Closing the pot-luck tabs ...
CIA director pick John Ratcliffe is expected to get a relatively smooth bipartisan confirmation on Tuesday. But after that, more controversial nominees await, and cooperation could be hard to come by.
Accelerating any confirmation will require unanimous agreement from senators, and after letting Rubio through, Democrats are not eager to ease the way for many other Trump picks.
“I don’t think the Democrats are in any hurry,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview. “So I think we’re just gonna have to grind through, and maybe you’re here for some late nights and weekends for the next few weeks.”
Ed: The only way to get through Democrat obstruction is to just get through it. Thune will have to force some late-night sessions before they get the message.
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To clear up confusion over the differences between Trump on Day 1 signing EOs & taking press questions on every topic & Biden:
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) January 21, 2025
✅Trump took numerous questions for 45m
Video 👇https://t.co/XqrlY0ZleJ
✅Biden took 1 q in less than 3 min that staff tried to shut down
Video 👇 https://t.co/a7i6azrDLD pic.twitter.com/aJIufTY6TT
Ed: The difference is enormous. Yuuuuuuge, even. Seriously, there really is no comparison, not even between the access that Trump gave the media during the campaign and the access provided by Biden and then Kamala Harris. The 45 minutes last night of extemporaneous conversation made it clear that we have an actual president who has assumed real command. Not least of his faculties, too.
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Mr. Trump invoked presidential powers to begin his long-promised immigration crackdown shortly after taking office on Monday. His executive actions included an order directing the federal government to stop issuing passports, citizenship certificates and other documents to many children born in the U.S. whose mothers are in the country illegally, or for whom neither parent is a legal permanent resident.
The lawsuit by the 18 states, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, claims Mr. Trump's initiative violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which the federal government has long interpreted to mean that those born on American soil are citizens at birth. The cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., also joined the suit.
Ed: For what it's worth, I doubt this will hold up in court. This isn't something solely within the purview of the executive branch; it would take an act of Congress, and even then might be difficult to sustain against the language of the 14th Amendment. I suspect this is a trolling exercise by Trump to force Democrats to defend birthright citizenship, which may well prove politically unpopular in terms of how it has been used.
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ROBERTS: "Round ups of criminal illegal aliens and the process of reporting them would begin.... When can we expect that to happen?"
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 21, 2025
HOMAN: "It's started. ICE teams are out there as of today." pic.twitter.com/k6ujXRoyxw
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House Democrats have named their members to serve on the DOGE Subcommittee on Oversight, signaling the minority party is ready to play ball on a Republican-led effort.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) will serve as the ranking member, joined by D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Reps. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, Greg Casar of Texas, Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Robert Garcia of California. The ranking member of the full Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), will sit on the subcommittee in an ex officio capacity.
Ed: I'm actually a little surprised that House Dems are playing along with this. They could have refused to engage at all and just demagogued DOGE. Perhaps they see that the House GOP are serious about it, though, which means they have to engage to protect their interests.
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Trump responds to the sermon at the National Prayer Service, that asked him to take “mercy” on those “scared” of his presidency.
— Reagan Reese (@reaganreese_) January 21, 2025
“Not too exciting, was it.”
“They could do much better,” Trump says. https://t.co/Zgvb1l5ICq pic.twitter.com/50QanxBNFc
Ed: Good to see the media laser focused on public poli -- oh, wait, they're gonna do the Othering Strategy again. It worked so well last year! And the year before that!
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Now the best you can say for anyone who wasn’t a member of the Biden nuclear family is that perhaps they didn’t know the full extent of it either and were made to respond on the fly. But if Blinken knew in 2022 that the president couldn’t handle an early-evening meeting with Scholz, so did plenty of other people—and nobody said anything for two more years.
Additionally, his administration rallied around him even after he announced he was running for reelection. That is unconscionable. Some of Biden’s term was a patchwork, bullpen-by-committee presidency. Which means a second term would have been an essentially fraudulent one. And from the highest reaches of the American government, officials were barreling forward with an attempt to get Biden a second term that they knew would be managed—perhaps by them—behind the scenes in a way we haven’t seen since Edith Wilson did so 100 years ago.
Ed: Seth Mandel is more gracious than I am about this. They spent most of the past four years allowing Jill Biden to be the new Edith Wilson, and practically everyone knew it.
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NEW: Megyn Kelly says Lauren Sanchez looked like a “hooker” at Trump’s inauguration, tells her to “have some dignity and some respect.”
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 21, 2025
“No one should be talking about your t*ts.”
“Have some dignity and some respect for your setting in your circumstances. No one should be… pic.twitter.com/4UwZ8Jinsz
Ed: I ... have no comment about this. I did see a video clip where Mark Zuckerberg was doing some "fact checking" on Sanchez at a luncheon yesterday, though.
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Ed: Once again, I give myself and my friend Peter Grandich the actual final word, because RHIP. Hope you enjoy.
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