"It is the winter of our discontent , made glorious by this son of New York?
Or is the swamp swallowing up everything in it’s wake , reminiscent of a naustalgic trip back to glitz’land classic ’ The Blob’?
By now perhaps even the provoked or intended comic politi Cal relief has swallowed in whole the difference, as Hollywood reins supreme on the power of Vaudville up in the U.S. psyche.
The reductio into absurdity was well received over all by a neat and almost perfectly split opinionated poll, on wether to in pinch or not.
As things stand, the choice hovers around the issue of which conspiracy theory is more substantial and sustainable.
Here is today’s debacle :
We’re going to have him for another four years.’ Impeachment fight riles up Donald Trump supporters for 2020
Supporters of President Donald Trump hold a “Stop Impeachment” rally in front of the US Capitol Oct. 17, 2019 in Washington, DC.
COURTNEY SUBRAMANIAN AND DAVID JACKSON |USA TODAY | 1 hour ago
As the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trumprapidly unfolds in Washington, the president is venting his frustration at campaign rallieswhere his attacks on House Democrats and the media are serving to further energize his supporters.
Trump, facing impeachment over allegations he improperly used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political enemies, is rousing his devotees on the road rather than hunkering down at home. He has derided the accusations as a “witch hunt.”
While Trump has faced intense criticism in Washington over the Ukraine scandal and his abrupt pullout of U.S. troops from Syria, he has reveled in the rock-star reception he has received at rallies thousands of miles away in Minneapolis and Dallas.
Supporters echo the president’s attacks on impeachment, House Democrats and what Trump calls the “swamp” of Washington, D.C. Like the president, they view impeachment as an illegitimate effort to take him down and defend his phone call with Ukraine’s president in which he pushed for an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, a top political rival. Impeachment, many said, will wind up re-electing Trump in 2020.
President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019, at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
JEFFREY MCWHORTER, AP
James Wilson, 47, a payroll manager in Rowlett who grabbed a front-row seat at Trump’s rally in the Dallas sports arena Thursday, said impeachment was just another in a long line of attacks including special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
But he likened it to a “boomerang.”
“Every time the other side throws something, it comes back and it hits them,” Wilson said.
It will never stop, he said.
“The Democrats don’t want him in,” Wilson said. “They’re going to do everything they can – legally and illegally – to get him out. But they’re going to lose in 2020.”
‘The swamp is fighting back’
It’s not just Democrats going after Trump, supporters said; it’s also members of what the president calls “deep state” of the government bureaucracy.
“I think the swamp is fighting back and they’re going down hard,” said Mary Shea, 65, a retiree from Houston who waited for hours to get into the Dallas arena.
“I don’t think he did anything that most other presidents haven’t done,” she said. “All presidents cut around the corners.”
The impeachment inquiry centers on Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky, in which he repeatedly urged him to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of Burisma, an energy company in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.
Trump rally in Texas: Here’s what it was like
Trump supporters slammed his accusers.
“That’s a bunch of guilty people trying to keep their crooks covered up,” said Naomi Hodgkins, 64, a semi-retired business consultant from nearby Mesquite, Texas, who wore a button that said “Trump 2020: No More Bullshit.”
“They’re doing a psychological transference of their guilt to him … The Biden thing is going to go real deep.”
Origins of a conspiracy: Trump’s conspiracy theories thrive in Ukraine, where a young democracy battles corruption and distrust
Hodgkins’ sentiment was echoed among the president’s supporters hundreds of miles north in Minneapolis, where Trump held a rally on Oct. 10, his first campaign event since the impeachment inquiry was announced on Sept. 24.
Impeachment signs sailed above crowds outside the downtown arena, where protesters blew whistles and beat drums in the rain along Minneapolis’ First Avenue. Dallas saw its own share of protesters thrusting similar impeachment signs into the air.
Supporters react as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a “Keep America Great” Campaign Rally at American Airlines Center on October 17, 2019 in Dallas, Texas.
Meanwhile, his supporters flocked to rallies, lining up hours – and in some cases days – ahead of time to get in.
Barb Koy, a Bloomington, Minn., resident who attended Trump’s Minneapolis rally, said the inquiry is “another game by the Democrats.”
“Everybody is tired of it. I know people who voted blue and they’re voting red now because they’re sick of it,” she said. “I’d think even if you’re a Democrat you’d be sick of it.”
The Minneapolis rally came on the heels of a new Fox News poll that found 51% of voters supported impeaching Trump and removing him from office, the latest in a string of polls showing a plurality of Americans have shifted their attitude on impeachment.
