Category Archives: Republican

Its understandable if you thought the threat had gone. Donald Trump left office nearly a year ago, is no longer serving up daily outrages by tweet, and is reduced to appearing with Nigel Farage on GB News. But the menace he represented lingers, and not only because Trump remains the most likely Republican presidential nominee for 2024, a contest he could well win given the parlous approval ratings of the current incumbent.

Trumpism lives on in the legacy he left behind, its most visible incarnation perhaps the three ultra-conservative judges he selected for the supreme court, who this week began hearing a case on abortion one that many expect to result in the removal of American womens constitutionally protected right to end an unwanted pregnancy.

But Trumpism endures too in the party he remade in his own image. He has left behind a Republican party no longer committed to democracy. That sounds hyperbolic but, if anything, it understates the case. Republicans are breaking from the principle that precedes the idea of democracy and is even more fundamental: the belief that arguments between citizens should be resolved by peaceful means. Todays Republican party is normalising the notion of violence as a means of securing a political outcome.

Start with the case of Paul Gosar, the Republican member of Congress for Arizona. He retweeted an anime-style video that depicted him murdering his Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as swinging a sword at Joe Biden. Appalling though that was, especially at a time when AOC and others face constant threats of violence, more telling was the response of Gosars party. When Democrats moved to censure him, only two Republicans voted with them. The 200-odd others gave Gosar their blessing.

Earlier, Republicans had had to make a similar decision. Before her election to Congress in 2020, Marjorie Taylor Greene had posted on Facebook a photograph of herself holding a gun next to an image of AOC and two other members of the so-called Squad, made up of left-leaning Democratic women of colour. Taylor Greene also all but called for the execution of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Yet when Democrats voted to kick the Georgia Republican off the various congressional committees she sat on, only 11 members of her party voted with them. The rest stood with her.

Of course, the pattern was set with the Republican response to Trump himself, and his encouragement of the attempt to overturn a democratic election by force earlier this year. Republicans could have repudiated the storming of the Capitol on 6 January by joining their Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach the outgoing president for inciting an insurrection. But only 10 Republicans did so.

Since then, those 10 dissenters have been pilloried and ostracised by their fellow Republicans. Among the shunned is Liz Cheney, who was stripped of her House leadership role and expelled from the state Republican party in her native Wyoming. Shes an arch-conservative like her former vice-president father, but that didnt matter. Cheney believes in respecting elections and that was enough to put her beyond the pale.

These responses coddling the advocates of violence, punishing those who denounce it prove the truth of the declaration that Taylor Greene made this week: We are not the fringe. We are the base of the party.

Shes right. She and Gosar are in lockstep with a Republican party whose face can be seen in the death threats now routinely meted out not only to nationally famous politicians such as AOC, but to the officials and volunteers who serve in public health, local government or on school boards across the country.

Trumps downplaying of the dangers of the pandemic and his hostility to mask-wearing made those stances articles of faith among his most ardent supporters who now threaten murderous violence against those who cross them, their fury directed especially at schools that require their pupils to wear masks. In early October, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, felt it necessary to send in the FBI to help protect school administrators, who were facing what the National School Boards Association calls a form of domestic terrorism.

To be clear, not every Republican in the House or Senate agrees with Gosar, Taylor Greene or the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania who promised to bring 20 strong men to a school board meeting because this is how you get stuff done but they are terrified of them, just as they are terrified of Trump and his supporters. They know that if they step out of line, they will soon face an internal, primary challenge for their own seat. So they say nothing.

The espousal of, or acquiescence in, political violence is the sharpest expression of Republicans steady march away from democracy, but it is not the only one. At the milder end is the unabashed gerrymandering under way in many of the states where Republicans are in control, redrawing boundaries to give themselves permanent and insurmountable majorities.

More troubling still are the hundreds of voter suppression measures advanced by Republican state legislatures, nakedly designed to make voting harder for groups that tend to vote Democratic, especially low-income Americans and those from ethnic minorities. Whether its demanding stricter proof of identity, reducing early or postal voting say, by allowing only one dropbox in each county, no matter how many people live there or how large it is the desired goal is the same: to shrink the franchise, hurting Democrats and helping Republicans.

The drive is, once again, fealty to Trump. Polls show that 68% of Republicans believe the former presidents big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and they are determined to make sure it wont happen again. To ensure there is no risk of Trump losing in 2024, Republicans are both making it harder for Democrats to vote and working to install reliable allies as election scrutineers: they want no repeat of 2020, when Republican officials allowed the votes to be counted fairly and declared Biden the winner.

What is fuelling this shift is not solely the cult of personality that still envelopes Donald Trump, though that devotion is a mighty force. Studies have long shown a potent authoritarian impulse on the American right drawn to the notion of a strong leader imposing order and guarding the nation against outsiders one greater than in comparable countries. As always with the US, race plays a central role. Enough white Americans fear a future in which they are no longer the dominant majority and are ready to do what it takes to stay in charge: to avert demography, theyll sacrifice democracy.

