Alternate Brexit Plans Rejected; Theresa May Offers to Step Down

In a highly-charged speech last night, Theresa May (pictured left) told Tory MPs she would quit 'earlier than intended' if Parliament backed her withdrawal agreement. There were initial signs that her gamble might pay off when a string of Eurosceptic MPs, led by Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith, said they would now swing behind her. But, in a bombshell announcement shortly before 9pm, the DUP said it would not support the agreement because it posed 'an unacceptable risk to the integrity of the UK'. The party's deputy leader Nigel Dodds indicated it would vote against the plan, saying: 'We don't abstain when it comes to the Union.' The DUP's support is seen as critical to unlocking the backing of dozens of Eurosceptic MPs. MPs last night rejected every Brexit option in a series of 'indicative votes', with a customs union, second referendum, Norway-style option and No Deal all failing to get a majority (pictured inset). Commons Speaker John Bercow (pictured right) warned he could block a third vote on Mrs May's plan, prompting senior Tories to consider drastic measures to ensure it can get through, including asking the Queen to cut short the session of parliament. 

NY TIMES

Mrs. May’s plan, which Parliament has already overwhelmingly rejected twice still faces long odds.

A number of hard-line Brexit supporters were holding out, and more important, so was the Conservatives’ ally, the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

If lawmakers seem unified around the idea of Mrs. May’s departure, nothing else is certain.

Mrs. May’s plan would maintain customs and trade arrangements with the European Union until at least the end of 2020, and ultimately envisions cutting most of those ties.

But it does not detail what would replace them, leaving open the vital question of Britain’s relationship to the European Union.

If Mrs. May’s plan is approved, the battle over the details of Brexit will be fought first in a leadership struggle in the Conservative Party and then by all the other parties and factions that have scrapped with one another throughout the last two years.

Europe has grown frustrated with the deadlock. Under the terms of the postponement, if Parliament does not accept Mrs. May’s deal, the new deadline will be April 12.

The European Union is “expecting the United Kingdom to indicate a way forward,” Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, said at the meeting in Strasbourg. But European leaders reiterated that they were still open to a long Brexit delay — perhaps two years — if, as Mr. Tusk said, “the U.K. wishes to rethink its Brexit strategy.” That delay would have to be agreed to by the April 12 deadline.

Wednesday’s votes were never expected to yield a firm result. There is a better chance of that happening on Monday, when Parliament is expected to vote again on the most popular options from Wednesday’s voting.

If that happens, lawmakers will then seek to forge a proposal that a majority can at least live with, and answer critics who complain that while Parliament knows what it doesn’t like, it has been incapable of saying what it does.

The Mueller Bait and Switch

Mar 27, 2019 

Thanks to US Attorney General William Barr's "summary" of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, President Donald Trump and most of the Republican Party can implant the idea in the mind of much of the public that Trump did nothing wrong. The truth will have a hard time catching up.

ELIZABETH DREW, PROJECT SYNDICATE

World Happiness Report: Americans Are the Unhappiest We’ve Been in Years

REAL CLEAR/LIFE

Push For Stronger NY Rent Laws Goes Up Against Powerful Landlord Lobby

GOTHAMIST

Mueller did not find Trump campaign conspired with Russia, attorney general says

• William Barr sends four-page letter to Congress
• Special counsel does not clear Trump of obstruction of justice

After the report, more investigations, more division and an election

The special counsel’s report, as summarized by Attorney General William P. Barr, contains enough fuel for both sides to cling to their version of the truth.

Analysis: 4 takeaways from the Mueller report summary.

Six takeaways from Barr’s letter about Mueller’s probe

• Democrats warn Trump against post-Mueller pardons.

Democratic leaders insist on release of full Mueller report

NY TIMES

‘No collusion!’ goes from defiant mantra to rallying cry for Trump’s reelection

The president and his supporters moved quickly to capitalize on the findings of the Russia investigation, an unmistakable political victory.

As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York

NY TIMES

Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General.

