Mediaboss Marketing

President Trump's $110 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia could have an unannounced side benefit of giving the United States leverage to reduce the Muslim monarchy's support for radical clerics, according to Republican lawmakers.

"There's no doubt there are things the Saudis are going to have to do to improve on as well," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told the Washington Examiner.

There are signs Trump is aware that the deal could help him address the problem. Just last year, presidential candidate Donald Trump was accusing Saudi Arabia of funding terrorism. A veto-proof majority of Congress voted last fall to allow the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue the Saudi Arabian government, and the Saudis were criticized heavily for financing schools around the world that teach a fundamentalist variant of Islam known as Wahhabism.

"That's the issue, in addition to other human rights concerns and other things," Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., said of the Wahhabist schools. "It's the incendiary, it's the kindling."

In public, Trump framed the arms deal as a means of getting Saudi Arabia, long a critical partner for U.S. security interests in the Middle East despite its ideological moorings, to counteract Iranian aggression and support for terrorism in the region. Those interests alone justify the agreement in the minds of many lawmakers.

"What's our list of high priority issues? Terrorism, pushing back against Iran, stability in the Middle East," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill. "When you put that kind of in a list, it makes sense to continue a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia."

But Rubio suggested that it could also be a way to extract reforms in Saudi Arabia. "I imagine if a year from now Saudi Arabia, two years from now, has not improved in its ability to control radicalism, portions of that deal would be on the table in terms of revoking it," he told the Washington Examiner.

Roskam concurred. "I think that there will be a great deal of interest in posing those questions to the Saudis, what are their next steps in terms of the recognition of their exporting of Wahhabism," he said.

U.S. policymakers have struggled to strike a balance between the need for that relationship, which has buttressed the American economy and foreign policy interests in the Middle East for decades, and the danger posed by radical Saudi-backed schools. Saudi Arabian leaders are "both the arsonists and the firefighters" in the struggle against most jihadists, the Brookings Institution's William McCants told the New York Times in August.

"They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim," he said.

The Saudis might not readily agree with that assessment, according to Roskam. "It's not clear to me that the Saudis recognize to the same extent that we do the concern about exporting Wahhabism," he said.

But that's where the arms deal could be useful. "To Senator Rubio's point, if you have a longer-term deal and delivery is not all at once, then you can stage it," Roskam said.

See the article here:
Trump gets new leverage over radical Saudi clerics, Republicans say - Washington Examiner

Top Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns about the cuts President Trump plans to make for the 2018 budget year, which is due out Tuesday.

The blueprint is certain to include a wave of cuts to benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, federal employee pensions and farm subsidies. The fleshed-out proposal follows up on an unpopular partial release in March that targeted the budgets of domestic agencies and foreign aid for cuts averaging 10 percent -- and made lawmakers in both parties recoil.

The new cuts are unpopular as well.

We think it's wrongheaded," Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said about the looming cuts to farm programs. "Production agriculture is in the worst slump since the depression -- 50 percent drop in the net income for producers. They need this safety net.

The House had a bitter debate on health care before a razor-thin 217-213 passage in early May of a GOP health bill that included more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts over the coming decade. Key Republicans are not interested in another round of cuts to the program.

"I would think that the health care bill is our best policy statement on Medicaid going forward," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The presidents budget plan promises to balance the federal ledger over the next 10 years, even while exempting Social Security and Medicare retirement benefits from cuts. To achieve balance, the plan by White House budget director Mick Mulvaney relies on optimistic estimates of economic growth, and the surge in revenues that would result, while abandoning Trump's promise of a "massive tax cut."

Instead, the Trump tax plan promises an overhaul that would cut tax rates but rely on erasing tax breaks and economic growth to end up as "revenue neutral."

Trump's earlier blueprint proposed a $54 billion, 10 percent increase for the military above an existing cap on Pentagon spending, financed by an equal cut to nondefense programs.

Trump's full budget submission to Congress is months overdue and follows the release two months ago of an outline for the discretionary portion of the budget, covering defense, education, foreign aid, housing, and environmental programs, among others. Their budgets pass each year through annual appropriations bills.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Original post:
Hill Republicans wary of cuts in Trump's 2018 budget plan out Tuesday - Fox News

Republicans on Capitol Hill spent last week fending off mobs of reporters who rarely asked a question about the GOP agenda.

Instead they wanted to know how Republicans feel about the escalating problems bubbling up from the Trump administration.

Drowned out were the talks about GOP's efforts to reform the tax code and repeal Obamacare, which led some to speculate that the Republican agenda has essentially been sidelined, perhaps permanently.

