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Senate Democrats are dispensing with talk of cooperation and preparing to fight President Trump across the board, delaying his nominees where possible and filibustering his Supreme Court pick if necessary.

Despite their minority status in the Senate, Democrats are under increasing pressure from their progressive base to stand up to a president they consider authoritarian and illegitimate. These activists demand that Democrats emulate Tea Party conservatives' opposition to President Obama by doing everything in their power to obstruct President Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is facing especially intense scrutiny in his own backyard from liberals who believe any cooperation smacks of appeasement that will only "normalize" Trump.

"We are coming out on Tuesday with boxing gloves, barbells, and a demand that Schumer strengthen his resistance and fight fight fight the horrible policies coming out of the Trump administration," read a post in the Facebook group What The Fuck, Chuck. "No appeasement, no dealmaking, no collaboration: we need powerful resistance and leadership of all the Senate Democrats to fight the administration!"

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Thus Democrats boycotted a scheduled Tuesday vote on the Senate Finance Committee to advance the nominations of Trump's designated secretary of the treasury, Steven Mnuchin, and health and human services secretary, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga.

Both nominees are accused of providing misleading testimony and disclosures. Democrats have pressed Munchin on foreclosures by the bank he once managed and Price on his healthcare stock investments while serving on a committee overseeing the industry.

"This is about getting answers to questions, plain and simple," the committee's ranking member Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement. "Ethics laws are not optional, and nominees do not have a right to treat disclosure like a shell game."

Senate Democrats also invoked a little-used rule to delay a Judiciary Committee vote on the nomination of their colleague Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., for attorney general. While Sessions has the votes to prevail in the full Senate, opposition to his nomination has been energized by the backlash against Trump's immigration executive order.

Sessions has had a strong influence on Trump's immigration policy and the senator's former aide Stephen Miller, now serving in the White House, reportedly had a hand in drafting the executive order along with top strategist Stephen Bannon.

Also from the Washington Examiner

Every president since Harry Truman has sent the Times an autographed portrait.

02/01/17 4:36 PM

Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates Monday night after she instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the controversial order. Democrats said Tuesday that the country needed an attorney general like Yates, not Sessions.

"That's what an attorney general must be willing and able to do," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said of Yates' refusal to follow Trump's orders. "I have no confidence Sessions will be able to do that."

Republicans were angry about the moves. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the committee Democrats' behavior "the most pathetic thing I've seen in my whole time in the U.S. Senate." Hatch was originally elected in 1976.

The typically straitlaced Hatch also said, "I'm very disappointed in this type of crap."

The Cabinet nominees are a sideshow leading up to the main event: resisting Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch's confirmation as the successor to late Justice Antonin Scalia would preserve the conservative majority on the court.

Also from the Washington Examiner

Meanwhile, groups that support gun control restrictions reacted with caution.

02/01/17 4:26 PM

While Senate Democrats cannot filibuster Trump's executive branch nominees without Republican defections, they can use this procedure to block Gorsuch on their own by requiring a 60-vote threshold for his confirmation or forcing GOP leaders to do away with this requirement using the "nuclear option." Republicans currently control the Senate 52 to 48.

Democrats not only wish to deny Trump an opportunity to leave a conservative imprint on the Supreme Court. They view it as payback for Senate Republicans' failure to confirm Obama's final high court nominee Merrick Garland after Scalia's death last year.

"The Democrats should treat Trump's SCOTUS pick with the exact same courtesy the GOP showed Merrick Garland," tweeted former Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer. "Don't flinch, don't back down."

"The most fundamental thing that must be understood about tonight's announcement is that this is a stolen seat," said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. in blistering statement.

"This is the first time in American history that one party has blockaded a nominee for almost a year in order to deliver a seat to a President of their own party."

Merkley argued Trump should have nominated Garland instead. Because he did not, the senator concluded, "This is a stolen seat being filled by an illegitimate and extreme nominee, and I will do everything in my popular to stand up against this assault on the Court."

While the Supreme Court nomination fight was always likely to be contentious because of the high stakes on issues ranging from abortion and religious liberty to the death penalty and affirmative action, the all-out opposition to Trump wasn't inevitable.

Trump isn't an ideological movement conservative. He is more closely aligned with Rust Belt Democrats on trade and manufacturing than with his own party.

Congressional Democrats initially signaled they would be open to cooperating with Trump on an infrastructure plan that will at minimum contain billions in new government spending. The president is a New Yorker who once had a cordial relationship with Schumer, to whom he has donated money in the past.

