Category Archives: Republican

Jeff Flake is at it again. The former Arizona GOP senator, famous for criticizing Donald Trump and then blowing town rather than staying and fighting, had an oped in The Washington Post over the weekend challenging his former colleagues: My simple test for all of us: What if President Barack Obama had engaged in precisely the same behavior? I know the answer to that question with certainty, and so do you. You would have understood with striking clarity the threat it posed, and you would have known exactly what to do.

Though my admiration for Flake has its limits because he threw in the towel, hes dead right about his former colleagues. Of course theyd be howling at the moon if Obama had done the same thing.

But about his most widely quoted assertion, made not in this column but earlier, that if the vote to convict were private he thinks 30 GOP senators would choose to remove Trump, I think hes dead wrong. These people are crazies or cowards or both, and theyre as locked into Trump at this point as those brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate were to Raymond Shaw. Except these senator-soldiers werent brainwashed by the North Koreans. Theyve brainwashed themselves.

It now appears there may not even be a trial, or therell be one and it will last about an hour before every single Republican votes to acquit Trump. Some will do so proudly and stand there and lecture us about the Constitution even as they take a piss on it (Lindsey Graham); some will run for the elevators (Susan Collins). And most will just hop on the Senate subway back to their office and relative obscurity. Hows Jim Risch going to vote? John Barrasso? Mike Braun? John Hoeven? Who cares?

Nobody knows what these peopleagain, the vast majority of Republican senatorsthink. I could go to their websites and look, but I dont care enough even to do that. I know all I need to know. Theyre from deep-red states where their rank and file is consumed with MAGAism, and theyre not about to take any chances. Some of them may be true believers, some just invertebrates, but it amounts to the same thing.

Meanwhile, the evidence against Trump just keeps piling up, not that it matters. Last Friday evening, the Center for Public Integrity got a bunch of documents from the Pentagon that it sought through the Freedom of Information Act and that a judge ordered released. (Side note: Its in times like these that we see the immense value of an organization like the Center for Public Integrity and a law like the FOIA law, which are both in their way products of the post-Nixon push for reform and transparency; lets hope theres a similar post-Trump flood of foundation money into such projects.)

The documents show that some administration officials worried that holding up the aid to Ukraine wasnt just a bad idea, but an illegal one: a violation of a federal law that prohibited presidents from refusing to carry out the will of Congress (in this case, foreign aid passed by both houses). The law dates to the 1970s and was passed because Congress will was continually being thwarted by, you guessed it, Richard Nixon.

The documents also show that barely an hour-and-a-half after Trump hung up from the infamous phone call with Vlodomyr Zelensky, a White House aide was ordering the Pentagon to put a hold on the Ukraine money. Ninety minutes. This aide, Michael Duffey, was one of many Trump officials who was subpoenaed to testify before the House last month and just blew it off. His boss at OMB, Russell Vought, tweeted at the time that neither he nor Duffey would testify. Hashtag #shamprocess. Dear Leader must be so proud.

Flakes assertion about the secret ballot assumes the existence of a conscience and principle among these people that just is not there. They have an obvious duty under the Constitution to defend the prerogatives of their branch of government. The chief executive thwarted their will with respect to Ukraine aid, to the point of breaking the law to do it. As members of the Article I branch, the legislature, theyre supposed to give a shit about this. But they dont. All they care about is polishing Trumps, uh, shoes.

Christmas approaches, the day of the birth of (one often hears it said) the only perfect man who ever walked the face of the earth. They didnt have telephones in his day, but if they had, maybe he could have made a perfect phone call. Donald Trump sure couldnt, and didnt, and all these sycophants acting like he did are humiliating themselves and the nation.

Meanwhile, speaking of Jesus Christ, what do we suppose hed make of a quick tour of the U.S.-Mexico border, where the temperatures dipped below freezing last week and familieschildren, babiesare sleeping in tents with no heat? (This is on the Mexican side, but theyre being held there because of the massive and intentional backup on the U.S. side.) Or of the white supremacist who sits in the White House (Stephen Miller, not Trump, but him too) orchestrating this cruelty?

And Republicans on Capitol Hill, men and women who purport to worship and love this Jesus, are able to ignore it all. Crazies or cowards? It hardly matters.

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In the Time of Trump, Are Republicans Crazies or Cowards? - The Daily Beast

DES MOINES, Iowa Few states have changed politically with the head-snapping speed of Iowa. Heading into 2020, the question is whether it's going to change again.

