LGBTQ activists held "dance party" protest outside Ivanka Trump's D.C. home

Hundreds of people protested in front of Ivanka Trump’s Washington D.C. home on Saturday for “climate justice.”
LGBTQ activists hosted a “dance party” protest to “send the clear message that our climate and our communities matter,” a detailed Facebook event said.
A crowd of protesters took to the streets with signs to protest President Donald Trump’s administration’s stance on climate change, the Daily Mail reported.
“The entire Trump Administration has shown a blatant disregard for our planet and its inhabitants,” the event page read. “Also, in case you hadn't heard, Trump revoked protections for LGBTQ government employees and removed LGBTQ questions from the census.”
Barricades were put up in front of Trump’s home by police, although it was uncertain if she and her family were home during the protest, WUSA reported.
Police told WUSA that the event had ended peacefully.

New York lawmakers miss deadline to pass state budget

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo a Democrat.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers missed the April 1 deadline for passing the state budget by the start of the new fiscal year and were still far apart on policy issues on Saturday.
Mr. Cuomo issued legislators a new deadline: Pass the budget by midnight on Sunday or he will pass an extender of the current budget instead.
Mr. Cuomo’s extender would last until May 21, when the U.S. Congress is expected to pass its budget resolution.
The governor said this would have the benefit of giving lawmakers more clarity about potential cuts to New York from a new Republican congress and president.
In a statement minutes after midnight on Saturday, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said the basic outlines of the roughly $160 billion spending plan for the new fiscal year were resolved, but policy issues that lawmakers intend to pass with the budget weren't.
Two obstacles were a measure to remove minors from the criminal-justice system and a replacement to 421-a, the expired law that gave real-estate developers tax breaks in exchange for including affordable housing in their real-estate portfolios.

Senate showdown, will GOP use 'nuclear option,' to confirm Gorsuch?

