Michelle Cottle

‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the House, not a creature was stirring — even though a chunk of the federal government will shut down at week’s end unless Congress and President Donald Trump reconcile his demand for $5 billion in border-wall funding with Democratic lawmakers’ position that they’d rather eat their own toenails than approve a penny for his folly.

Lest anyone have any doubts, if a shutdown does come to pass at midnight Friday, when parts of the government are set to run out of funding, this president will own it 110 percent. Lawmakers, in a rare display of bipartisan, bicameral unity, have made this abundantly clear — in large part because Trump has given them no other choice.

Ordinarily, the strategy in such a situation is for each team to try to hang a shutdown around the neck of the other. Trump made that impossible for Republicans last Tuesday when, during a televised sit-down with Democratic congressional leaders, he said he’d be “proud” to “take the mantle” for grinding government operations to a halt. “I’m not going to blame you for it,” he promised Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

At that moment, you could almost see Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi begin to quiver with glee.

Republicans, by contrast, promptly began lamenting that no one had any clue how to avert the looming crisis. “There is no discernible plan — none that’s been disclosed,” Sen. John Cornyn, the party’s No. 2 man in the Senate, told reporters last week.

“No one has any idea what the play call is — we don’t know what’s going on,” Rep. Ryan Costello, who is retiring within weeks, told The New York Times.

Trump’s embrace of a shutdown has given lawmakers on both sides the freedom to throw up their hands and claim this whole mess is beyond their control. The mood around the Capitol is less one of urgency and activity than of fatalism. Last week, Sen. Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Congress looked to be “headed down the road to nowhere.”

In the House, both teams have proclaimed impotence, claiming it’s all up to the president and the Senate. Not only did Speaker Paul Ryan fail to mobilize lawmakers for a vote on Trump’s $5 billion, but many lame-duck members couldn’t be bothered to show up for work at all. (Nothing like an electoral rout to take the starch out of a conference.) Counting, much less whipping, the vote became all but impossible. By Thursday, House leaders gave up and sent members home for a six-day weekend.

On the Senate side, Schumer’s office is insisting that everything depends on whether the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, can persuade the president to embrace a deal that Democrats can live with. The latest offer on the table is for a one-year “continuing resolution,” or CR, that would delay the fight by temporarily funding parts of the government at current levels.

Some Hill Republicans think the smart move is for Trump to push for a much shorter, two-week CR that would kick the battle into early January, allowing Republicans to try to shift some of the blame onto the incoming Democratic House majority. But as of Monday, the president reportedly wasn’t keen on this option.

There have been rumblings that Trump might come around to the bipartisan compromise passed by the Senate earlier this year, which included $1.6 billion for fortifying existing border barriers. But no one has any sense of when, or even if, that might happen, and the signals emanating from the White House suggest the president isn’t yet in an accommodating mood. Even as Sen. John Barrasso, an incoming member of leadership, went on “Face the Nation” Sunday to stress the need to keep the government open, the administration dispatched hard-liner Stephen Miller to declare that, absent wall funding, a shutdown was “absolutely” on the table. During his executive time Monday, Trump tweeted that a wall is vital for “good Boarder Security.”

Whatever his ultimate plan — assuming he has one — the president is clearly looking to wring every ounce of drama he can from this game of chicken. These standoffs jibe neatly with his belief that negotiations, and life in general, are a never-ending battle of nerve. He lives to make the other side blink and is eager to signal that he’ll do whatever it takes to win.

Shutdowns are especially fertile ground for Trump because they pit him against a political establishment that, as he sees it, obstinately refuses to pay proper deference to his genius. He has repeatedly voiced frustration at Congress’ unwillingness to lie back and let him run things as he sees fit. Threatening to throw the government into chaos — to furlough, or in the case of personnel deemed “essential,” withhold paychecks from hundreds of thousands of workers, including Food and Drug Administration inspectors, Transportation Security Administration inspectors and, paradoxically, Border Patrol agents — lets him exact a bit of cathartic payback, reminding lawmakers just how uncomfortable he can make their lives.

Chest thumping and trash talking remain central to Trump’s brand as a disrupter. His followers thrill to him precisely because of his pugilistic, vaguely unhinged personality. The more he rails against politics as usual, the more his base swoons.

As for those who see Trump as behaving like a petulant toddler, he doesn’t have to face their electoral judgment for another two years — an eternity in politics.

For now, the president can relish playing the tough guy. Even if he winds up folding, he’ll doubtless toss out some alternative facts and declare victory. As usual, he has ensured that this holiday season’s drama is all about him.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/editorials/government-shutdown-2018.html" id="95f50a3a-41b6-3120-a256-d888ea6e6753">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

Chaos? A Trump Specialty

Rep. Elise Stefanik considers last month’s midterm elections a “watershed moment” — and not in a good way.

Stefanik, a Republican from upstate New York, is sick of her party losing female members. In the new Congress, the number of Republican women in the House will plummet to 13 from 23. That’s the lowest in more than two decades, even as a majority of the incoming Democrats in the House takeover are women. Republican women also lost significant ground in state races. As for voter support, 59 percent of women went Democratic, and the overall gender gap hit a whopping 23 points.

This meltdown should be a “wake-up call” for every member of her party, said Stefanik in a phone interview. While the reasons for Republicans’ lady troubles are many and varied, the dearth of women’s voices at the table makes it all the more unlikely that the situation will improve.

When Stefanik, at 34 one of the youngest members of her conference, pushed the issue at a recent meeting, her colleagues — about 90 percent of whom are men — displayed little motivation to address it. “I don’t think there has been enough introspection,” she said.

More troubling was the total absence of ideas for tackling the problem: “I wanted a specific strategy for how we do better to ensure that the conference reflects the American public.”

