Category Archives: Republican

WATERTOWN, Wis. Wisconsins concealed-carry and open-carry laws mean people will be able to have guns within blocks of the Republican National Convention next month.

Just dont do anything that could be considered a threat to our community. It will not, it will not be tolerated, Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman said at a Friday press conference laying out the security plan.

We have the understanding and respect for those who are carrying concealed or carrying open carry. Its about behaviors.

The chief, who has applied for the top cop job in Austin, Texas, was emphatic about not tolerating disorder with guns only banned in a small perimeter around the event.

Violence in Milwaukee peaked in 2022, and Norman is credited with helping bring down homicides by 40%.

Milwaukee police officers shot two teenagers Thursday, killing an unborn baby, after chasing a vehicle on a major city thoroughfare wanted in connection with two carjacking incidents.

During the joint city and Secret Service presser, Nick DeSiato, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnsons chief of staff and former police chief of staff, said that more than a hundred individuals and organizations have signed up to demonstrate during the convention and so far, the city hasnt denied any applications. There will be two speaker platforms for protesting in the areas around the security perimeter, within sight and sound of the RNC.

Asked about prohibited items, DeSiato said the city is bound by the state Constitution and cannot contradict state law on concealed and open carry.

Were governed by the Constitution, he said.

Pere Marquette Park, identified as a protest zone, has been an area of dispute among protesters, the RNC and the Secret Service.

The GOP is holding convention events inside the Wisconsin Historical Society building.

Given its vicinity to the building, the park was put inside the hard security perimeter, said Secret Service RNC Coordinator Audrey Gibson-Cicchino.

Ensuring the safety and security of our delegates, guests, officials, members of the media, and the entire Milwaukee community while standing up for our First Amendment rights and liberties have always been topmost priorities for the Republican National Convention, RNC spokesman Kush Desai said. We look forward to continuing to collaborate closely with the US Secret Service as well as local law enforcement to ensure the best possible convention experience for everyone.

Gov. Tony Evers declared a state of emergency ahead of the convention, which allows certain security measures to be in place, including calling up the Wisconsin National Guard.

Asked about using the National Guard to provide security for the RNC, Gibson-Cicchino said only that the Secret Service does have a partner in the force.

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RNC Convention security measures address concealed carry - New York Post

The GOP party line on the expiring 2017 tax law has been to extend and make it permanent, but changing politics and growing debt has House Republicans charged with reviewing the provisions shifting away from that message.

Lower tax rates on individuals, relief from the alternative minimum tax, treatment of money U.S. companies make abroad, small-business deductions and other provisionsestablished by 2017 law are set to expire at the end of next year.

The impending tax cliff has prompted lawmakers to start laying the groundwork for 2025, even though no one can predict the outcome of Novembers elections.

Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and Director of the National Economic Council Lael Brainard, have said Democrats would extend tax breaks for households making less than $400,000 and offset the cost with tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.

Republicans have long said they would like to extend and make permanent expiring provisions, but in a shift in messaging some members on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee say fully extending the provisions isnt a foregone conclusion.

Addressing the tax cliff is likely to be central to the budget reconciliation plans GOP leadership is pulling together in the event of a Republican sweep in November. And the constraints of that process are such that squeezing in a multitrillion-dollar increase in federal deficits could be difficult, even if the willingness on the part of lawmakers was there.

I dont think it is the default position, Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, said of a full extension of the 2017 law, often referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. I would call it Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2.0. What worked? What didnt work? What changes can be made?

Feenstra, a Ways and Means member, has been assigned to the supply chains, global competitiveness and rural America tax teams, three of the 10 Republican-only working groups established by Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., to prepare for next years expirations.

[House GOP tax teams in the spotlight as expirations near]

Ways and Means member Blake D. Moore, R-Utah, vice chair of the global competitiveness tax team and a member ofthe community development team, said shifting politics and risingdebt were major considerations as lawmakers weigh how to approach next years expirations. Tax teams are examining every provision with an open mind, he said.

No one understands it more than us that 2017 politics versus 2025 politics, theyre not in the same spot, Moore said. Were taking a look at whats worked, whats been helpful. How has it affected things? And whats the biggest impact? And prioritize those things moving into the next cycle. Everythings on the table.

Offsets included in the bill, such as the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, are unpopular among members representing districts in high-tax states, including New York Republicans, who helped hand the GOP majority in the House in 2022, Moore said.

Other provisions intended to lower the cost of the 2017 law, such as the amortization of businesses deductions of research and development investments, are also unpopular among Republicans and Democrats, and have been the target of repeal.

I dont think its, Lets just make TCJA permanent. A lot of that would be the plan, but were not going to be in the same situation, Moore said, adding that the debt is higher and majorities are slimmer than they were in 2017.

Republicans had about a 40-seat majority in the House and a narrow majority in the Senate in 2017, compared to the five-seat majority the GOP has in the House today. Democrats control the Senate 51-49, but face a tough election map this fall.

The 2017 law was estimated to cost about $1.5 trillion in foregone revenue at the time. Fully extending the expiring provisions for another decade would cost $4 trillion, not counting debt service costs, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Undoing certain revenue raisers from that law that have either already triggered or are scheduled to would add to the cost, pushing the total including interest payments on the added debt past $5 trillion, according tothe Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Fully extending the law would maintain the $10,000 SALT cap and would add to the deficit, opening the law up to criticism from both more centrist Republicans from blue states and deficit hawks on the right, Moore said.

Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., who chairs the influential Republican Study Committee, as well as the global competitiveness tax team, said debt and deficits loom large as the GOP weighs how to handle next year, if the party is in power.

The Trump tax cuts, they worked perfectly at the time, Hern said. We have to look at whats right for today, just as we did 10 years ago. And economic times are different. Debts 50 percent higher, more than that, actually its almost double. Inflation is high caused by President Biden and his team. And weve got to look at this. Weve got to look at the interest rates and all this is going to impact what we can do now.

Federal debt held by the public, which excludes debt held by government accounts such as the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, was $14.7 trillion at the end of fiscal 2017; the Congressional Budget Office this week said it expects debt at the end of this fiscal year to be $28.2 trillion.

[CBO: Deficits and inflation higher, but so is economic growth]

The Treasury was paying an average interest rate of 2 percent on that borrowed money in 2017; this year, the CBO says the comparable figure is 3.4 percent. Interest payments on the debt have already exceeded Medicare costs and next yearare expected to eclipse defense spending.

