Trump Is Gunning to Replace Senator Corker and "Conservatize" the Tennessee Seat before Healthcare and Tax Reform Votes

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS TRUMP'S PLAN TO REPLACE SENATOR CORKER. He will do it. • • • SENATOR CORKER REVEALS HIS #NEVERTRUMP SWAMP CREATURE FACE. President Trump will, before October 15, either re-certify or de-certify the Iran nuclear deal. Reuters and much of the world's media reported last Thursday that Trump called the coming days “the calm before the storm” at a White House dinner for US military leaders. Despite re-certifying the Iran deal twice since January (the President has to do this every 90 days), many reports suggest that President Trump will reject the deal ahead of the October 15 deadline, saying Teheran has violated the spirit of the agreement : “The Iranian regime supports terrorism and exports violence, bloodshed, and chaos across the Middle East. That is why we must put an end to Iran’s continued aggression and nuclear ambitions. They have not lived up to the spirit of their agreement.” • France, Britain and Germany have all urged Trump not to abandon the deal that they also signed -- they are knee-deep doing business deals with Iran, and Trumps Defense Secretary James Mattis has said that keeping the accord is in US national security interests. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned last month that decertification would hit US credibility. And, as we would expect, Obama's deputy foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, said Thursday : “Trump is lying. Iran is complying with the deal. Everyone -- including his own Administration -- has verified that fact.” • Not exactly, Mr. Rhodes. • But, as TheHill reported last week, it was Senator Bob Corker --he recently announced that he will not seek re-election in 2108 -- who has fallen into the Iran deal and foreign policy fray. Last Wednesday, Corker accused members of the Trump administration of not supporting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, adding that Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and chief of staff John Kelly are protecting the country from “chaos.” Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he supports Tillerson : “I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis and chief of staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos. And I support him very much...I watch, and I see what’s happening, and I deal with people throughout the administration, and he, from my perspective, he is in an incredibly frustrating place, where as I watch, and I can watch very closely on many occasions, he ends up not being supported in a way that I would a hope a Secretary of State would be supported, and that’s just from my vantage point.” Asked by The Hill whether the "chaos" he was referring to is Trump, Corker said there are “people within the administration” working against the interest of the country. Corker added : "Tillerson, Mattis and Kelly work well together to make sure that the policies that we put forth around the world are sound and coherent, where other people within the administration, in my belief, are not. I hope they stay because they’re valuable to the national security of our nation. They’re valuable to us putting forth good policies. They’re very valuable as it relates to our citizens feeling safe and secure, and I hope he’s here for a long time.” • As a point of reference, after the August violence in Charlottesville, Corker questioned whether Trump has the “stability” or “competence” to be a successful President. • Last Wednesday, NBC News reported that Tillerson had to be talked out of resigning this summer by Vice President Pence. The news outlet said it spoke to a dozen current and former senior administration officials for its article, as well as others who are close to the President. Tillerson responded to the report by denying that he has ever considered resigning. But he did not deny that he called Trump a moron, saying only that he did not want to “deal with petty stuff like that.” And, Pence has denied that any such conversation between Tillerson and him ever took place. • On Sunday, things got worse in the Corker spat with President Trump. The clash may create problems for Trump and the GOP's legislative push on tax reform, because Senator Corker has a key vote. Early Sunday, Trump in a series of tweets claimed Corker sought his endorsement for his re-election bid, which Trump said he declined : “Senator Bob Corker ‘begged’ me to endorse him for re-election in Tennessee. I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without.....my endorsement)." But, Corker's chief of staff, Todd Womack, told TheHill on Sunday that Trump pushed the Tennessee Senator to run again, even offering his endorsement should Corker decide to do so : "The President called Senator Corker on Monday afternoon and asked him to reconsider his decision not to seek reelection and reaffirmed that he would have endorsed him, as he has said many times." • The real point of contention centers on the Iran nuclear deal. Trump tweeted : “He also wanted to be Secretary of State, I said ‘NO THANKS.’ He is also largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal!” The President also accused Corker of not having “the guts to run” for reelection : “...Hence, I would fully expect Corker to be a negative voice and stand in the way of our great agenda. Didn't have the guts to run!” Corker quickly fired back, describing the White House as “an adult day care center” : “It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” • BUT, later on Sunday, Trump explicitly blamed Corker for the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement negotiated between the United States, Iran, and international powers that provided Teheran with sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program : "Bob Corker gave us the Iran Deal, & that's about it. We need HealthCare, we need Tax Cuts/Reform, we need people that can get the job done!" That tweet makes it pretty clear that Trump would not have supported Corker in 2108. And, Trump's grassroots guru, Steve Bannon, had already announced that his group would be supporting Republicans in the Tennessee Senate primary who are running against Coprker. Many saw Bannon's announcement as the coup de grâce that quickly led to Corker's decision not to run for re-election. On Sunday, Trump was just pointing out the obvious -- Senator Corker is not a Trump fan and was and will continue to lead a neo-conservative quasi-#NeverTrump flanking action as long as he is in the Senate. • • • CORKER GUIARANTEED OBAMA'S IRAN DEAL. On September 2, 2015, NPR's "Heard on Morning Edition" Steve Inskeep said : "Senator Bob Corker opposes the deal, but was among the architects of rules that make it hard to stop the agreement....Most lawmakers have said they oppose the deal, yet [Obama] has a good chance of winning. That is because the deal will be considered under rules that favor him, even if only a minority supports him in Congress." Inskeep said he had asked then-President Obama : "Are you entirely comfortable going forward with a historic deal knowing that most of the people's representatives are against it?" Obama answered : "Well, what I know is, is that unfortunately, a large portion of the Republican Party, if not a near unanimous portion of Republican representatives, are going to be opposed to anything that I do." Here is how the Iran deal was "consented to" by Congress and shoved down the throats of Americans -- with a lot of help from Senator Corker. • The Obama White House contended that Congress had no business in that deal, calling it an executive agreement, not a treaty. Lawmakers in both parties demanded a voice. Many disliked the deal -- a lot. Inskeep recalled that : "When Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before Congress, Senator Bob Corker described the agreement this way : 'From my perspective, Mr. Secretary, I'm sorry. Not unlike a hotel guest that leaves only with a hotel bathrobe on his back, I believe you've been fleeced.' So he said -- yet Corker was among the architects of rules that make it hard to stop the deal." • Corker and the Senate had known for some time that President Obama and the United Nations were on their way to approving the Iran agreement. Once the President has made a deal with five other nations and had the deal endorsed by the UN Security Council, Congress voting to block it would look good for anybody -- the country or them. So, Corker set out to find a way to make it work. Instead of voting on whether to approve the Iran deal, Congress voted on whether to disapprove. If they had disapproved, the President could have vetoed their disapproval. And, it would have taken two-thirds of the House and the Senate to override the veto. NPR editor Ron Elving explained back in 2105 : "If it were normal legislation and not a treaty, you would need 60 to shut off debate and then 51 to prevail. For a treaty, 67 votes would be needed. So how many does the President need for this deal? Thirty-four. That's the essence of what we're talking about here. If the Senate gives the President 34 votes to sustain his veto, he has won and it's over." Obama would also have won without a veto, if a minority of 41 Senators sustained a filibuster. But, since 34 Democrats voiced support for the deal, even if all Republicans had voted no -- and even if Democratic skeptics like Senator Charles Schumer of New York also voted no -- President Obama would have had enough votes to prevail. • And, that is exactly what happened. The Senate passed a bill to treat Obama's Iran nuclear deal as a normal bill and not as a treaty on a 98-1 Senate vote. GOP Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was the only Senator to oppose the bill. He said in a statement that he objected that the deal was not to be presented to the Congress as a treaty : "A nuclear-arms agreement with any adversary -- especially the terror-sponsoring, islamist Iranian regime -- should be submitted as a treaty and obtain a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate as required by the Constitution," he said. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell filed a motion to end debate after Senators Marco Rubio and Cotton tried to force a vote on an amendment requiring Iran to recognize Israel's right to exist as part of a final deal. McConnell said that he would have preferred that amendments be added to the bill, but that it might have invited a presidential veto : “If we didn’t face the threats of filibusters, or the blocking of amendments, or the specter of presidential vetoes, this bill would be a heck of a lot stronger. I assure you. But the truth is, we do. That’s the frustrating reality.” Rubio slammed the decision not to allow his amendment requiring Iran to support Israel as part of a deal to come up for a vote, saying that some Senators were "terrified" of voting against it : "Apparently there are Senators terrified of voting