James Hohmann/WaPo:
The survey by Marist for NPR and PBS shows that 57 percent of Americans think Trump should compromise to prevent gridlock, and 69 percent say building a border wall should not be a priority. But 65 percent of Republicans do not think Trump should compromise, even if it means a shutdown, and 63 percent say building a wall should be a top priority. Among strong Republicans, just 19 percent believe Trump should compromise on wall funding to avoid a shutdown. More than 90 percent of all Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration.
“The wall is polarized in terms of partisanship,” said Marist Poll director Barbara Carvalho. “It’s an important issue for the president’s base.”
Matt Glassman/WaPo:
Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan want to weaken incoming Democratic governors. Here’s what’s the usual partisan politics — and what isn’t.
More problematic are changes to electoral rules, including the Wisconsin legislature’s effort to reduce early voting, separate a state Supreme Court election date from the presidential primary and codify voter ID requirements. Some of this hardball stays well within policy norms. Many states still have no early voting. And moving local elections from on or off the state or federal elections day is common practice in many states.
What’s more troubling is when partisans pursue changes that appear designed to reduce turnout, thereby undermining the very premise of democracy. Such efforts are reminiscent of racial voter suppression, from historical poll taxes and literacy tests to contemporary disparities in poll location availability and wait times to vote. And those are a continuing stain on U.S. democracy.
Jacob T Levy/NY Times:
The Democrats’ Best Response to Republican Power Grabs
Democrats are exploring the possibility of legal challenges to those maneuvers. But party leaders face a more difficult, and perhaps more consequential, problem: Should they go tit-for-tat and escalate procedural shenanigans, rules-stretching and rules-breaking? Or should they strive, leading by good example, to maintain a system of norms that have provided political stability in the hopes that a more moderate, reasonable Republican Party will re-emerge?
Both strategies come with serious risks: Retaliating in kind could aggravate already deep polarization and wreck what’s left of our political norms. Restraint, on the other hand, would establish new norms that establish electoral disadvantages for Democrats and embolden Republicans.
There is a better option, and it also happens to be the best option. Democrats can use the Republican hardball against them by weaving together the Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina cases into a larger story to take to voters in 2020: the indictment of Republican attacks on democracy accompanied by an aggressive reform agenda for strengthening constitutional norms and democratic procedures.
Ron Brownstein/CNN:
The foundation of Trump's coalition is cracking
The collapse of any meaningful distinctions among evangelicals reflects both their hardening loyalty to the GOP and the contraction of their overall numbers, says Robert P. Jones, chief executive officer of the Public Religion Research Institute, a non partisan group that studies religion, values and politics.
In PRRI surveys, he notes, evangelical Christians have declined from about 21% of the total population in 2008 to 15% this year. That erosion, Jones says, has been "asymmetrical," with younger and better-educated members becoming the most likely to leave the faith. That's left behind a group that is older and more uniformly conservative.
"As this group is shrinking and aging it is just becoming more and more homogenous," says Jones, author of the 2017 book "The End of White Christian America." "When you have that kind of attrition, and it's coming all from the low [younger] end, and the low end is more likely to be college educated and likely to be more liberal on a whole range of cultural issues and less anti-immigrant ... you start losing differences."
CNN:
CNN Poll: Approval ratings for Trump, Mueller fall
As Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election inches closer to the President, approval of Donald Trump's handling of the investigation has fallen, matching its all-time low in CNN polling. The findings, from a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, come as half of Americans say they think it is likely that the Mueller investigation will implicate the president in wrongdoing.
In the new poll, Trump's approval rating for handling the Russia investigation dips to 29%, matching a low previously hit in June of this year.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
As Trump slides in a new poll, reality begins piercing the bubble
Meanwhile, for all of Trump’s outward swagger, signs are mounting that the White House is deeply rattled. Federal prosecutors now claim Trump personally directed a criminal conspiracy to secure his election in the form of illegal hush money payments. We’ve learned that Trump negotiated business dealings with Russia throughout the GOP primaries, which he concealed. And there are solid grounds for believing Mueller still hasn’t tipped his hand on all he’s learned about Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia’s sabotage of our election or on Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice.