This represents a mortal threat to the American republic. But the US remains the worlds most powerful nation. As of now, only one of its two governing parties is committed to democracy and that poses a danger to us all.

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The Republican party is embracing violence in the name of Trump - The Guardian

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Hello, and Happy Thursday,

Over the last few months, weve seen lawmakers in several states draw new, distorted political districts that entrench their political power for the next decade. Republicans are carving up Texas, North Carolina and Georgia to hold on to their majorities. Democrats have the power to draw maps in far fewer places, but theyve also shown a willingness to use it where they have it, in places like Illinois and Maryland.

But something uniquely disturbing is happening in Ohio.

Republicans control the legislature there and recently enacted new maps that would give them a supermajority in the state legislature and allow them to hold on to at least 12 of the states 15 congressional seats. Its an advantage that doesnt reflect how politically competitive Ohio is: Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 53% of the vote.

Whats worse is that Ohio voters have specifically enacted reforms in recent years that were supposed to prevent this kind of manipulation. Republicans have completely ignored them. It underscores how challenging it is for reformers to wrest mapmaking power from politicians.

Its incredibly difficult to get folks to say, OK, were just gonna do this fairly after years and years and decades and decades of crafting districts that favor one political party, Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group that backed the reforms, told me earlier this year. I did not envision this being as shady.

In 2015 and 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved two separate constitutional amendments that were meant to make mapmaking fairer. The 2015 amendment dealt with drawing state legislative districts and gave a seven-person panel, comprised of elected officials from both parties, power to draw districts. If the panel couldnt agree on new maps, they would only be in effect for four years, as opposed to the usual 10.

The 2018 amendment laid out a slightly different process for drawing congressional districts, but the overall idea was the same. Both reforms also said districts could not unfairly favor or disfavor a political party.

Something started to seem amiss earlier this fall when the panel got to work trying to create the new state legislative districts. The two top Republicans in the legislature wound up drawing the maps in secret, shutting their fellow GOP members out of the process. After reaching an impasse with Democrats, Republicans on the panel approved a plan that gives the GOP a majority in the state legislature for the next four years.

When it came time to draw congressional maps, things did not go much better. The panel barely even attempted to fulfill its mission, kicking mapmaking power back to the state legislature. Lawmakers there quickly enacted the congressional plan that benefits the GOP for the next four years.

The new map benefits the GOP by cracking Democratic-heavy Hamilton county, home of Cincinnati, into three different congressional districts, noted the Cook Political Report. It also transforms a district in northern Ohio, currently represented by Democrat Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving woman in Congress, from one Joe Biden carried by 19 points in 2020 to one Trump would have carried by 5 points.

The maps already face several lawsuits, and their fate will ultimately be decided by the Ohio supreme court. Republicans have a 4-3 advantage on the court, though one of the GOP justices is considered a swing vote. Well soon see if voter-approved reforms will be completely defanged.

Reader questions

Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and Ill try to answer as many as I can.

Few places better encapsulate the new Republican effort to undermine American elections than Wisconsin. Some Republicans there are calling for the removal of the non-partisan head of the states election commission.

Georgia saw a jump in the percentage of rejected mail-in ballot requests in one of the first elections after Republicans imposed new requirements. Many of those who had their ballot requests rejected didnt ultimately vote in person, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a statement of interest in voting rights lawsuits in Arizona, Texas and Florida. All three filings significantly defend the power and scope of section two of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the 1965 civil rights law.

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A Republican power grab in Ohio might be the GOPs most brazen yet - The Guardian

Senator Josh Hawley is worried about men. In a recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he blamed the left for their mental health problems, joblessness, obsession with video games and hours spent watching pornography. The crisis of American men, he said, is a crisis for the American republic.

The liberal reaction was flippant. A CNN analysis mocked the speech, contrasting the decline of masculinity with real issues like the pandemic and inflation. The ReidOut Blog on MSNBCs website declared, Josh Hawleys crusade against video games and porn is hilariously empty. But the contempt and mockery his speech received was, at least in part, misplaced.

Mr. Hawley is not alone in sensing that masculinity is a popular cause; around the world, male politicians are tapping into social anxieties about its apparent decline, for their own ideological ends. The Chinese government, for instance, has declared a masculinity crisis, and it is responding by cracking down on gaming during school days and by investing in gym teachers and school sports.

There can be a homophobic and fascistic component to such calls: China has also barred sissy men from appearing on TV; in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has said that masks are for fairies; and Mr. Hawley, in his speech, fueled anti-transgender prejudice by alluding to a bogus war on womens sports. Nothing justifies this hateful nonsense. But Mr. Hawley, for all his winking bigotry, is tapping into something real a widespread, politically potent anxiety about young men that is already helping the right.

American politicians have long fanned popular flames of masculine panic to advance their own agendas, and Mr. Hawley is a scholar of this tradition. In 2008, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, he wrote a smart, compelling book about a historical figure who also worried about masculinity. In Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness, published by Yale University Press, Mr. Hawley described how Roosevelt sought to imbue men with the fortitude the country needed to drive big national projects like war and territorial expansion.

