Daily Archives: April 15, 2021

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., here in 2017, is pushing his party to focus on working-class voters as a way to win back the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms and the White House in 2024. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images hide caption

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., here in 2017, is pushing his party to focus on working-class voters as a way to win back the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms and the White House in 2024.

A growing number of working-class voters were drawn to Donald Trump's Republican Party, and now top Republicans are searching for ways to keep those voters in the fold without Trump on the ballot.

"All of the statistics and polling coming out of the 2020 election show that Donald Trump did better with those voters across the board than any Republican has in my lifetime since Ronald Reagan," Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told NPR. "And if Republicans want to be successful as a party, win the majority in 2022, win back the White House in 2024, I think we have to learn lessons that Donald Trump taught us and how to appeal to these voters."

Since 2010, the most significant growth in the Republican coalition has been white voters without a college degree an imperfect but widely used metric to quantify the working-class voting bloc along with some marginal growth among similarly educated Black and Hispanic voters. Banks believes the only winning path forward for the GOP is to reimagine itself permanently as the party of working-class America.

Banks is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative faction in the House long rooted in small government, low taxes and social conservatism, and he recently sent a six-page memo to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., making his case. For Banks, it means tougher immigration laws and cracking down on China, Big Tech and, perhaps most provocatively for the GOP, corporate America.

"For too long, the Republican Party fed into the narrative and the perception that the Republican Party was the party of big business or the party of Wall Street," Banks said.

Read the full memo below:

Republicans are increasingly comfortable attacking corporations these days, a political stance made easier after Wall Street donors gave more to President Biden in 2020, major companies halted donations to Republicans who objected to Electoral College results on Jan. 6, and as companies take more liberal positions on controversial issues such as Georgia's new voting law.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last week issued a rare public lashing toward companies that oppose the law. "My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics. It's not what you're designed for," he said. McConnell a top recipient of corporate political donations walked back his comments, but not a statement his office released warning corporations of "serious consequences" for "behaving like a woke parallel government."

Top Senate Republicans some considering 2024 presidential runs have been echoing the call to remake the party even before the 2020 election. "We've got a big battle in front of us, Republicans do, to try and make this party truly the party of working-class America," Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in November.

He's among a number of Senate Republicans who have taken recent positions that run counter to longstanding party orthodoxy, such as linking up with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in support of stimulus checks last year and supporting a mandatory $15 minimum wage for companies with annual revenues over $1 billion.

Others include Florida's Marco Rubio, who recently sided with pro-union forces in an organizing dispute at Amazon and speaks frequently of "common good capitalism," and Utah's Mitt Romney, who has introduced legislation to expand the welfare state to provide more generous benefits to combat child poverty.

"I think the claim that says the Republican Party is the party of the working class is at best, insincere, and more likely, political misdirection and rebranding exercises," said John Russo, a visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and a co-editor of the publication Working-Class Perspectives.

The working-class vote is complicated and too often confused with whiteness when about 40% of the working-class vote is people of color, Russo said. Their support also didn't cut overwhelmingly toward Republicans in 2020. Biden still won a majority of voters who earn less than $50,000 year, while Trump won a majority of voters who earn over $100,000 a year.

Russo said about one-third of working-class voters are considered persuadable in elections, and it's never reliable whether cultural or economic forces will drive their vote. "The working class, like all of us, carry multiple identities, race, class, gender, religious, geographic, and people may vote different parts of their identity as situations and moments change in their lives."

Democrats are not ceding this vote without a fight, led by a new president with a blue-collar upbringing who wants to enact the most radical economic investment in working people since the New Deal, with a message to sell it targeted almost squarely at the working-class vote. "I'm not trying to punish anybody, but damn it, maybe it's because I come from a middle-class neighborhood, I'm sick and tired of ordinary people being fleeced," Biden said in a recent speech promoting his $2 trillion infrastructure and economic stimulus plan.

