Ominous Signs For Republicans' Retaking the House

In Virginia, the immediate focus is on ending Republican control of the Virginia General Assembly in November, 2019, and allowing Virginia to finally become the progressive state the majority of its population wants.  Longer term the focus is on 2020 and hopefully ending the political career of Donald Trump and numerous Republicans.  Outwardly, Congressional Republicans are boasting that they will retake control of the House of Representatives in the 2020 elections.  Privately, many are singing a different song - one that I and decent Americans should hope proves accurate, namely that such a GOP win is unlikely and there are numerous signs that such bragging is little more than hot air.  A piece in Politico looks at some of the danger signs facing the GOP which is powerless to change the dynamics as long as Trump is in the White House and the party base remains controlled by white supremacists and "Christian" religious extremist (often, the two are one and the same group).  Here are article highlights:

A parade of Republican retirements. Red flags about the economy. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings under water. A nail-biter race in a GOP stronghold.

House Republicans are grappling with a string of ominous warning signs from over the past month that could spell doom for the party’s chances of clawing back power in 2020, an unsettling prospect for the GOP conference as it prepares for its annual retreat in Baltimore on Thursday.

[T]he big picture for Republicans remains dim. Even some of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill recognize that it’s going to be an uphill climb in flipping the 18 seats they need to win back the House. . . .  there are a host of reasons for Republicans to be rattled by Bishop’s 2-point victory. The GOP had to go all-out to save the seat in a district that Trump won by 12 points in 2016 and which has been in Republican hands since the 1960s. And Bishop performed poorly in the suburbs, a key battleground where voters fled the GOP last year.

Even more ominous for the party: There are 35 GOP-held House seats that are even less Republican than North Carolina’s 9th District, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

“This is like a five-alarm fire for Republicans in prosperous suburbs,” Dave Wasserman, House editor for the Cook Political Report, said in an interview. “[The GOP] averted disaster, but there’s nothing in the results to persuade House Republicans who are sitting on the fence about running for reelection that they are any likelier to take back the majority.”

A mix of veteran and vulnerable Republicans have called it quits in recent weeks, a sign that GOP lawmakers may be growing less confident about their chances of seizing back the House next year. Some Republicans — two-thirds of whom have never served in the minority — would rather call it quits than continue to roam the political wilderness.

Several of the retirements have been especially devastating for the GOP. The party is losing Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, a rising young star and the only black Republican in the House; . . . .

[A]t least three of the races have become more competitive in the wake of the retirement announcements, and more endangered members could jump ship if they don’t want to duke it out another term — especially if the GOP’s prospects look bleak in 2020.

GOP leadership, however, has downplayed the recent wave of retirements and maintains they are in a strong position to flip the House.

The GOP is banking on strong economic growth and low unemployment rates to serve as their calling card in 2020.

But Trump has thrown that strategy into question. [Trump] The president escalated his trade war last month, slapping a new round of tariffs on China that directly hit consumers for the first time — though on Wednesday he announced he would delay imposing an additional 5 percent duty on about $250 billion of goods from China. And there have also been signs of a possible economic recession, including a shrink in the manufacturing sector and the so-called inverted yield curve.

[T]he public doesn’t seem to have as much confidence in the economy. Six in 10 Americans think a recession is likely in the next year, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. Trump is also lagging behind his top 2020 Democratic rivals, while his approval ratings have dipped 6 points, down to 38 percent, according to the same survey.

“In both 2018 and last night, House race results have been highly correlated with Trump’s approval ratings,” Wasserman said. “It’s unlikely that [Republicans] win back control of the House either way. Right now, I would put the chances at somewhere between 25 and 35 percent.”

Let's hope the odds shrink even more.

Democrats Prepared to Force Mueller Report Release

With the Russiagate investigation seemingly closing in on Der Trumpenführer, many fear that Trump's unconstitutionally appointed acting Attorney General will be pressure to try to kill the release of the report as a last ditch effort to hide the criminality Trump and his circle of sycophants - and perhaps even their acts of treason - from the American Public. Now, Democrats who are about to take control of the House of Representatives a mere eleven (11) days from now are signalling that that effort to protect Trump and his co-conspirators will not be allowed and that the House will force the release of Robert Mueller's report. A piece at CNN looks at the Democrat vow to make the report public and to expose the wrongdoing expected to be revealed in the report.  With Trump's announcement that he will force James Mattis from the office of Secretary of Defense, some Republicans may be ready to see Trump taken down. Here are article excerpts:

California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said if President Donald Trump's attorneys try to assert executive privilege to stop the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller's eventual report, he would likely compel publication in some form.

