GOP in paradise
Guests included Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, House Homeland Security Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.).
NRCC Chair Richard Hudson and CLF President Chris Winkelman also discussed 2026 midterm elections.
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Politico
a few seconds ago
- Politico
Chris Murphy goes all in on funding bill boycott as Dems seek bipartisanship
Chris Murphy has been warning for months that voters want Democrats to fight. This summer, the Connecticut senator is picking a battle that puts him at odds with his Democratic colleagues. Murphy has made surprising moves over the last month to protest bipartisan government funding talks as a member of the Appropriations Committee, demonstrating his vision of what opposition to President Donald Trump should look like and further stoking speculation about his own presidential ambitions. The third-term senator said in a recent interview that Trump "doesn't give a fuck what we write' into spending legislation. And so he sees no reason to participate in the drafting of funding bills if the president is going to keep withholding billions of dollars Congress already approved and goading Republican senators to claw back more. 'Every single day, there's new evidence that our democracy is falling, and you've got to take stands. You have to take fights,' Murphy explained. 'I just worry — every time that we go along with these appropriations bills, we're putting a bipartisan veneer of endorsement on an illegal process that's ultimately part of his campaign to destroy our democracy.' As the top Democrat on the appropriations panel that funds the Department of Homeland Security, Murphy occupies a role that has historically demanded across-the-aisle collaboration. But in recent weeks, he opposed all spending measures advanced during Senate Appropriations Committee markups for which he was present, challenged his Republican counterpart on the DHS funding bill and voted 'no' on the Senate's first bipartisan funding package of the year. 'I'm nothing if not consistent. I don't like the position I'm in,' Murphy said. 'It's lonely. 28-to-1 votes are lonely.' So far, Murphy isn't slamming his colleagues for embracing bipartisan negotiations, and his peers aren't directly criticizing his approach. But they aren't exactly praising him either. 'He has the right to his opinion," said the top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington. "And I just have the opinion that the more we can do to get bills done, the better chance we have of getting better things for our country.' Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, one of Murphy's friends and another senior member of the Appropriations Committee, said Democrats have a duty to at least attempt to strike a cross-party compromise on federal spending ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. 'I'm not his spokesperson,' said Schatz, who is in line to be the chamber's Democratic whip in the next Congress. 'So all I can say is: We've been demanding a bipartisan process. So when there's a step in that direction, I think it's our obligation to try to be constructive.' While Murphy has never been a moderate, he has grown rapidly into a liberal firebrand in recent years. Once best known on Capitol Hill for his advocacy for gun control and his foreign policy expertise, he's now a frequent anti-Trump voice on cable news shows and has waded into controversial social topics like the nation's 'male identity' crisis. But Murphy's latest political stand against Trump comes as his name is floated for a bigger-stage battle against Republicans — this time as a presidential contender in 2028. If the 52-year-old senator seeks the Democratic nomination in three years, his protest of government funding bills could help differentiate him as a candidate who fought the Trump administration with more than just verbal criticism. 'It does fit, right? These are strategies that would make sense if he's interested in a national platform and to run for office like president,' said Hans Noel, a Georgetown University professor who studies presidential nominations. 'There's some appeal to a lot of voters — of fighting — especially at the national stage, where he doesn't have to worry about winning over allies for legislative progress,' Noel continued. 'Murphy has been somebody who's been talking on a national stage for a long time. It's not completely new. But he's somebody who's got that kind of appeal.' This past week, Murphy spent his birthday at an event with progressives in Arizona, where he talked broadly about the need for Democrats to balance opposition with real policy commitments: 'We can't just be against Donald Trump. We've got to give people a vision of something different.' Since Trump's election last November, Murphy has grown a beard, announced the end of his 17-year marriage and sparked rumors about romantic ties to a prominent Democratic strategist. In April, he hosted a town hall back in rural North Carolina — more than 500 miles from his blue home state. Then this summer, he launched a PAC aimed at taking on Trump and Republicans in Congress. Murphy hasn't always resisted negotiations with Republicans. In 2022, after a gunman left 21 people dead inside a Texas elementary school, he undertook weeks of painstaking talks that resulted in the first significant federal gun-control legislation in two decades. It was the culmination of a nearly decade-long fight for Murphy, who represented Sandy Hook Elementary School in the House at the time of that devastating 2012 shooting. His next foray into bipartisan talks did not have a happy ending. Last year he scrupulously crafted the high-profile bipartisan border deal with Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford, in an attempt to enact Congress' first major immigration overhaul in more than three decades. Then Trump chilled Republican support for the bill. To Murphy, it signaled that Republicans couldn't be trusted to be good-faith actors in negotiations to fund the government: 'I think that drama was early proof that they're never going to cross him,' he said of Republicans' loyalty to Trump. This belief was further cemented when Murphy's GOP colleagues cleared Trump's $9 billion rescission request last month targeting public broadcasting and foreign aid. 