In 2008, its voters propelled Barack Obama to the White House, as an overwhelmingly white state validated the candidacy of the first black president. A year later, Iowa's Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage, adding a voice of Midwestern sensibility to a national shift in public sentiment. In 2012, Iowa backed Obama again.

All that change proved too much, too fast, and it came as the Great Recession punished agricultural areas, shook the foundations of rural life and stoked a roiling sense of grievance.

By 2016, Donald Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Republicans were in control of the governors mansion and state legislature and held all but one U.S. House seat. For the first time since 1980, both U.S. Senate seats were in GOP hands.

What happened? Voters were slow to embrace Obamas signature health care law. The recession depleted college-educated voters as a share of the rural population, and Republicans successfully painted Democrats as the party of coastal elites.

Those forces combined for a swift Republican resurgence and helped create a wide lane for Trump.

The self-proclaimed billionaire populist ended up carrying Iowa by a larger percentage of the vote than in Texas, winning 93 of Iowa's 99 counties, including places like working-class Dubuque and Wapello counties, where no Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower had won.

But now, as Democrats turn their focus to Iowas kickoff caucuses that begin the process of selecting Trumps challenger, could the state be showing furtive signs of swinging back? Caucus turnout will provide some early measures of Democratic enthusiasm, and of what kind of candidate Iowas Democratic voters who have a good record of picking the Democratic nominee believe has the best chance against Trump.

If Iowas rightward swing has stalled, it could be a foreboding sign for Trump in other upper Midwestern states he carried by much smaller margins and would need to win again.

Theyve gone too far to the right and there is the slow movement back, Tom Vilsack, the only two-term Democratic governor in the past 50 years, said of Republicans. This is an actual correction."

Iowans unseated two Republican U.S. House members and nearly a third in 2018 during midterm elections where more Iowa voters in the aggregate chose a Democrat for federal office for the first time in a decade.

In doing so, Iowans sent the states first Democratic women to Congress: Cindy Axne, who dominated Des Moines and its suburbs, and Abby Finkenauer, who won in several working-class counties Trump carried.

Democrats won 14 of the 31 Iowa counties that Trump won in 2016 but Obama won in 2008, though Trump's return to the ballot in 2020 could change all that.

We won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent Republicans, veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link said. I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next year.

Theres more going on in Iowa that simply a merely cyclical swing.

Iowas metropolitan areas, some of the fastest growing in the country over the past two decades, have given birth to a new political front where Democrats saw gains in 2018.

The once-GOP-leaning suburbs and exurbs, especially to the north and west of Des Moines and the corridor linking Cedar Rapids and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, swelled with college-educated adults in the past decade, giving rise to a new class of rising Democratic leaders.

I dont believe it was temporary, Iowa State University economist David Swenson said of Democrats' 2018 gains in suburban Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. I think it is the inexorable outcome of demographic and educational shifts that have been going on.

The Democratic caucuses will provide a test of how broad the change may be.

I think it would be folly to say Iowa is not a competitive state," said John Stineman, a veteran Iowa GOP campaign operative and political data analyst who is unaffiliated with the Trump campaign but has advised presidential and congressional campaigns over the past 25 years. I believe Iowa is a swing state in 2020.

For now, that is not a widely held view, as Iowa has shown signs of losing its swing state status.

In the 1980s, it gave rise to a populist movement in rural areas from the left, the ascent of the religious right as a political force and the start of an enduring rural-urban balance embodied by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.

Now, after a decade-long Republican trend, there are signs of shifting alliances in people like Jenny OToole.

The 48-year-old insurance industry employee from suburban Cedar Rapids stood on the edge of the scrum surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden last spring, trying to get a glimpse as he shook hands and posed for pictures.

I was a Republican. Not anymore, OToole said. Im socially liberal, but economically conservative. Thats what Im looking for.

OToole is among those current and new former Republicans who dot Democratic presidential events, from Iowa farm hubs to working-class river towns to booming suburbs.

Janet Cosgrove, a 75-year-old Episcopal minister from Atlantic, in western Iowa, and Judy Hoakison, a 65-year-old farmer from rural southwest Iowa, are Republicans who caught Mayor Pete Buttigiegs recent trip.

If such voters are a quiet warning to Trump in Iowa, similar symptoms in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats also made 2018 gains, could be even more problematic.

Vilsack has seen the stage change dramatically. After 30 years of Republican dominance in Iowas governors mansion, he was elected in 1998 as a former small-city mayor and pragmatic state senator.

An era of partisan balance in Iowa took hold, punctuated by Democratic presidential nominee Al Gores 4,144-vote victory in Iowa in 2000, and George W. Bushs 10,059-vote re-election in 2004.

