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By Gary Fineout The Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE Florida Gov. Rick Scott is escalating his increasingly bitter feud with some of his fellow Republicans by using money from his political organization to pay for television ads that will soon hit the airwaves in the nation's third-largest state.

Scott has been harshly critical of GOP legislators who are pushing to shutter the state's economic development agency and overhaul the agency responsible for luring tourists to Florida's well-known beaches and theme parks.

A new spot that will air statewide features Scott warning that "Tallahassee politicians don't get it" and that the move will cost the state jobs.

"If the politicians in Tallahassee say they don't want to market our state, and we lose tourists, then we're gonna lose jobs," said Scott in the ad.

The ad will be paid for by Let's Get to Work, a political committee controlled by Scott that relies on private donations and not taxpayer money. Those who have donated in the last two months include some of the state's large corporations including Florida Power & Light, Disney, Duke Energy, the grocery chain Publix and rental car company Hertz.

Let's Get to Work has not disclosed how much will be spent on the ads, which will start airing next week.

Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran has made eliminating the state's economic development agency, also known as Enterprise Florida, a top priority. The Florida House earlier this month passed a bill to eliminate the agency. House Republicans passed a separate measure that places tight restrictions on Visit Florida. Visit Florida, which promotes tourism, came under fire for signing a secret $1 million deal with rapper Pitbull that called on him to promote the state.

The legislation still must clear the Florida Senate and so far Senate Republicans have refused to go along with the proposal. But that hasn't stopped Scott, a former health care executive first elected in 2010, from going after House leaders. This past week he visited a Tallahassee manufacturing plant where he praised local Democrats for voting against the House proposal.

Corcoran and other Republicans have defended their actions. Corcoran has called support for Enterprise Florida which uses taxpayer money to help lure companies to the state "corporate welfare."

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TV ad escalates Scott's feud with Republicans - The Ledger

Republicans who control legislatures in key states around the country are moving to seize power from Democratic executive officers and independent judges, enraging Democrats, who say the moves undermine the will of voters.

Republicans defend the proposals as steps necessary to balance power between branches of government and analysts say the GOP is doing now what both Republicans and Democrats have done since the founding of the republic.

In North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature is debating three measures that would limit Gov. Roy Coopers (D) ability to appoint state and local judges. Kentucky Republicans are advancing a bill to block the states attorney general, a Democrat, from filing civil lawsuits.

Its probably part of a national effort like weve seen over this entire decade, of plans formulated from afar to amass as much power as possible in the hands of Republican legislators across the country, said North Carolina Sen. Dan Blue, the leader of the Democratic minority.

The fight in North Carolina is only the latest in a series of battles Republicans have waged to curtail Coopers powers, which began just weeks after he won election in November. In February, a state court blocked a Republican-backed measure requiring Cooper to seek legislative approval for his Cabinet nominees. The legislature also passed measures curtailing Coopers power to appoint members of state and county boards of elections.

One of the new proposals would reduce the size of the North Carolina Court of Appeals from 15 judges to 12. Two others would give the legislature, rather than the governor, the power to appoint superior and district court judges.

State Rep. Justin Burr (R), who sponsored all three measures, said they are necessary to reinstate a balance of power that has tilted toward the executive branch in recent years.

The legislative branch of government is closer to the people of our state than I believe the executive branch is. We come from 170 districts all over North Carolina, Burr said. Traditionally, this is a state where the legislative branch has pretty strong muscle in terms of the ability to implement and move forward policy.

In recent years, Burr said: We have seen too much of a shift in power to the executive branch.

Virginia and South Carolina are the only other states that vest the power to pick judges in the legislature, rather than the governor. Democrats say Republicans in North Carolina are taking political opportunism to new heights.

Their argument about the governor is that the executive is a separate branch of government, but its not equal, Blue said.

In Arizona, Ducey and state legislative Republicans have moved to consolidate power in the governors office, and to add two new judges to the state Supreme Court. The court in recent years has frustrated Republicans, ruling in favor of voter-passed ballot measures the legislative majority opposes.

Its kind of just a buffet of power grabs, Arizona state Rep. Ken Clark (D) said. Under the auspices of reducing the size of government, making it, quote unquote, run more like a business, they are trying to coalesce power.

Duceys office did not respond to a request for comment. Arizona House Speaker J.D. Mesnard (R), who sponsored the measure to add new judges to the Supreme Court, was not available for comment.

