Trump needs a legislative win with Congress.
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Senate GOP to Back Trump on Border Wall
Senate Republicans have drafted a Homeland Security spending bill that includes the full $1.6 billion President Donald Trump wants for a wall at the Mexican border, increasing the chances of a shutdown fight before current government funding runs out Dec. 8.
Bill author Senator John Boozman of Arkansas told reporters Tuesday the border wall funds would be resolved in a giant trillion-dollar spending bill in December, along with the issue of whether to continue work permits for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, known as Dreamers.
"That will be part of the negotiations," he said. "I think at the end of the day, the president is going in insist that the border funding be there."
Boozman said the spending bill would direct construction to the areas on the border where the most human trafficking occurs. A wall along the entire border would be debated later, he said.
https://www.agweb.com/mobile/article...wn-fight-blmg/
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Trump supporters eager to ‘drain the swamp’ help fill Republican Party coffers
Fueled by a string of fundraising appeals from President Trump to his supporters, the Republican Party is on track to raise more money from small-dollar contributions than it has collected in more than a decade.
The influx of cash from Trump’s base is helping the GOP amass a major advantage as the parties prepare to battle for control of Congress in the 2018 elections, with the Republican National Committee pulling in nearly twice as much money overall as its Democratic counterpart this year.
The RNC’s success with small donors illustrates how the Republican Party, long a center of the political establishment, has managed to turn Trump’s anti-Washington message to its advantage
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.948e5baaa729
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President Trump could remake judiciary for next '40 years'
President Donald Trump has nominated 50 candidates to lifetime appointments to the federal bench — including a man who asserted transgender children were evidence of “Satan’s plan,” one deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association and a handful of prolific bloggers.
And the GOP has unanimously stuck by Trump’s judges. Senate Republicans have cleared judicial nominees at a comparatively rapid clip this year — even as the conservative base has complained they’re not moving fast enough — and are planning to pick up the pace even more in the coming months.
No Republican senator has voted against Trump’s judicial nominees so far this year, either in committee or in confirmation votes on the floor.
The Senate has confirmed seven judges, including four to the powerful appellate courts and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. In comparison, Barack Obama had just three judges confirmed, including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at this point during his first year in office.
Even at the committee level, Republicans have been moving more quickly to fill the judicial vacancies.
As of Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will have held confirmation hearings for 26 district and circuit court nominees.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/1...t-picks-243834
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Trump Defeats ISIS In Months — After Years Of Excuses From Obama
Nine months after President Trump promised to defeat ISIS "quickly and effectively," U.S.-backed forces captured Raqqa, which until Tuesday had served as the ISIS capital. The battle now is over who deserves credit: Trump or President Obama.
"It had to do with the people I put in and it had to do with rules of engagement," Trump said in a radio interview.
Before dismissing this as typical Trump self-aggrandizement, consider that for several years Obama insisted that a quick and decisive victory against ISIS was all but impossible.
Rather than talk endlessly about how long and hard the fight would be, Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his "top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS."
Once in office, Trump made several changes in the way the war was fought, the most important of which were to loosen the rules of engagement and give more decision-making authority to battlefield commanders.
Joshua Keating, writing in the liberal commentary site Slate, noted that Trump had "instructed the Pentagon to loosen the rules of engagement for airstrikes to the minimum required by international law, eliminated White House oversight procedures meant to protect civilians, and ordered the CIA to resume covert targeted killing missions." (He meant it as a criticism.)
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who can hardly be called a Trump lap dog, praised what he said was "a dramatic shift in a very positive way — away from the political micromanaging of the Obama years to freeing up generals and troops to destroy ISIS."
The result of this shift seems pretty obvious. In July, ISIS was booted from Mosul, and this week Raqqa was liberated. For all intents and purposes, ISIS has been defeated.
Trump did in nine months what Obama couldn't in the previous three years.
http://www.investors.com/politics/ed...es-from-obama/
Senate Republicans have drafted a Homeland Security spending bill that includes the full $1.6 billion President Donald Trump wants for a wall at the Mexican border, increasing the chances of a shutdown fight before current government funding runs out Dec. 8.