After the 2006 national wave swept Democrats into total Statehouse control for the first time in 50 years, the stage was set for Obamas combination of generational change, his appeal to anti-Iraq War sentiment and the historic opportunity to elect the first black president.

We were like a conquering army, prepared to negotiate terms of surrender, said Cedar Rapids Democrat Dale Todd, an early Obama supporter and adviser.

Todd was one of a collection of Iowa Democratic activists who gathered at a downtown Des Moines sports bar last year to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Obama's historic caucus campaign.

Just across the Des Moines River in the state Capitol, there was a reminder of how much the ground had shifted since those heady days.

Republicans control all of state government for the first time in 20 years. Part of their wholesale conservative agenda has included stripping public employee unions of nearly all bargaining rights, establishing new voter restrictions and outlawing abortion six weeks into a pregnancy.

It was in line with Republican takeovers in states such as Wisconsin that were completed earlier, but traced their beginnings to the same turbulent summer of 2009.

On a Wednesday in August that year, throngs flocked to Grassleys typically quiet annual county visits to protest his work with Democrats on health care legislation.

Thousands representing the emerging Tea Party forced Grassleys last event from a community center in the small town of Adel to the town park, where some booed the typically popular senator and held signs stating, Grassley, you're fired.

The events became a national symbol for uneasiness about the new president's signature policy goal.

The previous April, Iowa's nine-member Supreme Court Democratic and Republican appointees had unanimously declared same-sex marriage legal in the state. A year later, Christian conservatives successfully campaigned to oust the three Supreme Court justices facing retention, waving the marriage decision as their cause.

Four years later, Democrats had high expectations of holding the retiring Harkin's Senate seat. But Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley lacked Harkin's populist appeal, and was beaten by state Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iraq War veteran from rural Iowa who painted Braley as an elitist lawyer.

By 2016, Republicans had completed their long-sought statehouse takeover, in part by beating longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal.

We tried in many cases to win suburbia, but we just couldn't lay a glove on it," Gronstal said. We just could not figure out how to crack it in Iowa."

The answer for Democrats in Iowa is much the same as the rest of the country: growing, vote-rich suburbs.

Dallas County, west of Des Moines, has grown by 121% since 2000, converting from a checkerboard of farms into miles of car dealerships, strip malls, megachurches and waves of similarly styled housing developments.

It had been a Republican county. However, last year, long-held Republican Iowa House districts in Des Moines western suburbs fell to Democrats.

It was the culmination of two decades of shifting educational attainment with political implications.

Since 2000, the number of Iowans with at least a college degree in urban and suburban areas grew by twice the rate of rural areas, according to U.S. Census data and an Iowa State University study.

Last year, a third of urban and suburban Iowans had a college diploma, up from 25% at the dawn of the metropolitan boom in 2000. Rural Iowans had inched up to just 20% from 16% during that period.

The more that occurs, the more you get voter participation leaning toward Democratic outcomes than has historically been in the past, Swenson said, noting the higher likelihood of college-educated voters to lean Democratic.

Since 2016 alone, registered Democrats in Dallas County have increased 15%, to Republicans 2%. Republicans still outnumber Democrats in the county, but independent voters have leaped by 20% and for the first time outnumber Republicans.

There is now a third front, Gronstal said. We can fight in those toss-up rural areas, hold our urban base, but now compete in those quintessentially suburban districts.

Though Trumps return to the ballot in 2020 shakes up the calculus, his approval in Iowa has remained around 45% or lower. A sub-50 rating is typically problematic for an incumbent.

Another warning for Trump, GOP operative Stineman noted, is The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Polls November finding that only 76% of self-identified Republicans said they would definitely vote to re-elect him next year.

With no challenger and 10 months until the election, a lot can change.

Still, thats one in four of your family thats not locked down, Stineman said.

There are also signs Iowa Democrats have shaken some of the apathy that helped Trump and hobbled Clinton in Iowa in 2016.

Democratic turnout in 2018 leaped from the previous midterm in 2014 from 57% to 68%, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. Republican turnout, which is typically higher, also rose, but by a smaller margin.

Overall turnout in Iowa, as in more reliably Democratic-voting presidential states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, was down in 2016, due mostly to a downturn in Democratic participation.

The trend was down, across the board," said Ann Selzer, who has conducted The Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll for more than 25 years. "So it doesnt take much to create a Democratic victory in these upper Midwestern states.

I think the success in the midterms kind of made people on the Democratic side believe that we can do it, Selzer said.

Perhaps, but Trump has his believers, too.

