much. joining us, david sanger, political and cnn analyst and white house correspondent for the new york times. david, today secretary of state antony blinken doubled down on the assertion that believes president putin made the decision to invade ukraine. didn t rule out diplomacy. you had a chance to speak with him over the weekend. what was your big takeaway from that conversation? well, secretary blinken was here at the munich security conference, and as he was speaking at the conference tshs w it was pretty clear that his enthusiasm for diplomacy continues, but he doesn t seem to think very much of whether the russians have engaged, and when you think about it. almost all of the engagement that has taken place so far by the russians has happened while they have been steadily increasing all of their buildups
republicans as well as democrats. it s often forgotten that medicare and the voting rights act passed because of republican votes as much as democratic votes. 112 republicans in the house voted for the voting rights act. 60 republicans in the house voted for medicare. so the challenge for lbj was he had southern democrats who were not going to support him certainly on civil rights, but he could pull over republicans to make a governing majority. president biden, when he s differed with the progressive caucus, which has about 95 votes in speaker pelosi s caucus, he doesn t have the luxury of getting republicans to help him get over the line. so this is a big difference. the majorities are too narrow, unfortunately, for president biden to achieve the kind of transformational legislative change that lbj was able to
while it was in the air. the second is, that if you take the first action, you re the first mover by doing the sanctions, the russian koss say, well, we weren t going to invade, but since your sanctions us were e regard as an act of war because you re trying to cut us off from the world financial system, we re going to go ahead with military action. and the third reason is that the sanctions are intended as deterrent and why they re advertised in advance. if you use them before the action takes con putin mike conclude they re sanctions me whether i attack or not. i might as well attack. doesn t make sense to do the sanctions early in my view. something else tied into this. you ve written about this. the administration dbeing so forward. realtime releasing intelligence overlooked friday. when one of the president s top national security issues focused
where you are, phil, seen large crowds gathering peacefully in the nation s capital in support of ukraine as well and something we re not just seeing in the nation s capital but really throughout the country as that threat of a russian invasion continues to grow louder and louder. often feels likes a geopolitical chess match. great reporting, very real people with very real implications. from new york, thanks very much. still to come a federal judge laying out how former president trump could be held accountable for inciting the capitol riot. what does that mean? the january 6th investigation, a member of the select committee looking into the insurrection joins me coming up next. you re live in the cnn newsroom. they repeplaced the glass and recalibrated my safety system. that s service i c can trust. singers: safelite repair, safelite replace. i like that my plan is built just for me. with the new ww personalpoints program,
insisting that he do. i think the former vice president has publicly indicated he did get the advice of former vice president dan quayle, who he knew obviously, they re both from indiana, and that so there s no basis for this. there s no discretion on the part of the vice president. he just opens the envelopes and then the tellers, i was one of them, read them aloud. i saw the newspaper article. obviously, this judge is known to be very, very conservative, and i imagine for conservatives, when this very conservative judge said, there s no basis for this. it s just unconstitutional, it probably had a meaningful impact on people of a conservative bent. yeah. no question about it. cited in the letter.