InsideSources

The Department of Justice plans to open an antitrust investigation into Apple and Google while the Federal Trade Commission plans to investigate Amazon, according to multiple news reports. The House Judiciary committee also announced it will open a bipartisan investigation into whether Big Tech suppresses competition.

“The open internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “But there is growing evidence that a handful of gatekeepers have come to capture control over key arteries of online commerce, content, and communications.”

The FTC investigated Google for antitrust violations in 2013 and, despite releasing a 160-page report finding that Google uses anti-competitive tactics that harm consumers and the internet ecosystem, did not take action against the company.

2020 presidential contender Elizabeth Warren and President Donald Trump both spoke out against Apple, Google and other Big Tech companies over the past year, with Warren calling for breaking up Big Tech and Trump threatening antitrust investigations.

But Big Tech lobbying groups and some economists insist that companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook don’t violate antitrust law based on the current understanding of consumer welfare.

(Under the current understanding of consumer welfare, economists assume that if monetary prices for goods and services are falling, then that can only be a good thing — even if falling prices are accompanied by market consolidation and fewer choices for consumers. Some economists also say consumers pay for Big Tech services with their personal data, which has led to privacy violations and the current debate over writing a federal privacy law.)

“The Justice Department’s investigation of Google will come to the same conclusion as the FTC’s did in 2013 — that there is no antitrust case,” said Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel for Big Tech lobbying group NetChoice, of which Google and Facebook are members. “It’s illogical that the DOJ is investigating competitors in the same market for monopoly behavior. Amazon, Apple and Google all compete with each other in a vibrant and competitive marketplace,” he said in a statement to InsideSources.

On Apple’s website, the company recently set up a page listing ways its App Store encourages competition among app developers and benefits consumers.

“We believe competition makes everything better and results in the best apps for our customers,” Apple said, almost as if speaking directly to federal lawmakers and regulators. “We also care about quality over quantity, and trust over transactions. That’s why, even though other stores have more users and more app downloads, the App Store earns more money for developers. Our users trust Apple — and that trust is critical to how we operate a fair, competitive store for developer app distribution.”

Aram Sinnreich, chair of communication studies at American University, said an antitrust investigation could jolt Big Tech into self-regulating and halting anticompetitive practices.

“Antitrust scrutiny on its own if nothing else is a good red flag to encourage companies to act more competitively and divest themselves of businesses that might invite regulatory action,” Sinnreich told InsideSources. “I think antitrust by the FTC is a good idea, that doesn’t necessarily mean the government will decide to break the company up.”

Despite Apple’s protests to the contrary, Sinnreich believes Apple does behave anticompetitively in its App Store because its business model encourages it — Apple works hard to dissuade any Apple customer from switching brands.

“I can’t get a new brand phone unless I find a place to store all the 15,000 photos I’ve taken over the years [with an iPhone],” Sinnreich said. “Their role in streaming distribution, combine that with their role in facial recognition and biometrics, it begins to get really problematic.”

Apple’s not alone in the scrutiny: tech experts and economists say the same about Amazon and Google.

“[Big Tech companies] do behave anticompetitively and are not concerned with maintaining a robust landscape of software providers,” Sinnreich said. “They use that landscape for free market research and then they adopt whatever is popular and undercut the market for the third parties that developed the technology in the first place.”

But not everyone agrees Big Tech should be broken up, even those who criticize Big Tech’s role in the marketplace. At a tech event hosted by the Hoover Institution in May, experts on both the right and the left discussed how we may not have a proper regulatory framework to deal with Big Tech because the internet evolved so rapidly.

While Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated report found no evidence of conspiracy, Mueller describes in great detail how Russians easily manipulated social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr and Twitter to serve their own political ends.

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), funded by Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin (a Russian oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in December 2016), operated hundreds of fake Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr and Twitter accounts to spread pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton messages leading up to the 2016 election, beginning as early as 2014, according to the Mueller report.

The scheme was simple but effective. According to the report, the IRA sent operatives to the U.S. in mid-2014 to “gather intelligence” and “obtain information and photographs” to fuel the barrage of fake posts and tweets leading up to the presidential election. The IRA targeted other presidential candidates, but focused on disparaging Clinton and supporting Trump by the summer of 2016.

“Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and not revealing their Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump campaign and other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies,” Mueller states in the report.

