WASHINGTON — A proposal by a senior House Republican to dismantle portions of the 2010 Wall Street reforms known as the Dodd-Frank Act has rekindled a partisan debate over the state of banking regulation eight years after the financial crisis.

Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, outlined the main parts of his plan on Tuesday during a speech in New York. He plans to introduce the legislation this month. The debate shows how divided Washington remains over how to supervise the financial industry, from the big banks to the small community institutions.

Mr. Hensarling’s plan, called the Financial Choice Act, builds on longstanding Republican hostility to the financial reform law, rolling back significant provisions and limiting the role of regulators in overseeing the country’s biggest banks. But it also advocates stronger penalties for financial fraud and puts a focus on capital buffers for large banks.

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Back in Washington, Democrats had sharp words for the plan. “We’ve only seen a summary of the bill so far, but even from that, it’s clear that Congressman Hensarling and his fellow Republicans think that the poor Wall Street banks have suffered too much under the new rules, and it’s time for them to return to the good old days before the 2008 crisis, when these banks could run wild,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said during a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

Senator Warren called the bill “Congressman Hensarling’s wet kiss for the Wall Street banks.”
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WASHINGTON — President Obama, after months of sitting on the sidelines of the rancorous contest to succeed him, is now ready to aggressively campaign for Hillary Clinton, starting with a formal endorsement of her candidacy as early as this week.

The White House is in active conversations with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign about how and where the president would be useful to her, according to senior aides to Mr. Obama.

Advisers say the president, who sees a Democratic successor as critical to his legacy, is impatient to begin campaigning. They say he is taking nothing for granted.

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Mr. Obama is particularly enthusiastic, aides said, about taking on Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. Mr. Trump has personally offended the president with his conduct on the campaign trail — Mr. Trump referred on Friday to a black man in one of his crowds as “my African-American” — and as the most visible champion of the “birther” conspiracy theories that falsely hold that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii.
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It’s an emblematically annoying ending to the Democratic campaign, one that reflects both the acrimony between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the fact that Clinton, in the end, is winning her party’s nomination by every available measure.

At 8:20 p.m. EDT on Monday night, The Associated Press declared Clinton to be the presumptive Democratic nominee based on her having accumulated 1,812 elected (pledged) delegates and 571 superdelegates, for 2,383 total delegates, exactly the number needed to win the nomination. In the overwhelming likelihood that Clinton’s nomination is confirmed at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia next month, she will officially become the first woman nominated for president by a major American political party.

In a statement released after the AP’s call, the Sanders campaign argued that the media is wrong to declare Clinton the presumptive nominee by including superdelegates, correctly pointing out that superdelegates can change their vote up until the convention, as several dozen superdelegates did in flipping from Clinton to Barack Obama in 2008. FiveThirtyEight’s pledged delegate count, which does not include superdelegates, has Clinton with 1,8111 pledged delegates to 1,526 for Sanders. The Sanders campaign said its “job from now until the convention is to convince superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump.”

But Sanders’s statement — and the AP’s call — distract from the larger point. Clinton will be the Democratic nominee because substantially more Democrats have voted for her. In addition to her elected delegate majority, she’s received approximately 13.5 million votes so far in primaries and caucuses, compared with 10.5 million for Sanders.
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The Washington Post’s editorial board criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) “patently ridiculous” claim that Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is ideologically extreme.

Since Garland’s nomination in March, groups like the Judicial Crisis Network, the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Rifle Association have made numerous false and misleading claims about Garland’s record to portray him as ideologically extreme. In fact, conservatives have praised Garland for years and multiple prominent conservative lawyers have announced their support for Garland’s nomination.

In a June 5 editorial, the editorial board slammed McConnell’s “patently ridiculous” claim after he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “from a conservative point of view, I don’t think you could have a worse nominee than Merrick Garland.” The board wrote that it is “absurd” to call Garland a “worst-case scenario for Republicans,” noting, “Fellow judges from across the ideological spectrum [have] effusively praise[d] Mr. Garland” and that Garland’s record as a judge has “been careful and evenhanded.” From the June 5 piece:

[blockquote style="border: 1px solid #000000;padding:10px;"]Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) continues to insist that the GOP blockade of Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, is “about a principle, not a person.” The crucial principle that apparently justifies hobbling the Supreme Court is the newly invented notion that the president should be able to fill court vacancies during only three-quarters of his elected term.