Foregrounding the iconic virility of the cowboy and the soldier, he set out to inspire civic virtue in a citizenry that, he believed, had lost traditional manly virtues when people moved from farms to cities. Conquest would allow American men to shed the temptations of the slothful life and become a more manful race. Mr. Hawley seeks to carry on this tradition.

He is right about some things. Deindustrialization has stripped many men of their ability to earn a decent wage, as well as of the pride they once took in contributing to prosperous communities. Boys are sometimes overdisciplined and overmedicated for not conforming to behavioral expectations in school. And while more women than men are diagnosed with anxiety or depression, men are more likely to commit suicide or die of drug overdoses.

None of these problems are caused by liberals. But liberalism hasnt offered a positive message for men lately. In the media, universities and other liberal institutions, it sometimes seems that every man is potentially guilty of something. As Mr. Hawley puts it, men are being told by liberals that theyre the problem. Our side the progressive side has struggled to articulate what a nontoxic masculinity might look like, or where boys might look for models of how to become men.

This has set up an existential crisis for the left, threatening its ability to win elections. For years, young men have been flocking to the far right, finding its messages and disgruntled virtual communities on YouTube and Reddit. In 2016, Donald Trump won the male vote by 11 percentage points. And with his attacks on pornography and video games, Mr. Hawley could appeal to mothers, too, who know that, in excess, these arent signs of healthy social adjustment.

Like Roosevelt, Mr. Hawley knows how to exploit the cultural anxieties of ordinary people to advance his brand of politics. But he hasnt offered solutions to this masculinity crisis because neither he nor his party has any.

Men and boys need good jobs, affordable access to team sports, an education system sensitive to their social and emotional development, public parks, mental health support, access to substance abuse treatment and paternity leave. All of this requires public funding, which is far more likely to come from the left than the right. To thrive, many men also need the freedom not to be men at all, but rather to become sissies, scrawny historians or even women, a cultural evolution Mr. Hawley and his conservative ilk adamantly oppose.

In his book, Mr. Hawley rightly condemned Roosevelts racism and commitment to violent conquest, but he also wanted to salvage from Roosevelts legacy a vision of the common good, an insistence that we can live nobler and more meaningful lives. In his speech, Mr. Hawley tapped into this legacy: To each man, I say: You can be a tremendous force for good. Your nation needs you. The world needs you.

I dont hate this message, taken alone, for our sons. Who would? But that vision of shared purpose and civic virtue wont come from Mr. Hawley any more than funding for more public baseball fields will. He, after all, has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed, from the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Build Back Better Act to the Green New Deal.

Meanwhile, the left will need to find a better way to talk to men; half of the population is far too many people to abandon to the would-be strongmen of the far right.

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Opinion | Josh Hawley and the Republican Obsession With Manliness - The New York Times

By March, Gov. Gavin Newsom knew he was in trouble.

His people had been tracking what, until then, was a mostly nascent campaign to recall the Democrat from office. Its the sort of thing generations of California governors have faced, and only one Gov. Gray Davis with real political consequences.

But, this year, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.

In 25 months, theres been six efforts to put a recall on the ballot, Newsom said in mid-March on ABCs The View. This one appears to have the requisite signatures, he acknowledged.

Indeed, by April, Secretary of State Shirley Weber declared that enough signatures had been verified more than 1,495,709 to force a recall election by the end of the year.

That campaign Newsom once dismissed as the purview of the far right alongside Trumpism, anti-vax conspiracy theories and a refusal to wear face masks? It had suddenly gained mainstream appeal.

All it took was the governor secretly violating his own public health orders on COVID-19, going out to dinner with friends and doing so at a Michelin-starred restaurant that most Californians navigating a pandemic-crunched economy could never afford.

I want to apologize to you because I need to preach and practice, not just preach and not practice, and Ive done my best to do that, Newsom said after being caught. Were all human. We all fall short sometimes.

COVID fatigue, he added, is exhausting.

Right.

By May, the recall circus was well underway. As was the case in 2003, when a deeply unpopular Davis was fighting for political life, dozens of unqualified clowns signed up to be candidates.

Among the most prominent: the millennial YouTuber Kevin Paffrath, the obnoxious Olympian-turned-reality-TV-star Caitlyn Jenner and the failed gubernatorial hopeful John Cox, who crisscrossed the state with a 1,000-pound, Kodiak bear named Tag.

Were gonna need big, beastly changes to be made in this state, Cox said during a campaign stop in Sacramento, while Tag snacked on cookies and chicken. Were going to have to be tough as a beast to go against the special interest groups.

The biggest entrance to the race came in July. Thats when Larry Elder, the loudmouth radio talk show host known for mentoring Trump sycophants and demonizing Black liberals to entertain white conservatives, decided he was going to save the state.