According to the report, the IRA reached “tens of millions of U.S. persons” through various social media accounts across different social media platforms.

“In November 2017, a Facebook representative (Facebook’s General Counsel Colin Stretch) testified that Facebook had identified 470 IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017,” Mueller writes. “Facebook estimates the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts. In January 2018, Twitter announced it had identified 3,814 IRA-controlled Twitter accounts and notified approximately 1.4 million people Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA-controlled account.”

All of the IRA-controlled social media accounts claimed to be operated by U.S. citizens, even the political groups claiming to be grassroots activists.

“For example,” Mueller wrote, “one IRA-controlled Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, purported to be connected to the Tennessee Republican Party. More commonly, the IRA created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots groups and used these accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political activists. … The IRA purchased dozens of advertisements supporting the Trump Campaign, predominantly through the Facebook groups ‘Being Patriotic,’ ‘Stop All Invaders,’ and ‘Secured Borders.'”

The IRA-controlled social media accounts were so convincing that Trump supporters and members of Trump’s campaign — like his son, Donald Trump, Jr. — frequently retweeted and shared the pro-Trump propaganda across social media, presumably unaware they were participating in a Russian propaganda campaign.

But manipulating social media companies is only half the story.

The report also details how easily Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The way Mueller describes it, it was practically child’s play.

Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the DNC via a VPN connection from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and also hacked computers and email accounts belonging to Clinton’s campaign, stealing hundreds of thousands of documents beginning in March 2016. No one even knew about it until the documents were released via WikiLeaks in the fall of 2016.

The GRU also stole voter information from the Illinois State Board of Elections and later conducted a spearphishing email attack against a voting technology company, VR Systems, which (Mueller said) the FBI believes granted the GRU access to “at least one Florida county government.”

During the 2018 midterms, Republicans mocked Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) for worrying about Russian influence in Florida elections.

The GRU did all this without local or state government knowledge. But the sheer laziness with regard to cybersecurity didn’t surprise Stuart Madnick, a professor of information technology and engineering systems at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

“It’s not a surprise that anyone can be hacked with some effort,” he told InsideSources. “You can go down a list of companies that should have the expertise and resources to protect themselves. We pay a lot of attention to the things that happen at Yahoo or Facebook or Target, these are multi-billion dollar corporations. We forget there are hundreds of thousands of small organizations in the country, whether your local pizza company or local DNC [with little to no cybersecurity]. There are hundreds of thousands of organizations no different from the DNC, and according to a recent report, they’re now the prime target for cyberattacks.”

Ironically, the DNC misreported a cyber attack last summer ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, which the DNC later explained was just a cybersecurity test by the Michigan Democratic Party. Madnick says this just shows how uneducated, understaffed and under-resourced so many companies and organizations are when it comes to cybersecurity.

“I suspect the DNC does not have a huge IT department,” Madnick said.

The kind of manipulation and hacking social media companies, political and government entities experienced in 2016 shouldn’t have happened in the first place. As Madnick pointed out, republics and democracies have dealt with various forms of election interference for hundreds of years.

“The role media can play in elections is not new, all we’re seeing is a new twist on it with new technologies,” he said. “The ethical and moral issues have been around for a long time, and maybe need to be reexamined and thought about under the new circumstances.”

At the same time, given the DNC’s blunder last year and the fact that so many state and local governments suffer from a lack of funding and resources when it comes to IT management and cybersecurity, the U.S. is still extremely vulnerable to more cyber-related election interference.

Big Tech, too, still hasn’t addressed privacy concerns of users and Facebook only recently started offering more details about who pays for the political ads on its platform.

Yesterday, Facebook confirmed to the Verge that when it required users to verify their email addresses a month ago, Facebook uploaded users’ email contacts to Facebook’s servers without their consent. Facebook claims this was an accident and claims it fixed the problem, but Facebook’s method of email verification was also unorthodox, because it involved taking users’ email passwords.

Facebook’s behavior doesn’t exactly instill confidence in American voters going into 2020. Facebook still doesn’t even have a chief security officer.

“They are [all] relatively easy targets,” Madnick said. “You don’t have to look really hard to find a back door unlocked. If DNC gets broken into next year with a different technique, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity (AFP) just announced an ad campaign lampooning 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s tech antitrust plan, begging senators not to make antitrust a “political issue.”

