Perry Bacon Jr/FiveThirtyEight:
Why Fights Over Immigration Keep Shutting Down The Government
Let me avoid making this a both-sides story: For the most part, Democrats are more aligned with overall public opinion on immigration. The majority of voters want undocumented young people who were brought to the U.S. as children to be protected from deportation, and Democrats’ demand for that provision that led to last winter’s shutdown. Likewise, most voters don’t support a border wall, but Trump is driving toward a shutdown in pursuit of a wall, an idea that many congressional Republicans are fairly lukewarm about.
That said, America did elect a president (in 2016) and a Senate majority (in 2016 and 2018) who belong to the party that is generally less supportive of immigration, so either there is some appetite for a middle ground or immigration is not a deal-breaker issue for many Americans. Either way, it would be logical for the two sides to find a compromise. But the shifts the parties have undergone in the last 10 or so years make such a compromise hard to execute. Democratic leaders can’t easily sign on to any funding for a wall that their base thinks is a physical monument to racism, particularly since the top Democratic leaders are white but much of the party base is not. Trump can’t easily give up on the wall, since he basically campaigned on the idea that America needs a wall to remain a great nation.
So we’re already at two shutdowns involving immigration policy in the Trump era — and I would not rule out a few more.
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent/WaPo:
It looks like Democrats will hold firm for now. Then what happens?
These days, it’s a surprise if we go more than a few months without at least the threat of a shutdown — and it looks increasingly like we’re going to see an actual shutdown happen within a day.
Earlier Friday, President Trump claimed that “it’s totally up to the Democrats as to whether we have a shutdown.” Which is funny, because for the moment, Republicans control both Congress and the White House.
However, Democrats do have some agency here, and it’s good to see that they are applying it in a responsible way.
Because here’s the thing: It is the responsible position to hold the line against Trump’s demand for $5 billion in wall money. The verdict of the elections was clear: Voters elected more Democrats to Congress to put a check on Trump’s agenda — and the constant falsehoods, bad faith and cruelty underpinning it — and if the government does shut down, it will be because Democrats did just this, placing a check, at least for now, on Trump’s wall, one of the most conspicuous examples of all of those excesses, which Trump could not abide.
Eliot A Cohen/Atlantic:
You Can't Serve Both Trump and America
The departure of Jim Mattis is proof that you cannot have it all
They may think wistfully of the unflinching Sir Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s magnificent play about integrity in politics, A Man for All Seasons. But they will be more like Richie Rich, More’s protégé who could have chosen a better path, but who succumbed to the lure of power. And the result will be policies that take this country, its allies, and international order to disasters small and large.
Jim Mattis’s life has been shaped by the Marine motto: semper fidelis, always faithful. Against the odds, he remained faithful to his beliefs, to his subordinates, to the mission, to the country. The president who appointed him to the office might have as the motto on his phony coat of arms nunquam fida, never loyal. His career has been one of betrayal—of business partners, of customers, of subordinates, of his wives, and as we may very possibly learn from Robert Mueller, of his country. The two codes of conduct could never really coexist, and so they have not.
Philip Rucker/WaPo:
‘A rogue presidency’: The era of containing Trump is over
For two years, they tried to tutor and confine him. They taught him history, explained nuances and gamed out reverberations. They urged careful deliberation, counseled restraint and prepared talking points to try to sell mainstream actions to a restive conservative base hungry for disruption. But in the end, they failed.
For President Trump, the era of containment is over.
One by one, the seasoned advisers seen as bulwarks against Trump’s most reckless impulses have been cast aside or, as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did Thursday, resigned in an extraordinary act of protest. What Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) once dubbed an “adult day care center” has gone out of business.
Trump will enter his third year as president unbound — at war with his perceived enemies, determined to follow through on the hard-line promises of his insurgent campaign and fearful of any cleavage in his political coalition.
It ‘s a Salina Zito article, who represents the fabulist wing of the party.
Saying the quiet part out loud.
