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Not allowing the administration to take over the government is the wrong thing to do, said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership. It is unacceptable. Its outrageous. Something has to change.

Here is what is happening: Democrats are requiring that Republicans check all the procedural boxes on most nominees, even those they intend to eventually support. That requires the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, to request a formal cloture vote to move forward.

President Trump has filled far fewer top jobs in cabinet or cabinet-level agencies than President Barack Obama had at this point in his presidency, according to a New York Times analysis.

An intervening day is then required to allow the cloture request to ripen. Next is a vote to impose cloture followed by 30 hours of post-cloture debate before a final vote. Democrats have refused to shorten the debate time to yield back, in the parlance of the Senate though in most cases there is little to debate.

In the end, many Democrats end up voting for the nominee, as each of them did last week on a federal appeals court judge from Idaho.

The level of obstruction exhibited by Senate Democrats on these nominees is just breathtaking, Mr. McConnell said Monday as he castigated Democrats again for forcing needless procedural votes on nominees they actually support.

Republicans engaged in similar procedural combat after Democrats made the 2013 change, tying up the Senate to slow President Barack Obamas push to fill judicial vacancies.

We became pretty good at it ourselves, acknowledged Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican. But he and other Republicans say Democrats are employing the tactic to a much greater extent to clog up the Senate and handcuff the Trump administration.

Democrats have required cloture votes on 31 of 52 nominees approved so far. To be sure, the Trump administration was slow to begin making nominations for the top jobs. But there are currently almost 50 people ready and awaiting Senate action, including national security officials who face votes this week. More than 200 Obama administration nominees had been confirmed at this point in 2009, according to the White House.

Democrats are not denying that they are slowing the process to protest how Senate Republicans have handled the health care bill. Its also payback for the way Republicans forced through some early nominees without the proper paperwork.

As weve made clear to our Republican colleagues, if they continue to insist on ramming through a secret health care bill without any public input or debate, they shouldnt expect business as usual in the Senate, said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.

In objecting to a request last week to speed up approval of high-level Pentagon nominees, Mr. Schumer said, Maybe once things change a little bit on health care, with the consent of my colleagues on this side of the aisle, we can move a lot of things quickly.

Democrats blame some of the holdup on self-inflicted wounds by the White House because the administration was slow to put forward names and withdrew others. They also say that Mr. McConnell has the option to keep the Senate in session more days to advance nominees.

Before the Senate became a setting for nearly nonstop partisan warfare, senators routinely approved most lower-level nominees by voice vote, rarely insisting on the full slate of procedural steps when the outcome was a given. But those days appear to be gone.

Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who has sought to streamline the nomination process, said he feared that the blockade would encourage the White House to give up on confirmations and instead leave top posts filled with officials serving in an acting capacity without having undergone review by the Senate.

We have never had a situation where several hundred key officials who run the government have not been examined by, and held accountable to, the United States Senate, he said. It makes the president more powerful and the Congress less powerful, and it gives the people less say into who the president is appointing, and what they are doing and how they conduct themselves.

He said that while it might seem like smart politics for Democrats to stall the nominees of a president they strongly oppose, they were actually shooting themselves in the foot by giving the White House incentive to bypass the Senate.

The clash is the latest development in a nomination process that has become politically poisonous in recent years, scarred by regular filibusters, two nuclear explosions altering the rules and a refusal even to consider a Supreme Court nominee. This latest chapter holds the potential for more long-term damage to both the Senate and the government across the board.

More here:
Democrats Perfect Art of Delay While Republicans Fume Over Trump Nominees - New York Times

Were already months into the Trump presidency and Democrats still have no clue how theyre gong to mount a comeback. Admittedly, Im not all that upset about that, but we should always have in the back of our minds that a robust and competent resistance to Donald Trump will emerge on the Left, though it might not occur in time for the midtermsand that can be related across the board. First, The Associated Presss story that shows how Democrats are still chickens running around with their heads lopped off. To complicate matters, there appears to be differing views on how to push back against this White House. We have the laser focused on health care route, health care is important, but dont forget about the Russia section, and the impeach/invoke 25th Amendment because Trump is crazy cohort:

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley hesitated when asked about his partys core message to voters.

That message is being worked on, the New York congressman said in an interview this past week. Were doing everything we can to simplify it, but at the same time provide the meat behind it as well. So thats coming together now.

The admission from the No. 4 House Democrat that his party lacks a clear, core message even amid Republican disarray highlights the Democrats dilemma eight months after President Donald Trump and the GOP dominated last falls elections, in part, because Democrats lacked a consistent message.

The soul-searching comes as Democrats look to flip at least 24 GOP-held seats necessary for a House majority and cut into Republican advantages in U.S. statehouses in the 2018 midterm elections. Yet with a Russia scandal engulfing the White House, a historically unpopular health-care plan wrenching Capitol Hill and no major GOP legislative achievement, Democrats are still struggling to tell voters what their party stands for.