“If we use antitrust law to punish successful competitors, we eliminate incentives for innovation. Government should not be empowered to pick winners and losers in the marketplace,” said AFP Senior Tech Policy Analyst Billy Easley upon the ads’ launch. “To prevent a politicization of an important process, antitrust decisions should be made by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice — not by political leaders campaigning for elected office. We want to remind lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that antitrust law exists to protect consumers, not to be used as a political weapon.”

But history and economics — and traditional free-market thought — aren’t on AFP’s side.

Antitrust has always been a “political process” — the president picks who heads the Department of Justice (DOJ), after all, and Warren is not the first presidential candidate to draw attention to an industry’s anticompetitive practices. President Theodore Roosevelt campaigned on antitrust issues (then called “trust busting”), and President Donald Trump regularly comments on what he calls the tech industry’s “antitrust situation.”

Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, a project of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which seeks to “increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments and ensure that political appointees are focused on serving the public interest rather than personal or professional advancement,” wrote in an op-ed that, “American antitrust law is built upon the timeless insight that the ability of dominant corporations’ to sustain dominance unfairly threatens our economic and political liberty. Since unfettered corporations can entrench themselves unfairly, competition regulators should block both mergers and corporate practices that allow already powerful corporations to stifle would-be competitors.”

Congress passed the Sherman Act in 1890 and the Federal Trade Commission Act (creating the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC) and the Clayton Act in 1914 to stop big companies from forming anticompetitive mergers and establishing anticompetitive monopolies or oligopolies in various industries.

The infamous 1911 Standard Oil of New Jersey v. United States case prompted the latter two laws, because the Sherman Act did not adequately address Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices.

Standard Oil, started by John D. Rockefeller, routinely underpriced suppliers who did business with oil competitors, and negotiated price fixing agreements with oil refiners and railroads shipping the oil. In doing so, Standard Oil prevented other entrepreneurs and innovators from entering and competing in the oil market.

Progressives and conservatives agree such behavior is anticompetitive, anti-consumer and anti-free market. In U.S. economic history, both left- and right-leaning administrations brought antitrust litigation against big business, from Taft to Reagan to Clinton.

Today, both left- and right-leaning economists identify monopolistic tendencies and anticompetitive practices within the tech industry, especially with Amazon, which employs anticompetitive practices similar to that of Standard Oil.

A range of economists and law professors told Senate Democrats and Republicans that antitrust enforcement against Big Tech may be a legitimate way to deal with some of the tech industry’s problems, although there is still some debate over how to measure market power and price within the tech industry, and how to define “consumer benefit” and “consumer harm.”

Hauser notes in his op-ed that where the tech industry is concerned, “America’s cops on the competition beat have grown lazy. They are not enforcing antitrust laws passed during the first Gilded Age to level a playing field tilted by powerful corporations for their own benefit; that’s why America is stuck in a second Gilded Age of economic inequality. These officials have been lulled to sleep by decades of corporate-funded pseudo-economics.”

Some economists argue that economic inequality often correlates with market concentration, although it isn’t clear whether antitrust enforcement causes economic inequality to decrease.

Elizabeth Warren tweeted a response to AFP last week: “Oh look — the Koch brothers don’t like my ideas. Apparently they’re horrified about any effort to try and rein in the economic and political power of giant corporations. I’m shocked.”

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Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld told a politically-savvy New Hampshire audience that he is forming an exploratory committee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 GOP primary to rescue the party from “Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Our President is simply too unstable to carry out the duties of the highest executive office,” Weld told the Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, NH—a must-stop on the presidential campaign trail through the Granite State. “They say the President has captured the Republican party in Washington. As the president might say: ‘Sad.’ But even sadder is that many Republicans exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with their captor.”

For Weld, who last held elected office in 1997, riding to the rescue of the GOP is an unexpected role.  His most recent foray into American politics was as the Libertarian Party’s nominee for vice president, and he has long been at odds with the party’s conservative base.  In fact, Weld often notes that the Gary Johnson/Bill Weld ticket in 2016 took votes by a three-to-one margin from otherwise GOP voters. “A Libertarian vote was a protest vote or change vote in 2016. Those votes were going to go to Donald J. Trump not Hillary Clinton,” Weld said.

But Weld has returned to the GOP  because, he argues, Trump has put the country “in grave peril.”

