By Kaitlan Collins
Washington - While President Donald Trump (click here) and Nick Ayers were still in the middle of negotiations about him replacing John Kelly as chief of staff, Trump had already given Ayers a task, according to a source familiar with the discussion. He wanted him to conduct a thorough review of how the West Wing operates, including evaluating staffing, in order to make it more politically focused over the next two years.
Trump has become increasingly concerned in recent weeks about what his administration is facing come January, when newly empowered Democrats are expected to unleash the full force of their oversight powers on the Trump administration....
It seems as though Ryan has had a difficult time breaking away from being Trump's lackey.
December 7, 2018
According to our friend Rep. Jim Jordan (OH-4), (click here) Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and his leadership team, including Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and GOP Whip Steve Scalise, refused to lobby for the Trump-supported Goodlatte immigration bill, which would have built a border wall, enacted E-Verify procedures, and offered DREAMERS a path to citizenship. It failed to pass the House after nearly 20 Ryan loyalists voted against it.
Now, many of the 20 Republicans who voted “NO” on Goodlatte are gone, defeated or retired in the 2018 midterm election, and Rep. Goodlatte has been clear on why his bill did not pass, when Republicans had the majority in the House.
Our friend Neil Munro reports Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the retiring Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, says the GOP leadership let the House immigration reform die in June by allowing a critical bloc of GOP legislators to split their votes between two rival reform bills.
“The strategy of having two options really let people have an off-ramp — they could vote for the more conservative bill and against the other, or vote for the second bill and not the first,” Goodlatte said, adding according to Munro’s reporting:
That is just not a good strategy and I complained about it at the time. I said ‘You’ve got to narrow this down to one bill and then work really hard to get the members to vote for that one bill.’
Mr. Goodlatte confirmed that House Speaker Paul Ryan made the decision to create the rival bill that blocked Goodlatte’s bill.
On November 30, Ryan told an interviewer that he preferred the second bill, which he credited to Florida GOP Rep. Carlos Curbelo....
