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The White House and Republican senators sought compromise Tuesday on limiting presidents' powers to unilaterally declare national emergencies, as chances improved that President Donald Trump might avoid a long-expected rejection by Congress of his effort to divert billions more for building barriers along the Mexican border. As a Thursday showdown vote in the Senate neared, GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and others were talking with the White House about related legislation that would curb the ability of presidents to declare future emergencies. If Trump would commit to signing a bill handcuffing future emergency declarations,...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Monday that she’s against impeaching President Trump “unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.” Which is exactly the point — there isn’t. The speaker is surely up to speed on what evidence Democrats actually have against Trump and has a fair sense of what Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s report will say. And she recognizes that it’s nothing that will persuade anyone who hasn’t wanted Trump ousted since Election Day 2016. Which means that moving to impeach him would be not just “divisive to the country,” as she says, but also bad for Democrats...

During CPAC on Feb. 28, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) thanked President Trump for nominating Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and having his "back."

House Democrats on Wednesday hammered Pentagon officials over President Trump's plan to move Defense Department military construction (MILCON) dollars to build his proposed southern border wall after declaring a national emergency. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment Robert McMahon offered few new details on Trump’s plans to take $3.6 billion in MILCON funds for his project, effectively sidestepping Congress. The lack of more information angered Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who heads the Appropriations Committee's sub-panel on military construction. “I’m not sure what kind of chumps you think my colleagues and I are,” she told McMahon during a particularly testy...

President Trump has declared a national emergency in order to pay for physical barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, but will Congress block it? That’s a long shot — but we can’t rule it out either. Here’s the basic process, as the New York Times explained in an article after Trump’s declaration. Congress can take up a resolution to end a presidential national emergency declaration. If such a resolution passes in one chamber, the other must bring it up for a vote within 18 days. If the resolution passes both chambers and the president vetoes it, a two-thirds majority in Congress...

Please contact White House RIGHT NOW - tell POTUS "do NOT sign the spending bill!" ********************* If You Don't Stand Up, You Will Be Stood On. ****** If you support building the wall, ending chain migration and instituting merit-based immigration, please contact the President RIGHT NOW and tell him do NOT sign the omnibus spending bill that went on his desk earlier today. Just declare a Border Emergency and FINISH THE WALL. Moreover, this [omnibus] bill will likely override Trump’s executive powers because of the sneaky limitations on wall construction. This is the sort of omnibus bill that ensnared Reagan...

President Donald Trump met with a key Republican negotiator Thursday, Feb. 7, to lay out his demands for a border deal, as lawmakers sought an agreement to stave off another government shutdown. Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told reporters after meeting with Trump that he believes the president will support a deal bipartisan congressional negotiators produce - as long as it meets his parameters. Lawmakers face a Feb. 15 deadline when large portions of the government will shut back down absent a deal. Shelby declined to detail Trump's requirements, and he did not say whether the president had agreed...

Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who blocked former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from ever having a hearing in 2016, told the New York Times Magazine that his "decision not to fill the [Justice Antonin] Scalia vacancy" was the "most consequential thing I've ever done." The big picture: McConnell cited "a longstanding tradition of not filling vacancies on the Supreme Court in the middle of a presidential election year" in his refusal to even meet with Garland after the death of Scalia — a tradition deemed "false" and "entirely a matter of circumstance" by Politifact. Since Trump's...

President Donald Trump was dismissive about the future political prospects of former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, saying in an Oval Office interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday that the Democrat could not defeat incumbent U.S. Sen. David Perdue in a statewide battle. Hours after Abrams delivered a well-received rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address on behalf of the Democratic Party, Trump said it would be a “mistake” for Abrams to run against Perdue, one of his top Georgia allies, in 2020. “I think it’s a mistake for her to run against him because I don’t think she...

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) is throwing his support behind President Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, a move that could stir trouble for his own electoral prospects next year. Gardner, a onetime critic of Trump, told IJR that he was backing the president, because he believed Trump would do right by the people of Colorado. “Look, there are things here – look, I’ve made it very clear that where I agree with the president, we will agree or where I disagree, we will disagree,” Gardner said. “But I’m going to fight like hell for Colorado, and we’ve done some good things for...