Sen. Mitch McConnell details efforts to replace ObamaCare

 “There were too many shaky hands holding the lighters near too many fuses.” – Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three
It’s always a numbers game on Capitol Hill. Which side possesses the most votes. After all, that’s the essence of democracy.
The Founders feared direct democracy -- and various other forms of republican democracy. So they tempered the power of the majority.
Unlike the House,  the Senate was the deliberative body. There, the minority could often prevail -- entailing a supermajority to shut down filibusters.
Neutralizing a Senate filibuster used to take 67 votes (two-thirds). The Senate dropped that to a three-fifths requirement in 1975. However, a two-thirds vote is still necessary to alter the Senate’s rules.
This is why the numbers game is so important. It’s clear that a majority of senators want to confirm Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. But it’s doubtful that a supermajority of 60 senators are willing to shut off debate on President Trump’s nomination.
This brings us to the so-called “nuclear option,” a fundamental obliteration of the Senate’s structure requiring a supermajority to overcome a threatened Democratic filibuster of Gorsuch.
It’s unprecedented for the Senate to successfully filibuster a Supreme Court pick. Defeat a nominee on the floor? Yes. Look at what happened to President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for the high court in 1987. Bork scored a scant 42 yeas when 51 ayes were necessary for confirmation. Require a Supreme Court nominee to secure 60 votes to shut off the filibuster before confirmation? Well, that’s a mixed bag.
Neither of President Obama’s selections for the court -- Justices Sonia Sotomayor nor Elena Kagan -- faced a “cloture” vote to end a filibuster. But the Senate confirmed both picks with supermajorities. Sotomayor secured 68 yeas. Kagan marshaled 63 yeas.
However, when President George W. Bush tapped Justice Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court in 2006, Senate Democrats (then in the minority) demanded a cloture vote to end a filibuster. Alito scored 72 yeas on the procedural vote. The Senate then confirmed Alito, 58-42.
This is what riles Senate Republicans. The GOP sports only 52 members right now. Two Democrats have announced their support for Gorsuch: Sens. Joe Manchin, West Virginia, and Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota.
Both are moderate Democrats in red states who face potentially brutal re-election campaigns next year. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., insists that if someone is going to sit on the High Court for life, they should command 60 votes on the Senate floor.
“It’s going to be a real, uphill climb to 60,” Schumer predicted for Gorsuch.
“It’s the most powerful court in the world,” said Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa. “If you’re seeking to be an associate justice on the Supreme Court, you ought to be able to rack up 60 votes. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
Republicans know they face a deficit to defy the Democrats’ filibuster of Gorsuch. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is unwavering.
“We are going to get Judge Gorsuch confirmed,” he said. “It will really be up to (Democrats) how the process to confirm goes moving forward.”
Embedded in McConnell’s remark is a gambit to deploy the “nuclear option” to confirm Gorsuch. After all, it’s about the numbers. So if McConnell doesn’t have the numbers, he’s willing to do something drastic to promote Gorsuch.
“If the nominee cannot get 60 votes, you don’t change the rules,” Schumer argued. “You change the nominee.”
The 60-vote threshold is dubious for Supreme Court justices. All recent justices proved they could command 60 votes at some point in the process. But the ceiling for Gorsuch so far is at 54 votes.
So what exactly is the nuclear option?
Schumer is wrong about one thing. The nuclear option is not a rules change. It’s a change in Senate precedent. The chamber currently has 44 rules. But as mentioned before, altering those rules requires 67 votes, seven more votes than necessary to invoke cloture and stop debate on Gorsuch’s nomination.
So with only 52 Republican senators, McConnell can’t switch Senate rules. But he could set a new precedent.
See, the Senate also operates on precedent -- a set of parliamentary criterion based on things that happened before. So, if you can’t change the rules, perhaps establish a new precedent.
Democrats opened Pandora’s Box on the nuclear option in November 2013 when they held the majority in the Senate. Senate Democrats didn’t have 67 votes to change the chamber rules. But then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, enacted a new precedent of how many votes are necessary to extinguish filibusters on executive branch nominees except Supreme Court picks.
As we say, it is a numbers game. Reid had the numbers -- a simple majority -- to form a new precedent for those types of nominees.
It’s a numbers game today, too. McConnell has 52 Republicans on his side. He could conceivably launch the nuclear option to constitute a new precedent to require but a simple majority to end filibusters of Supreme Court nominees -- rather than the old bar of 60 votes. All McConnell needs are 51 Republicans to go along to with his gambit.
McConnell must be sure he has at least 51 of his 52 members willing to do the deed. Fifty yeas would suffice if Vice President Pence comes round to break the tie. It’s unclear whether McConnell has those votes. Some Republican senators are leery of re-opening Pandora’s Box to authorize a new precedent. Senators are generally reluctant to change the chamber’s long-standing traditions for a quick-fix today.
One school of thought is that McConnell could let the issue percolate over the upcoming, two-week Easter and Passover recess. This could gin up support among Republicans or even let the Democrats marinate for a while about the consequences.
But Fox is told by multiple, senior Republican sources that should the Democrats not help Republicans count to 60 on Gorsuch, McConnell has the votes on his side to deploy the nuclear option. It’s likely this will all go down on Thursday with a prospective confirmation vote on Friday.
It likely looks like this:
The Senate Judiciary Committee meets Monday to vote the Gorsuch nomination out of committee and dispatch it to the floor. Actual debate on Gorsuch begins in the Senate on Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, McConnell files a “cloture petition” to end debate on Gorsuch.
By rule, cloture petitions require an intervening day before they’re “ripe” for a vote. So a vote to end debate on Gorsuch likely comes Thursday.
Let’s say Gorsuch fails to get 60 votes to end the filibuster Thursday. That’s where McConnell trips the nuclear wire. From a procedural standpoint, the Senate must be in what’s called a “non-debatable” posture.
In other words, a failed cloture vote is just that. There’s no more debate. This parliamentary cul-de-sac is important because it’s practically the only procedural locus in which McConnell could initiate the nuclear option. Any other parliamentary disposition prevents McConnell from going nuclear. But this unique place -- following a failed cloture vote -- is practically throbbing with political isotopes.
McConnell could switch his vote to halt debate so he winds up on the “prevailing side” of the cloture vote. In other words, the Democrats won. The “nay” side prevailed. By briefly siding with the Democrats since they won that round, grants McConnell the right to demand a revote on that same issue.
This is where McConnell lights the fuse.
All McConnell must do is make a point of order that the Senate needs only a simple majority (51 votes) to end debate on a Supreme Court nominee. Naturally, whichever GOP senator is presiding over the chamber would rule against McConnell. After all, that’s not the precedent.
But McConnell would then appeal that ruling, forcing another vote. At that stage, the Senate is voting to sustain the ruling of the presiding officer. But if 51 senators vote no (remember, McConnell wants to establish a new precedent), the Senate has rebuked the chairman’s ruling and set a new precedent. Only 51 yeas are then necessary to break a filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee.
That is the nuclear option.
McConnell could summon Pence to preside over the Senate should he have two defectors on his side. Bizarrely, it’s possible Pence could rule against McConnell’s point of order -- adhering to Senate precedent. But Pence could then vote to break a 50-50 tie to establish a new precedent should it come to that.
The Senate would then re-take the failed cloture vote on Gorsuch. Presumably Gorsuch secures 51 yeas to end debate. And then Democrats, fuming at the GOP’s political artifice, would require the Senate to burn off 30 hours before a final vote to confirm Gorsuch on Friday night.
The Senate usually grants opponents of an issue 30 hours of debate once the chamber votes to end debate.
Prepare for nuclear fallout.
Republicans will claim that Democrats opened Pandora’s Box with their version of the nuclear option in 2013. Democrats will counter they had to because of Republican filibusters back then. Republicans will declare they had no other choice but the nuclear option because Democrats filibustered Gorsuch.
Democrats will contend it never should have come to this. The GOP should have granted President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing.
Regardless, 51 votes will be the new precedent to break filibusters on Supreme Court picks. This is the nuclear option. It may be inevitable. As Stephen King wrote, “there were too many shaky hands holding the lighters near too many fuses.”