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Several liberal groups that had been laser-focused on health care have intensified calls for impeachment in recent weeks, including MoveOn.org, Indivisible and Ultraviolet.

We need to be talking about impeachment constantly, said Scott Dworkin, co-founder of the recently formed Democratic Coalition Against Trump. He warned on Twitter, If youre an elected Dem & youre not talking impeachment or 25th amendment then find a new party.

Yet one of the lefts favorites, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is focusing almost exclusively on health care.

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Democrats would make a mistake if we thought pounding Trump and not having an authentic message of our own is a winning strategy, said Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper. The message of Democrats has to be about issues that matter to people at their kitchen table.

In South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said Democrats dont have to retreat from their opposition to Trump, including talking about Russia, but they must tie it all together with a consistent theme that goes beyond day-to-day news cycles.

The AP quoted Democrat Jason Crow, who says hes getting questions regularly about Russia. Crow is challenging Republican Rep. Mike Coffman in Colorados sixth congressional district, one of the 24 districts that Democrats will try and flip next year, though the notion that Russia is resonating outside of the beltway should be taken with some skepticism. In June, Ed OKeefe at The Washington Post wrote that Democrats running in next years races are saying that the party needs to move on from Russia, which he reiterated on CBS Face The Nation:

Spent most of the week outside of Washington talking to these Democrats who are starting to run, and they made very clear, stop talking about Russia, they said to party leaders. Nobody out here cares. Talk to us about the economy, about how you defend or preserve Obamacare. Let's see whether party leaders actually pay attention to that.

Well, were back on Russia due to the latest and ill-advised meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer under the pretense of having dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian governments efforts to help his father win the election.

The House will be hard to win back. While Democrats are eyeing these 23-24 House Districts that broke for Clinton, but voted for a Republican member of CongressTrump won 12 Democratic House districts. It remains to be seen if Democrats can find solid candidates after the collapse of their recruitment machine. Moreover, based on some reports, if Democrats were able to turnout every 2016 Clinton voter who backed a GOP House member and had them flip, it wouldnt be enough to win the House. The road to the majority for Democrats rests with winning in red districts, which took a punch to the gut when Democrat Jon Ossoff lost to Republican Karen Handel in Georgias sixth congressional district. Even with Democratic turnout the highest in ten years in GA-06, it wasnt enough, meaning that the 2018 electorate could mirror that of the 2016 election, which favored Republicans.

It doesnt get much better for the Senate, where there are fewer pick-ups for Democrats. James Carville, the top strategist for Bill Clintons 1992 campaign, threw a lot of cold water on this one speaking with John Catsimatidis on our own AM970 WNYM station (via Salon):

I think right now most Democrats are trying to focus on the 2018 elections and trying to recruit people and keep incumbents, and you know I would say we have a pretty good chance of taking the House back. The Senate is very, very difficult The problem in the Senate is we have a large number of seats we have to hold in states that Donald Trump carried. Indiana, Missouri, you know, places like that we have to hold seats, Carville added. The only places where we have an opportunity for pick up are, you know, Nevada is pretty good. After that Arizona is less good, then youre down to Texas and Alabama, and for Democrats to win the Senate back, they have to pick up three seats.

Carville seemed resigned that Democrats wont do well next year, saying that the party should focus on candidate recruitment and keeping incumbents in power. He also admitted that the Democratic Party has no leader.

Please read Guys take on this as well. As of now, a majority of Americans think that Democrats are only against Trump and dont stand for anything else by a 52/37 margin. As John Kerry and Mitt Romney found out the hard way, you have to be more than just the anti candidate. You need to offer something else and while Democrats have multiple doors to flesh out a new narrative, along with plenty of avenues of attack against the GOPthey have nothing. Could it be because deep down they know they need to reach out to white working class (i.e. Trump) voters?

Read more:
The Wilderness: Democrats Ponder Revival, While Top Strategist Throws Wet Blanket On Their Senate Hopes - Townhall

Saying the special legislative session is built on make-believe crises, House and Senate Democrats vowed Monday to resist wherever possible, starting by denying Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick the ability to speed the approval of bills in the early part of the special session.

Patrick, who presides over the Senate, cannot suspend Senate rules without the support of 25 senators, including five of the bodys 11 Democrats.

He doesnt have five Democrats, said Sen. Jose Rodriguez of El Paso, head of the Senate Democratic Caucus. This is not a time for us as Democrats to just roll over and say yes we want to get out of here, pass all your bad legislation.

Im here to resist, said Sen. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston and head of the Senate Hispanic Caucus. We will try to do everything we can to stop what we can.

