Category Archives: Republican

The way-too-early race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination has entered a new phase.

Though its still a long way off from anyone officially declaring their candidacy, former President Donald Trump has officially returned to the campaign trail and other would-be candidates are making more trips to early primary states to stump for Republicans there and speak with voters. Trump came in first in straw poll at theConservative Political Action Conference in Texas Sunday with 70%, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 21%, and a host of other potential candidates at 1% or less.

Back in April, Deseret News looked at the early field of potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates. Since then, some have begun making moves that suggest theyre serious about preparing for a possible run, while others have kept a lower profile. The possible candidates in this list are based on whos stayed in the news, traveled recently to Iowa or other early primary states, or finished high in a recent Western Conservative Summit straw poll.

Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he made up his mind about whether hell run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination again, but he didnt say what the answer is, keeping the 2024 field open, for now.

The former president held his first post-White House rally in Ohio on June 26 the first since his inflammatory Jan. 6 Save America rally that preceded the failed insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. Trump called it the first rally of the 2022 election, but no cable news network carried it live, not even Fox News.

President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Monroe Civic Center in Monroe, Louisiana, in November 2020.

Evan Vucci, Associated Press

The rally came in the middle of a busy few days in June for Trump. Trumps personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in the state of New York over his false and misleading claims about the 2020 election, and a week ago, The Trump Organization and its Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg were indicted on tax fraud charges and accused as part of a two-year investigation that began when Trump was still in office. Weisselberg and lawyers for the Trump Organization both pleaded not guilty.

The former president has reportedly told others that he wont have to wait until 2024 to return to the White House. The New York Times and other news outlets have reported that Trump expects to be reinstated as president by August.

Trump also made his first appearance on C-SPANs Presidential Historians Survey, coming in fourth-to-last in the survey of 142 historians, professors and other professional presidential observers.

DeSantis narrowly beat out Trump in a straw poll at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver last month, but his greatest strength could also prove to be his greatest weakness. Praised by Republicans as a next-generation Trump, it could put him on a collision course with Trump should both run.

DeSantis is up for reelection next year, and hes purposely avoided Iowa to not drive 2024 speculation, according to Politico. Still, hes building out a gubernatorial record sure to please primary voters. Name a top Republican issue today, chances are DeSantis has signed a bill and/or has run Facebook ads about it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Feb. 26, 2021, in Orlando, Fla.

John Raoux, Associated Press

Hes signed bills banning vaccine passports, restricting ballot drop boxes and voting by mail, and setting mandates for civics curriculum in the state. Another bill prohibiting deplatforming was signed into law in May, but a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Wednesday, arguing it likely violates social media networks First Amendment freedom of speech rights. Hes run Facebook ads about critical race theory and transgender athletes in sports.

But DeSantis has backed away from partisanship when responding to the building collapse in Surfside, Florida. The first-term governor welcomed President Joe Biden to the state last week when he visited to meet with families and survivors. Youve recognized the severity of this tragedy from day one and youve been very supportive, DeSantis said of Biden.

If youre curious how the former vice president might handle the fact that many of Trumps supporters think hes disloyal for certifying the 2020 election, his speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on June 24 laid out his argument.

Pence opened the speech with one of his favorite lines, in which he calls himself a Christian, conservative and Republican, in that order and then proceeded to spend the next 20 or so minutes praising Trump and the work of the Trump-Pence administration. We made America great again in just four years, he boasted. Then he finally touched on the attack. Jan. 6 was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol, he said.

Mike Pence speaks during a rally in Charlotte, N.C., on Oct. 10, 2016.

Pence said he would always be proud that elected officials reconvened to finish certifying the election after the riot, and he said he understood why many were disappointed in his tickets loss last year: I can relate, I was on the ballot. He also positioned his view on the election as one informed by Republican patriotism and love of the Constitution.

The Republican Party will always keep our oath to the Constitution, even when it would be politically expedient to do otherwise, he said. Theres almost no idea more un-American that any one person can choose the American president. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.

He didnt dwell on Jan. 6 for long, though. We must not allow the Democrats and their allies in the media to use one tragic day to discredit the aspirations of millions of Americans, Pence said. Though some might find Pences position unenviable, hes building the case that hes the best-suited Trump successor, with a hand in the administrations conservative agenda but no part in his election denialism. Whether or not that will appeal to Republican primary voters down the road remains to be seen, but it definitely sets him apart in a field that so far seems defined by fealty to Trump.

Haley has changed her tone when it comes to Trump. After saying he let us down and lost any sort of political viability he was going to have following Jan. 6, Haley is, at least publicly, a fan again. During her remarks at the Iowa Republican Party dinner on June 24, Haley praised Trump and told a story about him asking if he should call Kim Jong Un little rocket man during his speech at the U.N. Haley said she cautioned him to treat the audience like church instead of a rally, but he went ahead and used the term.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks while campaigning for U.S Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., Monday, Oct. 12, 2020, in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Matt York, Associated Press

Haley even sounded kind of Trumpian during her speech, telling Republicans they were too nice. We have to be tough about how we fight, she said. We keep getting steamrolled and then whine and complain about it. The days of being nice should be over.

She also didnt shy away from her gender, opening the speech by saying, America needs more strong conservative women leaders and less of Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, and praising female Iowa Republicans like U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds. I wear heels, Haley said. Its not for a fashion statement. I use it for kicking. But I always kick with a smile.

During his remarks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority conference in Florida last month, Cruz said that a conservative revival is coming and hearkened back to the Reagan revolution. It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan, he said. Joe Biden is Jimmy Carter 2.0. Left unsaid, but implied, is that Cruz sees himself as the Reagan 2.0 who will ensure Biden is a one-term president.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, heads to the floor as the Senate prepares for a key test vote on the For the People Act, a sweeping bill that would overhaul the election system and voting rights, at the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday, June 22, 2021.

Alex Brandon, Associated Press

Cruz said at that conference that having social conservative or patriotic views can get you canceled, and its time to fight back. He also recited a favorite quote from the late Andrew Breitbart who said politics is downstream from culture, and said the phrase was now outdated. Today, politics is culture, Cruz said, which might help explain why he signaled his support to free Britney Spears from her conservatorship the day after her court testimony.

Cruz has begun making endorsements in other races, including Susan Wright in the runoff for Texas 6th Congressional District later this month, as well as former Rep. Matt Salmon in Arizonas gubernatorial race next year. While Republicans are undoubtedly happy to have Cruzs support, Democrats like it, too, at least in Virginia, where fundraising emails from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe that mention Cruzs endorsement of his Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin bring in big bucks, per the Dallas Morning News.

In the month of June, Pompeo tweeted the word pipehitter 18 times, and his political action committee CAVPAC short for Champion American Values PAC tweeted pipehitter another 16 times. Be a pipehitter, read one. All of us need to be Pipehitters. If youre a Pipehitter like us, join the team. What the heck is a pipehitter, though?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gestures toward a reporter while speaking at the State Department in Washington on Nov. 10, 2020.