Bill author Senator John Boozman of Arkansas told reporters Tuesday the border wall funds would be resolved in a giant trillion-dollar spending bill in December, along with the issue of whether to continue work permits for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, known as Dreamers.
"That will be part of the negotiations," he said. "I think at the end of the day, the president is going in insist that the border funding be there."
Boozman said the spending bill would direct construction to the areas on the border where the most human trafficking occurs. A wall along the entire border would be debated later, he said.
https://www.agweb.com/mobile/article...wn-fight-blmg/
-----------------------------
Trump supporters eager to ‘drain the swamp’ help fill Republican Party coffers
Fueled by a string of fundraising appeals from President Trump to his supporters, the Republican Party is on track to raise more money from small-dollar contributions than it has collected in more than a decade.
The influx of cash from Trump’s base is helping the GOP amass a major advantage as the parties prepare to battle for control of Congress in the 2018 elections, with the Republican National Committee pulling in nearly twice as much money overall as its Democratic counterpart this year.
The RNC’s success with small donors illustrates how the Republican Party, long a center of the political establishment, has managed to turn Trump’s anti-Washington message to its advantage
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.948e5baaa729
---------------------------------
President Trump could remake judiciary for next '40 years'
President Donald Trump has nominated 50 candidates to lifetime appointments to the federal bench — including a man who asserted transgender children were evidence of “Satan’s plan,” one deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association and a handful of prolific bloggers.
And the GOP has unanimously stuck by Trump’s judges. Senate Republicans have cleared judicial nominees at a comparatively rapid clip this year — even as the conservative base has complained they’re not moving fast enough — and are planning to pick up the pace even more in the coming months.
No Republican senator has voted against Trump’s judicial nominees so far this year, either in committee or in confirmation votes on the floor.
The Senate has confirmed seven judges, including four to the powerful appellate courts and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. In comparison, Barack Obama had just three judges confirmed, including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at this point during his first year in office.
Even at the committee level, Republicans have been moving more quickly to fill the judicial vacancies.
As of Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will have held confirmation hearings for 26 district and circuit court nominees.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/1...t-picks-243834
-------------------------
Trump Defeats ISIS In Months — After Years Of Excuses From Obama
Nine months after President Trump promised to defeat ISIS "quickly and effectively," U.S.-backed forces captured Raqqa, which until Tuesday had served as the ISIS capital. The battle now is over who deserves credit: Trump or President Obama.
"It had to do with the people I put in and it had to do with rules of engagement," Trump said in a radio interview.
Before dismissing this as typical Trump self-aggrandizement, consider that for several years Obama insisted that a quick and decisive victory against ISIS was all but impossible.
Rather than talk endlessly about how long and hard the fight would be, Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his "top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS."
Once in office, Trump made several changes in the way the war was fought, the most important of which were to loosen the rules of engagement and give more decision-making authority to battlefield commanders.
Joshua Keating, writing in the liberal commentary site Slate, noted that Trump had "instructed the Pentagon to loosen the rules of engagement for airstrikes to the minimum required by international law, eliminated White House oversight procedures meant to protect civilians, and ordered the CIA to resume covert targeted killing missions." (He meant it as a criticism.)
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who can hardly be called a Trump lap dog, praised what he said was "a dramatic shift in a very positive way — away from the political micromanaging of the Obama years to freeing up generals and troops to destroy ISIS."
The result of this shift seems pretty obvious. In July, ISIS was booted from Mosul, and this week Raqqa was liberated. For all intents and purposes, ISIS has been defeated.
Trump did in nine months what Obama couldn't in the previous three years.
http://www.investors.com/politics/ed...es-from-obama/
Bergen: No, Trump didn't defeat ISIS
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 1:30 PM ET, Wed October 18, 2017
On Tuesday, US-backed forces announced that Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS in Syria, had fallen.
President Donald Trump quickly took a victory lap during an interview the same day, stating that ISIS hadn't been defeated earlier because "you didn't have Trump as your president."
