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Sen. Elizabeth Warren isnt as toxic as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi yet but Republican operatives are laboring to change that, saying they will use the run-up to the elections next year to try to make the rising liberal star too poisonous for Democrats to handle.

The Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican-aligned groups such as American Rising are testing out the depth of the anti-Warren sentiment, hoping to inject her into Senate races the way Republican operatives have made Mrs. Pelosi a drag for House Democrats.

At the very least, they hope to make vulnerable Democrats have to declare whether they side with Ms. Warren on some of her most liberal causes.

Just like Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren is deeply unpopular with voters and her policies are out of step with a vast majority of Americans, and we think that will be an effective way to brand vulnerable Democrats, said RNC spokesman Rick Gorka.

Mrs. Pelosi has been a staple of Republican attacks, and Republicans say using her against Democrats helped their party win several close special congressional elections this year.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also been a favorite target for Republican campaigners, and now they are adding yet another woman to the list in Ms. Warren, whose approval rating is underwater in states such as Virginia and Missouri where incumbent Democrats could face tough Senate elections next year.

Republicans said Ms. Warren appears to turn off voters more than Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York, who does not register much in polls, and Sen. Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent whose populist message resonates in Trump-friendly states.

Whit Ayres, a Republican Party pollster, said Ms. Warren is less known than Mrs. Pelosi, but a concentrated messaging campaign could change that.

Elizabeth Warren has that potential, but she doesnt have it yet, Mr. Ayres said. It is not unusual for her name ID to be a good 15 to 20 points lower than Pelosis. It is not that she is unknown, but she is not as universally known as the former speaker.

Ms. Warrens office didnt respond to a request for comment.

John McLaughlin, a Republican Party strategist, said injecting Ms. Warren into the races complicates things for fellow Democratic senators, who will either have to side with her, putting them on the liberal wing of the party, or else distance themselves, potentially angering the progressive base.

Her liability is her radical ideas, Mr. McLaughlin said. If Republicans or a political opponent wants to make her a liability to more moderate Senate Democrats, they have to be able to attach those Democrats to some really radical ideas including single-payer health care and higher taxes.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm for Senate Democrats, said Republicans are trying to draw attention away from their own failures.

Republicans will try any desperate and ineffective tactic to try and distract from the fact that their toxic health care plan spikes costs and strips coverage from hardworking Americans, said David Bergstein, a DSCC spokesman.

Both parties have sought to make their rivals into boogeymen in recent elections, to mixed results.

Democrats made modest gains in the House and Senate last year after trying to tie their rivals in congressional races to presidential candidate Donald Trump.

On their way to winning back the House in 2010 and Senate in 2014, Republicans framed races as referendums on Mrs. Pelosi, Mrs. Clinton, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and President Obama.

Ms. Warrens national profile has been on the rise in recent months.

She was a top surrogate for Mrs. Clinton last year and a top critic of Mr. Trump, who returned the favor by calling her goofy and dubbed her Pocahontas in a jab over her claims of Cherokee Indian ancestry.

Ms. Warren garnered more national attention in early February after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, cut her off in the middle of an attack on the chamber floor against Sen. Jeff Sessions, who had been nominated as attorney general.

Progressives said the clash with Mr. McConnell showed that Ms. Warren should run for president in 2020, while Republicans signaled that they were OK with her becoming the face of the party.

Later that month, the NRSC, the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, started running digital ads linking Ms. Warren to Democrats in 10 states.

They pointed out that Sen. Jon Tester received $10,000 from Ms. Warrens political action committee called PAC for a Level Playing Field and that the Montana Democrat had voted with Ms. Warren 90 percent of the time, according to a Congressional Quarterly voting analysis of their records from 2013 to 2017.

Republicans also highlighted the voting similarities between Ms. Warren and Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, 97 percent; Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, 96 percent; Claire McCaskill of Missouri, 88 percent; Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, 84 percent; and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, 78 percent.

Each of those senators is up for re-election in states won last year by Mr. Trump.

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Republican campaign operatives aim to make Elizabeth Warren as toxic as Nancy Pelosi - Washington Times

Judge Jeanine: Any Politician Would Take 'First Trolley to Hell' if the Devil Offered Opposition Research

Greg Gutfeld reminded that Democrats were not afraid of the USSR back when it was much more dangerous.

"The Dems used to root for the Russians against us when the USSR was deadly and wanted us dead," Gutfeld said on his show Saturday. "And now decades later things are better and the libs are finally seeing red? Save me the outrage."

Gutfeld reminded that Ted Kennedy set up a quid pro quo agreement with Soviet Union officials regarding his 1983 campaign against President Reagan. Kennedy offered to help Russia cope with Reagan if Russia helped him beat Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.

Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer who was supposed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton raised the alarm last week with liberals.

"If info on Trump was offered to the media, you think they'd ponder its origins?" Gutfeld asked.

"Carl Bernstein would crawl over a bed of angry ferrets to get to that meeting, then call the source a whistleblower."

