Trump: Staying the course led to a year end victory

In the waning hours of 2017, it’s traditional for political journalists to review the previous year, and the one person that seemed to dominate the national scene was the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump, who after a tumultuous election led an even more tumultuous administration, which was preceded by the contentious presidential election of 2016. And, while the definitive account of that election has not been written, let’s take a look back on the year under his leadership.

To the surprise of many, following election day, where results were uncertain, and the front pages of many of the nation’s daily newspapers bannered that uncertainty, it finally became official that Donald J. Trump had indeed won the American presidency, if only by a slim margin. What ensued, on Inauguration Day, after a brief thumbs up sign,was a short inaugural speech that said little, and promised much. Then the bedlam began: first there was the chaotic first press conference with seemingly everyone, screaming and shouting questions, and Trump giving snarky answers and pithy putdowns, accompanied by a noise level akin to Barnum and Bailey; an unprecedented scene from the elegant and historic East Room of the White House, under the watchful gaze of George and Martha Washington, from their gilt framed portraits.

Then there was the implementation of the travel ban against those travelling from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea. The ensuing chaos at the nation’s airports gave more credence to the ethos of Steve Bannon, an advisor plucked from the alt-right press, who bent toward chaos, and got it. With his removal and the challenge from the appeal courts the ban is now in place while the appeals court follows procedure, in a move from the Supreme Court, who in an unsigned order said that the ban could remain; and seemed to suggest that Trump was not exceeding his constitutional powers with immigration laws, and does not reflect an anti-Muslim bias. Critics do not agree, and the Administration is not entirely happy with less than a full court press.

As each new day dawned the president was front and center news with his incessant tweets, attacking everyone,(including GOP leaders) , obscuring the facts, and even downright lying; there were calls to pull the plug. When someone did just that, many applauded. Upon its restoral, some saw the role of advisor to favourite daughter, Ivanka, that she could control her father. Yet, nothing or no one could, even bringing in the Marines, in the role of chief of staff, with General John Kelly, did no good, Trump kept keeping on, keeping on, despite charges that the West Wing resembled an adult day care facility.

Race has seemed to plague Trump in the White House with charges that he is a racist, and while some have begun to accept the label, despite his denials, his early campaign to deny President Obama his tenure, claiming that he was foreign born, buttressed by his attacks on the protest against racial profiling by some American police, from mostly black players made many pause. That was lifted after the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va, over the threatened removal of statues of Confederate leaders,erupted with a stream of tiki lantern carrying white supremacists marching on a rather ragtag assembly of local protesters, mostly undergraduate students from the University of Virginia. Things got ugly when a protester was killed by a car that ran over a young woman.

Trump’s response waffled at best, and was less than what was expected from the chief executive. Writing during that time, I noted, “Trump was also criticized for a slow response to the incident, and when he did, did not call out, or identify such people as David Duke, a Klan member, (who was present) or even the Klan itself, (which was there), among other groups present, is ironic, for he continually criticized President Obama, during terrorist attacks for not saying, “radical Muslim extremists.” He after a more equivocal response backtracked, on a trip to New York and said that there was fault on both sides. The die was cast.

Concern among GOP leaders was unequivocal in its condemnation of both the march and the death; and some including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell noted privately that the president did not know how to govern, and did not want to learn. All of this was against the clear evidence that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election, and that the possibility that Trump was linked to that effort, in his desire to thwart Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign; as belief supported by both the FBI and CIA. While the president denied the charges, credible reports showed that his son-in law Jared Kushner, had secret talks with Russian officials to establish a back channel, without informing the U.S. government. With most people believing that this was done with Trump’s full knowledge, his polls fell and fell some more when Paul Manafort, a campaign official was charged with further collusion.

Soon after rumors swirled across the supper tables of Georgetown, as well as the local diner, that Trump was money laundering, as well as cavorting with Russian prostitutes. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the esteemed Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to lead an investigation, that is still ongoing. Seasoned observers where beginning to think of Trump making Richard Nixon and the Watergate break-in looking like kindergartners. But, the seriousness, and the Trump administration's ineptitude at crafting meaningful legislation was beginning to take its toll, as conservative critics were equally incensed that Obamacare was still in place, and the wall between Mexico was not.