against that amendment, so they'd rather not have a vote at all. So I am deeply disappointed by the direction this has taken." But, Rubio, like every other GOP Senator except Cotton would support the final bill, sayng that it was better than nothing. Rubio said : "At a minimum at least it creates a process whereby the American people through their representatives can debate an issue of extraordinary importance. So I hope this bill passes here today so at least we'll have a chance to weigh in." • The bill that moved through the Senate 98-1 was put together and sponsored and negotiated by Senator Corker and Democrat Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on Corker's Senate Foreigh Relations Committee. It was a bill with no teeth and no chance of stopping the Obama-Iran nuclear deal. The Senate bill required a completed deal to be submitted to Congress, which could then vote to approve or disapprove the nuclear deal within 30 days -- Corker had the temerity to suggest that passage of the bill allowed Congress to take "power back" from President Obama, that the bill ensured that Congress would play "an appropriate role" in the nuclear talks. BUT, in reality, a Senate vote to disapprove a nuclear deal with Iran would not have killed it. President Obama would have vetoed such a measure, and the House and Senate would have needed two-thirds majorities to override his veto -- an impossibility with 34 Democrats standing with Obama. • • • AMERICA KNEW IT HAD BEEN "HAD." Breitbart's John Hayward published an article on September 3, 2015, that laid out the sham : "The Beltway press tried to make the passage of President Obama’s nuclear sellout to Iran look like a moment of high political drama, but you could tell their hearts weren’t really in it. Everyone knew this was a done deal from the very beginning, thanks to the efforts of the true “deciding vote,” Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. Democrat Barbara Mikulski might have been the 34th vote from her party that made it impossible for the Senate majority to stop the deal, but Corker was the key figure in turning Congressional rules upside-down and rendering the majority powerless. Everything since Corker’s deal has been mere theater, with Corker himself an occasional star performer." Hayward noted : "Even more hammy were Corker’s hilariously inaccurate predictions that his rules could actually halt the Iran sellout. 'Look, I don’t ever want to overcommit and under-deliver,' he said in April. 'We are moving in a very positive direction, and we’ve worked through some issues that I think have given me a lot of hope...I feel like we're going to present a bill tomorrow that keeps 100 percent of the integrity of the process relevant to the nuclear agreement in place.' He was confident that process would result in President Obama’s deal dying on Capitol Hill -- a confidence shared by no one capable of counting how many Democrats had survived the 2014 midterm bloodbath." Hayward cited another reason Corker’s deal was so foolish : "Even if the Iran sellout could not be stopped -- because Obama went outside the American political system to work with China and Russia at the United Nations, cutting American voters and their representatives out of the loop entirely -- it was still important to make this painful for the Democrats. Instead, Corker made it as painless as possible with his 'bipartisan' arrangement, leaving the Democrats plenty of room to indulge members like Schumer, who had to pretend they were concerned about national security and the fate of Israel." • Progressive Politico’s post-mortem on the Iran saga portrayed Corker as "President Obama’s man on the Republican side of the aisle, a slightly tetchy player on a team quarterbacked by Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland, who became the top Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrat after the interestingly-timed corruption probe of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, an opponent of the Iran deal." Politico wrote : “The low-key Cardin engaged in a furious round of negotiations with gregarious Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, prompting something that was once viewed as almost unthinkable : a bipartisan deal for Congress to review an Iran nuclear deal -- with the blessing of President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Cardin served as 'liaison' between Obama and Corker, ostensibly a 'blunt-spoken Tennessee Republican,' who was 'burning up the phones over the two-week congressional recess, keeping at bay presidential hopefuls like Florida Senator Marco Rubio as he sought to find a middle ground on the highly charged issue.” • Breitbart hit the GOP Congress with an uppercut in 2015 : "And that is just what Republican voters wanted when they crawled over broken glass to give Republicans a seemingly impossible Senate majority in 2014, right? Democrats still effectively running the Senate even though they are in the minority, and a beaming Nancy Pelosi blessing polite arrangements to give Barack Obama everything he wants, at minimal political cost? This is all a mirror image of the way President Obama’s hapless team got taken to the cleaners by tough-talking Iranian negotiators, who knew from Day One that Obama would give them nearly anything to get a deal, and played their cards accordingly. Those negotiations also produced a great deal of tough-guy theater from Kerry and Obama, but the Iranians saw no reason to play along." • Breitbart