And so Stefanik decided to take action herself. She has begun touting a new crusade to get more Republican women elected to Congress by having her leadership PAC “play big” in primary races. Last cycle, as head of recruitment for the National Republican Congressional Committee — the first woman to hold that position — she drafted around 100 female candidates for the midterms, only to see many of them fall in the primaries. The NRCC has a policy of not playing favorites in primary races. But, citing her own experience as a first-time candidate in 2014, Stefanik stressed that early support is vital in what can be an “overwhelming” process. “This needs to be a real priority,” she said.

Stefanik’s new project may seem like an uncontroversial step — a no-brainer. Except that the Republican Party has always been skittish, derisive even, about prioritizing female candidates, sniffily claiming to reject identity politics in favor of backing the “best candidate” without regard to gender or race.

This means that, going forward, Stefanik will be battling not only a fired-up Democratic opposition, but also deeply entrenched elements within her own party.

Sure enough, upon announcing her effort, Stefanik promptly faced pushback from the NRCC.

Rep. Tom Emmer, the committee’s new chairman, pronounced her plan “a mistake,” telling Roll Call, “It shouldn’t be just based on looking for a specific set of ingredients — gender, race, religion — and then we’re going to play in the primary.”

The idea that the Republican Party under President Donald Trump doesn’t indulge in identity politics is laughable. In addition to fanning racial grievance, Trump has aggressively pitched himself as a defender of Traditional Manhood against feminists and #MeToo advocates, reflexively defending accused predators and lamenting how scary it is to be a young man these days.

Emmer’s comments, in fact, struck some Republican women as Exhibit A of how a shameful number of men in their party still don’t grasp the gravity of the situation. “Totally tone deaf,” lamented one strategist. “Antagonistic when he didn’t need to be.”

According to Andrea Bozek, the spokeswoman for Winning For Women, a super PAC aimed at getting more Republican women elected, “Someone has to be pushing the panic button — we’re at code red.” If women “don’t see themselves” and “don’t feel like they have a voice” in the party, she warned, “those numbers are going to dwindle” even further.

There’s no reason the party can’t take a stand on this, agreed Jean Card, a communications strategist active in Republican politics. “How about: Men and women are different and do approach tasks differently and do approach life differently? That’s a Republican value.”

Stefanik finds the whole debate over identity politics “outdated.”

“I’m from a different generation,” she said. “I really leaned into talking about the fact that I am a young woman.” At campaign events, she would boast that she “wasn’t what most people picture when they picture a traditional Republican candidate.”

She also aimed to “talk about every issue as a women’s issue.” As an example, she cited medical-device manufacturing, a field that employs a large number of women in her district but doesn’t exactly qualify as a traditional women’s issue. “Some colleagues would say that’s identity politics,” she said. “I think it’s a smarter, more personalized way of communicating.”

Of course, the Republican refrain that “all issues are women’s issues” is often used to shift discussion away from policy areas that have been helping Democrats expand the parties’ gender gap — areas like as health care, gun safety, reproductive rights and this president’s irrepressible sexism. Liz Cheney, the House Republicans’ newly elected chairwoman, hit this theme soon after the midterms, denouncing the Democrats’ approach to wooing women as “offensive” and “paternalistic.”

Another way to characterize it might be “highly effective.”

Stefanik isn’t looking to have a public brawl over ideology. She’s simply pushing to get more women a seat at her party’s table. Who’s to say where things could go from there?

“Elise Stefanik is no dummy,” said Card. “She knows that a political party is reformed in the primaries. That’s what’s going on here.”

Which may explain why some of Stefanik’s male colleagues don’t seem all that enthusiastic about her plans.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/gop-women-republican-stefanik.html" id="f2f52f28-f861-37b6-a816-8b36892b060e">The New York Times</a>.

Can More Women Join the GOP Boys' Club?

Talk about gripping political theater. President Donald Trump’s televised sit-down with Democratic congressional leaders in the Oval Office on Tuesday was fast-paced, spicy and even occasionally edifying — though perhaps not in the way its participants intended.

Topic A was Trump’s cherished border wall and, more specifically, whether he really intends to shut down parts of the government next week if Congress doesn’t give him the $5 billion in funding he’s demanding.

Starting out, Trump tried to keep things “friendly,” by his terms at least: He spouted his usual folderol about the indispensability of a wall; he spun scary fictions about hordes of terrorists, criminals and — in a slightly fresher twist — contagion-carrying migrants swarming the southern border; he mansplained to Nancy Pelosi, the once and future speaker of the House, how the legislative process works; he shrugged off multiple jabs at his habitual dishonesty by Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer; and, as usual, he cheerfully ignored his vice president, Mike Pence, who spent the entirety of the 15-plus-minute confab doing his best impression of a throw pillow.

“See! We get along!” the president enthused after his Democratic guests agreed that border security is important.

But after being gigged by Schumer about having repeatedly threatened a shutdown, Trump couldn’t resist going all Tough Guy for the cameras. He sat up extra straight, gave his suit jacket that who’s-your-daddy? snap he so loves, and thrust his chin at the Senate leader:

“You know what? You want to put that on my — I’ll take it!” he challenged. “If we don’t get what we want — one way or the other, whether it’s through you, through a military, through anything you want to call — I will shut down the government, absolutely. ... And I’ll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck.”

And with that, the president moved to wrap up the discussion, leaving Chuck, Nancy and everyone else to marvel at the weirdness of what had just transpired — and, just as important, what it all means.

Short answer: Whatever happens with the funding standoff, the next two years of divided government promise to be a freak show of finger-pointing and point-scoring and people talking over and past one another with no hope of, or even much interest in, engaging the other side. While entertaining, this also risks taking the level of dysfunction to new depths likely to further erode public faith in government — no small feat considering that the public already holds the government in lower esteem than your average war criminal.

