Tag: GOP House

Freedom Caucus steps into the GOP messaging gap

Conservative hard-liners fill vacuum to counterpunch for Trump

Mark Meadows’ gaze was scrupulously trained on Adam B. Schiff.

On Oct. 3, after deposing a former Trump official for hours, Schiff, the House Intelligence chairman, emerged from a secure room in the Capitol’s basement and addressed a waiting television camera.

“Encouraging a foreign nation to interfere again, to help his campaign,” the California Democrat said of President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. That conversation has become the focus of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, and Schiff and party leaders argue it represents a “fundamental breach of the president’s oath of office.”

View the complete October 15 article by Patrick Kelley on The Roll Call website here.

Anxious GOP treads carefully with Trump defense

The Hill logoRank-and-file Republicans are treading carefully when it comes to speaking out about the escalating controversy surrounding President Trump‘s entreaties that foreign governments investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

Republicans don’t want to get on the bad side of Trump, who is a powerhouse within the party. But they recognize a danger in speaking out too forcefully in defense of the president as details about Trump and his administration’s actions slowly trickle out.

“They’re handling [it] correctly,” one former GOP lawmaker told The Hill, referring to the cautious approach.

View the complete October 7 article by Juliegrace Brufke on The Hill website here.

A second Senate Republican just broke with Trump on the Ukraine whistleblower

AlterNet logoRepublican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa took a stand at odds with President Donald Trump on Thursday, defending protections for whistleblowers as the White House fights back a scandal sparked by alarms raised in the intelligence community.

Trump has engaged in outright attacks on the whistleblower who alerted officials about the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his potential political rival Joe Biden. He has called the intelligence community member partisan, suggested that the person and those that provided the information in the complaint are guilty of treason and could deserve the death penalty, and said that he is trying to uncover the whistleblower’s identity.

As NBC News reported, Ernst joined Sen. Chuck Grassley, the other Iowa Republican in the Senate, who stood up for the whistleblower earlier in the week.

View the complete October 4 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Kevin McCarthy and the ‘but not impeachable’ defense of Trump

Washington Post logoRepublicans who want to avoid criticizing the president are likely to lean on the wiggle room the Constitution gives Congress.

Republicans in Congress have struggled to explain why President Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president is okay. Witness the top House Republican, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Reporter Scott Pelley asks McCarthy whether what Trump has done is wrong.

McCarthy doesn’t directly answer the question. “You and I have all the information we need,” he says. “The president did nothing in this phone call that’s impeachable.” The exchange is instructive about how Republicans might move forward in this impeachment inquiry: switch the metric Trump is graded on from what’s wrong to what’s an impeachable offense.

This could be where Republicans’ hat will hang throughout this process: Maybe it was wrong (though McCarthy isn’t allowing that much), but it’s not impeachable.

View the complete September 30 article by Amber Phillips on The Washington Post website here.

GOP faces new pressure to act on guns

The Hill logoFor Republicans hoping to run out the clock on gun reform, the weekend’s mass shooting in Texas has complicated the math.

The killings of seven people in Odessa by a lone gunman on Saturday has rekindled the push for stricter gun laws, rousing Democrats and outside reform advocates already energized by the summer’s tragedies.

Walmart, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced Tuesday that it would limit its ammunition sales and request customers not openly carry firearms — a move immediately condemned by the National Rifle Association (NRA) as “shameful.”

View the complete September 3 article by Jordain Carney and Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Secret Memo Urges House Republicans To Blame White Nationalist Killings On ‘The Left’

House Republicans have been circulating a memo internally that instructs members of Congress to blame violence initiated by white supremacists, like the recent El Paso mass shooting, as something that is the fault of “the left,” according to TheTampa Bay Times.

A spokesperson for Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) said the memo was “provided by the House Republican Conference,” is currently chaired by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). Bilirakis included talking points from the memo in a newsletter he emailed to constituents last week.

The memo provides Republican members a series of questions they are likely to face from constituents and gives them the language to respond.

View the complete August 18 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

Republicans struggle to respond in wake of El Paso, Dayton shootings

Washington Post logoThe Republican Party, which controls power in Washington and both states where America’s most recent mass shootings occurred, struggled on Sunday to provide a response or offer a solution to what has become a public safety epidemic.

There were thoughts and prayers, an appeal to donate blood, accolades for law enforcement and a presidential proclamation to lower flags to half-staff to honor the victims — 29 killed in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and dozens more wounded over 13 hours.

Some Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, cited the influence of social media and video games or mentioned mental health problems. But on the question of how to stem the rising tide of gun violence, the overwhelming response from the party was silence or generalities.

View the complete August 4 article by Felicia Sonmez and Paul Kane on The Washington Post website here.

The GOP’s questions to Mueller seemed bizarre — unless you watch Fox News

Washington Post logoTreating right-wing conspiracy theories as smoking guns shows that Republicans are mostly speaking to their base.

When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during the hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in Mueller’s report.

Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning. He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic-intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.

The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But it was almost certainly inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into Fox News, right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.

View the complete July 24 article by Nicole Hemmer on The Washington Post website here.

‘Send her back’ chant chills Washington

Some Republicans criticize crowd at Trump rally; McConnell says Trump is ‘onto something’ with attacks on progressive ‘squad’

The words “send her back” briefly drowned out the President Donald Trump’s speech in Greenville, North Carolina, last night, and quickly sent chills through Washington.

Trump carried his screed against Rep. Ilhan Omar from Twitter on to the stage of a campaign stop Wednesday night, prompting supporters to respond that he should “send her back” to the country she emigrated from as a child. The moment stoked fear about both the safety of the congresswoman and about the ramifications of the nation’s most powerful politician inflaming racial and religious hatred.

The president’s Democratic rivals rapidly condemned his diatribe and the crowd’s approving chant as “racist,”“vile”and “disturbing.”

View the complete July 18 article by Emily Kopp on The Roll Call website here.

With Name-Calling and Twitter Battles, House Republican Campaign Arm Copies Trump’s Playbook

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is portrayed as wearing clown makeup. Democratic congressional candidates — including an Air Force combat veteran — are labeled “socialist losers” or anti-Semites. Others have been singled out as Lyin’ Lucy McBath, Fake Nurse Lauren Underwood, Little Max Rose and China Dan McCready.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, with the blessing of House Republican leaders, has adopted a no-holds-barred strategy to win back the House majority next year, borrowing heavily from President Trump’s playbook in deploying such taunts and name-calling. After losing 40 seats and the House majority in November, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the committee’s new chairman, and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, decided that their messaging needed to be ruthless.

The offensive hinges largely on the relatively facile notion that by tagging all House Democrats as socialists, anti-Semites or far-left extremists, Republicans will be able to alienate swing-state voters. On Tuesday night, after the House voted to condemn as racist President Trump’s attacks on four congresswoman, the campaign arm’s communications team deluged reporters’ inboxes with message after message calling vulnerable Democratic lawmakers “deranged.”

View the complete July 17 article by Catie Edmonson on The New York Times website here.