Pelosi Kept The Democrats United But It Was The House Republicans Who Killed TrumpCare

Ryan, Pence, McCarthy and Price-- with Trumpy-the-Clown in tow-- failed to pass TrumpCare 3.0 or, put another way perhaps more salient for their base, failed to repeal Obamacare for the 3rd time in as many weeks, not just failed to repeal it-- their #1 campaign promise for how many years?-- but failed to even call a vote. That's because the bill is so horrible that, except for Republicans representing the most backward, ignorant districts where everyone is strung out on prescription drugs and incapable of thought, Republicans in normal parts of the country know voting for it is a political death sentence. Yesterday we looked at the Republicans who killed it by stepping forward and publicly defying Ryan and Trump. But there were far more Republicans-- cagey Republicans-- who refused to say. Trump is less likely to attack them-- and so are their Democratic opponents. Trump can't say they betrayed the GOP and the Democrats can't say their betrayed their constituents.

One, Texan Brian Babin, even quit the Freedom Caucus over it. Babin represents one of the worst hellholes in America, a stretch of polluted devastation between Louisiana and the Houston Ship Channel/San Jacinto River. It's where the KKK chained James Byrd, Jr. to a truck and dragged him to his death. Is every single person in the district like that? Not every single one of them but Trump beat Clinton there, 72.0-25.2%. Remember Steve Stockman-- the guy whose corruption trial just got postponed? He was the congresscritter before Babin. The two of them are EXACTLY what this hell-on-earth district wants. Babin was a YES on TrumpCare 1.0. Maybe someone mentioned that 20,645 of his constituents, would be kicked off health insurance if it passed because this time he said he was unsure of he could vote for it or not. That's a district with an R+25 PVI. One of the 9 counties, Hardin, has a per capita income of $17,962 and only 16% of the folks there voted for Obama. 12% voted for Hillary. If the Republicans can't get a YES out of the congressnut representing a district like that, you can forget TrumpCare.

But most of the congressional Republicans afraid to say whether they were voting for it or against it aren't districts like Babin's. They're in more swingy districts where a vote to take away health care from thousands of people and a vote to eliminate the mandate for covering people with pre-existing conditions could be career suicide for congresscritters like John Culberson (TX), David Valadao (CA), Rod Blum (IA), Paul Cook (CA), Ed Royce (CA), Carlos Curbelo (FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Brian Mast (FL), Duncan Hunter (CA), Pete King (NY), Steve Knight (CA), John Faso (NY), Dana Rohrabacher (CA), Will Hurd (TX), Fred Upton (MI), Elise Stefanik (NY), David Joyce (OH), Steve Pearce (NM), Bruce Poliquin (ME), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Kevin Yoder (KS), Mike McCaul (TX), Adam Kinzinger (IL), Bill Posey (FL) and the wily coyote himself, Darrell Issa (CA).

In a story updated for Politico yesterday, Jennifer Haberkorn chalks up the GOP loss this round to concerns from mainstream conservatives over preexisting conditions. "Some Republicans," she wrote, "just don’t want to talk about it. Rep. Darrell Issa of California paused to hear a reporter’s question on his vote, then kept walking." Except for the hard-right extremists in the GOP conference-- somewhat over half the members-- everyone else was arguing TrumpCare 3.0 would hurt people with pre-existing conditions. They're arguing that "the latest changes only moved the bill to the right and could put more Americans at risk of losing their health insurance."

“My concern has always been and what a lot of us talked about: people with pre-existing conditions, the elderly,” said Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL). “How this makes the original bill better? Where is the part that is better for the folks I’m concerned about it? I’m not seeing it at this stage.”

Protections for people with pre-existing conditions have only been in effect for seven years, but proven to be one of the most popular and well-known features of the Affordable Care Act. Moderate Republicans are worried about stripping the safeguards without a reliable replacement. If the resistance from moderates holds, it would be enough to block Obamacare repeal in the House-- or send the effort back to square one. And other than cowardly Rodney ther than Frelinghuysen IV, there are no so-called "moderates" who have publicly flipped to support the bill.

Byron York had a piece in the far right Washington Examiner yesterday worth reading. He asked the obvious question: "Why can't House repeal Obamacare?" And answered it: "Because a lot of Republicans don't want to." He reminded his readers that "Republicans have 238 seats in the House. Repealing Obamacare will require 217 votes. Even with unanimous Democratic opposition, Republicans could lose 21 votes and still prevail on repeal. Why haven't they done it?... The Republican-controlled House and Senate both voted to repeal Obamacare in January 2016. In the House, 239 Republicans voted for repeal, while three voted against it and four did not vote. President Obama, of course, vetoed the bill." Now, that it's not a game and it would become law, they can't even get to 217, maybe not even to 200.

By this time, it's becoming increasingly clear that Republicans have not repealed Obamacare because a lot of Republicans do not want to repeal Obamacare.

They don't even want to sorta repeal Obamacare. The bill currently on the table, like the bill pulled in March, falls far short of a full repeal of Obamacare. And yet Republicans still cannot agree on it.

About a week after the first Obamacare repeal failure, a House Republican, speaking privately, said the difficulty in passing the bill was not a parliamentary problem involving the complexities of the Senate and reconciliation. No, the lawmaker said, "It is a problem that we have members in the Republican conference that do not want Obamacare repealed, because of their district. That's the fundamental thing that we're seeing here."

"I thought we campaigned on repealing it," the lawmaker continued. "Now that it's our turn, I'm finding there's about 50 people who really don't want to repeal Obamacare. They want to keep it."

Other conservatives are saying similar things. In an email exchange Thursday afternoon, I asked one member where the latest bill stood. "We absolutely do not have the votes to repeal it," he answered. "The fact that some members are balking at even allowing states to waive out of some of Obamacare regulations is proof positive. We've gone from 'repeal it root-and-branch' to 'Mother-may-I opt out of some of Obamacare'-- and we still are having trouble getting the votes."

In a phone conversation Thursday afternoon, another Republican, Rep. Steve King, quibbled a bit with the number of House Republicans who don't want to repeal Obamacare-- he would put it in the 40s-- but felt certain there are lots of Republicans who don't want to repeal. "If you don't want to get rid of federal mandates to health insurance, then it's pretty clear you don't want to get rid of Obamacare," King said.

"Whatever we come out with, it will say to the American people that a full repeal of Obamacare is no longer in the cards," King added.