Indeed, if Tuesday’s preview was any indication, Trump will spend the rest of his term talking smack, patronizing and tweaking congressional Democrats, and playing ever more wildly to his base, even as Democrats express growing frustration about their inability to have a rational conversation with a president who lives — with apologies to Mr. Rogers — in his own Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

Both Pelosi and Schumer looked alternately bemused and exasperated by their visit, and both pleaded that the negotiations were best conducted in private. At one point, Trump scolded Pelosi: “But it’s not bad, Nancy. It’s called transparency.” This sent the House leader into a flustered effort to insist that you cannot have “transparency” when the parties involved aren’t operating with the same set of facts. “Let us have a conversation where we don’t have to contradict in public the statistics that you put forth,” she urged later in the conversation. The data Trump turned to “are not factual” she said. “We have to have an evidence-based conversation.”

Translation: The only thing Pelosi considered transparent about this encounter was Trump’s dishonesty.

Now, maybe relations will be better behind the scenes, when there’s less impetus to grandstand or score points. (While Trump was the one in full diva mode, Schumer fired off a couple of good zingers.) Maybe progress can happen here and there, on select issues. (Criminal justice reform?) But, as far as public encounters go, don’t look for anything more productive any time soon.

After the meeting, Pelosi was less restrained, reportedly offering this piquant assessment to her conference colleagues: “It was so wild. It goes to show you: You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.”

As for the issue of wall funding, the Democratic leader was even more cutting: “It’s like a manhood thing with him — as if manhood can be associated with him,” she said. “This wall thing.”

Buckle up, people. With or without a shutdown, things promise to get even bumpier.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/opinion/trump-pelosi-schumer-wall-shutdown.html" id="d4a8455d-3e76-3dea-a01d-b0ae42cc8ada">The New York Times</a>.

The Chuck and Nancy and Donald Show

<h1>(Editorial Observer): Round 1 of the Democratic presidential primary debates is history, leaving the public with much to chew over. So many candidates. So many promises. So many governing visions for where to take the nation.</h1>

Here’s the stark reality: Regardless of who captures the Democratic nomination, and possibly the White House, next year, his or her grand plans will be for naught unless there is a shift in the U.S. Senate.

There will always be squabbling, showboating and foot-dragging in the upper chamber. That is how the Founding Fathers wanted it. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, however, has devoted much of his career to perfecting the art of obstructionism, weaponizing Senate gridlock like no one before him. He calls himself the “Grim Reaper,” having turned his chamber into a legislative graveyard.

When it comes to putting the interests of himself and his Republican Party over that of the public, he has no scruples. Just ask Merrick Garland.

A telling moment from Wednesday’s Democratic debate was when the candidates were asked how, as president, they would prevent McConnell from jamming up their Supreme Court nominations like he had Garland’s. None had a good answer.

To be fair, there is no good answer. Restoring sanity to the Senate requires removing McConnell from power, either by unseating him or by stripping him of his majority.

To control the Senate, Democrats need a net gain of four seats. Already, the fever to dislodge President Donald Trump has complicated this effort as the party has struggled to recruit marquee challengers in possibly competitive states. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was hoping to woo Beto O’Rourke to run in Texas against Sen. John Cornyn. He also made early pitches for Gov. Steve Bullock to run in Montana and former Gov. John Hickenlooper in Colorado. To no avail. The lure of the Senate this cycle cannot compete with the chance, no matter how minuscule, of winning the presidency — or, barring that, the vice-presidential slot or a choice Cabinet post.

Beyond the presidential field, other potential recruits ran a cost-benefit analysis and decided a Senate race wasn’t worth it. Among the more painful failures was Georgia, where party leaders had labored to persuade Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her race for governor under sketchy circumstances last fall, to take on Sen. David Perdue.

In Kentucky, a challenger to McConnell has yet to emerge. Party leaders and activists have been pushing hard for Amy McGrath, the former fighter pilot who lost a tough race for Congress last year. In March, the grassroots-funded group Ditch Mitch announced its campaign to draft McGrath.

This is not to say that Democrats haven’t scored some wins, including signing up Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, to run in Arizona. Now, as the field begins to jell, party leaders are pushing the message that they’re pursuing a Senate strategy much like the one that worked in the House last year, offering fresh faces and unconventional candidates who suit the reformer-outsider spirit of the times.

Determined to keep a spotlight on the Senate, Democrats are aiming to elevate McConnell’s profile. Senate candidates are featuring him in their launch videos. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is going after him hard on social media, and other McConnell-focused projects are in the works.

The Republican leader has expressed delight at all the attention. “I was thrilled to dominate the discussion last night,” he told reporters after the Wednesday night debate.

This was a bit of overstatement, but anyone interested in a remotely functional government would do well to work for change in the Senate. Trump may pose a particularly vivid threat to American democracy, but a Senate commanded by McConnell presents a potentially more enduring, if far more conventional, one.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/opinion/senate-democrats-mcconnell-2020.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Here’s the stark reality: Regardless of who captures the Democratic nomination, and possibly the White House, next year, his or her grand plans will be for naught unless there is a shift in the U.S. Senate.

Hey, Democrats, what about the senate?

<h1>(Editorial Observer): President Donald Trump officially started his 2020 re-election campaign Tuesday night in Orlando, Florida. If the kickoff rally was any indication, Season 2 of this political reality show promises to be largely a rehash of Season 1 — except darker, whinier and even more divisive.</h1>

The throng that came out to celebrate Trump’s announcement was big and boisterous. The president may be broadly unpopular, but to much of the Republican base, he is a cult idol — Justin Bieber with a faux tan and an unearthly comb-over.

