It’s a national emergency! I know he’s been threatening it, but I really didn’t think even Trump would declare a national emergency over something he’s been talking about for three years. On top of that, our allies in Europe sent us a clear message about what they think of us now after two years with this administration. At least Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia still like us though!

Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Border Wall/Shutdown:

1. We started the week with another stalemate on DHS funding, but then negotiators in Congress agree on a deal that:

• • Provides $1.375 billion for 55 miles of new border fencing (Trump wants $5.7 million for over 200 miles).
  • Provides $1.7 billion for border security, including more staff, humanitarian aid, and more modernized technology.
  • Reduces the number of detention beds allowed for unauthorized immigrants to 40,520 beds, but funds over 45,000 beds until September to give ICE time to comply.

2. Trump says he doesn’t like the deal, but he’ll sign it. Mitch McConnell tells the Senate that Trump plans to declare a national emergency to bypass the bill they agreed upon. This way, Trump can keep the government open and fund his wall. The White House is also looking at other ways to fund the border wall, like redirecting money from flood control projects, disaster relief funds, and DOD funds.
3. Nancy Pelosi warns the president not to declare a national emergency because it sets a bad president. 

4. As promised, Trump signs the bill and declares a national emergency so he can build his wall. It was one of the weirdest presidential speeches I’ve ever heard. Especially from 22:08 to 22:48 here.

• • I won’t go into the whole speech here, but I created a new post with the highlights (according to me).

5. The DOJ warns Trump that ahead of time that his national emergency would be held up in courts. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) sues over the national emergency declaration. California, New York, and the ACLU (among others) prepare to do the same.
6. The Trump administration is already being sued over their new policy of forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for a hearing and over their policy of extreme vetting of sponsors (which is basically holding immigrant minors hostage in order to be able to deport some of the sponsors).
7. The House Judiciary Committee announces an investigation into the emergency declaration based on comments Trump made during his announcement of the national emergency. Trump said that he didn’t need to do this, but that he’d rather do it (build the wall) much faster.
8. Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) says he’ll introduce a resolution to cancel the national emergency. Other House Democrats are on board. If the House passes such a resolution, the Senate has to vote on it as well. Trump says he’ll absolutely veto anything like that.
9. Trump blocks back pay for contractors who worked during the government shutdown.

Russia:

1. A federal judge rules that Paul Manafort did intentionally lie to federal prosecutors as alleged by Mueller’s team. He lied about:

• • His contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, an alleged Russian spy.
  • Certain financial transactions.
  • A business associate with suspected ties to Russian intelligence.

2. His plea deal is effectively over, prosecutors can now prosecute him for crimes to which he’s already pleaded guilty, he’ll likely serve time for the crimes he already copped to and those he was already convicted of, and he could be charged on the additional crimes of lying to federal prosecutors.
3. Manafort cannot retract his earlier guilty plea, and he still has to cooperate with prosecutors.
4. Mueller recommends a sentence of 19.5 to 24.5 years for Manafort, because he “acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law” and deprived the government and banks of millions of dollars.
5. Court documents show that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were meeting with Kilimnik in August of 2016. Prosecutors think they talked about Russia as it relates to Trump’s campaign, resolving the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and Trump campaign internal polling data.
6. Trump quotes Rush Limbaugh in calling for investigators in the Russia probe, including Robert Mueller, to be put in jail. He says it’s unprecedented that they’re working with Obama intelligence agencies, though intelligence agencies don’t belong to any president.
7. In a 60 Minutes interview, former FBI director Andrew McCabe says that he launched investigations into the administration’s ties to Russia because he thought there would be an attempted coverup and the case would disappear. He also says:

• • There were conversations about working with Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.
  • When intelligence officials told Trump that North Korea has missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, he responded, “I don’t care. I believe Putin.” Putin had apparently told him that North Korea doesn’t have such capabilities.
  • Mueller’s team has McCabe’s memorandums describing his transactions with Trump.

8. After the interview, Trump accuses both McCabe and Rod Rosenstein of plotting treason against him and says they got caught.
9. The judge in Roger Stone’s case issues a partial gag order. Attorney’s from both sides can’t talk to the media about the case, and Stone can’t talk to the media in the vicinity of the courthouse.