Impeachment ad blitz
Trump campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany dismissed the poll as inaccurate.
The campaign and the Republican National Committee are pushing back, spending $10 million on ads attacking the impeachment inquiry, with $8 million coming from the campaign itself, McEnany said.
Trump’s schedule over the next few weeks has plenty of events that will take him out of Washington. He will attend a 2020 presidential candidate forum in Columbia, S.C. and a natural gas conference in Pittsburgh next week, and has rallies in Tupelo, Miss. and Lexington, Ky. at the beginning of November.
What Americans think: Nearly 3 weeks into the Trump impeachment inquiry, polls show a shift in public opinion
Not all Trump supporters were shrugging of the impeachment inquiry. Some worried it could cast a shadow over his re-election effort.
University of Minnesota student Blake Paulson, one of dozens who slept in a downtown Minneapolis skywalk ahead of Trump’s rally, said he’s concerned at how his classmates perceive the impeachment inquiry.
Paulson said students scrolling through social media are taking their cues from headlines that he believes are misleading.
Trump rally: President in Minneapolis spurs protests, support
“They see these headlines and think, ‘Oh, he did something bad,’ and that’s what they go off of,” said the 20-year-old, who will cast his first vote for Trump in 2020. “These are new voters who are going in with that shallow information and not thinking it through.”
“I’m afraid of a lot that’s happening next year,” he added.
While several supporters in Minneapolis and Dallas said they expect the Democratic-led House to impeach Trump, they contend it would be political act with no meaning. They expressed confidence that Republican-dominated Senate would never vote to convict and remove Trump from office.
Caiden Anderson, 15, a high school sophomore from Alvin, Texas, and a volunteer at the Dallas event, said House Democrats’ impeachment drive is “nothing.”
“Even if they get it past the House, they won’t get it in the Senate,” Anderson said.
Emotions run high at Trump Minneapolis rally
Wayland Hunter, a 24-year-old who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and was attending his first rally in Minneapolis, dismissed the inquiry’s legal implications.
“It’s just an inquiry,” the dental school student said. “It’s not even like an official, drawn-out government procedure. It just seems like political staging.”
Impeachment will only embolden voters, backers said – Trump voters like themselves.
Halona Porter, 45, who works in an auto parts store in Fort Worth, said Trump’s enemies “need to give it up, because it’s not going to happen.”
After 2020, she said. “we’re going to have him for another four years.”
Originally Published 1 hour ago
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POLITICO
Trump veterans see a presidency veering off the rails
But White House insiders differ on whether the president has changed — or they have.

By DANIEL LIPPMAN
10/19/2019 06:31 AM EDT
Former Trump White House officials and other Republicans close to the White House are increasingly worried about President Trump’s erratic behavior and say there are no longer enough safeguards around him to prevent self-inflicted disasters large and small.
Just in the last two weeks, Trump precipitously withdrew U.S. troops from northern Syria and attacked America’s Kurdish allies as “no angels,” sparking outrage among GOP lawmakers; released a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan whose undiplomatic language was widely mocked; called his former defense secretary “the world’s most overrated general”; and blew up at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a meeting his own White House had called.
His acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, also admitted on national television that the administration had held up aid to Ukraine for political purposes, before reversing himself hours later on Trump’s orders and claiming his remarks had been “misconstrued.”
Under the strain of a metastasizing impeachment probe on Capitol Hill and helming an administration run by a diminishing number of heavyweight officials of independent stature, the president is displaying the kind of capricious behavior that once might have been contained or at least mitigated, former officials say.
“The wheels are not off the car. The situation is way worse than that. The car has been impounded and we are now waiting to figure out what the fine is and to see whether or not we’re going to get the car back,” said former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. “Mulvaney is a good Catholic and in fairness to him, that was a full-blown Catholic confessional on Thursday afternoon.”
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump has never felt shackled by traditional ways of running a government. But earlier in his administration, “there was enough guardrails around Trump or enough caution on his part that when he did things that were more impulsive, they had less significance and fewer external ramifications,” said a former White House official.
Now it’s become more of a one-man White House and government.
Trying to constrain Trump is “a pipe dream,” said one current White House official. “Everyone who has tried had eventually failed in some way.”
“It’s just looking like everything is coming apart,” said a former White House official. Another former senior West Wing aide agreed that the White House seemed to be “a little bit unraveling” in recent days.
"Mulvaney is a good Catholic and in fairness to him, that was a full-blown Catholic confessional on Thursday afternoon.”
- Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
Some current White House officials say they are simply exhausted after all the constant fighting, and lack the energy to try to constrain a wilful president bent on having his own way. It’s normal for officials to return to the private sector after a few years of pressure-cooker public service, but the Trump administration has seen extraordinary levels of turnover, and the administration’s current ranks are thin and getting thinner. A current White House official described a “who cares” attitude creeping through the building under Mulvaney’s hands-off management style.
But others in the White House relish the daily hand-to-hand combat as House Democrats careen toward what looks like an inevitable impeachment vote. Those people “feed off of the frenzy and want to fight and are kind of excited about another opportunity to fight the ‘witch hunt’ like they did with Mueller and impeachment,” a former official said.
“We’re having the time of our lives fighting for the president and this country,” said a senior administration official.
There is also a concern among Trump alums and other Republicans close to the White House about the current quality of the White House staff. Unlike past officials who occasionally stood up to Trump, redirected his fury or learned which of his whims they could safely ignore, today’s crop of aides are more willing to indulge his basic political needs and desires, they say.
“Your Year Three team is very different from the Year One team in terms of the type of people and how they view their role and how Trump views their role,” said the former official. “He’s not looking for people to offer contrary opinions or to urge caution or try to restrain him in any way, and the people there don’t view that as their role either.”
The letter to Erdogan is a case in point, former officials note: It shows that Trump is more directly in charge of what goes on at the White House than ever before.
Earlier in his tenure, when the president was going to write a foreign leader, officials at the State Department and the National Security Council would usually draft a version and the president would try to “insert some of his Trumpisms into it” before other officials worked with him to get to a letter that everyone was comfortable with, said the former official. But with experienced bureaucratic warriors like Jim Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton now gone, there are few senior foreign policy officials left to stand in Trump’s way.
“You wouldn’t have a letter to a foreign leader that was just like dictated on the back of a napkin by him,” said the former official. “He’s even more personally and individually in the driver’s seat and doing things on his own.”
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley pushed back against the criticism, describing it as a “chattering class ‘we know best’ mentality.”
“While the media allow so many in Congress, the D.C. establishment and Beltway bureaucracy to complain anonymously from the shadows because their precious swamp is being drained,” he said, “President Trump continues to be out front working tirelessly and successfully for the American people.”
Veteran Trump aides differ as to whether, and to what extent, the president’s recent behavior is truly new. “Essentially it’s him doing what he wants, just as it was in the beginning, and now, and forever,” one former White House official said.
But the chaos at the White House has led to more staffers to plot their departures and try to get new jobs, according to a former senior aide in touch with current White House employees.
Another factor: It’s considered bad form to leave when the reelection campaign is in full swing, this person noted, not just because White House staffers are desperate to “get out of the crazy."
© 2019 POLITICO LLC
Bannon Predictions:
Steve Bannon says Trump may be impeached ‘in six weeks,’ face challenge from Bloomberg, Clinton
By Jon Levine
October 19, 2019 | 2:50pm
Impeachment is a “mortal threat” to Donald Trump’s presidency and the White House needs to start taking it more seriously, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told The Post.
“This is serious. As sure as the turning of the earth, he is going to be impeached by Pelosi in the next six weeks,” Bannon said during a wide-ranging interview with The Post. “Nancy Pelosi is very focused.”
And if Trump makes it out of a House impeachment probe alive, the 65-year-old ex-Breitbart News chairman says the president may have to face surprising — and viable — challengers in 2020 in Mike Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton.
Bannon said he’s been dismayed by what seems to be an uncoordinated White House approach to impeachment.
“I don’t feel comfortable when I see the chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney,” Bannon said, citing a disastrous press conference Thursday in which Mulvaney confirmed Trump’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine was part of a quid pro quo. He later walked that back.
“The problem we have is that the president needs a team around him and somebody has got to step up and make a play. Trump can’t do everything,” Bannon said. “There is just no coordination with the team.
“The fake news and witch hunt stuff is not working.”
The former 2016 campaign boss said Trump shouldn’t look to dump off-message surrogates like Mulvaney or Rudy Giuliani, but rather bring in people to share the burden.
Bannon advised the White House to establish an impeachment squad.
“You need to augment the legal team,” he said, adding that what worked on the probe by Robert Mueller into Russian interference “was bifurcation of the White House Counsel’s office. You need … a team put together than can focus on [impeachment] 24/7.”
Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton might pose as a threat for Trump in the election.Getty Images
And while the GOP-controlled Senate would likely never find Trump guilty in an impeachment trial, Bannon repeatedly refused to offer a full vote of confidence to leader Mitch McConnell — who he called an adversary — and instead expressed frustration that the Senate leader might opt for a drawn-out public trial.
