with this ring i thee wed. i now pronounce you legally married. in 2004 no one s really thinking that much about gay marriage, but then it becomes legal in massachusetts. and that s enough to agitate a lot of people. so suddenly the republicans see this great opportunity. today i call upon the congress to promptly pass and to send to the states for ratification an amendment to our constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman, as husband and wife. president bush had at his right hand one of the great political masterminds of his era. karl rove was very good at exploiting the vulnerability of the american middle classes who were unsure about the world in which they lived. what two men do when they together, what two women do when they get together is perverting the human body. you don t know about god.
and the voters responded. why all the glum faces? yesterday the people went to the polls. and they cast their vote for a new direction in the house of representatives. and while the ballots are still being counted in the senate, it s clear the democrat party had a good night last night. and so we have a divided government. democrats running congress, a republican in the white house. that portends battles ahead. after that election, many republicans are concluding that iraq is their vietnam and that this war is going to have a big political cost, and bush needs to do something. congress must no longer follow him deeper into the quagmire in iraq. but then he takes one of the most unexpected steps you could imagine. he says there s going to be a surge of troops in iraq. on capitol hill, president bush faced more skeptical, even
military. paul: kim, you can tell us what you is there any downside you see here or upside, either? well, we re living one of the downsides right now. the failure to get an immigration deal earlier this year and that was a particular pit at thiy because the potentis right there. you had democrats that wanted a deal for the dreamers, a daca deal. you had a president that wanted more border security. he didn t manage to rally his caucus around it. now here we are at the end of the year, dealing with a standoff over $5 billion in border wall funding and a government shutdown. paul: it seems to me i followed that decision very closely inside the white house in reporting, kim, as i know you did. it seems that the white house thought they could use the immigration issue in the campaign, in the election, that it would be a winner for them. they ended up losing 40 seats. didn t sound like a great winner. so the they gave up potential
paul: it s the story that dogged president trump throughout this first two years in office, charges of collusion between his campaign and the russians. so with investigations likely to heat up in the new democratic controlled congress and with special counsel robert mueller sprawling probe set to continue in the new year, what have we learned so far about the trump, russia connection. kim, let s first just focus on the russia collusion, the trump, putin conspiracy, alleged, to defeat hillary clinton. if we learned any more factual basis to prove or disprove that allegation? absolutely nothing. at least nothing that has been made public by the special counsel s office. we ve learned that there were
them. but i think also his recent decision to pull troops out of syria rather abruptly which seems to have cost him the defense secretary. i think that has to counted among the top setbacks of the year. the one other would be how little congress really accomplished in its last chance for republican policy for several years now. paul: well, wait a minute. didn t they do the budget deal with the two year budget deal that got defense spending up, which you fought for very hard as i recall in our council and i think rightly so. the cost was a lot of domestic spending but they got a lot more military spending. they did, paul. it s a two year bump. it s not anything off the 3% of gdp that s now the norm. also, i think if it doesn t continue through the next budget caps deal with democrats running congress narks it will end up being pretty modest in what it will buy and sus dane fo sustaie