Georgias state House last month passed a bill to redraw eight Republican-held districts, most of them in the Atlanta suburbs, where incumbents won reelection by narrow margins this November. The state Senate, which is also controlled by Republicans, has yet to act on the proposal, which would then go to Gov. Nathan Deal (R) for a signature.

Experts said legislatures and executives rewriting the rulebook to claim more power at the expense of their political rivals is nothing new. Throughout the Gilded Age, legislators frequently drew new district lines to consolidate their power until the opposition party won control and redrew their own lines.

This is the oldest trick in the political book, writing the rules to win the game, said Thad Kousser, a political scientist at University of California San Diego and an expert on state legislative politics. Politicians are never committed to reform in the abstract. Theres always some near-term political gain that they get out of political reforms.

Kousser pointed to Franklin Roosevelts scheme to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would rule in favor of his New Deal-era programs. Later, Republicans led efforts to end so-called fusion voting laws, allowing candidates to run on multiple party lines, which enabled Democrats to align with minor liberal parties to earn more votes. And both parties routinely engage in partisan gerrymandering to secure seats.

More recently, Republicans pointed to Democratic-led legislatures in states like Massachusetts and New Jersey, which changed the rules governing appointments to vacant United States Senate seats aimed at curtailing the powers of Republican governors.

In Nevada, Democrats who took control of the state Senate by a margin of just three seats passed new rules this year aimed at blocking Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison a Republican from casting a tie-breaking vote.

In our constitutional government, there is always a push and pull on power between the three major branches, said David Avella, president of GOPAC, which recruits and mentors Republican legislative candidates. While some see Republican legislators asserting their power on executive responsibilities, others will see the judges asserting their power in redistricting cases against Republican legislators.

But politics is cyclical, and todays majority may betomorrowsminority. Democrats who win back control of state legislatures midterm elections are rarely kind to an incumbent presidents party will face the tantalizing allure of writing their own rules once they return to power. That, Kousser said, should be a consideration for Republican majorities today.

Is this the first step in an ever-escalating partisan battle? Kousser asked. If the shoes on the other foot, if we lose power, are we going to face a backlash?

Thats the question being asked in the United States Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnellMitch McConnellShutdown politics return to the Senate GOP leaders want details before funding Trumps border wall GOP faces dilemma over ObamaCare tax credits in red states MORE (R-Ky.) has resisted calls to end filibuster rules for Supreme Court nominees, even after former Democratic Majority Leader Harry ReidHarry ReidRepublicans move to curb Dem powers in the states Perez creates advisory team for DNC transition Reid told Warren to run for president in 2020: report MORE (D-Nev.) limited the filibuster for other presidential nominees.

In state legislatures, long-term thinking is rarely rewarded, Kousser said.

Careers are shorter in state legislatures overall, and careers have an end date baked into them in states with term limits, he said.

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Republicans move to curb Dem powers in the states - The Hill

Less than two weeks after the unveiling of the GOP ObamaCare replacement, the party is already staring into the abyss.

The bill has had the worst rollout of any major piece of legislation in memory, and failure is very much an option. If the proposal falters, it will be a political debacle that could poison President Trumps relationship with Congress.

That relationship is awkward and tenuous. Its an uneasy accommodation between a GOP Congress that would find a more natural partner in a President Rubio, Cruz or Bush, and a President Trump who would, presumably, be happier to work with Speaker Dave Brat the populist congressman from Virginia than with Speaker Paul Ryan.

This is a product of how the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump tore up many Republican orthodoxies and went out and found a different way to unlock the electoral map, winning in the industrial Midwest.

Congressional Republicans more or less stuck with the usual script, kept Trump at arms length and held their majorities in the House and the Senate.

As a result, theres no significant Trumpist wing in Congress. The faction most favorable to him, the House Freedom Caucus, is made up of ideological conservatives whose philosophy is at odds with Trumps economic populism, if not his anti-establishmentarianism.

And there was no off-the-shelf Trump legislation Congress could begin on right away. In the campaign, Trump identified a constituency and a message, but the agenda was often symbolic (Mexico will pay for the wall) or nebulous (better trade deals).

The natural reflex, then, was to defer to the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump couldve come roaring out of the gate with one of his distinctive proposals, the $1 trillion infrastructure plan, and wooed Democrats to support it and dared Republicans to oppose it. Instead, thats been put off to the second year, and may not happen at all.

