CJR:
It’s time to rethink how we cover Trump
For all of its many flaws, Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury, broke out in part because it was a departure from pattern of much of the more recent Trump coverage. He didn’t seem to give a flip what the president was trying to say or how we was trying to spin it. He didn’t allow himself to get drawn into a fight with Kellyanne Conway over “alternative facts.” He didn’t let Trump draw attention away with bogus refutations of his claims; all of that was to reporters on the daily Trump beat. It reminded me of what a Trump voter in Pennsylvania told me when I asked her whether she was bothered by the president’s tendency to lie. “He gets at a bigger truth,” she said. And so, too, did Michael Wolff.
For people in the fact business, who pride themselves on getting as close to the truth as a human can get, the success of Wolff’s book, with its myriad errors and dubious sourcing, was professionally and personally offensive.
But the sad fact, one year into this presidency, is that the current approach to covering this White House is no longer working. We are reading the same memes again and again, and the president, a savant at intuiting public sentiment, is doing everything he can to keep the treadmill moving.
It’s way past time to rethink how you cover Trump. start by figuring that he’s guilty and everyone around him lies. if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong. And don’t forget the complicit Republicans in Congress, who enable him. Never forget them.
Julian Zelizer/Atlantic:
Out of Control
Nixon’s excesses prompted Congress to reassert its own powers, but those changes eroded over time. Now, Trump is demonstrating anew all the dangers of unchecked executive authority.
The past 12 months have opened up a crucial conversation in our democracy about a subject that too often receives insufficient attention: the excessive power of the presidency. One of the best outcomes of Watergate was to trigger congressional pushback as well as to create momentum for reforms that curbed the executive branch.
Unfortunately, we have allowed too many of those reforms to fall away, and we are now in a situation where a president like Trump has the capacity to do some very dangerous things. It is time that we don’t just focus all attention on Trump the person but, more importantly, on the nature of the presidency that he controls and the awesome power that he exercises without almost any congressional oversight.
BuzzFeed:
The GOP Campaign Against The Trump-Russia Probe Seems To Be Unraveling
At the end of its second week, many of the narratives that Republicans have been using to cast doubt on the special counsel investigation have been debunked or questioned.
In any case, the Senate Intelligence Committee — long seen as the last bastion of nonpartisanship in the congressional Russia inquiries, the rest of which have been derailed by interparty bickering — has shown little interest in House Republicans’ vocal criticisms of Mueller’s investigation.
Sen. Richard Burr, the chair of the committee, bluntly told reporters Wednesday that he doesn’t discuss details of the investigation. Burr then appeared to take a shot at House Republicans’ public posturing during the investigation. “They've talked about it since the beginning,” he said, smirking. “That's their prerogative.”
The base is thrilled with the DACA proposal:
Philip Klein/WashExaminer:
The days of the filibuster are numbered
Cruz acknowledges, “Although I support [getting rid of the legislative filibuster] and we’re actually having more and more serious conversations within the conference about it, and there is more support for doing it, at this point, we’re nowhere close to having 50 votes to do it.”
McConnell has been adamant about preserving the legislative filibuster, and it may be safe as long as he is in charge. But he won’t be leader forever. And whether his successor is a Republican or Democrat, whether the pressure is coming from the Right or Left, at some point, the filibuster will be gone as a tactic.
In a bitterly divided country, the nation’s political combatants are not going to accept in perpetuity the idea that they have to win a minimum of 60 seats in the Senate in addition to the presidency and the majority in the House to move on their priorities.
David Wasserman/FiveThirtyEight:
Hating Gerrymandering Is Easy. Fixing It Is Harder.
To explore how subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes to district lines can affect the makeup of the U.S. House, we embarked on a project to redraw each state’s boundaries based on different priorities. We used a web-based application created by programmer Dave Bradlee and drew new maps six different ways:
- To maximize the number of usually Democratic districts
- To maximize the number of usually Republican districts
- To make the partisan breakdown of states’ House seats proportional to the electorate
- To promote highly competitive elections
- To maximize the number of districts in which one minority group makes up the majority of the voting-age population in the district (what we’ll refer to as a majority-minority district)
- To be compact while splitting as few counties as possible
Additionally, we explored an algorithmic approach to optimizing district compactness developed by programmer Brian Olson.
You can see the full interactive map here.
Here’s what happened when we drew each of those maps — and why each of these priorities matters in the real world:
The Fix/WaPo:
The Mueller confrontation that Republicans were trying to avoid has just arrived
The firing of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has long been a red line for most Republicans in Congress who are trying to work with their president.
But it's a red line they'd rather not act on — and now, with news that President Trump actually made moves to do it, they may be forced to.
There are two bills in Congress, both of which have some Republican support, that would protect Mueller from being fired by Trump. But neither bill has been seriously considered by leadership.
Up until this point, Republicans had given Trump the benefit of the doubt that he wouldn't launch a constitutional crisis. From their perspective, why take action and cause a confrontation with the president (and jeopardize their agenda) if they don't absolutely have to?
Now they may now have to.
Know what’s weird? All this has been true for months. And now D.C. is woke? Weird.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
In trying to fire Mueller, Trump digs his own legal grave
Fifth, this underscores how irresponsible Republicans have been in failing to shore up protections for the special counsel. Next time, McGahn may not be there or be able to head off an order to fire Mueller when Trump loses his cool. Republicans — for the president’s own protection — need to bring up legislation allowing notice of a decision to fire Mueller and/or some procedural recourse if Trump does pull the trigger. “While credit goes to Don McGahn, this is a blaring alarm: if there was ever any doubt in any Republican leader’s mind that Trump is willing to subvert the rule of law, that is now gone,” says Ian Bassin, who heads the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy. “The question now for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and their caucuses is whether they truly believe we are a nation of laws and not of men and what they’re willing to do to assure that.” Unfortunately, from indulging the antics of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to refusing to set up a select committee, GOP congressional leaders seem to have already answered the question.
Thread (click and read tweets) on Muller and indictments:
Foreign Policy:
Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses
The president targeted three bureau officials who could provide key testimony in the Mueller probe.
In a brief conversation Friday afternoon, Dowd denied the accounts of administration officials contained in this story as “flat-out wrong,” but he also refused to discuss what details were incorrect. “My advice to the president is confidential,” he told Foreign Policy.
“You don’t know me,” Dowd added. “You don’t how I lawyer, and you don’t know what I communicated to the president and what I did not.”
While Dowd’s private advice to the president would ordinarily be protected by attorney-client privilege, Mueller might be able to probe comments that Trump made to others about that legal advice by asking him directly about it as well as anyone else he shared that advice with.
Eric Levitz/New York:
This could have been a golden age for American liberalism. The Democratic Party — and the progressive forces within it — have so much going for them. The GOP’s economic vision has never been less popular with ordinary Americans, or more irrelevant to their material needs. The U.S. electorate is becoming less white, less racist, and less conservative with each passing year. Social conservatism has never had less appeal for American voters than it does today. The garish spectacle of the Trump-era Republican Party is turning the American suburbs — once a core part of the GOP coalition — purple and blue.
If the Democratic Party wasn’t bleeding support from white working-class voters in its old labor strongholds, it would dominate our national politics. Understandably, Democratic partisans often blame their powerlessness on such voters — and the regressive racial viewsthat led them out of Team Blue’s tent. But as unions have declined across the Midwest, Democrats haven’t just been losing white, working-class voters to revanchist Republicans — they’ve also been losing them to quiet evenings at home. The NBER study cited by McElwee found that right-to-work laws reduce voter turnout in presidential elections by 2 to 3 percent.