Is this claim true? Not really, according to US military officials.
In August 2016, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who was the ground commander for the fight against ISIS, said the US-led coalition had killed an estimated 45,000 ISIS fighters.
About a year later, at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017, the commander of the US Special Operations Command, Gen. Raymond "Tony" Thomas, said that an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 ISIS fighters had been killed since the US-led campaign against the terror group began in August 2014.
Ergo, according to these senior US military officials, the bulk of ISIS fighters were killed during the pre-Trump period.
That shouldn't be too surprising. After all, the campaign to eradicate ISIS began two and a half years before Trump assumed office.
The operation to take back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq where ISIS had first declared its "caliphate," began in October 2016 while President Barack Obama was still in office and had been long-planned.
Shortly after the Mosul operation was launched, Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of US Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Syria, told me: "We have been doing preparatory stuff against Raqqa and Mosul for a long time, long before we said, 'the assault on Mosul has begun.' We have taken out 36 ISIS leaders in the Mosul area; to me that is part of the preparation phase."
Under Obama, ISIS also lost significant Iraqi cities such as Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit.
To be sure, Trump loosened the "rules of engagement" for the US military, enabling ground commanders to more easily carry out operations without having to seek permission up the chain of command, but these are tactical changes -- not strategic game changers.
According to the UK-based Airwars, which carefully tracks coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, the numbers of strikes has declined in Iraq under Trump, while they have spiked in Syria.
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Significantly, in May, Trump approved a plan to arm the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria. Turkey strenuously objected to this plan because of its restive Kurdish population, but the Trump administration went ahead anyway. These are the Kurdish forces that helped to liberate Raqqa on Tuesday.
Bottom line: There is much continuity between the Obama campaign plan against ISIS and the Trump plan.
Also, Trump needs to be careful about taking too much of a victory lap when it comes to ISIS. He could fall into the same trap that Obama did when he observed in early 2014 that ISIS was a "JV team" -- meaning junior varsity team, made up of younger, less-experienced players.
The political conditions in the Middle East that gave rise to ISIS -- the sectarian and ethnic conflicts around the region and the collapse of Arab governments and economies -- will surely engender a son of ISIS. And even a deeply wounded ISIS can continue to inspire attacks in the West.
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 1:30 PM ET, Wed October 18, 2017
On Tuesday, US-backed forces announced that Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS in Syria, had fallen.
President Donald Trump quickly took a victory lap during an interview the same day, stating that ISIS hadn't been defeated earlier because "you didn't have Trump as your president."
Is this claim true? Not really, according to US military officials.
In August 2016, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who was the ground commander for the fight against ISIS, said the US-led coalition had killed an estimated 45,000 ISIS fighters.
About a year later, at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017, the commander of the US Special Operations Command, Gen. Raymond "Tony" Thomas, said that an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 ISIS fighters had been killed since the US-led campaign against the terror group began in August 2014.
Ergo, according to these senior US military officials, the bulk of ISIS fighters were killed during the pre-Trump period.
That shouldn't be too surprising. After all, the campaign to eradicate ISIS began two and a half years before Trump assumed office.
The operation to take back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq where ISIS had first declared its "caliphate," began in October 2016 while President Barack Obama was still in office and had been long-planned.
Shortly after the Mosul operation was launched, Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of US Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Syria, told me: "We have been doing preparatory stuff against Raqqa and Mosul for a long time, long before we said, 'the assault on Mosul has begun.' We have taken out 36 ISIS leaders in the Mosul area; to me that is part of the preparation phase."
Under Obama, ISIS also lost significant Iraqi cities such as Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit.
To be sure, Trump loosened the "rules of engagement" for the US military, enabling ground commanders to more easily carry out operations without having to seek permission up the chain of command, but these are tactical changes -- not strategic game changers.
According to the UK-based Airwars, which carefully tracks coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, the numbers of strikes has declined in Iraq under Trump, while they have spiked in Syria.