Yet another Republican member, in an email exchange, estimated that there are 25 to 30 House Republicans "who don't want to be forced to make the repeal vote." Even that lower number would be enough to sink a repeal measure.

Other GOP lawmakers are openly conceding that whatever the House does-- if it does anything-- it won't actually repeal Obamacare. Large parts of Barack Obama's legacy legislation will remain standing, a fact that more Republicans are admitting as time goes by.

"It's not full repeal. I will be honest, it's not," Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News on Wednesday. "But it's as good as we think we can get right now."

"We've given up on trying to get this bill repealed, basically," Rep. Louie Gohmert told Fox Business on Tuesday. "But we've been demanding at least let's repeal some of the provisions that we know will bring down rates."

..."A pure repeal would get less than 200 votes," said the second member quoted above. "It really is one of the biggest political shams in history-- many of these members would not have been elected without promising repeal, and now they are wilting. Some are even complaining that [the Rep. Tom MacArthur amendment] pushes the bill too far right-- even though is it far short of a full repeal."

When repeal first failed last month, a number of commentators blamed the conservative House Freedom Caucus. In the days since, caucus members have made the case, convincingly, that they have shown an enormous amount of flexibility in trying to reach agreement with the Tuesday Group, made up of House GOP centrists.

Now, the centrists-- a number of Republicans refer to them as "the mods," for moderates-- appear to be moving the goalposts, even as the conservatives offer concessions. Conservatives suspect the centrists were perfectly happy for conservatives to take the blame for killing the first bill, but now are showing their true colors by rejecting compromise on the second version. Whatever the circumstances, they don't want to vote to repeal Obamacare.

The reason is fear. When the lawmaker said colleagues don't want repeal "because of their district," that was another way of saying the members are all representatives, and the voters they represent don't want repeal. From The Hill on Thursday afternoon: "Many vulnerable Republicans are running scared. One moderate Republican was overheard in a House cafeteria this week telling an aide: 'If I vote for this healthcare bill, it will be the end of my career.'"

Whichever faction inside the Republican Party is to blame, it could well be that the conservatives' numbers are basically right: There are a lot of Republicans, say 40 to 50, who don't want to repeal Obamacare. Given unanimous Democratic opposition, that means that there are somewhere around 190, or maybe 195, House members who actually want to repeal Obamacare. That will never get the job done.

So now the GOP will blame their own "mods," many in targeted swing districts, for the collapse of the repeal? How smart is that when they are the most electorally vulnerable members and without them, the Republican Party goes back to being a minority party?

More Trouble For TrumpCare Supporters-- In Swingy Arizona, Nevada, Alaska And Maine

Yesterday we looked at how the debate over TrumpCare is impacting the 2018 congressional races in Arizona. Hours later polling came out for Arizona-- as well as for Alaska Maine and Nevada-- showing the danger TrumpCare supporters face in Congress. We'll come back to that poll in a moment. PPP also released a poll yesterday-- a national one-- showing support for TrumpCare at a startlingly low 24%. Even before the disastrous CBO numbers have been factored in, 49% of Americans already oppose Ryan's proposal-- and even among Republican voters only 37% are in favor of the proposal.

The Affordable Care Act continues to post some of the best numbers it's ever seen, with 47% of voters in favor of it to 39% who are opposed. When voters are asked whether they'd have rather have the Affordable Care Act or the American Health Care Act in place, the Affordable Care Act wins by 20 points at 49/29. Just 32% of voters think the best path forward with the Affordable Care Act is to repeal it and start over, while 63% think it would be better to keep what works in it and fix what doesn't.

“There’s virtually no support for the Republican health care plan,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Voters have been getting warmer and warmer toward the Affordable Care Act and would much rather keep it than switch to the new proposal on the table.”

...Congress as a body continues to be very unpopular (18/64 approval) with Paul Ryan (34/48 approval) and Mitch McConnell (20/50 approval) unpopular individually as well. Democrats lead the generic House ballot 46-41.

Trump probably isn't enjoying this. And he blames Ryan for leading him down this foolish ideological path. There's no chance Trump ever read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, the 2 children's books that set Ryan on the path to come up with TrumpCare. In yesterday's Washington Examiner Byron York hit the nail on the head: "New to Washington and with no experience in public office, Trump has become a prisoner to the House Republican leadership-- or more precisely, to the complicated procedural requirements of the House and Senate, and the judgment of the GOP leadership that must operate within those boundaries...Republicans are working on the wrong thing. And the Republican president is allowing himself to be distracted from delivering early and often on his core campaign promise of improving the economy and bringing jobs to millions of Americans... Washington is rife with intrigue over the Obamacare fight. It has brought back talk of the old tensions between Trump and the GOP establishment, especially Speaker Ryan. Every player in Republican politics or conservative media has some advice for the leadership. Trump loyalists worry that it is harming his brand. And House Republicans push ahead. 'Failure is not an option,' GOP whip Rep. Steve Scalise told Sean Hannity Tuesday."

Just one more thing before we look at those new polls for Arizona, Alaska, Maine and Nevada-- a poll of WI-01 voters. That's Ryan's district, where the DCCC has made a point of undermining any Democrat who dares to go up against Ryan in such horrific ways that no plausible candidates are willing to take on Ryan-- just what the DCCC wants, for whatever arcane reason. Ryan's favorability in his district is 49-44% (Trump's favorability there is 50-47%) But when you dig down into the specific issues, the voters and Ryan are not on the same page. Making that connection would be the job of election opponents-- the ones the DCCC have guaranteed won't exist. But on issues from holding town halls-- Ryan refuses by 83% of his constituents want him to-- to an independent investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 Presidential election, defunding Planned Parenthood, GOP gutting of EPA rules and protecting Social Security and Medicare, Ryan's voters and Ryan are on different planets entirely. Here are two question for Ryan to think about:

OK, now let's start with Arizona. "The survey finds Arizonans would prefer to fix and improve the Affordable Care Act instead of repealing it and starting over and they would be less likely to vote for someone who voted for repeal. In addition, the survey found high unfavorable ratings for the GOP repeal bill proposed by President Trump and Republican Leadership in Congress, and people are significantly less likely to vote for someone who supports it. This survey was conducted before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the proposal. The polling makes clear that the GOP leadership’s health care agenda has been rejected by Arizona voters, and those who support it will pay a political price. We know the bill will lead to fewer covered, less protection and higher costs for Arizona families."