Republicans think Democrats are overreaching with their economic largesse. Banks compared Biden's plans to a feel-good sugar high that will lead to a crash. "And I predict it will crash long before the 2022 midterm election, as we see a lot of government spending inflate the economy, but then when it bottoms out and American workers, blue-collar working-class Americans feel the effect of it, they're gonna blame Joe Biden and Democrats for it," he said.

The battle for the working class is even more urgent for the two parties because it's a growing bloc of voters. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Russo said, more middle-class people have slid economically backward and are experiencing what he calls "the fragility of working-class life."

Original post:

Top Republicans Work To Rebrand GOP As Party Of Working Class - NPR

John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency. He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency. He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted.

John Boehner says he couldn't win an election as a Republican these days.

"I think I'd have a pretty tough time," he says. "I'm a conservative Republican, but I'm not crazy. And, you know, these days crazy gets elected. On the left and the right."

Boehner has a new memoir, On the House, about his time in politics.

His refrain is familiar a retired politician bemoaning increased polarization and partisanship, laying the blame squarely on both parties though as a member of House Republican leadership for much of his career, he has more experience and more stories about dealing with the "noisemakers" and "knuckleheads" within his own ranks.

Boehner was first elected to the House in 1990 as a firebrand conservative from Ohio, rising to become House speaker with the help of Republican Tea Party victories in the 2010 midterms. Until his retirement in 2015, he led a Republican caucus largely focused on undoing former President Barack Obama's signature health care overhaul even if it meant shutting down the government.

Boehner's memoir tells of his attempts through the years to corral his members. As he tells Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition, often that meant going in directions he personally opposed.

He relates the situations to one of his folksy sayings "Boehnerisms" that says, "A leader without followers is just a man taking a walk."

"There were a couple of times where I found myself taking a walk. And I was going one direction, the team was going some other direction," Boehner says.

One of those times came in 2013, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other hard-line Republicans forced a government shutdown in a failed attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act.

"And even though I didn't really want to go the direction where the team's going, they were the ones who elected me to be the leader and I had an obligation to go lead them," Boehner tells NPR. "So that means I had to go jump out in front of them, even if I thought what they were trying to do really made not a whole lot of sense."

Boehner's retirement in 2015 allowed him to avoid working with former President Donald Trump in the White House. By the time of Trump's swearing in, Boehner writes that he was "not sure I belonged to the Republican Party he created."

Boehner tells NPR that when Trump refused to accept his election loss, "he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him."

Here are excerpts of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

You describe the way that you ran meetings when you were speaker of the House or really in any leadership position. You say that the key thing was to listen to other people and figure out what was on their minds and which way the room was going.

Well, I was in the sales and marketing business before I got into politics and learned a few things about sales. The most important thing about a salesman is not his ability or her ability to talk. It's their ability to listen. Because if you're listening to the person across the desk, you have a pretty good idea what it is they're looking for and you can figure out a way to get there.

And no different in politics, because in politics especially in the Congress you've got this large body of people that you're trying to move in a particular direction. You really can't even begin to move them until you understand where they are and why they are where they are.

Your party captured the House in 2010. It was driven by the Tea Party movement. You make it clear that there are a lot of people in the Tea Party movement that you consider "crazies." But at the time, you made sure there was no distance, no gap between mainstream Republicans and Tea Party types. You knew that was the way to power.

Well, the fact is they got elected as Republicans, they were members of the Republican conference and most of those so-called Tea Party candidates became what I would describe as regular Republicans. There were a few who I would describe as knuckleheads who all they want to do is create chaos. But the fact is they got elected. I was the speaker and I had to find a way forward as a team.

What do you think about some of the leading figures in your party, the way that it has gone in recent years?

Well, the people of governing in Washington today on both sides of the aisle have an even more difficult task than I did. The country is far more polarized now than it was 10, 12 years ago. And that means the people trying to govern have an even more difficult time trying to bring two sides together, or for that matter bring one side together.