Jacquelyn Martin, Associated Press

The word refers to members of special forces, though it has other slang definitions not suitable for a family news website, which inspired mockery online and from Stephen Colbert. According to Pompeo, though, a pipehitter is basically a Pompeo super fan. Facebook ads run by CAVPAC in Pompeos home state of Kansas and the four early primary/caucus states define pipehitter as someone who is unapologetically American, someone who fights for our future, someone who never gives an inch, someone who is dedicated to stand against the radical Lefts agenda.

In non-pipehitter news, a recent joint investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica found Pompeo has been the subject of Chinese propaganda campaign that included coordinated videos of Uyghurs calling Pompeos accusations of Chinese human rights abuses false. In January, the State Department declared that the Chinese Communist Party was committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, and Pompeo called it the stain of the century.

One thing Scott has going for him that other potential 2024 contenders do not is a bunch of their endorsements. Scotts up for reelection next year, and in an ad kicking off his campaign released last week, Republicans including Cruz, Pompeo, Haley and Pence all backed his candidacy. Scott is positioning himself as a Trump-friendly conservative. In his ad, he included a clip of Trump calling him a friend of mine, and at a rally for his reelection, Scott said he wanted to make sure this wasnt a centrist crowd after asking them to boo Biden louder, according to The State.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., arrives as senators go to the chamber for votes at the Capitol in Washington on May 27, 2021.

J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press

Cotton needs to work on his pushups. The 44-year-old senator did 22 pushups onstage at a Republican fundraiser in Iowa alongside Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and he barely had any depth. Grassleys werent any better, but he gets a pass for being 87 years old, and he runs four days a week. The contest was for a good cause: to raise awareness of the average 22 veterans a day who take their life.

Cottons remarks at the fundraiser were an early preview of what could become a campaign stump speech. He attacked Biden, critical race theory and China, according to KCCI in Des Moines. He also offered his full throated endorsement of the Iowa caucus, which is something candidates who want to win the Iowa caucus do.

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., speaks at a North Little Rock, Ark., news conference on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014.

Danny Johnston, Associated Press

Why should there be any change to the Republicans first in the nation status just because the Democrats cant run a caucus? Cotton said, referencing Democrats delayed caucus results in 2020. Iowa has had this status now going back decades and that develops more than just a custom or habit, it develops a tradition of civic engagement unlike you see almost anywhere else in the country.

Noem is among the potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates whove been overshadowed recently by other top contenders, but shes back in the news over the border. Though Noems not a border state governor, she announced last week that shes sending up to 50 South Dakota National Guard members to Texas to secure the border at the request of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

The tab is being picked up by an out-of-state megadonor whos also given to Trump and the NRA, according to The Washington Post. Its unclear if the arrangement is legal, experts who spoke to The New York Times said, and Gov. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., said the move sets a bad precedent.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks at the Sioux Falls City Hall in Sioux Falls, S.D., on June 22, 2020.

Stephen Groves, Associated Press

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2024 Republican candidate forecast: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ron ...

Once in your life you probably mixed up the concepts republican and conservative, believing that they were the same. Even though they believe in similar things, these are very different concepts.

Keep on reading to discover whats the difference between republicans and conservatives.

For starters, no, a republican is not a synonym for a conservative person. They have pretty similar world and political views. However, theyre not necessarily the same. Some key details make them different.

So, to understand the difference between these two political stands, youll need to pay attention to some details and minor information. Lets see why conservatives are not the same as republicans.

The biggest and most important difference between them is that Republicans are members of a political party, the Republican Party of the United States of America, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP).

The conservatives are people who advocate for social conservatism and/or fiscal conservatism. There is a big variety of conservatives groups, which makes it hard to explicit who is who.

The United States has two major parties: the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Overall, the Republican Party is known as a conservative party a party that advocates for social conservatism and/or fiscal conservatism. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, advocates for progressivism, a political philosophy that supports social reforms.

Thats the reason why Republicans are known as conservative people. But that does not mean that every conservative person is a Republican.

Every country in the world has its own vision of what the conservative philosophy is.

The United States conservative philosophy is social and political that wants to protect and bring back United States traditions, republicanism, and limited federal governmental power concerning the states. They want to simplify government and states rights.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president to be elected in 1861.

Overall, the Republican Party is predominated by white men, people that live in rural areas, members of the Silent Generation (1928-1954) and Baby Boomers (1946-1964), and evangelical Christians, especially the white ones.

There are 36 million United States citizens under the Republican Party membership, according to a March 2021 ballot.

The United States conservative philosophy is a social and political philosophy. It supports individualism, American exceptionalism, American traditions, republicanism, moral universalism, Judeo-Christian values and is generally pro-capitalism and pro-business.

It is common for conservative people to advocate for free trade, and a strong national defense. And because of their Christian values, many conservative people are against abortion, same-sex marriage, and civil unions. It is also common that conservative people fight against communism (or what they believe that communism is), socialism, and moral relativism.

What conservatives want the most is to preserve the old ways of living, emphasizing a lot on individuals rights.

Conservatives are less supportive of compensatory approaches for those who have been marginalized in civil rights. That includes black people, immigrants, women, Indigenous people, and LGBT+ people.

To them, the federal government should provide to the states government. And it should not have importance in deciding what happens to the states. Every state has to government by itself, protecting the states political independence.

There are also the United States fiscal conservatives, a more political philosophy than social. And its most important and known idea is to minimize the size of federal and state government, which would minimize the governments role.

The income taxes for individuals and businesses should be minimized. And institutions just like the financial industry should be deregulated. Fiscal conservatives believe that a fully capitalist economy is the right way to go.

They believe that the governments role should be small. Meaning, many social services should become privatized, such as education, health insurance, retirement investments, security, and more.

The Republicans believe in almost the same things that the conservatives do. The free market, individualism, Judeo-Christian values, American exceptionalism, republicanism, American traditions, a strong national defense, free trade, limited government, and states rights are supported by Republicans.

Theyre, overall, against abortion, moral relativism, socialism, communism, Marxism, civil unions, and same-sex marriage.

Theyre also opposed to compensatory approaches to marginalized groups. These groups include immigrants (especially the Latin ones), black and Asian people, women, LGBT+ people, Indigenous people, etc.

Republicans not all of them are against higher tax rates for higher earners. They believe that this is unfair since the richer are supposedly the ones that create jobs and wealth for the country.

They are against a single-payer health care system. And they believe that is better for the private sector to help poor people through charity than the government to help them through welfare programs and social assistance programs.

No. Conservatives are part of the right-wing. However, the right-wing has more philosophies and political visions than only the conservative.

Inside the right-wing party, you can find nationalists, fascists, classical liberals, the far-right, Christian democrats, and the conservatives.

The New Right that came from the political views after the Cold War is based on the following values: free market, individual initiative, small government, and liberal conservatism.