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Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020? - Minneapolis Star Tribune

The top Republican in the Wisconsin Senate says the first year of divided government under Gov. Tony Evers has been a rocky road. The head of the Assembly Republicans says the last 12 months have probably gone better than I expected.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos have together served as the respective heads of their caucuses over the last three legislative sessions. But this is the first time the two are concurrently doing so under a Democratic governor.

Both have said the arrangement has brought them closer together, particularly during the state budget process earlier this year. Still, each have their own take on the new governor and how to navigate that office.

The two spoke with reporters separately in year-end interviews in recent weeks; Fitzgerald addressed reporters in a news conference, while Vos held one-on-one conversations.

In his comments, Fitzgerald noted hes met with Evers three times over the course of the year and most of that was early on. Still, the Juneau Republican added hes working to set up another meeting in the new year, to map out some stuff that we've got some common ground on.

He also touted Republicans work in the state budget process, saying the plan Evers presented to the Legislature in early spring fell far short of where it needed to be to win legislative support, forcing lawmakers to kind of start from scratch.

Vos, R-Rochester, called the two-year spending plan generally a conservative budget that (Evers) tried to make more liberal. And he credited Republicans for opting to focus on topics that were not controversial in my mind.

If you look at this tone of their statements, they're almost always snarky and negative, Vos said of Democrats. And while we all have our fair share of snark, so I'm not going to say it's just them, they have a disproportionate amount that certainly is not helpful in the process.

But he also said hes looking to put forth a property tax cut proposal that would come after homeowners received bills this month showing potentially the largest property tax increase in a decade, according to a nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum report that found the increases were driven by state budget changes and local referendums.

Fitzgerald didnt give a target figure for the reduction, but said hed like it to be significant enough to attract lawmakers support. Any final amount would depend on the states tax revenue forecast, he added.

"People are concerned about a bump in their property tax bill," he said.

A Vos spokeswoman said the speaker is open to the idea, but it all depends on how successful the economy is next year.

Meanwhile, Vos in his interview said hes less interested in a bill Evers previously endorsed seeking to reimburse local clerks for the cost of holding special elections, though the caucus has yet to discuss it. That bill cleared the Senate with unanimous support in October. But Vos argued when someone decides to run for Congress, its not necessarily the states responsibility to pay for it.

In the Senate, Fitzgerald said hes expecting action every month that the chamber is on the floor this winter, the calendar will include some of Evers yet-unconfirmed Cabinet picks. Still, he said its a possibility the Senate wont act on all of them -- meaning some could be serving as secretaries without being officially signed off on by the chamber.

I don't know that anybody is necessarily going to make the case to vote down a secretary at this point, but I know there's still concerns with some, he said. But there are others that have garnered enough support and so I think we'll definitely have a couple more on the calendar in January.

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'A rocky road': Wisconsin Republicans recap the first year of split control under Gov. Tony Evers - Madison.com

One of President Donald Trump's top re-election advisers told a group of influential Wisconsin Republicans that voter suppression is "traditionally" part of the party's election strategy in battleground states, the Associated Press reports.

Now, Justin Clark, an attorney and one of Trump's senior political advisers, says he was referring to the historic, false accusations that the Republican Party suppresses votes to win elections.

At a November 21 event meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association's Wisconsin chapter, Clark spoke for about 20 minutes, and the speech was recorded by a liberal advocacy group and provided to the AP.

"Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," Clark told the group, which included Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and the executive director of the state's Republican party.

"Let's start protecting our voters," he continued, partly referring to Election Day monitoring of polling places. "We know where they are [...] Let's start playing offense a little bit. That's what you're going to see in 2020. It's going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program."

Attorneys Harmeet Dhillon, left, and Justin Clark, right, who represented the state and national Republican parties, discuss the tentative ruling by a federal judge to halt a California law that's aimed at forcing the president to release his tax returns, in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, Sept. 19, 2019. AP Photo/Rich Pedroncell

The recording was taken at the country club where the event was held in Wisconsin by the liberal group American Bridge and provided to the AP by One Wisconsin Now, a liberal advocacy group based in Madison.

In addition to his comments on voter suppression, Clark expanded on the re-election strategy for the "blue wall" of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which Trump won in 2016. The states are presumed to be critical for the 2020 election, and both parties have spent millions campaigning in the region.

The renewed interest in Election Day monitoring comes after a judge lifted a 1982 decree that barred the Republican National Convention from "ballot security" efforts that Democrats characterized as voter intimidation, particularly of black voters, in that year's New Jersey gubernatorial election. The federal lawsuit claimed the GOP stationed off-duty police in urban polling places with "National Ballot Security Task Force" wristbands, some carrying visible guns.

