WaPo:
Trump and his allies are blocking more than 20 separate Democratic probes in an all-out war with Congress
Trump’s noncooperation strategy has shifted from partial resistance to all-out war as he faces mounting inquiries from the Democratic-controlled House — a strategy that many legal and congressional experts fear could undermine the institutional power of Congress for years to come. All told, House Democrats say the Trump administration has failed to respond to or comply with at least 79 requests for documents or other information.
The president is blocking aides from testifying, refusing entire document requests from some committees, filing lawsuits against corporations to bar them from responding to subpoenas and asserting executive privilege to keep information about the special counsel’s Russia investigation from public view. One such case will come to a head in court on Tuesday, when a federal judge is expected to rule on whether Trump can quash a House Oversight Committee subpoena demanding financial records from his personal accounting firm.
Carrie Sietstra/NY Times:
Georgia’s Terrible Law Doesn’t Have to Be the Future of Abortion
A self-induced abortion with misoprostol can be a safe, reliable way to end an unwanted pregnancy.
This week, Georgia became the fifth state to ban abortion at six weeks after a last menstrual period, before many people even realize they are pregnant. Its ban goes further than the others, criminalizing doctors and others who help induce abortions, as well as making those who are pregnant, potentially liable for murder if they prompt a pregnancy loss. They could even be liable if they do it in another state.
On Thursday, Alabama postponed a vote on what could be the country’s most restrictive abortion ban.
This is where we are headed on abortion.
Now that two more conservatives have ascended to the Supreme Court, and the Senate has elevated dozens of new right-wing judges to the federal bench, Americans face an increasing likelihood that courts will uphold such de facto bans on abortion, and some states will effectively ban induced pregnancy loss for the first time since 1973.
A return to illegal abortion will not look like a return to the era of coat hangers. More likely, it’ll make our system of abortion rights even more lopsided. Even now, while people with resources generally have access to safe, clinic-based abortions, vulnerable people — particularly those in conservative states — may experience forced pregnancy or risk prosecution for pregnancy loss that they may or may not have had a role in causing.
This seems important:
WaPo:
Prospects for trade deal suddenly darken as China looks for a way to save face
Chinese stock markets, after suffering big losses earlier in the week, actually gained on Friday. The Shanghai Composite index rose 3.1 percent, and the Shenzhen Component index gained 4 percent. European markets also were generally up, but Wall Street opened lower.
For President Xi Jinping and his ruling Communist Party, the escalation in trade tensions could hardly have come at a worse time.
He will now have to find a way to forge a deal with the United States that he can sell as a victory at home — at the same time as the party steels itself for June 4, the 30th anniversary of the protests that began in Tiananmen Square and left thousands dead across the country…
“I don’t see a short-term resolution in the making,” said Paul Haenle, a former China director on the National Security Council who now runs the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing.
“It’s now become much more complicated to cut a deal because Trump has put a spotlight on all the things that the Chinese are most reluctant to give up,” he said, citing intellectual property rights and forcing companies that operate in China to hand over their technology secrets.
WaPo:
‘Who’s going to take care of these people?’
As emergencies rise across rural America, a hospital fights for its life
The only reason the hospital had been able to stay open at all was that about 30 employees continued showing up to work without pay, increasing their hours to fill empty shifts and essentially donating time to the hospital, understanding what was at stake. Some of them had been born or had given birth at Fairfax Community. Several others had been stabilized and treated in the emergency room after heart attacks or accidents. There was no other hospital within 30 miles of two-lane roads and prairie in sprawling Osage County, which meant Fairfax Community was the only lifeline in a part of the country that increasingly needed rescuing.
“If we aren’t open, where do these people go?” asked a physician assistant, thinking about the dozens of patients he treated each month in the ER, including some in critical condition after drug overdoses, falls from horses, oil field disasters or car crashes.
“They’ll go to the cemetery,” another employee said. “If we’re not here, these people don’t have time. They’ll die along with this hospital.”
“We have no supplies,” Steele said. “We have nothing. How much longer can we provide quality care?”
Tom Nichols/USA Today:
US adversaries are watching us self-destruct as Trump foreign policy spins into chaos
Trump has blundered into conflict with competitors, insulted allies and made the US a laughingstock. No one is in charge, and it's frightening.
If we take a moment to pull ourselves away from the daily melodrama of President Donald Trump’s efforts to suppress a report that he claims exonerates him, we might notice that American foreign policy has spiraled completely out of control.
Our trade war with China continues, for no other reason than that the president does not understand how the international economy works. After two splashy but vacuous summits that never should have happened, the North Koreans continue to press ahead with their nuclear program.
Meanwhile, Trump’s clumsy ditching of the Iran deal has achieved the miracle of ceding the moral high ground to Tehran and making a terror-supporting regime seem like the aggrieved party. The Iranians are now threatening to resume parts of their nuclear program that would put them closer to potentially making a bomb — as the White House stares dumbfounded, with no second move for a contingency that anyone who can think more than 10 seconds ahead would have seen coming.
There was a reason we didn’t want him anywhere near the WH.
David Drucker/Washington Examiner does an excellent job dissecting a partisan poll that seemingly maybe has good news for Trump.
President Trump holds critical advantages in a collection of key 2020 battlegrounds, according to fresh data from a Republican pollster.
Trump’s approval rating was 50% or higher in four of six states tested — Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Texas — and 49% in Wisconsin. In Texas, Trump led Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso vying for his party’s presidential nomination, in a hypothetical matchup. In Iowa, a perennial swing state, Trump topped former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner. In both states, the president garnered the support of 49% of poll respondents.
The survey, commissioned by an industry advocacy group and provided to the Washington Examiner, revealed a few red flags for Trump, mostly in Michigan, whose Electoral College votes are crucial to the president’s reelection prospects…
Overall, the margin of error was 2.8 percentage points, a figure generally considered reliable. However, each state measured, with a sample of 200 likely voters, had a relatively high margin of error of 6.9 points. Americans for Fair Skies purposely commissioned this poll of states important to Trump’s reelection in a bid to catch the president’s attention on a trade dispute American carriers are embroiled in with airlines being subsidized by Qatar.
Charles Franklin offers a polling primer on how to read these things.
Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:
The Senate Is as Much of a Problem as Trump
If Democrats don’t do something about it, winning the presidency in 2020 won’t be enough.
As it stands now, the Senate is highly undemocratic and strikingly unrepresentative, with an affluent membership composed mostly of white men, who are about 30 percent of the population but hold 71 of the seats. Under current demographic trends this will get worse, as whites become a plurality of all Americans but remain a majority in most states.
The Republican coalition of rural whites, exurban whites and anti-tax suburbanites may not be large enough to win the national popular vote in a head-to-head matchup with Democrats. But it covers a much larger part of the country’s landmass, giving it a powerful advantage in the Senate. And while this coalition — or its Democratic counterpart of liberal whites and the overwhelming majority of nonwhites — isn’t set in stone, it could be years, even decades, before we see meaningful change in the demographic contours of our partisan divides.
Politics is unpredictable and events matter, but it’s also clear that Republicans are on the verge of a durable structural advantage in the Senate that will make Democratic majorities rare outside of the occasional “wave” election.