We will fight’: Democrats prepare to battle for Mueller’s complete findings

Lawmakers are looking to the special counsel’s findings to inform their investigations — and insist they will be satisfied with nothing short of a complete account of the results and the evidence that informed them.

Trump silent so far; White House says the next steps are up to attorney general

The inquiry has consumed Washington for nearly two years and led to guilty pleas from former advisers to the president.

NY TIMES

Where Does Brexit Go From Here?

Supporters and opponents of Brexit outside the Parliament in London. The process has left emotions running very high on both sides.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

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NY TIMES



[A small but influential party aligned with Prime Minister Theresa May’s government suggested on Friday that it still cannot support her plan for Britain to leave the European Union, a development that could doom her hopes of persuading Parliament to pass the deal next week on the third try.

The Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland holds just 10 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, but the central sticking point in the talks on a British withdrawal has been how to handle the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and the party’s position carries disproportionate weight with others in Parliament.

Parliament has twice rejected the agreement that Mrs. May negotiated with the European Union for Britain’s departure, known as Brexit, and both times the D.U.P. has voted against it, largely because of concerns about the border issue.

The party and many others who support a withdrawal contend that the deal could leave Britain trapped, by making it subject to some European Union economic rules indefinitely. And by treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the nation, they say, the deal risks splitting the United Kingdom apart.

“Nothing has changed as far as the Withdrawal Agreement is concerned,” Nigel Dodds, the leader of the party’s caucus in Parliament, said in a statement posted online. “We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom.”

View image on Twitter

Nigel Dodds@NigelDoddsDUP

We have been very clear that we want a deal which delivers on the referendum result and which works for all parts of the U.K. and for the EU.

But it must be a deal that protects the Union. That remains our abiding principle. 2/2

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Mrs. May has planned to try for a third vote in Parliament, but she would need to win the votes of about 70 members. That was considered a tall order even before Mr. Dodds’s message.

Palestinian Lives Don’t Matter*

*Unless Israel is to blame.

BRET STEPHENS, NY TIMES

EU will only back short Brexit delay if May’s deal passes.

The EU will give Britain a 'short' Brexit delay but only if MPs back Theresa May's deal next week, European Council President Donald Tusk said today - setting up a dramatic political showdown days before the UK is due to leave. The dramatic intervention came hours after the Prime Minister revealed she had asked to delay Brexit until June 30, and indicated that she could quit if it is postponed beyond then. Tomorrow's summit now looks certain to set the stage for an historic and pivotal week in British politics as the Brexit endgame goes right down to the wire. If no delay or deal is agreed with the EU before Friday, the law says Britain will leave without a deal - despite years of dire warnings about its impact on Britain. If May's deal fails, the EU has not ruled out offering a longer delay but this would likely come with preconditions such as a second referendum. Speaking in Brussels today Mr Tusk said: 'In the light of the consultations that I have conducted over the past days, I believe that a short extension would be possible. 'But it would be conditional on a positive vote on the Withdrawal Agreement in the House of Commons. 'The question remains open as to the duration of such an extension.' Eurosceptic Cabinet ministers were pictured leaving Downing Street in a seemingly jovial mood before Tusk's announcement amid claims some had threatened to resign last night if Mrs May had pushed for a delay of nine-months.

Mike Trout Signs 430M Contract with LA Angels. 

Here's What Other Leaders Receive in Their Sports.

NY TIMES

For Trout, M.L.B. Flaunts Its Wealth. Average Players Reap Austerity.

NY TIMES

MILKMAN BY ANNA BURNS WINS NAT'L BK CRIT PRIZE FOR BEST FICTION

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ALL BOOK MARKS REVIEW EXCERPTS FOR MILKMAN:


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The New Booker Prize Winner Who May Never Write Again

NY TIMES

New Zealand Shooting Attack on Christchurch Mosques Leaves 49 Dead.