The host also noted that the definition of "collusion" keeps changing.

"It's not collusion for people to chat," Gutfeld remarked. "I've been fighting collusion all my life from media, academia and Hollywood as they trick us into accepting foul lies and propaganda."

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Gutfeld: Democrats Rooted for USSR When it Was Deadly - Fox News Insider

The bill from Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia was introduced in February but will be re-introduced with some changes, Cotton's office confirmed.

The original version of the bill cut back on what's referred to as "chain migration," ways of immigrating to the United States that are based on family or not based on skills. The bill would limit the types of family members of immigrants that can also be brought to the US to primarily spouses and minor children, would eliminate the international diversity visa lottery and limit the number of annual refugee admissions.

The over-arching goal for the Cotton-Perdue bill, the official said, is to install a system where immigrants are allowed into the country based on their skills and contributions, as opposed to familial connections or a lottery.

"The bottom line here is that the President believes we should have a merit-based system of immigration in this country," the official told CNN. "What the merit-based system would do is bring our immigration policy more in line with what's good for American workers and taxpayers, so that's the overarching goal, and that I'm sure is the driving force behind talks with Congress and these senators."

The official acknowledged that it remains to be seen whether the White House goes all in to support a final version of the bill, which faces an uphill climb in Congress.

"I think we're a long ways away," the official said.

The President spoke about a desire for comprehensive immigration reform while flying to Paris Wednesday night as well.

"What I'd like to do is a comprehensive immigration plan. But our country and political forces are not ready yet," Trump told reporters.

Perdue and Cotton's offices both confirmed the senators continue to work on the "RAISE Act" but wouldn't elaborate on details.

While a move to end chain migration was part of the ill-fated Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate but died in the House in 2013, that bill was loaded with other side deals that helped pave the way for passage.

"To me it's more of almost a political discussion vs. actual enactment or trying to enact policy," said former Bush administration Homeland Security deputy James Norton, who now works as a strategist.

Rosemary Jenks, the vice president and director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group that advocates limited legal immigration and supports the RAISE Act, said her group stands ready to support it, she said, but still lacks a clear feel for where the administration wants to go.

"(We're) feeling a little bit more optimistic about some of them and pushing forward that much harder because it appears there may be an opportunity here and if there is, we want to be ready for it," Jenks said.

In addition to the difficulty of building a bill that works for the many constituencies represented in both parties, the Senate calendar has proven daunting for lawmakers this year, who are still struggling to pass an Obamacare repeal bill, need to extend government funding by the end of September, hope to pass tax reform and need to pass a defense authorization.

A nasty fight over immigration reform could also scuttle efforts to pass government funding that includes money for Trump's border wall.

"It has momentum in the sense that there are definitely people who have been working on immigration since day one," Norton said, "but I think in terms of active legislation I think it has a very difficult road for it to go down to become law."

See the article here:
White House working with senators on immigration limits - CNN

Don Jr. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

As shoe after shoe after shoe keeps dropping about the Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and other questionable intermediaries, there has been a quiet but significant effort by prominent legal minds to defend, or at least be skeptical of, the whole affair. The thrust of these counterarguments is that the main characters did nothing wrong because the law simply doesnt penalize anything that happened at the meeting.

The defenses run the gamut: The Trump team couldnt have broken campaign-finance laws because seeking and receiving damning materials on a political adversary is what campaigns do all the time, so federal law doesnt apply. Or, if the law does reach what transpired at the meeting, the promised dirt on Hillary Clinton isnt the type of in-kind contribution or thing of value that federal law forbids foreign nationals from making. Or, if the damaging information does count as an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign national, the penalties would only be civil in nature which means Robert Mueller, the Russia special counsel, cant just prosecute Trump Jr. or his associates over what happened at that fateful June 2016 gathering.

By far the most intriguing of all these defenses is the suggestion, advanced by First Amendment expert and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, that Trump Jr. and crew were merely exercising their constitutional right to solicit and receive a campaign boost from Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked attorney who requested the meeting. And that she may also have been acting within her rights to share the Clinton dirt with Trumps inner circle. As if theres somehow a free-standing, free-speech right to exchange opposition research, no matter the nationality of the source. And the Constitution would suffer if we criminalize these acts.

Volokhs arguments and hypotheticals are thoughtful, compelling even: If the Clinton campaign heard that Mar-a-Lago was employing illegal immigrants in Florida and staffers went down to interview the workers, that would be a crime, he writes as one of his examples. A Slovakian student temporarily in the U.S., he writes in another, would similarly be forbidden from sharing potentially explosive information about Trumps dealings in her home country. These and other scenarios are meant to illustrate how the federal ban on foreign nationals making election-related contributions including anything of value to a campaign, which would encompass the Clinton dirt would sweep far too broadly. And when a ban lends itself to such a substantially broad reading, Volokh explains, that means the ban itself is unconstitutional on its face.

