Politics

On Thursday CNN reported that Donald Trump was taken aback that his nominee for attorney general William Barr and special counsel Robert Mueller are old chums. ‘I have known Bob Mueller for 30 years,’ Barr said during Senate testimony on Tuesday. ‘And I have the utmost respect for Bob and his distinguished record of service.’ Now Barr’s statements are about to create much bigger problems for him. Barr unequivocally affirmed, in response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham, that it would be a crime if the president sought to tamper with the testimony of a witness: ‘yes, under an obstruction statute. Yes.

Is Rudy Giuliani becoming a bigger problem for Donald Trump than Nancy Pelosi? Pelosi is bad enough: she is tying Trump in knots with her refusal to budge on the shutdown, which Trump had assumed she should assist him in shutting down weeks ago. Now she’s dissed him with her acidic letter explaining that it would be best to defer the State of the Union speech, which Trump had counted on using to bludgeon the Democrats, until safety issues related to the shutdown have been resolved.But on Wednesday night, Giuliani may have delivered an even bigger hammer blow. He explained to CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he ‘never said there was no collusion’ between President Trump and Russia.

1. Barr will be confirmed Republicans hold a 53-seat majority in the US Senate. Nothing that emerged in William Barr’s Senate hearing came close to losing him the four GOP votes that would put his confirmation in jeopardy. Remember, all but one Republican senator voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh for a lifetime position on the Supreme Court despite a credible allegation of sexual assault and serious charges that Kavanaugh had lied in his responses. 2. Don’t believe a word Barr said I am only being half facetious here. Of course, we can learn something from nominees’ testimony in confirmation hearings.

INT – APARTMENT – AFTERNOON JESSICA (Harvard ’09, JP Morgan ’10 to ’12, Obama White House Staffer ’13 to ’16) is returning to her Georgetown apartment after her morning Tibetan throat singing class. There is a yoga mat under her arm. She shares the apartment, and a lovingly open relationship with ZAK (Columbia ’10, Senior Green Urban Planning Correspondent at Vox.com, Fellow of the Aspen Institute for Ideas ’14 to ’17), who is blogging at their Hygge-influenced open-plan kitchen. JESSICA looks visibly disturbed. ZAKHoney, what is it, is everything OK?JESSICAIt’s… It’s…ZAKDon’t worry about the Whole Foods delivery. It came just after you left.

Government shutdown stories aren’t sexy, everyone can see that. Nevertheless, it is curious that the journalists who most loathe Trump are so willing to distract their audiences from a political crisis which polls show is hurting the President, in order to focus again on the exhausting Russia conspiracy, which isn’t. This weekend, we saw another flurry of noisy Trump-Russia scoops. These latest feel thinner than usual. Still, they dominated the airwaves and Twitter feeds of media VIPs. On Friday, the New York Times related that the FBI ‘became so concerned’ about Trump’s firing of FBI director James B. Comey that they began investigating whether the President was indeed working for Russia.

When the new class of Congress officially began this month, the Democrats dominated the airwaves — perhaps for the first time in the Trump era. The Democratic rainbow coalition of women were front and center of the public conversation. Many of these freshman congresswomen are young and come from diverse backgrounds. Some of these women support wildly erratic forms of leftism, including socialism. But, despite the silly and dangerous ideas of incoming congresswomen such as Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, they are adored by the media. Such naked identity politics might annoy conservatives, but there is no denying the logic: when the electorate is so diverse, having diverse politicians is effective.

Europeans generally do a poor job of understanding how the US Constitutional system works. Just how poor was evident in the coverage of the new Democrat-controlled regime in the US House of Representatives, and all the related stories about Democrats taking over Washington, or taking over ‘the government’. The British Guardian, for instance, reported the momentous news of something approaching regime change: ‘Democrats reclaim power as Nancy Pelosi elected House speaker;’ ‘This is the Nancy Pelosi moment.’ To read such papers, you’d think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the new Prime Minister. Or perhaps it is Nancy Pelosi. Patiently, one must explain to foreign friends that it’s totally different here.

Kamala Harris’s memoir, published this week, has reignited speculation that the senator has her eyes on a Presidential run. Harris – a self-made public servant with a solid record on progressive causes – should be a strong candidate for the Democratic ticket. Somehow, however, she isn’t. The former California Attorney General’s biggest problem is that the left has changed: rather than organizing around unions or the party itself, a large chunk of the Democratic base now mobilizes around identity issues. Some of these pet causes make a lot of sense; others less so. Either way, Harris breaches two of the big ones. First of all, she’s a career prosecutor – or as the new left like to put it, ‘a cop’.

In his late essay ‘Perpetual Peace,’ Immanuel Kant lauded the ideal of ‘universal hospitality.’ In his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took issue with Kant (though not by name), noting that the porous Southern border of the United States represented a serious humanitarian and security crisis. Everyone who can spell ‘Google’ knows that the Democrats, until November 7, 2016, supported robust border security and, indeed, a physical barrier — otherwise known as a wall — to retard the flow of illegal immigrants into this country.

The freshman class of Democrats arriving to be sworn in on Capitol Hill had always threatened to shake things up from the very start, overturning precedent and doing things their own way. But none managed to make good on their promise quite as quickly as Rashida Tlaib, the newly elected US Representative for Michigan’s 13th Congressional district. She managed to alienate her party leadership at the same time as angering her opponents, ignoring any Democratic talking points about staying away from the ‘I’ word in the sort of language that once came with ‘parental guidance’ stickers. ‘We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!

The 116th Congress opened this week with little fanfare in the Senate, where all eyes were on whether there was still some hope a partial government shutdown could be prevented or at least concluded quickly. Things were very different in the House of Representatives, where a change in control led to a lot of children running around and pumping their fists in celebration. I do mean children literally — I’m not trying to characterize the Democrat-controlled House and its 101 new members as juvenile, even if that day one called the president a ‘motherfucker’ (Rashida Tlaib) and another taunted Republicans on Twitter with ‘Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas’ (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who else?).