'Something happened during his travels': The boy who turned into a Muslim-hating mass killer and murdered 49 in New Zealand after his dad died of cancer and he left Australia to travel the world including North Korea and Pakistan 

NY TIMES

Christchurch Mosque Shootings Were Partly Streamed on Facebook

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The College Bribery Scandal and the Uberization of Graft

Wealth doesn’t just buy cool stuff. It buys status and permanence.

NY TIMES

MPs vote by majority of 211 to extend article 50 and delay Brexit

May WINS showdown and will now try to force her Brexit deal through a THIRD time before asking EU to extend Article 50 - for 12 weeks if her plan passes or up to two years if it's blocked. 

GUARDIAN

May’s final warning to Tory rebels: back me or lose Brexit.

 PM signals she will put her deal to Parliament a third time  (Hardline Brexiteers 'with a gun to the head' say they may back her) 

GUARDIAN

New Brexit Defeat Plunges U.K.’s Theresa May Into Crisis.

In theory, if there is no agreement by March 29, Britain will depart the European Union without any formal deal. But Britain is ill-prepared for a disorderly and potentially chaotic exit, and lawmakers are so alarmed at that prospect that they voted in January against such an outcome in a nonbinding motion. Parliament will get that chance again in a binding vote on Wednesday.

Britain hurtled into unknown political territory on Tuesday when Parliament, for the second time, rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to quit the European Union, leaving her authority in tatters and the country seemingly rudderless just 17 days before its scheduled departure from the bloc.

Mrs. May had hoped that last-minute concessions from the European Union would swing the vote in her favor, but many lawmakers dismissed those changes as ineffectual or cosmetic and voted against the deal, 391 to 242.

After the vote, the prime minister defended her agreement as the “best outcome” for the United Kingdom and showed her frustration in addressing the lawmakers, who are scheduled to vote later this week on whether to seek an extension to leave the bloc.

“Let me be clear that voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face,” Mrs. May said. “The E.U. will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension, and the House will have to answer that question.”

Tuesday’s vote, while expected, deepened an already profound crisis over the biggest peacetime decision to confront a British government in decades.

Mrs. May, who was forced to argue for her plan in a croaking voice because of a head cold, has essentially ceded control of events to Parliament, at least for now, with important votes coming on whether to bar a no-deal Brexit and whether to request the extension, something many analysts say is now inevitable.

The defeat threatens Mrs. May’s hold on her office. Under party rules she cannot be challenged for the leadership by Tory lawmakers until December. But there is always the risk of a cabinet coup if she mishandles the next steps.

Mrs. May now faces a number of possible options, none of them particularly palatable. She might still try one last time to force her deal through, perhaps at the very end of the month, but until then she will face pressure to change course.

Some lawmakers want to take nonbinding votes on various alternatives to Mrs. May’s Brexit plans, like those that would keep closer economic ties to the bloc, similar to those enjoyed by Norway.

Jeremy Corbyn, head of the Labour Party, accused the Government of trying to 'fool' its own backbenchers and the British people over its Brexit deal.

There is discussion about a second referendum to confirm public support for a Brexit deal as against remaining in the European Union. The opposition Labour Party now says it would potentially support some form of plebiscite. But Mrs. May has been implacably opposed to a second vote, saying it would not solve the problem.

More realistically, there is speculation about the possibility of a general election to change the composition of a logjammedParliament. Opinion polls show the Conservatives with a comfortable lead over Labour.

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain and the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, in Strasbourg, France, on Monday.CreditVincent Kessler/Reuters

While Parliament is expected to support an extension in the Brexit negotiations, the question will be for how long and to what purpose. All European Union leaders would have to agree to extra time for Brexit and, when they meet on March 21, they will want to know the reasoning behind any request.

On Monday Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, argued that, in any event, Brexit should occur before May 23, the day of elections to the European Parliament.

For legal reasons, any extension beyond this date might require Britain to take part in that contest, he suggested. That is something most British politicians do not want to contemplate.