called out the GOP, in a preview of the Trump campaign against the Swamp : "Defenders of the Corker arrangement say the fix was really in when Obama made it clear he would cut the American people out of the deal and impose it through international arrangements, but a fighting party would call a threat like that and force the President to carry it out -- making him bleed politically with every step, shouting from the mountaintop to warn those marginalized Americans of how their representation had been cast aside like garbage, to be replaced by foreign councils. A fighting party would have made this process as difficult as possible for their opponents, rather than working out bipartisan compromises to grease the wheels, asking for little but a few spotlight moments to voice their objections along the way. The GOP leadership supposedly believes this Iran deal is a dangerous mistake that puts the future of the world at risk, does it not? Then why did they make this deal as easy to pass as an automatic debt-ceiling increase, instead of fighting like wildcats and making the Democrats pay for every inch of ground they shoved this dead weight across? Senate Republicans made themselves irrelevant to a process they decided they could not actually stop....The inevitable round of 'we tried to stop Obama’s dangerous nuclear deal!' GOP fundraising letters will not go over well, if Republican voters have truly gotten sick of this crap, and insist on a party that fights like the Democrats do." • • • DEAR READERS, feel no pity for Bob Corker. He richly deserves every bashing word President Trump can muster to lay out Corker's pious feigning of bringing Obama and his Iram nuclear deal to bay -- when what Corker really did was facilitate it. Trump knew that in 2105. He knows it now. The President does not forget. His anger can simmer for years until the right moment appears for him to lay open, for all to see, the deceit or lies or stupidity in both Democrat and Republican Swamp Creatures. • The Tennessee Senator's decision not to run now gives him the freedom to be more vocal in his criticisms of President Trump and the Trump administration -- he doesn't have to worry about alienating the huge base of Tennessee Republican voters loyal to Trump. • But, despite Corker’s impending departure from Congress, his committee assignments still present a possible hurdle to Trump, who is reportedly planning to de-certify the Iran nuclear deal. Such a move would give Congress 60 days to reimpose sanctions on Teheran. Corker also sits on the Senate Budget Committee, which last week moved a budget resolution that will help the GOP’s effort to pass tax reform legislation without Democrats -- yet Corker has emerged as one of the top skeptics of the Republican tax reform framework Trump rolled out last month, saying : “I want it to be pro-growth, and I want it to be permanent.” Corker promised not to cast a vote for “one penny’s worth of deficits" in a new tax plan. • The Swamp and its lapdog mainstream media like to say that Trump is lost at sea in Washington and cannot get anything done because he is such a neophyte -- Mitch McConnell agreed and spoke the words this summer. He was roundly chastized by Trump for it, and the end of the McConnell action may still be in the wings awaiting Trump's uncanny timing to put it back on the front burner. Mitch can wait. It is now Corker's turn on the hot seat. Monday on CNN’s “New Day,” CNN political commentator Jason Miller, the former communications director for Trump’s presidential team, weighed in on the public back-and-forth that has taken place between President Trump and Senator Corker over the past few days. Miller told CNN : "I think it is important to point out Senator Corker has been attacking the President over the last couple of months here. And obviously the President took issue with that. Look, Senator Corker definitely didn’t mind kissing up to President Trump when he wanted to be vice president, when he wanted to be secretary of state. But now since he didn’t get either of these positions, and now he’s retiring, he seems to just be kind of letting it all hang out there. And I think it’s really showing the true colors of the Swamp nature of Washington DC that he is criticizing such basic tenets of the Republican platform as tax cuts.” Miller suggested that given Corker’s newfound willingness to criticize the Trump and his reluctance to support his agenda, Corker should step aside and allow Tennessee's Republican Governor Bill Haslam appoint Representative Marsha Blackburn, who announced last week that she would seek the Senate seat Corker is vacating. Miller said : “And look, if Senator Corker is retiring and he doesn’t want to be in the US Senate, and he doesn’t want to support President Trump, and he doesn’t want to support such basic conservative principals, he should just resign. Let the governor of Tennessee go and appoint a conservative like Marsha Blackburn, the congresswoman who is running to replace Senator Corker and get someone in there who is actually going to support the President.” • That, dear readers, is the real story in the Trump-Corker fight. Trump has singlehandedly set out to add one more solid conservative Republican to the Senate. Marsha Blackburn was a spokesperson for President Trump during the campaign. She is an expert in healthcare. There would be no Swamp around her votes or #NeverTrump neo-conservatism in her support for Trump and his agenda. • Trump, a neophyte??? I don't think so. Do you???