The sun rising on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., late last month.
Photo: joshua roberts/ReutersNORTH CAROLINA’S SENATE RACE ERUPTS over dark money meddling. A group linked to Republicans spent over $2 million trying to shape the Democratic primary, boosting a long-shot candidate against frontrunner Cal Cunningham, who has the backing of the national Democratic apparatus. Their TV ads highlight progressive policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, which Republicans hope will push Cunningham to the left.
Days of news coverage about the provenance of the ads have undercut their aim: to get Cunningham to engage in an intraparty policy debate that could affect his general election chances. State Democratic leaders, like former Charlotte Mayor and Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, have rallied around Cunningham.
Democrats see the ad buy as evidence that Republicans worry about Sen. Thom Tillis’s ability to beat Cunningham, an Army Reserve captain and lawyer. Cunningham accused national Republicans and Tillis of trying to weaken his candidacy but said he trusted North Carolinians’ “BS meter.” The ad buy also shows that GOP groups have more money to spend in North Carolina than they expected, since Tillis won’t have to face a primary opponent now, having gone all-in on his relationship with President Trump. A Tillis spokesman said his campaign “couldn’t be the least bit concerned with which radical liberal emerges” from the Democratic primary.
Republicans are using their incumbency advantage to get involved in Democratic primaries elsewhere, too: Trump encouraged New Hampshire Republicans to vote in the state’s Democratic presidential primary for the “weakest one,” and some South Carolina Republican leaders are encouraging their flock to vote for Bernie Sanders, who they see as a poor candidate against Trump.
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MEDICAL RESEARCH got lots of love from the president during last week’s State of the Union address, with Trump highlighting “ambitious new initiatives” for Alzheimer’s, kidney disease and mental health. But this week, Trump’s budget called for cutting National Institutes of Health funding by $2.6 billion. He also said the advances happened “because Congress funded my request,” when in fact Trump requested a $4.9 billion cut last year that Congress ignored. They instead bumped up funding by nearly 7%.
The vast majority of NIH funds are for research, mostly at universities around the U.S. and on NIH’s campus in Bethesda, Md. Some scientists have expressed worries about the future of U.S. science and medicine because of these frequent Trump budget-cut threats, and some young academics have gone overseas to work, in part because of the uncertainty of U.S. government funding. But no cuts to NIH funding have actually come to fruition under Trump, in large part because congressional appropriators, including Republicans, have rejected cuts and touted funding increases.
TRUMP’S BUDGET also came down hard on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that includes the National Weather Service and does a large amount of the government’s climate change research. Trump recently feuded with the agency after it contradicted his assertion that a hurricane was about to hit Alabama, and the White House altered one of the agency’s hurricane maps with a sharpie to include the state in the storm’s path.
The $287 million in proposed cuts target the agency’s coastal grant programs, which fund coastal development, environmental restoration and water quality projects. The White House called those programs “lower priority” and “wasteful and duplicative.” Environmental groups urged Congress to ignore the proposal: “This is one of those agencies that every American depends on every day of our lives,” said Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
LOCATION TRACKING services used by the Department of Homeland Security come under scrutiny by Senate Democrats. Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey sent a letter to DHS following a report by the Journal last week showing that the agency purchased data and software that tracks the physical location of individuals based on cellphone app data. Markey asked DHS to provide answers about its use of the data and what legal standards it applies when using it.
KELLY LOEFFLER , the newly appointed Republican senator from Georgia, is raking in donations from the financial derivatives industry she used to be a part of as a senior executive at Intercontinental Exchange Inc. She received donations from several ICE senior executives, as well as the Futures Industry Political Action Committee, the American Bankers Association and Kenneth Griffin, the founder of investment giant Citadel. The biggest financial industry donors to her campaign are herself and her husband, ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher, who dumped $5 million into her campaign fund.
NEW YORK TIMES editorial page editor James Bennet can talk about politics again at work after his brother, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, dropped out of the presidential race. The journalist Bennet recused himself from any involvement in opinion coverage of the 2020 election while his brother was an active candidate, starting in May 2019. The politician Bennet received 963 votes in the New Hampshire primary.
MINOR MEMOS: Tourist from Sweden gets a question in at Elizabeth Warren event in New Hampshire.… Iowa Democratic Party sign falls off lectern during press conference about how the party handled the caucus.… Trump budget chief makes case against funding a Bob Dylan statue in Mozambique.
Write to Gabriel T. Rubin at gabriel.rubin@wsj.com
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Republicans Try to Shape Democratic Races in Their Favor - The Wall Street Journal
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