Bannon remained bullish overall about Trump’s chances in 2020, dismissing the current crop of Democratic candidates.
“Nobody on that stage can beat Trump at least as far as right now. The only person that could beat Trump that is currently in the field is Trump,” he said.
He predicted a total Biden implosion by the end of the year and a centrist revolt against Elizabeth Warren.
If Biden falters and Warren appears to be marching toward nomination, “Bloomberg and Clinton, both will … get into the race,” Bannon said. “Nobody is on the stage. The Cory Bookers and Kamala Harrises haven’t gotten enough traction to compete with Warren. The hedge fund investment banking corporatist community of the Democratic Party is not prepared to have them.”
Elizabeth WarrenAFP via Getty Images
Clinton and Bloomberg would be much stronger than the current field, Bannon conceded.
“Bloomberg or Clinton could be very competitive,” he said. “She is a very formidable candidate and I think Bloomberg would be very formidable.”
He said Democrats looking for an edge should do their best to force Team Trump to spend resources in his “southern arc” — potential swing states like Arizona, Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas.
Whoever ended up as the Democratic nominee would also “have to live in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin,” he said. In her 2016 race, Clinton famously neglected these states, and they turned against the party for the first time in a generation.
Since leaving the White House in 2017, Bannon has traveled the world at a breakneck pace, speaking at conferences, meeting with billionaires and promoting his vision of populist nationalism wherever he can find a friendly audience.
He has also taken a growing interest in China, which he views as the primary threat to the United States. Bannon spoke with The Post shortly after a screening of his new film, “Claws of the Red Dragon” in New York. The movie is a loose retelling of the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada last year.
© 2019 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The court that could decide the future of Trump’s presidency
By Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Updated 2:22 PM EDT, Sun October 20, 2019
Washington(CNN)Presidents understand the power of this court, and President Donald Trump may come to understand that more than most.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit – known as the DC Circuit and dubbed the country’s “second highest court” – handles a distinctive caseload testing the power of federal regulators and the executive branch.
The DC Circuit’s portfolio has long put it at the center of disputes over potential White House wrongdoing, such as during Watergate in the Nixon years, the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration and Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton.
Now, it could help determine the fate of legal issues surrounding the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry and Trump’s desire to withhold personal information and limit his allies from cooperating with investigators.
In its first such case regarding Trump, a three-judge panel earlier this month affirmed the investigatory power of the US House of Representatives and upheld a subpoena for eight years of the President’s financial documents.
The decision, already reverberating in other Trump-related litigation, comes from an appeals court that is not only more prominent than most, but one whose members have been more provocative and attention-getting. Four of the current nine Supreme Court justices were elevated from this singular circuit. And Merrick Garland, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the Supreme Court but never received a Senate vote, is the chief judge of the DC Circuit.
The court’s robust interpretation of Congress’ oversight power arose in litigation that began before the Democratic-led House initiated its impeachment inquiry and started focusing on Trump’s Ukrainian dealings. The subpoena fight involving Trump’s longtime accountants, Mazars USA, had been simmering for months.
Yet the DC Circuit’s regard for congressional power was broadly cast and could influence other battles between Democrats and Trump.
The decision reflected the judiciary’s long-established regard for Congress’ oversight authority. The DC Circuit also leans liberal. Of the 11 active judges on the circuit, seven were appointed by Democratic presidents and four by Republican presidents.
“They view themselves as legal technicians. Their view is that they do not make policy, they apply the law,” said University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley. “But the nature of the fights that are brought to the DC Circuit are often those that get the partisan blood boiling.”
Two of the three judges who ruled against Trump were appointed by Democrats. The third, Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote a strong dissent siding with the President.
“The law is on Congress’ side,” said Bagley, who was a law clerk on the DC Circuit and the Supreme Court and now specializes in administrative law, “But to the extent that politics matters here, and it probably matters at the margins, there are more Democratic appointees on this court.”
Laying down markers in the Trump tax records lawsuit
Presidents tend to tap for the DC Circuit candidates with executive branch experience and a record of scholarly writings. They look for likeminded thinkers, sometimes ideological crusaders.

As a result, DC Circuit nominees have endured bitter confirmation fights through the years. Three of the current judges appointed by Obama made it onto the bench after a titanic 2013 partisan clash that led the then-Democratic Senate majority, faced with GOP stonewalling, to amend the longstanding filibuster rules.
Confirmation controversy has only accelerated over time as the DC Circuit has become a stepping stone for the Supreme Court. Among the four current justices who came from the DC Circuit is Chief Justice John Roberts. (An earlier chief justice, Warren Burger, also first wore a black robe on the DC Circuit.)