Trump vs. Freedom Caucus: President takes names, starting with Amash

Freedom Caucus member talks next efforts to repeal ObamaCare

The list of House Freedom Caucus members being targeted by President Trump for sinking Republicans’ ObamaCare overhaul plan grew Saturday when the White House singled out Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash for a primary defeat.
“Donald Trump is bringing auto plants & jobs back to Michigan,” tweeted White House social media Director Dan Scavino Jr. “@justinamash is a big liability. #TrumpTrain, defeat him in primary.”
Most of the ultra-conservative caucus’ roughly 35 members withheld their support for the Republican House leadership’s overhaul plan, which kept it from even getting a final vote in the GOP-led chamber, despite Trump’s rigorous dealmaking efforts.
The president invited caucus leaders to the White House and met with them and others in the House Republican conference on Capitol Hill in the days before the scheduled final vote.
Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., purportedly agreed to cancel the vote, instead of forcing non-supporters to cast “no” ballots on the record. However, Trump still appears bent on political revenge, with the White House suggesting support for a more moderate conservative against Amash in next year’s midterm elections.
“The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”
Also that day, The Post and Courier newspaper in South Carolina reported that Trump dared Freedom Caucus member Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., to vote against the overhaul bill.
Sanford, who with Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul has a competing ObamaCare replacement bill, said White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told him: "The president asked me to look you square in the eyes and to say that he hoped that you voted ‘no’ on this bill so he could run (a primary challenger) against you in 2018," according to the paper.
The Freedom Caucus members who opposed the House leadership plan say it doesn’t go far enough to repeal and replace ObamaCare, and they largely appear entrenched in that position.
“Trump admin & Establishment have merged into #Trumpstablishment,” Amash, a Tea Party favorite seeking a fourth term, tweeted Saturday in response to Scavino’s tweet. “Same old agenda: Attack conservatives, libertarians & independent thinkers.”
Previously, Amash had tweeted that instead of draining the swamp, Trump was being sucked into it.
Amash and Stanford are not the first Freedom Caucus members on Trump’s political hit list. Trump told caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., at the closed-door Capitol Hill meeting: “Oh Mark, I'm coming after you.”
Daniel Jacobson, a former Obama White House lawyer, argued Saturday that Scavino's tweet violates federal law about mixing official business with politics.
"This violates the Hatch Act. WH staff can't use an official or de facto govt Twitter acct (which this is) to call for defeat of a candidate," he tweeted.

Indebted to Ohio, Pence returns to vow ObamaCare fight 'ain't over'

Vice President Pence said Saturday in Ohio that President Trump’s effort to overhaul ObamaCare “ain’t over yet,” trying to assure voters in the battleground state that he and Trump will make good on their winning campaign promise.
Trump suffered a major defeat in late-March when the GOP-led House could not pass an overhaul bill.
However, the president now appears willing to resort to more hardball tactics, including negotiating next time with Democrats and backing 2018 primary challenges against members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who led the opposition to House leadership’s overhaul bill.
Texas Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold later Saturday expressed concerns on Fox News about both tactics, saying that working with Democrats will likely result in a more liberal-leaning bill, which will further alienate more GOP conservatives in Congress.
“If you move further to the left, you’re not just going to lose the Freedom Caucus,” he said. “You’ll lose people like me.”
Farenthold also suggested a recent White House tweet about backing GOP primary challenges and courting congressional Democrats is “the wrong way” to get overhaul legislation passed.
“It ain’t over yet,” Pence said about ObamaCare during a roundtable discuss Saturday at Dynalab, in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, that largely focused on jobs. “You can take that to the bank.”
“I’m really here to ask one simple question,” Pence also told the small group that including Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman, whose support for Trump helped him become the first Republican presidential candidate to win the state since 2004.
“With this group right here, you have a car (dealer), a flag maker and a pizza maker,” Portman said. “You have a great group of entrepreneurs here.”
Pence said that the administration has created about 500,000 new jobs in its roughly first 10 weeks and that Trump remains focused on tax reform and improving the country’s infrastructure.