●  52% of people said they would be less likely-- 43% much less likely-- to vote for someone who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even 54% of Independents and 50% of white voters would be less likely.

●  Only 37% (and only 35% among Independents) support the GOP position of repealing the ACA and starting "over with a new health law." An overwhelming 60% prefer fixing and improving the law instead.

●  55% of voters have an unfavorable opinion-- 41% very unfavorable-- of the bill from President Trump and Republicans in Congress known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA). 63% of Independents are unfavorable towards it.

●  After hearing some key information about what AHCA would do, 57% of people would be less likely-- 47% much less likely-- to support Senator Flake or their Member of Congress if they supported this bill. 58% of Independents are less likely to vote for someone who [votes for] this bill.

●  A staggering 66% of people strongly oppose-- and 83% oppose overall-- the provision that lets insurance companies charge older Americans 5 times more than younger people for insurance. Opposition grows to 71% strongly opposing-- 89% overall-- among people over 65.

●  An overwhelming 68% strongly oppose-- and 81% oppose overall-- the anticipated increases in premiums that are estimated to come from this bill.

●  55% strongly oppose-- and 68% oppose overall-- the Medicaid cuts that will slash mental health and substance use disorder services including those for tackling the opioid crisis.

●  35% strongly oppose-- and 47% oppose overall-- effectively ending the Medicaid expansion.

●  42% strongly oppose-- and 66% oppose overall-- the reduction in tax credits that leads to millions losing their coverage.


The political makeup of Arizona is such that these kinds of numbers are more likely to keep Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema from crossing the aisle and voting with the GOP, her normal default position. It is also likely to persuade Tucson Republican Martha McSally to vote NO. As for the rest of the GOP crew, the districts are too red and gerrymandered to scare any of them and most of them are so out on a limb ideologically, that it would be hard to imagine anti-health care fanatics like Franks or Schweikert or Gosar ever changing their minds-- or the bulk of their constituents voting them out.

And as bad as TrumpCare is polling in Arizona, it's even worse in the other states-- 36% support in Alaska, 34% in Maine and just 31% in Nevada. When asked if they would be less likely to vote for someone who voted for repeal 57% in Arizona said they would, but the numbers were higher in Maine (59%) and Nevada (65%-- which should be enough to give Dean Heller pause). The number is 53% in Alaska. This is the question asked to Nevada voters Heller has to look at when he decides what to do about TrumpCare:

And then there are these two if he still didn't get the point:

The Humiliation Of Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, The Republican Party-- While The Demented Donald Laughs At America

The superficially crafted messaging of the Republican convention has been stepped on and obliterated every day. But Hillary better not feel powerful for having had anything to do with it. It's all Trump and his incompetent, deranged micro-campaign that's causing all the seemingly self-destructive chaos. Trump lifted those plagiarized passages from Michelle Obama's speech and put them into Melania's address and ate up two-and-a-half days of headlines that might have gone to republican messaging. Trump lured Ted Cruz into an untenable position last night, overshadowing, Mike Pence's introduction to the nation as the two squared off in some kind of an alternative universe 2020 preview.

I'm not Ted Cruz fan, but you almost feel sorry for the guy. Trump had originally said that unless his former rivals endorsed him in advance, they wouldn't get convention speaking slots. It kind of worked on sweaty, wormy Rubio but Ted Cruz-- who was not going to humiliate himself by publicly fellating the man who denigrated him and his family so violently-- well that turned into the kind of chaos Trump loves to spark and then take advantage of. Cruz decided to address the convention-- packed with really dumb Trump supporters-- without endorsing the legitimate party nominee. Trump was waiting for him, with a well-coordinated whip plan for strategic booing and camera-chaos. This is what America woke up to this morning:

David Frum referred to what Cruz did last night as "his brave and noble act" and I tend to see it similarly-- with reservations. Many others put Cruz in a far less heroic light-- even as a backstabber. Patricia Murphy at Roll Call: Having already identified Trump "a narcissist and a pathological liar," Cruz "exacted his revenge and refused to endorse Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention meant to unify GOP support behind his nomination." Politico noted that "Boos rained down on Cruz, and his wife had to be escorted from the hall amid verbal taunts in an unreal scene that marked an end to a surreal primary season."

“We deserve leaders who stand for principle, who unite us all behind shared values, who cast aside anger for love,” Cruz said. “That is the standard we should expect from everybody.”

It was a standard that Cruz determined Trump did not meet.

“Don’t stay home in November,” Cruz told the audience. “Stand and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

But he wouldn’t say Trump’s name.

In doing so, Cruz handed Hillary Clinton and the Democrats a potentially devastating cudgel of a slogan-- “vote your conscience”-- with which to hammer Trump all the way through November. Clinton grabbed it immediately, tweeting the phrase and a link to a voter registration page.

So... yes, Cruz kicked off his 2020 election campaign-- probably against Hillary, in the GOP's alternative universe, against President Gas. Byron York pointed out Cruz is taking a big gamble with his political future. "No one," he correctly asserted, "will know whether he won or lost until a few years from now... The upside of Cruz's gamble is that in one brief appearance, he won the intensified support of those Republicans who cannot reconcile themselves to Trump. And, if Trump goes down to defeat in November-- and it's safe to say everyone in that group believes he will-- Cruz will have serious I-told-you-so cred. Then, the theory goes, he will be in a strong position to put the party back together and run in 2020.

The scene irritated the still-raw feelings of some veterans of the 2016 GOP race. Veteran Republican strategist Curt Anderson, who ran Bobby Jindal's campaign, saw in Cruz's action far more calculation than principle, recalling the days when Cruz expressed admiration and affection for Trump.

"No one did more to create Donald Trump than Ted Cruz did," Anderson wrote in an email shortly after Cruz's speech. "While others were attempting to stop Trump, Cruz was complimenting him and sucking up to him. It was a political calculation that failed. Everything he does is a political calculation. Tonight he calculated that not endorsing the Republican nominee will be good for him. That will be another failed calculation, no matter whether Trump wins or loses in the fall."