Clark told the AP that his point was "Republicans have historically been falsely accused of voter suppression and that it is time we stood up to defend our own voters." He said he did not condone anyone's vote being "diluted" and that "our efforts will be focused on preventing just that."

He also made remarks that accused Democrats of "cheating" in rural areas of Wisconsin around mid-size cities like Green Bay, but did not elaborate on how the party cheats, and there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state. Clark said the campaign would "focus on these places" if they could recruit enough staffers, which is part of Trump's re-election strategy.

The Trump 2020 campaign didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

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In leaked audio, a top Trump adviser said the Republican party has 'traditionally' relied on voter suppression - Business Insider

Over the last 25 years, Republicans have been successful at gaining control over state governments. Matt Grossmann explores this in his book,Red State Blues. He writes, An increasingly conservative Republican Party has made unprecedented gains at the state level, winning control of 24 new state governments. While Republicans appear to be highly successful, particularly in Texas, he says larger trends have impeded some of their progress.

Grossmann is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, and says they havent really reversed the rise in the size and scope of state government. Median state spending has doubled and they havent reversed the buildup of past liberal laws.

What youll hear in this segment:

How common political patterns affect the Republican Partys ability to gain influence and power

Why Medicaid expansion is one state issue that gets national attention, and is a challenge for Republicans

What lessons conservatives and liberals can learn from Grossmanns book

Written by Caroline Covington.

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'Red State Blues' Explores What Bolsters And Tempers Republicans' Success - Texas Standard

In a revealing recent interview with Rolling Stone, Chuck Todd, host of NBCs Meet the Press, discusses what led him to begin approaching Republicans and others on the right with more skepticism and reporting on their claims in a less naive way than he had in the past. In his comments, Todd indicates that he does not view Democrats and their claims in the same skeptical light.

The interview was conducted as part of an upcoming Meet the Press special on the weaponization of disinformation, which, according to Todds comments to the Rolling Stone, appears to approach the topic from a glaringly one-sided angle.

Asked what made him decide to devote a show to the topic of disinformation and fake news, Todd said it began with an interest in the impact of social media on politics, which he said is ultimately really about misinformation.

This is bigger than social media, said Todd. The Ukraine story for me really crystallized it. And for good or bad, our show has been at the forefront of this.

Todd then traced the topic back to what he suggested was its source: the Trump administrations claims about his inauguration.

The first Sunday of the Trump administration is when the phrase, alternative facts was debuted, he said. It was on Meet the Press Rudy that Giuliani used the phrase Truth isnt truth.'

So look, whether wed liked it or not, our platform has been used, or theyve attempted to use our platform to essentially disseminate, or to sort of, what I would say, is lay the groundwork for this, Todd explained.

After describing the dissemination of misinformation for which he and the interviewer only give examples from the Trump administration and Republicans as an epidemic, Todd addressed the issue of political advertising.

I think our biggest problem going into 2020 is that we have two sets of standards simply on political advertising, he said. If you choose to advertise on cable or television, on linear television, theres a certain set of standards on fact that you have to surpass in order to get your ad on television. Not the case on social media. And we have seen the Trump campaign literally use two different ads one that allows them to say their misinformation about Biden in the areas that they can.

Asked if he was surprised by the consistency that the Trump administration was willing to spread disinformation about the crowd size at the inauguration, Todd said yes.

I fully admit, listening to you ask that question now, and me giving you the honest answer of, yeah, I guess I really believed they wouldnt do this, said Todd. Just so absurdly naive in hindsight.

Todd then presented his succinct summary of his view of Trump:Donald Trumps entire life has been spent using misinformation, he said. His entire life.

But its not just Trump and his administration that Todd now views in what he described as a less naive way, its Republicans and everyone else on the right.

The fact is, and by the way, this isnt going to be easy to show, but I actually think when we outline this it will, the right has an incentive structure to utter the misinformation, he said in response to a question about Republicans supposedly pushing Russian talking points about Ukraine. I do think one of the things that I want to explore on this is the incentive structure. One of the things we dont fully appreciate in mainstream media on these attacks is that its become fun to attack the press, if that makes sense, on the right. It doesnt matter if were right or wrong, attack them anyway.

Throughout the interview, neither Todd nor the interviewer acknowledges even the possibility that Democrats and those on the left have spread misinformation and made overtly false claims on the airwaves; instead, the problem is presented as a purely Republican/right issue.

Related:Feud Between Trump And Christianity Today Results In Resignation From Another Publication

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NBC's Chuck Todd Explains Why He's Changed How He Reports On Republicans - The Daily Wire