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Capital Journal
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Good morning from the WSJ Washington Bureau.
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Trump's Day: President Trump delivers remarks at the 38th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service, meets with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and hosts the White House Historical Association Dinner.
Evacation Order: The U.S. has ordered all its nonemergency staff to leave Iraq immediately, amid heightened tensions with Iran over recent attacks against oil tankers and facilities in the Persian Gulf region.
Boeing: FAA Acting Administrator Daniel Elwell testifies in the House on the status of the now-grounded Boeing 737 MAX fleet. An FAA review determined that its engineers deferred to Boeing’s early safety classification of the MAX flight-control system, with limited oversight.
Alabama: The Alabama Senate passed an antiabortion bill that would effectively ban the procedure and is aimed at reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Gov. Kay Ivey didn’t immediately comment on the bill’s passage.
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President Trump signaled Tuesday that he was in no rush to reach a trade deal with China, and pledged that the federal government would come to the financial aid of American farmers hurt by Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs, reports Vivian Salama.
Economic activity in China cooled across the board last month, undoing a brief surge earlier in the year and raising questions about the vitality of the world’s second-largest economy.
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The new tariffs, if unchecked, are likely to drive up costs for more products, including smartphones, that would partly be passed to consumers. Until now, the U.S. focused its tariffs on components.
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China has amped up its rhetoric in a tariff battle with the U.S., playing to nationalistic sentiment with strident state-media criticisms aimed at Washington, even as it reiterated a preference for a resolution.
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White House Relaunches Immigration Push
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The White House is renewing a push for legislation overhauling the U.S. immigration system.
At a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans on Tuesday, a group of White House officials including Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller outlined an immigration plan. While the Trump administration has made a priority of reducing illegal immigration, the latest proposal would change the standards for entering the U.S. legally, to attract more highly-skilled and educated immigrants, according to lawmakers who attended the meeting.
Consensus on merit-based immigration and border security could open the door to broader unity in the GOP on immigration, said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), an ally of the president who attended the meeting.
“If you can nail those two things down then you’ve got a place to start a discussion about the other things,” said Mr. Graham. “We’re trying to present a plan that would unify Republicans. Whether it will or not, I don’t know.”
Republicans have struggled to come together on immigration during Mr. Trump’s tenure. When the GOP controlled both chambers of Congress, it failed to pass major immigration legislation. Compromise efforts failed on the House floor last summer when the party could not reconcile the demands of its centrist and conservative wings, and last year Mr. Trump rejected at least two bipartisan efforts.
Total Republican control of the federal government ended in January with the beginning of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. House and Senate Republicans could not agree at the time on how much funding to provide for Mr. Trump’s desired wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I want to get this out on the table so we don’t have another train wreck,” Mr. Graham said of the new proposal.
Some Senate Republicans said the White House proposal could be an opportunity to change the party’s focus and branding on immigration.
“We talk a lot about illegal immigration but we’re a nation of immigrants and I think we ought to be talking about legal immigration and what we can do to make it better,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas).
Write to Andrew Duehren at andrew.duehren@wsj.com
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Video: At a news conference following a meeting with Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked whether the U.S. is choosing a strategy of force with Iran.
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled a willingness to mend relations between the two countries, even as they remained deeply at odds on crises in Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, reports Georgi Kantchev.
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Mr. Pompeo said he raised Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election at a meeting in Russia, and made clear no further interference would be tolerated.
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Tensions between the U.S. and Iran was another topic of contention. “We fundamentally do not seek a war with Iran,” Mr. Pompeo said. “But if American interests are attacked, we will respond in an appropriate fashion.”
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North Korea demanded the return of a ship that the U.S. seized for allegedly violating sanctions, and accused the U.S. of breaching the spirit of the countries’ pledge to forge new ties, its state media said.
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The White House's resistance to a budget deal worries Republicans, report Kristina Peterson and Kate Davidson. The government’s funding expires Oct. 1. In preliminary discussions, senior aides to President Trump have resisted a two-year agreement and argued instead for a one-year extension of current funding.
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The difficulties lawmakers and Mr. Trump are facing in trying to agree on a disaster-aid package has set off alarm bells that a bitter fiscal fight may be looming this fall, according to lawmakers in both parties.