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., who introduced a bill to make the 2017 law permanent, said he was willing to set that position aside and be open-minded. Buchanan is leading the American manufacturing tax team.

We got to look at the debt and the deficit and what that means, and how were going to pay for it. So its changed in terms of the debt for us five years ago, he said. We have to find a way to create balance between having targeted tax cuts, but at the same time start dealing with our financial wherewithal.

On the Senate side, Republicans on the Finance Committee have begun meeting in their own small working groups, while panel Democratsmet to talk 2025 strategy on Thursday.

Senate Finance Democrats are beginning to compilea menu of possible revenue-raising provisions and vetting proposals that would aid the middle and working classes, such as supporting the construction of more housing and increasing availability of child care.

Continued here:

House Republicans shift message on extending 2017 tax cuts - Roll Call

Donald Trump has loudly touted his support for the hundreds of Jan. 6 participants whove faced charges, convictions, and imprisonment all year. Now theyre ready for their close-up at the Republican convention but theres no indication that its coming.

The Republican National Committee and Trump campaign aides are keeping their cards close to the vest on any convention decisions. (An RNC official, when asked about possible plans surrounding Jan. 6 and the convention, said in a statement that speculation on programming and speakers is just that.) But a lawyer whos been a key connector between Jan. 6 defendants and Trumps campaign says hes seen no indication planners are interested in taking up offers to have a speaker representing the cause be featured at the upcoming event.

I made a few inquiries about that, but it didnt really go nowhere, said Joseph McBride, who told Semafor back in March that he hoped the movement would have a convention presence. I dont think you have any real interest of anybody outside of the immediate circle at the top.

McBride suggested that activism around Jan. 6 makes a lot of these people uncomfortable, but that the RNC risked ceding ground to their critics to define the movement.

Its unfortunate, but theres a lot of weak people, spineless people in that group, he said. What can you do?

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Will the Jan. 6 prisoner movement make it to the Republican National Convention stage? - Semafor

RACINE, Wis. (CN) Former President Donald Trump gave a campaign speech to hundreds of supporters who came to rally around him in a blue-collar enclave of battleground Wisconsin on Tuesday, painting the U.S. as an embattled, violent and corrupt place under the current Democratic administration.

Trump took the stage at Racine Festival Park to Lee Greenwoods God Bless the U.S.A. and immediately referenced a recent report saying he called Milwaukee the site of the Republican Partys national convention this July, where Trump will presumably be named the partys nominee a horrible city during a private meeting with House Republicans.

Wisconsins Republican delegation reacted to the report last week by variously qualifying what Trump meant by his statements or denying he said them altogether. Trump did both at that time, at first saying through a spokesperson that he was referring to crime and voter fraud in the city before taking to Truth Social over the weekend to issue a denial.

Trump not only denied the comments again on Tuesday but said Milwaukee was getting the Republican National Convention because of him.

Im the one who picked Milwaukee, Trump said.

Trumps freewheeling, nearly 90-minute speech was light on specific policy but blasted migrants crossing America's southern border, endless global wars, rampant crime, China, inflation and the larger U.S. economy all of which he said have become major issues under President Joe Biden.

The former president went into sometimes graphic detail of recent murders alleged to have been committed by migrants in the U.S. illegally, including those of Rachel Morin in Maryland and Laken Riley in Georgia. He additionally blamed migrants, at least in part, for a lack of jobs and affordable housing because the flood of "17 or 18 million" who have crossed the southern border although official estimates of those numbers are considerably lower. He decried a Biden plan announced Tuesday that would eventually grant citizenship to half a million immigrants.

Recent estimates put the annual inflation rate at around 3.3%, but Trump claimed the actual rate was many times that figure. With the economy in shambles, Trump said he would bring an end to Bidenomics and replace it with MAGAnomics.

One piece of policy Trump mentioned was a version of the U.S. Reciprocal Trade Act first championed during his presidency. No substantial details of the proposal were provided, but it would essentially seek to resolve trade imbalances with other counties or, as Trump put it, telling other countries that: you screw us, we screw you.

The atmosphere on Tuesday felt as much like a rock concert as a political event. Vendors selling food, water and all manner of Trump paraphernalia did brisk business as the former presidents supporters lined up for several blocks in the roughly 90-degree heat hours ahead of his speech.

Some T-shirts for sale at Trumps rally referenced the former presidents recent conviction in New York of 34 fraud felonies and depicted him as an outlaw the point being that support for Trump was unwavering among his followers despite his status as a convicted felon.

Trump on Tuesday blamed his recent multifaceted legal troubles on Biden and radical left Democrats, communists, fascists and others he said were collaborating with the president. He claimed that those taking him to court are coming after him because of what he represents.

Our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never, ever let them take away your freedom, he said, prompting peals of applause. In the end, theyre not after me. Quite simply put, I am just standing in their way.

Trump's supporters amassed in Racine on Tuesday cheered and jeered in response to the former presidents well-worn digs at the news media, which he claimed was doing all it could to make the enfeebled, senile Biden seem better, including through clean fake videos.

Before Trump's speech, large screens near the staging area played, among other things, a video of Trump advising his supporters to vote via all available means, including by mail, to foil Democrats trying to cheat in the election. A switch to paper ballots, same-day voting, voter ID and an era of secure, beautiful elections would follow his victory, Trump said in the video.

During his speech, Trump once again falsely claimed that he won Wisconsin in 2020 as he did in 2016. Multiple reviews of the election results and a recount Trump demanded reaffirmed that Biden won the Badger State by about 20,000 votes.

Nevertheless, the state and its 10 electoral votes will likely prove to be crucial for Biden or Trumps electoral success, as Trump noted.

We win Wisconsin, we win the whole thing, he said.

Briefly appearing on stage with Trump on Tuesday was Eric Hovde, an entrepreneur who is running for U.S. Senate later this year against Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic senator who has represented Wisconsin since 2013.

Speakers ahead of Trump included Wisconsin Republicans from state and federal government, among them former governors Scott Walker and Tommy Thompson and U.S. Congressmen Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden.

Also giving remarks on Tuesday was biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who participated in early debates before dropping out of the Republican primary race. He said the country was at a 1776 moment and that Trump is the George Washington of our moment.

Much of the recent forecasting of Biden and Trumps electoral odds show either a toss-up between them or an edge for Trump. One poll released on Monday by the Des Moines Register paints a more troubling picture for Biden: felony convictions notwithstanding, Trump holds a double-digit lead over the president in Iowa.