• • Stone requests a different judge, but is denied. Mueller designated Stone’s case as being related to the case indicting 12 Russian intelligence agents on charges of hacking and leaking Democrats’ emails in the 2016 election. Because these cases are related, they have the same judge.
  • It’s the same judge who oversees one of Paul Manafort’s cases as well.

10. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-NC), says they haven’t discovered evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA), says the evidence is obvious and compelling. Maybe they have different definitions of collusion? Schiff does clarify that this does not yet prove criminal conspiracy.
11. The House Judiciary Committee hires two lawyers to review Mueller’s investigation and allegations against Trump. They’re focused on ethics and corruption issues as well as possible obstruction of justice.

Legal Fallout:

1. American Media, Inc., owner of the National Enquirer, asked the DOJ last year if they needed to register as a foreign agent for their work with and coverage of Saudi Arabia. Based on the limited information AMI provided the DOJ, they said AMI didn’t need to register.
2. For the third time, Michael Cohen postpones a Congressional hearing, this time because of a recent surgery.

Courts/Justice:

1. Jerrold Nadler invites former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker back to clarify his testimony because his previous responses are contradicted by the evidence.
2. The Senate confirms William Barr as our next Attorney General. Barr is sworn in and takes office. Interesting side notes:

• • Barr’s daughter and a son-in-law both work in the DOJ (which Barr will be heading), but are moving on to different jobs. Another son-in-law works in the National Security Division of the DOJ.
  • His daughter is going from being the director of Opioid Enforcement and Prevention Efforts to working in the Treasury’s financial crimes unit.
  • His son-in-law (married to a different daughter than above) is going from the Virginia U.S. attorney’s office to the White House counsel’s office. It’s not clear yet what his responsibilities will be.

3. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returns to the office for the first time since her surgery last December.

Healthcare:

1. Teen children of parents who refused to vaccinate them are trying to get vaccines on their own without stepping on any parental landmines. This is difficult because parental consent is required in some states. These teens are also concerned for their younger siblings.
2. Someone starts a fire at a Missouri Planned Parenthood Clinic and the FBI is investigating it as a hate crime.
3. Even pediatricians who are publicly against vaccinations start to urge people to vaccinate their children in the midst of the latest measles outbreak. Even though these doc’s have long called measles a benign childhood disease, they know it can cause things like blindness, deafness, pneumonia, swelling in the brain, and even death. And new research says it makes you susceptible to other illnesses for years following an infection.
4. Mississippi lawmakers pass a heartbeat abortion bill that could limit abortion after six weeks. It provides exceptions for cases where the mother’s life or health is threatened, but does not provide exceptions for incest or rape. The governor says he’ll sign it. A federal judge already found Mississippi’s previous 15-week ban from last year unconstitutional, so this is likely to be found the same.

International:

1. A suicide bomber kills 27 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Iran blames the U.S. and Israel for the attack, but a militant Sunni Muslim group claims responsibility.
2. The House passes a resolution to stop funding Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. This would force the administration to pull U.S. troops out.
3. The Trump administration misses its deadline to provide Congress with full information about the role the Saudi Crown Prince played in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. A Republican lawmaker had requested the information under the Magnitsky Act.
4. The Munich Security Summit highlights the growing split between the U.S. and its European allies.

• • German Chancellor Angela Merkel receives a standing ovation for:
    • Defending multilateral institutions.
    • Pushing back against U.S. demands that Europe pull out of the JCPOA (Iran deal), adding that the agreement is a step toward containing Iran that will lead to more cooperation.
    • Criticizing unilateral moves by the Trump administration.
  • Vice President Mike Pence is greeted with silence during what he expected to be applause lines in his speech. In contrast to Merkel’s message of working together, Pence addressed a list of U.S. demands in our own interest.
  • Joe Biden also speaks at the summit and reassures our allies that this will pass, though allies say that the damage done will not be fixed anytime soon, no matter who succeeds Trump.
    • Allies agree that Trump is more a symptom than a cause of what’s going on in the U.S.
    • Allies also take it as a given that the liberal world order led by the U.S. has collapsed, and they wonder who will pick up the pieces.

