The Senate on Tuesday voted largely along party lines to confirm Paul Matey — who served as deputy chief of counsel to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) during the Bridgegate scandal — to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that has handled cases in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
The big picture: Matey is the 35th circuit nominee to be confirmed under President Trump, a historic number at this point in his presidency, amid ongoing Republican efforts to impose a conservative imprint on the federal judiciary. Matey's confirmation marks the first time Trump flipped an appeals court previously dominated by Democratic presidents' nominees, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) breaking with his party and voting in favor the nominee. The Third Circuit now has a 7-6 majority of GOP picks and 1 pending vacancy.
Andrew Yang, a former tech executive who founded Venture for America, announced Tuesday that he has qualified for the first round of the Democratic primary debate by raising money from more than 65,000 unique donors.
The big picture: Yang's top 3 policy concerns are universal basic income, Medicare for All and a "human-centered capitalism" approach to the economy. His proposal for universal basic income, his central campaign issue, is grounded in a belief that millions of jobs will be wiped away due to automation.
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan will likely face a grilling today when he testifies before the House Financial Services Committee, led by Rep. Maxine Waters, but if history is any guide the hearing will make little difference to Wall Street.
What it means: It's the company's fourth appearance on the Hill since the bank's cross-selling scandal came to light in 2016. Previous hearings haven’t moved its share price to the downside.
Presidential budget proposals — all of them, no matter the president — are aspirational. They are not bills with the potential to be signed into law; they are statements about an administration's priorities.
Between the lines: With that in mind, here are the health care highlights from the budget proposal the White House released yesterday.
The New York Times' Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman get the jump on "Kushner Inc.," a book by investigative journalist Vicky Ward that's out a week from today:
She portrays Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner as two children forged by their domineering fathers — one overinvolved with his son, one disengaged from his daughter — who have climbed to positions of power by disregarding protocol and skirting the rules when they can. And Ms. Ward tries to unravel the narrative that the two serve as stabilizing voices inside an otherwise chaotic White House, depicting them instead as Mr. Trump’s chief enablers. ...
Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum anchor Election Night '18. Photo: Fox News
Top Fox News anchors said they were disappointed by the DNC's rejection of Fox News as a host for one of the 12 party-sanctioned 2020 presidential primary election debates.
Axios' Dan Primack speaks with 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, in this special episode. Hear his position on such issues as automation, whether big tech are monopolies, and more.
Industries in the U.S. that provide food, shelter, clothing and health care often rely on the labor of immigrants — those on work visas, brought here as kids or in the country illegally, according to new data given exclusively to Axios from New American Economy (NAE), a group that supports immigration.
Why it matters: House Democrats are resuming the fight over immigration issues with the reintroduction of the Dream Act, to give legal status to immigrants who came to the U.S., illegally as children.
Rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her 2018 race for Georgia governor, said Monday a run for presidency in 2020 is "definitely on the table."
Details: Abramshad said in an interview at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival earlier in the day: "2028 would be the earliest I would be ready to stand for president because I would have done the work I thought necessary to be effective in that job."
In the first White House press briefing in 42 days, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders refused to directly answer whether President Trump believes Democrats hates Jews, following an Axios report that Trump made that comment in a speech to RNC donors this weekend.
The White House has rejected House Oversight chairman Elijah Cummings' request to interview former deputy counsel Stefan Passantino, who represented President Trump to federal ethics officials looking into hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels in 2016, CNN reports.
Why it matters: Cummings wrote in his interview request last month that the committee had new documents showing Passantino and another Trump attorney "may have provided false information" about the payments — campaign finance violations for which Michael Cohen is now going to prison. This is the second time that White House Counsel Pat Cipollone has rejected a request from House Oversight, with the first — which involved documents about the White House's process for granting security clearances — prompting Cummings to threaten a subpoena.
President Trump on Monday sent a record $4.75 trillion 2020 budget proposal to Congress, in which he called for a 5% increase in military spending, a $1.9 trillion cut to safety net programs and an additional $8.6 billion for his border wall.
Why it matters: Trump's budget won't balance for 15 years, and Capitol Hill will promptly reject this budget, as it does every year with every president. But the proposal nonetheless highlights the White House's priorities for 2020.
The Democratic Party will hold its 2020 national convention in Milwaukee on July 13–16, the AP reports.
The big picture: Wisconsin is a key state for Democrats to win back after President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there in 2016. The GOP will hold the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 24–27.
Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on Friday unveiled a tech trust-busting plan that would theoretically undo some of the past decade's most influential mergers, including Facebook's 2012 acquisition of Instagram, Google's 2007 deal for DoubleClick, and Amazon's 2017 purchase of Whole Foods Markets.
What to watch: Other companies affected could theoretically include Apple and Walmart, although Warren didn't explicitly call them out. Warren has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that she is a capitalist, not a socialist, but that she believes America's current application of capitalism is so lawless as to be counterproductive.
Advisers to former Vice President Biden say it will be apparent within days whether he has decided to activate a presidential campaign that would likely launch by early April.
Between the lines: A Biden insider tells me the "final, final" decision is now "imminent."
Creatives in music, film and tech that have for decades been the center of attention at the annual SXSW (South by Southwest) festival in Austin, Texas, have been overshadowed this year by the arrival of rising political stars.
Why it matters: The invasion of politicians, regulators and political reporters at the festival shows just how much politics has become entrenched in every aspect of our cultural lives.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg called Vice President Pence a "cheerleader for the porn star presidency" during a CNN townhall event Sunday.
Details: Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made the comments after CNN host Jake Tapper asked him whether Former Indiana Gov. Pence would make a better commander-in-chief than President Trump. "Does it have to be between those two?” Buttigieg replied. Buttigieg went on to talk about Trump's alleged affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which the president denies having had.
Presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) declined to call Syria's President Bashar al-Assad a war criminal during a CNN Town Hall interview with Dana Bash Sunday.
What she's saying: “I think that the evidence needs to be gathered, and as I have said before, if there is evidence that he has committed war crimes, he should be prosecuted as such."
The big picture: Gabbard met with Assad when she made a secret trip to Syria in 2017. In February, she told MSNBC: "Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States." But Gabbard told Bash she believed her past comments on Assad had been misunderstood.
Biggest anecdote: "There have been reports showing that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, both by the Syrian Government as well as different terrorist groups on the ground in Syria," Gabbard told Bash. "The skepticism and the questions that I raised were very specific around incidents that the Trump Administration was trying to use as an excuse to launch a U.S. Military attack in Syria."