As the minority party in both houses, Democrats are limited in their responses to Gov. Greg Abbotts call for a 20-item special session that is filled with issues important to social and religious conservatives, including abortion regulations and limits on which bathrooms transgender people may use.

During a Capitol news conference Monday, Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, said Democrats also plan to act as a counterpoint by focusing on issues pertaining to children, the economy, health and communities.

A major focus will be on providing meaningful property tax relief by requiring the state to pay at least half of public school costs, instead of a projected 37.7 percent by 2019, Democrats said.

When the state refuses to keep up its end of the funding bargain, those costs are shifted to homeowners, said Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, who added that the state must stop shirking its responsibility and pay its fair share of the school finance system.

Other Democratic bills would increase the states minimum wage, ensure women get equal pay for equal work, seek to lower the states high maternal mortality rate and allow transgender Texans to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

The idea, Turner said, is to propose real solutions to problems in contrast to the dangerous and divisive policies being pushed by Abbott and Patrick.

See more here:
Democrats vow to resist special session's 'make-believe crises' - Austin American-Statesman

MOREAU After nearly two years of dysfunction at Town Board meetings, Democrats are sensing opportunity.

This might be the moment they regain the supervisor position, which they lost to Republican Gardner Congdon two years ago.

Two candidates are vying to run for the seat on the Democratic line. The Democrats will select one of them at their caucus, Aug. 3 at 7 p.m. at Town Hall.

They also have two candidates who want to run for Town Board, giving the Democrats a full slate.

The Democrats won't identify the candidates until the caucus.

The caucus promises to be an interesting one because there are more than enough candidates for the positions already. The Democrats will also take nominations from the floor, as always, said Chairman Kevin Elms.

The assembled Democrats will choose among the candidates rather than running a primary election.

Its a big year for the Democrats in several ways. Two longtime Republicans Todd Kusnierz and Bob Prendergast are not running for re-election to their Town Board seats. Kusnierz is running for supervisor, while Prendergast is retiring.

That leaves both seats open to newcomers, which Elms said could give his candidates a better chance than when they must run against popular incumbents.

Our town has proven before they dont vote by party. They vote for the person, he said.

Also, Congdon is not running for re-election to the supervisors position. (Condgon said that from the start, when he ran for the office two years ago.)

And Elms thinks some voters may have been disillusioned by the way the current Town Board and supervisor have conducted business. He suspects they might long for the days of Democratic Supervisor Preston Jenkins Jr., who was voted out by a slight margin in 2015.

That left just one Democrat on the board. But shortly after Congdon took over, even the Republicans on the board began to complain that they could not get anything done amid the rancor and bickering at board meetings.

Elms said the Town Board meetings became so painful to watch that he stopped attending.

Its so discouraging. Nothing has been accomplished, he said. I want to get things done. Its like, guys, stop. Get the work done.

Hes hoping voters will choose Democrats in response to the current boards troubles.

Were going to try hard, Elms said.

Visit link:
Moreau Democrats eager to run for office - Glens Falls Post-Star

During what would normally be a time of summer doldrums in Washington, President Trump following a pomp-filled visit to Paris and a weekend getaway to his New Jersey golf property returns to a capital roiled by the burgeoning Russia investigation, a faltering GOP healthcare plan and sinking opinion polls.

Trump goes back to work after a four-day absence and another news cycle dominated by disclosures stemming from last summers meeting of his eldest son, a Kremlin-linked lawyer and at least one other controversial Russian figure.

Included in that maelstrom were more tweets Sunday by the president renewing his defense of Donald Trump Jr. in connection to that June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. In a series of tweets, Trump returned to familiar twin themes of attacking former opponent Hillary Clinton and castigating the news media over its coverage of Russia-related matters.

While Trump continued his protestations, senior Democrats said Sunday they believe ongoing disclosures about the meeting could prove to be a turning point in the tangled, months-long investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Only smoke and no fire? Thats clearly been put to rest, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on NBCs Meet the Press. This clearly brings the investigation to a new level.

The White House dispatched a senior member of the presidents personal legal defense team to the major Sunday news shows to play down last weeks steady drip of revelations about the meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, which was also attended by Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, now a senior White House aide.

The turmoil coincides with two new public opinion polls showing Trumps approval ratings are plumbing depths greater than at this point in any modern presidency. Trump, who this week will mark six months in office, characterized the numbers as not bad at this time, even while dismissing their accuracy.

And Republican leadership delayed a vote on the Obamacare overhaul plan until Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recovers from surgery to remove a blood clot. With two Republican senators already opposed to the bill, GOP leaders need every remaining vote in their caucus to advance the measure.

In the latest chapter of the Russia investigation, defenders and critics of the president offered starkly differing narratives about campaign contacts with still-unknown numbers of potentially Kremlin-associated figures and what that indicated about alleged collusion.

