Tag: GOP has no policy agenda

Biden’s climate plan doesn’t ban meat. But baseless claims left Republicans fuming: ‘Stay out of my kitchen.’

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This past weekend, a cadre of Republican critics raised the alarm that President Biden would take hamburgers and steaks off the menu as part of his new plan to combat climate change.

“To meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to, get this, America has to stop eating meat,” Larry Kudlow, a former White House economic adviser to Donald Trump, said on Fox Business on Friday. “No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue.”

But Biden’s plan doesn’t include any call to limit meat-eating. Instead, conservative ire was sparked by a Daily Mail article that baselessly speculated about measures that could accomplish Biden’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Continue reading.

How the G.O.P. Lost Its Clear Voice on Foreign Policy

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After four years of Donald J. Trump’s America-first mantra, Republican views on foreign intervention, long a signature part of the party’s brand, have splintered.

For decades, Senator Lindsey Graham traveled the world with his friend John McCain, visiting war zones and meeting with foreign allies and adversaries, before returning home to promote the Republican gospel of an internationalist, hawkish foreign policy.

But this week, after President Biden announced that troops would leave Afghanistan no later than Sept. 11, Mr. Graham took the podium in the Senate press gallery and hinted that spreading the party’s message had become a bit lonely.

“I miss John McCain a lot but probably no more than today,” Mr. Graham said. “If John were with us, I’d be speaking second.”

Mr. McCain, the onetime prisoner of war in Vietnam, in many ways embodied a distinctive Republican worldview: a commitment to internationalism — and confrontation when necessary — that stemmed from the Cold War and endured through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush before evolving after the Sept. 11 attacks to account for the threat of global terrorism. Continue reading.

GOP leaders in ‘a state of confusion’ after Trump’s loss leaves them with almost no policy agenda: NYT

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While President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress were pushing through a massive pandemic relief package earlier this year, the leaders of the Republican Party seemed obsessed with talking about Dr. Seuss.

As the New York Times reports, this is a marked difference in how Republicans in 2009 were relentlessly focused on attacking former President Barack Obama’s “socialist” economic and health care plans, and it marks a shift in the party toward non-stop culture war grievance above all else.

The Times notes that the all-culture-war-all-the-time focus of the GOP has left party leaders in “a state of confusion over what they stand for,” with many of them now going so far as to say they want corporate America to stay out of politics. Continue reading.