AZ Congressional Delegation

White House goes to war with John McCain over ‘failed’ Yemen raid

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It appears the Trump White House is afraid that its botched handling of the Yemen raid could become the next Benghazi! meme — Al Bayda! — although this Tea-Publican Congress shows little interest in investigating anything that the Trump administration does.

Margaret Hartman reports, U.S. Military Sources Claim Trump Approved Yemen Strike Without Enough Preparation:

New questions have emerged about what went wrong in the U.S. military raid against Al Qaeda in Yemen last weekend. Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the operation and three other U.S. service members were injured. Nawar Al-Awlaki, the 8-year-old daughter of American Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki, was also killed, and local reports say as many as 30 people died. The raid was the first operation approved by President Trump.

Earlier this week, a senior military official told NBC News that “almost everything went wrong” during the mission. The aim was to detain Yemeni tribal leaders working with Al Qaeda and gather phones and computers that could yield intelligence. But Navy SEALS found themselves in an intense 50-minute firefight, with Al Qaeda fighters using women and children as cover, and some of the women firing at the commandos.

Airstrikes were called in to take out the Al Qaeda fighters, and then two MV-22 Ospreys were sent in to extract the SEALs. One experienced a “hard landing,” injuring crew members, and the $75 million aircraft had to be destroyed by a precision-guided bomb to keep it from falling into enemy hands.

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Money changes everything: GOP Senate approves unqualified Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary

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For the first time in American history, a vice president had to vote in the Senate to break a tie on a Cabinet nominee, and Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Donald Trump’s education secretary. With historic tiebreaker from Pence, DeVos confirmed as education secretary:

The Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary Tuesday by the narrowest of margins, with Vice President Pence casting a historic tiebreaking vote after senators deadlocked over her fitness for the job.

The entire Democratic caucus of 48 senators voted against DeVos, as did two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who said they did not think that DeVos was qualified for the job. The remaining 50 Republicans voted for her, setting up a 50-50 tie that could be broken only with Pence’s vote.

It marked the first time that a vice president’s tiebreaker was needed to confirm a Cabinet secretary, according to Daniel Holt, an assistant historian in the Senate Historical Office. And it was the first time a vice president cast any tiebreaker in the Senate since Richard B. Cheney did so nine years ago.

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‘Fence Sitter’ Martha McSally has got to stand for somethin’

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Rep. Martha McSally’s short political career has been most notable for her gravity-defying fence sitting, trying to maintain her perch on the fence having it both ways without ever taking a principled stand on anything. She literally stands for nothing.

It’s long past time for you to get off the fence, Martha: “You’ve Got To Stand For Somethin’, or you’re going to fall for anything” (John Mellencamp).

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The Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller writes today, McSally’s tentative Trump support galvanizes Dems:

Whichever way U.S. Rep. Martha McSally turns, there’s a trap.

If she supports President Trump’s initiatives, that galvanizes the already-energized Democrats and potentially puts her seat at risk in 2018. If she rejects Trump, she turns off the 44 percent of the Congressional District 2 electorate who voted for Trump, the base of McSally’s GOP.

It’s a trap she’s long tried to avoid in the southeast Arizona district that has gone to both Democratic and Republican candidates. On Aug. 31, the day candidate Trump visited the Mexican president and gave a dark anti-immigration speech in Phoenix, she declined to say whom she would vote for in the presidential election, saying “My vote is between me and God and the ballot box.”

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Arizona’s GOP congressional caucus votes to aid and abet Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution

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I previously posted about the lawsuit against Trump under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. The legal team intends to use the lawsuit to try to get a copy of Trump’s federal tax returns, which are needed to properly assess what income or other payments or loans Trump has received from foreign governments.

As I pointed out at the end of the post:

Sen. Ron Wyden (OR), the top Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee, along with Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA), introduced legislation earlier this month to require all sitting presidents and nominated presidential candidates to release their tax returns for the past three years. Want President Trump to release his tax returns? There’s a bill for that.

Will Tea-Publicans in Congress pass this bill? Or will they enable Trump by aiding and abetting his display of contempt for the public’s right to know and possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

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This past week we learned the answer: aiding and abetting Trump’s display of contempt for the public’s right to know and possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution it is!

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ACA repeal is a tax windfall to the wealthy – and you will pay for it

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I have previously explained that the GOP’s headlong rush to repeal the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare” is actually about repealing the taxes on the very wealthy that help pay for the program. The “blue-collar working class voters” who elected these Tea-Publicans to office will not only lose their health care coverage, they will wind up paying higher taxes as the wealthy receive a huge tax windfall. These voters got played, and the best part is, they did it to themselves.

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Jared Bernstein fleshes this out today with new data in How Republican-style health-care reform quickly becomes a tax cut for the richest of the rich:

The election of Donald Trump with a Republican-majority Congress is proving once again that conservative economic policy largely reduces to cutting taxes, mostly for the rich.

But wait a second, aren’t they also wading into health-care reform?

They are, and it proves my point. While much attention is reasonably focused on how they’re all repeal with no replace — and how that’s likely to reverse the coverage gains we’ve seen and undermine insurance markets — there’s something else going on here. And that is — you guessed it — a big tax cut for the rich.

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