Immigration, Trade and J-O-B-S – Real Issues on the President’s Plate

  • Good morning! This much is certain: President Trump either does or doesn’t support a compromise immigration bill that has taken weeks for members of Congress to negotiate. After several confusing tweets last week, the White House said Friday night that the president would sign a bill if it came to his desk. He is scheduled to travel to the Hill on Tuesday evening to talk with House Republicans and with Sen. Shelly Moore Capito about the bill and the border wall. Meanwhile, members of both parties, including First Lady Melania Trump and  former First Lady Laura Bush, are pushing Trump to stop the policy of separating families at the border.
  • The House of Representatives could hold the Trump Administration in contempt of Congress if the FBI and the Justice Department don’t hand over documents that Congress is seeking about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. On “Fox News Sunday,” Rep. Trey Gowdy said that the House could use “its full arsenal of constitutional weapons” if documents aren’t turned over in response to a House subpoena.
  • Both the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees will take a look this week at the Inspector General’s report on Justice Department and FBI actions in advance of the 2016 election. The IG’s report was delivered last week, and Senate Judiciary will hear from the IG, Michael Horowitz, and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday afternoon, while the House committee will grill the IG on Tuesday morning. And on Wednesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee will have its own hearing on “Policy Response to Russian Interference in the 2016 US Elections.”
  • Has President Trump engaged the United States in an all-out trade war? It’s beginning to look that way, especially after he announced tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods on Friday, which prompted quick retribution from the Chinese government. Many market economists are beginning to fear that, despite the economy’s strength, the disruption in global commerce caused by tit-for-tat tariffs could stall economic growth. The Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday will hear from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on “Current and Proposed Tariff Actions.”
  • It’s hardly a stretch to say that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the government’s least-liked agency among Republicans. (So determined are they to scrub the agency of the fingerprints of its birth mother, Elizabeth Warren, that Republicans even have sought to change its name, now referring to it almost exclusively as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.) Over the weekend, the White House said it intends to nominate as director Kathy Kraninger, a deputy to OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, who is acting director of the bureau, setting up what is likely to be a bruising confirmation process.
  • Just how much was accomplished at the Trump-Kim Summit? Depends whom you ask. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs is skeptical that Kim Jung Un will live up to his promises and has vowed to play “an aggressive oversight role” in monitoring the outcome, beginning with a subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. On Monday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies takes a look during its “ROK-US Strategic Forum.”
  • Lest anyone think the dangers of nuclear weapons have been solved by the Singapore Summit, a different House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Thursday will convene a hearing on “Russian and Chinese Nuclear Arsenals: Posture, Proliferation and the Future of Arms Control.”
  • Following up on its April grilling of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on how social networks handle consumer privacy, the Senate Commerce Committee’s panel on consumer protection on Tuesday brings in three experts in technology and psychology to examine data privacy risks in a hearing titled “Cambridge Analytica and Other Facebook Partners.”
  • If there is one word that President Trump likes to tweet more than any other, it probably is spelled J-O-B-S. He was at it again on Friday, tweeting “U.S.A. Jobs numbers are the BEST in 44 years.” But has the Trump Administration really tapped into the biggest potential source of jobs going forward? On Thursday, the Brookings Institution takes a look at “The Infrastructure Jobs Opportunity.”
  • One place where jobs seem to be available, of course, is at the White House itself, which last week circulated an email advertising a conservative job fair on the Hill. Those are not the type of jobs that the President has been touting. So where is the strength in the labor market coming from? The Labor Subcommittee of the House Education and Workforce Committee will examine the issue on Thursday at a hearing titled “Growth, Opportunity and Change in the US Labor Market and the American Workforce: Current Developments, Trends and Statistics.”

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