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Capital Journal
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Good morning from the WSJ Washington Bureau.
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Trump's Day: The president welcomes Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to the White House for talks and a St. Patrick's Day event.
Congress: The Senate votes on a resolution to terminate Mr. Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the border. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin testifies to Congress on Mr. Trump's fiscal 2020 budget proposal.
Court: Roger Stone is expected to receive a trial date. He was indicted for allegedly lying to Congress about his efforts to obtain and share information about WikiLeaks’s plans to publish emails damaging to Hillary Clinton.
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President Trump said the U.S. is grounding all U.S. flights of the Boeing 737 MAX airliners, a major safety setback for the plane maker after two deadly crashes in less than five month, report Andy Pasztor, Alex Leary and Andrew Tangel. The order will remain in effect pending further investigation.
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The global grounding of Boeing’s most popular model is likely to generate a host of business challenges for the aerospace giant.
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The most likely flights to get canceled: trips on routes where airlines have multiple flights a day.
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PHOTO: MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY IMAGES
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Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke announced this morning he is running for president, aiming to parlay his turn as one of the Democratic stars of the 2018 midterm elections into a run at his party’s nomination, reports Reid J. Epstein.
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Democratic Super PACs funded in part by George Soros plan to spend at least $130 million in states that Trump narrowly won in 2016, reports Julie Bykowicz. Together, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida make up 75 of the 538 electoral votes.
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Boosting GOP female recruitment is proving to be an uphill climb, reports Kristina Peterson. A cluster of GOP women operatives and elected officials are responding by trying to scout women willing to run and make sure they have the money and infrastructure necessary to do so.
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The number of House Republican women fell to 13 after the midterms from 21, compared with a record 89 Democratic women in the chamber.
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Investigations and the Courts
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Dana Verkouteren/Associated Press
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Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, 69, is facing a possible total of more than seven years in prison. He was sentenced yesterday to 43 additional months in prison for two crimes related to his political consulting work in Ukraine after last week being sentenced 47 months for dodging taxes and committing bank fraud, reports Aruna Viswanatha. He has already been incarcerated for nine months. Also yesterday, an indictment charging Mr. Manafort with residential mortgage fraud was unsealed in New York.
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Judge Amy Berman Jackson made clear she did not buy Mr. Manafort's argument that he likely wouldn't have been targeted but for his brief role as President Trump's campaign chairman. "A significant portion of his career has been spent gaming the system," she said, describing Mr. Manafort's arguments as spin and strategy rather than substantive legal arguments. But she also made clear the case before her had nothing to do with the question of links between Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign. "The question of whether there was any collusion…was not presented in this case. Period," she said. Washington will have to wait longer for the answer to that question.
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—Aruna Viswanatha | aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com
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Federal prosecutors have requested Michael Cohen’s communications with a New York lawyer, the lawyer, Robert Costello, said. The interest in the communications comes after WSJ reported last week that Mr. Cohen last spring directed an attorney to ask the president’s lawyers about the possibility of a pardon, report Joe Palazzolo and Rebecca Ballhaus.
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The DOJ is investigating whether a $100,000 contribution to Mr. Trump's re-election effort came from Jho Low, a Malaysian businessman charged in a global financial scandal, report Tom Wright and Bradley Hope. Authorities are probing whether transfers to LNS Capital originating with Mr. Low financed a donation to Trump Victory.
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Congress Seeks to Reassert Its Constitutional Authority
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With two votes this week, Congress is clawing back power that some lawmakers fear the legislative branch has improperly ceded to the executive branch.
On Wednesday, seven Senate Republicans joined all 47 Senate Democrats to vote to end most U.S. military assistance for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, arguing that Congress has not approved war activities there. The resolution will now head to the Democratic-led House, which has previously approved a resolution withdrawing U.S. forces from the Saudi-led coalition.
And on Thursday, the Senate is expected to pass a resolution terminating the national emergency President Trump has declared at the U.S. Mexico border. As many as 10 Republican Senators could ultimately join Senate Democrats in passing the resolution, which has already cleared the House.