I get the impression, though, that you think that a lot of leading personalities in your party don't really stand for anything, don't really believe in anything.

Well, listen, I've been around politics now for 40 years, and I thought I knew something about politics. But clearly today, I don't know as much as I thought I knew about politics. Because, you know, I'm a Republican, actually. I'm a conservative Republican, but I'm not crazy. And then they've got, I don't know, these noisemakers, I'll call them. But Nancy Pelosi's got the same problem on her side of the aisle.

When you talk about noisemakers, who do you mean? Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan?

Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan. I could go down a long list of people who are more interested in making noise than they are in doing things on behalf of the country. Sometimes I get the idea that they'd rather tear the whole system down and start over because I've never seen anything that they were for. I know what they're against, but I've never really seen what they're for.

There's a case to be made that the Republican Party today is abandoning the idea of democracy. So many people supported the effort to overturn the 2020 election. So many state lawmakers now are pushing for voting restrictions based on false claims about that election. What do you make of that argument?

Listen, the election is over. I listened to all that noise before the election, after the election. And, you know, there's always a few irregularities, but there's really been nothing of any significance that would have changed one state's election outcome, not one. Nothing even close.

I just find what President Trump did before the election, especially what he did after the election, he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him by continually telling them that the election was going to be stolen before the election. And then after the election, telling them that the election was stolen without providing any evidence, no facts. And that's the part about this that really disturbs me the most.

People who were loyal to me, people who trusted me, I felt like I had a responsibility to be honest with them, straightforward with them. And to see this loyalty and trust be abused by President Trump, it was really kind of disheartening at best.

Bo Hamby and Reena Advani produced and edited the audio interview. James Doubek produced for the Web.

See original here:

John Boehner On The 'Noisemakers' Of The Republican Party - NPR

At the time, the Obama administration was cracking down on illegal immigration in an attempt to bring Republicans to the table for a grand bargain on comprehensive immigration reformbut it was more effective politics for both Democrats and Republicans to pretend that Obama was less of a border hawk than he really was.

Again and again, Republicans have targeted groups they believe too small or too powerless to spark a costly political backlash. By attacking them, the GOP seeks to place Democrats in a political bind. If they decline to bow to demagoguery, Democrats risk looking either too culturally avant-garde for the comfort of more conservative voterswhose support they need to remain viableor too preoccupied with defending the rights of a beleaguered minority to pay attention to bread-and-butter issues that matter to the majority. This strategy has worked in the pastPresident Bill Clinton, who signed the federal statute outlawing same-sex marriage in 1996, was no Republican. Many people across the political spectrum accept the premise that defending a marginalized groups civil rights is identity politics, while choosing to strip away those rights is not.

In 2004, Republicans pursued a good-cop/bad-cop strategy: Bush sounded notes of tolerance and acceptance in public, while Republican strategists pursued an anti-gay-rights agenda behind the scenes. In 2012, the partys presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, ran to the right of Bush on both immigration and LGBTQ issues in order to prove that he was severely conservative. In 2016, the Republican base wanted a nominee who would sound their hatreds with a foghorn rather than a dog whistle. Trump obliged, promising to ban Muslims from coming to the United States and build a wall on the border with Mexico. Trump had previously mocked Romneys harsh self-deportation policy as maniacal, but the reality-show star knew what the Republican base wanted in a president when he finally ran.

That brings us to 2021. Republicans lost the fight over marriage equality so decisively that some now pretend not to have vigorously opposed it in the first placemuch to the alarm of many religious conservatives, who are their most dedicated supporters. The fight over immigration is locked in a stalemate, because Trump showed national Republicans that embracing nativism is less politically costly than they had supposed. Anti-Muslim animus has hardly disappeared, but it is no longer as useful a tool to oppose the current leader of the Democratic Party, an elderly Irish Catholic man.