As the self-proclaimed Sage of South Central, Elder had name recognition and no experience. That, of course, set him up for a rapid rise to the top of the polls, above more traditional candidates such as former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and Assembly member Kevin Kiley.

Elder vowed to do away with mask and vaccine mandates, put the brakes on police reform and, for all intents and purposes, ignore climate change and systemic racism. He also said some dumb stuff about homelessness, which no doubt prompted the egging he received while trying to tour a Venice encampment in a three-piece suit.

As President Biden said of Elder while stumping for Newsom in Long Beach, The leading Republican running for governor is the closest thing to a Trump clone that I have ever seen.

Despite all of this, by the final weeks of the race, Elder had an actual shot at being governor. Blame Californias nonsensical recall election process.

Lucky for Newsom, in this bluest of blue states, where the vast majority of the electorate is terrified of electing anyone at all connected to former President Trump, the governor managed to handily beat back the recall attempt.

As he said in his no-frills victory speech: Democracy is not a football. You dont throw it around.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, joined by firefighters, speaks at a news conference on Sept. 9 in Glendale.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

As 2021 comes to a close, I find myself wondering what if anything California learned from this embarrassingly expensive exercise in ego-stroking political theater. And what if anything will come of it.

At the very least, we seem to have learned that the recall process needs an overhaul.

Californians are very frustrated that we just spent $276 million on this recall election that, from the looks of it, certified what voters said three years ago, Assembly member Marc Berman of Menlo Park said in September.

Hearings are already being held by the election committees of the Legislature.

But I suspect the impact of the recall election wont stop there. Rather, it will be felt most across the nation.

Consider that after Newsom trounced his would-be Republican ousters, political watchers speculated that his strategy of tying Republican candidates to Trump was one that would help Democrats in the midterm election.

Fast-forward a few weeks. Democrat Terry McAuliffe tried the Trump clone strategy while running for a second term as governor of Virginia and Republican Glenn Youngkin won anyway. Now those political watchers arent so sure anymore.

Just as important, Winsome Sears won the race for lieutenant governor, becoming the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginias history.

A conservative Republican, she previously led the national committee to boost Black voter turnout for Trump. She rails against critical race theory, insists that voters are being pitted against each other based on race and argues that Black people are coddled too much by government programs.

Sound familiar? Call it the Larry Elder strategy, pioneered right here in California. What better way for Republicans to avoid talking about their partys embrace of white supremacists than to promote Black conservatives?

Former NFL player Herschel Walker is trying the same trick in Georgia with a run for the U.S. Senate. Trump might try it too, as he weighs options for a running mate in 2024, Trumps pollster speculated to Politico.

The night Elder lost his bid to replace Newsom, he promised his mostly white, Republican supporters that hed be back.

We may have lost the battle, he said, pacing a stage in Costa Mesa, but we are going to win the war.

Not in California. But the rest of the country could be in trouble.

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Republicans sent in the clowns for California's recall circus - Los Angeles Times

The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, said on Saturday he had reached out to Democrats over Islamophobic comments made by one of his party, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, about the Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar.

Boebert apologised for the remarks, in which she likened one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress to a suicide bomber, on Friday, saying she wanted to meet Omar in person. Omar responded by condemning the remarks and calling for action from party leaders.

In a statement to CNN, McCarthy said: I spoke with Leader [Steny] Hoyer today to help facilitate that meeting so that Congress can get back to talking to each other and working on the challenges facing the American people.

McCarthy did not condemn Boeberts remarks. He also faced criticism from within his own ranks, after another pro-Trump extremist, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, tweeted that she had a good call with McCarthy and liked what he has planned ahead.

Greene had criticised McCarthy, seeking to cast doubt on his ambitions to be speaker should as seems likely Republicans take back the House next year.

A Republican who spoke anonymously to CNN and was described as a moderate said McCarthy was taking the middle of the conference for granted. McCarthy could have a bigger math problem [in the election for speaker] with the moderates.

The anonymous moderate said his wing of the party more of a rump, perhaps, given Donald Trumps dominance was upset about McCarthys embrace of extremists.

One such extremist, Paul Gosar of Arizona, was this month censured for tweeting a video which depicted him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York like Omar a leading progressive and woman of colour in Congress and threatening Joe Biden.

Gosar lost committee assignments. McCarthy said he would get them back under a Republican speakership and held out the same prospect to Greene, who was stripped of her committees in February for racist, antisemitic and generally incendiary behaviour.

McCarthy has faced calls from the right to punish Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, as well as the 10 who voted to impeach Trump over the deadly Capitol riot.

Two who voted to impeach, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, will retire next year. Primary challengers await the rest including Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a stringent conservative nonetheless split from the Trumpists over the Capitol attack.

On Saturday, Kinzinger criticised the minority leaders call with Greene, writing: Here is real strength, when Kevin McCarthy has to call a freshman begging for permission to stay in power. What has Kevin promised? The people deserve to know.

He also said it had been a while since most normal members last talked to Kevin.

