The Senate Budget committee voted to move forward on the Republican tax bill Tuesday afternoon, a small but substantial step forward for the GOP overhaul, which will now go before the full Senate for debate. “I think we’re going to get it passed,” said President Donald Trump at a White House meeting with GOP congressional leadership, a few minutes after the bill passed out of committee. “I think it’s going to pass. And it’s going to be very popular.”
It now falls to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to thread the needle on a bill he needs 50 of the Senate’s 52 Republicans to support, a task he called “a challenging exercise.”
“Think of sitting there with a Rubik’s cube trying to get to 50,” McConnell said at his habitual Tuesday press conference. “We do have a few members who have concerns, and we’re trying to address them. We know we will not be able to move forward until we get 50 people satisfied.”
Trump, however, sounded confident even while acknowledging the bill will change before getting to his desk. “It’s going to have lots of adjustments before it ends, but the end result will be a very, very massive—the largest in the history of our country—tax cut,” he said.
Trump travels to St. Louis on Wednesday for a speech touting tax reform.
Must-Read of the Day—From the New York Times: “Trump Once Said the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Was Real. Now He’s Not Sure.”
North Korea Watch—After two months of relative silence, North Korea conducted another intercontinental ballistic missile test on Tuesday, prompting a stern but predictable rebuke from the Trump administration.
“I will only tell you that we will take care of it,” President Trump said at a meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday afternoon. “It is a situation that we will handle.”
Secretary of Defense James Mattis added that the Korean missile had gone “higher, frankly, than any previous shot they’ve taken.”
“It’s a research and development effort on their part to continue building ballistic missiles that could threaten everywhere in the world, basically,” Mattis said. “It’s a continued effort to build a ballistic missile threat that endangers world peace, regional peace, and certainly the United States.”
Trump insisted that the launch would not change America’s policy on North Korea. “Nothing changed,” he said. “We have a very serious approach, but nothing changed. We take it very seriously.” The administration last week redesignated North Korea as a state sponsor of terror, after the George W. Bush administration had removed the rogue nation from the list in 2008.
As the Kim regime continues to test more and bigger missiles, areas within their reach have begun to brace themselves for a possible attack. The state of Hawaii announced Tuesday it would begin monthly tests of its nuclear warning siren system for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
Benghazi Trial Update—From my colleague Jenna Lifhits, who has been following this trial closely: “Abu Khatallah, the first person publicly charged in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, was acquitted of federal murder charges Tuesday after a grueling seven-week trial.”
CFPB Watch—A federal judge ruled against a deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday, declining to issue a restraining order against the Trump administration for installing its own selection for acting director of the agency.
Last week Leandra English, the deputy director of the CFPB, was tapped to lead the agency by its outgoing director, Obama appointee Richard Cordray. But the White House named its Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, as acting director until President Trump could nominate a replacement. It’s widely believed Cordray resigned from the CFPB in preparation for a run for governor of Ohio.
English is suing the administration to block Mulvaney’s temporary appointment, but U.S. district judge Timothy Kelly (a Trump appointee) ruled against her after holding an emergency hearing on the matter Monday. Mulvaney began working as acting director this week.
Republicans have been skeptical of the broad powers of the CFPB since its creation in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank financial services bill—particularly the agency’s lack of accountability with Congress. The White House has seen Cordray’s CFPB step up its work in the months since Trump’s election, going farther into what Shannen Coffin calls the agency’s “regulatory overreach.”
Mulvaney’s appointment drew criticism from defenders of the CFPB since the former South Carolina congressman had called the bureau a “joke.”
Cordray’s surprise appointment of English, his 34-year-old chief of staff, as his successor reportedly rankled employees at the CFPB.
College Football Watch—An online editorial Tuesday argues that the squelched hiring of Greg Schiano as Tennessee’s head coach is a small and insufficient payment for the disgrace of the Penn State football program in covering up the sexual abuse by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Schiano was once a defense coach working under Sandusky. Here’s more:
More on James O’Keefe—Over at Commentary, Noah Rothman makes the astute observation that for whatever claims conservative activist and sting-video purveyor James O’Keefe makes about his commitment to the truth, he’s treating his audience like chumps. “Tragically, conservative media activists are becoming the debased, partisan creatures they once resolved to combat,” writes Rothman. “In the process, displays like the one to which we were all privy yesterday betray an audience’s trust and insult their intelligence.”
Song of the Day—“Ode to a Butterfly” by Nickel Creek