The House Democratic Women's Working Group is inviting female members of both parties to wear white to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address next week as a symbol of solidarity. "Wearing suffragette white is a respectful message of solidarity with women across the country, and a declaration that we will not go back on our hard-earned rights," Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida, the chair of the working group, told CNN. Frankel pointed out there have never been as many Democratic women serving in Congress as there are today. In 2017, the same group coordinated Democratic women wearing white...

OAKLAND — Sen. Kamala Harris began her Democratic campaign for president Sunday with an attack on President Donald Trump and a promise to unify a country deeply riven along social, cultural and political lines. Speaking from the steps of Oakland’s City Hall plaza to a crowd that spilled over several downtown blocks, Harris depicted her candidacy as a fight against those “trying to sow hate and division.” “We are here at this moment in this because we must answer a fundamental question,” Harris said. “Who are we? Who are we as Americans? So let’s answer that question, America. We are...

Now that the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination has officially started, one of the big issues that will likely come up is which candidate is the most electable. One way to find that out is to see how the different possible candidates have done in the past. Of course, it's difficult to compare candidates when they run for different offices in different years. There are, however, six potential 2020 Democratic contenders ran who ran for the US Senate in 2018. The big takeaway from those results: Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sherrod Brown of Ohio are above-average candidates...

43% approve, 38% disapprove. That's a net positive rating of 5%. In contrast, the Turtle's approval rating is 38% approve and 47% disapprove.. a negative rating of -9% McConnell has one of the worst ratings in America.

President Trump did something Tuesday night that he has rarely done since taking office: He used the presidential bully pulpit to reach beyond his hardcore base of supporters to make his case to the American people as a whole. Speaking from the Oval Office for the first time during his presidency, Trump embraced our country's tradition as a nation of immigrants, declaring "America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation." He then offered a cogent explanation for why he believes we face what he called "a humanitarian crisis - a crisis of...

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who announced on Monday that she is exploring a presidential run, is quickly assembling a robust and experienced team to lead a campaign in Iowa -- an early signal of the outsized importance of a strong showing in the state. Emily Parcell, who worked as then-Sen. Barack Obama's Iowa political director for the 2008 caucus and as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton in the state eight years later, has signed on with Warren, along with Janice Rottenberg, according to two sources. Rottenberg was an Ohio organizer for Clinton in 2016 and ran the Iowa Democratic...

Mitt Romney’s op-ed Wednesday in The Post is being widely praised by the usual suspects in Never-Trump Land. This should be your first clue as to how wildly out of touch the senator-elect is with Republican voters. What are some others? Let’s start with the article’s premise that President Trump’s character is more important than his accomplishments or principles. Most Republicans simply don’t accept this argument. Many instead see Trump’s pugnacious and sometimes crude talk as an essential part of his virtue — he fights while other Republicans cower. Others would prefer he tweet less and do more, but still...

The senator-elect wouldn’t say why he didn’t have a problem when Trump was falsely accusing Barack Obama of being born in Africa. Sen.-elect Mitt Romney (R-Utah) may have criticized Donald Trump in a Washington Post op-ed, but he apparently didn’t have a problem accepting the president’s endorsement during last year’s Senate race. During a CNN interview on Wednesday, Jake Tapper pressed the onetime Republican presidential candidate on whether that was a mistake. Tapper pointed to a Twitter message from 2016 ― two years before Romney accepted the president’s endorsement in 2018 ― in which Romney seemed to reject the idea...

The meeting would be the first time the president has sat down with Democrats since the shutdown started. President Donald Trump has invited congressional leaders to a Wednesday afternoon briefing on the border wall at the White House, according to three congressional sources familiar with the invitation. White House officials on New Year’s Eve asked House and Senate leaders in both parties to attend the meeting. The session, which will include a briefing by top Homeland Security Department officials, comes as a partial government shutdown over Trump’s border wall reaches its eleventh day. The meeting would mark the first time...

We’ve seen it before: a highly-recognized political name coming out early to kick off a presidential bid, banking that the candidate’s big fundraising chops and a carefully assembled campaign apparatus will scare away potential opponents, lock down front-runner status, and ultimately secure the nomination. But the last time, when that candidate was a Republican named Jeb Bush, it didn’t turn out so well. Elizabeth Warren’s nearly half-decade flirtation with the presidency has finally produced a presidential exploratory committee. She used to be the one potential Democratic challenger that Hillary Clinton was worried about, last time around. Now, with the energy...