According to the British academics Roger Eatwell and Nol OSullivan, the right is divided into five types: reactionary, moderate, radical, extreme, and new that I already explained.

The reactionary right is the one that values the past a lot, wanting to keep those old aristocratic, religious, and authoritarian values.

The moderate right can tolerate change if its gradual. It accepts some aspects of liberalism, and sometimes can even be confused with liberalism itself. The moderate right is known for its love for capitalism, nationalism and it can promote social welfare policies.

The radical right is a term created after World War II events, and some of the biggest examples of it are the following ideologies: Thatcherism, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the German Republican Party (Republikaner Party).

Finally, the extreme right is most known for these 4 traits: anti-democracy, nationalism, racism, and strong state.

There are multiple types of research and articles trying to find in what side fascism is.

Overall, its believed that this ideology is part of the far-right, being an example of its extremist belief. However, some historians believe that this ideology does not belong on any side, it kind of has a side of its own.

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Republican vs Conservative: What's the Difference? - Differencely

House passes bill to protect same-sex marriage, moves to Senate vote

All Democratic members of Congress along with 47 Republicans voted for the bill which would codify into law protections for same-sex marriage.

Patrick Colson-Price, USA TODAY

Three of Iowa's four U.S. representatives voted Tuesday to protect the right to same-sex and interracial marriages, as Democrats seek to protect constitutional rights they fear are at risk from the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. Reps. Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Cindy Axne voted forthe Respect for Marriage Act, which passed the House on a 267-157 vote Tuesday night. Axne is a Democrat and Hinson and Miller-Meeks are Republicans. In all, 47 Republicans joined Democrats to vote in favor of the bill.

Rep. Randy Feenstra, a Republican who represents Iowa's 4th Congressional District, voted against the legislation.

The Respect for Marriage Act would require the federal government torecognize marriages as long as they were valid in the state where the marriage took place. It also bans states from denying recognition to out-of-state marriages based on the sex, race, ethnicity or origin of those getting married.

The new legislation would repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman. That lawis still on the books but was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, when it held same-sex marriage was a constitutional right.

More: House votes to codify same-sex marriage, fearing Supreme Court revisiting 2015 decision

Congressional Democrats are moving to hold votes protecting the rights to same-sex and interracial marriage and contraception afterthe U.S. Supreme Court last month overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the nationwide right to an abortion. Democrats fear the high court may roll back other rights established via court decision and are moving to codify them into law.

In his concurrence in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the Supreme Court to "reconsider" other rights established by the high court, including the right to contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. No other justice joined Thomas' concurrence, but it sparked alarm among Democrats.

The House has already voted for a bill that would codify abortion rights into law in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. Axne, of West Des Moines,was the only member of Iowa's House delegation to vote in favor of that legislation.

Axne issued a statement Tuesday saying "marriage equality is under threat" and citing Thomas' opinion.

"Today I voted yes on the Respect for Marriage Act to enshrine marriage equality in federal law and ensure same-sex and interracial marriages will continue to be recognized," Axne said in a statement. "I will continue fighting in Congress to protect these rights."

More: Kim Reynolds, Chuck Grassley tout abortion court win at conservative Christian event

Hinson, ofMarion, issued a statement urging Democrats to turn their focus to economic issues like addressing inflation and high gas prices.

"I voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation that respects & maintains settled law," Hinson wrote on Twitter."Now, Democrats need to focus on policies that will help families: lowering costs for groceries & gas, securing our border to keep our communities safe & getting our economy working again."

Feenstra, of Hull, and Miller-Meeks, ofOttumwa, did not issue statements about their votes.

Iowa was the third state in the nationto legalize same-sex marriage, via a unanimous 2009 Iowa Supreme Court decision in the case of Varnum v. Brien.

That decision prompted conservatives to mount a campaign against three of the court's justices who faced retention elections in 2010. All three justices were ousted.

Iowa's high court also ruled abortion was a fundamental right in 2018, but overturned that decision this year.

It's not clear if the marriage legislation has enough support to pass in the U.S. Senate and ultimately become law. The legislation would need at least 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and Democrats currently hold 50 seats.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican, downplayed the possibility that the Supreme Court could revisit the right to same-sex marriage.

"Well, the right to gay marriage is not currently an issue simply because one justice mentioned it very briefly in a previous decision in a concurrence that he wrote," Grassley said. "It takes more than just one justice to consider the case. I'm also not aware of any pending challenges to any of the other decisions that this bill agrees with."

"But I do want you to know that I'm going to read the text in the House bill, and we'll wait and see if that is going to come up in the United States Senate," he .

Brendan Conley, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican, said Ernst "is keeping a very open mind about this legislation" and plans to read and review the bill's text if it is brought up in the Senate.

"I have a good number of very close friends that are same-sex married," Ernsttold national reporters Wednesday.

Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.

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Two Republican Iowa lawmakers join Democrats in voting to protect same ...

The tweet comes after Cox clinched a victory in his primary battle on Tuesday, defeating former state Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz, a moderate who was backed by Hogan. Cox could face Wes Moore, a political newcomer and bestselling author backed by Oprah Winfrey, as his Democratic opponent in the general election.

Coxs win was praised by Trump loyalists and is being viewed by some as part of a broader battle between two competing visions for the party.

Trump was among those who praised the victory, and he also took aim at Hogan just before the race was called, saying: RINO Larry Hogans Endorsement doesnt seem to be working out so well for his heavily favored candidate. Next, Id love to see Larry run for President!

But the win also excited some on the other side of the aisle, after the campaign got a boost from an unlikely source: the Democratic Governors Association, which touted Coxs pro-Trump record and policies in a strategy aimed at making Democratic candidates more desirable in the general election.

Ultimately, Democrats want to run against the weakest candidate, Democratic strategist Don Calloway said on MSNBC on Wednesday, saying that Cox is crazy enough to be repulsive to the moderate or undecided voter.

A Trump loyalist, Cox called former Vice President Mike Pence a traitor after he certified election results for Joe Biden during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. Cox also reportedly arranged buses to Trumps Jan. 6 rally, where the then-president urged his supporters to march to the Capitol.

Coxs positions have raised tensions with more moderate members of the party, including Hogan.

During the early days of the pandemic, Cox called for the governors impeachment over stay-at-home orders and other measures aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19. Cox alluded to the rivalry during his victory speech on Tuesday.

We will never again give over our bodies, our churches and our businesses to a lockdown state, Cox said.

Hogan, who has served two terms, remains highly popular in a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-to-1. A recent poll from Goucher College showed that 84 percent of Democrats would not consider supporting Cox during the general election.

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Larry Hogan snubs Republican victor in Maryland, escalating Trump proxy war - POLITICO

WASHINGTON One hundred million Americans from Arizona to Boston are under heat emergency warnings, and the drought in the West is nearing Dust Bowl proportions. Britain declared a climate emergency as temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of blistering Europe are ablaze.