Paul Manafort’s Prison Sentence Is Nearly Doubled to 7½ Years

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, will serve seven and a half years in prison after a federal judge nearly doubled his sentence, denouncing him as having “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system.” It’s still far less than he could’ve served.



NY TIMES

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

by Jill Abramson

Simon and Schuster, 534 pp., $30.00

Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics

by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts

Oxford University Press, 462 pp., $27.95 (paper)

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

The Left-Liberal Elites Hate Beto O’Rourke—Which Might Be a Sign He Can Win

Rank-and-file Democrats aren’t looking for a single-issue litmus test, no matter what the party’s loudest voices are saying.

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

Weak Jobs Report Clouds the Economic Picture

Employers increased payrolls by only 20,000 in February, a stark contrast to the two preceding months.

NY TIMES

The economy’s remarkably steady job-creation machine sputtered in February and produced a mere 20,000 jobs. It was the smallest gain in well over a year and came on top of other signs that the economy was off to a sluggish start in 2019.

For months, the labor market could be counted on for an upbeat counterpoint to negative developments, including a fragile global economy weighed down by trade tensions. In the United States, growth for the first quarter is expected to dance around the 1 percent bar, as the shot of adrenaline delivered by last year’s tax cuts fades.

Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago, said Friday’s news from the Labor Department was worrisome. “This is a disappointing report,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat it.”

But the longer-term trend is what matters, and there were competing interpretations of whether the report was a troubling omen or a fluke.

Beyond the month’s payroll figure, the report offered some unambiguously good news, including 3.4 percent year-over-year wage growth, the strongest in a decade. Revisions to previous months’ estimates added 12,000 jobs, bringing the average gains for December, January and February to 186,000. The official jobless rate fell to 3.8 percent, from 4 percent in January.

A broader measure of employment that includes part-timers who would prefer full-time work and those too discouraged to search fell to 7.3 percent from 8.1 percent. “That’s a year’s worth of improvement in one month,” said G. Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at the private bank Brown Brothers Harriman.

Aftereffects of the government shutdown and wretched weather may have contributed to anomalies in the report. “This is the strangest jobs report I’ve seen in a long time,” Mr. Clemons said. “It’s bizarre. I can’t help but think there is noise in there.”

During the decade-long expansion, the economy has churned out 20 million jobs. The anemic job creation and rising wages could indicate that the pool of available workers was drying up, and employers were having trouble filling openings.

Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon and Facebook.

NY TIMES

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is bidding to be the policy pacesetter in the Democratic presidential primary, championed an expansive idea on Friday evening in front of a crowd of thousands in Queens: a regulatory plan aimed at breaking up some of America’s largest tech companies, including Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.

At a rally in Long Island City, the neighborhood that was to be home to a major new Amazon campus, Ms. Warren laid out her proposal calling for regulators who would undo some tech mergers, as well as legislation that would prohibit platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace.

“We have these giants corporations — do I have to tell that to people in Long Island City? — that think they can roll over everyone,” Ms. Warren told the crowd, drawing applause. She compared Amazon to the dystopian novel “The Hunger Games,” in which those with power force their wishes on the less fortunate.

“I’m sick of freeloading billionaires,” she said.

Ms. Warren’s policy announcement sent reverberations from New York to Silicon Valley, as she further cemented herself as one of the Democratic candidates most willing to call for large-scale changes to the country’s structure in the name of equality.

Among the crowded field of Democrats seeking the presidential nomination, Ms. Warren has done the most to add detail to those early proposals, including a plan for universal child care, a tax on the country’s wealthiest families, and, as of Friday, breaking up big technological giants.

Ms. Warren’s regulatory plan would also force the rollback of some acquisitions by tech giants, the campaign said, including Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, Amazon’s addition of Whole Foods, and Google’s purchase of Waze. Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. Dual entities, such as Amazon Marketplace and AmazonBasics, would be split apart.

Read MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST : Elizabeth Warren Is Running for President. The Other 2020 Democrats Are Just Jockeying for Position.