Trumps Racine trip comes a little more than a month after President Joe Biden rallied in the same area to tout Microsofts plan to make major investments in AI infrastructure in the region.

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Trump rallies supporters in Wisconsin ahead of the Republican National Convention - Courthouse News Service

Elections

Cao's Senate nomination comes after he ran for the U.S. House in Virginia's 10th Congressional District in 2022, losing to Democratic U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton.

Author: Preston Steger, Eugene Daniel (WVEC)

Published: 7:36 PM EDT June 18, 2024

Updated: 8:51 PM EDT June 18, 2024

VIRGINIA, USA Retired Navy captain and Trump endorsee Hung Cao has won the Republican nomination for Virginia's 2024 U.S. Senate election, setting up a contest against Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine.

As of 7:30 p.m., Cao is leading the pack with 67% of the vote against candidates Jonathan Emord, Eddie Garcia, Scott Parkinson, and Chuck Smith.

Cao's Senate nomination comes after he previously ran for the U.S. House in Virginia's 10th Congressional District in 2022, losing to Democratic U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton by more than six points. Former President and 2024 presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump backed Cao's Senate candidacy ahead of Tuesday's primary.

Cao is campaigning on border security issues popular within the Republican Party, including building a wall, using advanced technology, and supporting the Border Patrol.

In a victory post on Facebook, Cao immediately criticized President Joe Bidens decision on Tuesday to allow certain U.S. citizens spouses without legal status to apply eventually for citizenship.

Tomorrow, we begin our campaign to save the country that saved my life, Cao stated. I spent twenty-five years in the Navy, while Tim Kaine spent thirty years in elected office.

In a recent campaign ad, Cao, who was born in Vietnam, makes comparisons between the countrys communist regime during the Cold War to the Biden Administration.

On the Democratic side, Kaine automatically became his party's nominee since he ran unopposed. He won his first Senate election in 2012 and secured another term in 2018.

In a statement following Cao's Republican primary victory, Kaine said in part:

"Ive been standing up for Virginians for 40 years as a civil rights lawyer and public servant representing my city, Commonwealth and country. As your Senator, Ill keep standing up for an economy that works for all, affordable healthcare, reproductive freedom, enhanced career and technical education and strengthening our military and allies while supporting our troops, veterans, and their families."

If Cao defeats Kaine, he would become the first Republican elected to the upper chamber since 2002. However, Sabato's Crystal Ball political analyst J. Miles Coleman told 13News Now he believes Kaine is a strong favorite for the general election.

Kaine has a long history of holding elected office in Virginia, having served as governor from 2006 to 2010, lieutenant governor from 2002 to 2006 and Richmond's mayor from 1998 to 2001.

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Hung Cao wins Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, will face off against Tim Kaine in November - 13newsnow.com WVEC

From left, Elizabeth Dole, Barbara Bush, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Kristi Noem, Nancy Mace, and Valentina Gomez. Photo: Porter Gifford/Liaison (Dole); Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Picture (Bush); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (Hutchison); Jeff Dean/AP Photo (Noem); Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters (Mace)

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Can you provide a definition for the word woman?

Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn lobbed this query at Ketanji Brown Jackson during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Blackburn was doing her bit for her partys effort to enforce transphobic gender conformity, positioning herself as a defender of womanhood as something fixed and narrow. When Jackson declined to provide Blackburn with a definition, noting that she was not a biologist, the senator took the opportunity to dial it up a notch. The fact that you cant give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about, Blackburn said with lip-smacking satisfaction.

Two years later, Republicans remain cruelly closed to the realities of gender fluidity and trans existence. But how the party understands and represents womanhood more broadly? Well thats getting weird. As we cruise toward November with two ancient white men on the presidential ticket and the rights of millions of people who are not white men in the balance, the public performance of Republican womanhood has become fractured, frenzied, and far less coherent than ever.

A true conservative woman, Valentina Gomez, one of several Republican candidates vying to be Missouris next secretary of state, told me in an email this spring, speaks the truth, works hard, loves and knows how to use guns of multiple calibers, cares for the wellbeing of children and her family, doesnt sleep with multiple men and most important, does not murder babies.

The 25-year-old Gomez made a viral ad in February in which she took a flamethrower to a pile of sex-education and LGBTQ+ books from the public library. In May, she filmed herself running through St. Louis wearing a weighted vest and advising, Dont be weak and gay; stay fucking hard. The day before, she had embraced her softer side, posting a photo of herself on X in a pale-pink pantsuit and pumps, with a winning smile and her eyes cast heavenward, under a caption restating Blackburns question: What is a woman?

Gomez told me feminists have made men the enemy, adding, they end up alone with three dogs at the age of 50 with no kids or husband a time-honored Republican sentiment that liberal women, unlike conservatives, are sexless, unmarriageable spinsters. But even that rusty rhetorical frame is wobbly: In April, 31-year-old far-right activist Laura Loomer, standing outside Donald Trumps criminal trial in New York, told the New York Times, You think I have a dating life? You think Im married? You think Ihave kids? Do you think I go out and do fun things? No. Because Im always putting every extra bit of time that I have into supporting President Trump. Loomer told the paper she would not be at the courthouse the next week because she had to return home to Florida to take care of her dogs.

Contradictions abound among conservative women in Washington. In response to Jacksons testimony, Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to be authoritative on the matter. Im going to tell you right now what is a woman, she said. We came from Adams rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex we are the weaker sex but we are our partners, our husbands, wife. But Greene, who has since divorced, regularly refers to men, including Speaker Mike Johnson and President Biden, as weak and is not shy about showing off her own brawn. In May, in the wake of a dustup with Democratic Texas representative Jasmine Crockett in which the two traded barbs about each others appearance, Greene posted a video of herself lifting heavy weights to a song by Sia: Im unstoppable/Im a Porsche with no brakes/Im invincible/Yeah, I win every single game.

Under the surface, subcutaneously, there is a tug-of-war, said Nancy Mace, a 46-year-old second-term Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. Mace was reflecting on the tension between presenting as traditionally feminine and deploying emasculating language that can make her sound more like Andrew Tate and his overheated manosphere buddies than Republican foremothers such as Margaret Chase Smith or even Michele Bachmann. Mace regularly declares that her male enemies, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, with whom she has a bitter rivalry, and Hunter Biden, the presidents son, have no balls.