But blue state Democrats are facing incredible pressure to oppose a president their constituents overwhelmingly voted against and who did not win the popular vote, none more so than Schumer. The Democratic leader has voted for every Trump nominee who has so far been confirmed by the Senate, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, whom Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against on civil libertarian grounds.

Schumer has since announced he will vote no on eight of Trump's Cabinet picks. New York progressives organized by What The Fuck Chuck demonstrated in Brooklyn Tuesday, saying "heartened but not mollified" by his newfound anti-Trump resolve.

Schumer voted to confirm Gorsuch for a federal judgeship in 2006, but greeted his Supreme Court nomination by promising "an exhaustive, robust and comprehensive debate" of the jurist's fitness to serve. Schumer expressed "serious doubts" about Gorsuch's ability to meet his standards.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., faced down liberal activists in Providence who were outraged by his vote to confirm Pompeo at CIA. "You are entitled to an explanation of why I have voted for some of the defense nominees and I will concede right off the bat that I may have been wrong," he said.

Outside the auditorium, a protester shouted through a bullhorn about Pompeo, "This is a man who sees international politics and world history as a clash between Judeo-Christians and Muslims, who thinks Edward Snowden should be executed, who supported torture and who refused to say that he thinks, to use Trump's term, that it is categorically wrong to 'take out' the families of accused terrorists."

Even before Trump, Bernie Sanders' Democratic primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was animated by the base's desire for Democrats to fight more, rejecting the centrist politics of Clinton's husand.

Up to seven Democratic senators have expressed varying degrees of support for an up-or-down vote on Gorsuch, the maximum number liberals can afford to have defect if there are going to mount a filibuster. But progressives might exert the same kind of pressure Republicans got from the Tea Party.

They are already receiving similar warnings. "Democrats are at risk of missing the point of what was an almost revolutionary election," said Republican strategist Christian Ferry. "People looking at what goes on in Washington and saying, 'Enough is enough.'"

Ferry managed Lindsey Graham's presidential campaign and was deputy campaign manager for John McCain in 2008, neither of whom have been reflexive Trump supporters. But he warned Democrats against listening only to their base.

"They lost a presidential election they thought was a sure thing," he said. "They need to grow their party." Ferry also warned that opposing everything Trump does as radical and extreme could produce a "boy who cried wolf" effect.

But with thousands of demonstrators protesting Trump's immigration initiatives and turning out for post-inaugural women's marches, Democrats may have a hard time turning a blind eye to their base's enthusiastic opposition.

Top Story

President Trump and his daughter Ivanka departed the White House for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware Wednesday afternoon to witness the arrival of Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens, who was killed during an intelligence gathering raid in Yemen last weekend.

Owens, a member of the Navy's SEAL Team Six, was killed in a clandestine raid at an al Qaeda facility that Trump had authorized early Sunday morning. The operation left four additional U.S. service members wounded and marked the first military fatality under the new administration.

Trump, who was to be joined by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., upon arriving at Dover, had a "very somber and lengthy" conversation with Owens' family on Tuesday.

02/01/17 3:38 PM

Read the original here:
Democrats running Tea Party playbook against Trump - Washington Examiner (blog)

One Southwest Michigan Tea Party leader says he thinks President Donald Trumps executive order on immigration and refugees last week had a good idea at its core. Gene Clem, President of the Van-Kal Tea Party in Kalamazoo, tells WSJM Newssomething needed to be done to keep the country safer.

There were certain areas where there are currently active groups, like ISIS and Abu Sayyaf and some other ones, that are known to be actively trying to get people in the United States as refugees, Clem said. So, it kind of makes sense to pick out those areas and say, Well, lets look at them much more carefully.'

Clem does think the way the executive order was implemented should have been better, though. He says theres something wrong when folks with green cards find themselves stuck at airports without knowing whats going on. Hes expecting to see positive effects of the order once the smoke clears, and tells us thats what hes heard from most other Tea Partiers hes spoken with in recent days.

Read more:
Tea Party Leader Discusses Trump Immigration Order - News/Talk 94.9 WSJM

Mike Stutz, a TV director, says said the left was on a learning curve. We probably got a little complacent during the Obama years. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

They came with chants and songs, banners and flyers and a chicken costume, and felt it was working that this and other grassroots protests were steeling Democratic resistance to Donald Trump.

We need to stand and fight. We are the majority. Lets take our country back, Mimi Fleischman told the crowd outside Senator Dianne Feinsteins Los Angeles office on Tuesday afternoon.

It was the latest anti-Trump gathering to target congressional Democrats for perceived pusillanimity towards Trumps embryonic, whirlwind administration.

About 200 protesters had picketed Feinsteins house in San Francisco after she had voted for four of the presidents cabinet nominees. Then on Tuesday morning the California senator, the ranking Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, announced she would oppose the nomination of Jeff Sessions as US attorney general.