And in the annals of high court confirmation battles, three DC Circuit judges stand out: the Democratic-led Senate’s 1987 rejection of Robert Bork, a nominee of Ronald Reagan; the Republican-led blockade of Garland; and last year’s bitter fight over Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who eventually was confirmed.
Trump has sued to prevent Mazars USA from turning over documents to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. The committee argued that it needs Trump’s financial records to assess his compliance with federal ethics regulations and to guide its work on legislation.
The DC Circuit sided with the House committee, 2-1, asserting that it has subpoena authority under the House rules and the Constitution, and that Mazars must relinquish the documents.
Rao, whom Trump named to the bench last year and confirmed earlier this year, dissented. Rao declared that the US House could investigate the President for wrongdoing only as part of an impeachment. “Allowing the Committee to issue this subpoena for legislative purposes,” she wrote, “would turn Congress into a roving inquisition over a co-equal branch of government.”
That view, said Judges David Tatel and Patricia Millett, both Democratic appointees, “would reorder the very structure of the Constitution.” Rao’s “novel approach,” Tatel wrote for the majority, would force “Congress to the Hobson’s Choice of impeachment or nothing.”
Either way, in classic DC Circuit style, both sides have laid down markers on the fundamentals of congressional investigations, likely with an eye to the Supreme Court and to future litigation. The Tatel opinion for the majority was 66 pages; Rao’s dissent was 68 pages.

READ: Appeals court ruling on Trump tax returns
Trump’s lawyers have the option of asking the full DC Circuit for an “en banc” hearing or directly appealing to the Supreme Court.
The DC Circuit rarely grants such en banc hearings, but if one was sought and granted, Trump’s lawyers would make their case to all 11 judges in a dramatic session.
Even if a request for a full DC Circuit hearing would ultimately be denied, the Trump team might find it advantageous to request one, as going through that process could buy more time for Trump’s larger effort to avoid disclosure of his records.
A history of controversy
Most US appeals courts handle an array of criminal cases, religion and social policy conflicts, and all manner of business disputes. But the DC Circuit, by virtue of its location in the nation’s capital and specific jurisdiction, hears a narrower docket tied mainly to how government works.
The DC Circuit interprets the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“Whatever combination of letters you can put together,” Roberts said in a 2005 lecture reprinted in the Virginia Law Review, “it is likely that jurisdiction to review that agency’s decision is vested in the D.C. Circuit.”
Ideological clashes have endured through the years. Reagan made his mark on the court with the appointment of eight conservative jurists in the 1980s, including Bork; Antonin Scalia, later elevated to the Supreme Court; and Ken Starr, who later became Whitewater independent counsel and triggered the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Tatel, at 77, is the liberal lion of the bench today. He authored a major voting rights opinion, involving Shelby County, Alabama, upholding a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their election laws. Tatel deemed race discrimination in voting “one of the gravest evils that Congress can seek to redress,” and wrote that Congress, when passing legislation against it, “acts at the apex of the power.”
The Roberts-led Supreme Court, in a decision that remains one of its most controversial, reversed by a 5-4 vote in 2013 and curtailed the reach of the Voting Rights Act’s reach.
A 1994 appointee of Clinton, Tatel early in his career had been director for the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and previously worked for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Chicago.
Obama’s imprint
When Obama took the White House in 2009, Democrats held the Senate majority, but Republicans were sizable enough to block efforts to cut off floor debate on his DC Circuit nominees. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid persuaded the Democrats to change the filibuster rules, with the “nuclear option,” so that a lower-court nominee could be confirmed with a simple majority of the 100 senators, rather than require at least 60 votes to close debate.
That change led to the confirmation of Obama appointees Millett, Cornelia Pillard and Robert Wilkins.
Pillard, now 58, was arguably the most liberal of the three. A Georgetown law professor, she had previously worked for the NAACP legal defense fund and had a deep record of advocacy for civil rights and women’s rights. Pillard already is on the short list of liberals hoping that a Democrat wins the White House in 2020 and can fill a new vacancy on the high court.
Millett, 56, an appellate specialist who had worked for the Justice Department and in corporate law, had a more moderate reputation. But soon after Trump took office, she faced off against then-DC Circuit Judge Kavanaugh in the first phase of an unusual abortion rights case. Kavanaugh was part of a panel that sided with the Trump administration in its effort to block a pregnant migrant teen from obtaining an abortion. Millett wrote that the move sacrificed the 17-year-old woman’s constitutional rights for no justifiable reason. The full DC circuit reheard the case and reversed the panel, allowing the woman to end her pregnancy.