North Korea Cartoons

Trump signs executive orders to crack down on trade abuses, increase enforcement

One week before he hosts a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump on Friday signed a pair of executive orders aimed at cracking down on trade abuses and identifying the causes of America’s massive trade deficit.
“We’re going to get these bad trade deals straightened out,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “The jobs and wealth have been stripped from our country, year after year, decade after decade, trade deficit upon trade deficit reaching more than $700 billion last year alone and lots of jobs.”
The first executive order concentrates on tougher enforcement of anti-dumping laws and increasing the collection of anti-dumping penalties and so-called countervailing duties -- a mechanism used against foreign governments that subsidize their producers and sell goods at below-market prices.
Anti-dumping penalties target exporters that sell goods below the cost of production.
Between 2001 and 2016, about $2.8 billion in import taxes went uncollected from companies in 40 countries, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday. He told reporters that by not using the enforcement mechanism properly, Americans lose out on funds that could be used for other purposes.
The second executive order calls on the Commerce Department and U.S. trade representative to produce a comprehensive report to identify “every possible cause of the U.S. trade deficit.”
Robert Lighthizer, Trump's nominee for post, has yet to be confirmed.
Once completed, the findings of the report will serve as the foundation that will guide the Trump administration’s future trade policy.
Officials will consider the impact on deficits of trade abuses, non-reciprocal trade practices, specific trade obligations, poor or inconsistent enforcement and World Trade Organization rules.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praised Friday's step.
"If anyone had any doubt about the president's resolve to fix the trade problems, these two executive orders should end that speculation now and for all time," he said standing next to Trump. "This marks the beginning of the totally new chapter in the American trade relationship with our partners overseas."
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ross said the first-of-its-kind report demonstrates that the administration will “not to do anything abruptly, but to take a very measured and analytical approach, both to analyzing the problem and therefore to developing the solutions for it.”
The cautious approach is welcome news to some in the business community.
“They are not just jumping into something. They are going to carefully look at what it is we really want to accomplish and hopefully think about how it will affect us and the other country,” founder of Paul Mitchell and billionaire investor John Paul DeJori told Fox Business Network.
Administration officials have 90 days to finish a country-by-country and product-by-product analysis.
The report will also examine whether bilateral deficits are caused by free trade deals, like NAFTA, and actions taken by previous administrations.
White House Trade Council President Peter Navarro broke slightly from Trump, saying deficits are not always bad for the economy and that bad behavior is not always the cause.
For example, one of the reasons for the trade deficit with Canada is the U.S. is not energy independent and imports a lot of oil.
During the campaign, then-candidate Trump frequently singled out China as a trade abuser and promised to hold China to account for unfair trade practices, including currency manipulation.
Asked Friday why Trump has not fulfilled his pledge to label China a currency manipulator on "Day One," Spicer said a decision would occur after next Thursday's meeting with Xi Jinping.
Navarro argued the executive orders address far broader concerns than just China.
"Let's not make this a China story. This is a story about trade abuses, this is a story about an under-collection of duties," he said.
Trump, however, recognizes the potential for an uncomfortable meeting next week in Palm Beach, Fla.
"The meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits,” Trump said in a Thursday tweet.
He added that "American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives."
On March 7, the Commerce Department released figures showing the U.S. had amassed its largest trade deficit since March 2012.
In January 2017, the trade deficit for goods and services was 11.8 percent higher as compared to January 2016, increasing from $43.4 billion to $48.5 billion.
“Today’s data shows there is much work to be done,” said Ross in a statement, adding that the administration would in the coming months “renegotiate bad trade deals and bring renewed energy to trade enforcement in defense of all hard-working Americans.”

