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“I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions. I’m not sending anyone to jail yet but it’s good to know I have that ability.”
— U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim. “Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos faces potential sanctions or a finding she’s in contempt of court for continuing to collect on the debt of former students at bankrupt Corinthian Colleges Inc., going so far as seizing their tax refunds and wages,” Bloomberg reports.
“Don’t tempt me. Do your job.”
— Hillary Clinton responding to President Trump’s tweet suggesting she should enter the 2020 presidential race.
“I must confess that I was dumb. I should have listened to those symptoms.”
— Sen. Bernie Sanders, quoted by CBS News, saying he ignored symptoms in recent weeks that suggested he had heart problems.
“Most voters are locked in to one of the parties. The swing vote tends to be low-information voters with a hazy grasp of the issues. Impeachment is a signal to those voters that Trump has done something seriously wrong. It’s not a magic trick that works against every president — there needs to be misconduct people can easily understand, and which the news media covers as a serious scandal. This easily qualifies. … If Trump has any political strengths, it is that he is a low-information voter himself, and grasps how the political narrative plays out in snippets of cable-news chyrons drifting across screens in bars and airports. Trump has confided to allies that impeachment ‘looks bad on his résumé.’”
29%
A new Quinnipiac poll finds Elizabeth Warren leading the Democratic presidential field with 29%, followed by Joe Biden at 26%, Bernie Sanders at 16%, Pete Buttigieg at 4%, Kamala Harris at 3% and Andrew Yang at 3%. No other candidate tops 2%. In general election match ups, Warren beats Trump, 49% to 41%, Biden leads 51% to 40% and Sanders is ahead 49% to 42%.
$984 billion
“The government ran a budget deficit of just under $1 trillion in the just-closed fiscal year,” the AP reports. “The $984 billion deficit tally for 2019 came in more than $200 billion more than last year’s, despite very low unemployment and continuing economic growth.”
58% to 38%
A new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds that, by a margin of 58% to 38%, Americans say the House was correct to begin an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
800,000
“The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears,” the Daily Beast reports. “Called ‘Conservative Country,’ the Facebook page was founded in 2014 and now boasts nearly 800,000 followers for its mix of Donald Trump hagiography and ultra-conservative memes.”
$50,000
Lawyers for the whistleblower said “certain individuals” had offered a $50,000 “bounty” for any information on the whistleblower’s identity after the official complained to a government watchdog that President Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, Reuters reports.
23%
The 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, the New York Times reports. “That’s a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy paid vastly higher tax rates than the middle class or poor. Since then, taxes that hit the wealthiest the hardest — like the estate tax and corporate tax — have plummeted, while tax avoidance has become more common.”
