Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake came to the Senate floor Wednesday with a simple message for Donald Trump: Stop attacking the media.
The speech, which Flake had previewed over the weekend, was the first of what the Arizona Republican has promised will be a series of addresses over 2018 aimed at noting the abnormalities of the Trump presidency.
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Critics have cast Flake as something of a sore loser — a Republican whose strong anti-Trump stance lost him the confidence of voters in his state. (Flake announced he would retire at the end of this year after a series of polls suggested he would have a very difficult time winning a second term.)
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White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that Flake’s speech was the result of his “poll numbers,” adding that the Arizona senator served as a “mouthpiece” for Cuba’s regime by recently making a trip to that country.
NBC News’ Lester Holt is in North Korea filing exclusive reports for NBC News and MSNBC through Monday. On Tuesday, January 23, he will anchor “NBC Nightly News” live from Seoul, South Korea.
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Last year, New York City saw hundreds of thousands of protesters spill into the streets of Manhattan for the Women’s March. In Washington, D.C., half a million came out. Across the country and world, women took a stand.
And they had some pretty great signs with them while doing it. This year was no different.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, women proved they are a force to be reckoned with. Women came out in record numbers last year to both protest and run for office. And men in power have seen their worlds shattered by women fed up with their abuse.
But we don’t need to tell you that.
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ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty Images
Protesters hold up signs near the White House after the Women’s March on Washington.
In the days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, a wealthy Russian pharmaceutical executive named Alexey Repik arrived in Washington, expressing excitement about the new administration.
He posted a photo on Facebook of a clutch of inauguration credentials arranged next to a white “Make America Great Again” hat, writing in Russian: “I believe that President Donald Trump will open a new page in American history.”
Throughout his trip, Repik had prime access. He wrote on Facebook that he got close enough to the president-elect at a pre-inaugural event to “check the handshake strength of Donald Trump.” He and his wife, Polina Repik, witnessed Trump’s swearing-in from ticketed seats in front of the U.S. Capitol. And he posed for a photo shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike Pompeo, the president’s nominee to head the CIA, although Repik later said he was not aware of Pompeo’s intended role at the time.
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Some prominent Russians came to Washington to witness Donald Trump’s inauguration last year. Above is a section where some had ticketed seats in front of the U.S. Capitol. (CNN/Photo illustration by The Washington Post)
Donald Trump campaigned as the master deal-maker, a guy who could come to Washington, knock a few heads and get the government working again.
But on the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, America awoke to a government shutdown — a dramatic testament to dysfunction, partisan gridlock and failed leadership.
There was a lot at stake: for the public, for House Republicans who fear losing their majority, for Senate Democrats whose incumbents will now have to defend their votes and the shutdown to constituents, and for Trump, whose approval ratings have languished below 40 percent.
But as federal spending authority expired at midnight Saturday, the nation’s top elected officials sent the election-year message that they’re less concerned with performing the most basic task of governance than catering to the demands of partisans.
Cindy Garcia has had a long, exhausting and life-changing week. And by all appearances, the whirlwind is going to continue.
On Monday morning, she watched immigration agents escort Jorge Garcia, her husband of 15 years, through the security gates at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, deporting him to Mexico after nearly three decades living and raising a family in Michigan.
Video of Cindy Garcia and the couple’s two adolescent children sobbing as they said goodbye grabbed national headlines. Supporters held up the family’s experience as an example of the far-reaching effects of President Trump’s sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigration. Observers across the political spectrum took notice. “Surely this should not be happening,” tweeted Bill Kristol, editor of the right-leaning Weekly Standard.
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Jorge Garcia poses with his wife, Cindy Garcia, in Detroit on Jan. 15 at a farewell party before he was deported to Mexico. (Niraj Warikoo /Detroit Free Press via AP)
Lawmakers appeared a little closer Wednesday to passing yet another short-term spending bill to keep the government open, but as Senate Democrats looked increasingly likely to cave, conservatives in the House looked increasingly likely to fight ― or at least get some concessions. And depending on what demands GOP leaders give in to, those changes could still throw the Senate into chaos and the government into a shutdown.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) emerged from a meeting with Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) on Wednesday night saying House Republicans don’t yet have the votes to pass another short-term spending fix, called a continuing resolution (CR).
“At this point, if the vote were to happen today, there’s not the votes to fund it with Republican-only votes,” Meadows told reporters Wednesday night.
Still, Meadows said they were making “good progress,” and he expected leadership to have some accommodation for conservatives.
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Bill Clark via Getty Images
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said a short-term spending bill is on shaky ground. “At this point, if the vote were to happen today, there’s not the votes to fund it with Republican-only votes.”
Only three people have a US national holiday observed in their honor: Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated on the third Monday in January each year (near his Jan. 15 birthday) to honor his legacy in battling for civil rights. The fight to create a national holiday was a massive struggle, one that required the same commitment as the movement to guarantee the rights of all Americans: community organizing, long-term determination, and relentless persistence.
King was assassinated in 1968. The legislation designating the federal holiday in his honor wasn’t passed for another 15 years, and the day wasn’t officially commemorated until 1986. And even as King’s work continues to inspire generations of leaders, the fight for universal recognition of the holiday in the US still isn’t over.
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King never stopped fighting, and neither did his supporters. (Associated Press)
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly told Democratic lawmakers Wednesday that some of the hard-line immigration policies President Trump advocated during the campaign were “uninformed,” that the United States will never construct a wall along its entire southern border and that Mexico will never pay for it, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The comments were out of sync with remarks by Trump, who in recent days has reiterated his desire to build a border wall that would be funded by Mexico “indirectly through NAFTA.”
The mixed signals underscore the difficulty congressional Republicans have faced as they have tried to decipher what the president wants in an immigration deal. And they have contributed to tensions over how to resolve the legal status of immigrants, known as “dreamers,” brought to the country illegally as children.
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White House Chief of Staff John Kelly arrives at the Capitol on Wednesday for a meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. (Susan Walsh/AP)
A couple days before Christmas 1995, then-Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole grew fed up with his negotiating partners in Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives and the Clinton White House.
“It’s time for adult leadership,” the Kansas Republican declared during a Senate floor speech.
Using a favorite phrase of his tenure as one of Washington’s most prominent figures, Dole emerged as the leader in talks to reopen the federal government amid a budget standoff pitting the House speaker, Gingrich (R-Ga.), against President Bill Clinton.
That “adult leadership” made a rare appearance Wednesday in the Capitol. President Trump and the bipartisan leadership awarded Dole, 94, with the Congressional Gold Medal, and it served as a stark contrast to today’s partisan toxicity, the whiff of another shutdown in the air.
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President Trump and congressinoal leaders pay tribute to former Senate majority leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) on Wednesday. In a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Dole received the Congressional Gold Medal. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Sen. Flake compares Trump’s rhetoric to Stalin
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ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty Images
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James' World 2 