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Crenshaw, the Republican U.S. House candidate mocked on 'SNL,' gets last laugh

Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw got the last laugh Tuesday, easily being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives after being mocked for his war injury days earlier on "Saturday Night Live."
Crenshaw, 34, was favored to beat Democrat Todd Litton to win the seat being vacated by Republican Ted Poe before last weekend’s "SNL" episode in which castmember Pete Davidson made fun of his appearance, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Crenshaw won with 53 percent of the vote compared to Litton's 44.4 percent, according to Politico.
During a "Weekend Update" segment, Davidson said Crenshaw looked like "a hitman in a porno movie," when he referred to the veteran's black eyepatch. Davidson continued, "You may be surprised to hear he’s a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno movie. I'm sorry. I know he lost his eye in war or whatever."
Crenshaw lost his right eye in 2012 after a bomb exploded during a mission in Afghanistan, his third military deployment.
Davidson also poked fun at Florida Gov. Rick Scott and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
At his election victory party in Houston, Crenshaw brushed off the joke, saying “I’m from the SEAL team so we don’t really get offended,” according to the Chronicle.
Davidson's comments were widely denounced by Republicans, Democrats and veterans groups as insensitive. Some Republicans called on Davidson and the show to apologize.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who lost her legs in Iraq, demanded Davidson issue an apology.
"No one should ever mock a Veteran for the wounds they received while defending our great nation, regardless of political party or what you think of their politics. Pete Davidson owes Dan Crenshaw an apology," she said.
On Monday, Crenshaw said he wasn’t interested in an apology. He instead called for those affiliated with the show to donate $1 million to veterans groups, the Washington Post reported.
“There’s a lot of veterans that really need help, and frankly, this kind of thing is offensive to them,” Crenshaw said on CNN. “They feel laughed at.”

Dems' House takeover sets up series of legislative showdowns

After years in the political wilderness on Capitol Hill, Democrats will have the power to push their legislative agenda in Congress after winning the House majority Tuesday. But faced with a Republican-controlled Senate and White House, the Democrats are in for a series of showdowns that could leave the party undertaking more modest legislative goals on issues from prescription drug prices to infrastructure, while laying the groundwork for a more ambitious national agenda ahead of the 2020 presidential race.
Meanwhile, President Trump's wide-ranging wishlist, including his recently announced plan for a 10-percent middle-class tax cut and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's renewed call for an ObamaCare repeal, now requires significant revisions. Compromise between Democrats and Republicans will surely remain elusive as the midterm season is overtaken by presidential election politics, though analysts say both sides may be forced to strike some deals in pursuit of legislative wins.
Democrats' first major initiative will likely be to enact rules changes that govern the House, because those internal regulations do not require Senate passage. In the wake of the dramatic arrest of Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., in August on insider trading charges related to his role on the board of a prominent biotechnology company, ethics reforms are set to be a marquee area of focus.
DEMS RETAKE HOUSE, BUT GOP EXPANDS SENATE MAJORITY -- GIVING THEM CONTROL OVER JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has her eyes on the speaker's gavel, signaled as much on Tuesday night, vowing that "we will have a Congress that is open transparent and accountable to the American people."
“Tomorrow will be a new day in America,” Pelosi declared. "It's about restoring the Constitution's checks and balances to the Trump administration. ... It's about ending wealthy special interests' free rein over Washington."
She promised to "clean up corruption to make Washington work for all Americans."
Pelosi similarly pledged to lead "the most ethical Congress in history" when she first rose to the speakership in 2007 -- a boast that became a liability when she placed then-Rep. William Jefferson on the Homeland Security Committee, despite allegations he had stashed $90,000 in bribe money in his freezer. (Jefferson was later convicted on bribery charges.)
"Members of Congress should not be sitting on boards of companies, especially those whose are impacted by policies — policy decisions and the government — so this is appalling, but it shows the brazenness of it all," Pelosi said on MSNBC earlier this year.
More substantive legislative changes are also possible on a series of high-profile policy items on which both parties have signaled they could ultimately have some common ground.