5. Mike Pompeo begins his time in Europe for the summit by visiting the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban. He then moves on to Slovakia, where the journalist who exposed their government corruption was murdered last year. Finally he meets up with Pence in Poland at a forum to rally the EU and MidEast against Iran. Europeans weren’t going for that, so they were forced to add sessions on Syria, Yemen, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
6. Even though Trump is pulling our own troops out of Syria, he urges our allies to commit to sticking it out.
7. One of the confusing things in Trump’s declaration of national emergency is when he says the Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace prize for his role is easing North Korea tensions. That turns out to be true, but it leaves out the fact that the U.S. government asked Abe to do so. It turns out that two Norwegian politicians nominated Trump for the same reason.
8. The Trump administration has been accelerating a no-longer-secret program to cripple Iran’s military by sabotaging their weaponry. The program is also designed to isolate Iran’s economy. This program has been ongoing since the Bush (Jr.) administration.

Family Separation:

1. The Trump administration still separates families at the border, removing young children from their parents even though a court ruled they could no longer do that. The administration formally ended the policy last summer. Annunciation House, one of many non-profit organizations near the border, receives one or two calls each week about new cases of separations (and that’s just in El Paso).

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. California Governor Gavin Newsom announces a withdrawal of National Reserve troops from the border. He’ll leave a couple hundred there to help CBP with trafficking problems, and the rest will be redeployed to help prevent wildfires.
2. New Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar makes controversial comments about Israel, specifically around organized boycotts of Israeli companies and AIPAC funding of U.S. politicians. The Democratic House leadership rebukes Omar’s comments and call on her to apologize, which she later does.

• • Note, however, that pro-Israel lobbyists and donors spent more than $22 million on the last U.S. election cycle.
  • Trump calls on Omar to resign, saying we don’t have room for anti-Semitism. Which reminds me of that time when Trump said there were some fine people among the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!”
  • Representative Kevin McCarthy calls Omar out for anti-Semitism. Which reminds me of the that time he deleted a tweet about three Jewish businessmen trying to buy our elections (Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg).

3. Trump holds a rally in support of his wall at the border in El Paso, and Beto O’Rourke holds as counter rally down the street. Both draw similar sized crowds, despite Trump’s claims otherwise.
4. The Senate unanimously passes a bill making lynching a federal crime. They’ve been trying to pass something like this for 100 years. The Senate passed it last year, but the House didn’t take it up.
5. Tennessee joins the list of states that have introduced bills allowing foster and adoption agencies to discriminate against potential LGBTQ parents and other groups that don’t comply with their closely held religious beliefs.
6. The ACLU files a lawsuit against CBP on behalf of two American women who say that a border patrol agent detained them in a small town near the Canadian border in Montana because they were speaking Spanish. The agent told them that Spanish is very unheard of up there.
7. The Supreme Court agrees to hear a case about whether a citizenship question can be added to the 2020 Census.
8. A white supremacist gets a life sentence for stabbing a black man with a sword in order to start a worldwide race war. Crazy people out there…

Climate/EPA:

1. California adopts a plan to convert all city buses to electric by 2040 (and hopefully by 2035).
2. Mitch McConnell says he’ll bring the Green New Deal to a Senate vote. It’s not likely to pass there, where Republicans hold the majority. Both parties think this will force members of the other party to make uncomfortable choices.
3. The Senate passes a huge land conservation bill that:

• • Designates over a million acres for wilderness preservation in Utah, California, New Mexico, and Oregon.
  • Permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses proceeds from offshore oil and gas drilling to fund onshore conservation efforts.
  • Protects millions of acres from mining and drilling.
  • Creates five new national monuments in Mississippi, California, Utah, and Kentucky.
  • Expands national parks in California and Georgia.
  • Protects some national parks in Montana and Washington from mining.

4. The bill is likely to pass in the House as well. The bill has incredible bipartisan support, which makes me wonder how the administration was so successful at reducing the sizes of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante in order to allow mining and drilling.

• • And in case you were wondering, there are still ongoing lawsuits holding up development in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase.

