Congress

Republican senators who support the president’s border wall demands regularly reject his foreign policy moves.

Senate Republicans are hunkered down and refusing to cross President Donald Trump on the border wall. But the GOP is more than willing to challenge the administration on foreign policy and national security.

On Wednesday, 11 GOP senators crossed party lines to vote against lifting sanctions on Russia. The effort failed under the Senate’s 60-vote threshold but was a far larger defection than the Trump administration has experienced on anything related to the shutdown. And it continues a theme of Republican unease with the president’s international policies reaching back more than a year.

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The Republican complaints range from disdain over Trump’s tariffs to disgust over the U.S. withdrawal from Syria to a repudiation of the administration’s refusal to implicate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It’s a trend that has accelerated over the past six months, even as centrists in both parties struggle to get Republicans to sign onto efforts to reopen the government without new wall funding.

“We’ve got a lot of people who know a lot about foreign policy and have strongly held positions and are willing to challenge some of the administration’s views and policies,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). Those Republicans think “they can have some influence over the administration on that. On the border, you know where the president is and you know where the Democrats are and there’s nothing really in between.”

On Wednesday, a diverse group of Republicans rebuked the Trump administration’s effort to lift sanctions on companies linked to Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. There were a pair of Republicans who have called for an immediate end to the shutdown — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado — but the rest of the dissenters are not typically associated with bucking the president.

Sens. John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) voted to keep the sanctions, and neither senator typically makes waves going against the president. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) are among the senators who are closest to Trump, and they also voted against him.

Treasury officials tried to make the case that the companies receiving sanctions relief had made major changes to blunt Deripaska’s influence — evidence that the sanctions had worked to put a squeeze on the billionaire oligarch. Deripaska is connected to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

But many Republicans didn’t buy it.

“We need to hold the Russians accountable here for their actions. I think it’s important that we look at if these sanctions are delivering the desired outcomes and changing behavior. I haven’t seen that yet,” said Daines, who visited Russia last year with other GOP senators. “I support the president on border security, I just have a difference on these sanctions.”

Treasury targeted the companies under a 2017 law intended to strengthen sanctions against Russia and limit the president’s power to remove them. The administration notified Congress of its plans to ease the sanctions Dec. 19, opening a 30-day window for lawmakers to intervene. Time runs out this week.

And even Republicans that sided with the Treasury Department did so somewhat queasily.

“This is a hard vote,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who stood with the administration. “This is not a black-and-white vote.”

The contrast was painful for some Democrats to watch. Behind the scenes, they were trying to convince Republicans to sign onto their plan to reopen the government and then hold a short debate on border security. If they got enough signatures, Democrats and centrist Republicans were hoping they could make a major breakthrough.

But most Republicans were balking due to resistance from the Trump administration. Never mind that nearly a dozen of them had just rejected an argument from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on why voting to keep sanctions on Russian companies Rusal, EN+ and EuroSibEnergo, which had been targeted because of their ties to Deripaska, was a mistake.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), one of the ringleaders of the effort to end the shutdown, was nearly incredulous when asked why it appeared much easier for Republicans to try and thwart the administration’s Russia policies than it is for them to break with the president on the shutdown.

“That’s an amazing question isn’t it? Why is it easier to get Republicans to vote against lifting sanctions on a Ukrainian Russian oligarch, than it is to get them to sign onto a letter that simply says: ‘Mr. President reopen the government and we will negotiate border security investments in good faith?” Coons asked rhetorically. “I don’t have a good answer to that.”

But a Republican like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is a perfect encapsulation of the dynamic within the Senate GOP. He has no plans to sign the letter despite his own grievances with the shutdown, but has been one of the leading critics of the president’s recent foreign policy actions.

In addition to voting against lifting the Russian sanctions, he’s also led the charge against Trump’s planned Syria pullout.

“I don’t view it as going against the administration. I view it as a deal that’s not good enough … the law says [Deripaska] is supposed to lose control of the company, and he hasn’t lost control of the company,” Rubio said of his sanctions vote. On Syria, he added: “We don’t want endless wars but the worst possible outcome is we leave, ISIS reemerges and we have to go back in.”

Because the effort failed despite some GOP resistance to the Trump administration’s treatment of the sanctions, Democrats were still angered by the result.