Trump said his campaign received more than 120,000 requests for tickets to the event. Supporters began lining up 30-plus hours before showtime, hauling in sleeping bags, coolers and stadium chairs. Rainstorms on Tuesday drove the crowd to seek shelter, but could not dampen its ardor. Inside and outside the arena, people danced, whooped and reveled in MAGA-mania.

There was little new in Trump’s performance. He did not offer a governing vision for a second term. His 76-minute speech was the usual brew of aggrandizement, aggrievement and demonization of political foes. He vilified Democrats as “ruthless,” “unhinged” monsters dedicated to “the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American dream.” He whined about his persecution by the “fake news” and the deep-state rogues who perpetrated the Russia “witch hunt.” He devoted so much time to attacking “Crooked Hillary” that it seemed as if a confused aide might have accidentally loaded one of his 2016 speeches into the teleprompters.

While delivering a jolt of adrenaline to his fans, the act has lost its freshness — perhaps inevitable considering that Trump has conducted some five dozen of these rallies since taking office. Every so often, he would pause in his remarks to wander about the stage, basking in the adulation. Whenever the crowd erupted in one of the chants that have become a staple of his rallies — “Build the Wall!” “CNN sucks!” “Lock her up!” — the president glowed. If nothing else, Trump made clear that he has no interest in expanding his appeal this cycle. He is digging in with his base, for whom he can do no wrong.

But 2020 is not 2016, and running as an establishment-bashing outsider is harder from inside the Oval Office. In the kickoff of his insurgency four years ago, Trump drifted down the escalator of Trump Tower and sold himself as the antidote to politics as usual. Dismissing America’s political leaders as “losers,” he declared the American dream dead and pitched himself as the only candidate who could bring it back “bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

In Orlando, Trump reprised that theme. “The fact is the American dream is back,” he crowed. “It is bigger and better and stronger than ever before.” Two and a half years into his presidency, however, many of the miracles he vowed to perform have not come to pass. He has not repealed and replaced Obamacare with something better, nor stopped manufacturing jobs from flowing overseas. He has not rebuilt America’s infrastructure, brought Iran to heel or tamed the national debt.

This is not to say he hasn’t achieved anything — tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments and criminal justice reform to name a few. He has a record now for people to judge, and he owns the good and the bad alike.

It is a tricky line that Trump will attempt to toe over the next 18 months. As the sitting president, he needs voters to feel good about the job he has done — good enough to turn out and give him another four years. The animating force of his political success, however, has always been cultural grievance. He is the master of stoking voters’ most primal anxieties and resentments. Tuesday’s speech suggests that going forward, the president’s struggle to reconcile these conflicting imperatives will not be pretty — or good for the country.

If his message in 2016 was that the political establishment and cultural elitists were ignoring or sneering at regular Americans, his message this time is that the opposition despises and is aggressively plotting to destroy MAGA country. “Our patriotic movement has been under assault from the very first day,” he declared.

As Trump tells it, this disdain for “hardworking patriots” is at the root of the attacks on his leadership. It’s not that Democrats are out to get him; they are out to get his people. “They went after my family, my business, my finances, my employees, almost everyone I have ever known or worked with, but they are really going after you,” he told the Orlando crowd.

Despite this unprecedented assault, Trump said, he — and by extension, his people — have prevailed. “We took on a political machine that tried to take away your voice and your vote,” he said. “But we will never let them do that.”

So, even as Trump brags of having made America great again, he does it in a way that fuels voters’ anger and fear.

Trump stressed to the crowd the importance of next year’s vote: “This election is not merely a verdict on the amazing progress we’ve made. It’s a verdict on the un-American conduct of those who tried to undermine our great democracy and undermine you.”

In that, at last, he spoke the raw truth.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/trump-2020-rally-orlando.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

The throng that came out to celebrate Trump’s announcement was big and boisterous. The president may be broadly unpopular, but to much of the Republican base, he is a cult idol — Justin Bieber with a faux tan and an unearthly comb-over.

The Trump show, season 2, begins

<h1>(Editorial Observer): With the announcement last week that Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., will not run for reelection next year, Republicans in Congress suffered yet another setback in their struggle to convince the American public that they are more than a collection of angry white men.</h1>

Brooks’ departure is embarrassing for a party that lost ground among female voters in the 2018 midterms and tilted ever more male in its congressional seats. A fourth-term lawmaker, she is one of only 13 women out of 198 House Republicans. (Of 235 House Democrats, 89 are women.) She is among the more moderate voices in a caucus desperate to win back the educated, affluent, suburban women (and men) who abandoned the party in November. Most awkwardly, as head of recruitment for the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, she is in charge of persuading women to run for office on the Republican line.

Brooks is sensitive to how her departure could reflect on her team and has repeatedly insisted she’s leaving for strictly personal reasons. “I’m not retiring because I’m upset with the Republican Party, because I’m upset with our leadership, because I’m upset with the president or vice president,” she told a reporter last week. She stressed to another: “This really is not about the party. It’s not about the politics.”

Despite her planned departure, Brooks is expected to continue her work at the NRCC. “Susan has assured me that she will be increasing her recruitment efforts,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, the committee’s chairman, “so we are full steam ahead.”

The Trump era has been rough for the Republican Party’s efforts to address its enduring difficulties in attracting women candidates and voters. Whatever women think of the party’s positions on issues such as reproductive rights, health care and gun safety, many are put off by President Donald Trump’s divisive politics, belligerent style and personal sexism. In the midterms, Democrats claimed 59% of women voters. The shift by white, college-educated women voters away from Republicans played a significant role in handing control of the House to Democrats.

After Republican women watched their numbers in the House drop from 23 to 13 (the lowest in almost a quarter-century) and the gender gap grow (to the biggest in a quarter-century), they hit the panic button. They fear that, if women don't see themselves represented by and as having a voice in the party, their support will continue to slip.