VA retaliation against whistleblower: doctor kept in empty room

Dr. Dale Klein

Dr. Dale Klein may be the highest-paid U.S. government employee who literally does nothing while he’s on the clock. A highly rated pain management specialist at the Southeast Missouri John J. Pershing V.A., Klein is paid $250,000 a year to work with veterans, but instead of helping those who served their country, he sits in a small office and does nothing. All day. Every day.
“I sit in a chair and I look at the walls,” the doctor said of his typical workday. “It feels like solitary confinement.”
A double board certified physician and Yale University fellow, Klein said the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) took away his patients and privileges almost a year ago after, he alleges, he blew the whistle on secret wait-lists and wait-time manipulation at the V.A. in Poplar Bluff, Mo., as well as his suspicion that some veterans were reselling their prescriptions on the black market.
When his superiors did nothing, Klein went to the inspector general.
“Immediately after the V.A. found out I made these disclosures, I started to get retaliated against,” Klein said.
Klein was initially placed on administrative leave. The Missouri-V.A. closed his pain management clinic and tried to terminate him. According to court documents, the V.A. tried to fire Klein “not based on substandard care or lack of clinical competence” but instead for “consistent acceleration of trivial matters through his chain of command.”
“I do not consider secret wait-lists and manipulations of wait times to be trivial matters,” Klein said.
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative agency in Washington, D.C., made it clear that since the doctor was a whistleblower, he could not be fired. But Klein said the retaliation continued and believes his superiors stripped him of his duties to silence him.
“It could set a bad precedent for other whistleblowers because they're going to say, ‘I don't want to risk my livelihood, my career, my security because I see what happened to Dr. Klein and I don't want that to happen to me or my family’,” said Natalie Khawam, president and founder of the Whistleblower Law Firm, which represents Klein.
The situation grew so dire that Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chair Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., chose to step in, writing a letter in January to the acting V.A. secretary requesting the V.A. “cease all retaliatory actions” against Klein.
“I'm concerned about a doctor who could be utilizing his skills to help veterans, but who is not able to utilize those skills,” Johnson said.
Remarkably, Klein isn’t the only V.A. employee who allegedly has been retaliated against. In fact, his story sounds eerily similar to that of Brian Smothers, who worked at the Denver V.A. from 2015 until last November when he says conditions grew so hostile he quit.
Smothers served in the Colorado Army National Guard and Reserves from 1999 to 2007, and later joined the Denver V.A. to help veterans engage with their own healthcare and assisted the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder clinical team.
“I come from a family of veterans who really highly values service to others and helping veterans and that's what I wanted to dedicate my life to doing… helping veterans who may be struggling,” he said.
Smothers was working as a peer support specialist when he alleges he found more than 3,500 veterans on what he believes were “secret” wait-lists at V.A. facilities in Denver, Golden and Colorado Springs.
"It looked like some kind of game they were playing with veteran’s mental healthcare, and I was very upset," Smothers said. “It became clear to me very quickly that many of the veterans that were on the PTSD clinical team’s wait-list had been waiting for care for three, four, five, six months,” Smothers said.
The reason, Smothers alleges, is profit: “People who run the V.A. and the mental health division hid these wait-lists so they could meet performance goals, and as a consequence of meeting these goals, got bonuses. They defrauded the federal government because it benefited them."
Smothers is haunted by one veteran’s death in particular, an Army Ranger in Colorado Springs who told the V.A. that he had been waiting for care and was suicidal. Instead of helping him, the V.A. allegedly placed him on a wait-list and he committed suicide a short time later, Smothers said.
"I wish I could have done more to change the system from within because as far as I understand nothing is being done to change any of this," Smothers said.
After Smothers reported the allegations to the inspector general, he said his superiors retaliated by forcing him to sit in his office, without any work assignments or authority to see patients. Human Resources also tried to get him to destroy the wait-lists, he alleges, and sign a piece of paper saying he had “compromised the integrity of the healthcare system," Smothers said.
The V.A. declined to address the allegations on camera and instead referred us to the inspector general, who confirmed it "identified wait-time and other issues in recent published reports and testimony before Congress regarding Colorado V.A. facilities."
Sen. Johnson intervened on Smothers’ behalf and got the inspector general to launch an investigation.
“It has quite honestly been shocking to somebody like me who comes from the private sector, the pervasiveness of retaliation even though we have 100 years of laws against retaliating against whistleblowers in government,” Johnson said.
Johnson is now trying to pass a whistleblower protection bill to help V.A. employees like Smothers and Klein.
A spokesperson from the V.A. said due to on-going investigations, the V.A. cannot comment on specific cases but added the department recognizes the importance of all employees, to include whistleblowers, who identify problems that impede the optimal delivery of care and services to Veterans.
Klein said he hopes the V.A., under the Trump administration, will make substantial changes so veterans can get quality care they need and so those who uncover problems or wrongdoing – and report it – are protected.
“This is a heart-stopping moment for the V.A. and the transformation can start in Poplar Bluff, Mo.”