Anderson was by no means alone in that feeling. Talking to attendees leaving the hall Wednesday night, most were unhappy with Cruz's performance. They didn't like the fact that Cruz would not fall in line behind his party's choice, and they could not understand his decision in light of their strong belief that the country has gone downhill fast under President Obama and will continue unless Hillary Clinton is stopped.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin, one of Trump's most blood-thirsty lady enforcers, has declared Cruz, henceforth, a persona-non-grata in the Republican Party:

Cruz’s broken pledge to support the will of the people tonight was one of those career-ending “read my lips” moments. I guarantee American voters took notice and felt more unsettling confirmation as to why we don’t much like typical politicians because they campaign one way, but act out another way. That kind of political status quo has got to go because it got us into the mess we’re in with America’s bankrupt budgets and ramped up security threats.

It’s commonplace for politicians to disbelieve their word is their bond, as evidenced by Cruz breaking his promise to endorse his party’s nominee, evidently thinking whilst on the convention stage, “At this point, what difference does it make?” We’ve been burned so horribly by that attitude that voters won’t reward politicians pulling that “what difference does it make” stunt again. Politicians will see — it makes all the difference in the world to us.

Who knew Palin was such a Talking Heads fan!



Josh Marshall tried to make sense out of what happened last night for normal observers-- but found it almost impossible. "Trump's convention is everything you could have predicted: a mix of bracing disorganization, provocation, aggression and lies. It is simply impossible to pick apart the incompetence from the transgressive behavior and pettiness... Years from today we will still wrestle with the meaning of Cruz for once leveraging the awesome power of his assholery in a righteous cause. Perhaps there is a salutary bravery or solidity there I hadn't noticed, or at least a quality vouchsafed for this moment. This is Trump. His convention would be his presidency-- entertaining and hilarious if he weren't also a live wire against the fumy gasoline can set against our national home. It is quite literally a terrifying prospect. He's quite likely to lose his quest for the presidency. But he might not. He's that close to the unimaginable. And he's brought almost an entire political party along with him. We will be blessed if we can escape this with no more harm."

click on the image to enlarge

Is Trump Really Getting A Concise, Definitive Message Out To Voters... Beyond Just, "I'm A Racist?"

Not having ever watched an episode of Trump's TV sit-com, I started examining his 4th grade vocabulary and his manipulative/infantile way of addressing audiences last year. During the Republican debates he understood the audience better than his opponents and spoke at a 3rd or 4th grade level, according to the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score.

Flattening the English language whenever he speaks without a script, Trump relies heavily on words such as “very” and “great,” and the pronouns “we” and “I,” which is his favorite word. As any news observer can observe, he lives to diminish his foes by calling them “losers,” “total losers,” “haters,” “dumb,” “idiots,” “morons,” “stupid,” “dummy” and “ disgusting.” He can’t open his mouth without bragging about getting the Clintons to attend his wedding, about how smart he is, the excellence of his real estate projects, the brilliance of his TV show, his generous donations to other political campaigns and so on. In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime-- except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong). Or perhaps he is afflicted with binary vision disorder, which renders all within his eyeshot either great or rotten.

It’s obvious that Trump’s verbal deficit, as grating as it may be on the ears of the educated class, has not caused him much political pain. The media has noted the opposite: Trump’s overreliance on sports and war metaphors in his public utterances, his reductionist, one-dimensional policy prescriptions-- including nuanced geopolitical arguments such as get tough with China and Mexico, which are killing us!-- inspire trust in many rather than distrust. Trump’s rejection of “convoluted nuance” and “politically correct norms,” mark him as authentic in certain corners and advance his cred as a plainspoken guardian of the American way. By not conforming to the standard oratorical style, he distinguishes himself from the pompous politician. Less is more when you’re speaking Trumpspeak.

Wednesday, right-wing journalist Byron York, writing for the right-wing website, Washington Examiner examined how Trump speaks for his right-wing audience. Right-wing operatives were flabbergasted by Trump's crazy, rambling hour-plus stand-up routine in Cincinnati Wednesday. Rory Cooper, one of the Eric Cantor aides who never quite got what Cantor was facing, seemed exasperated: "We shouldn't be talking about anything but Clinton's flagrant abuse of classified info but Trump wants to exercise his right to word vomit."

Any hostility to Trump aside, there appears to be a serious disconnect, a communications gap, between those who cover and comment on Trump and those who support him and come to his rallies. Trump is simply so far outside the conventions of political oratory that his style is sometimes hard for political professionals to grasp.

The first thing to remember is that Trump does not give a speech in the sense that veteran political strategists or reporters recognize and understand a speech. From the very beginning of his campaign, Trump has expressed contempt for the entire genre of political speechmaking.

Speaking at a giant rally in Dallas last September, Trump started off by noting that he wasn't using a teleprompter. "That would be so much easier," he said. "We read a speech for 45 minutes. Everybody falls asleep, listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier."

On many other occasions-- at rallies, debates, other appearances-- Trump has expressed a fear of boring his audience, of putting everyone to sleep. He is determined not to do that.

Instead of a prepared stump speech that he gives over and over again-- the standard diet for political reporters covering the presidential race-- Trump instead has chosen to deliver a stream of consciousness performance designed to capitalize on his celebrity, to entertain, to attack opponents, and to address the actual issues in the race. And most of all, to keep his audience awake and paying attention.

Trump wanders all over the lot. In any given speech, he will talk about his businesses, his golf courses, his friends, his TV ratings, his children, all the Republicans he has defeated in primaries, the club championships he has won, and much, much more. (Trump used to talk incessantly about polls when he was leading the GOP race; now, not so much.) He will talk about anything that comes to mind. This goes on for 10, 20, 30, 45 minutes, and often more than an hour.

There's a lot of bragging in Trump's speeches. He can seem strangely needy, repeatedly asking the audience to affirm that he did a good job with this or that. But mostly he's telling voters how great he is, how everything he does and everything he possesses is the best, and how he will be a great, great president.

It's all part of the show. As Rush Limbaugh, who probably understands Trump as well as anybody, has pointed out (in what Limbaugh called a "Trump Shtick Explainer") Trump "knows he's putting everybody on, and the trick is that he knows his audience knows." It's all part of the performance, and amid all the bombast, Trump makes it a practice on two or three occasions, in Limbaugh's words, "to go all humble, go total humility." He tells people he's honored to be in their presence even as he dwells at great length on his own wonderfulness. People aren't offended by the bragging because they sense it's part of the act, and they appreciate the occasional touch of humility. Trump almost never expresses a complete thought without going down some side road.