While Brooks led the recruitment charge at the NRCC, Elise Stefanik of New York, the committee’s previous recruitment chief, rebranded her leadership PAC to bolster women in primary races. Missouri’s Ann Wagner took aim at the suburbs and has been recruiting and financing women and minority candidates. She also rebooted the dormant Suburban Caucus to push a policy agenda aimed at suburban voters — including all those affluent, educated white women who defected to the Democrats.

Outside groups also increased their efforts. A new group, Winning for Women, arose to support “free-market conservative women running for federal office.” The group’s political action arm is spending six figures in a primary runoff next month in North Carolina, where its pick, Joan Perry, is facing a state lawmaker, Greg Murphy, who is backed by Rep. Mark Meadows, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. All 13 Republican congresswomen are supporting Perry, and the race is seen as an early gauge of the party’s diversification strategy.

Other early signs have been underwhelming. As of mid-May, just 38 of 172 declared Republican House challengers were women, according to The Associated Press. On the Democratic side, 84 of 222 declared challengers were women — far smaller than their share of the population, or the party’s base, but a respectable edge over Republicans. In terms of both money and a cohesive plan for advancing women candidates, Republican consultants and candidates acknowledge that they remain outmatched by Democrats.

The party has missed opportunities to raise the profile and influence of women incumbents. Of the seven members of the House Republican leadership, there is only one woman, Liz Cheney, the conference chairwoman. Of the 14 members of the Democratic House leadership, five are women, including the speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The Senate is similarly skewed. Of the six members of the Republican leadership — seven, if you count the president pro tempore, a post traditionally bestowed on the basis of seniority — one is a woman. On the Democratic side, six of 11 leadership positions are held by women.

Both the NRCC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee are led by men. The Democratic campaign committees for both the House and Senate are led by women.

Brooks may well be leaving for purely personal reasons, but Republicans’ difficulties in attracting, elevating and retaining women leaders are systemic. And it’s not just the president who is to blame.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/republican-party-women.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Brooks’ departure is embarrassing for a party that lost ground among female voters in the 2018 midterms and tilted ever more male in its congressional seats. A fourth-term lawmaker, she is one of only 13 women out of 198 House Republicans.

Mind the GOP gender gap

This is the advice — some might even call it a warning — that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been drilling into her caucus of late. If Democrats want to send President Donald Trump packing in 2020, she told The New York Times recently, they must resist being pulled toward the hard, partisan fringes in ways likely to turn off the middle.

Along with a slow and steady course on oversight — no impeachment talk, please! — the speaker is pressing a policy agenda more evolutionary than revolutionary. Democrats dominated the midterms, she said, with a “simple message” of better health care, better jobs and less swampy politics. “We did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party.”

For a clearer definition of “exuberances,” see: the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Pelosi’s is a cautious prescription — one that, in addition to frustrating the less patient elements of her party, clashes with her long-standing image as a crusading San Francisco liberal. This incongruity flows partly from the fact that her caricature was always just that, a partisan construct Republicans used to fire up their base. But it also reflects the political landscape in which the speaker now finds herself the nation’s most powerful Democrat.

Count it among the ironies of the Trump era: After years of being vilified as the embodiment of “San Francisco values,” Pelosi has become the ambassador for political moderation and mainstream policy.

The use of “San Francisco” as a partisan smear did not start with Pelosi. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, then-Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick, a foreign policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, blamed “San Francisco Democrats” for her party’s dovishness. (The Democratic convention had just taken place in San Francisco.) In 1996, Rep. Frank Riggs, R-Calif., slammed his Democratic challenger, Michela Alioto, for her “San Francisco values.”

Still, Pelosi’s political ascent did kick things up a notch. In the 2006 midterms, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, an innovator in partisan blood sport, hit the trail for Republicans, flogging the specter of a Speaker Pelosi — she was then the minority leader — forcing “San Francisco values” on a hapless nation. This line of attack swept through conservative circles, ripening into one of the Republican Party’s juiciest and most enduring rallying points.

The speaker’s politics are progressive, but she’s never been a purist. She was born into an old-school Democratic political dynasty in Baltimore. Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., served in Congress and as the mayor of Baltimore; her brother Thomas III also had a stint as mayor. Deal-cutting and constituent-tending are in her blood — and were crucial as she sweated, charmed and slashed her way to the head of the congressional boys’ club.

Pelosi, to be sure, has always had an edge. In 2002, The Washington Post noted that she’d been in Congress over a decade before trying for a leadership post. “In part it is temperament,” The Post wrote. “Pelosi is an unabashed advocate, less comfortable as a conciliator finding a middle road.”

But with the energy in today’s Democratic Party flowing from the left, Pelosi often finds herself herding her team back toward the center. Whatever her ideological sympathies, she does not intend to let woke progressives damage members from more competitive districts and imperil her majority. The bigger and more diverse the caucus, the harder she has to work to keep it in balance.

“Sometimes part of leadership is pushing against currents so that the caucus never tilts too far off — I wouldn’t say the center — but the mainstream,” Chicago’s departing mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who served in leadership with Pelosi during the George W. Bush years, told me.

Pelosi remains dismissive, in that grandmotherly way of hers, of some of the bolder ideas backed by caucus rabble-rousers. This month, she oversaw the passage of environmental legislation focused on keeping the United States in the Paris agreement on climate change — a far cry from what she dismissed as the “Green Dream or whatever” championed by freshman phenom Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. And the speaker supports shoring up Obamacare rather than starting from scratch with a single-payer plan.

Most delicately, Pelosi keeps pumping the brakes on impeachment. In the past week, she has repeatedly charged that the president is “goading” Democrats to go down that politically treacherous road. “Every single day he’s just like taunting, taunting, taunting, because he knows that it would be very divisive in the country, but he doesn’t really care,” she said at a Tuesday event. “He just wants to solidify his base.”

