Mark Cuban isn’t ready to launch a formal campaign to challenge President Donald Trump. Yet Cuban, an outspoken Texas billionaire who describes himself as “fiercely independent” politically, sees an opportunity for someone to take down the Republican president, who is increasingly viewed as divisive and incompetent even within his own party.
Congress is just into the second week of a five-week summer August break, but that doesn’t mean lawmakers are staying idle when it comes to working on gaining support for legislation they’re sponsoring. Take Sarasota’s Vern Buchanan, whose office announced Thursday that his bill that would ban the killing of horses for human consumption picked up its 150th co-sponsor in New York Republican Dan Donovan.
Six months into his presidency, Donald Trump is saddled with a stalled agenda, a West Wing that resembles a viper’s nest, a pile of investigations and a Republican Party that’s starting to break away. Trump on Friday indirectly acknowledged the troubled state of his unconventional White House when he abruptly replaced his chief of staff with hard-nosed retired Gen. John Kelly, until now the Homeland Security secretary. Kelly will take the desk of Reince Priebus, a Republican operative who was…
A day after an attempt by Senate Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act crashed and burned, Lakeland GOP Congressman Dennis Ross blasted members of his own party, saying he’s “sick of the excuses.” “The Senate has failed the American people and abandoned voters who were promised that they would repeal and replace the disastrous Obamacare. The House did its job. We honored our pledge and passed legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare in early May. There is no need to…
U.S. Representative Kathy Castor is breathing a sigh of relief now that the GOP-Senate led repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act has blown up in spectacular fashion. On Monday night two Senate Republicans – Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah, came out in opposition to the bill, leaving Republican leaders at least two votes short of those needed to start debate on the measure. That prompted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to declare that he hoped…
The Latest on the probes into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia (all times local): 12:05 p.m. A music publicist says he set up a meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump’s eldest son on behalf of a client in Moscow named Emin Agalarov. In a statement to The Associated Press Monday, Rob Goldstone says the lawyer said she had information about purported illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee that she thought Donald Trump Jr.…
Until 1987, presidential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court were respectfully received and reviewed by the U.S. Senate. In 1986, Antonin Scalia, a judicial conservative and constitutional originalist, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a vacancy on the court. He was confirmed 98 to 0 by the U.S. Senate. The confirmation process imploded in 1987 when another Reagan nominee to the court, Robert Bork, was subject to such a vicious attack concerning his record and judicial temperament, that the…