That's not true, say GOP lawmakers, who blame the Capitol Hill media for downplaying coverage of their agenda in favor of round-the-clock reporting of Trump's troubles.

"Today, I have dealt with healthcare, we've started to wade into actual tax reform," Sen Jim Risch, R-Idaho, told the Washington Examiner. "We can't make headlines, though. How can you make headlines when there is already a headline: Trump did fill in the blank."

Republicans are indeed working intensively on plans to make major reforms to the tax code as well as repeal and replace Obamacare.

The House Ways and Means Committee held its first major public hearing on tax reform on Thursday and has been meeting privately for weeks with lawmakers as well as key players in the Trump administration, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., denied the problems at the White House are interfering with completing tax reform.

"Our goal, and I feel very confident we can meet this goal, is calendar year 2017 for tax reform," Ryan said last week. "And I think we're making good progress."

In the Senate, Republican lawmakers meet daily to discuss how to write legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, while two separate working healthcare groups are holding several meetings each week.

"We are doing stuff all the time," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "All the press wants to cover is whatever is going on at the White House."

A new study backs up the GOP's complaint.

Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy issued a report last week that found Trump was the topic among all news stories 41 percent of the time during his first 100 days in office. That's triple the level of coverage for previous presidents.

Almost all of the media coverage of Trump was negative, Harvard's analysis found, "setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president."

Trump's problems have literally migrated to Capitol Hill.

A half-dozen committees in the House and Senate are delving into allegations that Trump campaign officials colluded with Russian operatives ahead of the November election.

Investigative committees are also digging for information about Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey and whether Trump tried to pressure Comey to drop his probe into ousted national security adviser Mike Flynn.

Nearly every day key lawmakers fire off requests to the White House for documents and information relating to the various congressional investigations.

On Thursday, only a smattering of reporters lurked around a closed-door GOP meeting on healthcare reform. Most of the media were elsewhere in the Capitol staking out a private briefing by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was summoned to explain to senators how Trump went about firing Comey.

This week, much of the attention will swing back to the House, where Comey has been invited to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said he has been misquoted by media who report he believes Trump's difficulties hobble the agenda.

"I'm saying it has diverted our attention," McCain told the Washington Examiner. "I have not seen it slow down the agenda."

McCain said he anticipates producing a major defense bill in June and Republicans are spending their daily meetings "going over certain aspects of healthcare reform," not talking about Trump's problems.

"It's sucking the oxygen out of the room because it is dominating the media," McCain said.

The true threat to the GOP agenda, Republicans argue, is the Democrats who have so far moved to slow down or stop legislation and executive branch appointments.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC after Trump's election that for most of the president's agenda, "we're going to have to fight him, and we'll fight him tooth and nail."

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said Democrats are upholding Schumer's pledge as they employed yet another delaying tactic on a Trump nominee, this time former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who is awaiting a Senate vote to be confirmed as the ambassador to China.

Instead of simply voting on the nomination, Democrats are forcing Republicans to hold a cloture vote that follows a two-day delay.

"Here we have cloture on an Iowa governor, who everybody knows and everybody likes," Roberts said. "So we just burn two days."

Excerpt from:
Trump coverage drowns out Republicans' agenda - Washington Examiner

New York Times

Republicans Watch Their Step in a Slow Retreat From Trump New York Times WASHINGTON Republicans on Sunday inched away from President Trump amid mounting evidence that he may have sought to interfere in the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. In a sign of growing anxiety, several important ... and more »

See the article here:
Republicans Watch Their Step in a Slow Retreat From Trump - New York Times

Blue slips. Remember those? They are actual slips of paper, and they are actually blue. Senators sign them to indicate their approval of judicial nominees from their home states. There is no actual rule about this, however, so whoever's chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee can play games with them pretty easily.

Here's how it works. If you require only one blue slip to proceed, that makes it easier for a president to get his nominees confirmed. If you require two blue slips, it's harder.

So when do you want to make it easier? When the president comes from your own party. When do you want to make it harder? When the president is from the other party. Here's how that's worked:

Patrick Leahy, the Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman from 2007-2014, applied the blue-slip rule impartially regardless of who was president. This was despite a vast level of obstruction from Republicans to all of Obama's nominees. On the one hand, good for Grassley. We could use more displays of integrity like this. On the other hand, Democrats lost out on a whole bunch of judges that they otherwise would have gotten confirmed.

By contrast, Republicans have a two-decade history of flipping the blue-slip rule whenever it conveniences them. Is there really much doubt that Grassley is going to nuke it just as soon as a single Democratic fails to return a blue slip on a Trump nominee and Fox News starts screaming about obstruction? I don't think so.

Read more:
Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork For Their Normal Blue Slip Hypocrisy - Mother Jones