There are the traditional roles of women in society, some biological. Were meant to nurture; were meant to breastfeed our kids, Mace told me over Zoom. But my mom worked. Ive worked my entire life since Iwas 15. Its a balance between whats your feminine side and your Main Character Energy. Mace was explicit: I do have Main Character Energy. I am an alpha dog, and so is my little six-pound dog, Libby.

The Republican women seeking to steer their party into the future are finding themselves in a series of constrictive binds: between upholding a conservative white patriarchy that has outlawed abortion and asserting their value as women; between projecting traditional notions of compliant, cheerful femininity and channeling the testosterone-driven rage of the conservative infotainment complex; and, above all, between trying to build independent political identities and slavishly following Donald Trump. That devotion has come at the cost of alienating suburban white women, who have been crucial to Republicans for decades but, since 2016, have been peeling away in response to Trumps pussy-grabbing malevolence and his partys ruthless campaign against reproductive rights.

Its surely a nasty tangle for them, but for those of us watching at home, Republican womens efforts to bridge these impossible chasms have a stupefying quality: What to make of these women?

As the Alabama political columnist Kyle Whitmire wrote after Katie Britt, his states U.S. senator, delivered the response to Joe Bidens State of the Union address from her kitchen in a demonic whisper, Katie Britt glitched out on national television and left millions of Americans asking what the heck they just watched. Weeks later, South Dakota governor Kristi Noems strenuous efforts to show off her casually cruel streak to Trump derailed her own vice-presidential audition when it emerged that her book contained a story about how she once shot her puppy and left the body to rot in a gravel pit.

Then there are the duck-lipped, smoky-eyed stylings of Donald Trump Jr.s fiance, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who danced to Gloria shortly before insurrectionists tore through the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and this spring announced a childrens book called The Princess & Her Pup. The former presidents daughter-in-law, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, recently promised four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House and posted a video of herself in sequined pants and stilettos as she played Let It Be on piano. The gun-toting congresswoman Lauren Boebert has railed against teaching kids how to have and enjoy sex, even same-sex sex, how to pleasure themselves, yet last fall was ejected from a theater for lewd behavior that included grabbing her dates crotch during the performance. Mace made headlines in 2023 for joking about her sex life to a roomful of Christian conservatives at a prayer breakfast.

Some of this is surely just old-fashioned political hypocrisy, particularly unpleasant coming from a right that has for generations sought to police all sorts of things that it itself engages in: Do as I legislate, not as I do. But in a post-Dobbs political climate in which Republicans have grown only more aggressive on issues of gender identity, contraception, and sex education, the ways in which the partys women have been comporting themselves loom large.

On the cusp of an election season that could further reshape this democracy and womens place within it, the questions facing the women of the American right are tricky. Are they supposed to be cutthroat or cute? Cold enough to kill a dog or warm enough to bake an apple pie? To whom is their devotion chiefly addressed: country, husband, God, or Trump? And how might their womanhood complicate their responses to the closing of obstetrics wards or the fact that their partys leader was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an extramarital affair with an adult-film actress?

The challenge of navigating these thorny questions has left many of them caroming from high-pitched rancor, to contorted eroticism, to the seemingly snug comforts of trad-wife chic. The spectacle can provoke amusement, fury, and a frisson of horror-movie unease. For if the women of todays Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion, theyre doing it in service of a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.

Lauren Boebert with Trump in a LETS GO BRANDON dress. Photo: Lauren Boebert/X

In both parties, women have never had it easy; this is a business that remains, 235 years in, overwhelmingly run by men. And for a time, it was Democratic women who encountered the gnarlier complexities.

As members of the party that at least theoretically represented the gains of the womens movement that were so disruptive to the old gendered order, they could not themselves present as too aggressive for fear of being seen as radical, nor could they be too vulnerable, feminine, or even conventionally beautiful lest they be dismissed as unserious. Jennifer Granholm, a former pageant contestant and the first woman to govern Michigan, has described cutting her hair short and trying to add gray streaks when she ran her first campaign in 1998. You had to look completely asexual, she once said. The first thing they think about is how you are shaped, what you are wearing. You have to be as neutral as possible so that people will pay attention to the words coming out of your mouth.

Meeting ridiculous gendered expectations could mean ridiculous micro-humiliations: When Hillary Clinton told reporters in 1992 that she had chosen to pursue a paid profession rather than stay home to bake cookies, she was pressured to participate in a First-Lady Bake-Off to prove her wifely chops. Fifteen years later, during her first presidential run, the presence of a body that was not male was such an anomaly on the campaign trail that the Washington Post published a fashion feature about how she was choosing to handle her cleavage. Clinton was perhaps the most acute example of an assertive Democratic woman whose efforts to satisfy a ravening press and public intolerant of female complexity left her so twisted and poll-tested that she became largely illegible as human, let alone female.

Meanwhile, Republican women faced limitations of their own but for a long time appeared at ease with them. Many came off as maternal and content, conservatively coiffed and shoulder-padded, a comfortable match for a party that wanted to offer reassurance to a nation jittery about womens liberation. Think Elizabeth Dole, a Reagan Cabinet member, future senator, and presidential candidate whose chatty, Oprah-style stroll through the crowd on the night of her husbands 1996 presidential nomination was the (sole) highlight of that convention. But they could also be tough and mean Barbara Bush once called Geraldine Ferraro a bitch!

The Republican Party, through the 1990s and into the new millennium, included quite a few moderate women, such as Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, who believed in fiscal conservatism but also held positions on so-called social issues that were comparatively liberal. They were, like many in their party before its sharp anti-abortion turn, pro-choice. They worked with Democrats to reach compromises, and the women on both sides of the aisle appeared to be friendly with one another: Collins partnered with Kirsten Gillibrand on the repeal of dont ask, dont tell, and Gillibrand helped then-Senator Clinton throw Collins a bridal shower.

A turning point in the evolution of conservative womanhood came when John McCain selected a little-known governor of Alaska to be his running mate in his presidential race against Barack Obama in 2008.

Sarah Palin was in her mid-40s, young enough not to be collared by the pearls and propriety that inhibited many of her forerunners in both parties. She was charismatic and uninterested in conforming to outdated gender stereotypes. Or rather, she conformed to a bunch of them simultaneously: She had a sexy-librarian beauty and no qualms about playing it up; a macho snow-machine-racing husband who had taken a leave from his job on the oil fields to be the primary parent to their five kids; and she used her youngest child, Trig, born with Down syndrome, as proof of her hard-core anti-abortion bona fides. She had white-nationalist instincts that led her to counter Obama with language about real Americans, and she pioneered a Mama Grizzly persona that was both sporty and menacing (fuck your dead puppy; this lady wanted wolves to be shot from helicopters). She was unafraid to stake her own claim to womens equality, advocating for a new, conservative feminism.