"I'm prepared to make sure we do everything possible so that the public has the advantage of as much of the information as it can," Schiff said on CNN's "State of the Union." Schiff is expected to chair the House Intelligence Committee when Democrats take the chamber next month, and he said he would likely use his subpoena power to obtain and release Mueller's eventual report if he needed to. "Now, there may be parts of the report that have to be redacted because they involved classified information or they involve grand jury material," Schiff said, adding, "This case is just too important to keep from the American people what it's really about."
 Schiff also stressed his concern repeatedly about acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker. CNN reported previously that Whitaker disregarded the advice of a Justice Department ethics official to step aside from overseeing the Mueller probe and that Trump lashed out at Whitaker regarding the federal case against his former attorney Michael Cohen.   "This is exactly what we feared about Whitaker's appointment," Schiff said. He also vowed to conduct oversight of Whitaker and inform the public about the man leading the Justice Department following the ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from oversight of the Russia investigation.  "We are going to scrutinize every single action by Matt Whitaker to make sure that the public knows just what he does," Schiff said.

Trump Is Trapped, Trying to Protect Himself at All Costs

Throughout his questionable real estate career which has involved ignoring the law and associations with mobsters and the Russian Mafia, three things have defined Donald Trump: (i) putting self interest/ego ahead of all else, (ii) con artist behavior, and (iii) using threats and bullying to fend off much deserved adverse consequences.  Since taking office and desecrating the White House, these three themes have continued and Trump's white supremacist and Christofascist base have happily allowed themselves to be played for fools, blinded by their thrill of seeing Trump's open racism on display and/or attacks on favored Christofascist targets.   Now, with Democrats set to take control of the House of Representatives come January, 2019, Trump may be on the verge of finally being held accountable.  Trump's reaction?  Lies, threats and efforts to subvert the law.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

On November 7, President Trump woke up to a world in which Democrats had smashed through a gerrymandered map to win three dozen House seats, depriving him of both his legislative majority and his effective immunity from congressional oversight and accountability. He responded in the most Trumpian way: with an atavistic display of brute dominance. He insisted the election had been a triumph (“I thought it was a very close to complete victory”), belittled Republicans who had lost for declining his “embrace,” pulled the press pass from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, and warned Democrats not to investigate anything in his administration or he would refuse to work with them and have Senate Republicans investigate them back.

And he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose sole offense, in Trump’s eyes, was recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Trump maintains the attorney general’s job is to protect [Trump's] the president’s political interests, even if [Trump] the president or his allies have committed serious crimes.

Trump finally acted on this vision, skipping the normal chain of command and declaring Matthew Whitaker the acting attorney general. As recently as three years ago, Whitaker worked for a scam company that catered to customers with invention ideas and “provided almost no service in return,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. Whitaker’s role was to testify to the company’s integrity . . . . and serve as legal muscle, firing off threatening letters to customers who complained they had been bilked.

Aside from his now highly relevant experience working for con men, Whitaker’s primary qualification to serve as the nation’s highest law-enforcement official is a fanatical adherence to the right-wing legal agenda. As an unsuccessful far-right Senate candidate in Iowa, Whitaker declared he would be “very concerned” about any judge with a “secular worldview” and should instead follow a “biblical view of justice.”

Whitaker’s hostility to the Mueller investigation is surely what recommended him to [Trump] the president. He claimed Trump’s campaign had not colluded with Russia . . . . . at a time when such a defense could not possibly be known. He even denied that Russia interfered in the election at all, a conclusion directly at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies have found. . . . Trump had appointed Whitaker as Sessions’s chief of staff, a position that reportedly allowed him to serve as the president’s eyes and ears within the building.

Whitaker will have ample opportunity to undermine or quash Mueller’s investigation, but his authority over Mueller is not the only weapon at Whitaker’s disposal. Nor is the Mueller investigation the only threat to the president. Trump is a crook who is drawn to other crooks, and the potential criminal exposure across his administration is vast. We barely have a handle on the criminality that has already occurred — it has only been in the last few weeks that we learned, via the Times, that Trump committed systematic tax fraud over many decades. A lawsuit credibly accusing Trump of having run a variety of “fraudulent schemes” came out October 29 — nearly two years after his election.