"The only legislative initiative that appears to be at stake is tax reform 2.0. Other than that, the same things happen."
— Fmr Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eaken

In June, Trump supported a compromise immigration bill that would have secured $25 billion for border wall construction while also providing a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers, or illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But after the legislation hit a wall of its own as moderate and conservative Republicans splintered, Trump seemingly withdrew that support and said his party should try again if a "red wave" materialized in November.
DEMS TO FLEX MUSCLE, AS HOUSE AFFORD THEM POWER TO SUBPOENA TRUMP ADMIN
Roosevelt University politics professor David Faris, who has said that the GOP likely wouldn't have made much legislative progress even it had retained control of the House, told Fox News that Trump might revisit that short-lived compromise effort in the coming months.
"If Democrats are willing to fund the border wall in exchange for the Dreamers -- I think that broad compromise has been there a long time," Faris said. "The real question is whether the president is willing to let go on restrictions on legal immigration. If he can let that go, I think the compromise is there."
Leaders from both parties have also publicly lamented soaring prescription drug costs. Trump has hammered Pfizer and other pharmaceutical giants on the issue, saying in July that they "should be ashamed that they have raised drug prices for no reason" and "are merely taking advantage of the poor."
The president has framed drug prices as an affront to his "America First" worldview, writing on Twitter that the companies are "giving bargain basement prices to other countries in Europe & elsewhere." Soon after his election, he charged that drug companies were "getting away with murder."
A 2015 Reuters study found that on average, prices for the world's top-20 highest selling medicines are three times more expensive in the U.S. than they are in Britain, owing to government pricing controls there.
On Tuesday, Pelosi promised to take action in brief remarks as early election returns poured in.
"Democrats will lower health care costs and prescription drug prices for seniors and families across America," she said. "Instead Mitch McConnell and the Republicans have put Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block, and will continue their cruel assault from the protections for people with preexisting conditions.
But the issue of soaring drug prices may be trickier to resolve than it appears. Trump already signed a bipartisan bill in October that guaranteed pharmacists the right to tell consumers when paying cash would be cheaper than using insurance for their prescriptions, over the objection of insurance companies. And Democrats, although united in their concern over soaring prices, are split on how to resolve the underlying problem.
Some Democrats want to allow the federal government to negotiate Medicare drug prices, even though similar efforts in the past may have made the problem worse. On Tuesday night, Pelosi hinted at taking "very strong legislative action to negotiate down the price control of prescription drugs that is burdening seniors and families across America."

"I think it deserves some hearings, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s not a magic bullet."
— Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., on Dems' plan for prescription drug prices

In 1990, Congress mandated that federal Medicaid programs either receive a 15 percent discount on drugs off their list prices, or the most competitive price offered to private payers -- an initiative that ultimately led drug companies to slash private discounts to roughly 15 percent off list prices.

But some in her party are skeptical. “It’s a great talking point,” Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., told Roll Call, referring to the idea of having the federal government negotiate with drug companies. “I think it deserves some hearings, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s not a magic bullet.”
Infrastructure reform could also be an area of bipartisan consensus, as Democrats have vowed to use the committee process to build agreement on any proposal to improve the nation's roads, bridges, sewer systems, and schools.