Efforts to repeal Obamacare fell flat more than once with the last iteration from Sens.Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. With the CBO stating that 13 million Americans would lose coverage, the law, officially known as the Affordable Care Act, they got a chilly reception from constituents who acknowledged, along with their medical providers, how much the ACA helped them with preventive measures, as well as emergency surgery.

With hands wrung on both sides of the aisle, and aching for a victory, the GOP dominated Congress passed a tax reform bill that solidified great tax cuts for the wealthy and cleverly using the rules, gave temporary tax cuts to some people, depending on where they lived, while capping state and local tax deductions, and the popular homeowner deduction, under the guise that a simplified system would benefit individuals, while the corporate tax would provide trickle down benefits; a charge not seen since the Reagan administration.

Declaring a victory, and soothing some Republican nerves, the Act gives cover to some officials, but not to those in high tax states such as New York, or California, who lose more than gain benefits. Riding on this success, the GOP is looking forward to infrastructure change - much needed effort and one that should include the Democrats; but hovering in the background is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan ready, and now emboldened, to try to slash away at Medicaid and Medicare, his long held wish. 

If you are experiencing any problems viewing this post, as a Chrome user, please use IE. Blogger is experiencing some technical problems. My apologies.

Jones' win in Alabama: a win for party and politics

Tuesday night’s victory by Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the Alabama special election to fill Jeff Sessions seat, when he became U.S. Attorney General, is one for the record books: the first time in 25 years that a Democrat has been elected from this true red state.

With a reliably conservative base, and an equally reliably electorate, Moore should have won, and handily defeated the 63 year old, former U.S. judge, but the inversion of popular wisdom, favored Jones with his slim record of mostly practical legislation.

This win has given new life to Democrats who now face future Senate legislation with a renewed vigor, but also a pathway for the midterm elections in 2018, and maybe, to recapture the White House in 2020.

With the onslaught of women standing up to, and outing, their sexual predators, and the near decapitation of such mega celebrities such as Charlie Rose, Harvey Weinstein, and even the venerable, and avuncular, Garrison Keillor, the time came when even, the South, as in capital letters, synonymous with political conservatism, draws a line against electing officials accused of sex with underage girls, as also did GOP establishment figures such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who wanted to ensure that Moore did not win.

McConnell was not alone, standing by him was a cluster of other Republican leaders, and lawmakers, who cringed at the idea of serving alongside of a man who autographed Bibles, said homosexuality should be punishable by law, and that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress.

“Even Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), who switched to the Republican Party in 1994 after winning reelection to the Senate as a Democrat,” opposed Moore. “He says he wrote in the name of a conservative Republican,” according to the Hill.

While Moore stood under the klieg lights of scandal, Jones created, and crafted, a strong and well-founded campaign that focused on his base, and then some.

Zac McCrary, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster, credited Jones with doing the leg work to make sure he took advantage of an energy among Democrats that has been evident in special elections across the country since Trump won the presidency. And, to no one’s surprise is that the Democrats will use the win and that of Virginia as a new chapter in political science.

“The Jones' campaign built a real infrastructure and funded it,” McCrary said. “So they poured gasoline on the fire that was already going,” reported NBC News.

One group of voters that was deeply affected were women, as  “He became the latest focal point in a long-running war between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who has made a mission out of toppling sitting senators in primaries and trying to oust McConnell from his job.”

Payback comes in many forms, and just as success has many fathers, failure is an orphan, and Bannon now stands as the reason the seat was lost, say GOP leaders.

Jones’ focus on women was a smart move, but even smarter was his focus on creating a “coalition [that]  was built on women, African-Americans, college graduates and younger voters — many of them in and around the metropolitan centers of Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile. Black voters accounted for 28 percent of the electorate, a slightly higher figure than their share of the population.”

As NPR reported, “Jones also made important inroads with the white vote. In 2012, Mitt Romney won white, college-educated women in Alabama by 55 points; this week, Moore won them by only 11, according to the exits.

Overall, Jones got 30 percent of the white vote. In the Deep South, that's the holy grail for Democrats and really hard to achieve. (In 2012, Barack Obama got just 15 percent of the white vote in Alabama.)”

The key to the Jones success was African American voters, who while only 25 percent of the state’s population, gave the push that mattered. And,, of this the core was the Black female vote, that pushed Moore off the stage on election night.