The congressional priorities are ObamaCare repeal and tax reform, both of which could easily have been the first-year agenda items of the aforementioned Presidents Bush, Rubio or Cruz. Theyll have to be passed without Democratic votes and through the Senate reconciliation process that circumvents the filibuster.

Its true that Trump promised to deliver on both, but neither was part of his core message or won over marginal Trump voters.

For now, its in the interest of Congress and Trump to make the shotgun marriage work. The speaker is pursuing repeal and replace simultaneously because that was Trumps preference, and the president has been supportive of Ryans bill while maintaining flexibility.

This is sustainable so long as things go smoothly; the test is when things dont. House leadership is counting on Trump to help get its bill over the top, at the same time it realizes he may seek an off-ramp as soon as it looks like leadership is failing.

If the bill falters in the House, it will be the most fraught moment of GOP tension since the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Except the question wont be whether congressmen and senators dump Trump, but whether Trump dumps them.

Even more than most politicians, Trump has no interest in owning failure. The explanation of the president and his supporters wont be that he backed a flawed strategy and bill in the House and paid the price. It will be that he was stabbed in the back. He went along with a GOP establishment politics that doesnt understand or care about Trump voters, and he can never make that mistake again.

Theres almost no question that Trump would win any blame game. He would have the larger megaphone, the more intense supporters and much sharper elbows. He could instantly define Paul Ryan as a creature of the Washington swamp and decide to triangulate away from the GOP Congress rather than work with it.

This would mean Trump would be a president not without a party necessarily, but without a Congress. It would make major legislative accomplishments impossible, although if ObamaCare repeal-and-replace fails, that might be the reality regardless.

Some skeptics of the Ryan bill hope that its defeat will allow the party to quickly move on to tax reform. But that wont be easier. It, too, is highly complex, involves painful trade-offs and will disappoint populists since the Republican template cuts taxes for the rich without much thought about working-class voters.

Its better for everyone if ObamaCare repeal-and-replace succeeds. Ryan should amend his bill to, among other things, boost coverage and make it a sturdier vessel for the turbulence ahead. The alternative is a defeat that may precipitate a nasty, perhaps enduring, split in a party desperate to paper over its divisions.

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Why Trump may dump House Republicans - New York Post

Sorry, poor people of America. Republicans are quietly sealing all the exits on the poverty trap.

Its a four-part process, in which officials at all levels of government are taking part:

First, reduce poor womens access to the reproductive services they need to prevent unintended pregnancies, so they have less control over when, and with whom, they have children.

Second, make it harder for any unexpectedly expecting women to have abortions.

Third, make the adoption process more expensive, reducing incentives for other families to adopt the babies resulting from these unplanned pregnancies. (Yes, amazingly, Republicans plan to do this.)

Finally, cut the services these involuntarily growing low-income families rely on to help support and care for their children, and to move up in the world.

Lets take a walk through the policies that constitute this poverty-prolonging policy four-step, shall we?

It begins with House Republicans American Health Care Act, which would eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Federal dollars are already barred from being used for abortions; the AHCA would prevent federal funds from being used for any other Planned Parenthood service, too. This is unfortunate, given that Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of contraceptive care for poor women in the country. Some of its patients would be able to find other providers of reliable, effective contraception, but many wouldnt. In more than 100 counties, Planned Parenthood is the only clinic providing publicly supported contraceptive services to poor women, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

In its analysis of the health-care bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that about 15 percent of people who live in areas without other clinics or medical practitioners serving low-income populations would lose access to care leading to more unintended pregnancies.

Now consider that at the state level, Republican officials have been aggressively curbing access to abortion, by banning the procedure after 20 weeks, imposing impossible-to-meet regulatory and licensing requirements on providers, and implementing waiting periods. As a result and by design, of course the women who do get pregnant without planning to will be less likely to terminate their pregnancies, even if they are not interested in having a baby. (Incidentally, Medicaid would pay for many of these births; the CBOs Trumpcare analysis estimated that eliminating Planned Parenthood funding for just a year would leave Medicaid on the hook for several thousand additional births.)

What options do these women have, then?

Pro-life conservatives often urge women seeking abortions to consider adoption instead. But under the House Republicans tax plan, adoptions would get more expensive.

You read that right.

The House leaderships A Better Way blueprint calls for dramatically cutting tax rates, especially for the rich. It partly pays for these rate cuts by eliminating some credits and deductions. Among those set to go? The adoption tax credit.