But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans were warning against rash action in response to the burning planet.

I dont want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change, said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, last week blocked what could have been the countrys most far-reaching American response to climate change. But lost in the recriminations and finger-pointing is the other side of the aisle: All 50 Republicans in the Senate have been as opposed to decisive action to confront planetary warming.

Few Republicans in Congress now outwardly dismiss the scientific evidence that human activities the burning of oil, gas and coal have produced gases that are dangerously heating the Earth.

But for many, denial of the cause of global temperature rise has been replaced by an insistence that the solution replacing fossil fuels over time with wind, solar and other nonpolluting energy sources will hurt the economy.

In short, delay is the new denial.

Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say that they believe that the United States should be drilling and burning more American oil, gas and coal, and that market forces would somehow develop solutions to the carbon dioxide that has been building in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a blanket around a sweltering Earth.

Im not in a position to tell you what the solution is, but for the president to shut down the production of oil and gas in the United States is not going to help, said Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho.

President Biden is not proposing to shut down fossil fuel production. He wants to use tax credits and other incentives to speed up the development of wind, solar, and other low-carbon energy, and to make electric vehicles more affordable.

The fact that scientists say nations must quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions or global rising temperatures will reach catastrophic levels does not appear to faze many conservatives.

In many ways, elected Republicans mirror the views of their voters. A May poll commissioned by Pew Research Center found 63 percent of Democrats named climate change as a very big problem, while just 16 percent of Republicans felt the same.

Build Back Better. Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. articulated his ambitious vision for his administration under the slogan Build Back Better, promising to invest in clean energyand to ensure that procurement spending went toward American-made products.

A two-part agenda. March and April 2021:President Biden unveiled two plans that together formed the core of his domestic agenda: the American Jobs Plan, focused on infrastructure, and the American Families Plan, which included a variety of social policy initiatives.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Nov. 15, 2021: President Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law,the result of months of negotiations. The president hailed the package, a pared-back version of what had been outlined in the American Jobs Plan, as evidence that U.S. lawmakers could still work across party lines.

The Democratic Party has made climate change a religion and their solutions are draconian, said Mr. Graham, who accepts the science of global warming. He is among a handful of Republicans who support putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions to encourage industries to clean up their operations.

But Mr. Graham dismissed Mr. Bidens goal of cutting U.S. emissions by half by 2030, to try keep average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. Thats the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic impacts increases significantly. The planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Mr. Graham repeated a common refrain among Republicans that it would be foolish for the United States, historically the country that has emitted the most carbon dioxide, to reduce its pollution unless other big polluters like China and India do the same.

The point to me is to get the world to participate, not just us, he said.

So it has gone with the Republican Party, where warnings of a catastrophe are mocked as hyperbole, where technologies that do not exist on a viable scale, such as carbon capture and storage and clean coal, are hailed as saviors. At the same time, those that do, such as wind and solar power and electric vehicles, are dismissed as unreliable and overly expensive. American leadership on a global problem is seen as a fools errand, kneecapping the domestic economy while Indian and Chinese coal bury Americas good intentions in soot.

When China gets our good air, their bad airs got to move, Herschel Walker, a former football star and now a Republican candidate in Georgia for the Senate, explained last week. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now weve got to clean that back up.

The partys political attacks often center on the symptoms of the climate crisis as they point to Central American climate refugees massing at the southern border, poor forest management as wildfires burn, and environmentalists who deprive farmers of water in record droughts.

For decades, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry denied the science of climate change. That has slowly started to change as the evidence that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate has become undeniable, and started to resonate with moderate and independent voters.

Last month Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, made public a conservative road map to address climate change. Lawmakers also have started a House Conservative Climate Caucus to discuss solutions that Republicans can support.

But Mr. McCarthys climate plan calls for increasing fossil fuel production. And last Thursday, when the Conservative Climate Caucus met with business executives to discuss climate change, the gathering was dominated by talk of more oil and gas drilling. Executives from fossil fuel companies also criticized new federal rules that require them to disclose their business risks from global warming, according to a Republican lawmaker who was at the meeting.

Denial used to be the way to delay, said Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Now, he said of Republican lawmakers theyve got to come up with some other way to delay.

Republicans involved in the issue say there has been clear movement from the day in 2015 when Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that global warming was a myth. Some Republicans privately acknowledge that bipartisan trips to see the glaciers melting in Greenland have settled any doubts they had about what is happening to the planet.

House Republicans have a series of incremental steps that they say they will pass if they win the majority in November: encouraging investments in American renewable energy and the restoration of forests and wetlands to absorb carbon dioxide. Senators Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, and Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, have proposed a carbon tariff on imports from countries that are doing less than the United States to stem climate change.

Yet many of those same lawmakers reject the idea that climate change is an urgent threat.

If Republicans win the House or Senate in Novembers midterm elections, I think you can expect a much more aggressive approach to domestic energy production, Mr. Cramer said this week. That doesnt mean we abandon climate as part of the agenda, but rather focus more on technologies that advance all forms of American energy.

One Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, called on Tuesday for a reasonable transition to clean energy. Democrats, he said, are trying to move far more quickly than technology and the economy can absorb.

Republicans say Mr. Biden, pushed hard by uncompromising climate activists on the left, took such a maximalist approach to climate legislation that its collapse was inevitable.

The far left has screwed this up so badly that Republicans might actually enact the first real action on climate change, said Benjamin Backer, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a right-of-center environmental organization.

But even Republicans who are trying to address the effects of climate change in their home states appear to find it difficult to recognize the root cause of the problem. Last week, three Utah Republicans, Senator Mitt Romney and Representatives Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens, proposed legislation to save the shriveling Great Salt Lake before its dusty remains choke the capital city that shares its name.

But absent from the proposal which included Army Corps of Engineers monitoring programs, ecosystem management and potential technologies to redirect water, reinforce canals and address drought was any mention of climate change.

The same went for an appeal on Friday from Mr. McCarthy, to save the giant sequoias in his district from fire and drought. In an opinion piece he co-authored in Time, Mr. McCarthy blamed decades of fire suppression and misinformed policies for year-round forest fires in his state, obliquely referring to worsening drought conditions and extreme heat without once mentioning climate change.

One of his co-authors, Representative Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped draft the Save Our Sequoias bill, declined to say why climate change went unmentioned in the Time piece, but he did say, I wholeheartedly believe climate change is fueling catastrophic wildfires in the southwest. He added of the bill, As far as Im concerned, they can tell the world that birthday cakes are starting these fires as long as we get the damn thing to the presidents desk.

Republicans grappling with the undeniable reality of climate change still struggle with a philosophical aversion to intervening in energy markets or, they would most likely say, in any markets at all. Left unsaid are federal tax breaks totaling as much as $20 billion a year that the fossil fuel industry enjoys and that Republicans, and some Democrats, support.

Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina and a founding member of the Conservative Climate Caucus, said she recognized the policy imperative to address climate change. But she called tax credits to steer consumers to electric vehicles or electric utilities toward renewable energy sources like wind or solar power picking winners and losers. She said Congress should simply cut taxes and let consumers and businesses decide how to use the extra money.

Id personally love to buy an electric vehicle, so lets cut taxes for everybody and allow people to afford things they otherwise could not afford, she said.

In a back-and-forth on Tuesday with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, dismissed the administrations push for electric vehicles, saying the price was $55,000, beyond the reach of most Americans even with the presidents proposal for a $7,500 federal tax credit on some vehicles. Mr. Buttigieg replied that a Chevrolet Bolt costs $26,595, and electric pickup trucks like Chevy Silverado or Ford F150 Lightning start around $39,000. He added that he bought a used plug-in Ford C-Max hybrid with 15,000 miles on it for $14,000.

Bob Inglis, a former Republican House member who lost his 2010 primary in part because he backed climate action, insisted that his party had made huge progress since then.

Im convinced were going to act on climate change, Mr. Inglis said. Its just whether were going to act soon enough to avoid the worst consequences.

Read more:

Delay as the New Denial: The Latest Republican Tactic to Block Climate Action - The New York Times

Then-Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, flanked by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, right, and Republican Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, criticizes Democrats' impeachment of then-President Donald Trump in December 2019. Now she is trying to convince the public that Trump is to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Samuel Corum/Getty Images hide caption

Then-Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, flanked by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, right, and Republican Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, criticizes Democrats' impeachment of then-President Donald Trump in December 2019. Now she is trying to convince the public that Trump is to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In the midst of former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, then-White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says he called her into his office at the front of Air Force One. He had been watching one of the hearings and didn't like what he saw.

"He screamed at me, lots of expletives, told me how useless I was," she said. Her sin: "not enough people were on TV defending him."

Despite the former president's apparent dissatisfaction, in 2019 and early 2020 there was a wide-reaching, highly coordinated effort to defend him in the court of public opinion. That isn't the case now, as the House Select Committee on January 6th wraps up its series of summer hearings in prime time Thursday night.

Republican leaders boycotted the hearings, so unlike Trump's televised impeachment trials, viewers haven't seen a vigorous defense of his actions from the dais. And there's not much of a broader outside defense of Trump, either.

During the first impeachment, over Trump's withholding of military assistance to Ukraine and efforts to strong-arm the country's leader into launching an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, the Republican National Committee, congressional Republicans, outside groups, the Trump campaign and a large team at the White House all had a coordinated strategy.

"The president had a dedicated White House staff of press relations people and communications people and lawyers to put together rapid responses," said Steven Groves, who as a deputy press secretary worked on Trump's impeachment defense.

Outside groups ran dozens of TV ads targeting members of Congress over impeachment and defending Trump, calling it "the radical left's impeachment obsession" and a "witch hunt" and a "travesty." There were nonstop cable hits from Trump-friendly surrogates and regular press conferences at the Capitol.

At a press conference in late September 2019, none other than Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney came to Trump's defense.

"Ever since President Trump was elected, the House Democrats have been careening from impeachment theory to impeachment theory," she said in her capacity as a member of the House Republican leadership. "But what we see repeatedly is a complete lack of focus on concern about evidence and facts."

Today, excommunicated from leadership for her criticism of Trump and Jan. 6, Cheney is vice chair of the House select committee, arguing Trump is a threat to democracy. But other congressional Republicans, still in his corner, simply aren't defending Trump in the same way they did during the first impeachment.

A decision by Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, not to name anyone to the committee means the Jan. 6 hearings are a one-sided presentation of evidence, more like a grand jury proceeding than a trial. They are nothing like a traditional congressional hearing with the whiplash of representatives from both parties scoring partisan points and asking leading questions. But the sorts of press conferences led by Trump allies in Congress that were standard during impeachment have all but disappeared along with the flood of cable appearances.

"There hasn't been as much of a sort of day-to-day focus from the congressional members who go on Fox as there was in the past," said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the progressive group Media Matters for America. Part of the reason for that, he said, is they aren't on the committee, so they don't have insight to add about the committee's inner workings and they don't have clips of explosive hearing exchanges to talk around.

"Fox News and others in the right wing media are spending less time engaging on a point-by-point basis than they did, say, during Donald Trump's first impeachment," said Gertz, whose job is to closely monitor the conservative media ecosystem.

And there isn't a defense during the commercial breaks, either. An analysis from the tracking firm AdImpact found more than 120 different anti-impeachment ads in 2019 and 2020. Some were from candidates, including Trump, but most were from outside groups. This time around there have been fewer than 20 ads mentioning the Jan. 6 investigation and those are mostly ads for primary candidates running against anti-Trump Republicans.

Groves says a big reason for the lower-octane public defense is simply that Trump is no longer president. The infrastructure that was around the president doesn't exist for the post-presidency.

"It's just not there anymore," said Groves. "He can't even go on Twitter and rapid-response on his own."

Trump was kicked off of Twitter on the day of the riot at the Capitol.

Other than a skeleton crew of staff working for Trump in his post-presidential office, who didn't respond to a request for comment, there's no one whose job it is to publicly defend him. Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, says there's no reason the RNC should be going to bat for him, especially with the midterms coming.

"The RNC and Republicans on Capitol Hill know they are poised for a great election year and what's the biggest thing that could be a hurdle to that? Donald Trump, who is not their principal anymore," Heye said. "So it's not their job to defend him and sometimes you just don't want to defend the indefensible."

A big argument from Trump allies is that these hearings are one-sided and dull. Filling inboxes and airwaves with rapid response messaging could undermine that argument.

"We really prepared for this epic battle and we also prepared for it to be a dud," said Matt Schlapp, who runs the pro-Trump group CPAC. It created a "J6Facts" Twitter account, which has about 2,000 followers now, and hired extra consultants, Schlapp said.

"It was a little dramatic in the beginning but over time it's been more of a dud," he said.

Of course, he has a reason to say that. When he is invited to appear on Fox News and its competitors, Schlapp largely discusses inflation, immigration and crime, themes that are getting a lot more airtime than the hearings, and that Republicans see as a winning message for the midterms.

Schlapp says the stakes just feel lower with these hearings than they did with impeachment because "They can't do anything to the president. They can't prevent him from running."

If the hearings break through, with no coordinated defense of Trump's reputation, it could hurt his chances should he run for president again.

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With midterms in sight, few Republicans are defending Trump as they did in 2019 - NPR

Rusty Bowers, the Arizona house speaker who testified to the January 6 committee about how he resisted Donald Trumps attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the sun belt state, has been formally censured by his own Republican party.

Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican party, said on Tuesday its executive committee formally censured Rusty Bowers tonight he is no longer a Republican in good standing and we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary.

Ward released a copy of the formal censure, which included killing all meaningful election integrity bills among Bowers alleged misdeeds and called on Arizona voters to expel him permanently from office.