Both votes offer an opportunity for Democrats to oppose Mr. Trump’s agenda and deliver political setbacks. But for some lawmakers, the votes are also an opportunity to reassert congressional authority set out in the Constitution. The White House plans to veto both measures.
Article I of the Constitution gives Congress both the power to declare war and set spending.
“Congress should declare the war, and Congress should spend the money,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who voted to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen and said he plans to vote to end the national emergency. “Those are two bedrock constitutional principles, I think it’s kind of extraordinary we had to discuss them in one week and good for the country to discuss it.”
Mr. Paul was not the only Republican senator who cited broader constitutional principles as he cast his votes. Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), one of the original co-sponsors of the Yemen resolution, announced on Wednesday that he plans to vote for the termination resolution.
“Congress is supposed to be the first among the federal government’s three co-equal branches,” he said in a statement. “For decades, Congress has been giving far too much legislative power to the executive branch.”
Mr. Lee had been working on a piece of legislation that would alter the law to limit the ability of the president to declare national emergencies in the future. When the White House opposed that effort, Mr. Lee said he decided to vote to terminate the emergency.
“While there was attention on the issue I had hoped the ARTICLE ONE Act could begin to take that power back. Unfortunately, it appears the bill does not have an immediate path forward, so I will be voting to terminate the latest emergency declaration. I hope this legislation will serve as a starting point for future work on this very important issue,” he added.
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The Senate is set to pass a resolution rejecting President Trump’s emergency declaration to build more of the border wall, report Kristina Peterson and Natalie Andrews. The Senate move would set the stage for Mr. Trump’s first veto, highlighting the depth of Republicans’ unease over his recent action.
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GSA head Emily Murphy told a House panel that President Trump "had no involvement" in the FBI location decision. She said she didn’t intend to mislead them when she failed to disclose that she met with him about the FBI headquarters' possible relocation, from a site near a hotel Mr. Trump’s company operates, Byron Tau reports.
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A bipartisan pair of senators want to give Wall Street’s top cop more power to recover funds for burned investors, reports Dave Michaels. The legislation would allow the SEC to recover money for harmed investors based upon wrongdoing that occurred as much as a decade ago.
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Mr. Trump’s deregulation czar, Neomi Rao, will fill the federal appeals court seat once held by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, after the Senate confirmed her nomination with a 53-46 party-line vote, Jess Bravin reports.
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How the U.S. Is Getting Pulled Into the Venezuela Crisis
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Thousands of Venezuelans are protesting the government of President Nicholas Maduro, the effects of economic and political instability in the country, and a nationwide power outage. The crisis will become increasingly difficult for the U.S. to ignore.
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The Pentagon plans to develop two types of conventional land-based missiles following the demise of a 1987 treaty with Russia, with flight tests beginning in August, defense officials said. The new intermediate-range missiles are to be conventionally-armed systems, and wouldn’t carry nuclear warheads, reports Michael R. Gordon.
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The U.S. military imposed a series of new restrictions on the ability of transgender people to serve in the armed forces, expanding the scope of ineligibility while stopping short of a ban, reports Nancy A. Youssef. Under the new policy, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria could disqualify an applicant from military service.
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The State Department blamed Saudi Arabian government agents for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, reports Courtney McBride, and for other "unlawful killings" in an annual world-wide survey of human rights. The U.S. has a policy of engaging with other countries regardless of their records on human rights if doing so benefits the U.S.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's statement that she isn't in favor of moving to impeach President Trump actually represents the consensus among Democrats. (Washington Post)
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Former Vice President Joe Biden has led every national poll of the 2020 Democratic primary tracked by RealClearPolitics, but there is a debate about what that means. (Vox)
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You may not have heard of Democrat Wayne Messam, mayor of Miramar, Fla., but he's forming an exploratory committee to run for president. (Axios)
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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.
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