The anonymous moderate who spoke to CNN said the party was on a collision course with itself, as their side isnt going to take this much longer.

On Sunday, Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas who is seen by some as a possible presidential nominee from the more moderate side of the party, told CNNs State of the Union McCarthy should have condemned Boebert.

Even in our own caucus, our own members, if they go the wrong direction, I mean, it has to be called out, Hutchinson said. It has to be dealt with particularly whenever it is breaching the civility, whenever it is crossing the line in terms of violence or increasing divides in our country.

Earlier this week, Jackie Speier, a senior Democrat from California, told the Guardian McCarthy had a number of radical extremists in his caucus that are very effective communicators to the right fringe, and he cant really rein them in because reining them in means they will attack him.

So they have become the face of the House Republicans. You might as well put a brass ring in Kevin McCarthys nose because theyre pulling him around.

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Republican McCarthy risks party split by courting extremists amid Omar spat - The Guardian

Last weekend I considered what the Democratic Party should expect from politics after Covid the hope of revived popularity for Joe Biden under return-to-normalcy conditions, the danger that the left-tilting party might be losing ground across multiple different demographic groups. Now, after an interlude of giving thanks, lets consider how post-Covid politics might look from the Republican side.

Republicans have a lot to be thankful for. In the years since George W. Bush their party has staggered around without a governing ideology, veering from one style of fantasy politics to another, and twice nominated a ridiculously unfit reality-television star for the presidency. Yet through it all the party has never collapsed, never fallen more than a little distance out of power and almost always retained a certain capacity to block the Democrats, which is the only thing its constituencies can agree on.

This pattern seems unlikely to be broken even if Bidens poll numbers bounce back across 2022 and 2023. In that scenario Republicans will still probably narrowly recapture the House of Representatives, returning to the position that they held immediately after last Novembers election as a minority coalition, but a large one rather than a rump, which thanks to its structural advantages can always hope to hold at least part of Congress and ride a few lucky breaks into the White House.

But in a way, that advantage is also the core Republican weakness, and the partys good fortune in avoiding profound punishment for all its follies is the reason those follies will probably continue. The problems in the Democratic Party the danger that its progressive turn is costing it conservative-leaning minority votes, even as anti-Trump suburban voters could swing back to the G.O.P. create an opportunity for Republicans to win real popular majorities at the national level, on the scale of Bush in 2004 if not quite Ronald Reagan. But the fact that they dont need to be a majority coalition to exercise a certain power means that theyre more likely to choose badly, and stay roughly where they are.

The alternative, the best-case post-Covid scenario for the party, was visible in Glenn Youngkins Virginia campaign, which essentially blended elements from Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 with Mitt Romney in 2012, while shedding the baggage that kept both men from winning popular-vote majorities. Youngkin has a Romney-esque persona the corporate suit and genial family man but where the man from Bain Capital ended up captive to party dogma on taxes and entitlement cuts, the former Carlyle Group executive promised higher education spending and tax cuts that benefit the lower-middle class, playing against the corporate-Republican and supply-side stereotypes.

Meanwhile, Youngkin imitated Trump not just in his relatively populist promises but also in his willingness to pick cultural fights in this case, on critical race theory in schools that other moderate Republicans might shy away from. But then in most other ways he was an anti-Trump: decent rather than bullying, reasonable rather than paranoid, keeping conspiracism at a distance, reassuringly competent rather than apocalyptic.

So thats all the G.O.P. needs nationally to fully exploit its post-Covid opportunities a more populist economic agenda, a willingness to take the fight to the progressive left (but with a smile) and an end to Trumpian conspiracism.

But do enough actors in the party really want that combination? At the elite level there is a clutch of politicians and candidates who keep groping for a more populist agenda and a group of nationalist intellectuals who think theyre on the cusp of imposing one upon the party. But there is still a larger group of lawmakers, strategist and donors who are very comfortable having no agenda whatsoever, or falling back on the familiarity of upper-bracket tax cuts and pretend budget cuts as soon as theyre restored to power.

Among the partys voters, activists and media personalities, meanwhile, there remains a clear appetite not for the Youngkin-style appropriation of certain parts of Trumpism, but for Donald Trump in full nourished by the plausible belief that populists and social conservatives cant entirely trust more-corporate Republicans, the implausible belief that Trumps nastiness helped him more than it hurt him, the false belief that he actually won the 2020 election, plus the very America-in-2021 desire for politics to be high-stakes TV entertainment rather than boring attempts to cobble together governing majorities.

And heres the thing: Between the Democratic Partys weaknesses, Bidens age and the unimpressiveness of his possible successors, Republicans could very easily be competitive in 2024 while renominating Trump and campaigning on a purely negative agenda.

Sure, they cant expect to govern effectively that way, and theyd be throwing away a potentially golden opportunity. But in the end the race would be close, there would be some exciting constitutional-crisis possibilities in the aftermath, and if the Democrats pulled it out, well, their majorities would be slim and 2026 would be just around the corner.