[I]t is difficult to estimate how much misconduct has escaped detection. Weeks before the election, congressional Republicans privately circulated a lengthy list of Trump scandals that would be investigated if Democrats won Congress. The list ranges from Trump’s tax returns (which Republicans had voted to keep hidden) to his acceptance of undisclosed payments from foreign and domestic interests while in office to more routine incompetence and sleaze, like lavish expenses by Cabinet members and the hurricane response in Puerto Rico.

In public, Republicans are warning that investigating any of these matters will backfire on Democrats. . . . . Yes, sometimes aggressive congressional oversight can backfire, like when Republicans fanatically pursued conspiracy theories like Benghazi and “IRS targeting” during the Obama years. . . . . Even if Congress somehow overreaches in its pursuit of Trump — a prospect that is almost logistically impossible, given the staggering list of misconduct already in plain sight — it would still probably help the Democrats’s 2020 presidential candidate run against the mess in Washington.

From the very beginning, when Donald Trump and his father ignored demands from the Nixon Justice Department that they stop discriminating against African-Americans, through his repeated tax fraud and financial scams, legal impunity has formed the through-line of his career. Holding him accountable serves not only Democrats’ self-interest but the rule of law. That process begins now.

Rust Belt Trump States Appear to be Spurning Republicans

While much of the media - and, I will concede this blog - has been focused on the circus surrounding Brett Kavanaugh's unfortunate nomination tot he U.S. Supreme Court and Republicans' intent to push him through no matter what, there is positive news.  A piece I saw today showed a poll revealing that the generic candidate enjoyed a 12 point lead over the generic Republican candidate.  Secondly as the Virginian Pilot reports via a re-post of a Bloomberg story, things are NOT looking good for Republicans in the Rust Bet states that disastrously handed the White House to Der  Trumpenführer,  Cook's Political Report described the GOP situation as follows:

The Republican challenge of holding onto their tenuous House majority seems unrelenting; something could happen to alter the apparent trajectory of this election, but right now it seems headed for Democratic gains of between 20 and 40 seats, most likely more than the 23 necessary to tip control.

Similarly, on the state level, the losses could be quite high. Keep in mind that three-quarters of the nation’s governorships and four-fifths of the state legislative seats are up in this midterm-election cycle. As Democrats learned in 2010 and 2011, having catastrophic losses in the last midterm before redistricting ends up being the defeat that keeps on defeating for the rest of a decade. We could see GOP net losses of at least five and as many as 10 governorships and between 400 and 550 state legislative seats, perhaps with control of 10 or 11 legislative chambers flipping from red to blue.

Of course, making sure these predictions come to pass means that Democrats and independents sickened by the Trump/Pence/GOP agenda must get out and actually vote on November 6, 2018.  This is especially true for Blacks, Hispanics and younger voters.  But back to the Pilot/Bloomberg piece: 

The Rust Belt states that provided an election night shocker two years ago — delivering the presidency to Donald Trump — could hand Democrats crucial wins in the midterm elections.

Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Trump won in 2016 by a total of less than 80,000 votes to put him over the top in the Electoral College count, are looking less like Trump country this year, as Republicans trail Democratic opponents.

The shift illustrates the year’s challenging political landscape for Republicans. Even with a booming economy and record stock market — typically benchmarks of presidential success — the party’s chances of keeping control of the U.S. House have dropped in recent weeks. Trump’s vulnerabilities even threaten the party’s prospects of holding the U.S. Senate, long considered thought safe from Democratic takeover this year.

The situation confronting Republicans is typified in Wisconsin, where Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton by 22,748 votes, or 0.8 percentage points.

While times are generally good in the Badger State — the unemployment rate in July was 2.9 percent, down from 3.5 percent in the month Trump took office, and below the national average — Republican candidates are struggling.

Gov. Scott Walker, once a rising Republican Party star, is fighting for his political life, according to a Marquette University Law School Poll released on Sept. 18. The survey showed Democrat Tony Evers with the support of 49 percent of likely voters, compared with 44 percent for Walker.

Also in Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat pummeled by millions of dollars in negative advertising from conservative groups, led her Republican challenger, state Sen. Leah Vukmir, 53 percent to 42 percent.