...Trump devotes an enormous amount of time in each speech to bashing the media. They're liars, dishonest, the worst sort of people. In Cincinnati, he spent about four and a half minutes defending himself on his infamous Star of David tweet, but the defense was almost an entirely an attack on the journalists who were making a big deal of it.

Trump also spent a lot of time in Cincinnati re-telling the story of his recent trip to Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland, and all the media flak he took for it. He went on and on complaining about his treatment, arguing that he only took the trip to show support for his son Eric, who had restored the famous golf resort.

Why does Trump think the audience wants to hear that stuff? In part, he is playing on the crowd's antipathy to the media, which is strong. But he's also playing to the public's appetite for celebrity gossip. When Trump talks about his plane and his golf courses and his oceanfront estate, there's a good chance the audience is interested for the same reason that it reads stories like "Matt Lauer buys Richard Gere's $36 million Hamptons compound" (to cite a recent headline from the New York Post). A lot of people like to hear about celebrities and their high-flying lifestyles.

Occasionally Trump's detours get him into trouble. Near the end of May, at a speech in San Diego, Trump went off on a ten-minute rant about the Trump University lawsuit. He discussed the plaintiffs by name. He offered his assessment of various law firms. He analyzed the question of summary judgment. And in the course of all that, he said, "So what happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican..." With that, Trump was off to the races for another controversy that consumed his campaign for many days.

Still, amid it all, Trump manages to cover some of the bases of a conventional political speech. In Cincinnati, he devoted the first part of the speech to attacking Hillary Clinton in light of the Obama Justice Department's decision not to charge her in the email affair.

"I just heard the news, because it just happened, with the Attorney General of the United States saying no problem, no problem," Trump began. "You know, I wrote out a couple of things about Hillary, Crooked Hillary, crooked, so crooked. She made so many false statements." Trump proceeded to go through Clinton's lies about why she had a secret email system, about the tens of thousands of emails she erased, about the emails she turned over to the State Department, about her handling of classified material, about the the security of her private server.

"Rigged system, folks," Trump concluded.

The Hillary section was the longest single part of Trump's speech, not counting the several times he returned to her later. And yet, even with that juicy material, Trump the showman was still worried about putting the audience to sleep. "There are many," he said of the particulars against Hillary Clinton, "I just don't want to bore you with too many of these things."

Describing an interview on Meet the Press, Trump suggested the audience doesn't want to be overloaded with any one thing. "[Meet the Press] wanted me to talk about Hillary for hours," Trump explained. "Hours. Fifteen minutes-- she's Crooked Hillary, that's all you have to know, she's crooked as hell."

Trump interspersed issues throughout the Cincinnati speech. As always, he never discussed specifics of how he would handle any given issue, choosing instead to talk in terms of goals. When he said, for example, that he would keep the air conditioner company Carrier from moving its operations to Mexico, or at least make Carrier pay a heavy price for leaving, he was doing what Limbaugh described when he said, "This is the way Trump telegraphs his preferences and his support for people." Anyone looking for details will be frustrated.

All the while, Trump told the audience he wants to talk more about issues, but the press is too focused on extraneous controversies to focus on what he discusses. Describing his speech the night before, Trump said, "We talked about terrorism. We talked about trade. We talked about terminating Obamacare and replacing it with something great, which we're going to do, too. We talked about getting rid of Common Core and bringing our education locally and taking it away from Washington. We talked about borders. We talked about building a wall, right? We talked about our depleted military, right?"

So what do the voters get from Trump's act? That depends on whether they are inside the room or out. Trump still draws big crowds-- bigger than any of his Republican rivals and now, bigger than Hillary Clinton. In Cincinnati, he drew a reported 7,000. (Trump is competitive in the key swing state of Ohio, trailing Clinton by 2.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, which is almost precisely the margin-- 2.6 points-- by which Mitt Romney trailed Barack Obama at the same time in 2012.)

But of course, while drawing 7,000 on a Wednesday night in Cincinnati is good, it's nothing compared to the 62 million Americans Trump will need to vote for him if he is to win the White House.

In the room, Trump has devoted followers who hang on every word, while others have come mostly to see what all the fuss is about. Of the latter group, it's not at all unusual to see people head for the exits when Trump hits the 30 or 40 minute mark. Ask them why they're leaving, and they usually say they have to be at work in the morning.

But here's the striking thing, whether the attendee is a loyal Trump fan or not: After all of Trump's rambling and meandering, after one discursive aside after another, many of those attending still manage to come away from Trump's speech with concise and focused takeaways. Asked what Trump is going to do, they'll say: He's going to build a wall, he's going to bring our jobs back, and he's going to knock the hell out of ISIS. Somehow, in long and winding performance, Trump got his message across.

He communicates in a way far different from what the political world is used to-- but he communicates.

The (far) bigger question is those 62 million voters. What do they hear? Mostly they hear what journalists want them to hear, if they're even listening to that. And in Cincinnati, the media message was that Trump had given a speech about the Star of David tweet.

The New York Times' headline was, "In a Defiant, Angry Speech, Donald Trump Defends Image Seen as Anti-Semitic." The paper reported that "the bulk of Mr. Trump's energy was spent on the Twitter post." It might be hard for other observers to come away from the hour-plus performance convinced that the bulk of it was the four-and-a-half minutes spent on the tweet, but that is what the Times said.

The Washington Post's headline was, "Trump says campaign shouldn't have deleted image circulated by white supremacists."

Given reporting like that, multiplied many times by other news outlets, it's clear Trump faces an enormous, perhaps insurmountable obstacle in getting his message out. He clearly believes he is a great communicator, and he is in fact a very good one. But as a political speaker, Trump is so far outside the box that he has virtually overwhelmed the senses of those reporting and analyzing the news, making it difficult for some voters who haven't actually seen him to get a clear picture of his appeal to supporters.

The GOP Would Have No Chance To Hold Their House Majority Against A Competent DCCC... But Today They Have No Chance To Lose It

A gaggle of silly Beltway pundit types decided to raise the specter of a Trump candidacy putting the Republican House majority in jeopardy. I wonder who they're trying to fool. A competent DCCC-- which would take at least a year to build, possibly longer-- could win back the majority in two cycles without Trump, one cycle with Trump (or Cruz). The current cast of corrupt clowns, meticulously put together, nurtured and groomed by losers Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel (+ Israel's absurd sock puppet)-- thank you, Nancy Pelosi-- will be lucky if they don't actually experience another net loss of seats even in the most propitious of years. They have grown so accustomed to losing that's it the only thing they know how to do-- and they keep playing the same hand over and over and over-- Republican-lite candidates vs Republican candidates... real inspiring.