“Forty two Republican senators chose today to stand with Vladimir Putin rather than the American people. The Trump administration has been shamefully and suspiciously weak on President Putin, and the Senate had a chance today to send a strong, bipartisan message that we won’t let Putin’s cronies off the hook,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Yet the bipartisan rebuke of the Trump administration’s Russia policies demonstrates that even as Trump Republican critics like Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee have left the Senate, there’s still a voting bloc left that’s comfortable taking on the president on international affairs. Corker in particular had led efforts at constraining Trump’s mercurial diplomatic style, trying to block him from imposing tariffs on allies and leading the charge in the Senate to cast blame on Prince Salman for Khashoggi’s death.

Sen. Jim Risch, the Idaho Republican who succeeded Corker as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, voted in support of the administration. But even he admitted it was the letter of the law governing the sanctions that was his motivating factor, not comfort with the administration’s plan to ease up on a close Putin ally.

“I’d love to say otherwise,” Risch said. “And from a political standpoint, it’s very easy to say otherwise.”

On Wednesday, two freshmen GOP senators, Martha McSally of Arizona and Josh Hawley of Missouri, voted to block Mnuchin’s department from lifting Russia sanctions. Trump campaigned repeatedly for Hawley last year, but for the new GOP senator from Missouri, voting against his administration’s wishes on Russia was not a tough call.

“I don’t think it was a hard vote. Because look, this is a bad dude,” Hawley said of Deripaska.

Government Shutdown

Agencies have called back thousands of furloughed federal employees, raising questions about whether the administration is favoring politically advantageous policies.

The Trump administration is pushing the legal boundaries of a government shutdown, fueling fears that the president is manipulating federal agencies and workers to soften the political blow against him.

In recent days, agencies have called back to work thousands of furloughed federal employees, restarted services and pursued key policies at shuttered agencies. The activity has legal experts, administration officials and veterans of past shutdowns questioning what actually constitutes a government shutdown if the administration can simply resurrect its preferred services and à la carte policy to-do list nearly a month after funding technically expired for several agencies.

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So far, the Trump administration has continued to plow forward on its controversial immigration policies, brought back workers to ensure government assistance gets to farmers and ranchers — a key constituency — and is weighing whether to recall workers would could assist in the federal rulemaking process that has been stymied during the shutdown, according to administration officials.

“What they are doing is making an obligation and policy without Congress’s approval,” said Barry Anderson, former deputy director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. “Congress is saying there is no money for this and Trump is still doing it.”

In particular, the Trump administration has continued work to finalize its “Remain in Mexico” policy, said three administration officials, even as the agencies working on the issue are mostly closed. The plan — cheered on by Trump’s base — would require Central Americans migrants to say on the southern side of the U.S.-Mexico border while awaiting the results of their asylum requests.

The administration officials also said the government is nearly finished with an upcoming rule that would revise a visa for high-skilled workers known as H-1B. President Donald Trump has promised the updated policy would offer “certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship.” Uncertainty over the future of such visas — frequently used by U.S. tech companies to bring in skilled foreign workers — has caused tech workers to decamp to friendlier countries like Canada.

The immigration work has irked some who see it as an example of the Trump White House reshaping the definition of “essential” to include its favored political agenda items.

“It is shady that the federal government is continuing to work on immigration policy while the Coast Guard is not getting paid,” said one official, not authorized to discuss internal government machinations. “You can’t shut down the government because of the lack of wall funding but then use the excuse of an emergency to keep working on immigration.”

The contested shutdown work is spanning the government.

On Wednesday, the Secretary of Agriculture announced he would recall roughly 2,500 Farm Service Agency workers to temporarily re-open offices to help provide services for farmers and ranchers — many of whom are hurting financially from the administration’s tariffs.

At the Office of the Federal Register, the administration is considering bringing back staff so it can continue publishing proposed rules out of agencies, said one administration official.

Already, thousands of food, drug, medical and aviation safety inspectors have returned to work without pay to blunt the effect of the shutdown on the lives of everyday Americans. And the Internal Revenue Service announced it would bring back to work thousands of employees if the government shutdown persisted until Jan. 28, the kickoff of tax filing season.

Over at the Environmental Protection Agency, officials updated their shutdown contingency plan to add 17 new employees to the agency’s exempted category in the wake of questions from Senate Democrats about whether acting EPA head Andrew Wheeler was using staff that should be furloughed to prepare for his own confirmation hearing on Wednesday. Wheeler has been tapped to run the agency permanently.

EPA justified the move by noting that Justice Department lawyers had told the agency the staffers were necessary for the performance of the president’s constitutional duties. The EPA’s efforts to revise and eliminate Obama-era climate regulations has been a key talking point for Trump officials.