Caught between an outrageous president and her outraged base, Pelosi increasingly resembles less a “San Francisco” crusader than the staid grown-up in the room.

All this adulting is playing well with the public. Since Election Day last fall, the speaker’s favorability numbers have ticked up, up, up. She has gained 10 points in Civiqs’ tracking polls, with similar gains in other surveys.

If this keeps up, Republicans may soon need to experiment with a different line of attack — or find a new nemesis altogether.

This article originally appeared in <a id="00ee4082-6e01-4c4d-9682-e91f45b305bf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/opinion/nancy-pelosi-democrats.html">The New York Times</a>.

Can Nancy Pelosi keep the Democrats in line?

(Editorial Observer): “Own the center-left. Own the mainstream.”

At 43 days and counting, this information drought supplants the previous record of 42 days without a briefing, set in March — which broke the 41-day record set in January.

At some point, one cannot help but wonder: What is the job of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who holds the title of White House press secretary?

Conducting daily briefings was once a core function of the press secretary. The White House put its spin on the news of the day; reporters pushed for more information or clarification. Somewhere in all the give-and-take, the public interest was served.

Under President Donald Trump, such sessions have all but vanished. Since the first of the year, Sanders has held two formal briefings. She has also developed a frustrating reputation for not responding to media inquiries in general.

This presumably pleases her boss. Trump prefers to broadcast to the public from the safety of Twitter, where truth and accountability are not held at a premium. In January, he even directed Sanders (in a tweet) “not to bother” with briefings anymore. Is a White House press secretary unwilling to interact with the press earning her taxpayer-funded salary?

In Sanders’ case, the growing lack of access is arguably less troubling than the lack of credibility — a problem highlighted in last Thursday’s release of the Mueller report.

The special counsel’s office detailed several instances in which, in her official capacity, Sanders flagrantly lied to the media and the American public.

After the firing of the FBI director, James Comey, in May 2017, Sanders, then the deputy press secretary, claimed on two occasions that she had heard from “countless” current and former agents that the “rank-and-file” had lost confidence in him. When later questioned by Mueller’s office, Sanders admitted that this was untrue — or, rather, that it had been a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment.”

Equally false was Sanders’ claim that Trump did not dictate a misleading statement for his son Donald Jr. concerning the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Russian go-betweens and senior members of the Trump campaign. Trump’s lawyers told investigators that the president had in fact dictated the statement.

Beyond a willingness to jettison the facts when convenient, Sanders has been true, if not to her role, at least to her boss’s priorities in her reflex when caught to shift into attack mode, railing about unjust persecution. Asked about her “heat of the moment” defense of the Comey untruth on ABC’s “Good Morning America” last week, Sanders said, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t a robot like the Democrat Party that went out for two and a half years and stated time and time again that there was definitely Russian collusion between the president and his campaign.”

Such responses surely endear the press secretary to this president. While they don’t reflect well upon her, they testify first and foremost to how ill-suited Trump is to his own role.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d381d0ba-1de3-48da-aa97-16a275230937" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/sarah-huckabee-sanders.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer): Tuesday saw yet another record broken by the Trump White House: the longest run without an official news media briefing.

Meet the press? Don't bother

While divided government complicates the already dim prospects for legislative progress, the confirmation of presidential appointees should be simpler — especially after the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, greased the process by slashing debate time on most nominees to two hours from 30.

Instead, President Donald Trump has been making senators’ lives ever more difficult in this area, proposing nominees seemingly purpose-built to cause distress. Some of his choices are unqualified; others are so nakedly partisan or ideologically extreme that they unnerve even conservative lawmakers. More than one has driven multiple Republicans to take the hazardous step of publicly disagreeing with their loyalty-obsessed president.

For the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Trump has been toying with two contentious possibilities: Stephen Moore, an economics pundit and former Trump campaign adviser with a reputation for being reliably wrong; and Herman Cain, a former pizza executive whose own presidential run in 2012 was crippled by multiple allegations of sexual harassment. Both men have expressed enthusiasm for adopting the gold standard.

Both are also devout Trump fans, and their possible addition to the Fed is regarded as a reflection of the president’s desire to gut its independence.

Cain’s vulnerabilities have already prompted four Republican senators — Cory Gardner, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Kevin Cramer — to announce that they would vote against him if he were nominated. Barring his winning Democratic support, this quartet would be enough to doom his chances.

Republicans are still pondering a challenge to Moore, who has raised alarms on professional as well as personal grounds (the IRS claims he owes $75,000 in back taxes). He admits knowing next to nothing about monetary policy, and his opinion writing over the years has drawn criticism from economists of diverse views. As Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan put it, “More than possibly any other economist in modern America, he has a track record of getting the big issues wrong.” Wall Street isn’t crazy about him, either.

Even more unsettling for Republicans has been the president’s spring cleaning at the Department of Homeland Security, spearheaded by his adviser Stephen Miller. Peeved that some of his policies have yet to be realized, like denying welfare benefits to legal immigrants and stripping child migrants of court-ordered protections, Miller has been targeting officials he considers insufficiently harsh. In recent days, the president has ousted a number of key officials, including Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whom he had long scorned as “weak” on border security.

To replace Nielsen, the White House has floated the names of such figures as Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s former attorney general, and Kris Kobach, Kansas’ former secretary of state. Both are immigration hard-liners. Kobach, who oversaw Trump’s failed voter fraud commission, has a reputation so toxic that multiple Republican senators have rushed to head off his nomination. John Cornyn of Texas, a member of leadership, declared that he could not support Kobach. Pat Roberts, from Kobach’s home state, proclaimed him unconfirmable — “Don’t go there,” he advised — and even Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a chronic presidential pleaser, said this would be “a tough one.”