Trump’s job approval has fallen to 42 percent in the state, down from 45 percent in Marquette’s August poll. Among independent voters, a pivotal group, 41 percent approve of his performance.

Many voters in Wisconsin, which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says is among the states most vulnerable to a prolonged trade war, are also skeptical of Trump’s tariffs on China and other nations. More than half — 58 percent — think free trade agreements have generally been a good thing for the U.S. economy, while 25 percent think they have been bad for the economy.

Trump’s approval ratings in the other states in the region are equally low, according to polling in August by Morning Consult. He was at 42 percent in Michigan, 45 percent in Pennsylvania, 44 percent in Iowa and 40 percent in Minnesota.

While not included in the Marquette poll, Republicans are nervous about the congressional race in southeastern Wisconsin to replace retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan, even though it’s rated as “lean Republican” by Cook. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the top super political action committee backing Republican efforts to hold the House, said this week that it’s reserving $1.5 million in advertising for the district. In 2016, Ryan swept the district by almost 35 points.

Prospects for Republicans in the other Trump-won states in the Rust Belt aren’t looking much better.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democratic incumbent Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Robert Casey have double-digit polling leads against their Republican challengers and also held massive cash-on-hand advantages in the most recent campaign finance reports.

In the fight for the House, Pennsylvania looks like one of the better pickup opportunities for Democrats. The state has two ingredients that could benefit the party in this year’s closest House races: suburban swing districts and an abundance of female candidates in a year when women are showing unprecedented levels of political engagement.

The contests for governor in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota are also rated as either “lean Democrat” or “likely Democrat.” Walker’s race in Wisconsin and another in Iowa that features a Republican incumbent — albeit the state’s former lieutenant governor, who rose to the post when long-serving Gov. Terry Branstad became U.S. ambassador to China — are rated as tossups.

John Brabender, a Republican strategist who served as a senior adviser to former Pennsylvania senator and 2016 presidential candidate Rick Santorum, said people shouldn’t be surprised that Republican candidates in Rust Belt states are struggling.

Trump only very narrowly won there and those states have been heavily Democratic in recent history. Plus, Brabender said, Trump was competing against a deeply unpopular candidate in Clinton.

“Unfortunately for Republicans this year, she’s not on the ballot,” he said. “Being pro-Trump may not equate to being pro-Republican.”

It remains critical to get every possible Democrat voter registered and to the polls on election day.  I don't want the Republicans to lose - I want them to lose by landslides that will send terror through whatever Republicans remain in office, including those in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates.  They need to understand that 2019 could see them sent into retirement if they continue their racist, voter disenfranchising and homophobic ways. 

Paul Ryan To Republicans: Lose House, Cover-Ups Will End

As regular readers know, I hold Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives for a while longer, in almost as much contempt as Donald Trump.   What perhaps makes Ryan worse than Trump is the fact that Trump, in my view is mentally ill and a malignant narcissist, whereas Ryan knows and understands precisely what he he is doing.  His reverse Robin Hood agenda makes a mockery of his feigned devout Catholicism.  Now, in statements pertaining to the future should Republicans lose control of the House and/or the Senate, Ryan has more or less admitted that he has participated in the obstruction of justice and actively aided and abetted in the cover up of the Trump regimes lies and likely crimes. Thankfully, Ryan will be out of office after January, 2019, but the harm that he has done to America will last for many, many years to come.  New York Magazine looks at Ryan's startling admission. Here are highlights:

Paul Ryan appeared at a financial conference to warn that, if Democrats win control of either the House or the Senate in the November elections, “you’ll have gridlock, you’ll have subpoenas.” The gridlock part is true, but it is basically the case already.

What really would change with Democratic control of a chamber is the subpoena part. But it’s worth spelling out just what it is Ryan is warning will happen — and what, by implication, he is confessing.

Ryan’s House has been run essentially as a subordinate arm of the Trump administration. Ryan and his party have quashed votes to compel release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, and they have used their investigative power not to oversee the presidency but to harass and intimidate the Department of Justice into falling into line behind the president’s whims, to the point where the acting attorney general had to bluntly accuse House Republicans of trying to “extort” him. Trump and his family have used their power to enrich themselves personally, with no hearings or oversight whatsoever from the House. His Cabinet members have likewise misspent funds and abused their authority without any accountability from the committees that are putatively tasked with the job.