Weld began his remarks to the crowd of New England business people and political insiders with a withering critique of President Trump, calling him a “schoolyard bully” who “virtually spat upon the idea that we should have freedom of the press,” and who “goes out of his way to insult and even humiliate ore democratic allies.”

“The situation is not yet hopeless,” Weld said, “but we do need a mid-course correction. We need to install leaders who know that character counts.

“As we move towards 2020 election we must uphold difference between the open heart, open mind and open handedness of patriotism versus the hard heart, closed mind and clenched fist of nativism and nationalism,” Weld said.

Weld laid out a series of his own policy proposals that were commonly heard in GOP circles in the 1990s but are rarely advocated today: a 19 percent flat income tax, baseline budgeting for the federal government and individual retirement accounts for “millennials who may never receive the benefits of Social Security.”  But it wasn’t Weld’s policy proposals that generated the massive media attention his speech received. It was the premise of a primary challenge against President Trump.

Weld repeatedly suggested that other candidates might enter the 2020 race, both as third-party candidates and as Republicans, which he clearly saw as a positive development.  When asked if his entrance into the GOP primary “would make the dam break,” Weld answered “If I get traction and cracks begin to appear, you may see a gold rush.”

This possibility—that Weld’s candidacy will open the door to a more traditional Republican challenger– may pose Weld’s most significant danger to Trump.  Trump’s poll numbers, both nationally and in key early primary states like New Hampshire, have actually risen in recent months.  Emerson College’s Director of Polling Spencer Kimball tells InsideSources that “We were just in the field in Iowa testing Trump vs. [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich and Trump was up 90-10 percent. It’s not going to be any easier there for Bill Weld.”

And in New Hampshire, which border’s Weld’s home state of Massachusetts, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 82 percent, and his approval among all Granite State voters has risen from 36 percent a year ago to 43 percent today in the latest NHIOP poll. When asked if they would encourage Trump to run for re-election in 2020, 77 percent of New Hampshire Republicans said yes.

Which may explain why multiple Republican strategists told InsideSources that they see little if any path forward for Weld in the Republican primary (“He misses on some of the attributes I think are needed to run a successful national effort,” New Hampshire-based GOP consultant Dave Carney tells InsideSources.)

Pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights says “Bill Weld is fighting an uphill battle on two fronts. First is that President Trump remains quite popular within the party, and rank-and-file Republican voters do not want to see a primary battle that could impair President Trump in a general election against a Democrat.

“Second is that Weld’s particular brand of Republicanism is now very rare in the party. Lots of voters in America are socially and fiscally progressive or are socially and fiscally conservative. But among those who ‘mix it up’ a bit, you find more people who are fiscally progressive but socially conservative – the opposite of a sort of ‘New England Republican’ formula.”

And even if the GOP base were in the mood to make a change, it’s hard to imagine the Republican Party of 2020 embracing Weld, with his history of pro-abortion and pro-amnesty policies, and his support for liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“The Republican Party is a big tent, but someone who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 as the Libertarian Party’s Vice Presidential nominee really needs to think about how welcome he is in the Republican Party,” said Steve Stepanek, chairman of the New Hampshire GOP.

“I don’t expect his campaign to get very far among Republican primary voters.”

Weld announced that he plans to stump across New Hampshire and other states in coming weeks, but emphasized that he has not made a final decision to run.

“If people won’t buy dog food, then I won’t advance,” Weld conceded. “That’s how it is in showbiz. If the dogs won’t eat the dog food, it doesn’t matter how good the promoter is.”

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld told a politically-savvy New Hampshire audience that he is forming an exploratory committee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 GOP primary to rescue the party from “Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Our President is simply too unstable to carry out the duties of the highest executive office,” Weld told the Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, NH—a must-stop on the presidential campaign trail through the Granite State. “They say the President has captured the Republican party in Washington. As the president might say: ‘Sad.’ But even sadder is that many Republicans exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with their captor.”

For Weld, who last held elected office in 1997, riding to the rescue of the GOP is an unexpected role.  His most recent foray into American politics was as the Libertarian Party’s nominee for vice president, and he has long been at odds with the party’s conservative base.  In fact, Weld often notes that the Gary Johnson/Bill Weld ticket in 2016 took votes by a three-to-one margin from otherwise GOP voters. “A Libertarian vote was a protest vote or change vote in 2016. Those votes were going to go to Donald J. Trump not Hillary Clinton,” Weld said.