Another possible liberal-leaning Supreme Court nominee for a Democratic president would be Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was born in India, grew up in Kansas, and would be the first Asian-American and Hindu on the Supreme Court.
Srinivasan, 52, was a relatively non-controversial Obama appointee, confirmed unanimously in spring 2013. He previously worked in the Justice Department and was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee.
Trump’s imprint
Trump has filled two DC Circuit vacancies since taking office, the first with Gregory Katsas in 2017, and then Rao, who until her confirmation this year had been the Trump-appointed administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
Both Katsas and Rao were law clerks to Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative member of the current Supreme Court. Both were approved by the Senate on party-line votes. No Democrat voted for Rao and only one Democrat voted for Katsas.
Katsas, 55, had previously worked in the George W. Bush administration and, in the Trump White House, was deputy to (former) White House counsel Don McGahn, defending early Trump immigration policies.
During her Senate hearing earlier this year, Rao, 46, drew controversy on multiple fronts, chiefly for her work overseeing Trump administration efforts to rollback regulations, but also because of her student writings suggesting women could avoid date rape by changing their behavior. After senators’ criticism, including from Republicans, she wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying, “Sexual assault in all forms, including date rape, is abhorrent. Responsibility for the rape is with the rapist.”
Before appointment as regulatory “czar,” Rao oversaw the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
She has been especially in sync with the Trump agenda to diminish the reach of agency power – what’s been called the “administrative state” – over the environment, labor and other public concerns.
Along with challenges arising from that Trump administration focus, the DC Circuit is positioned to take up more cases involving the House efforts to obtain Trump documents.
This is a familiar tale, the DC Circuit majority wrote in last Friday’s case. “[D]isputes between Congress and the President are a recurring plot in our national story,” Tatel said. “And that is precisely what the Framers intended.”
The separation-of-powers doctrine, he said, quoting Justice Louis Brandeis in 1926, “was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction … [among the branches] … to save the people from autocracy.”
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
-‘-’-‘-’-‘-“-”’’ -‘-’-“-”-‘-’
Romney: Some in GOP fear for jobs if they criticize Trump
By Ashley Imlay
on October 20, 2019 7:48 pm
Romney chimes in:
Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Sen. Mitt Romney believes other GOP senators who may not agree with President Donald Trump often remain mum to keep their jobs, and to keep a Republican president in office.
The second of those reasons, he said, is more “elevated” than the first.
“People genuinely believe, as I do, that conservative principles are better for our country and for the working people of our country than liberal principles. And that if Elizabeth Warren were to become president, for instance, or if we were to lose the Senate, that would not be good for the American people,” Romney told HBO Axios co-founder Mike Allen.
The interview took place in Romney’s Holladay home and spanned topics ranging from hiking Utah’s Mt. Olympus to foreign relations, to the chance of Romney facing up against Trump during the upcoming election.
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When asked why many other Republican senators will only criticize Trump off the record, Romney said: “They don’t want to do something which makes it more likely for Elizabeth Warren to become president, or for us to lose the Senate.
“So they don’t want to go out and criticize the leader of our party, because they feel that may have the consequence of hurting our country longer term,” he said on the show that aired Sunday afternoon.
Although Romney said he votes with the president about 80% of the time, “I think that in some of the things that he has said and done, that he has detracted from the mission of a leader in shaping the character of the country in a positive way.”
Romney hasn’t shied away from voicing his disapproval of some of the president’s decisions, including his recent withdrawal of troops from northern Syria. He echoed those concerns during the HBO interview.
Other allies will think that they can’t count on America after the withdrawal, Romney said. And though the senator is on the Foreign Relations Committee, he said he didn’t get a head’s up on the decision beforehand, instead learning about it on Twitter “like most folks.”
On the Senate floor Thursday, Romney said serious questions remain about the decision to withdraw and that the administration needs to explain America’s future role in the region.
“The announcement today is being portrayed as a victory,” Romney said in that speech. “It is far from a victory.”
Romney has faced criticism in return from Trump.
On Friday, the president tweeted “REPUBLICANS MUST STICK TOGETHER AND FIGHT!” along with a video targeting Romney, the Associated Press reported. Also, a conservative political advocacy group — Club for Growth — is paying for television ads that describe Romney as a “Democrat secret asset” after his recent comments about Trump.
When asked how he feels hearing Trump say he “choked like a dog” in 2012, and other insults, Romney said he doesn’t take it too hard.
