Bedugul Coffee: Wednesday Morning Briefing: Trump faces restraints after Democrats seize House

MIDTERM ELECTION 2018

By the time President Donald Trump and his team tucked into hamburgers and hot dogs at a White House election watch party on Tuesday night, he was ready for the bad news. Republicans’ loss of control of the House of Representatives will leave the party with a more conservative congressional caucus that is even more bound to Trump and more united around his provocative rhetoric and hardline agenda. See the full results from election night.

Democrats have pledged to use their new majority to hold Trump accountable after a tumultuous two years in the White House. The party says it will reverse what it sees as a hands-off approach by Republicans toward the President’s foreign policy, and push for tougher dealings with Russia, Saudi Arabia and North Korea.

Voters in Minnesota and Michigan elected the first two Muslim women to serve in the U.S. Congress, Ilhan Omar a former refugee who fled Somalia’s civil war and Rashida Tlaib a Detroit-born Palestinian-American. Tuning into the news at dawn, Tlaib's extended family celebrated her victory in their home in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Let the 2020 White House race begin. Tuesday’s elections sounded the starting gun for a long, crowded, expensive and no doubt dramatic race for the presidency. Former Vice President Joe Biden is the early leader for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination, a Reuters/Ipsos Election Day opinion poll found, in a field likely to quickly take shape as candidates seek to challenge Republican President Donald Trump.

Stock returns have been fueled the past year by Trump’s corporate tax cuts, which have pumped up profits. Yet, any hope of further fiscal stimulus in the form of more tax cuts faded with the results of Tuesday’s congressional elections, with Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives from Trump’s Republican party.

Dan Whitcomb

@DanWhitcomb

Top @Reuters pictures from Election Night in America: https://reut.rs/2QrtG8q via @Reuters

1:58 AM - Nov 7, 2018

World

Russia would consider any new chemical weapons-related sanctions imposed by the United States to be illegal, a Kremlin spokesman said.

“A tag is the only item that would have allowed us to formally identify him,” said forensic doctor Bruno Fremont in a hospital mortuary in eastern France, as he examines a gaping hole in the skull of a soldier killed by shrapnel a century ago, at the Battle of Verdun during World War One. Laid out on a white sheet are the combatant’s near-complete skeleton, many of the bones blackened, and his leather boots, the laces tied tight. What’s missing is the soldier’s ID tag.

Italy’s government won a confidence motion in the upper house Senate on a contested security decree, which tightens immigration regulations and bolsters anti-terrorism and anti-mafia rules.

Special Report: When soccer’s governing body in Europe began to get tough on the sport’s finances from 2009 onwards, the British club Manchester City came up with a two-pronged counter-attack, a trove of documents relating to soccer shows. One Man City plan was to get more money from sponsors; another was to offload some costs relating to players’ image rights. In both cases, the owner of Man City, an Abu Dhabi royal, would foot some of the bill, according to “Football Leaks” documents obtained by the German publication Der Spiegel and reviewed by Reuters.