The pressure is working, said Daniel Lee, 43, an actor and writer.

One rally speaker, Laura Smith, said congressional Democrats should imitate the blanket opposition their Republican colleagues waged against Barack Obama. I hated that obstructionism but you know what, it frickin worked.

Activists said they were studying tactics used by the Tea Party, a grassroots movement which yanked the GOP to the right and hardened congressional resistance to Obama. Some have called it the Herbal Tea Party.

As a mobilisation group the Tea Party was very successful. Weve taken a page from that, said Viviana Fefferman, 65, a retired insurance worker.

She was part of Indivisible of Sherman Oaks, a newly formed group which takes its name from Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, a 23-page document written by congressional staffers who experienced the Tea Partys impact.

Some speakers appropriated the radical rights claim to represent US values. Are the flyover states the real America? No. They bought all the fake news. Who says we are not the real America? said Ginsberg.

Protesters acknowledged decrying Tea Party tactics when directed against Obama but justified imitation on the grounds Trump was an extreme, perilous aberration. If John McCain or Mitt Romney was president Id get behind him, said Ginsberg.

Sessions may well become attorney general but for those outside Feinsteins office her opposition still signalled a victory of sorts. And with other nominations for cabinet plus the supreme court looming, followed by an expected blizzard of controversial legislation, the stakes will get only higher.

Fleischman, who organised the rally, said activists needed to stiffen the resolve of their representatives in Washington DC. People are really fired up. I dont think theres any doubt the protests are influencing the Democrats. They cant hide in their little club any more.

Merle Ginsberg, another speaker, said Feinstein and Kamala Harris, Californias other Democratic senator, had not grasped the intensity of hostility to Trump. We voted these people in and we can vote them out. They need to listen.

Several protesters said Harris had shown a little more backbone but wanted her to go further.

Are we satisfied with the Democrats yet? asked Pat Thomas, another speaker.

No! shouted back several hundred voices.

Banners expressed contempt and scorn for the president and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, an architect of the travel bans. Time to play hardball. No Manchurian president. Ban Bannon. You dont need a time machine to fight Nazis. Fear is our gross national product. Shut it down.

The Herbal Tea partiers are still finding their footing.

Protest organisers needed to master basics like audio megaphones and microphones to make sure people could hear, said one speaker.

Mike Strutz, a TV director who came dressed as a chicken, said the movement was on a learning curve. We probably got a little complacent during the Obama years. We let some skills slide. At the Womens March it was like we were getting back into practice. We didnt have as much of the imagery as we should have.

Strutz, who inherited the costume from a TV show, said it was going to be a long fight, he said. We have to be ready to be on the streets for four years. I think a lot of people will be surprised at how resilient the left will be.

He held a sign saying Dont be chicken. Keep fighting back.

Originally posted here:
The left is stealing from the right's playbook. Call it the Herbal Tea Party - The Guardian

WINCHESTER Chuck Smith, who is seeking the Republican nomination for state attorney general in the upcoming election, will be speaking to the Apple Valley Tea Party on Thursday.

A Virginia Beach attorney, Smith visited Frederick County last year and really did impress a lot of people in the tea party, said local tea party leader Dody Stottlemyer. Hes just a great guy.

Lately, Smith has been a vocal proponent of President Donald Trumps immigration policies. He is facing Richmond attorney John Smith in a GOP primary for the nomination. He is a former Marine and military prosecutor.

Stottlemyer said Smith decided to come based on his experience here last year; the meeting was initiated by a text message conversation.

The meeting is at the Frederick County Public Safety Building at 1080 Coverstione Drive. Refreshments will be available at 6:30 p.m. and the meeting starts at 7 p.m.

See the original post here:
Apple Valley Tea Party to host Republican candidate Chuck Smith - The Winchester Star

A municipal worker inspects damage to a home after shelling in the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Feb. 1, 2017.(Photo: Alexander Ermochenko, AP)

At least 12Ukrainiansoldiers have been killed and more than two dozenwounded in an outburst of fighting with Russian-backed rebels since the weekend that is playing out against a backdrop of still uncertain relations between Moscow and Washington.

In the latest deaths, Ukraine's Anti-Terrorist Operation saidtwo Ukrainian soldiers were killedWednesday in the disputed eastern regions.The governments press office said one soldier was killed and nine soldiers and one civilian injured late Tuesday in Avdiivka, a town of 20,000 people located just north of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

The government-held town of Avdiivka came under sustained shell fire, which knocked out power as temperatures fell as low as zero Fahrenheit, the Associated Press reported.Several buses were used to remove people from the conflict zone, Bloomberg reported.