Cuccinelli has drawn the ire of none other than McConnell. The majority leader is said to have reminded his troops at a closed-door lunch last week that Cuccinelli heads the Senate Conservatives Fund, an anti-establishment political action committee that McConnell sees as having cost his team seats in past elections by championing unpalatable candidates. In 2014, the group backed a Tea Party challenger to McConnell, a transgression not likely to be forgotten by the leader. Ever. On Thursday, McConnell told reporters that he had expressed his “lack of enthusiasm” for Cuccinelli.

That’s Senate-speak for: No way this guy is getting through my chamber.

More firings are anticipated, even as more Republicans bemoan the chaos. Chuck Grassley, the Senate’s most senior Republican, is trying to prevent the dismissal of the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, who is a former Grassley staffer. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Romney of Utah have voiced concerns that the “growing leadership void” is “seriously troubling.”

Republican lawmakers also express unease about the president’s eagerness to increase his power at the expense of theirs. Critical departments are being steered by advisers like Miller and by “acting” officials, whose temporary status lets them skip the inconvenient step of being confirmed by Congress. As Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia recently noted, this trend is “problematic because it doesn’t give us as members the oversight that we need to have.”

It’s heartening to see Republicans scrambling to contain some of the president’s more erratic impulses. (An unfavorable election outcome tends to focus the mind.) But they have only themselves to blame. Having let Trump have his way for so long, they can hardly be surprised that he continues to act as if he is accountable to no one.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e391e2f7-b321-4085-a181-7d95eaaee6cf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/opinion/trump-nominees.html">The New York Times</a>.

Trump's nominees: Too much even for the die-hards

(Editorial Observer): These are vexing times for Senate Republicans.

As President Donald Trump continues his mad purge of the Department of Homeland Security, a sinister figure is emerging as the driving force behind all the chaos: Stephen Miller, the president’s top immigration adviser.

A fierce restrictionist, Miller seems to have rarely met an immigrant he didn’t want to deport. He is among the hardest of hard-liners, known for spurring his boss to pursue ever more draconian measures.

Not that Trump needs much encouragement. He did, after all, ascend to the White House on an immigrant-bashing, ethnonationalist platform as dishonest as it was divisive. Many of the administration’s uglier policy ideas have been a result of Trump’s failure to deliver on his signature campaign promise of a “big, beautiful” border wall. Small wonder Miller has emerged as his favorite consigliere on such matters.

Miller’s preferred approach to immigration and border security is straight out of Ann Coulter’s fever dreams. He was a chief architect of the travel ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries. He favors the building of tent cities at the border for warehousing asylum-seekers. He’s agitating to end the 20-day limit on detaining migrant children. And he wants to reinstate the practice of snatching migrant children from their families — though this time he’d like to give parents a “binary choice” of having their kids taken from them or held with them in detention indefinitely.

Miller is being credited with the bloodbath at the Department of Homeland Security. Since Friday, a handful of top leaders have been, or are soon to be, shown the door, including the head of the Secret Service, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was never quite ruthless enough for the president’s or Miller’s taste. More firings are expected as Miller moves to remake the department in his image.

Bottom line, Stephen Miller is a man whose anti-immigration zeal remains unfettered by concern for the law, international norms or basic humanity.

And yet. The portrait of the 33-year-old policy adviser as a figure of singular evil is both overly simplistic and counterproductive. Sure, the guy is a force for darkness, easing the president ever further into nativism. But no matter how much of the administration’s immigration agenda Miller has been responsible for, it has taken a village to make that vision a reality. Giving too much credit to any one person builds up Miller, undeservedly, as a Machiavellian genius and lets many other folks off the hook.

A society does not fall because of a small coterie of bad actors. Widespread rot requires legions of enablers, many of whom are driven by varying blends of personal ambition, ideological expedience and the self-aggrandizing delusion that, through their invaluable counsel, they can save the state from total destruction.

Expect increasingly to hear this last rationalization from former administration officials starting redemption tours as they resume life outside the Trump bubble.

Advisers like Kellyanne Conway, lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, party apparatchiks like Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel and a whole host of Trump-friendly media personalities may not personally share the president’s views or policy aims. But their willingness to swallow some of the administration’s cruelest acts renders them complicit. Neither their reputations nor their consciences should be wiped clean.

Take Nielsen. Since her departure was announced, she has enjoyed some sympathy for having behaved less viciously than some in the White House desired. Throughout her tenure, stories bubbled up about how she incurred Trump’s wrath by dragging her feet on policies that would have run afoul of the law or thrown the nation into chaos. But she still carried out and aggressively enforced her share of atrocities.

Now, defenders are portraying the woman who was in charge of caging migrant children as a hapless victim of the administration’s more unhinged forces.

“The so-called immigration hard-liners have flailed about since the beginning of the administration, giving bad advice to the president and misdirecting resources toward the wrong solutions to the wrong problems,” Thad Bingel, a homeland security official under President George W. Bush and former aide to Nielsen, told The Times. “They apparently don’t want anyone like a Secretary Nielsen or Secretary Kelly, who deals in reality, to tell them or the president any of this.”

No doubt, Nielsen had a difficult, perhaps impossible, job. But it was no profile in courage for her to cling to her morally untenable position until Trump gave her a shove.

It’s tempting to see Stephen Miller as the archvillain of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But there is much guilt to go around, and even reluctant collaborators cannot be allowed to absolve themselves of responsibility for the administration’s continuing outrages.

This article originally appeared in <a id="84f00d5e-a698-3792-a3b4-4e3a1e67eea7" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/opinion/stephen-miller-trump-immigration.html">The New York Times</a>.