James Hamblin/Atlantic:
The Worrisome Word in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Cancer Diagnosis
Experts note that although the Supreme Court justice is not in imminent danger, the presence of two separate malignancies in her lung raises the possibility of metastatic cancer elsewhere.
But the word that makes the statement more complicated and concerning istwo.
Pulmonary nodules are indeed extremely common, and most are benign. To find two malignant nodules in a person who smokes would not be especially surprising. However, if you have two separate malignant nodules in your lung and you do not smoke, doctors worry that this means they represent metastatic disease from a cancer somewhere else.
This is especially true if the patient has a history of cancer, as Ginsburg does. She had early-stage colon and pancreatic cancers removed in 1999 and 2009, respectively.
Lung nodules are generally removed when they are deemed suspicious for malignancy, meaning they either showed signs of growth or were not seen on prior oncologic screening. “Growing pulmonary nodules can be primary lung cancers, and synchronous ones do appear,” says Howard Forman, a radiologist and professor at Yale. “But in a patient with two primary known malignancies, we would need to know the pathology of the nodules before believing she is cured.
Dan Crenshaw/WaPo:
Why guys like me go to places like Syria
Stay the course, Mr. President. We may have accomplished the territorial defeat of the Islamic State — and you deserve credit for that — but we are lying to the American people if we let them believe that the chaos of the Middle East cannot reach our borders. Send our men and women to face our enemies there, so that our enemies don’t face us here.
Rep-elect Crenshaw represents the part of the Republican Party Trump is losing. It’s polite language but make no mistake about the criticism.
Unnamed. Reasonably sure it wasn't Harris, Warren, or Booker. Sanders isn’t technically a Democrat, and/so probably not him either.
Speaking of which:
Jonathan Allen and Alex Seitz-Wald/NBC:
Inside Bernie-world's war on Beto O'Rourke
As the Texas congressman's star rises, Sanders supporters turn up the heat: 'Reading Karl Marx is cool. Doing a livestream while you’re doing your laundry is a gimmick.'
"I don’t think there’s much appetite among Democratic voters to re-live some of the dumb Twitter fights that we saw in the 2016 primary," said Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama. "There are plenty of progressives who might run — from Beto and Bernie to Kamala and Booker and others — and I think it’s more productive to focus our time and energy talking about why we support the candidates who inspire us."
But O'Rourke's ability to connect with younger and progressive white voters — Sanders' source of strength in his losing 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton — puts him in direct competition with the Vermont senator.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Dec. 19 showed that 57 percent of Democrats between the ages of 18 and 34 have a favorable view of Sanders, while his unfavorable ratings are higher than his favorables with Democrats 35 and older.
While the vast majority of Democrats have an opinion about Sanders, that's not true of O'Rourke. Twenty-five percent of millennials view O'Rourke favorably and 15 percent view him unfavorably, with 59 percent telling Quinnipiac they haven't heard enough about him to know how they feel.
That explains the rush to define him in negative terms.
Obviously not all Bernie supporters are doing this but some fairly well known public figures are.
BuzzFeed:
Cory Booker Is Building A 2020 Campaign That’s Just Like Him: Vegan, Hyperactive, And Unapologetically Unconventional
French fries with Iowans in Newark. Eager big donors. A clearly defined message of “radical love.” Cory Booker has spent a year laying the groundwork for an ambitious possible presidential bid.
As a presidential candidate, he would effectively run on Hillary Clinton’s failed slogan — “Stronger Together” — with the belief that it was the right message to take down Trump, but that where she faltered, he would be the right messenger. (Allies say he sees no value in a “fight fire with fire” approach.) As a senator, he has both worked in opposition to the administration and also delivered its sole bipartisan victory: a major reworking of the criminal justice system that Trump signed into law Friday. And after five years in Washington, he holds a reputation as both a progressive leader in the Senate and a friend to Wall Street with a long history of backing charter schools.
“I am not going to change or warp myself to try to win any political office. I am who I am,” Booker said in an interview this week.
Keeping up with the 2020 hopefuls.