On Tuesday, Pelosi specifically touted her plans to "deliver a transformational investment in America's infrastructure," including broadband networks, housing, schools, and sewers.
"Infrastructure has never been partisan," she claimed.
In October, Trump signed a bipartisan bill to provide several billions of dollars to fund drinking-water initiatives and Army Corps of Engineers projects, just one day after he signed a similarly bipartisan bill to combat the opioid epidemic and just two months after he signed a massive defense spending bill into law.
"If you want to know about bipartisan accomplishments, look no further than this Congress," Stephanie Penn, press secretary for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Fox News. "Water infrastructure, opioids, defense, etc. All passed with overwhelming bipartisan support."
Trump's own infrastructure proposal, which called for a $200 billion federal investment in the hopes of spurring $1.5 trillion in additional funding from states and private investors, stalled in Congress earlier this year. Democrats balked at further spending cuts to pay for the measue, and instead suggested rolling back the GOP's recent tax overhaul. Republicans, meanwhile, split on whether to fund the plan with a gas tax or other mechanism.
RED-STATE DEMS WHO OPPOSED KAVANAUGH DROP LIKE FLIES IN MIDTERMS
Another potential showdown looms over Trump's recently renegotiated trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, which is slated to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) secures greater U.S. access to Canadian dairy markets and changes regulations to bring back more auto manufacturing to the U.S. and is considered one of the White House's crowning foreign policy achievements -- but it requires congressional authorization.
"The bar for supporting a new NAFTA will be high,” Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., who is poised to become the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told Politico. And Trump himself has similarly sounded a note of caution: "Anything you submit to Congress is trouble," he said.
But other analysts have warned that Democrats, by fighting Trump on trade, would risk drawing attention to his accomplishments -- and play into his critiques that they are only interested in obstruction. One of the only major concessions by the U.S. in the USMCA is that it preserves a tariff-dispute regulatory regime that Canada had insisted was a sine qua non.
"Given the modest nature of the revisions he pursued with these trade agreements, I don't see Democrats dying on that hill," Faris told Fox News. "I think the opinion within Congress is broadly supportive of these agreements. ... You could argue that's an area where the president has succeeded, and I don't think Democrats want to highlight that success by trying to stop it."
Still, Faris added, if Trump decides to escalate the ongoing trade conflict with China, a congressional clash could be imminent.
"The collision course possible here is with China," Faris said. "If we get to the point where we're talking aboutmost-favored-nation status, I could see a potentially significant battle with Congress over that." (The U.S. has afforded China permanent normal trade relations since 2000, an arrangement that afforded China the same trade advantages as other countries with that designation.)
While more partisan fireworks are likely in the next two years, Faris said, the actual impact of divided government may not be as significant as it might appear, owing to the lack of pending, articulated GOP policy proposals that actually hang in the balance.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously directed the Congressional Budget Office and now heads the conservative American Action Forum think tank, agreed, telling Fox News that the Democratic takeover of the House won't actually "change much."
"The only legislative initiative that appears to be at stake is tax reform 2.0," Holtz-Eaken said. "Other than that, the same things happen -- with [Democrats] doing a lot more oversight."

Battleground-state Dems who opposed Kavanaugh all defeated

Incumbent Senate Democrats in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination appeared to have paid a price on Election Day, with senators Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Indiana's Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Florida's Bill Nelson all suffering defeat.
In fact, every Democrat incumbent who opposed Kavanaugh in states rated "toss up" by Fox News lost their race. In contrast, the lone Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, won his race.
"Every Dem Senator in a competitive race who voted against Kavanaugh lost," tweeted Tom Bevan, Co-founder of RealClearPolitics. Fox News polling offered evidence the Kavanaugh issue was a major problem for those battleground incumbent Democrats.
A Fox News poll from early October, just before the Kavanaugh confirmation vote, found 34 percent of North Dakotans said they would be less likely to vote for Heitkamp if she voted against Kavanaugh, with just 17 percent saying it would make them more likely to vote for her.
In Missouri, among the 28 percent of voters who said they could still switch candidates, almost twice as many said they'd be less likely to support McCaskill if she opposed Kavanaugh.
In Indiana, a Fox News poll found 32 percent said they would be less likely to vote for Braun if he voted against Kavanaugh, compared to 30 percent who would be more likely.
Sen. Manchin got grief for his vote for Kavanaugh, and was shouted at by protestors with chants of "shame!" One reporter asked him: "Do you think there's still a place for you in the Democratic Party after this?"
Manchin replied by saying, "I'm just a West Virginian."
Manchin also came under fire from his Republican opponent for waiting to announce his vote until after the Republicans had already secured enough votes. Many speculated that had been the deciding vote, he would have gone against Kavanaugh.
But he survived that charge.
The other incumbents Democrats took a different tack. Heitcamp told CNN she had been ready to support Kavanaugh until she heard his testimony. "I saw somebody who was very angry, who was very nervous," she said.
Donnelly came out with a more full-throated statement. “As I have made clear before, sexual assault has no place in our society," he said. "When it does occur, we should listen to the survivors and work to ensure it never happens again."
Lindsey Graham, who was outspoken in condemning what he saw as unfair treatment of Kavanaugh during the hearings -- he told Senate Democrats "God you all want power. I hope you never get it -- chimed in on the subject Tuesday night.
"One of the reasons we are winning big in the Senate tonight is because of the way Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh," he tweeted.