But Weld has returned to the GOP  because, he argues, Trump has put the country “in grave peril.”

Weld began his remarks to the crowd of New England business people and political insiders with a withering critique of President Trump, calling him a “schoolyard bully” who “virtually spat upon the idea that we should have freedom of the press,” and who “goes out of his way to insult and even humiliate ore democratic allies.”

“The situation is not yet hopeless,” Weld said, “but we do need a mid-course correction. We need to install leaders who know that character counts.

“As we move towards 2020 election we must uphold difference between the open heart, open mind and open handedness of patriotism versus the hard heart, closed mind and clenched fist of nativism and nationalism,” Weld said.

Weld laid out a series of his own policy proposals that were commonly heard in GOP circles in the 1990s but are rarely advocated today: a 19 percent flat income tax, baseline budgeting for the federal government and individual retirement accounts for “millennials who may never receive the benefits of Social Security.”  But it wasn’t Weld’s policy proposals that generated the massive media attention his speech received. It was the premise of a primary challenge against President Trump.

Weld repeatedly suggested that other candidates might enter the 2020 race, both as third-party candidates and as Republicans, which he clearly saw as a positive development.  When asked if his entrance into the GOP primary “would make the dam break,” Weld answered “If I get traction and cracks begin to appear, you may see a gold rush.”

This possibility—that Weld’s candidacy will open the door to a more traditional Republican challenger– may pose Weld’s most significant danger to Trump.  Trump’s poll numbers, both nationally and in key early primary states like New Hampshire, have actually risen in recent months.  Emerson College’s Director of Polling Spencer Kimball tells InsideSources that “We were just in the field in Iowa testing Trump vs. [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich and Trump was up 90-10 percent. It’s not going to be any easier there for Bill Weld.”

And in New Hampshire, which border’s Weld’s home state of Massachusetts, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 82 percent, and his approval among all Granite State voters has risen from 36 percent a year ago to 43 percent today in the latest NHIOP poll. When asked if they would encourage Trump to run for re-election in 2020, 77 percent of New Hampshire Republicans said yes.

Which may explain why multiple Republican strategists told InsideSources that they see little if any path forward for Weld in the Republican primary (“He misses on some of the attributes I think are needed to run a successful national effort,” New Hampshire-based GOP consultant Dave Carney tells InsideSources.)

Pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights says “Bill Weld is fighting an uphill battle on two fronts. First is that President Trump remains quite popular within the party, and rank-and-file Republican voters do not want to see a primary battle that could impair President Trump in a general election against a Democrat.

“Second is that Weld’s particular brand of Republicanism is now very rare in the party. Lots of voters in America are socially and fiscally progressive or are socially and fiscally conservative. But among those who ‘mix it up’ a bit, you find more people who are fiscally progressive but socially conservative – the opposite of a sort of ‘New England Republican’ formula.”

And even if the GOP base were in the mood to make a change, it’s hard to imagine the Republican Party of 2020 embracing Weld, with his history of pro-abortion and pro-amnesty policies, and his support for liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“The Republican Party is a big tent, but someone who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 as the Libertarian Party’s Vice Presidential nominee really needs to think about how welcome he is in the Republican Party,” said Steve Stepanek, chairman of the New Hampshire GOP.

“I don’t expect his campaign to get very far among Republican primary voters.”

Weld announced that he plans to stump across New Hampshire and other states in coming weeks, but emphasized that he has not made a final decision to run.

“If people won’t buy dog food, then I won’t advance,” Weld conceded. “That’s how it is in showbiz. If the dogs won’t eat the dog food, it doesn’t matter how good the promoter is.”

Viewers of Fox and Friends in the “First in the Nation” primary state of New Hampshire are seeing a new ad from  Defending Democracy Together, a Republican advocacy organization founded by Bill Kristol, urging the GOP not to prevent candidates from challenging President Trump in the 2020 GOP primary.

“There has been chatter among New Hampshire Republicans calling for the elimination of the party’s neutrality requirement before presidential primaries, which would allow the state party to endorse President Trump against a potential primary challenger. A discussion is expected at the meeting at the end of the month,” the organization warns.

“We are running a commercial Fox and Friends in the Manchester, NH media market urging the RNC not to rig the primary in Trump’s favor,” the organization said in a statement.