And if theres anything weve learned over the past 15 years, its that the chance to enjoy a little bit of power without any real responsibility is impossible for Republicans to resist.

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Opinion | Republicans Have a Golden Opportunity. They Will Probably Blow It. - The New York Times

People were, like, shocked, Mr. Durr said. Theyd say, Nobodys ever been here.

Mr. Durr said he hoped to keep his job as a truck driver for the Raymour & Flanigan furniture chain, and the health insurance it provides, even after he is sworn in as a senator, a part-time position that pays $49,000. Lawmakers who took office after 2010 are not eligible for health coverage.

He rides a 2012 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, spoils his three pit bulls I call them my fur babies and, with his five siblings, takes care of his mother, a recent widow who lives next door.

Before joining the furniture company, he worked in construction and said he often held multiple jobs, including making pastries for Dunkin Donuts and working in a farm supply store. During two growing seasons, he drove trucks for East Coast Sod and Seed.

He was on time, said Andy Mottel, the manager of the Pilesgrove, N.J., farm, which transports sod across the country and provides the field grass for Yankee Stadium. He worked every day. He has that strong voice very knowledgeable about sports.

Mr. Durr completed his G.E.D. through Gloucester City High School, and he has made no secret of his unease with his sudden stardom. (I feel like Im about to throw up, he said the day Mr. Sweeney conceded.) He will be a member of the minority party in the State House, making it unlikely he will have significant power to steer or stonewall legislation.

When ticking off his legislative priorities, he mentions goals like bringing jobs here, bringing businesses here, and he is the first to say he has a lot to learn about how Trenton works. If its an issue that concerns New Jersey citizens, Im going fight for it, he said.

It was his fourth campaign for public office. He ran for State Assembly as an independent in 2017 and as a Republican in 2019, and he ran last year for Logan Township council.

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Edward Durr Jr.: The Trump Republican Whos Riding High in New Jersey - The New York Times

The New England Newspaper and Press Association honored The Republican and Sunday Republican as distinguished newspapers of the year for 2021.

The recognition was announced recently during the fall conference of the association. The event was held virtually due to continuing concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Awards are wonderful, and we appreciate them. What is even more wonderful is the day-to-day work of our reporters and editors, who stand on their heads to tell the communitys story on a straight-up basis, striving hard for objectivity and fairness in a world that seems to be forgetting what that means, said George Arwady, publisher and CEO of The Republican.

The Distinguished Newspaper honors came in the daily and Sunday categories for newspapers with weekday circulations over 20,000 and Sunday circulations of more than 25,000. This marks the fourth straight year in which The Republican and Sunday Republican landed in the top honors among New England newspapers. In 2019, The Republican was Newspaper of the Year in both the daily and Sunday categories.

The awards are based on a review of two editions in each category, one of which can be chosen by the entrants and the other an edition designated by the judges panel. Then, the papers are reviewed, and the honors determined by experts and readers impressions of the quality of the reporting and writing, use of photos, design and presentation, online offering, and overall utility and value.

Being named a Distinguished Newspaper of the Year for both our Sunday and daily editions is an honor we do not take lightly, especially amid this pandemic. It is an entire team effort, from advertising to circulation to our press team, said Cynthia G. Simison, executive editor. Our content and publications teams work hard in tandem to keep each days newspaper an interesting and informative product for our readers. Its rewarding to know the judges recognize the hard work and creativity by all.

In the comments delivered by the judges, there was praise for the local news coverage, as well as for the quality of photography and the exceptional amount of advertising.

In the comments on the weekday entry, the judges wrote: It provided all of the news stories that I would like to see if I lived there and good color throughout the newspaper.

Among the comments on the Sunday entry, the judges wrote, I was drawn more to the many special features and sections of the paper, rather than the news, and A wide variety of stories, many of them caught my eye. On the quality of photography, judges wrote: The photography in this newspaper is outstanding, and The photos support the stories and draw the readers in. On quality of local news coverage, one judge said, high quality local news coverage.

In the daily category, Newspaper of the Year honors went to the Republican-American of Waterbury, Connecticut, and the Providence Journal was also named a distinguished newspaper. In the Sunday category, the Providence Sunday Journal was named Newspaper of the Year, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette joined The Republican as a distinguished newspaper for 2021.

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The Republican, Sunday Republican earn 2021 New England Distinguished Newspaper of Year awards - masslive.com

Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy has been condemned by CNN anchor Jim Acosta for allowing his caucus to become a freak show amid a number of recent controversies in Congress.

The CNN anchor said on Saturday that the Republican was allowing his House caucus to become the Trump Republican Party freak show caucus, and referred to comments by Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar towards Democrats in recent weeks.

Mr Acosta said Mr McCarthy bears responsibility for the behaviour of both Ms Boebert and Mr Gosar, who was censured last week for an animation in which US President Joe Biden and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were murdered.

Ms Boebert was meanwhile condemned by the CNN anchor for referring to a Democrat, Ilhan Omar, as a member of the Jihad squad, in remarks that the Republican afterwards apologised for.