One of the dumbest columns I've ever seen in the Washington Post-- and that's saying a lot-- was penned by a politically-backward associate professor at poor Fordham University, Charles Camosy. He has a plan for the Democrats to lose even more seats. Although he correctly points out that "the liberal coalition put together by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s is also in its final stages of collapse. Three-quarters of state legislatures are now in GOP hands, as are two-thirds of governorships" and the party "is now dominated by special interests of big donors of the Northeast and West Coast," instead of exercising the kind of critical thinking Thomas Frank did to figure out how the Democrats could win, he made the lame suggestion of turning off women and young voters by going for the anti-Choice vote. Watch the DCCC lap this one up... it's right up their ally. I can't believe even a school like Fordham has to stoop this low for personnel! [Update: I see Charles Pierce agreed with my assessment: "And, just to show you that bad ideas are not limited to one side of the big sack of crazy that is the presidential campaign this year, there is a guy writing in the Washington Post about the great political advantages the Democratic party could gain if only it tossed the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population overboard and alienated the part of the nation's demographic that pretty much guarantees a Democratic victory in any national election. If you're quoting nutbag Patrick Mahoney, the scourge of the Terri Schiavo hospice, then you've lost the argument. Genius! Just no, OK?"]

Thanks to the Republican-lite strategy of Emanuel, Van Hollen and Israel, the Republicans have a 58 seat majority in the House, more seats than at any time since their policies-- basically the same conservative clap trap that serve as their policies today-- crashed the economy and caused the Great Depression. In many of the districts that a competent DCCC would be well on the way to winning back, the DCCC has done no work of any kind, has no candidates and has added to the alienation of local Democrats to the hated Beltway party. In New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida... just the states where voters are likely to be most offended by Trump's and Cruz's extremism, the DCCC has no candidates or candidates too weak to win or, in some cases, Democrats they are actively sabotaging.

Anyway, back to the wrong-headed, divorced-from-reality assertions in Politico of the Democrats' opportunity to capitalize on Trump to win back the House. "Trump’s remarkable rise in the GOP presidential race and the backlash he has already provoked among the broader electorate," write Theodoric Meyer and Elena Schneider, "has suddenly raised the prospect of a large November wave against Trump and the Republicans who would share the ballot with him." Is that so? Show me.

Evidence #1: Bob Dold and Carlos Curbelo are sounding the alarm. OMG! Dold is in a D+8 Chicagoland district-- the bluest district occupied by a Republican anywhere in America-- and the only reason he has the seat is because the Democrats forced a Republican-lite fake Dem into it in 2012 (Brad Schneider, who they just manipulated into the nomination again). Obama won the district 63-36% against McCain and 58-41% against Romney. Curbelo is in a South Florida blue district that Obama won both times (53-46% in 2012) and Curbelo only won because the Democratic incumbent, Joe Garcia, voted with the Republicans and proven to be as corrupt as a typical Republican to boot. (He's trying to run again too.) If the DCCC needs Trump to win back these seats, they might as well all commit mass suicide; actually they should anyway.

Israel, Hoyer, Wasserman Schultz-- the root of the problem

Evidence #2: Israel's sock puppet guy, Ben Ray Luján is pushing CA-25 (Steve Knight's district) and FL-07 (John Mica's district), which would actually make a lot of sense except for the fact that Luján and Zoe Lofgren have sabotaged the California Democratic Party's nominee in CA-25, Lou Vince for a lawyer from Orange County who's a crony of Lofgren's-- a classic case that illustrates Thomas Frank's point about how the Democratic Party has kicked union members to the curb in favor of rich professionals. CA-25 is newly blue with a Democratic registration advantage but Luján's and Lofgren's ineptness and interference could well deliver this easy win back to the Republicans. The whole Orlando area is a mess because of Luján (without any help from Lofgren; but Florida Democrats don't need her to screw up the party; with Wasserman Schultz in the driver's seat, they're long time experts). FL-07 should be a good get this cycle but the DCCC picked an idiot banker, Bill Phillips, to run against seasoned pro, John Mica, and Phillips, a Blue Dog, couldn't win an election if he was running against the bubonic plague.

Deep in the story was the key to why it's nonsense: "One major question mark for Democrats is whether they have the candidates to ride a wave, if Trump generates one in their favor. With the filing deadline approaching in Colorado, Democrats still don’t have a candidate in GOP Rep. Scott Tipton’s district, which the party targeted as recently as 2012 and which has a substantial Latino population. Bill Phillips, the Democratic candidate in Mica’s Florida district-- one of the seats Luján mentioned last week-- had less than $20,000 in his campaign account to start the year. In key California districts, Democrats face primaries and feuding between local activists and the national party." That's scratching the surface on the DCCC's and the affiliated House Majority PAC's troubles.

A potential path toward 30 seats, once thought to be outside the realm of possibility, has become clearer for Democrats in recent days. Luján ducked when asked whether Democrats could win back the House at a news conference last week, but his committee is actively preparing to compete in districts that weren’t on the radar months ago. Democrats are targeting seats with “high numbers of independent voters, socially moderate voters, millennials and minority voters,” Luján said.

“We are going to keep recruiting through filing day because of this momentum that has been created by Donald Trump,” Luján added.

Luján specifically mentioned upstate New York's 22nd District, a battleground seat where moderate GOP Rep. Richard Hanna is retiring, and the fast-changing districts currently held by Mica in Florida and Knight in California. He also cited freshman Rep. Mia Love, who represents a conservative Utah district, as a target.

National Democrats say they’re also looking closely at a collection of socially moderate suburban districts. Many of them haven’t elected Democrats in years, but they have high proportions of the college-educated voters who have been least keen on Trump in the GOP presidential primary so far. Democrats figure that lack of enthusiasm could weigh down Republican House members in November.

Those off-the-beaten-path GOP seats getting a new look include Rep. Erik Paulsen’s district in the Minneapolis suburbs, freshman Rep. Dave Trott’s seat outside Detroit, veteran Rep. Dave Reichert’s district outside Seattle, and Rep. Kevin Yoder’s district in Kansas City suburbs.