Join us on Twitter and Facebook
Significantly, in May, Trump approved a plan to arm the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria. Turkey strenuously objected to this plan because of its restive Kurdish population, but the Trump administration went ahead anyway. These are the Kurdish forces that helped to liberate Raqqa on Tuesday.
Bottom line: There is much continuity between the Obama campaign plan against ISIS and the Trump plan.
Also, Trump needs to be careful about taking too much of a victory lap when it comes to ISIS. He could fall into the same trap that Obama did when he observed in early 2014 that ISIS was a "JV team" -- meaning junior varsity team, made up of younger, less-experienced players.
The political conditions in the Middle East that gave rise to ISIS -- the sectarian and ethnic conflicts around the region and the collapse of Arab governments and economies -- will surely engender a son of ISIS. And even a deeply wounded ISIS can continue to inspire attacks in the West.
http://reason.com/archives/2017/08/27/why-trumps-wall-is-not-going-to-happen
Why Trump's Wall Is Not Going to Happen
Plenty of GOP members would rather put Barack Obama on Mount Rushmore than underwrite this addled project.
In a January 27 phone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, Trump pleaded: "I have to have Mexico pay for the wall. I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period." It didn't work. Pena Nieto said bluntly, "My position has been and will continue to be very firm, saying that Mexico cannot pay for the wall."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Textbook snowflake, begging like a child! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
The impasse led to an unintended exercise in hilarity by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday. When a reporter noted that Trump no longer says Mexico is going to bear the cost, she replied, "He hasn't said they're not, either."
Mexico isn't going to pay for the wall, and the U.S. Congress isn't going to pay for the wall. One of these days, Trump and his followers will have to face the truth: It was a 2,000-mile fraud.
Why Trump's Wall Is Not Going to Happen
Plenty of GOP members would rather put Barack Obama on Mount Rushmore than underwrite this addled project.
In a January 27 phone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, Trump pleaded: "I have to have Mexico pay for the wall. I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period." It didn't work. Pena Nieto said bluntly, "My position has been and will continue to be very firm, saying that Mexico cannot pay for the wall."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Textbook snowflake, begging like a child! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
The impasse led to an unintended exercise in hilarity by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday. When a reporter noted that Trump no longer says Mexico is going to bear the cost, she replied, "He hasn't said they're not, either."
Mexico isn't going to pay for the wall, and the U.S. Congress isn't going to pay for the wall. One of these days, Trump and his followers will have to face the truth: It was a 2,000-mile fraud.
IMO, the wall is more of a figure of speech akin to enforcing the laws already on the books, doing away with bullshit sanctuary cities and letting ICE and the Border Patrol do their ******* jobs without emotional elites rushing to their defense with jelly dongs and butt plugs.
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Senate passes a budget, moving the GOP closer to tax reform
Senate Republicans approved a $4 trillion budget measure Thursday, taking a crucial step toward their goal of passing a tax plan this year.
The chamber approved the budget resolution by a 51-49 vote. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was the only GOP senator to vote against it.
President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., contend tax cuts will unlock economic growth.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/19/senate-passes-a-budget-moving-the-gop-closer-to-tax-reform.html
Senate Republicans approved a $4 trillion budget measure Thursday, taking a crucial step toward their goal of passing a tax plan this year.
The chamber approved the budget resolution by a 51-49 vote. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was the only GOP senator to vote against it.
President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., contend tax cuts will unlock economic growth.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/19/senate-passes-a-budget-moving-the-gop-closer-to-tax-reform.html
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House clears budget, paving way for $1.5 trillion tax cut
The budget legislation paves the way for Republicans to cut taxes by as much as $1.5 trillion without needing any votes from Democrats.
Republicans are expected to introduce the first version of their tax bill next week
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe...onomy/business__alert-politics--alert-economy
The budget legislation paves the way for Republicans to cut taxes by as much as $1.5 trillion without needing any votes from Democrats.
Republicans are expected to introduce the first version of their tax bill next week
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe...onomy/business__alert-politics--alert-economy
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He might get a win, but to off set revenue cuts, the GDP will need to grow a little more. And it is.
When is the wall building ready to break ground? By mid 2018?
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