In the wake of this news, Axios now reports that a “reality tremor” has coursed through the White House, noting that “top officials” are “growing more anxious about Trump’s reelection prospects,” and that even some hardcore outside allies were “rattled by the specificity” of the latest revelations. The Associated Press reports that the news is “unnerving some of his fellow Republicans,” who now fret about his reelection chances that “the turmoil has left him increasingly vulnerable.”
This piece from the WaPo is a reminder that Trump isn’t the only one struggling. The NRA is in deep weeds as well:
Maria Butina, a Russian gun rights activist, is poised to plead guilty in a case involving accusations that she was working as an agent for the Kremlin in the United States, according to a new court filing.
Federal prosecutors and attorneys for Butina jointly requested in court documents Monday that U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set a time for Butina to withdraw her previous plea of not guilty.
“The parties have resolved this matter,” Butina’s attorneys and D.C.-based prosecutors wrote in their joint filing.
Chutkan said she would hear the matter Wednesday.
I have a lot of confidence in this guy.
I have a lot of confidence in Jared, too. Maybe he should be chief of staff, amIrite?
Hey, how about some policy?
Jon Walker/shadowproof.com
BEST OPTION FOR FUNDING MEDICARE FOR ALL MAY BE EMPLOYER MANDATE
One of the biggest political and technical hurdles standing in the way of Medicare for All is deciding how to pay for it, but voters have made clear there is one option they would support: simply requiring every employer to purchase Medicare (or equivalent) coverage for their employees.
This is the least disruptive option. It is successfully used by other countries. Most importantly, it is the only idea that is both popular and can reasonably produce enough money to fund the program.
In 2016, the United States spent more than $1.12 trillion on private insurance and another $352.5 billion on out-of-pocket expenses. It will be necessary to make up this roughly $1.4 trillion in either taxes, cost-sharing reforms, or new deficit spending in order to move toward a universal system with no or only nominal cost-sharing.
And now, the President of the United States:
Chuck:
Nancy:
Tom Nichols/WaPo:
Trump made competence a dirty word. Now he has to settle for second-rate talent.
Actively bad-mouthing expertise is how you get the current White House quagmire.
His inability to recruit, or to even to listen to, top people has hampered everything from Trump’s foreign policy to his own legal defense. His hostility to sound advice, coupled with reliance on his frequently terrible instincts, has produced a kind of synergy (to use a newly infamous word) of incompetence in the White House and beyond: Things go wrong on the world stage, Capitol Hill or with the media. Trump never blames himself, instead blaming everyone else, including the people who work for him. Experts — also known as people who know they’re doing — have had two years to observe this and have understandably become less willing to work for him. Their numbers inside the administration dwindle, lesser lights take over, more mistakes are made; lather, rinse, repeat.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
America knew how to deal with a crook like Spiro Agnew. Why is Trump so hard?
In 1973, the idea that a known crook might spend the last 2-3 years of Nixon’s term in the Oval Office, with his finger on the nuclear button during the depths of the Cold War, was completely unacceptable to the wiser men in both political parties (including Richardson, a Republican who reported to Nixon until he was fired later that eventful October in the “Saturday Night Massacre.”)
In 2018, with growing evidence of Trump’s criminality? Meh. The Establishment doesn’t seem to have to guts to confront what’s directly in front of them.
House Democrats, who’ll be taking over the gavel in January, have grudgingly conceded that they might have to take the first steps down the road toward a Trump impeachment — with about the same enthusiasm as a patient learning about his looming root-canal work. Republicans in both houses of Congress — including some who voted for the impeachment or removal of Bill Clinton — seem more determined now to move the bar on whether violating campaign finance laws to fool voters in a presidential election is really that bad. Team Trump is convinced the president can rally his base and even ride the ensuing chaos to win a second term — which, bizarrely, would get him past the statute of limitations for the crimes he allegedly committed with Cohen.
(One more fascinating thing that Bagman revealed was that Agnew may have also taken the resignation deal to prevent some embarrassment: Exposure of an extramarital affair, or affairs. In the Stormy Daniels era, that kind of embarrassment seems a nonfactor.)