Balancing these divergent identities came naturally to Palin, and she was, at first, chillingly effective, the best to ever play the game of covering the cognitive dissonance of the rights anti-woman policies with high-gloss girl power. What was the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick, losers.

But if Palin was a model for a new generation of right-wing women, she was also a fundamentally unstable molecule.

McCain had hired Palin as a gimmick rather than as a colleague and thus had no idea what to do with her. His campaign fed her straight into the blades of the press, which exposed such deep ignorance of basic policy questions that Tina Fey could parody her on Saturday Night Live by simply repeating what she had said. But even had they prepared and protected Palin better, the combustibility of what she brought to the table was a preview of the metaphysical impossibility of women gaining real power on the right.

She was a star and then, almost immediately, too much of one. Palins poor media showing would be blamed for her tickets loss, but the eagerness to throw her under the bus surely stemmed in part from irritation: She had not been subservient. She had, famously, gone rogue. She had outshone the man at the top of the ticket.

The brutal irony of women on the right is that their emergence as mighty politicians is reliant entirely on feminist gains, and their experiences track with the feminist critique of inequality, including expectations of acquiescence to powerful men. Palins self-assured ethos was made possible by the womens movement that she was interested in co-opting for herself and which the modern Republican Party is seeking to destroy.

It was in the post-Palin flameout that the contours of that vengeful project would cease to be subtext and instead become mainstream conservative liturgy. The white-Christian-nationalist brand of Republicanism Palin embodied previewed the rise of the tea party and the rights relentless drive to defund Planned Parenthood, an agenda accompanied by an open disregard for and cluelessness about women and their bodies.

During Obamas first term, Republicans at the state level pushed through TRAP laws mandating that abortion clinics have wide hallways or that doctors tell patients about wholly fictionalized ties between abortion and breast cancer. Missouris Todd Akin proclaimed that in cases of legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down, while radio host Rush Limbaugh said law student Sandra Fluke, who had testified in front of Congress about requiring contraceptive insurance for students, was a slut who was having sex so frequently that she cant afford all the birth-control pills that she needs. This period saw the calcification of the Republican universe we now inhabit, in which, just this past February, Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville defended his states brief curtailment of IVF services by repeatedly insisting that the decision made sense because we need to have more kids.

The possibilities of earlier eras, in which a fiscal conservatism could be imaginatively walled off from social revanchism, thus mitigating contradictions for women like Snowe and Collins and Hutchison, were foreclosed by a post-Obama, post-Palin, post-tea-party right that was flagrant, excited even, about its ability to demean women. Some of the old-guard moderates, including Snowe and Hutchison, left their posts, while those who stayed began to turn right, in line with their ever more misogynistic party.

Valentina Gomez taking a flamethrower to sex-education books. Photo: Valentina Gomez/Instagram

When the Republican Party of Palin first began to make way for the Republican Party of Trump, he was still best known as a reality-television star. He was the owner of the Miss Universe pageant, a serial adulterer who had cheated on two of his wives and was married to a woman who appeared to be his ideal: a simulacrum of every sculpted, shiny, glittery, enhanced expectation of femininity. Here was a man who regarded women with wolf-whistling lasciviousness or dismissed them as pigs and dogs. As a presidential candidate, he expressed revulsion for female bodies, claiming that debate host Megyn Kelly had blood coming out of her wherever and calling Clintons bathroom break during a debate disgusting. He was accused by more than a dozen women of sexual assault. When he became president, he stacked the Supreme Court with anti-abortion zealots who proceeded to strike down Roe.

For the women in his party who want to gain any political authority, submitting to him and conforming to his standards is the only path to survival, and womanly fealty to Trump can be vividly expressed by meeting the physical demands of his universe.

For years, the right promoted a very particular version of conservative femininity via its Fox News arm. Lithe blonde couriers of white panic over Black Santa and Sharia were one of Roger Ailess innovations, and Kelly, Gretchen Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others gained powerful public perches in exchange for their chaturanga-toned arms and poisonous propaganda. That many of them would eventually come forward to tell of the grotesque harassment and sexual abuse they experienced while working at Fox is perhaps the ultimate portrait in miniature of the dynamic in which women on the right so often find themselves embroiled.

But if the sleek women of Fox were one model of idealized feminine aesthetics, this era demands a different look, one constructed not to Ailess tastes but to Trumps.

Kristi Noem, like Palin, began her political life as a female herald of the hard-right turn her party was making, elected to the House of Representatives in the tea-party sweep of 2010. A former rancher, she came to office opposed to abortion and marriage equality. Noem was always classically attractive, a Jennifer Aniston look-alike who at the start of her political career worked a rural white middle-class-mom vibe: practical trousers, ill-fitting blazers, weed-whacked hair (there but for the grace of God go any of us).

Noem became a conservative superstar in 2020 when, as South Dakotas governor, she refused to implement any COVID-mitigation efforts in her state. In 2021, the Times described her eagerness to project a rugged Great Plains Woman image. The next year, her first memoir, Not My First Rodeo, featured a cover image of Noem sitting astride a horse, in a cowboy hat and a red-white-and-blue western blouse.

In the years since COVID, in which the rights affirmation clearly filled her with the ambition to ascend alongside Trump himself, Noem has undertaken an astonishing physical transformation. Gone are the boxy do and blazers; she now sports long, highlighted waves. Her cheekbones are angular, her lips pillowy, her eyelashes go on forever, and she wears body-skimming dresses. As Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times observed, Noem has begun to resemble a doppelganger for Kimberly Guilfoyle or a dark-haired version of Lara Trump in other words, Trumps kind of woman. Youre not allowed to say shes beautiful, so Im not going to say it, Trump said approvingly of Noem earlier this year.

Generations of women of both parties have been caught in this finger trap. When your value is tied inextricably to sexualized standards contrived by white men, you will not be appreciated, sometimes not even seen, unless you meet those standards. Yet if you do hit their (often shifting) aesthetic marks, you risk being degraded by those same men, not taken seriously as their peers but rather understood as their ornament.

In March, Noem cut an infomercial for the Texas dental practice that gave her a new set of front teeth. She said she wanted people to focus on my thoughts and ideas, instead of her allegedly flawed teeth, unconsciously echoing Granholm, who made herself dowdier for the same purpose. Thanks to the team at Smile Texas, she continued, I can be confident when I smile at people, and know that they can actually appreciate and see the kindness in my face and know the love I have for them.