Stephen Miller can't act alone

For days, the president has been indulging in one of his made-for-TV teasers by threatening to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border. Not beef up the Border Patrol. Not tighten security at ports of entry. Just hang up a “Closed” sign and call it a day.

As the White House tells it, the failures of Mexico and congressional Democrats to stop illegal crossings have left the president no choice: The influx of drugs, criminals and other undesirables has reached the point where drastic action is required.

Trump is nothing if not a man of drastic action, or at least ominous vows of drastic action.

Dismayed critics have rushed to object that shutting the border will do nothing to solve the humanitarian strains caused by the flood of migrant families from Central America — that such a move will, in fact, make things only worse by disrupting the legal flow of people and commerce, wreaking social and economic havoc.

Such warnings are spot on. They also miss the point. In threatening to shut down the border, Trump isn’t looking to solve a crisis. His primary aim is to make life unpleasant for those who have crossed him — or simply had the misfortune to get in his way.

In politics, as in life, there are Fixers and there are Punishers. Fixers shine a light on problems or injustices and work to find ways to resolve them. Theirs is a constructive vision, one that values cooperation and pragmatism and getting stuff done.

Punishers, too, are about spotlighting problems, a skill at which they may excel even more than Fixers. But Punishers aren’t looking to make things right so much as to find someone to blame — and chasten — for the perceived wrongs.

Neither party holds a monopoly on either category. Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, is a Fixer. Ilhan Omar, the freshman Democratic House member from Minnesota, is fast establishing herself as a Punisher. President Barack Obama was a Fixer, while the entire House Freedom Caucus sprang from the conviction that anyone willing to work with Obama should be cast into the abyss. Punished with extreme prejudice, as it were.

Punishers have their charms and their purpose, and whether you see them as avenging angels or vengeful demagogues often depends on whether you share their particular worldview. But every now and again, along comes a Punisher so wanton that he rattles even members of his own team. Trump is one of this rare breed.

The desire to crush those who displease him is a defining characteristic of this president. When challenged, his impulse is to lash out — preferably with personal, degrading insults. This has been on most vivid display with the myriad investigations into sketchy presidential behavior, but it also has been a hallmark of Trump’s approach to key policy issues. Border security, health care, trade — you name the debate, Trump’s answer is to stake out his position, vowing pain and regret for those who do not embrace it.

On Sunday, the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to rub Democrats’ noses in the growing border tumult and defend the president’s closure threat. “We hate to say we told you so,” he said. “We need border security, and we’re going to do the best we can with what we have.”

He also dismissed questions about the wisdom of Trump’s plan to end financial aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Complaining about the troubled nations’ failure to stop their people from fleeing north, Mulvaney brushed off administration experts who have cautioned that cutting aid would further destabilize the countries, likely worsening the migrant crisis.

Translation: Fine. No one will give us a border wall. We’ll show you the meaning of chaos.

The president’s fans cheer his pugilism, as if he was bravely defending himself — and them — against big, bad bullies. But all too often, the price is paid by the innocent and vulnerable: migrant children snatched from their parents at the border, federal workers thrown into financial turmoil by the government shutdown, farmworkers and manufacturers caught up in the trade war, the millions of Americans who stand to lose their health insurance if the administration keeps laboring to kill Obamacare.

For Trump, anyone who stands between him and his objective becomes collateral damage. And pity those considered part of an unfriendly demographic, such as the people of Puerto Rico, whom the president dismisses as a tool of the Democratic Party and mistreats accordingly. As the Senate has worked this week to hash out a comprehensive disaster-relief package, Trump’s contribution has been to fire off a series of obnoxious, dishonest tweets charging that “corrupt or incompetent” island officials have wasted epic levels of relief funding and are now hot for Democrats “to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!” A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, subsequently appeared on TV with a spirited defense of his boss’ broadside against “that country.”

As for those who actively defy the president, the goal is not simply to punish them for a single transgression but to discourage them from future rebellions. Deliver a painful enough lesson, and everyone will fall into line.

This article originally appeared in <a id="36c9548d-b13a-4611-b9e3-bf91b2dc119a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/opinion/trump-border-mexico.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer): Once more, President Donald Trump stands ready to dazzle with his willingness to sacrifice the national interest on the altar of his political whims.

Trump the punisher

Of all the pressing business McConnell could be tackling, he devoted precious floor time to the resolution introduced last month by Democrats Ed Markey, the junior senator from Massachusetts, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a House freshman from New York. A grand reimagining of America’s environmental and economic landscape, the Green New Deal is not a policy proposal. It is a statement of values — a nonbinding resolution that even its champions do not expect to become law. Ocasio-Cortez has called it “a vision document.”

Which is precisely why McConnell couldn’t resist it.

The Senate majority leader, like so much of his party, has zero interest in climate change — or rather, he has no interest in pursuing policies to address what many regard as the defining crisis of our time. McConnell is, however, passionate about making life politically awkward for the opposition. With their base voters fired up about climate change, dozens of Democratic lawmakers have embraced the Green New Deal, including at least half a dozen 2020 presidential contenders. Even so, the resolution’s sweeping ambitions — built around a huge infrastructure investment and a shift to carbon-free energy — strike more than a few Democrats, especially moderates, as unrealistic and politically perilous.

Republicans have been quick to mock the proposal, claiming that Democrats are poised to outlaw everything from cars to cows to airplanes. McConnell has been particularly vicious, slamming it as a “destructive socialist daydream.”

McConnell sought to raise the stakes on Tuesday by forcing Democrats to cast a vote on the controversial measure — exacerbating intraparty tensions in the process.

(Editorial Observer): For those wondering if it was still possible for the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, to raise his cynicism game, Tuesday’s show vote on the Green New Deal supplied a resounding “yes.”

Michelle Cottle

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