One senior administration official defended all of these actions, arguing the Trump administration is following rules and precedent first laid out in legal arguments from DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel dating back to 1981 and 1995. The official called the 1995 rulings a guiding light for what is permissible during a shutdown. And the Office of Management and Budget must approve every action an agency takes during this shutdown to reopen services or recall personnel.

“We are doing everything legally possible to keep programs running, and if critics want to argue we should let [food stamp] beneficiaries go without payment for a month or that tax refunds should sit around, then that is their prerogative,” the senior administration official said. “I’d rather be busy trying to figure out with agencies what we can do legally.”

But longtime federal workers and legal experts say the Trump administration is playing fast-and-loose with well-established rules as it continues to pursue its agenda while trying to inoculate itself from public grips by maintaining services for consumers. The shutdown has now lasted a record 26 days, and there is no clear end in sight to the impasse, which centers on funding for Trump’s long-promised wall on the southern border.

G. William Hoagland, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee, said the Trump administration is violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, which says the federal government cannot employ personnel, or accept voluntary services during a shutdown except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or protection of property. The senior administration official disputed this idea, saying the prior legal rulings provided more flexibility than the act itself says.

“At the end of the day, whenever this is over with, there will be a number of GAO investigations or requests for investigation,” Hoagland said. “I would argue they ought to be careful about these decisions they are making on the fly. At some point, they will be audited on these decisions after the fact.”

Already, House Democrats are questioning some these shutdown decisions, focusing most recently on an Interior Department decision to bring back employees working on offshore drilling efforts, another politically divisive policy move. They slammed the move as illegal and demanded an end to it.

“This is an outrageous step, and the justifications provided … are farcical and make it clear that the administration cares only about the impacts on its favorite industry and not its workers, their families, and ordinary Americans,” wrote House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Rep. Betty McCollum (D.-Minn.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee for Interior, and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.).

Everyday, top officials at the Office of Management and Budget are meeting and talking with agency heads to determine what services can reopen, or which employees need to return to work without pay. That calculus has changed as the shutdown has dragged on. Keeping essential parts of the government humming is a mandate from the acting director of the budget agency, Russ Vought, who has urged agencies to make the shutdown as painless as possible, said the senior administration official.

A federal judge on Tuesday also rebuffed a lawsuit from federal workers that argued the Trump administration couldn’t force its employees to work without pay during a shutdown.

That approach stands in contrast to White House’s attitude during the second-longest government shutdown, which occurred under President Bill Clinton. Then, Democratic officials wanted Americans to feel the pain of the shutdown as a way to create pressure on Republicans to end it and refute their opponents’ claims that big government was not ultimately necessary.

“The Trump administration seems to be eager, whenever they get pushback from citizens, to do something about it and mitigate it. We were not in that mode,” said Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget during that time. “We were not trying to make it easy. We wanted to show you do need the government and let’s get this settled.”

Jim Dyer, former staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, argued the Trump administration is not doing anything illegal because they are not spending new money, which has yet to be appropriated by Congress at the closed agencies — even if they are making thousands of employees work unpaid.

And in some instances, the Trump administration is reopening services like asking the IRS to verify incomes for mortgage applications and arguing those services can be funded by fees paid to the agency instead of appropriated money.

“The legal boundary for me is the obligation of money. I have not seen or heard any evidence it is happening,” said Dyer, now a senior adviser at Baker Donelson. “The only thing you’ve got to be mad at them about is the fundamental stupidity of the shutdown.”

Dyer cautioned that this fiscal year was meant to be an easy one, with plenty of money to work with and agreements already reached by the appropriators in Congress.

The 2020 fiscal year will be much more trying, he added, with budget caps that need adjusting and a debt ceiling will need raising — a foreshadowing of the potentially epic battles ahead.

Eric Wolff and Ben Lefebvre contributed reporting.

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2020 elections

A decentralized, Bernie Sanders-style campaign model is being discussed.

EL PASO — Beto O’Rourke has left Texas, decamping for a highly anticipated road trip, but his former advisers are quietly sketching the outline of a potential presidential run that would replicate — and on a national scale — the grassroots-driven organizing model O’Rourke employed in his Texas Senate campaign.

Becky Bond, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and an adviser to O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run, has been talking with operatives in recent days about potential jobs on a 2020 campaign, two sources familiar with those conversations told POLITICO.

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The effort is preliminary, and the imprimatur of O’Rourke was implied — not stated, the sources said. Unlike many candidates-in-waiting, who have PACs or other organizations to assemble staff, O’Rourke is not yet assembling a campaign team.