The original supporters of an NHGOP rule change, Rep. Fred Doucette and Windham, NH selectman Bruce Breton, told InsideSources they have no plans to present a proposal to change the party bylaws and allow NHGOP officials to publicly endorse candidates in party primaries. They didn’t submit such a change by the state party deadline that passed the first week in January.

Bill Kristol tells NHJournal that’s good news, but Defending Democracy Together is running the ad to bolster the idea of a wide-open primary as pressure from the Trump organization on GOP institutions rises.  He also notes that other states like South Carolina, along with the RNC don’t seem as dedicated to the tradition of open primaries as the Granite State.

Members of the South Carolina state GOP have openly discussed simply cancelling their 2020 primary, which would–intentionally or otherwise–deny a Republican challenger the opportunity to take on Trump in a key, early state or compete for those delegates.   Meanwhile, some members of the national Republican party are promoting the idea of using the party rules to prevent or discourage a primary challenge.

“Look, the political history is clear. No Republican president opposed for re-nomination has ever won re-election,” RNC committeeman Jevon O.A. Williams said in a email first obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, loopholes in the rules governing the 2020 re-nomination campaign are enabling these so-called Republicans to flirt with the possibility of contested primaries and caucuses.”

“I feel much better about New Hampshire, actually,” Kristol said. “I’m confident the Republicans in New Hampshire–guardians of the First In The Nation primary–aren’t going to let themselves be pushed around by Trump apparatchiks.”

If you’re watching Fox and Friends tomorrow (Friday) morning, you may see the new ad from  Defending Democracy Together, a Republican advocacy organization founded by Bill Kristol, urging the NHGOP to maintain its neutral stance in any 2020 GOP POTUS primary.

“There has been chatter among New Hampshire Republicans calling for the elimination of the party’s neutrality requirement before presidential primaries, which would allow the state party to endorse President Trump against a potential primary challenger. A discussion is expected at the meeting at the end of the month,” the organization warns.

“We are running a commercial today and Friday during Fox and Friends in the Manchester media market urging the RNC not to rig the primary in Trump’s favor,” the organization said in a statement.

The original supporters of an NHGOP rule change, Rep. Fred Doucette and Windham, NH selectman Bruce Breton, told NHJournal last week they have no plans to present a proposal to change the party bylaws and allow NHGOP officials to publicly endorse candidates in party primaries. They didn’t submit such a change by the state party deadline that passed the first week in January.

Bill Kristol tells NHJournal that’s good news, but Defending Democracy Together is running the ad to bolster the idea of a wide-open primary as pressure from the Trump organization on GOP institutions rises.  He also notes that other states like South Carolina, along with the RNC don’t seem as dedicated to the tradition of open primaries as the Granite State.

“I feel much better about New Hampshire, actually,” Kristol said. “I’m confident the Republicans in New Hampshire–the home of the First In The Nation primary–aren’t going to let themselves be pushed around by Trump apparatchiks.”

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump took his battle for border wall funding to primetime TV, but Democrats refused to even acknowledge there was a border “crisis” to battle over.  In fact, listening to the three speakers, it was hard to tell they were discussing the same topic.

President Trump addressed the issue of the ongoing government shutdown briefly, but spent most of his time talking about the surge of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the borders, as well as the negative impacts of illegal immigration.

“In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings,” the president said. “Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders.

“In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, made vague references to Democrats supporting border security while opposing what Schumer called an “ineffective, unnecessary border wall” and talking mostly about government workers and their families hurt by the shutdown.

“The fact is: President Trump has chosen to hold hostage critical services for the health, safety and well-being of the American people and withhold the paychecks of 800,000 innocent workers across the nation – many of them veterans,” Speaker Pelosi said.

“There is no excuse for hurting millions of Americans over a policy difference. Federal workers are about to miss a paycheck. Some families can’t get a mortgage to buy a new home. Farmers and small businesses won’t get loans they desperately need,” added Sen. Schumer.

Liberal groups like the League of Women Voters joined in: “The real threat to the safety and security of Americans is the loss of paychecks for hundreds of thousands of hard-working public servants during the ongoing shutdown,” they said in a statement.

So who carried the day? “Judging by the comments from both sides, we’re no closer to ending this impasse,” Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies told InsideSources. Vaughan, who supports stricter immigration enforcement, said that Trump “did a good job promoting border security, but I wish he’d spent more time explaining why there’s a crisis.”

