Politics

Former president Donald Trump caused quite the stir over the weekend when he decided to launch a new attack against his one remaining GOP primary opponent, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. During a rally on Saturday, Trump repeatedly asked where Haley’s husband was, which on its face seemed to be a question regarding why Major Michael Haley is not on the campaign trail with his wife.“Then she comes over to see me at Mar-a-Lago. ‘Sir, I will never run against you.’ She brought her husband. Where’s your husband? Oh, he’s away. He’s away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone! He knew. He knew,” Trump said.

Few moments are less promising to reach a bipartisan deal than the months before a presidential election. And few issues present greater obstacles than limiting illegal immigration. Even the word “illegal” is contested. Progressives say it is too harsh. Conservatives say it is simply truthful. It is no surprise, then, that the compromise “border-security bill” gasped its final breath this week. The Senate bill, negotiated by a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent, met a hostile reception as soon as the text was released. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reluctantly brought it up for a procedural vote, where it went down in flames. Why such stiff opposition?

The prosecutor who signed off on the plea deal in the case of a transgender daycare worker who sexually abused an infant says he believes the “sentence that the defendant served was appropriate for what could be proven in court.”  “The defendant pled guilty to sexual misconduct and received a sentence of twelve months," McCracken County Commonwealth’s attorney Dan Boaz told The Spectator in an exclusive statement. "The defendant served over 300 days in jail, primarily in solitary confinement, prior to entering the guilty plea. As the case developed, there were contradictions as sometimes happens and a plea bargain was entered. As stated, the defendant served over 300 days in jail.

Special Counsel Robert Hur predictably concluded that President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents when he was a senator and vice president do not warrant criminal charges.  But unfortunately for the White House, Hur’s recommendations to the Justice Department quickly became background noise. Instead, his unsparing descriptions of the commander-in-chief took center stage.  None of Hur’s characterizations should surprise anyone who has watched Joe Biden for more than forty-five seconds over the last three and a half years. It’s not like the American people have had only one opportunity to catch Biden seeing dead people. There was a second and third showing.

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is reportedly preparing to step down from her post after seven years on the job. Multiple sources told the New York Times that McDaniel intends to resign after the South Carolina GOP primary at the end of the month; she had been facing years of pressure as the longest-reigning RNC chair with seemingly few tangible successes. The RNC expressed plans at its Winter Meeting last week to take out a credit line amid disappointing fundraising and cash-on-hand numbers, and McDaniel took sharp criticism for her failure to produce a “red wave” in the 2022 midterms and her unwillingness to get financially involved in Virginia’s state elections in 2023.

After a long wait, the text of the bipartisan Senate bill for Ukraine and border funding was finally released on Sunday night. The massive piece of legislation clocks in at 370 pages and, in addition to the border policy changes previously reported on here, sends an additional $60 billion to Ukraine, tightens asylum standards, prohibits removal of unaccompanied minors, authorizes $1.4 billion in FEMA funding for resources for migrants settling in the US and gives President Biden the authority to overturn any emergency authorization at the border. The House GOP’s verdict is in: Speaker Johnson asserted that the legislation is “dead on arrival” in his chamber.  “I’ve seen enough.

The US is currently launching retaliatory air strikes in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon confirmed this afternoon.  The strikes come after three American servicemembers were killed in a drone strike by an Iranian-backed militia on Sunday, with dozens more wounded. Top Biden administration officials had said “it will pretty be clear” when the American response begins. “The first thing you see won’t be the last,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told the media Wednesday. -Matt McDonald Soros staffers unionize — and immediately get laid off This month’s better-than-expected jobs numbers are cold comfort to employees of a George Soros-funded group that recruits young Democrats to run for office.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where we must pretend that this primary isn’t over for another week or three, thanks to the brilliant decisions of Nikki Haley’s donors. No, seriously, they think she still has a shot! Or at least that’s what they're telling people: Billionaire Ken Griffin, one of the nation’s top GOP donors, said Tuesday he has backed Haley and a source familiar with his donations confirmed he gave $5 million in January to the super political action committee supporting her...During an earlier appearance Tuesday on CNBC, Griffin said he thought Haley would “run away with the general election” if she became the Republican nominee. But he also acknowledged her path is “a narrower road than it was eight weeks ago.” How narrow you ask? Oh, very, very narrow.

A former Trump official is reportedly in critical condition after being shot during an attempted carjacking in Washington on Monday evening. Mike Gill was waiting to pick up his wife when a man shot him and then fled on foot. The carjacker allegedly went on a rampage, killing Alberto Vasquez Jr. after taking his car keys, stealing two more cars and then firing a gun at a police officer before he was finally shot and killed.Carjackings have become a serious problem around the country, but especially in the nation’s capital. Last year, carjackings doubled, reaching a shocking 959 reported incidents. Public officials have said that most of the carjackings in DC are committed by repeat teenage offenders.

As the Republican National Committee launches its annual Winter Meeting in Las Vegas, Trump allies are once again calling for the GOP to oust Ronna McDaniel as its chairwoman. Their preferred replacement? Scott Presler. Presler, for those unfamiliar, first rose to social media and political fame by organizing a clean-up in Baltimore after the former president Donald Trump called the Maryland city a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.” Since then, the activist better known on X as “#ThePersistence” launched a Republican voter registration effort and, subsequently, Early Vote Action, a political action committee aimed at getting Republicans to cast their votes before Election Day. Prior to all this, Presler was a co-founder of Gays for Trump during the 2016 election.

Senate Republicans who are negotiating an immigration reform bill with Democrats are defending their efforts after conservatives reacted angrily to leaked details for the deal. The lead negotiator, Senator James Lankford, said on Fox News Sunday that his detractors are relying on “internet rumors” to fuel their opposition to the bill.“This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day,” Lankford said. “There’s no amnesty, it increases the number of border patrol agents, it increases asylum officers, it increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.

Given just how unpopular illegal immigration is, it is stunning to see both the likely nominees for president fumbling the issue. That’s political malpractice.  For Biden, the malpractice consists not only in keeping the border open, which is already killing him in the polls, but in resisting the strongest Republican proposals to close it. Every time Republican congressional leaders visit the White House to negotiate, they come away empty handed.   In stiff-arming the Republican proposals, the White House has put itself in the awkward position of saying it will grudgingly accept their efforts but only if Republicans make concessions on other issues.

A new report from the Dispatch claimed that David Bossie, a Republican National Committee member and former advisor to the Trump campaign, had drafted a resolution that would effectively end the primary and put the RNC symbolically behind former president Donald Trump. The draft resolution was immediately met with concerns that only two states had voted in the GOP primary and that the RNC should preside over a fair process, although it would not have ended the primary nor changed how state parties ran their elections.