In Knight’s California seat, a Simi Valley district north of Los Angeles that President Barack Obama carried in 2012, Democratic candidate Bryan Caforio [not the candidate of anyone but the DCCC and puppet establishment media types at Politico-- thoroughly rejected by Democrats in the district but still in a position to prevent the actual Democratic candidate, Lou Vince, from emerging from the jungle primary] says he wants voters to think of Trump and Knight as “two peas in a pod.”

“Knight is the Donald Trump of Southern California. He’s the man who, shortly after taking office, threatened to beat up a constituent,” Caforio said, citing an incident in which Knight, baited by an anti-immigration protester, threatened to “drop [his] ass.” “[Knight] has extreme immigration views, extreme family planning views, so I’m not surprised he hasn’t condemned [Trump] because of those extreme positions he’s taken.”

Knight, like most other House Republicans, has stayed silent on Trump in recent weeks. But he told the Santa Clarita Valley Signal in January that he didn’t think the billionaire “could win the general [election] in a million years.”

“The hard part is that a lot of people are making absolute statements about what Trump is going to do for the electorate, but it’s shown to be an incredibly unpredictable impact so far,” said Matt Rexroad, a Republican consultant who’s advising Knight.

GOP state Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney, who’s running for the open upstate New York seat Democrats are eyeing, said she doesn’t think Trump hurts her chances at all.

“I don’t think Trump is going to be as negative as everyone thinks in this particular district,” she said, adding that Trump’s fierce criticism of trade deals resonates in a district that has lost manufacturing jobs. “Honestly, I meet a lot of Democrats who like him,” she added.

Democrats believe they will gain more voters than they lose.

Asked on Wednesday whether the House is in play Luján said: “Look, I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know what’s going to happen in November. But I’m optimistic about the environment that’s being created today."

The L.A. Times noted that because of Latino hyper-engagement the Trump Effect may well be to make weak Democratic incumbents safer (think of pathetic cases like Peter Aguilar, Raul Ruiz, Scott Peters and Jim Costa, 4 right-of-center slugs with nothing to offer working families) and weak Republican incumbents like Jeff Denham, David Valadao and Steve Knight even more vulnerable. They don't take the incompetence of the DCCC into account, but the theory is correct.

Byron York, a right-wing blogger, looks at the plight of these Republican incumbents from a sympathetic perspective and explains why they're too scared to break with the Trumpist menace. For one thing, Trump is more popular in their districts than they are! "Each member of the House represents a district, average size about 700,000 people. According to my calculations from a breakdown of voting provided by 538's Nate Silver, 115 congressional districts voted in the race from Iowa through the first Super Tuesday. Trump won the majority of them." He won all 6 of the GOP districts in Alabama, 3 of the 4 GOP districts in Arkansas, all the Republican districts in Georgia, all 3 Republican districts in Nevada, all 5 Republican districts in Kentucky, the 4 Republican districts in Louisiana, all 6 Republican districts in South Carolina... You get the picture?

"[I]f you are a Republican member from a district Trump won," speculates York, "what value is it to you to publicly dump on the candidate who won your district? Shouldn't you assume that, even with the inclusion of nontraditional Republican voters, most of the voters who elected you also voted for Trump? It's not hard to see why elected representatives would choose not to go on the warpath against the choice of their own voters. Trump critics might call that cowardice. More neutral observers might call it the way democracy works."

If you'd like to help defeat Trump, his candidates and the DCCC, there's a page for that... and you'll find it by tapping the thermometer:

Who Ever Decided To Call It A "Deep Bench" Never Looked To Closely At What Makes Rubio Tick

Rubio's excuse for abandoning his Senate seat while running for president-- which is not what fellow Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders have done-- is that mere senators and congressmen can't get anything done anyway. I suspect most of his colleagues would beg to differ. What he's done is kind of similar to what Chris Christie did by spending 72% of his time outside of New Jersey. Both of these guys should resign and stop cheating the citizens of Florida and New Jersey. Rubio doesn't just miss votes. He has completely abandoned the crucial Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard he chairs, which has only had 2 meetings since he became chairman and is crucial for Climate Change planning, a pretty important issue for many of his constituents. Ironically, Christie was slinging mud at Rubio for missing Senate votes. These guys have no sense of self-awareness at all... or maybe no respect for the voters. Yesterday Christie tore into Rubio with a vengeance: "I just don't think Marco Rubio's going to be able to slime his way to the White House." No, that wasn't Herr Trumpf it was Christie.

"The guy who advocated for amnesty and then ran away when the topic got too hot tells you two things: He’s not a reliable conservative, A, and B, whenever it gets too hot, Marco turns tail and runs. I’m not the least bit concerned that Marco Rubio will hurt me with conservatives. Marco Rubio has work himself to do with conservatives."

Yesterday Chuck Todd and his colleagues at MTP's "First Read," noted that the rest of the GOP field has pounced on the Jersey pig-boy lately. "Kasich's Super PAC," he wrote, "has whacked Christie over New Jersey's budget deficit; Jeb Bush's Right to Rise Super PAC jabbed the New Jersey governor (as well as Kasich); and yesterday, Marco Rubio's Super PAC threw the kitchen sink at Christie [ad below]. 'One high-tax, Common Core, liberal-energy loving, Obamacare-Medicaid-expanding president is enough,' the Rubio Super PAC ad goes."



But the big battle shaping up is to see who will face Herr Trumpf in the end-- Cruz of Rubio. Cruz has probably noticed that every time Rubio attacks him, which he does frequently and with increasing desperation, Cruz's numbers go up. So he's not punching down all that much. The new NBC national tracking poll released yesterday shows Cruz with 18% trailing Trumpf (35%) and Rubio struggling to stay in double digits down at 13%.

Right-wing writer Byron York points to the stretch that Rubio has been making in his senseless and ineffective jihad against Cruz, noting that he's now "quick to accuse his fellow Republicans of aiding the world's most notorious terrorist organization. 'If ISIS had lobbyists in Washington, they would have spent millions to support the anti-intelligence law that was just passed with the help of some Republicans now running for president,' Rubio said in foreign policy speech delivered Monday in Hooksett, New Hampshire." Rubio, the old fashioned neocon who doesn't quite understand that the consititution prohibits domestic spying on American citizens for a reason, was talking about Rand Paul and, more importantly, Ted Cruz. Rubio-- like I said, desperate-- went so far as to note, referring to Cruz and Paul that "We have isolationist candidates who are apparently more passionate about weakening our military and intelligence capabilities than they are about destroying our enemies."