“Oh, look, if I worried about criticism, I’d be in the wrong job, in the wrong industry,” he said. ”Look, I’ve been tough on the president, so he’s gonna whack me back.”
When asked about his comments concerning Trump’s “brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and Ukraine” to investigate Joe Biden, Romney stood by them.
“I don’t think there’s any question but that going on TV on the White House lawn and saying, ‘China, will you investigate my political opponent?’ is wrong. It’s a mistake. It was shocking, in my opinion, for the president to do so.”
The conversation then turned to the topic of honor when Allen asked Romney if he believes President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are honorable men.
Of Obama, Romney said, “I believe he’s an honorable man, yes, yeah. A good family man. And he made a lot of mistakes, most presidents do.”
He said he doesn’t know Biden well, but that “he seems to be a man of honor.”
When asked the same question of Trump, Romney said: “He has elements, I’m sure, of honor in his life, and there’s things I think are not honorable. And I mention that because of the payment to a porn star for sexual relations outside of marriage. I’m one of those who believes we have a responsibility to be honorable and faithful to our wives, and the president made a failing in that regard.”
But while some have suggested Romney throw his hat into the ring during next year’s presidential election, Romney said Sunday there’s no chance of that.
“Well, I’m not going to run against President Trump. That would be a fool’s errand, I’m afraid, on my part. I’ve run twice before and lost, so I’m not going to do it again. There may be other people who will make that effort, and they can do so if they’d like to. I’m certainly going to indicate to them it’ll be an uphill climb.”
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WHHHHHAAAATTT IIIFF HHEEE WIIIIN AAGGGAAAIIIN? Experts in politocal predictions were asked this question:
What If Trump Wins?
He survives impeachment and he surprises at the polls. The second four years could be even crazier than the first.
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN
10/21/2019 05:04 AM EDT
Darren Samuelsohn is a senior White House reporter for POLITICO.

M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITIC
President Donald Trump has a lot riding on 2020. If he loses, he won’t just quietly resume his carefree snowbird lifestyle, albeit with millions of new Twitter followers. He’ll be dogged by big legal bills as he fends off criminal investigations in multiple jurisdictions.
But what if he wins?
The election is more than a year away, his possible impeachment over the widening Ukraine scandal is far from resolved, and, yes, numerous polls show the president trailing nearly all of his likely Democratic opponents. But impatient politicos are already gaming out a scenario that is hardening into conventional wisdom: Trump is impeached by the House, acquitted by the Senate and re-elected on November 3.
The prospect of four more years has already captured the fevered imaginations of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted, “The reelection of Donald Trump would do irreparable damage to the United States.” Even the president’s own supporters envision an emboldened incumbent who pulverizes political norms with a vigor, to borrow the president’s go-to line, the likes of which the world has never seen.
Trump himself isn’t saying much about what a second term would really look like. Scripted legislative agendas are not how he rolls. Still, if his first term has taught us anything, Trump as a lame duck would be anything but unifying. Indeed, the civil war that the president has predicted could well be visible in the hostile crowds hectoring each other on the Mall in January. After that? What does a bruised but unbowed Trump do with his political capital? What does an enraged Democratic opposition bring to bear that it hasn’t already?
There’s only one way to answer these questions: the POLITICO Time Machine.
M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
For the uninitiated, we used it once before in April 2016, when Trump wasn’t even the Republican nominee yet and when most people insisted he still had no chance of winning the White House. But our band of armchair time travelers already foresaw the looming possibility that the unorthodox novice could well be impeached if he ever took office. Our prognosticators weren’t so far off, given how fast Democrats started investigating Trump once they took the House majority halfway through his first term.
OK, sure, we were a little wide of the mark in predicting Trump would reopen Alcatraz and the World War II-era internment camps to house suspected Islamic extremists. And back in early 2016, no one saw Russia, much less Ukraine, emerging as the centerpiece of the impeachment inquiry. But, boy, did our brain trust nail it on predictions about Trump skirting Congress to pay for his border wall; a full-blown civil war brewing inside the intelligence community; and presidential approval numbers collapsing faster than a Greenland glacier.
To further fine-tune the conventional wisdom, we reconvened the Time Machine travelers and added a bunch more to the roster—25 people who know Trump world and GOP and Democratic politics—and asked them: What’s in store for Washington and the nation if Trump defies the odds to hold onto the White House?