Dems to flex muscle with new House majority: Subpoenas, investigations, even possible impeachment talks loom

The incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has the power to open a slew of investigations into the White House and President Trump when the new Congress is seated in January, and early indications are that Democrats plan to aggressively take advantage of their new authority.
Bogging down the Trump administration with burdensome document requests and subpoenas could backfire, political analysts tell Fox News, but there is little doubt that the strategy -- made more viable by heightened partisanship and loosened congressional norms -- would impair Republicans' messaging and even policy goals for the next two years.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who aims to reclaim the position of House speaker when her colleagues vote on leadership roles in the coming weeks, recently seemed to threaten to use congressional subpoenas as a cudgel against the White House.
“Subpoena power is interesting, to use it or not to use it,” Pelosi said at a conference in October, referring to the authority of House committees to summon individuals and organizations to testify or provide documents under penalty of perjury. “It is a great arrow to have in your quiver in terms of negotiating on other subjects." She added that she would use the power "strategically."
DEMS RETAKE HOUSE, BUT GOP EXPANDS SENATE MAJORITY -- GIVING THEM CONTROL OVER JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS
On Tuesday night, as it became clear Democrats would retake the House, Pelosi appeared to double down on that rhetoric, declaring that the midterms were about “restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances to the Trump administration."
"In sharp contrast to the GOP Congress, a Democratic Congress will be led with transparency and openness, so the public can see what's happening and how it affects them. ... We will have accountability," Pelosi said.