For Republican women less driven to cosmetic enhancement, there is another, more traditional expressive model still available: that of the demure maternal presence. Yet those working this angle are also plying their cozy wares in a manner that jibes with the despotic nihilism of Trumpian America, producing messaging that can feel like an unnerving subversion of maternal tropes as much as a reinforcement of them.

Katie Britt is the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the Senate, a 42-year-old mother of two married to a former NFL player. The pretty white straight woman dating the football player was surely once one of the conservative universes holy archetypes until gay-friendly Taylor Swift and her vaccine-loving boyfriend, Travis Kelce, scrambled conservative brains and sent a right-wing media into seething paroxysms of vilification and paranoia.

After the Swift-Kelce meltdown came Britts rebuttal to Bidens State of the Union address, recorded in her homes sparse kitchen, a glinting cross around her neck. Here was the remnant of the delicate and devout figure the right has long advertised as its heart and soul, the retro view of the comforting lady unadorned by anything but her love for Jesus, ready to make you dinner while also working as a senator.

Then Britt began to talk. And out came a gruesome tale of how the American Dream has turned into a nightmare for so many families. If it werent for her eyelash batting, the speech would have been a direct callback to Trumps inaugural 2017 address about American carnage. Britt told the story of a woman shed met who had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12 and whod shared with her not just that she was raped every day but how many times a day she was raped. (Freelance reporter Jonathan M. Katz would quickly identify the woman Britt was describing as Karla Jacinto Romero, an advocate whod had this horrific experience between 2004 and 2008, when Republican George W. Bush was president, and not even in the United States.)

By grossly misrepresenting the experiences of a woman of color, Britt was working an age-old reactionary script of white American womanhood being vulnerable to violent sexual incursions by Black and brown people. Yet her fixation on the lurid details struck a contemporary note, one played often in the more conspiratorial corners of the right-wing internet, as if for a brief period she really had been possessed by the voices of Truth Social and was broadcasting them to the nation direct from her home in the uncanny valley. In fact, older videos would show that the breathy, baleful voice she adopted was nothing like her actual, perfectly normal voice.

Even Britts views on abortion, which are typical for a conservative Republican from the South, have taken on a more frightening cast. In May, she released a video advertising the MOMS Act, which she described, with a smile so aggressive it was audible, as a way to support Americans through typically challenging phases of motherhood. The bills approach to these challenging phases almost exclusively entails ensuring that no one ends a pregnancy: It includes the words abortion, terminate, and kill the unborn child 17 times but offers only two references to housing and three to childcare.

Use of the white mother figure in the past was meant to signal the preservation of the private family sphere from the purported overreach of government: no federal officials reaching their sticky collectivist fingers into your home, telling you how to raise your children. But now, empowered by Dobbs, Britts motherly warmth was being deployed on behalf of a government project that would gather information about location, menstrual cycles, and pregnancy on behalf of a party that would like your friends to turn you in if you end that pregnancy. It recalled the hissed threat of Britts State of the Union response: We see you; we hear you.

Perhaps no elected official embodies the contortions of the modern Republican woman more than Mace, who was first sworn in to the House of Representatives on January 3, 2021. Three days later, her workplace was under attack by insurrectionists, anathema to a woman raised on military order. Her father was commandant of the Citadel, the South Carolina military academy of which Mace, in 1999, became the first female graduate. She denounced Trump after January 6, telling CNN the presidents entire legacy was wiped out by the coup attempt and later arguing that we have to hold the president accountable for what happened.

The Citadel shaped Maces identity in more ways than one. Her 2001 book, In the Company of Men, tells the story of her experience there: the scrutiny of her physical presentation, sexist intimidation, harassment. This is a politician, in other words, who has thought a lot about gender, power, and inclusion. When we spoke in May, she smiled at me warily and said, Yeah, in the party, Im a unicorn. She has, for example, announced her intent to work on legislation with Democrat Ro Khanna to make child care more affordable. Collectively, as a party, were not traditionally seen as pro-woman, and Im trying to change the narrative, she said. Its a rather lonely experience.

Mace is enthusiastically anti-abortion but broke with her party when she was in the South Carolina legislature during a 2019 debate on a fetal-heartbeat bill that included no exceptions for rape or incest. No one was talking about rape, she said. I felt shattered as a woman because I am a rape survivor. Mace had been sexually assaulted at 16. I took the microphone and went to the well, and I gave a speech I never thought I would ever give, she said.

Maces story mirrors the 2013 experience of thenState Legislator Gretchen Whitmer, who, in the midst of a Michigan senate debate over a bill requiring separate health insurance for abortion coverage, surprised herself and advisers by putting her notes aside and speaking extemporaneously about how she had been raped more than 20 years earlier. But for Whitmer, a Democrat, her firsthand experience of assault and its connection to abortion access fit seamlessly with the rest of her politics. For Mace, the connections are far harder to draw.

Im a pro-life member in a pro-choice district, said Mace. Im willing to find common sense and common ground. When we knew Roe was going to be overturned, Iwent straight to the microphone; I went straight to writing op-eds, doing interviews, being the voice of reason. Because I saw the visceral reaction in my district and I said, Im not leaving these women behind. Her solution, she said, is a ban at somewhere between 15 and 20weeks. In 2023, Mace introduced a bill to protect contraceptive access, calling it just common sense. She introduced a resolution denouncing the Alabama IVF ruling, a position she called a no-brainer.

Back in 2021, Mace did not, ultimately, vote for Trumps impeachment. But he remembered the slight of her initial rebuke and endorsed Maces 2022 primary challenger. Mace tried to win him back by traveling to Trump Tower and posting a video documenting her devotion to him; he responded by calling her a grand-standing loser. Mace survived her reelection bid thanks in part to the backing of Trumps future primary rival, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.

When I asked Mace if there were any women in politics she regarded as models, she replied, I respect the hell out of Nikki Haley. She has shattered glass ceilings her entire life. She has stayed true to her values and her principles; I think shes a remarkable woman. Yet in January, Mace endorsed Trump over Haley. I respect her so much, Mace said when I asked her about this incongruity. But I could see as clear as day that Donald Trump was who South Carolinians want, hand over fist.