Bowers testified to the House January 6 committee on 21 June. Discussing Trumps claim that Bowers told him the Arizona election was rigged, Bowers said: Anyone, anywhere, anytime I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.

Bowers also recalled a conversation with Rudy Giuliani in which Trumps personal lawyer, a key player in the attempt to prove mass electoral fraud, allegedly said: Weve got lots of theories but we just dont have the evidence.

Bowers also spoke about how his Christian faith motivated his defiance of Trump, and described threats made to his safety by Trump supporters while his daughter lay mortally ill.

Like Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee and its vice-chair, Bowers was given a Profile in Courage award for his resistance to Trump.

After the hearing at which he appeared, though, it emerged that Bowers had previously told the Associated Press: If [Trump] is the nominee [in 2024], if he was up against [Joe] Biden, Id vote for him again. Simply because what he did the first time, before Covid, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.

This month, Bowers told the Deseret News he might have changed his mind.

I dont want the choice of having to look at [Trump] again, he said. And if it comes, Ill be hard pressed. I dont know what Ill do.

But Im not inclined to support him. Because he doesnt represent my party. He doesnt represent the morals and the platform of my party

That guy is just hes his own party. Its a party of intimidation and I dont like it. So Im not going to be boxed by, Who am I gonna vote for? Because thats between me and God. But Im not happy with him.

And Im not happy with the thought that a robust primary cant produce somebody better than Trump, for crying out loud.

He also told Business Insider: Much of what [Trump] has done has been tyrannical, especially of late. I think that there are elements of tyranny that anybody can practice on any given day, and I feel like Ive seen a lot of it.

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Arizona Republican censured by party over testimony on resisting Trump - The Guardian US

Once the backbone of the Democratic base, working-class white voters have been migrating toward the Republican Party since the 1960s, largely out of alienation from the Democrats liberal stands on cultural and racial issues. Half a century later, those working-class white votersusually defined as having less than a four-year college educationhave become the indisputable foundation of the Republican coalition, especially in the era of Donald Trump.

Now a chorus of centrist and right-leaning political analysts are claiming that the same shift has begun among working-class nonwhite voters, especially Latinos.

Were seeing a political realignment in real time, Axios insisted in a recent analysis. Democrats are becoming the party of upscale voters concerned more about issues like gun control and abortion rights. Republicans are quietly building a multiracial coalition of working-class voters, with inflation as an accelerant.

If correct, these claims would offset, or even eliminate, the advantage Democrats expect from the demographic change that has steadily increased the share of the vote cast by people of color by about two percentage points every four years. Growth among working-class Latino voters, in particular, would offer the Republicans an escape from the demographic cul-de-sac in which their core constituencies of non-college-educated and white Christian voters have each fallen to only about two-fifths of the total population.

Geraldo L. Cadava: Theres no such thing as the Latino vote

Theres no disagreement that Trump, despite all the controversies surrounding his hard-line immigration policies and his often harsh rhetoric about immigrants, ran better among Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. And theres no dispute that President Joe Bidens approval rating among Latinos has sagged, just as it has in most polls among other groups.

But whether these results amount to a lasting realignment among working-class Latino voters is much more disputedas is the assertion that rejection of liberal cultural values is the principal cause of the recent Democratic difficulties with them. I would say theres a difference between a dominant narrative and dominant data, Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster who specializes in Latino voters, told me.

The best evidence in polling and election results suggests that claims of a fundamental shift among non-college-educated Latino voters (who comprise about 85 percent of all U.S. Latinos) is, at best, wildly premature. But that doesnt mean that the ground isnt shaking in the Latino community.

The only honest answer is that nobody actually knows, and its maddening the extent to which we are not acknowledging the uncertainty here, Carlos Odio, the senior vice president of Equis Research, a Democratic firm that focuses on Latino voters, told me. He believes that those who claim Democrats face an irreversible death spiral with Latinos are exaggerating this moment. But even so, the degree of uncertainty and variability right now should be nerve-racking for Democrats, he said.

The major data sources about the election results differ on exactly how much stronger Trump performed last election, but broadly they suggest that Biden won Latino voters in 2020 by roughly 30 percentage points, after Hillary Clinton had carried them in 2016 by about 40 percentage points.

The shift was most visible in South Florida (with its large population of Cuban Americans and immigrants from Central and South America) and South Texas (with a large culturally conservative population of rural and small-town Mexican Americans). But gains for Trump were evident in every key state. Demographically, he found support across a wide range of groups as well, but the most important change may have been that, in 2020, a considerably higher share of Latinos who identify as conservative voted Republican than in 2016 or 2012, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. Taken together, all of these factors pushed Trumps Latino support to about 35 percentwell above his 2016 showing but in range of what Republicans have carried in many other presidential races since 1980.

Bidens standing among Latinos has fallen sharply; multiple recent polls place his approval rating among them at less than 50 percent and sometimes at as little as 40 percent. Bidens fall has exerted a downward pull on Latino support for other Democrats, with multiple surveys showing the party holding a much narrower advantage among them than usual in the so-called generic ballot for the House of Representatives.

These two dynamics are propelling claims that Latinos are undergoing a structural realignment, in which more of them are recoiling from woke cultural liberalism and concluding that the GOP better reflects their values.

While there certainly was a white vs. black dimension to the working class realignment of the 1960s, today its mostly just white progressives against everyone else, Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, insisted in a recent tweet. Hispanic voters will find a religious connection with many, many white Republicans, and that religious connection can prove far more culturally and politically consequential than any effort to create a politics based on ethnic or racial identity, David French, a conservative writer critical of Trump (and an Atlantic contributor), recently declared. Almost daily, a different New York Times writer offers some version of the claim that, as David Leonhardt wrote last week, the social liberalism of Democratson immigration, marijuana, L.G.B.T. rights, affirmative action, abortion and morehas simultaneously attracted progressive college graduates and repelled more culturally conservative working-class voters.

In making these claims, the realignment camp is using something of a double standard. It argues that Republicans have become a multiracial working-class coalition even though the major data sourcesincluding the exit polls; the analysis done by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm; and the Pew Research Centers Validated Voters studyall show that Trump carried only about one-fourth of nonwhite voters without a college degree in 2020. Each of those sources showed that Biden actually carried a notably higher share of white voters without a college degree (about one-third or more). Yet that performance purportedly leaves Democrats as a party solely of upscale voters, while the weaker showing among nonwhite non-college-educated voters earns Republicans credit as a multiracial coalition of working-class voters.

Still, the Catalist and exit-poll data both show that Trump in 2020 improved the GOP performance among those non-college-educated minority voters from 2012, when each found that Mitt Romney carried only about one-sixth of them, and from 2016, when both found that Trump carried about one-fifth. The question is why.