“We will have entered an era of authoritarianism,” warned John Dean, the former Richard Nixon White House lawyer whose public testimony about Watergate helped lead to the president’s resignation
That’s just left-wing hysteria, said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and outspoken Trump ally. “No. I don’t think Trump will be emboldened. I think Trump will be Trump. I think Trump is emboldened every morning. He goes, ‘I’m a billionaire. I’ve got the White House, Air Force One and Marine One. And I’m commander in chief. What’s part two?’ All these guys who spent three years shooting at me and I’m still in the building and they’re not.’”
But even some Trump supporters foresee the chance that Trump might test the boundaries of presidential power with bad results.
Former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, a card-carrying establishment Republican who once criticized the president but now largely supports him, said a reelected Trump has the potential to take things too far. “I think it’d be very much like the first term with the risky exception that having survived impeachment and having been elected by the people he might feel like the guard rails are even farther away from the road he travels. I’d hope he’d realizes the guardrails are there for a good purpose and if he drives too fast [he’ll] crash through them.”
At a Rose Garden press conference in early 1999 after the Senate acquitted him, President Bill Clinton responded to a question about whether he could “forgive and forget” by saying, “I believe any person who asks forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.” According to Bob Woodward’s account in his book, Shadow, a reporter then shouted to the president as he was walking away asking whether he’d be vindictive toward the Republicans who’d just impeached him. Clinton didn’t turn around.
Trump “won’t keep walking,” Fleischer predicted. “He’ll run back to the mic.”
So what would Trump say? We’ll let the Time Machine do the talking.
The time is January 2021. The election has left the nation a psychological mess and a sulfurous cloud of election meddling by foreign hackers hangs over the still-contested results. Trump’s Ukraine scandal ultimately spared him but it wounded Joe Biden enough to give Elizabeth Warren the nomination. Once again, though, the result came down to the Electoral College, but even closer than in 2016. Warren, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, took the popular vote by a resounding margin. But this mixed verdict has done nothing but further entrench the battle lines of a civil war that has become more than just a metaphor.
M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
The weeks after Election Day were ugly. Protests in New York, Washington, San Francisco and a dozen other cities turned violent, the byproduct of a tangled mass of disgruntled pink-hatted Democrats, MAGA supporters, left-wing antifa and far-right Proud Boys. People have been killed. The president chalked up the discord to urban blight. And then he imposed curfews and directed the National Guard to patrol the streets over the protests of governors and mayors.
On January 20, Trump takes the oath of office, vowing in the shadow of the Capitol for the second time that he would “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The scene is unlike anything before in the country’s history. What’s always been a high-security event takes on a militaristic tone, with Trump ordering U.S. troops onto the streets of Washington as a show of force to deter more riots. His family surrounds him, along with a loyal base of congressional Republicans who but for a few defectors hung on during his first four years and most notably voted to keep him in office and defeat impeachment. Democrats, still seething at Trump’s flagrant constitutional violations, boycott the event en masse, the first time in modern history this has happened. Their seats are given away in a lottery open to Trump supporters.
Protesting former presidents
Imagining Trump’s second term: “They skip Trump’s inaugural ceremony and … hand out meals at a Washington D.C. homeless shelter.”
Jimmy Carter
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush
Barack Obama
Something else is notable, too. The four living ex-presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter join George W. Bush in a protocol-busting protest. They skip Trump’s inaugural ceremony and accept Carter’s invitation to hand out meals at a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter.
After the inaugural parade, which includes tanks for the first time in a half-century, the president goes into the White House, takes out a hand-written enemies list of people who work for him and makes Jared Kushner fire everyone on it. The casualty list includes Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper resigned before the election, having been blamed by Trump for the Ukraine mess. Steve Mnuchin is the only original Cabinet secretary still in Trump’s good graces.
A new crop of loyalists gets hired, including now-former Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Doug Collins, as well as Lindsey Graham, who steps down from the Senate to become the new Defense secretary. Brad Parscale moves from campaign manager to serve as White House chief of staff—but only after Trump leaves Mick Mulvaney’s former job open for six months. Trump promises his longtime adviser Stephen Miller an appointment to run the Homeland Security Department in an acting capacity during the close of the second term, when Senate confirmation won’t matter for a lame duck administration. And the president also raids his reelection campaign for new staff, believing they will be more loyal than the Frankenstein crew from the Republican National Committee that he hastily assembled in 2017.
Trump Loyalists
Imagining Trump’s second term: “A new crop of loyalists” join the administration.
Brad Parscale Trump campaign manager
Jared Kushner Senior advisor to the president
Rep. Jim Jordan
(R-OH)
Sen. Lindsey Graham
(R-SC)
Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA)
Rep. Mark Meadows
(R-NC)
Stephen Miller Senior advisor for policy
William Barr Attorney General
Rudy Giuliani Attorney to Trump