Mr. McConnell’s discovery of this principle has been as obvious a case of situational ethics as has ever been seen in Washington. Indeed, from the beginning, it was clear Republicans had more than proper procedure on their minds. “The next justice could fundamentally alter the direction of the Supreme Court and have a profound impact on our country,” Mr. McConnell warned in March.

Now Mr. McConnell has gone a step further, making his opposition not simply cynical but patently ridiculous. In interviews last week, Mr. McConnell argued that Mr. Garland is ideologically extreme. “I don’t think you could have a worse — from a conservative point of view, I don’t think you could have a worse nominee than Merrick Garland,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I would say, he’s a well-qualified, very liberal judge,” he told NPR.

It is absurd to claim that Mr. Garland, a nominee about whom many liberal groups are not excited, a judge whom Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) once called a “consensus nominee,” is the worst-case scenario for Republicans. Fellow judges from across the ideological spectrum effusively praise Mr. Garland. His work on the country’s second-most prominent court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been careful and evenhanded. Mr. McConnell’s claims do not pass the laugh test — unless by “worst,” he means “most-qualified” and therefore most difficult plausibly to reject.

Mr. McConnell’s admission that Mr. Garland is “well-qualified” should end the discussion. The president gets to nominate; the Senate gets to object in extraordinary circumstances, but has an obligation to confirm if nominees are, as in this case, obviously qualified and within the mainstream of judicial thinking. No other arrangement can keep the system working. But the majority leader obviously has other considerations in mind.
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California—the home of the next big Democratic primary--may be the Golden State, but many Democratic insiders seem worried their chances against Donald Trump are already tarnished. While the national horse race has indeed temporarily narrowed, it seems unlikely that Bernie Sanders is the cause, or that Democratic primary is causing Hillary Clinton lasting damage.

Polls show Democrats are more optimistic than one might expect during a supposed contentious primary. The latest CBS/New York Times poll shows a full 80 percent of Democrats nationally feel "hopeful" about the future of their party, compared to 55 percent of Republicans who say the same about their own party. And while Democrats are divided on whether the party is divided (48 percent "divided" versus 50 percent "united&quot , Republicans are nearly unanimous on their intra-party rancor (84 percent "divided&quot . In this case agreement is no prize.



Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton


Comparing the same poll's results to an earlier 2008 CBS/NYT poll suggests there's actually even less Democratic division today than in our last competitive primary. While slightly more than a quarter (28 percent) of Sanders voters say they won't support Clinton if she's the nominee, slightly more (35 percent) of 2008 Clinton voters said at the time they would not support Obama. That the party coalesced in 2008 doesn't automatically mean it will again in 2016, but it certainly serves as a good reminder of how temporarily fractious primaries can be.

In fact other data further suggests the current divisions are not just temporary, they're overblown. In the same recent poll, over eight in ten Democrats say Clinton will be able to unite the party, compared to just two-thirds saying the same about Sanders. And while much is made of the supposed lack of Democratic enthusiasm behind her, Clinton trails Sanders in "enthusiastic support" by single digits – hardly the stuff of party panic.

So it's Trump—the candidate who cruised through his primary with record turnout—who is damaged today. According to Gallup, Trump's favorable ratings are lower among Republicans than the ratings of past nominees, and half of his own party's base wishes for a different nominee. The CBS/NYT poll shows fewer than two-thirds of Republicans predict unity behind their candidate. And, amazingly, a quarter of Republicans think a Trump presidency will "make the U.S. image in the world worse" (almost no Democrats offer this view about Clinton.)
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Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign - and it's becoming a serious problem.

Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that's prisoner to Trump's momentary whims.

"Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants," a source close to the campaign said.

In reporting on Trump's operation, NBC News talked to three Trump aides and two sources working closely alongside the campaign, all of whom requested anonymity in order speak freely.

Veteran operatives are shocked by the campaign's failure to fill key roles. There is no communications team to deal with the hundreds of media outlets covering the race, no rapid response director to quickly rebut attacks and launch new ones, and a limited cast of surrogates who lack a cohesive message.
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