But Adav Noti, an attorney with Campaign Legal Center, isnt convinced. His organization filed a complaint on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice alleging that the Trump campaign effectively solicited an illegal campaign contribution by procuring the incriminating Clinton evidence from Veselnitskaya. Noti told me in an interview that most of the hypos Volokh laid out in his article arent covered by the statute because the law already contains an exception for volunteer services to a campaign information that is offered voluntarily and that you otherwise cant ascribe value to.

But opposition research by a person flying in from Moscow at no cost to the campaign that the campaign actively sought can indeed be very valuable. And, if its part of a larger, coordinated effort by a foreign power to sway an American election, a scheme to obtain it would be largely distinguishable from, say, undocumented workers dishing to the Clinton camp for free on shoddy working conditions at a Trump property.

Bob Bauer, an election-law expert who has written extensively on the campaign-finance implications of Trumps flirtations with Russia, acknowledged in a Friday post on the blog Just Security how the federal ban on foreign-national contributions might run into First Amendment problems if the right facts come along. But were not dealing with those facts right now. In his view, everything that has come out from the Trump campaign vis--vis Russia is an entirely different animal. A court would likely go out of its way to uphold the law in a case where, as alleged against the Trump campaign, a candidate and his organization enters into a systematic understanding with a foreign government to assist its bid to win the presidency, Bauer wrote.

In other words, what weve seen so far in the recent onslaught of revelations about Trump Jr. and his wish to get an assist from Russia is analogous to the kind of conduct that courts have already said falls outside the scope of the First Amendment. In Bluman v. FEC, a case Noti litigated and won, a three-judge district court reaffirmed the principle that prohibiting foreign nationals from spending money in the electoral process is perfectly consistent with our constitutional ideals. The court said:

It is fundamental to the definition of our national political community that foreign citizens do not have a constitutional right to participate in, and thus may be excluded from, activities of democratic self-government. It follows, therefore, that the United States has a compelling interest for purposes of First Amendment analysis in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in activities of American democratic self-government, and in thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.

That was written by U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative the Trump administration has been eyeing for a promotion to the Supreme Court. The high court, for its part, didnt even bother hearing an appeal over the case; it just affirmed the ruling summarily with no dissenting opinions. All of which suggests that other judges would follow suit if presented with the Trump Tower scenario: a meeting where no actual money may have changed hands, but where something more nefarious, coordinated, and potentially criminal may have taken place. Theres yet more to come.

Courts have a way of salvaging perfectly constitutional laws if they have to, limiting their analysis to the specific fact patterns before them. Since the documented Russian connections to the Trump campaign is unlike anything this country has seen, its easy to see how the First Amendment wouldnt stand as an obstacle if it were shown that there was a coordinated attempt to strike at the core of American self-government.

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The agency wasnt even protecting the presidents son at the time.

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The courts have already been pretty consistent on this issue of foreign citizens not being able to participate in Americas self-government.

McCain is expected to recover, but the same cant be said for the GOPs haphazard efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.

And, yes, hes going to write about his experience dealing with Trump.

Looks like the Trump campaign thought there was something in that nothingburger.

And yet, it still might pass in the next few days.

The new plan would dramatically expand where and when the government could target immigrants for deportations which bypass immigration courts.

Voters are worried about his voter-fraud commissions attempt to gather information on them.

Shes totally open, the future president clearly says to the young pop singer in 2013. But what else?

Most of Trumps Christian right allies dont bother to take his own slight religious pretensions very seriously. A new book apparently will.

Trump may be pushed by a lawsuit to keep his 2016 promise to kill DACA and deport Dreamers or they could become a pawn for nativists in Congress.

One golfer said his attendance would be a debacle, but Trump doesnt care.

At this point it would take a strange coincidence for hacking not to have been discussed.

He ordered the government not to enforce the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on which relatives can enter the country.

Soon Republican centrists will have to decide if big insurance losses due to Medicaid cuts are okay after all.

See the article here:
Knocking Down the Best Argument in Defense of Trump Jr. - NYMag - New York Magazine

When Rowan County commissioners opened their meeting with a prayer specific to one religion, and a call that those in attendance join them in that prayer, said Meno, that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution. (Photo credit: WLOS staff)

County commissioners across western North Carolina are reviewing an appeals court decision that ruled that Rowan County Commissioners are in violation of the Constitution for opening their commission meetings with Christian prayer and a request for those attending the meeting to participate in the invocation.

The court ruling stated that the commissioners delivered only Christian prayer, and veered from time to time into overt proselytization."

Mike Meno, spokesman for the ACLU of North Carolina, spoke on behalf of the organization that played a role in the lawsuit brought to the court.

When Rowan County commissioners opened their meeting with a prayer specific to one religion, and a call that those in attendance join them in that prayer, said Meno, that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution.

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Court decision: Rowan County Commissioners violated First ... - WLOS - WLOS