She also insisted that Donald Trump is good on womens issues. He was the most pro-woman candidate in the presidential primary. And he gets it. Never mind that Trump has called the end of Roe a -miracle. He poohpoohs claims that he would restrict contraceptive access one day and say hes open to state restrictions the next. He has called the state-by-state fight over whether abortion will remain accessible a beautiful thing to watch. It is very difficult to maintain a moderate keel through rhetorical gates like this.

Here is the quandary of the ambitious Republican woman laid bare. Maces history and profile her time at the Citadel, her experience of assault, her admiration for the women who paved her way into politics, her self-professed moderation on abortion might have put her in a position to reclaim the new conservative feminism Palin had staked out. Much of that gets warped by the pull of Trump and his politics of domination, a centripetal force that demands the breaking of bonds with mentors, adherence to day-is-night lies and inconsistency, the humiliating recanting of past criticisms, and de facto support of an abortion agenda more extreme than it has ever been. Maces efforts were rewarded: In 2024, Trump endorsed her and she won her primary bid on June 11 by 27 points.

There is surely a perverse pride in emerging victorious near the top of a power structure built to exclude you. These are the dynamics that have long rewarded white women for acting as foot soldiers within a white patriarchy, willing to take one another out to get closer to power, their positions adjacent to the brutes at the top a signal of their uncommon tenacity. But there is a difference between the status granted those willing to do whatever unhinged thing it takes to get ahead in contemporary right-wing politics and the political autonomy these women might yearn for just as much as the classical feminists they wage war against.

When Valentina Gomez agreed to respond to my emailed questions, I noted that she had used MAGA to describe her politics and wondered whether she saw a distinction between MAGA and the Republican Party. I do not use MAGA, Gomez corrected me. I am MAGA and The Future of the Republican Party. Gomez told me she developed her political ideals while swimming Division I, graduating from college at 19, earning an M.B.A. at 21, and building a real estate empire with my family all achievements enabled by the feminist movement. But, she said, feminism is exactly like the Trans Movement, they are both doomed.

Mace too turned to certain tools of feminist argument. During the Hunter Biden no balls hearing, she used the language of grievance when she was interrupted, asking, Are women allowed to speak here or no? In our conversation, she criticized former Speaker Kevin McCarthy for pushing only one major womens bill (as it happens, a piece of anti-trans legislation). Mace went on, I cant tell you how offensive that was as a Republican woman knowing how important womens issues were going to be. His chauvinism was ridiculous. And his misogyny and sexism.

Mace also cried misogyny when ABC News George Stephanopoulos asked her during an interview how, as a rape survivor, she could support Trump. And while it is true this question should be addressed to all supporters of Trump, not just those who have experienced sexual assault, Mace deflected the challenging question by claiming Stephanopoulos was rape-shaming her.

In the past, it was easier for Republican women to get away with inconsistency and self-contradiction. Phyllis Schlafly, the brilliant, diabolical political strategist, could inveigh against the masculinized ambitions of women working outside the home from pulpits well outside her own home because her professional efforts paid lip service to restoring certain comforting hierarchical expectations about mens and womens spheres.

That paradigm has been subverted. What Schlafly and her generation feared most that the expanded opportunities and protections for women would become their own kind of traditional expectation has come to pass. This is why the overturn of Roe was not greeted as some welcome restoration of a bygone order but as a threatening attack on the protections that plenty of American women, especially white middle-class women of all political persuasions, had come to count on as an established norm during the 49 years Roe stood.

Every one of these Republican women relies on the gains of womens liberation, and well they should. This was, in fact, what the womens movement was for: not just so those who agreed with it might enjoy more opportunities but so those who did not agree with it also could. As an early political ballbuster, former New York congresswoman Bella Abzug famously said, We dont want so much to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel. Welcome, ladies.

Remarkably, these dark years have seen women on the left conduct themselves with new ease and assuredness. Democratic women at both the center and the left edge of their party now communicate in a range of styles that appear more authentic and less stilted than those of previous generations of female politicians. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fluent on social media; Elizabeth Warren lets her professorial freak flag fly; Ayanna Pressley is bald and beautiful. They tell stories of abortion, of assault, of pregnancy and childbirth, of their gay and trans offspring, of their disabilities and military service, weaving the facts of their lives into arguments for civil rights, health-care access, and housing.

Whitmer is perhaps the most prominent Democratic woman to experiment with mixing a traditional white femininity and historically masculine cadences. Though her politics could not be more different, she is perhaps the closest we have yet seen to a natural echo of Palins swashbuckling cheek. In May, Whitmer wore a fuchsia wrap dress to pick up an award for a campaign she undertook as Governor Barbie. Her five-word acceptance speech was Wear pink; get shit done. In the days after Noems disastrous book tour, Whitmer took a break from posting about the NFL draft to put up a photograph of her with her two dogs, Kevin and Doug, with the caption, Post a picture with your dog that doesnt involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit.

Its certainly all performed in its own way. But for the first time, its the Democratic women who can articulate the mix of football and Barbie and health care and labor without tripping over themselves, who seem more comfortable in their own bodies. The women on the right appear in perpetual confusion and find themselves, like some negative image of Clinton, twisting into something unrecognizable.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wearing pink and making testicle jokes. Though shooting dogs is not nice and giving hand jobs during Beetlejuice is rude, they are part of a range of impulses a free society should be open to evaluating on their own merits, regardless of the gender of the person engaging in them. If you could separate it from the regressive politics, there might be something exhilarating about Marjorie Taylor Greenes willingness to throw weights around and toss off suffocating norms of feminized civility in the workplace.

But there is no way to understand these varied approaches to gender expression outside the context of their own political aims. These are politicians who regularly refer to gender-affirming health care as castration and mutilation. Boebert famously campaigned against drag story hours, while Noem wrote to South Dakotas college board asking it to ban campus drag shows. Republican women longing to attach themselves to the feminist brand leverage transphobia to do it, a riff on the TERF movement currently flourishing in the U.K. Mace has argued that conservatives laboring to keep trans women out of athletic competitions are the feminists of today, and Haley has cast anti-trans policymaking as the womens issue of our time.

Yet these women express themselves via a dizzying mash-up of gendered conventions: They augment their smiles, bedazzle their pantsuits, and broadcast their bench presses. In their fevered performances of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity, so many of the GOPs most visible women are themselves engaging in a form of drag.

Of course, drag in its queer context offers the chance to slip from and send up the constricting bounds of gender norms, to encourage empathy and celebrate diverse forms of identity. The show these Republican politicians are putting on is its cold opposite: asphyxiated, distended, nasty. Theirs is surely drags gothic inverse.