Mr Acosta told viewers that Ms Boebert appeared to believe that trolling and overt racism were a part of the job here in Washington, and that Mr McCarthy was failing to keep the party in check because of his appeasement of former US president, Donald Trump.

Now where would she get that idea?, the CNN anchor asked of Ms Boebert, before playing footage from a Trump campaign rally in which the crowd chanted send her back referring to Ms Omar, who is a US citizen but was born in Somalia.

Remember that? Mr Acosta said of the rally. Yes, welcome to the Trump Republican Party freak show caucus, home of Paul Gosar who wasrecently censured for posting a violent photoshopped anime showing him attacking prominent Democrats.

He continued: And of course, there isMarjorie Taylor-Greene who has been stripped of her committee assignmentsin part because of her past racist and anti-Semitic comments.

The freak show caucus knows the partys current leader in the House, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, is not going to stand in their way, Mr Acosta said of the Republican leader, who he said has gone from blaming Trump for January 6th to complaining that Trump should have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

The remarks by the CNN anchor comes after Ms Taylor-Greene said Mr MrMcCarthy does not have the full support to become House speaker if the Republican Party wins the House in 2022, citing an apparent lack of support for her and other far-right Republican figures.

She followed by saying on Saturday that she had a good call with Mr McCarthy, and that We spent time talking about solving problems not only in the conference, but for our country. I like what he has planned ahead.

Mr McCarthy faces the difficult task of appeasing Mr Trump and his critics within the Republican party, as well as confronting Democrats who accuse him of failing to keep his members controlled.

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Kevin McCarthy condemned by Jim Acosta for allowing freak show Republican caucus - The Independent

Its all right, Ive got all night, he said to groans from the chamber not long into his remarks around 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 18 as the House was on the verge of voting on the bill. McCarthy then continued to speak and point his finger into the air until 5:10 the next morning, his forehead shimmering under the glare of lights, his bleary-eyed colleagues behind him resisting the urge to nod off.

For McCarthy, the marathon speech a record for the House was a defining moment, a crucial chance to show that he can lead a House Republican caucus that over time has become more radical, combative, and adept at obstructionism and media manipulation. It also looked much like an audition for House speaker, should the Republicans win the majority of seats in next years election.

The most rancorous members of the party, those in the House Freedom Caucus, derailed his first bid to be speaker in 2015, because they viewed him as an establishment moderate. But, as he railed and kept railing into the night earlier this month, McCarthy appeared determined to send his colleagues a message that he could change, too.

This was a key moment for him to show leadership, longtime Republican strategist Douglas Heye said. In a party that values fighting so much ... that [speech] should bode well for him in a future speaker election.

Earlier this year, McCarthy tried to balance his appeals within a House Republican caucus divided over Donald Trump and the violence he inspired at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

No longer.

The 2022 midterm landscape is looking promising for Republicans energized by the partys upset victory in the Virginia governors race. And McCarthy appears to have decided to put aside his concerns over protecting the partys establishment wing, as he squarely centers on tending a base still committed to Trump and the hardline, outrage politics he helped push into the mainstream.

The shift comes as McCarthy has drawn fire from Trump allies who fault him for failing to stop 13 House Republicans from voting for the Democrats $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill on Nov. 5, securing its passage. And on the day before McCarthy delivered his all-nighter, former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows suggested the former president would make a better House speaker if Republicans gain the majority. (The notion is highly unlikely, yet not impossible, because there is no constitutional requirement that the speaker be a member of Congress.)

Another former Trump administration official, Peter Navarro, blasted McCarthy recently for removing all Republican members from the Houses special Jan. 6 commission except for Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Trump critics who were appointed to the panel by Democrats. Navarro said that left Trump exposed as the commission investigates the events that led to the deadly mob attack on the US Capitol.

Kevin McCarthy made arguably the dumbest checkers move in a chess game Ive ever seen, Navarro told Yahoo News.

Trump and McCarthy have a complicated relationship. Trump sometimes referred to him as my Kevin, and McCarthy cozied up to him while he was president. But things have not always been smooth between them, particularly when McCarthy publicly criticized Trump in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack and reportedly floated a resolution to censure Trump. Though McCarthy reversed himself, Trump blasted him for criticizing one of his allies, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for spouting conspiracy theories comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust.

McCarthy has responded by veering further to the right. He refused to take action against Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, who this month posted an anime-style video of him killing Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Democrats then voted on Nov. 17 to censure Gosar, which McCarthy and all but three Republicans opposed.

The next day, with many Republicans still seething over the censure of an outspoken Trump ally, McCarthy used a special House privilege known as the magic minute to buttress his right-wing credentials. The congressional procedure allows House minority and majority leaders to speak as long as they wish and speak he did.

Standing in his dark suit and red and white geometric tie, McCarthy employed the cadence of an obstinate salesman to repeatedly return to the same themes. He blamed Democrats for high gas prices and inflation, a chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, and increased federal funding for Internal Revenue Service audits, which he misleadingly suggested would go after families earning $75,000 or less.