Ryan has played an invaluable role covering up and enabling Trump administration scandals. When he says his party needs to keep control of the House to prevent subpoenas, he is both promising the cover-ups will continue if his party keeps its control of government, and expressing his clear belief that he opposes any level of independent oversight of the Executive branch.

As to Paul Ryan, I can only say good riddance.  His departure cannot come soon enough.

Trump Could be a Huge Asset for Democrats This Fall

Donald Trump's defining characteristic - even more than his pathological lying - is his malignant narcissism.  Everything is ALWAYS about him and he simply cannot accept anything or anyone that doesn't support his "Sun King" vision of himself.  The good news is that this characteristic may help Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives - and with luck, the U.S. Senate.  Trump forgets that a huge number of voters failed to vote in the 2016 presidential election and that his win traces to only about 27% of voters and a 70,000 vote spread across three states.  If those who stayed home (or those who feel they made a huge mistake) turn out in disgust with Trump and/or the GOP's reverse Robin Hood policies, things could be brutal for Republicans.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at how Trump may further wound the GOP.  Here are highlights:

One of President Trump’s most bedrock character traits is his refusal to truly reckon with any piece of information that reflects poorly on him. This self-aggrandizing, reality-denying flavor of egotism has defined Trump for decades, through his roller-coaster business career and into political life. In recent months, it has sometimes veered into the straight-up delusional, as when he reportedly claimed last year that it wasn’t actually his voice on the Access Hollywood tape.

Trump’s insistence that everything is going great was validated in unprecedented fashion when he won the presidency despite some of the strongest headwinds imaginable, shocking almost everyone — possibly including, on some deep level, himself.

But now, finally, [Trump's] the president’s unwavering confidence may finally be about to take a serious electoral toll.  The New York Times reported on Saturday that in the runup to the midterm elections this fall, President Trump is simply not listening to advisers and lawmakers who tell him what anyone can plainly see: Republicans are in deep trouble:

Congressional and party leaders and even some Trump aides are concerned that [Trump's] the president’s boundless self-assurance about politics will cause him to ignore or undermine their midterm strategy. In battleground states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada, Mr. Trump’s proclivity to be a loose cannon could endanger the Republican incumbents and challengers who are already facing ferocious Democratic headwinds. In election after election over the last year and a half, Democrats have vastly over performed their expected vote share, largely thanks to animus toward the president. They have triumphed in a Pennsylvania Congressional district where Trump won by more than 20 points, picked up a Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama, dominated state races in Virginia, and made close several contests that almost certainly would have been Republican landslides in previous years. . . . Republicans have been sounding the alarm for months.

Trump’s reaction to all this: everything will be just fine.

The Times piece also reports that, as his fellow Republicans fret, Brad Parscale, [Trump's] the president’s pollster, is feeding him inaccurate, Trump-friendly poll numbers, which [Trump] the president is more than happy to parade on Twitter.

Why does this matter? Most presidents, even if they claim not to be obsessed with polls the way Trump is, have a pretty good idea of their own political currency, and adjust their alignment with their parties accordingly.

Something different is going on this time around. President Trump remains enormously popular within the Republican Party; most Republican members of Congress have made the calculation that even if Trump is underwater in their state, defying Trump the president would be a political loser, since it leave them without any reliable constituency.

The problem is not only that Trump refuses to believe that Republicans will lose, but that, even if he were sufficiently worried, he doesn’t care enough about his own party to bother helping.

Establishment Republicans reportedly want Trump to flog the GOP’s unpopular tax law on the campaign trail. [Trump] The president is pushing back on this directive — which he is right to do, since the unpopular law probably isn’t galvanizing anyone to vote.

But [Trump's] the president’s own, predictably unpredictable routine is unlikely to work much better. He might attack vulnerable Republican Senators he disagrees with; he might serve more as a distraction than a cheerleader, . . . This routine won’t turn off voters who already love [Trump] the president. But it’s more likely to spark another Trump news cycle than rally much-needed enthusiasm for Republican candidates.

The GOP’s best hope may be to invent reasons that red-state Democrats are hurting Trump personally, then watch him go wild on Twitter and the campaign trail.