Still, it is possible to catch a glimpse of pathos beneath the performance because the show covers for something awful and real: The identities of those women are no more valued or recognized by the party for which they labor than gay or trans or feminist identities are. Women fundamentally cannot lead a party that wants to oppress women; they cannot, in fact, even be fully human within it.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 17, 2024, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Are Republican Women Okay? - New York Magazine

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia stepped off a tour bus wrapped in Trump 2024 decals one afternoon this month in south-central Virginia with a simple message: Representative Bob Good of Virginia, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was a traitor to former President Donald J. Trump.

We need loyalists, Ms. Greene barked at about a dozen voters gathered on a baking parking lot in Goochland. Mr. Good, she said, had kicked Trump when he was down, and went and endorsed another candidate.

John J. McGuire, a state senator, former Navy SEAL and election denier, is challenging Mr. Good for the Republican nomination on Tuesday. Mr. McGuire, who attended the Stop the Steal rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, is the true MAGA, the true Trumper loyalist! Ms. Greene said.

Not too far down the road the following evening, Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, was on hand to rally with Mr. Good, an important injection of MAGA bona fides for a congressman dealing with the potentially crippling fact that Mr. Trump has endorsed his opponent.

They think youre a bunch of morons who dont count, Mr. Bannon told a large crowd gathered on a pleasant summer evening in front of the Powhatan Court House, surrounded by rolling farmland. He reminded the audience that Mr. Good was one of eight rebel Republicans who voted last year to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his post, and he cast the fight for re-election as a battle against the traditional G.O.P.

Why are we here today? Mr. Bannon asked. Because of Kevin McCarthy. Were here because we were sold out by the Republican establishment. They hate anybody that will stand up to them. This is not about President Trump.

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In Virginia, Bob Goods Republican Primary Has Split the MAGA Movement - The New York Times

International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean OBrien plans to address the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next month, in what would be a rare appearance by a high-profile labor leader at the GOPs quadrennial meeting.

Former President Donald Trump announced the news on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday, saying OBrien had accepted my invitation.

Sean, I look forward to seeing you represent the Teamsters in Milwaukee, Trump said. Together we can Make America Great Again.

A Teamsters spokesperson confirmed the planned appearance in an email and said OBrien had asked to speak at both the Democratic and GOP conventions.

This is truly unprecedented since it will be the very first time a Teamsters General President has addressed the RNC, the spokesperson said. Our 1.3 million members represent every political background, and their message needs to be heard by as wide an audience as possible, and that includes all political candidates running for elected office.

Most major unions have either publicly opposed or kept their distance from Trump, whose agenda as president was extremely hostile to organized labor. The Teamsters endorsed President Joe Biden during his 2020 run against Trump, but so far, the union has declined to throw its backing behind either candidate for 2024.

In the meantime, OBrien appears happy to hear Trump out. He and other top Teamsters met with the former president in January, rankling members who strongly oppose a Trump return to the White House.

OBrien, who took the helm of the union in March of 2022, said it was important to speak with all candidates.

Theres always a threat to organized labor, so we want to be proactive and make certain every candidate not just President Biden understands how important our issues are, he told Politico in March.

When Trump was president, he wasnt exactly friendly to organized labor. He installed members on the National Labor Relations Board who made it more difficult for workers to organize unions and rolled back several workplace regulations meant to improve safety and raise wages.

Once Biden arrived at the White House, he set to peeling back several of those Trump-era changes and shaped the NLRB into arguably its most pro-union form in decades. He also signed a coronavirus relief package that provided $86 billion in funding for troubled union pension funds, with the largest beneficiary being a Teamsters plan.

The AFL-CIO labor federation, which includes 60 unions but not the Teamsters, has already endorsed Biden for reelection. So has the United Auto Workers union, whose president, Shawn Fain, declared during the announcement in January that Trump is a scab.

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Teamsters President To Address Republican Convention At Trump's Invitation - Yahoo! Voices

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Teamsters president will speak at the Republican National Convention - The Bakersfield Californian

Prichard has said he didnt do anything wrong and thought he had completed his probation before voting in Georgia. But that didnt convince the judge in the case.

The court does not find the respondents explanations credible or convincing, Boggs wrote in her 25-page decision. At the very least, even if the court accepts he did not know about his felony sentences, the record before this court demonstrates that he should have known.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Pritchard declined to comment Wednesday on the judges ruling.

Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for Pritchard to resign immediately or be removed from his position in the Georgia Republican Party.

Our state party should be the leading voice on securing our elections. ... It is unacceptable for our party to have a man in leadership who has repeatedly committed voter fraud himself, Greene said Thursday.

Pritchard testified in February that he believed his felony sentence ended in 1999, but attorneys for the state showed evidence that his probation had been repeatedly revoked and extended until 2011. Georgia law prohibits felons from voting until theyve completed their sentences.

Pritchard registered to vote in Georgia in 2008 and cast ballots in nine elections before his probation was over, according to election records presented in court.

I felt it ended, Pritchard said after the court hearing. Do you think the first time I voted I said, Oh, I got away with it. Lets do it eight more times?

Pritchard pleaded guilty in 1996 to forgery and theft charges involving $38,000 worth of checks that he deposited while working on a construction job, according to court records from Alleghany County, Pennsylvania.

Pritchard acknowledged that he endorsed and deposited a check made out with someone elses name but said he didnt profit and the construction companies involved were repaid.

His probation initially lasted three years, but Pennsylvania judges repeatedly extended it until 2011 on allegations Pritchard failed to pay restitution, court records showed. Pritchard maintained that he didnt owe money and he thought that case was resolved.

Attorneys for the state said in court that Pritchard knew he was still serving his sentence because records show he appeared in Pennsylvania court for probation revocation hearings in 1999, 2002 and 2004. Pritchard denied that he was present in court in 2002 or 2004.

When he came to Georgia, he was aware that he was registering to vote illegally. He knew when he went in all nine times and signed that voter certificate, he was voting illegally, Senior Assistant Attorney General Russell Willard said during closing arguments in February.

The judge fined Pritchard $500 for each of the nine times he voted illegally, plus another $500 for his illegal voter registration. Pritchard can appeal the decision.

Before becoming a Republican Party official, Pritchard ran unsuccessfully last year for the state House seat that Speaker David Ralston held before he died in 2022.

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Georgia judge rules that Republican Brian K. Pritchard voted illegally - The Atlanta Journal Constitution