The turnout among Black voters was 96 percent, and that included 98 percent of Black women, prompting DNC Chair Tom Perez to say, “Black women led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic party,” and furthermore, “We can’t take that for granted.”

As Charles Barkley, former NBA star, remarked, “Democrats, and I told Mr. Jones this, and I love Doug, they've taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time. It's time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black voters and people who are poor. They've always had our votes and they've abused our votes and this is a wake up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.”

Twitter lit up and noted that all of the efforts to suppress the Black vote - id requests, inadequately staffed polls, etc  - all came to naught.

Jones also captured something stronger: the hearts of minds of that population: “One of his African-American supporters, Mae Stevenson, told NPR's Russell Lewis Tuesday night that Jones was "somebody who really and truly had a heart for the black people." She cited his prosecution while U.S. attorney of two Ku Klux Klan members for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, in which four African-American girls were killed.”

If that alone was not enough, that prosecutorial legacy for that heinous act that is a nearly iconic representation of America’s struggle for civil rights, Jones listened to Black Alabamians who feared a return to the old ways of Jim Crow South, as they see the deleterious changes that the Trump administration has done.

Helping to forge the fear was Moore himself who said, in response to a query at a rally by a Black man that he felt that even under slavery, families in the South were better.

Barkley called Bannon a white supremacist and said Moore should have been disqualified for his alignment with the former White House strategist for President Trump.

Taking it further, “Jones cast the election as an opportunity for Alabama voters to reject the embarrassment he said Moore was sure to bring the state. And campaigned “with civil rights icon and Georgia Rep. John Lewis, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and other black leaders,” said CNN.

“While African-Americans make up roughly a quarter of Alabama’s population, years of dismal Democratic returns have left his party without much of a ground game,” to counter that aspect, “Jones’s campaign has furiously fought to find every vote, making 1.2 million phone calls and knocking on more than 300,000 doors, according to the campaign.”

Campaigning is one thing and governing is another, and while Jones won’t begin until January, If the past is any indication, then he will focus on education, job training, and energy.

Another legislative concern for him is health care, and to note he supports Obamacare, but not single payer care..

Despite Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s earnest wish to hold off on tax reform until he can vote, the hard and fast of Jones’ character, and record, seems to indicate someone that will focus on “bread and butter” issues, and as Barkley, said, for poor whites and blacks to get at least a lion’s share of attention.

U.S. Senate pulls off win with a Hail Mary pass on tax bill

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the U.S. Senate passed on a 51-49 vote, a tax reform plan that the Republican majority has said will redefine not only the tax structure for Americans, but also help add jobs to the economy, and give tax relief to the middle class. But, as Democrats have noted, those claims have disingenuous, as the bulwark of them cited in a study by the Congressional Budget office, show that instead of relief, there would be a tilt towards deficit, and that only some people, not all would get tax relief.

Then a much anticipated report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, came out with its assessment of the plan, but not one to bring joy to the debate. It revealed: “A new analysis released today by the Joint Committee on Taxation found that the Senate tax bill would generate enough economic growth to lower its $1.4 trillion revenue cost by only about $458 billion over a decade. After accounting for interest rates, the growth figure would fall to $407 billion, said the JCT, Congress's official scorekeeper on tax legislation. That would leave a 10-year revenue loss of roughly $1 trillion.”

Eager for a legislative win, by the end of the year, The GOP, despite its trifecta of holding majorities in both chambers of Congress, has failed to secure any wins, and only losses, especially in promises made on the 2016 campaign trail, such as repealing Obamacare, which failed miserably on two attempts.

Nerves were shot, as the Capital lights burned late into the night, with 14 hours of debate, and there was some horse trading to get to the final vote, as well as a dramatic shift by some that were essentially opposed to the plan. But, if politics is the art of compromise, then adding a few more made the day.

Most notable was James Lankford, the concerned senator from Oklahoma, whose focus on the prospect of a deficit had many worried, and who along with Bob Corker of Tennessee wanted a trigger to remove the tax cuts, and increase taxes, should the plan refuse to refuel the economy as promised. This was dashed when it was defeated by the senate’s parliamentary rule.

The Oklahoman reported that “On Thursday, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, taking into account that economic growth, estimated the bill would increase the national debt by $1 trillion. On Nov. 5, Lankford told “Meet the Press” that he would oppose a tax bill that significantly raised the debt, saying, “I'm actually not comfortable with increasing the debt.”