Republicans seem to have grasped the lesson that Trump needs to be personally invested in their election results. They are trying to make the stakes of the election startlingly personal, reportedly telling Trump that if he doesn’t help them out this fall, they may not have his back if and when Democrats initiate impeachment proceedings next year. That stark warning may perk Trump’s ears up, but it’s just as likely to be perceived as an unacceptable intramural threat, not as motivation to work for the party.

[Trump] will continue living in a bubble of his own making. Because Trump was right to dismiss the concerns of the many, many people who insisted he couldn’t win in 2016, he can now perennially point to that shocking election result as proof that his instincts, not some politico egghead’s, are always correct. And if Republicans lose big this year, he’ll just say they didn’t stick by him closely enough.

It’s a dishonest, solipsitic approach to life. But it’s one that has worked shockingly well for Donald Trump.

Why Democrats Must Take Control of the House

While many progressive remain hopefully optimistic that a blue wave in the 2018 midterm elections will see control of the House of Representatives shift to Democrat control, a piece in Slate underscores why  this is so important in terms of halting Donald Trump's horrific agenda.  Better yet, it could lead to the Trump/Russia ties and/or money laundering efforts finally see the light of day.  While many often hear the refrain that this is the most important election cycle, this time, it is really true.  Hence why Democrats need to use care and an over the top ground game to get voters to the polls in November.  Here are article highlights:

If President Trump hates Bob Mueller so much, why doesn’t he have him fired?

For most Republicans, the concern over firing Mueller is that it would incite a backlash in the 2018 midterm elections, costing them unified control of Congress and imperiling their policy objectives.

But for [Trump] the president, the concerns are much more personal. A Democratic takeover would be catastrophic. Instantly, the House would be converted into a hive of investigatory bodies. In a Democratic House, the grand Washington battle will no longer be Trump versus Mueller. It will be Trump versus 21 subpoena-wielding House committee chairmen, played out in public on a 24-hour televised loop.

Unlike a legislative agenda, executive oversight can be prosecuted by just one chamber. Taking control of the House would empower Democratic committee chairmen to aggressively pursue every aspect of the president’s personal and political interests.

There are 21 House committees that endow their chairmen with subpoena power. Some require a committee vote and/or consultation with the ranking minority member, but none endow the minority with veto power. The expansive subpoena power of Congress is limited only by countervailing constitutional rights. For example, Congress cannot force a witness to waive her right not to incriminate herself. Otherwise, Congress can compel testimony, and the production of documents, from any government employee or private citizen in America.

A House committee can initiate inquiries into any area within its jurisdiction. This investigative authority, and the subpoena power through which it is advanced, has mostly lain dormant in the 115^th Congress. When Republicans have exercised their subpoena power, it has mostly been in the service of defending the president against Mueller’s investigation. But that could change in the blink of an eye, as Trump has surely been advised by some old Washington hand.

When it comes to opportunities for congressional oversight, the Trump administration provides what military strategists call a target-rich environment.

The Ways and Means Committee could sharpen the national discussion around tax fairness by subpoenaing President Trump’s tax returns. As the 2018 elections draw near, that committee could convene hearings to educate the public on how Trump’s sabotage of Obamacare will send consumers’ health insurance premiums soaring.

The Financial Services Committee, chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters, a favorite target of Trump’s invective, could exercise its authority to investigate the phenomenon of foreign oligarchs laundering ill-gotten gains through purchases of luxury condominiums in hot markets, including through Trump-owned buildings in New York and Miami.

Now imagine a pajama-clad President Trump gazing in horror at the trio of TV monitors in the presidential bedroom, one showing Jared Kushner being grilled on his never-ending security-clearance-application corrections and amendments, while the second displays Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin attempting to defend his addiction to first-class flights, and the third presents a tableau of heartland factory workers displaced by the Bush steel tariffs of 2002. Consider the president’s unbridled anger as he watches a cable-news version of This Is Your Life, a procession of Cabinet secretaries, disgraced former White House officials, unpaid construction contractors, disqualified eligible voters, terrified Dreamers, abandoned factory workers, and colorful NDA signatories, all led by Democratic House committee chairs, many of whom Trump has traduced in nasty personal terms.

With that image in mind, you can see why Trump stops short of firing Mueller. If a rash decision to dispatch the special counsel costs Republicans their House majority, the president will subject himself to a ceaseless barrage of charges, confessions, and revelations. For Trump, that’s the nightmare scenario.

Of course, Trump's nightmare scenario would be my dream come true.