On the campaign trail, Rubio has been citing the USA Freedom Act to accuse Cruz of weakening national security. Now, Rubio has escalated his attack, saying Cruz and ISIS were on the same side with the legislation.

Beyond going wildly over the top, has Rubio looked at who else voted for the USA Freedom Act? There are a lot of Republicans-- conservatives whose support Rubio will need in this campaign-- who acted, in Rubio's telling, in concert with those imaginary ISIS lobbyists.

The bill passed by a vote of 67 to 32 in the Senate and 338 to 88 in the House.

Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley voted for the USA Freedom Act. Rubio's ISIS-would-support-that-bill accusation surely can't sit well with the senior GOP senator in the nation's first-voting state. (The other Iowa Republican in the Senate, Joni Ernst, voted against the bill.)

Iowa's three-member Republican House delegation split on the bill, with Rep. David Young voting for it, and Reps. Steve King (a Cruz endorser) and Rod Blum against it.

In New Hampshire, the only Republican senator, Kelly Ayotte, voted for the USA Freedom Act. She most likely does not feel that she did the bidding of imagined ISIS lobbyists. (New Hampshire's only Republican congressman, Frank Guinta, voted against the bill.)

In South Carolina, Sen. Tim Scott, a key figure in that state's presidential politics, voted for the Freedom Act. He, too, most likely does not feel he did ISIS's bidding. The state's other senator, Lindsey Graham, did not vote, although he surely would have voted against the bill.

South Carolina has six Republican members of the House. They split evenly, with Trey Gowdy, Joe Wilson, and Tom Rice voting yes, and Mark Sanford, Mick Mulvaney, and Jeff Duncan voting no. (It should be noted that some of the "no" votes in the House were from Republicans who felt the bill did not go far enough in restricting government surveillance, the opposite of Rubio's position.)

Gowdy not only voted for the USA Freedom Act, he was one of the bill's original co-sponsors in the House. That is remarkable, because Rubio was absolutely delighted recently to win Gowdy's endorsement, even bringing Gowdy to Iowa to speak at Rubio events. And now, Rubio portrays those who voted for the Freedom Act as somehow helping ISIS by passing a bill the terrorist organization would surely support.

Again: "If ISIS had lobbyists in Washington, they would have spent millions to support the anti-intelligence law that was just passed with the help of some Republicans now running for president," Rubio said.

...It's an understatement to say that Ted Cruz is not universally liked among Republicans. But it's also hard to see how Rubio could convince many GOP voters, even those who don't support Cruz, that Cruz is somehow soft on national defense. And yet that is apparently what Rubio hopes to do.

In the third Republican debate, Rubio memorably smacked down Jeb Bush after Bush clumsily attacked Rubio's Senate attendance record. "The only reason why you're doing it now is because we're running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you," Rubio said to Bush.

Now Rubio is swinging wildly at Cruz, because they're running for the same position and, perhaps, because someone has convinced him that doing so will help him. It seems hard to believe it will.

Poor young fogey! The robotic little candidate has so much on his mind these days and the last thing he needs is for all the old fast living, coke and cash charges to break out into the open. (I get the feeling the Democrats want to wait to see if he gets the nomination before the Sacramento Party House becomes an issue.) Meanwhile, though, the Washington Post let the national audience know what Floridians have long known about Marco: there's something sleazy about this guy that's even sleazier than most politicians, sleazy that a seasoned sleaze-bag who's been doing it for decades, like Schumer, knows how to cover up but that a young fogey gets tripped up on.

When Marco Rubio was majority whip of the Florida House of Representatives, he used his official position to urge state regulators to grant a real estate license to his brother-in-law, a convicted cocaine trafficker who had been released from prison 20 months earlier, according to records obtained by the Washington Post.

In July 2002, Rubio sent a letter on his official statehouse stationery to the Florida Division of Real Estate, recommending Orlando Cicilia “for licensure without reservation.” The letter, obtained by the Washington Post under the Florida Public Records Act, offers a glimpse of Rubio using his growing political power to assist his troubled brother-in-law and provides new insight into how the young lawmaker intertwined his personal and political lives.

Rubio did not disclose in the letter that Cicilia was married to his sister, Barbara, or that the former cocaine dealer was living at the time in the same West Miami home as Rubio’s parents. He wrote that he had known Cicilia “for over 25 years,” without elaborating.

Rubio has avoided discussing Cicilia’s case in detail and has declined to answer questions about his relationship with his brother-in-law. Earlier this month, prior to The Post publishing an article about Cicilia’s case, Rubio declined to answer a written question about whether he had helped win the approval of his brother-in-law’s real estate license.

Rubio also declined to say whether he or his family received financial assistance from Cicilia, who was convicted in a high-profile 1989 trial of distributing $15 million worth of cocaine. The federal government seized Cicilia’s home; the money has never been found.

Cicilia, 58, could not be reached for comment. He still lives in the same home as Rubio’s mother and has appeared at campaign events for his brother-in-law. Rubio-affiliated PACs and campaigns, including his ongoing presidential operation, have paid Cicilia’s two sons more than $130,000 in the past decade.

...Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group in Washington, said Rubio’s role concerned her.

“Someone who serves their time should be a productive member of society, and it’s important for families to help each other, but it’s wrong to use your public office for personal or private gain,” Brian said.

By not disclosing his relationship, Rubio withheld a key piece of information from the real estate board, Brian added. “The general rule of thumb I apply to conflicts of interest is, if you can’t eliminate them, you need to manage them by disclosing the conflict,” she said. “I’m uncomfortable that he didn’t acknowledge the conflict.”

Rubio, a Republican who represents Florida in the U.S. Senate, was a 16-year-old high school junior in 1987 when Cicilia was arrested in one of the largest drug cases in Florida history. There has never been any evidence that Rubio or his family knew that Cicilia was dealing cocaine, although Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance records show Cicilia stored cocaine from the drug ring at his home, a few miles away from where Rubio and his parents lived.

Rubio has been lucky. He's never been caught. And once he was in Tallahassee he had David Rivera handling the dirty work for him. Is that guy in prison yet or did he flee the country again? Or running for Congress again?

Rivera brings an aura of impropriety with him when he shows up at Marco's events