5. Trump wants the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep an aging coal plant open. The plant purchases coal from one of Trump’s leading donors, Robert Murray (of Murray Energy). This is one of two underused coal plants that the TVA is considering shutting down.
6. The resolution that includes some funds for the border wall also creates a new national park: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan.
7. A federal judge in North Dakota dismisses a lawsuit brought by Energy Transfer Partners against several DAPL protesters, including Greenpeace. It was a pretty crazy lawsuit, trying to make a RICO case against protesters.

Budget/Economy:

1. The national debt surpasses $22 trillion for the first time. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it’ll keep growing and that by 2025 it will cost more to service the debt than what we’ll spend on defense.
2. In evidence of a strong job market, employers posted a record 7.3 million job openings in December. There were just 6.3 million unemployed Americans.
3. But then… retail sales fell dramatically in December—down 1.2% from November and the worst drop in nine years.
4. Seven million Americans are delinquent on their car payments by 90 days or more. Previously the highest number was around six million and that was following the Great Recession. Economists say that this is a sign that even with low unemployment and a strong economy, low-income and working-class families are struggling to pay their bills.
5. Following a series of teacher strikes across the country, teachers in Denver strike for better salaries, an end to exorbitant administrative salaries, and access to professional development.
6. Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announce the creation of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board to help develop job training programs. The board is made up of prominent executive officers of major companies and it will work with the National Council for the American Worker, which was created last year.
7. The House Finance Committee holds its first hearing of the session. It’s on the growing problem of homelessness in America.
8. Trump signs an executive order to help increase development and regulation of artificial intelligence to make sure the U.S. stays ahead of the technology. The EO creates a new American Artificial Intelligence initiative that aims to improve education in the field, provide access to needed technology and tools, and promote international cooperation.
9. As a result of the 2017 tax cuts, corporations spent $770 billion on stock buybacks in 2018. They expect to spend $940 billion on buybacks this year. In 2017, corporations spent about $150 million on employee compensation, mostly in the form of bonuses. No such employee perks have been announced yet for this year.
10. Amazon had $11.2 billion in profits last year, but won’t pay any federal taxes this year. They didn’t pay last year either, and are actually looking at getting a $129 million rebate. It also looks like Netflix won’t pay any U.S. taxes either.

Elections:

1. Trump downsizes two federal task forces that help safeguard our elections from foreign interference. The task forces were created in response to Russia’s meddling in our 2016 elections.
2. A federal judge rules that a State Senate district in Mississippi is unfairly gerrymandered to dilute the African-American vote.
3. We now have six women in the running for President of the United States. #YearOfTheWoman

Miscellaneous:

1. Brock Long resigns his position as FEMA administrator. Peter Gaynor will serve as acting administrator.
2. Sprint and T-Mobile come to Congress to defend their merger, and telecom companies end up getting an earful from lawmakers over spotty cell coverage in the U.S.
3. The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Education issues a scathing report on the department’s handling of student loans. The report says that inconsistent oversight gives lenders a sense that noncompliance is OK. This lets lenders ignore the rules, cause harm to borrowers, and hold on to money they should be returned to the government.
4. Remember how Trump’s doctor said last week that he’s in great health and will be healthy for the next two years and beyond? He forgot to mention that Trump also nudged up into the obese category.
5. A gunman kills five people and wounds five police officers at the Henry Pratt Co. manufacturing plant near Chicago.
6. Trump’s nomination to replace Nikki Haley as Ambassador to the UN withdraws her name from consideration. Heather Nauert, who IMO has done a bang up job as spokesperson for the State Department, cites concerns about her family as the reason.
7. This is probably my favorite news tidbit of the week. Trump says he’d like to start a new 4th of July tradition… maybe a parade or gathering at the Capitol building. Except both are already a tradition.
8. The White House security specialist who raised concerns about security clearance for certain administration officials (ahem, cough cough, Jared Kushner) asks for whistleblower protections.

Polls:

1. 56% of Americans trust Mueller’s facts vs. 33% who trust Trump’s facts.
2. 81% of Americans think Mueller’s report should be released in its entirety to the public.
3. 33% of voters support another government shutdown in order to get Trump’s border wall; 60% oppose it (this was taken before the declaration of national emergency).
4. The split for support of the wall is pretty even, with 47% of voters supporting it and 47% opposed.
5. Trump’s approval rating bounced back up to it’s normal (around 41%) shortly after the shutdown ended (it tanked during the shutdown).