“As long as we have policies that allow people who make asylum claims–claims they know are almost certain to be rejected–to be released into the country if they have a child with them, we’re encouraging desperate people to risk the lives of children. That’s the ‘immoral’ part  that Speaker Pelosi won’t fix,” Vaughan said.

President Trump echoed that sentiment in what was probably the most memorable line of the evening:

“Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is for the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.”

While President Trump and the Democrats mostly talked past each other, there was one clear area of disagreement. President Trump insists that there is, in fact, a “crisis” at the southern border, while both Pelosi and Schumer referred to it as Trump’s “manufactured crisis.”  Who’s right?

According to the Washington Post, “2,000 unauthorized migrants who are being taken into federal custody each day” at the Mexico border.  Another anti-Trump outlet, Vox.com says: “More families crossed the US-Mexico border without papers in November 2018 than in any month since the Department of Homeland Security started tracking family apprehensions separately.”

But the final judgment belongs to the voters, and according to a Morning Consult poll released the day of the speech, they are with President Trump on the “crisis” question.  The poll found that 42 percent describe the current situation as a “crisis” and 37 percent say it’s “not a crisis but a problem,” while just 12 percent agree with the Democrats that there’s no problem at all.

“This is why Trump may have won the night. Democrats are still denying there’s a problem. Americans can see people rushing the border and climbing the fences, they see the coverage of the overcrowded border facilities. Of course there’s a problem–a major one,” Vaughan said.

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump took his battle for border wall funding to primetime TV, but Democrats refused to even acknowledge there was a border “crisis” to battle over.  In fact, listening to the three speakers, it was hard to tell they were discussing the same topic.

President Trump addressed the issue of the ongoing government shutdown briefly, but spent most of his time talking about the surge of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the borders, as well as the negative impacts of illegal immigration.

“In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings,” the president said. “Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders.

“In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, made vague references to Democrats supporting border security while opposing what Schumer called an “ineffective, unnecessary border wall” and talking mostly about government workers and their families hurt by the shutdown.

“The fact is: President Trump has chosen to hold hostage critical services for the health, safety and well-being of the American people and withhold the paychecks of 800,000 innocent workers across the nation – many of them veterans,” Speaker Pelosi said.

“There is no excuse for hurting millions of Americans over a policy difference. Federal workers are about to miss a paycheck. Some families can’t get a mortgage to buy a new home. Farmers and small businesses won’t get loans they desperately need,” added Sen. Schumer.

Liberal groups like the League of Women Voters joined in: “The real threat to the safety and security of Americans is the loss of paychecks for hundreds of thousands of hard-working public servants during the ongoing shutdown,” they said in a statement.

So who carried the day? “Judging by the comments from both sides, we’re no closer to ending this impasse,” Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies told InsideSources. Vaughan, who supports stricter immigration enforcement, said that Trump “did a good job promoting border security, but I wish he’d spent more time explaining why there’s a crisis.”

“As long as we have policies that allow people who make asylum claims–claims they know are almost certain to be rejected–to be released into the country if they have a child with them, we’re encouraging desperate people to risk the lives of children. That’s the ‘immoral’ part  that Speaker Pelosi won’t fix,” Vaughan said.

President Trump echoed that sentiment in what was probably the most memorable line of the evening:

“Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is for the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.”

While President Trump and the Democrats mostly talked past each other, there was one clear area of disagreement. President Trump insists that there is, in fact, a “crisis” at the southern border, while both Pelosi and Schumer referred to it as Trump’s “manufactured crisis.”  Who’s right?

According to the Washington Post, “2,000 unauthorized migrants who are being taken into federal custody each day” at the Mexico border.  Another anti-Trump outlet, Vox.com says: “More families crossed the US-Mexico border without papers in November 2018 than in any month since the Department of Homeland Security started tracking family apprehensions separately.”

But the final judgment belongs to the voters, and according to a Morning Consult poll released the day of the speech, they are with President Trump on the “crisis” question.  The poll found that 42 percent describe the current situation as a “crisis” and 37 percent say it’s “not a crisis but a problem,” while just 12 percent agree with the Democrats that there’s no problem at all.

“This is why Trump may have won the night. Democrats are still denying there’s a problem. Americans can see people rushing the border and climbing the fences, they see the coverage of the overcrowded border facilities. Of course there’s a problem–a major one,” Vaughan said.