Escalation in the area is of grave concern, with the civilian population greatly suffering,said Ertugrul Apakan, chief monitor of the special monitoring mission to the Ukraine by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.Violence on such a scale, involving the loss of life, is unacceptable and the protection of civilians must be paramount.

Henoted damage to awater filtration plant, disrupting the delivery ofheating supplies, electricity and water.In the late morning Wednesday, shelling subsided amidunconfirmed reports that bothsides had agreed to a cease-fire to restore electricity and water supplies, the AP reports.

AnAPcorrespondentreported seeingrebel artillery positions in the center of Donetsk city on Wednesday. Localresidents reported incessant outgoing and incoming artillery salvos heard throughout the night and in the morning, an intensity that the city has not seen in months,AP reported.

Separatist forces saidtwo of their fighters were killed and six wounded in the latest violence, according to the AP.

Local residents are provided with hot soup by the emergencies ministry at a humanitarian assistance point on Feb. 1, 2017, in Avdiivka, Ukraine. The conflict with Russia-backed rebels has intensified dramatically in the front-line town over the past several days.(Photo: Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images)

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cut short his visit to Germany and calledan emergency meeting of the Contact Group for the settlement of theconflict andappealed to the United Nations.

The U.N. Security Council expressed its "grave concern"over the "dangerous deterioration" in eastern Ukraine and called for an end to the violence.Both Russia and Ukraine are members of the council:Russia as a permanent member and Ukraine takingoverthe rotating presidency on Wednesday.Both nations had agreed to the Security Council statement, which decried the unrest for its"severe impact on the local civilian population."

TheState Department said in a statement that the United States "is deeply concerned with the recent spike in violence in eastern Ukraine."

The Ukrainian Crisis media center blamed Russian-backed militants for the upsurge in fighting, charging that the rebels hadlaunched an "unprovoked attack" on Ukrainian troops and the civilian population but met heavy resistance.

The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Ukrainian troops of launching offensive operations to pick up territory using heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems.Ina statement, theministry also notedthateveryoutbreak of new fighting "strangely enough" occurred while the Ukrainian leadership, in this case Poroshenko, wason foreigntrips. "Clearly, this is an attempt to keep the crisis provoked by Kiev on the international agenda," the statement said.

Nearly 10,000 people have died since initial clashes broke out in April 2014between Ukrainian troops and rebels, largely ethnic Russians living in the eastern regions who are seeking independence from Kiev. A tenuous ceasefire known as the Minsk agreement was declared in a meeting in the Belarusian capital in February 2015 in an attempt to end the conflict.

An urgent meeting of the so-called Contact Group, which brings together representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the rebels along with the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe, ended Wednesday in Minsk, Belarus. The group, which aims at implementing the 2-year-old Minsk deal,called for the opposing sides to cease fire and urged them to pull back their heavy weapons by the end of the week.

Ukraine and NATO have accusedtheKremlin of supporting the rebels with troops and weapons. The United States and European Union have imposedsanctions on Russiafor supporting the rebels, as well as annexing Crimea, which was part of Ukraine.

Whether plannedor not, the latest eruptions come amid a shifting political landscape. Among them are President Trump'semergingrelationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two leaders spoke Saturday for the first time, andTrump has publicly mused about the prospect of easing sanctions against the Kremlin. The sanctionswere imposed by the Obama administration over concerns about Russian hacking during the U.S. presidential election.

The escalation seems to be another reason for the soonest possible resumption of dialogue and cooperation between Russia and America, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense minister Stepan Poltorak charged Wednesday thataUkrainian Navy transport aircraft came under small arms attack over the Black Sea from a Russian oil rig. He said there were no injuries but the Antonov An026 aircraft was damage, according to Interfax Ukraine.

A spokesman for the Russian Black Sea Fleet headquartersin Sevastopol denied the charge, saying the oil rigs' security guards did not open fire on the plane but gave it flash signals to prevent it hitting a drilling tower, Tass reported.

Ukraine's month-long role as president of the U.N. Security Council will likely giveKiev an opportunity togaugewhether it still has the councils backing specifically from the so-called P3 permanent members of France, Britain and the United States in its claims to Crimea and on addressing instability on its eastern border.

The P3 have always been rock-solid supportive of Ukraine when it comes to the issue of Crimea, said Volodymyr Yelchenko, Ukraines ambassador to the U.N. We have heard remarks of Mr. Trump on Crimea when he was a presidential candidate. But we need to understand that campaign rhetoric and real business may vary.

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At least 12 Ukrainian soldiers killed in disputed east - USA TODAY