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“You’ve got a Democratic House, and to get the defense numbers that we want, we’re going to have to deal with nondefense spending increases.”
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— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.)
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Congress and Investigations
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Attorney General William Barr has enlisted the nation’s intelligence chiefs to help him examine the origins of the Russia investigation, suggesting his review of what he termed “spying” on people affiliated with the Trump campaign is more expansive than previously known, report Sadie Gurman and Dustin Volz.
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Mr. Barr is working closely with CIA Director Gina Haspel, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and FBI Director Christopher Wray in his inquiry into whether the government’s intelligence-gathering efforts in the probe’s early stages were legal and appropriate.
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Heading up the review is John Durham, the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, who has experience investigating the intelligence community.
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The House Intelligence Committee is investigating whether lawyers for Mr. Trump and his family sought to obstruct the panel’s Russia investigation, including by editing a false statement that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to the committee in 2017, reports Rebecca Ballhaus.
Donald Trump Jr. agreed to give limited follow-up testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee next month about answers he previously gave as part of lawmakers’ Russia probe, after a subpoena of the president’s son by the GOP-led panel drew widespread criticism from Republican lawmakers, reports Rebecca Ballhaus.
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Democrats are raising the prospect they could issue subpoenas after the White House didn't produce health-law documents, reports Stephanie Armour. House Democrats had requested documents concerning the White House’s legal position favoring the overthrow of the Affordable Care Act. A new deadline of May 24 has been set.
Sen. Ron Wyden asked Steven Mnuchin in a letter on what basis he rejected a request for Mr. Trump’s tax returns, reports Richard Rubin. Mr. Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, is also seeking information about how this response differed from how the IRS and Treasury Department typically respond to congressional requests under the portion of the tax code that sets privacy rules.
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In federal court, the president’s effort to block House Democrats’ subpoena for financial records was met by skepticism, reports Brent Kendall. No Supreme Court case or major lower-court ruling since 1880 has found Congress had overstepped its bounds in issuing subpoenas, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said.
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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden greeted supporters in New Hampshire Monday. PHOTO: ALLISON DINNER/ZUMA PRESS
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Joe Biden is wrapping himself in the banner of the Obama years as a chief selling point to voters, reports Ken Thomas. The primary will serve as a test of whether Mr. Biden’s direct association with the 44th president will insulate him from critics in the party who view his policies as too incremental and him as too willing to work with Republicans. Mr. Biden has a sturdy lead in early polling.
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“He is running as a pragmatic, center-left Democrat...And that isn’t entirely satisfying to some on the left."
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— David Axelrod, a former strategist for former President Barack Obama
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Gov. Ron DeSantis said Russian hackers compromised voter databases in two of Florida’s counties during the 2016 election, indicating a wider breach of Florida voting systems than previously known, reports Dustin Volz. The voter data that was accessed was already public, Mr. DeSantis said. He didn’t name which counties were affected, saying he had signed a nondisclosure agreement before a briefing provided by the FBI.
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U.S. births have fallen to the lowest rates since the 1980s. Last year, the number of babies born in the U.S. fell to a 32-year low, deepening a fertility slump that is reshaping America’s population and future workforce.
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About 3.79 million babies were born in the country in 2018, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The general fertility rate—the number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44—fell to 59.0, the lowest since the start of federal record-keeping.
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The continuing declines appear to be rooted in several trends, including teenagers and unmarried women having fewer babies and the rise in women obtaining college degrees, report Anthony DeBarros and Janet Adamy.
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Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is preparing to run for president by presenting himself as the rare Democrat who won in a state that President Trump carried in 2016. (The Atlantic)
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New York state added 250,000 Democrats but just 10,000 Republicans to its registration rolls last year. (Daily Caller)
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Trump Tower now is one of Manhattan's least desirable luxury buildings, with most condo owners who have sold in the last two years suffering inflation-adjusted losses. (Bloomberg News)
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This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Tim Hanrahan, Kate Milani, Troy McCullough and Daniel Nasaw. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com. You can follow politics coverage during the day on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics.
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