Those clashing interpretations continued a pattern of recent months, but this time the two sides were both referring to publicly available source material: emails disclosed by the presidents son, not characterizations provided by anonymous sources.

Warner, speaking on CBS Face the Nation, promised to widen the inquiry, bringing in some of the folks from the Trump digital campaign to look into the barrage of falsified news stories that appeared on social media users news feeds.

Trump for months has described investigations of alleged collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin as a Dem hoax and a witch hunt.

After an initial White House-sanctioned statement suggesting the meeting was mainly about Russian orphans, the younger Trump acknowledged in emails released last week that the intermediary who set up the meeting described Veselnitskaya as having access to Russian government information that could be used against Clinton. He replied: I love it.

In addition to Trump Jr. and Kushner, the meeting was attended by Paul Manafort, who at the time was the Trump campaign chairman, and Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian American self-described lobbyist with a reported background in Russian counterintelligence.

Warners House counterpart, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), said the meeting and the circumstances leading up to it directly established for the first time the willingness by Trumps campaign to cooperate with what the U.S. intelligence community has concluded was a broad Russian effort to tip the election in his favor.

They can call it a fishing expedition. They can call it a witch hunt. It's all an aligned message with the White House, Schiff said on ABCs This Week. Even so, he said, real evidence is coming forward that just can't be ignored. This is about as clear of evidence you could find of intent by the campaign to collude with the Russians.

The fact that the most striking revelations came in the words of the presidents son made it more difficult for the White House to push back against anonymous sources. Even so, Trump again blamed negative coverage for keeping what he has termed a baseless controversy alive.

Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country! he said in an early-morning tweet from his club in Bedminster, N.J. In another Twitter statement, he said Clinton could illegally get the questions to the Debate and delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?

The tweet referred to a primary debate question that had been provided to the Clinton campaign and not to her then-rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and to emails Clinton deleted from the private server she used while serving as secretary of State. The disclosure about the debate question was drawn from Russian-hacked electronic communications.

A senior member of the presidents legal team, Jay Sekulow, tried to distance the president from the affair and insisted that the 2016 meeting did not violate any criminal laws.

I know this: He, the president, was not aware about this meeting, did not participate in this meeting, he said on CBS Face the Nation. On CNNs State of the Union, he suggested that the encounter had seemed harmless at the time.

Youre trying to put a moral, ethical aspect to it, he complained to interviewer Jake Tapper. And it's easy to do that in 20/20 hindsight, but not when you're in the middle of a campaign.

And on Fox News Sunday, Sekulow said he saw no reason to doubt the presidents statement that he had learned of the meeting only days ago. Democrats have questioned how the meeting could have been kept from the president for so long, particularly as he repeatedly denied anyone from his campaign had strategized with Russians.

I do not think the denial by the president of the United States is suspect at all, Sekulow said.

The new polling released Sunday confirmed how deep the hole is that Trump finds himself in six months into his presidency, but also offered some warnings to his Democratic opponents.

A Washington Post-ABC News survey found that 58% of Americans disapproved of Trumps performance in office and that 36% approved of his performance.

That's a significantly worse grade than the public has given any president at this point in his tenure since modern polling began in the 1940s.

There's no evidence that the 2016 Trump Jr. meeting has affected the president's standing so far, although the poll did find that 63% of Americans thought it was "inappropriate" and that 26% said it was appropriate.

The poll showed a slide in Trump's standing since the survey was last taken in April. Many other polls in the intervening weeks have documented that drop.

Most of the decline appears to have taken place in early May around the time that Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey and the House passed the Republican healthcare bill, which is extremely unpopular.

But the poll offers some potential good news for the president: He has largely kept support within his own party.

While Democrats and independents disapproved of Trump's performance by large margins, those who identified themselves as Republicans continued to approve, 82% to 15%.

That could give Trump a base on which to rebuild.

The president also could benefit from the Democrats' failure so far to convince the public that they stand for something other than opposition to Trump. In the Post-ABC poll, 37% said the Democrats stood for something, and 52% said they just opposed Trump.

Separately, a new NBC/Wall St. Journal survey that looked at counties Trump carried in 2016 found that 50% of adults in those areas now approved of Trump. That level is significantly below Trump's showing in those counties in the election, which averaged about 60%. The two numbers are not entirely comparable, but the figure suggests some weakening of Trump's backing in the places crucial to his victory.

The Washington Post-ABC poll was conducted July 10 to 13 among 1,001 adults nationwide. The margin of sampling error is 3.5 percentage points in either direction. The NBC/Wall St. Journal survey was conducted July 8 to 12 among 600 adults in the targeted counties. The margin of error for the full sample is 4 points in either direction.

Staff writer David Lauter contributed to this report.

laura.king@latimes.com

@laurakingLAT

Updates from Washington

Read more from the original source:
Democrats say Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting takes Russia inquiry to a 'new level' - Los Angeles Times