to erode.
Sally Kohn at The Washington Post explores coverage about white extremists:
Houser was crazy and held some beliefs that were variations of more mainstream conservative beliefs. The roots of some of Houser’s political views are hard to distinguish from ideas espoused by many, if not most, of the candidates running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
I want to be very clear here: I am NOT saying any of them would endorse or remotely condone Houser’s violence or the extremities to which he took his beliefs. Period, full stop.
Still it’s naïve, not to mention counterproductive, not to acknowledge that what ensnarled Houser’s singular mind grew from seeds of a widely sowed ideology. Houser was a bad seed, of course. And he fell far from the tree. But he was of it.
Paul Waldman at The Week asks if climate change will be a tough issue for Hillary Clinton:
The Clinton campaign says it will be rolling out her climate plans in stages; this first part is about clean energy. Clinton proposes to increase the nation's solar capacity by 700 percent by 2020, and to generate enough renewable energy by 2027 to power every home in America. As Brad Plumer points out, electricity generation accounts for only 38 percent of carbon emissions, so that doesn't solve the whole problem, but it's still an extremely ambitious goal. [...] No matter how serious Clinton is about this issue, as president she'd face an uphill climb.
That's partly because the Obama administration has already taken many of the executive actions readily available to deal with climate change. The administration set ambitious new fuel efficiency standards for cars, capped carbon emissions from power plants (limits that Clinton has said "must be protected at all costs"), and struck a deal with China to reduce carbon pollution. It is readying a new round of regulations on emissions from airplanes, trucks, and oil and natural gas operations. It just announced that it had recruited major corporations like Microsoft, General Motors, and Walmart to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions. And that's not to mention the fact that the 2009 Recovery Act (aka the stimulus) was, among other things, the largest clean energy bill in American history.
Ruth Marcus examines the latest Hillary Clinton email developments at The Washington Post:
The latest controversy over Hillary Clinton’s e-mails — the allegation that classified information was improperly transmitted on her private e-mail server — is, or should be, a non-scandal.
Clinton has only herself to blame for a lot of the e-mail mess. She should have behaved like other government officials and used an official account, however cumbersome the multiple-device consequences might have been. [...] Nonetheless, the classification kerfuffle is a non-scandal blown out of proportion by a toxic combination of sloppy reporting, official miscommunication and partisan positioning.
First, the original version of the New York Times article — swiftly revised — falsely suggested that Clinton herself was the subject of a criminal probe.
Then, the Justice Department added to the confusion by confirming a “criminal” referral — only to reverse itself and withdraw that bombshell adjective.
Not that any of this stopped Clinton’s Republican critics and competitors for the presidency from capitalizing on the reports. “The fact is that what she has done is criminal,” blared Donald Trump. “I don’t see how she can run.”
Here's that long-awaited
editors' note on Clinton email coverage:
Shortly after the article was published online, however, aides to Mrs. Clinton contacted one reporter to dispute the account. After consultation between editors and reporters, the first paragraph was edited to say the investigation was requested “into whether sensitive government information was mishandled,” rather than into whether Mrs. Clinton herself mishandled information. That type of substantive change should have been noted immediately for readers; instead, a correction was not appended to the article until hours later.
On a final note, Paul Waldman looks forward to the GOP debates and the "Republican demolition derby":
With the first Republican presidential primary debate only a week and a half away, one can’t help but sense a rising level of fear from the party establishment. And who can blame them? All their primary polls are being led by a buffoonish vulgarian who is not only scorned by strong majorities of Americans, but happens to be setting out to alienate the constituency Republicans most need to court if they’re going to win the White House. The rest of the field is a chaotic mess of 15 other candidates, none of whom has managed to perform up to expectations in any area apart from raising money.
And it could all come to a head next Thursday in Cleveland — or maybe before.