"A Democratic Congress will be led with transparency and openness."
— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Pelosi has said that unearthing Trump's personal tax returns would be "one of the first things we'd do" in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, calling it the "easiest thing in the world" to obtain them using statutory authority granted to congressional committees under the Internal Revenue Service code. Democrats made several efforts to obtain Trump's returns while in the minority, only to be rejected by House Republicans.
Trump would likely seek to stall those requests with legal challenges, and it remains unclear whether Democrats could publicly release his tax returns even if they obtained them for investigative purposes.
Before a rally in Indiana on Monday, Trump appeared unconcerned about the matter. "I don't care," he said. "They can do whatever they want, and I can do whatever I want."
House committees can effectively hold in statutory contempt anyone who refuses to fully comply with a subpoena relevant to the committee's legislative purpose and pertinent to its investigation. While criminal penalties, including fines and even imprisonment, are then possible with a judge's approval, separation-of-powers issues emerge when the House tries to penalize a member of the Executive branch.
In 2014, a federal judge denied House Republicans' efforts to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of court, saying the move was "entirely unnecessary."
FROM MAXINE WATERS TO JERRY NADLER, MEET THE LIKELY NEW HEADS OF KEY HOUSE COMMITTEES 
But even fruitless investigations can beleaguer and derail administrations, and historical evidence suggests they are becoming a popular partisan tool in the lower chamber for that reason.
Research conducted by Cornell University political science professor Douglas Kriner, who co-wrote the 2016 book "Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power," underscores how important control of the House, as opposed to the generally less partisan and slower-moving Senate, is to these congressional probes.
"We examined every congressional investigation from 1898 to 2014 – more than 11,900 days of investigative hearings," Kriner told Fox News. "What we found is that divided government is a major driver of investigations in the House. This is particularly true in periods of intense partisan polarization. For example, from 1981-2014, the House averaged holding 67 days of investigative hearings per year in divided government, versus only 18 per year in unified government."
KAVANAUGH EFFECT? RED-STATE DEMS WHO OPPOSED KAVANAUGH ALL OUSTED IN MIDTERMS
Kriner added that modern congressional probes seem geared towards "maximiz[ing] the political damage on the White House," rather than producing more substantive results. "Investigations are less likely to trigger new legislation than in previous, less polarized eras," Kriner told Fox News.
President Trump has repeatedly derided the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible illegal Russian collusion and obstruction of justice as a "partisan witch hunt," saying it's fueled by Democrats upset that he won the 2016 election. But it's not clear how effective those attacks have been: An August poll showed that 59 percent of registered voters approve of Mueller's investigation.
SECRET WATERGATE 'ROAD MAP' COULD OFFER GUIDANCE FOR MUELLER PROBE 
The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff, already has warned his party would relaunch the Russia probe in the House with Democrats in charge.
“We will be able to get answers the Republicans were unwilling to pursue,” he recently told CNN.
Democrats have an array of potential avenues of investigation to pursue aside from Russia. In September, a federal judge ruled that Democrats have standing to sue Trump over potential violations of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, which ostensibly precludes the president from accepting certain foreign favors. While the legal argument that Trump is violating this clause by maintaining lucrative and profitable overseas investments is far from settled, Democrats' pursuit of this line of argument offers some clues into what their investigations might focus on.
University of North Carolina Law Professor Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional expert who testified during impeachment proceedings of former President Bill Clinton, told Fox News in an interview that Democrats might focus on Trump's financial ties to Saudi Arabia.
"It is possible — would not be a surprise — if there were some interest in exploring the president’s Saudi connections or finances," Gerhardt said, before adding: "It would also not surprise me if the Democrats did not pursue these things."
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The killing of dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey last month led to heightened scrutiny of the past connections between Trump's business empire and the Islamic country. The president initially condemned what he characterized as a rush to judgment against the Saudi government, before saying that its agents had apparently engaged in the "worst cover-up ever."
Trump has tweeted that he has "no financial interests in Saudi Arabia," and there is no evidence that he currently does. However, he has repeatedly touted his real estate deals with the country, saying at a 2015 rally that "they buy apartments from me" and "spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much."
In August, Axios published a spreadsheet circulating among Republican circles on Capitol Hill documenting possible areas of focus for Democratic investigations. They include the White House's revocation of top former officials' security clearances, Trump's unreleased tax returns, and the administration's proposed travel ban and a prohibition on transgender individuals in the military. Other topics on the list, which Axios said originated in the office of a senior Republican lawmaker, are Trump's personal iPhone use and his personal payment to porn star Stormy Daniels -- a move that implicated, but did not appear to definitively violate campaign finance law.
Frequent Trump critic Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said in an interview last week that Democrats intend to "exercise oversight over the executive branch the way the Framers intended."
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He went on to mirror Pelosi's threat: "We would be able to get Donald Trump's tax returns to see if he's being influenced by foreign entities. ... We can call in the secretary of Homeland Security [to] ask her why she still has hundreds of children she has not reunited that she ripped away from parents at the border. There are a lot of things that we can do with our oversight responsibility."
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who is poised to become the committee's chairman, offered another possible angle in an interview with The Hill. "I want to look at what President Trump has done, aided and abetted by the Republicans in Congress, to tear down the foundations of our democracy," he said.
Republicans who control the Oversight committee have rejected more than 50 Democratic requests for subpoenas of Trump administration documents, covering everything from the White House's decision not to defend key provisions of ObamaCare in court, to perks used by Cabinet members.
A particularly prominent possible investigation would revolve around Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, which critics have cited as potential obstruction of justice in part because Trump acknowledged that Russia-related matters were on his mind at the time.
“The cover-up is always worse than the crime, and this one is very shady,” Andrew Hall, who represented a top adviser to then-President Richard Nixon during Watergate, said in an interview. Hall has maintained that Trump will "undoubtedly be impeached."
However, legal experts, including emeritus Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, have said that penalizing the president for firing an FBI director who serves at his pleasure would be unconstitutional, and others have pointed out that Comey's firing would have done little to halt the Russia probe generally.
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Mueller's findings, which are expected to be submitted to Congress in a matter of months, might provide a launching point not only for further investigations but for even impeachment proceedings.
"Impeachments tend to be driven by particular events that are instances of grave misconduct — not liking someone or being an opponent is not likely to be enough to get the whole process started," Gerhardt told Fox News.
Such an escalation, analysts warn, would potentially pose a risk to Democrats. "I don’t think there is something as well developed as a tradition not to seek an impeachment when it appears conviction is unlikely or unthinkable," Gerhardt added. "Nonetheless, I think there is always awareness of the possible risks of seeking an impeachment when conviction is impossible."
Handling many of these congressional inquiries will be the new White House Counsel, veteran high-powered Washington lawyer Pat Cipollone, who will oversee an office that dwindled from a staff of approximately 50 to fewer than 30 in recent weeks. That headcount is expected to expand significantly in the wake of Democrats' House takeover.
"He’s very talented and he’s a very good man," Trump said last month, referring to Cipollone. In a campaign email in the days leading up to Tuesday's vote, the president made an impassioned effort to cut down on Cipollone's workload, saying Democrats are interested only in "vicious obstruction and mindless resistance."
"We can only imagine what they’d do with legitimate power in our government," Trump said. "We can’t hand Democrats the keys to Congress. We can’t go back.”