He falsely claimed Democrats had banned oil and gas and refused to fund Israels air missile defense system known as the Iron Dome. He wildly exaggerated the contents of a Justice Department memo issued in response to threats of violence against school board members nationwide over mask mandates, describing it as a Biden directive to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to target parents as domestic terrorists. And McCarthy incorrectly said that Bidens decision not to reissue a permit for the Keystone pipeline had caused more than one million people to lose their jobs, when the actual figure was about 11,000 temporary positions.

If I sound angry, I am, McCarthy declared early in his speech. Throughout the night, he shouted so much his voice grew hoarse at times. He badgered Democrats who interrupted him or pushed back on his comments. When he was told to address the presiding officer as House rules require, he yelled in indignation.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe the amount of control one-party rule wants, he said, waving his hands up. They now want to dictate to a member of the floor where I can look?

His wide-ranging remarks touched on his upbringing in a Democratic household, his friendship with tech billionaire Elon Musk, and a little secret about baby carrots (They are just big carrots. They chop em and they charge you more and you buy them.). At one point, he spent four minutes ruminating on an 1851 painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. Often, he denounced the money earmarked in the social spending bill to help undocumented immigrants, whom he referred to as a slur and pitted against other beneficiaries of federal funds.

This evening showed that no matter the time, the day, or the circumstances, House Republicans will always fight for you, fight for your family, and fight for our country, he insisted as he ended the speech just before dawn on Nov. 19.

To some, McCarthys lengthy oration was a throwback to the one then-House minority leader John Boehner gave in 2010, when he opposed the Affordable Care Act with shouts of, Hell no, you cant! That address was seen as an attempt by Boehner to ride out the arch-conservative wave of the Tea Party Movement, which formed to oppose former President Barack Obama. Its members such as Meadows eventually pushed Boehner into retirement in 2015 and prevented McCarthy from succeeding him as speaker.

Historians traced the roots of McCarthys performance to the Republican whose tactics helped inspire the Tea Party: former Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich, who abandoned congressional norms and developed the aggressive, no-holds-barred tactics now deployed by both sides of the political aisle. Before he became House speaker in January 1995, Gingrich used floor speeches televised on fledgling C-SPAN to speak unfiltered to Americans, control political messaging, and obstruct the legislative process.

Those strategies continue to be effective, particularly for Republicans, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University.

They have a massive media ecosystem from social media to Fox [News] that didnt really exist in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Zelizer said. Its easy to circulate bits and pieces of what [McCarthy] did for a long time and to reach audiences predisposed to believing it was meaningful.

McCarthys speech was mostly a stall tactic and did not change the outcome of the vote, although it did break the record for longest speech, previously held by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at eight hours and seven minutes. It likely wont be remembered so much for its content as its duration and tenor.

That kind of tone emotionally charged, angry is good at getting donations and media attention, said Sarah Sobieraj, a sociology professor at Tufts University who studies US political culture and extreme incivility. Being provocative in that way works, she said.

It should also send a message to Democrats, who have continued to relegate their own most outspoken members to the sidelines as they struggle with intra-party dynamics, failing to coalesce behind a clear narrative for the infrastructure and social spending bills, said Reece Peck, assistant professor at the College of Staten Island under the City University of New York.

The wakeup call for Democrats is this: You need to retool and put more investment in your communication strategies, Peck said, adding that McCarthys rant came at a moment when many Democratic voters seem dispirited, while the the right-wing, conservative movement is energized.

For McCarthy, the speech veered at times into a manifesto of sorts, the pinnacle of a transformation he accelerated in 2018, when he sought to recast himself as an immigration hardliner and populist in the mold of Trump. It has been a sharp evolution for a politician who arrived in Congress in 2007 and became part of a trio of young Republicans who sought to move the party forward with a focus on a strong policy agenda.

But McCarthy has never been seen as fully committed to any particular conservative ideology and above all else like Gingrich has been devoted to the belief that you cant dictate the agenda in Congress if you dont hold the majority.

McCarthy is still viewed as the front-runner for speaker if Republicans take control of the House, so close now to his ultimate goal that he can almost taste it, said Mark Martinez, chairperson of the political science department at California State University in Bakersfield. But to get there, he is embracing the most extreme elements of his party to the detriment of his district, Martinez added.

At the same time, McCarthy is still facing the same challenge with Trump supporters that he did with Tea Party members a decade ago, said Dan Schnur, a professor at the University of Southern Californias Annenberg School of Communications who served on Senator John McCains 2000 presidential campaign.

He has to convince them that they can trust him, he said. To that end, losing a valiant fight is almost as good as winning.

Reach Jazmine Ulloa at jazmine.ulloa@globe.com or on Twitter: @jazmineulloa.

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In Kevin McCarthys 8-hour tirade, a rambling attempt to show he can lead the rancorous Republicans - The Boston Globe