Adopting a child can be enormously expensive, running into tens of thousands of dollars. This tax credit was designed to offset some of those costs, up to $13,460 per child, though the credit phases out for higher earners. In 2014, about 74,000 families claimed the credit, costing the government about $355 million, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

For context, the mortgage-interest deduction, which the Republican tax-reform plan would preserve, will cost the federal government about $69 billion this year about 200 times as much.

I doubt Republicans have anything against adoptive parents; in fact, one of the architects of the House tax plan, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), is himself an adoptive parent (though at a recent speech, he noted that he did not qualify for the adoption tax credit because his family was in the wrong tax bracket). Promoting adoption is just not their priority, pro-life rhetoric to the contrary.

In any case, whatever Republicans intentions, the elimination of this tax credit would mean that at least on the margin, women who became pregnant accidentally would have fewer options.

Which leads us, finally, to President Trumps newly released budget.

Trumps budget would dramatically slash the social safety net, especially services for the poor, and especially services for poor families. It would cut housing and energy subsidies for low-income households, as well as after-school, before-school and summer programs that millions of parents depend on. Moreover, it would decimate many of the programs that low-income parents and children rely on to climb out of poverty, including job training, college assistance and community banking.

Thus the cumulative effect of Republicans family policies: force poor people to have more children than they want or believe they can afford, then tell them and their children that theyre on their own.

So much for family values.

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How Republicans plan to hurt American families - Washington Post

WASHINGTON The leaders of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan statement on Thursday rejecting President Donald Trump's assertion that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The top Republican in Congress, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, added his voice to a growing chorus of lawmakers saying there was no sign of a wiretap.

In a testy briefing with reporters, White House spokesman Sean Spicer forcefully defended the president, citing news reports of intelligence collection on possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia in the presidential campaign.

"There is no question that there were surveillance techniques used throughout this," Spicer said.

The Republican president, without providing evidence, has accused his predecessor, Democrat Barack Obama, of wiretapping him near the end of the campaign. An Obama spokesman said that was "simply false."

"Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016," Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Mark Warner, the committee's Democratic vice chairman, said in a statement.

Ryan also said there was no evidence of surveillance.

"The point is, the intelligence committees in their continuing, widening, ongoing investigation of all things Russia, got to the bottom - at least so far - with respect to our intelligence community that - that no such wiretap existed," the House speaker told reporters.

'HE STANDS BY IT'

Pressed at the White House briefing on whether Trump would back down from his wiretap accusations, Spicer said: "He stands by it."

Spicer also chastised the media for focusing so much attention on comments disparaging Trump's claim about surveillance. He said reporters had not focused enough on comments from officials denying evidence of any collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

The Russian government has rejected an accusation by U.S. intelligence agencies that it worked to influence the election in Trump's favor by hacking computer systems, among other methods.

Trump has been dogged by allegations that his associates had ties to Russian officials. Trump fired his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, last month after he failed to disclose contacts with Russia's ambassador before Trump took office on Jan. 20.

An official familiar with the investigations by Congress and intelligence and law enforcement agencies said investigators had looked as aggressively and thoroughly as they could for evidence of any spying on Trump or his associates but had found none.

On March 4, six weeks after he took over from Obama, Trump made the wiretap accusations in a Twitter post.

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!," Trump wrote.

At least four congressional committees included the startling accusation in their investigations of possible Russian meddling in the election campaign and Russian ties to Trump and his associates.

On Wednesday, House of Representatives Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, and top Democrat Adam Schiff told reporters they had seen no evidence that Trump Tower was tapped and said they would ask Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey about the issue during a public hearing on Monday.

On March 9, Comey briefed Nunes, Schiff, Ryan, Burr, Warner and three other top congressional officials on the same intelligence.

Trump appeared to back away from his accusation of wiretapping in a Fox News interview on Wednesday night.

"But wiretap covers a lot of different things. I think youre going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks," Trump said.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Grant McCool and Peter Cooney)

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny pressed U.S. President Donald Trump about undocumented immigrants in the United States at their first meeting on Thursday, a day before St Patrick's Day.

LONDON Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency dismissed claims made on a U.S. television station that it helped former President Barack Obama eavesdrop on Donald Trump after last year's U.S. presidential election.

WASHINGTON U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis met with Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday and they discussed U.S.-Saudi military cooperation in the fight against Islamic State, the Pentagon said in a statement.

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Leading Republicans, Democrats reject Trump's Obama wiretap assertion - Reuters