In a recent article, the longtime Democratic demographic and electoral analyst Ruy Teixeira, a leading proponent of the realignment theory, cited polling from Ruffinis firm to bolster his argument that Democrats emphasis on social and democracy issues, while catnip to some socially liberal, educated voters, leaves many working class and Hispanic voters cold. Teixeira pointed to results in Ruffinis poll that showed Latinos leaning toward Republican positions on specific issues, particularly in their support for increasing funding for police and for requiring transgender kids to play in sports that match their assigned sex at birth. But mostly he highlighted the divergence in the poll between the attitudes of Latinos and self-defined progressives on broad statements of values, such as whether America is the greatest country in the world, racism is structurally built into American society, or that hard work guarantees success. In each case, Latinos took positions much less critical of American society.

Read: The new swing voters

Its far from clear that most Democratic officeholders, as opposed to liberal activists and organizers, would really answer those basic values questions very differently than most Latinos did. But even leaving that aside, that list omits many of the most important choices that government officials at all levels actually face on cultural issues. And on those issues, preponderant majorities of Latinosincluding those without a college degreeexpress views that place them in the Democratic mainstream and in direct opposition to the dominant position in the Republican Party.

Take abortion. In recent polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, two-thirds of Latinos said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. The survey also found that big majorities of Latinos opposed the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, measures Republican-controlled states are discussing to prohibit women from traveling across state lines to seek an abortion, and prohibiting women from receiving abortion medication through the mail.

On gun control, the split was similar: A majority of Latinos took positions that align with Democrats and directly collide with the dominant view among Republicans. In 2021 polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about two-thirds of Latinosincluding more than three-fifths of those without a college degreesaid they believed gun laws should be made more strict and supported a ban on both assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. About four-fifths of Latinos opposed the proliferating red-state policy of allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

There is data right now that says Latinos are angry about the overstepping of Republicans on abortion, Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a group that mobilizes support for causes and candidates that focus on communities of color, told me. Simultaneously, she said, the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, was a massive flashpoint for Latino communities across the country around gun reform.

Likewise, a huge gulf separates Latino voters from Republicans on the biggest issues surrounding immigration. Polling (like the Ruffini survey cited by Teixeira) has found that many Latinos, like other voters, do not embrace radical calls for an open border or unconstrained illegal immigration. But nearly nine in 10 Latinos in Pews poll supported legal status for Dreamers, an idea blocked by the Republican Senate coalition. In PRRI polling, more than two-thirds of Latinos opposed Trumps efforts to build a border wall and large majorities of Latinos think undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. should be eligible for citizenship, another idea opposed by almost all House and Senate Republicans.

Most broadly, about three-fifths of all Latinos, including roughly that many Latinos without a college education, agreed in the PRRI polling that the Republican Party has been taken over by racists. By contrast, only about one-third of Latinosroughly the GOPs typical level of support in most presidential electionsagreed with the statement that socialists have taken over the Democratic Party.

Charles Coughlin, a longtime GOP consultant in Arizona, told me he believes conservative inclinations on some cultural and economic issues should allow his party to improve its performance with Latino voters. But he says he remains uncertain that Republicans can exploit that opportunity because of how the party is presenting itself in the Trump era. You dont hear Republicans talking about values anymore that bring people together, he said. Its always that government is this existential threat and they are out to get you. I dont find that to be a narrative thats popular with a lot of bread-and-butter Hispanic voters. [Republicans] talk themselves out of the room.

Yet none of this means that the Democrats who study Latino voters see no risks in the current trends. Amandi, the Democratic pollster, says the party has created opportunities for Republicans with the unforced errors of using rhetoric such as Defund the police and Latinx, which he says alienates many Latino voters. Odio, of Equis, says the threat facing Democrats in most places is not so much their positions on social and cultural issues, but the spreading perception that they prioritize those questions over the economic concerns paramount for most Latino families.

The challenge for Democrats, Odio told me, is when Latinos see their emphasis on cultural issues as evidence that Democrats are not prioritizing jobs and the economy. Still, he noted that the question of possibly mismatched priorities is very different from concluding that a growing number of Latinos now feel closer to Republican values, as those promoting the realignment theory maintain. Where some of the current commentators take it another step forward is the idea that there is an outright rejection to what Democrats believe in, and thats the one I feel is not totally borne out by the data, Odio said.

Like Amandi and others, Odio attributes the GOP gains among Latinos since 2020 less to long-term cultural factors than to near-term economic onesfirst a belief among them that Trump was more committed than Biden to reopening the economy during earlier stages of the pandemic and, more recently, that Biden isnt significantly concerned with addressing intense dissatisfaction over inflation. The 2020 election exit poll bolsters the conclusion that economic considerations have predominated. According to results provided to me by Edison, Trump won more than 90 percent of Latinos who felt he could better manage the economyand just 6 percent of those who thought Biden would do a better job producing prosperity.

Now, though, in polling by Navigator Research, a consortium of Democratic pollsters, three-fifths of non-college-educated Latino voters said they were uneasy about their current financial situation. Everybody is looking for all the reasons for Bidens decline with Latinos, and its like the suspect is there holding the smoking gun and its always the frickin economy, Odio said.

To some Democrats, the economy shifts the arrow of blame. While centrists point fingers at the left for advancing cultural positions and language unpopular with Latinos, liberals say the real culprit is the partys moderate wingparticularly Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinemawho have derailed the economic assistance embodied in Bidens Build Back Better legislation, which enjoyed strong Latino support in Navigator polling.

Geraldo L. Cadava: The battle for Latino voters in the Rust Belt

Gavito, the Way to Win president, told me that the critics of cultural liberals are aiming at the wrong target. I wish they would bring some of that ire to Joe Manchin to ask why he kicked out the legs from our stool on a really solid economic argument behind Build Back Better, she said. Is the real problem, she added, that Democrats are losing touch with working-class voters because a group of movement leaders responding to the George Floyd uprising made a bold request of our policing system, or is it more likely that the powers that be who can actually vote on big economic packages just arent moving?

Teixeira, who recently relocated from the liberal Center for American Progress to the center-right American Enterprise Institute, doesnt buy any of that. He told me hes dubious that Democrats can push their Latino support back into the 2-to-1 range they once enjoyed even if the economy is roaring. He thinks Democrats will need massive changes in their program to prevent further erosion among Latinos, including a much less expensive domestic agenda, more support for domestic fossil-fuel production, and a completely revamped social agenda. They would talk less about race, period, he said. They would talk less about gender. They would not go down the road of wading into all these very arcane and difficult, contentious trans issues. They would not use language that sounds like it comes out of, in James Carvilles immortal words, the faculty lounge.

Some change in Latino loyalties seems irreversible. In particular, the increased willingness of self-identified conservative Latinos to vote Republican has likely raised the share of the Latino vote the GOP can routinely expect to a point that is firmly in the 30s, with the possibility of a push toward 40 percent, as Odio put it. But as Amandi pointed out, if Democrats can sustain even a roughly 3-to-2 split among Latino voters, that will pay increasing dividends going forward as more of them enter the electorate.