But in talks with Democratic strategists, Bond and David Wysong, O’Rourke’s former longtime chief of staff, have discussed ways for O’Rourke to expand the “distributed organizing” form of field operations used by Sanders in 2016 and replicated by O’Rourke last year — with the campaign training low-level staffers and volunteers to orchestrate their own, phone banking, text and email operations.

O’Rourke’s closer-than-expected run against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year was supported by the creation of hundreds of “pop-up” offices across Texas, which served as decentralized hubs for volunteers and get-out-the-vote operations.

O’Rourke, who had been lying low in El Paso since leaving Congress earlier this month, posted on Medium on Wednesday that he had left the state, traveling through New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. Far from reporters who have been trickling into El Paso, he said he spoke with a motel owner, a waitress and a community college student, among other people he encountered. He also went on his first run in more than a month.

“Have been stuck lately,” he wrote. “In and out of a funk. My last day of work was January 2nd. It’s been more than twenty years since I was last not working. Maybe if I get moving, on the road, meet people, learn about what’s going on where they live, have some adventure, go where I don’t know and I’m not known, it’ll clear my head, reset, I’ll think new thoughts, break out of the loops I’ve been stuck in.”

O’Rourke is leaning toward running for president, according to at least four sources who have spoken to him or his advisers, but he has kept a relatively low profile since leaving Congress earlier this year. He is scheduled to appear in New York for a live, one-on-one conversation with Oprah Winfrey on Feb. 5.

Wysong has been speaking privately with Democratic strategists since November. In late December that Bond was quoted as saying she wanted to be part of O’Rourke’s presidential campaign. “I don’t know if Beto is going to run, but if he does I’m all in,” she said.

Bond, an online organizing specialist, was instrumental in helping to build Sanders’ national organizing operation in 2016, a juggernaut that helped to keep the Vermont senator competitive during the 2016 primary. Noting the limited supply of staffers for 2020 contenders at a gathering of progressive donors and activists in the Los Angeles area last month, Bond urged “movement leaders” and donors to “really consider going into that vacuum, joining a presidential campaign early, and you can actually bend these campaigns towards the agenda that you really care about.”

Jody Casey, who managed O’Rourke’s Texas Senate run, is not expected to join the 2020 effort, according to two sources familiar with her plans.

Bond referred questions to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign spokesman, Chris Evans, who declined to comment.

O’Rourke, who raised more than $80 million in his Texas Senate campaign, is polling in the top tier of 2020 contenders and is widely expected to be able to raise money quickly if he joins the race. But he will start at an organizational disadvantage, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and other candidates already locking down talent in early nominating states.

In an effort to prepare groundwork for O’Rourke, two separate “Draft Beto” campaigns have intensified their efforts in recent weeks, adding strategists and hosting meetings in early primary states. On Wednesday, organizers of one of the efforts began a social media campaign with a video of O’Rourke supporters urging him to run.

Will Herberich, a New England-based strategist co-chairing the group behind the social media push, said, “Our whole idea has been to be able to start to identify grassroots activists who can be helpful to him, especially while other candidates are announcing or reaching out.”

He said, “We want people to have a place to go who are Beto supporters … My hope is that we’re able to hand over a list of those people when we’re done on the draft side for him to tap into.”

If he runs, O’Rourke would enter the race in a far different position than he has held in previous campaigns, when he ran as an insurgent for Congress in 2012 and again last year in his race against Cruz. With recent polling putting O’Rourke near the top of the 2020 field, he would join the Democratic primary as one of a handful of frontrunners.

“It’d be a position that he has never run from, but his campaigns have always been grounded on getting out and speaking to people and listening,” said Steve Ortega, a friend of O’Rourke who served on the El Paso City Council with him. “What will change is that everyone’s arrow will be pointed at him.”

He said that O’Rourke, who famously eschewed political strategists and pollsters in his 2018 race, “will always be at the forefront of his campaigns.”

“He is the manager, he is the strategist,” Ortega said. “And if he runs, it will be the exact same way.”

Distributed organizing is not without limitations: Relying on volunteers can result in clunkier execution, with less oversight leaving doors unknocked and campaign messaging less controlled. But even O’Rourke’s critics saw its value in his Senate campaign — and in a potential 2020 run.

“They had a lot of flaws,” said Jeff Roe, who was Cruz’s chief strategist. “They had distribution problems, they had execution problems, they had engagement problems. But they had a good, fervent group of people hustling. And hustle makes up for half of that problem.”

As for scaling the distributed organizing model for a presidential campaign, Roe said that for a Democrat, “That’s a great model for a national campaign.”