'They can say that they're going to honor the words on the page,' Murphy said. Yet if Trump 'decides to ignore the law,' he continued, 'I just don't think that my Republican colleagues are going to really fight to protect it.' Democratic leadership's interest in engaging in bipartisan funding negotiations, from which Murphy is abstaining, is a relatively new development. Just a month ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer penned a lengthy 'dear colleague' letter insinuating that his members should cut off cross-party talks if Republicans accepted the White House's rescissions package. Nine days later, Senate Republicans banded together to pass that bill. And five days after that, Schumer stood with his House counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to announce that Democrats still 'want to pursue a bipartisan, bicameral appropriations process.' It has left Murphy as the lone Democratic appropriator continually opposing the funding bills his colleagues are trying to advance, even as he readily admits it's not the substance of the spending measures he's against. 'The bills themselves are good, bipartisan bills,' said Murphy. 'It's just — I don't believe that anything in there is actually going to be implemented.' This is the case Murphy said he wants to get through to Sen. Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican who chairs the Homeland Security appropriations panel opposite Murphy. The two lawmakers were seen last month in a heated exchange in the well of the Senate floor after passage of the clawback request. Britt described the conversation, captured by C-SPAN cameras, as 'a spirited dialogue,' vowing: 'I'll continue to work in good faith, as I always have.' Murphy, however, said negotiations on the DHS funding bill will be meaningless if Trump and Republicans are going to undermine the spending directives when the measure becomes law. 'We had an animated discussion,' Murphy said of his talk with Britt. 'Obviously it's hard to write a bill when the administration is going to stab you in the back as soon as you write it, especially in a space as difficult as immigration and DHS.' He pointed to specific examples of how Trump has already undermined appropriators, including the president's efforts to fund the controversial 'Alligator Alcatraz' immigration detention center in Florida by diverting money Congress appropriated for 'humane' alternatives to detainment. 'And you know,' Murphy continued, 'he's going to use the money in this budget to treat immigrants like animals.' Jordain Carney, Katherine Tully-McManus and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.
USA Today
29 minutes ago
- USA Today
Congress must hear from Jeffrey Epstein's victims about Ghislaine Maxwell's role
Trump is openly mulling a pardon for a known liar who could benefit from spinning a favorable tale about him, while two Congress members are using their posts to give the women she victimized a voice. Lawyers for a convicted child sex trafficker got right to the point recently while seeking to prevent the public release of testimony from the grand jury that indicted her. "Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not," they wrote in an Aug. 5 legal brief, opposing the release of those records. That blunt and binary assessment – Epstein died from an apparent suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, Maxwell is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence – didn't have much to say about the other people involved in this metastasizing scandal in Donald Trump's second term as president: the victimized underage girls who are still seeking justice years later. Maxwell has been the center of attention – and, so far, a beneficiary of it – in this scandal. But in three weeks, we'll focus instead on some of those victims. Sounds like they have plenty to share about her. House Speaker Johnson wants Epstein files to just go away U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, have jointly announced that they will hold a Sept. 3 news conference at the U.S. Capitol to hear from those victims and their attorneys while pressing for passage of their bipartisan legislation to release what has become known as the "Epstein files." That bill, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, has 11 Republican and 33 Democratic cosponsors. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, found a vote on that bill so concerning in July that he sent the House members home early for the summer break to avoid it. Opinion: Epstein accomplice Maxwell angles for a Trump pardon. Would she lie to help him? "We're not going to play political games with this," Johnson said at a July 22 news conference while openly, publicly playing political games to snuff out a bipartisan move for transparency. Johnson's punt bought a little time for Trump, who used to hang out with Epstein and Maxwell and has been haunted of late by a 2002 New York magazine interview, in which he said Epstein was "a lot of fun to be with" and "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." All eyes now on Ghislaine Maxwell and possible pardon But this isn't going away, despite Trump's flailing efforts to quiet the controversy. And Massie and Khanna are platforming exactly who we need to hear from in this scandal – the victims – while Maxwell's turn in the congressional spotlight is still very much up in the air. She was subpoenaed in July to testify from behind bars this week for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. But that was postponed indefinitely, in part because Maxwell has an appeal for her conviction being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court and because she demanded congressional immunity, and the committee refused. That's a rare setback for Maxwell, who has used her infamy to rack up something of a winning streak as Trump struggles with the Epstein scandal. Maxwell, who was convicted of recruiting underage victims and coaching them to have sex with Epstein while sometimes joining in, got her way when a federal judge in New York on Aug. 11 declined to release that grand jury testimony. Two days of secretive interviews in July with a top Department of Justice official – who once served as Trump's private lawyer – won Maxwell a transfer from a women's prison in Florida to a much cushier federal camp in Texas. Her lawyers are now angling to win her a pardon from Trump, something he feels regularly obliged to note publicly that he is allowed to do. Opinion: Republicans in Congress head home to angry voters. So much for summer break. So Trump is openly mulling a pardon for a known liar who could benefit from spinning a favorable tale about him in this scandal. And Massie and Khanna are using their congressional posts to give voice to those Maxwell victimized for Epstein. Really, who are you rooting for here? If you find yourself on Team Maxwell, a growing chorus among many of Trump's most MAGA media supporters, you're going to bat for a woman who recruited and sexually abused children. That's ugly stuff, a perversion of political partisanship so profoundly grotesque that it has broken through and overcome that constant stream of chaos Trump has been deploying to distract America. This scandal won't dissipate in the summer heat, just because that's what Trump wants. American voters – Republicans, Democrats and independents – are calling for transparency. Congress must provide it. Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
Business Insider
36 minutes ago
- Business Insider
‘Time to Wave Bye Bye,' Says Former Bull About Palantir Stock
Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) stock has been the subject of a mad scramble in recent years, as investors rush to ride the big data company's momentum. Its Q2 2025 earnings release once again topped expectations, with revenues surpassing the $1 billion mark for the first time. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. That milestone reflects more than just solid sales figures – it underscores how Palantir has carved out a distinctive niche, offering platforms that empower sovereign actors and government clients to dramatically increase efficiency and make faster, better-informed decisions in real time. Capitalizing on these gains, the company has continued to raise guidance and secure major deals, the latest being a U.S. Army contract worth up to $10 billion over the next decade. With revenue growth seemingly on autopilot, it might appear there's little reason for long-term holders to waver. But not everyone is convinced. One investor, known by the pseudonym Weebler, just can't justify PLTR's valuation – despite being a fan of the company's incredibly impressive moat. 'Even when we hold an almost stubborn conviction in any company's long-term potential, we must strive to be willing to set aside personal bias when new variables shift the risk-reward equation,' admits the 5-star investor. For Weebler, the problem lies in what the market is currently pricing in. A forward P/E multiple near 420x is 'beyond excessive,' and even dialing that back to a lofty 60x assumes Palantir will grow earnings tenfold in just two years, a feat without precedent for a large-cap tech company. 'That is beyond what even the most elite, high-growth tech companies have historically achieved at this scale,' emphasizes Weebler, adding that such assumptions also hinge on the share price holding steady. While acknowledging that irrational exuberance could keep fueling the rally in the short term, Weebler has decided it's time to step aside, cutting his rating on PLTR from Buy to Sell. 'The market seems to be getting irrationally greedy, and the growth expectations have stepped beyond what the most hypergrowth plays have ever achieved,' the investor concludes. (To watch Weebler Finance's track record, click here) There is clearly an abundance of caution on Wall Street as well. With 13 Hold ratings far outweighing 5 Buys and 2 Sells, PLTR holds a consensus Hold (i.e. Neutral) rating. Its 12-month average price target of $154.56 implies a 17% downside from current levels. (See PLTR stock forecast) To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks' Best Stocks to Buy, a tool that unites all of TipRanks' equity insights.