Less certain is whether Democrats can hold the line at about that level of support. In the near term, the key question about Latinos in 2022 is the same as for other Democratic-leaning constituencies who are expressing disappointment in Biden: Will they decouple their views about the president from their choices in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races to a greater extent than has been common in the past few decades? Based on recent polling he conducted in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Amandi is relatively optimistic, at least in Senate races. We are seeing a conscious distinction that voters are making between whether they want to give Republicans power again despite their disappointment and sense of pessimism about President Bidens performance thus far, he told me.

But even with greater than usual decoupling, the level of Latino discontent over the economy and Bidens performance is so great that few would be surprised if many Democratic candidates in November lag their usual support in that community.

Such a result would undoubtedly fuel another round of debate over whether a lasting realignment among Latinos is really under way. And that talk will undoubtedly grow louder if Bidens Latino support remains depressed moving closer to 2024. Whether the Democrats recent struggles among Latinos is structural and mostly values-based, or personal to Biden and mostly economic-based, probably wont matter as much to the party as whether it can reverse that erosion, if not in November then certainly before voters pick the next president.

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Are Latinos Really Realigning Toward Republicans? - The Atlantic

Former Treasury Department economist David Beckworth analyzes the pace of inflation and the risk of global recession on 'Varney & Co.'

EXCLUSIVE: A top Senate Republican plans to introduce legislation Thursday that is designed to provide targeted relief to lower- and middle-income Americans who are struggling financially due to rising consumer prices by indexing certain tax benefits to inflation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is set to unveil the "Family and Community Inflation Relief Act," which would adjust the phase-out thresholds or deductible amounts for several tax credits and other benefits for families and students.

The proposal a copy of which was first shared with FOX Business comes just one week after new June inflation data from the Labor Department showed consumer prices soared 9.1% from the previous year, the fastest year-over-year jump since 1981.

Although the IRS adjusts the federal income taxes for inflation, that is not the case for many of the government's low-income assistance programs including the child tax credit, an income-based program that provides up to $2,000 per child for millions of families with children under the age of 17. Under current law, the payments go to individuals earning less than $75,000 and married couples earning less than $150,000.

WHY IS INFLATION STILL SO HIGH, AND WHEN WILL IT START TO COOL?

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) speaks with reporters before a vote at the U.S. Capitol Building before a Senate Luncheons on October 19, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Grassley's bill would adjust those income cut-off levels, as well as the annual payment of $2,000, by indexing them for inflation to ensure the credit is not eroded by the hottest inflation in four decades. The proposal also includes the non-child dependent credit, which provides up to $500 for other dependents, such as elderly parents.

"Indexing useful tax credits to inflation like the child tax credit and the lifetime learning credit will help parents and students keep up with rising costs," Grassley said. "While President Biden has failed to produce any meaningful solutions to the economic crisis he created, Ill continue working on common sense policies that will help Americans weather this soaring inflation."

These are the other tax programs covered by the bill:

Grassley has proposed paying for the changes proposed in his bill by extending the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction that was imposed by Republicans in the 2017 tax overhaul. The current SALT deduction limit is poised to expire in 2025.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about inflation and the economy in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus May 10, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

Scorching-hot inflation has created severe financial pressures for most U.S. households, which are forced to pay more for everyday necessities like food, gasoline and rent. The burden is disproportionately borne by low-income Americans, whose already-stretched paychecks are heavily impacted by price fluctuations.

Rising prices and the rapid dissolution of Americans' buying power have become a major political liability for Biden ahead of the November midterm elections, in which Democrats are expected to lose their razor-thin majorities. Surveys show that Americans see inflation as the biggest problem facing the country and that many households blame Biden for the price spike.

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The president has blamed higher prices on greedy corporations, supply chain bottlenecks and other pandemic-induced disruptions in the economy, as well as the Russian war in Ukraine. Most economists now agree that unprecedented levels of government stimulus and a stronger-than-expected recovery from the pandemic have also played at least some role in exacerbating the price spike.

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Senate Republican to propose 'inflation relief' in new bill targeting tax credits - Fox Business

The House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee voted to approve new legislation that would ban assault weapons, with all of the Democratic members supporting the measure.

All of the 18 Republican members of the committee who were present for the vote opposed the adoption of the legislation, while GOP Representative Greg Steube wasn't in attendance.

The Assault Weapons Ban Act of 2021 is the first piece of legislation to restrict assault weapons that the Judiciary Committee has approved in 20 years. It aims to prohibit the sale, manufacture, transfer and import of all semi-automatic rifles, if those rifles can accept a detachable magazine and they have a pistol grip.

The bill would also ban such weapons when they have a grenade launcher, a barrel shroud or a threaded barrel, a forward grip or a folding, telescoping or detachable stock, along with other measures to restrict the firearms.

The vote comes after a number of deadly mass shootings in recent weeks, including at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

The alleged gunman in Uvalde used an AR-15 style rifle, which the legislation will restrict if it's passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden.

An AR-15 style rifle was also used in the deadly Highland Park mass shooting that saw seven people killed during a Fourth of July parade.

The Republicans who voted against the legislation were:

Jim Jordan of Ohio

Steve Chabot of Ohio

Louie Gohmert of Texas

Darrell Issa of California

Ken Buck of Colorado

Matt Gaetz of Florida

Mike Johnson of Louisiana

Andy Biggs of Arizona

Tom McClintock of California

Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin

Thomas Massie of Kentucky

Chip Roy of Texas

Dan Bishop of North Carolina

Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota

Victoria Spartz of Indiana

Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin

Cliff Bentz of Oregon

Burgess Owens of Utah

Representative Jordan, the ranking member on the committee, said the legislation would "strip Americans of their right" and "would do nothing to make our communities safer."

"Democrats know this legislation will not reduce violent crime or reduce the likelihood of mass shootings, but they are obsessed with attacking law-abiding Americans' Second Amendment liberties," Jordan said.

The official Twitter account of the House Judiciary Committee GOP posted on Wednesday: "HOUSE DEMOCRATS JUST VOTED TO STRIP LAW ABIDING CITIZENS OF THEIR SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS."

They later sent a tweet quoting directly from the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

However, Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler, chair of the committee, argued in favor of the legislation.

"As we have learned all too well in recent years, assault weaponsespecially when combined with high-capacity magazinesare the weapon of choice for mass shootings. These military-style weapons are designed to kill the most people in the shortest amount of time," Nadler said, during his opening statement.

"Quite simply, there is no place for them on our streets," he added.

Following the vote, the House Judiciary Democrats' Twitter account criticized Republican opposition: "Every committee Republican voted no.If the deaths of our nation's children from gun violence won't motivate Republicans to take action to save lives, what will?"

It remains to be seen how quickly the legislation will advance. Congress will enter recess in early August.

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Every Republican to Vote Against an Assault Weapons Ban - Newsweek