Lankford and other fiscal conservatives were faced with a decision Friday: to accept a bill that will add to the debt or vote it down, spoiling a major Republican initiative. The Oklahoma City Republican chose the former.”

This would not be the first, or possibly the last time, that political expedience, and no doubt, the last helps to win the day, albeit through party loyalty.

"This is a great day for the country," Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a 2 a.m. press conference after the vote., and added, "We have an opportunity now to make America more competitive, to keep jobs from being shipped offshore and to provide substantial relief for the middle class."

The statement is somewhat dubious, and while it does reflect a change in competitiveness, by lowering the U.S. corporate tax rate, it does so by siphoning off tax deductions from the very people it purports to defend, like the middle class, by removing the state and local income tax deduction.

With some, there is an echo of Reaganomics, when the plan’s supporters suggest that this will result in greater job creation, and the money funnelled back into employment when previous efforts showed that, when given tax holidays, most of the companies gave the money back to their shareholders, and there was no job creation.

Wags are saying that the plan’s creators, along with their House counterparts, think that the American public is dumb, dumber, and dumbest, when it comes to seeing the picture behind the picture.

Holding firm for a profile in courage, was Corker who voted no on the bill, and said ". . . At the end of the day, I am not able to cast aside my fiscal concerns and vote for legislation that I believe, based on the information I currently have, could deepen the debt burden on future generations,” in a statement.

“But GOP leadership appeared confident on Friday that they would be able to pass the legislation after GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Steve Daines (Mont.) came on board, reported the stalwart news forum, The Hill.

Johnson and Daines had been pressuring for a larger tax deduction for small- and mid-sized businesses known as “pass-throughs.”

Johnson noted that Republicans had been able to get the deduction increased from 17.4 percent to 23 percent and that he would be involved in further pass-through discussions as lawmakers work to get the bill to Trump’s desk.

"A seat at the table. Not just input. Not just consulting, but a seat at the table," Johnson said when asked what leadership promised him in exchange for voting "yes."

More help came from Jeff Flake of Arizona, when he gave McConnell the 50th vote for the plan.

“The Arizona Republican, who is retiring after 2018, said that, in addition to getting rid of a “budget gimmick” relating to the full expensing of capital investments, he had also gotten a commitment on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.”

The conscience of the senate is Susan Collins, “a moderate who voted against the GOP’s ObamaCare repeal efforts, also voted in favor of the legislation after getting several of her amendments into the bill, including the restoration of a $10,000 deduction for property taxes and a lower threshold for deducting medical expenses, said to reporters, "I will cast my vote in support of the Senate tax reform bill. As revised, this bill will provide much-needed tax relief and simplification for lower- and middle-income families, while spurring the creation of good jobs and greater economic growth.”

Democrats,who were outnumbered, and outfoxed,were forced to complain in sidelines, or in amendments, that were more protest, than hope, an unenviable position, but also was the only one that the minority party can play when it is dealt out of the game.

It brought fellow politico observers, such as myself, a few chuckles to see that the GOP now in the majority, forgot their own similar behavior when the roles were reversed.

The biggest loser was ObamaCare with the repeal of the individual,mandate, the penalty that people must pay, if they choose not to have insurance, yet most -- at least 80 percent of all Americans, get their coverage through their employer, or from the government, in either the form of Medicare or Medicaid.

What is unclear is what the outcome will be after Collins, who was assured by Trump and MCconnell that there would be two more compromise bills (to help Americans retain the cost-sharing benefits of Obamacare) can offer, or retain. Of course, as was attributed to St. Theresa, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The CBO does say that markets will remain stable, on the exchange and a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that this was the sixth straight year that employer provided policies have increased well under five percent, giving some assurance that the markets may not roil with this repeal.

Smaller companies are the exception and according to KFF, over the last five years, “the percentage of business with under 50 workers, offering coverage, has fallen from 59 percent to 50 percent,”  reported The New York Times at the end of September.

There is still some hope that the Alexander-Murray compromise will hold firm yet most realists say that there is such firm opposition to that bipartisan efforts, that hopes rest on reinsurance, where there will be monies for sick people, and help to decrease premiums.

For now, the remaining chance is for the House to approve the Senate bill, or both chambers to reconvene to pass a compromise bill, and at this point, it may be all over but for the fighting.