WASHINGTON—For the first time since his inauguration, Donald Trump is being treated like a conventional president.
.. “In the short run, this will clearly benefit him politically,” said Karl Rove, the top political aide to President George W. Bush. “It will cause people to look at him differently, and it will cause our adversaries to see us differently.”
.. Democrats who have stridently opposed Mr. Trump’s agenda praised the airstrikes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called it “the right thing to do.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California called the military response “a limited, and I think an important strike, and it accomplished its purpose and sent a message.”
.. Large numbers of Republicans have reversed their position on congressional approval for Syrian airstrikes since then-President Barack Obama weighed attacking the country in 2013.At the time, Republicans such as then-House Speaker John Boehner insisted Mr. Obama lay out a fuller plan for action in Syria before launching airstrikes after the Assad regime carried out a suspected chemical attack in Damascus. Scores of Republicans said they would oppose an authorization for the use of military force. No vote was taken... Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch also praised Mr. Trump’s action, though in 2013 he said he had “strong reservations” about authorizing force against Syria.
.. Mr. Rove said Mr. Trump would lose any newfound political goodwill if he didn’t articulate his foreign-policy philosophy “within days.”
.. “He told us he would be the president of America, not ‘the world,’ ” Ann Coulter wrote on Twitter.
.. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) said the airstrikes are “illegal, and they’re unconstitutional.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), the lone member of Congress to vote against the post-9/11 authorization to use force against Afghanistan, said the airstrikes represent “a dangerous military escalation into the Syrian civil war and are without legal justification.”
.. “It makes people question: If a photo of an incident that has occurred in another nation causes the president to drop 50 or more cruise missiles, is that a real well thought-out strategy, or is this an emotional reaction?”
House Fires at Ethics and Shoots Self
Mr. Trump’s response was something altogether different. He didn’t condemn these Republicans for defying and undermining his drain-the-swamp pledge. He asked them to address more urgent business first, like destroying health care reform and passing tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, while he was tweeting on Tuesday morning, Kellyanne Conway, the incoming counselor to the president, had already been on television supporting Mr. Goodlatte and his gang, saying House Republicans had a “mandate” to curb “overzealousness” over ethics.
House Republicans, Under Fire, Back Down on Gutting Ethics Office
Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader — who, along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, had opposed the proposal — lobbed a pointed question at his fellow Republicans, according to two people present: Had they campaigned on repealing the Affordable Care Act, or tinkering with an ethics office?
.. House Republicans, led by Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, had sought on Monday to prevent the office from pursuing investigations that might result in criminal charges. Instead, they wanted to allow lawmakers on the more powerful House Ethics Committee to shut down inquiries. They even sought to block the small staff at the Office of Congressional Ethics, which would have been renamed and put under the oversight of House lawmakers, from speaking to the news media.
“It has damaged or destroyed a lot of political careers in this place, and it’s cost members of Congress millions of dollars to defend themselves against anonymous allegations,” Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, said Tuesday, still defending the move.
.. Mr. McCarthy told his fellow Republicans that they needed to reverse themselves quickly, or potentially face an even more embarrassing revolt on the House floor. By his estimation, he told them, the provision was going to be removed one way or another.
.. Perhaps most prominently, in 2011, Representative Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat who later left Congress to join the Obama administration, tried to cut the agency’s budget by 40 percent, a proposal that failed on a 302-102 vote.
.. But Mr. Goodlatte’s critics said he had simply been caught trying to sneak through a favor to help protect his fellow lawmakers.
Military-Industrial Election
Among all the 2016 hopefuls, Ted Cruz was the recipient of the most defense-industry dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Cruz received a total of $343,000, followed—perhaps surprisingly—by Bernie Sanders with $323,000, and then Hillary Clinton with more than $273,000.
Sanders’s place at the top of the Democratic heap in terms of defense-sector support may seem odd for a man who attacked Clinton’s support for overseas military interventions. But it’s not so strange at all when one considers that the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the most expensive aircraft in U.S. history, and more than a decade overdue—underwent development in Sanders’s home state of Vermont.
.. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have PACs that rank among the wealthiest in the industry. Lockheed’s PAC, which spread around over $1.6 million for federal candidates this spring, had given $10,000 to Cruz by the end of March. Northrop Grumman’s PAC, on the other hand, gave all of its $1.5 million as of March to House and Senate candidates—mostly Republicans.
.. Clinton has a candidate profile that seems like an especially good fit for military industries.
.. ABC’s Martha Raddatz, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said of Clinton, with classic understatement, “I think that she probably would be somewhat more hawkish than President Obama.”
.. As Landler’s story makes clear, Clinton has had an unusually accommodating relationship with generals and top civilian brass. She has always been portrayed as a sympathetic partner, an enabler-in-waiting. To the wider national-security establishment, she is clearly “of the body.”
.. The defense industry is in fact a relatively marginal player in the presidential contest, at least from what the visible paper trail shows. Hillary Clinton is far more reliant on resources from the securities and investment industry. The war machine doesn’t even crack her top-20 list of contributors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
.. That’s because the defense sector spends its money elsewhere. By putting their cash into Congress, defense industries can elect and influence legislators who will remain in Washington far longer than any president. Congress is where the action is ..
.. “Defense contractors have enormous influence in shaping the secretary of defense’s decisions, but if the secretary happens to do something that displeases the industry, they will get Congress to undo that too, taking advantage of the broad leverage the companies have bought by spreading subcontracts across 48 states, by contributing generously to key committee congressmen, and by unleashing armies of lobbyists and paid-for think-tank pundits.”
.. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, comes in third on the list, with $265,450 as of this writing. The next Republican after him is a top F-35 proponent, Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), chairman of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, who raked in $181,950. He’s followed by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, with $166,700.
.. but critics warn of tricky accounting: the House Appropriations plan uses wartime contingency funds to get around funding caps for baseline budgeting.
.. the big fight in 2017 will be getting rid of those spending caps, which were put into place under the Budget Control Act (BCA), the “sequester” of 2011.
.. “The F-35 is in 46 different states and 350 districts,” Smithburger says. “That is a lot of political support for one program.”
.. Even when the Department of Defense asks for something else, lawmakers in the pocket of contractors make sure the companies’ pet projects are funded anyway. And the corruption is getting worse.
.. Because of this entrenchment, little will change next year no matter who wins the White House, says Dan Grazier.