Read: The GOPs Islamophobia problem

Conflicts between civil rights and religious freedom can certainly present thorny legal dilemmas, but most of what Im describing here involves Republicans consciously choosing not to leave people alone. There was no threat to life or liberty that demanded same-sex-marriage bans, Sharia bans, or draconian state-level immigration laws. They embraced these causes because they believed that picking on these particular groups of people was good politics, because of their supporters animus toward them, and because they believed that their targets lacked the votes or political allies to properly fight back.

Read the rest here:

The GOP's War on Trans Kids - The Atlantic

Iowa Republicans need to show support for higher education instead of underfunding and micromanaging them.

Iowas higher education systems are getting constantly slapped by Republican legislators, and its time for it to stop.

House File 868 a bill that freezes funding and tuition and fees for universities under the state Board of Regents recently passed through the state House Appropriations Committee. The Senate Appropriations Committee, meanwhile did propose a funding increase restoring an $8 million cut from last year and $6.5 million for Iowas community colleges while the funding increase is applaudable, it still falls short of the regents requests.

While Iowa House Republicans argue the regent universities already received emergency funds from the American Rescue Plan, what they cant seem to wrap their minds around is that legislation like this is harming higher education in Iowa.

Im not here to argue over tuition rates because thats a separate conversation. Legislation that underfunds Iowa universities is part of the negative attitude that many Republicans have blatantly displayed toward higher education.

This bill is just the most recent example of an ongoing trend. The constant underfunding and micromanaging needs to stop. Otherwise, the future of quality higher education in Iowa is at stake.

Frankly, Iowas history of underfunding higher education is frightening. Take for example the 2021 state budget proposal that was introduced by Gov. Kim Reynolds which underfunded public universities request by $11 million. Whats really alarming though is the fact that while the state budget has doubled over the past two decades, funding has declined by about a net $8 million.

But funding isnt the only method Republicans are using to bludgeon Iowas public universities. On top of underfunding institutions, legislators are determined to micromanage them in a way that derails their academic missions.

Where is this evident? House File 802 which prohibits divisive concepts in diversity, equity, and inclusion training in schools, universities, and government institutions.

Yes, its hypocritical that Republicans are supporting a bill that prohibits certain topics to be discussed after passing a bill in support of the freedom of speech at regent universities. But it also drives away minority populations from attending Iowa universities. Why would anyone want to attend a school in a state that sends a bad message on how it views minority groups?

And, we cant forget the infamous tenure bill that has been introduced and died for three consecutive years. Nothing says we dont fully value Iowas higher education system than trying to get rid of a practice thats meant to help retain and recruit faculty.

While the tenure bill is dead and the future of the DEI and funding bills is unsure, legislation like this shouldnt be introduced in the first place. All it does is send a message to prospective and current students, faculty, and staff, that Iowa doesnt value higher education.

What does the tenure bill do? It drives away faculty from coming to Iowa institutions, which is the last thing they need as numbers have declined across all three universities.

What does the DEI training bill do? Its going to prevent diversity in universities by limiting conversations about systemic racism.

What does underfunding the Iowa public universities do? It says that the state doesnt want to invest and value its life- and industry-saving research, nor its award-winning students, faculty, and staff. Not only does it send a bad message, but if quality of education is the goal, this undercuts the universitys mission in the long run.

With financial losses from COVID-19 and a decrease in student enrollment, Iowa universities are in desperate need of financial help.

Our institutions dont need the state telling them what they can or cant teach or attempts to get rid of practices that provide top-tier education. Support must come financially, but it also must be evident through legislation. And right now, certain bills and Iowas history of underfunding isnt particularly doing that.

Iowa Republican lawmakers need to change their attitude toward higher education. Its time to stop the underfunding and micromanaging and instead show support from state legislators.

Columns reflect the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Editorial Board, The Daily Iowan, or other organizations in which the author may be involved.

Read more:

Opinion | Iowa Republicans need to value higher education - UI The Daily Iowan