Congressional Republicans’ three-day retreat this week was supposed to be about hammering out a policy agenda for the year. It didn’t work out that way.
“The hot topic at congressional Republicans’ annual policy retreat that began Thursday is not infrastructure, immigration, or even tax cuts — it’s ‘The Memo,’” the Boston Globe said Friday.
“While Republicans are dutifully attending seminars in a West Virginia mountain resort on reforming the government and overhauling the nation’s roads, bridges, and airports, they’re also waging a preemptive spin war” — and that was even before the midday release of the controversial classified GOP memo alleging surveillance abuses by law-enforcement officials investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
While the spin war will only intensify now that the memo is out, GOP lawmakers will come away from their time at the Greenbrier resort “with little consensus on how to address the long to-do list awaiting them in Washington, D.C.,” Roll Call reports, adding that “the silence on contentious lingering issues such as health care, government spending and immigration was deafening.”
