Tag: GOP

Republicans Are Going to Try the ‘Red Scare’ Strategy Again. Will It Work?

Republicans, their conservative media allies, and more than a few Donkey Party apostates, have been calling Democrats “socialists” for a long, long time. The habit really began with FDR, who was generally thought to have introduced a social-democratic strain to American liberalism. His predecessor as Democratic presidential nominee and as governor of New York, Al Smith, said this to a room full of anti-Roosevelt conservatives in 1936:

Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side … After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will have your hand on the Socialist platform.”

At least FDR was indeed advocating significant new public policy restraints on private enterprise, if not anything you could really characterize as “socialist” by historic standards. But the same label was applied to virtually every post–World War II Democratic president other than perhaps Jimmy Carter.

View the complete March 7 article by Ed Kilgore on The New York Magazine website here.

‘There is a strategy’: Noam Chomsky dismantles the Trump-McConnell Republican party ‘con game’

AlterNet logoEven for Donald Trump, the remarks were almost staggering in their density. Last month, in an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Western liberalism has “outlived its purpose,” adding that “it has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” When asked during the G20 summit in Osaka if he agreed, Trump offered this gleaming ruby: “[Putin] sees what’s going on—I guess if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

Trying to deduce any kind of grand strategy from a president who confuses the West with California and believes the moon is part of Mars can feel like a fool’s errand, if not “the purest acid satire.” But as Noam Chomsky argues in an interview with Truthout this week, “there is a strategy”—one that has empowered the far right across the globe and ultimately endangers human life on earth. If Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a tragedy, he speculates, then Trump’s is history repeating itself as farce.

“It’s understandable that the farce elicits ridicule, and no doubt some are relishing the coming photo-op of Trump and Boris Johnson upholding Anglo-American civilization,” claims the celebrated linguist and philosopher. “But for the world, it’s dead serious, from the destruction of the environment and the growing threats of terminal nuclear war to a long list of other crimes and horrors.”

View the complete July 7 article by Jacob Sugarman of Truthout and Noam Chomsky on the AlterNet website here.

Republicans Fear NRA Turmoil Will Hurt Trump’s Re-Election Chances

Republicans are concerned that the seemingly never-ending parade of scandals at the National Rifle Association could seriously hurt Trump’s reelection efforts.

This week Politico reported on GOP concerns about the NRA, which has been a pivotal part of the Republican right’s vote mobilization efforts in the past.

“The turmoil is fueling fears that the organization will be profoundly diminished heading into the election, leaving the Republican Party with a gaping hole in its political machinery,” Politico noted.

The outlet reported that Republicans are already raising alarms and asking the NRA to come clean with its plans for 2020 so they can address possible deficiencies before the race begins in earnest.

View the complete July 6 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

Internal cracks emerge in GOP strategy to avoid shutdown

The Hill logoSenate Republicans are struggling to unite behind a plan to fund the government after budget talks have ground to a halt.

Congress has until the end of September to prevent the second government closure of the year, but Republicans are struggling to overcome the first roadblock — agreeing to top-line defense and nondefense figures or deciding what comes next if they can’t.

The drama over how to fund the government and avoid deep budget cuts has played out in private, closed-door meetings and put a public spotlight on the high-profile split among Republicans as well as with the White House about the best path to avoid a shutdown.

View the complete June 30 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

‘Huge victory for the Republican Party’: Legal experts weigh in on Supreme Court’s landmark gerrymandering decision

AlterNet logoThe U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on gerrymandering, deciding that federal courts cannot block lawmakers in individual states from partisan gerrymandering in political districts. And legal experts have been weighing in on the decision.

Elie Mystal, editor of Above the Law, has been highly critical of Chief Justice John Roberts in a series of tweets — complaining that the Supreme Court has, in effect, said that there is no legal remedy “if states gerrymander your vote completely away.”

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin sees the 5-4 decision as a major victory for the Republican Party. Thursday on CNN, Toobin asserted, “Two points. One: huge victory for the Republican Party here, because it’s the Republicans who control most of these states — who control Ohio, who control Florida, who will be redistricting following the 2020 census and now this is a green light to jam all the Democrats into a handful of districts and put the Republicans in Congress of all the rest of them.”

View the complete June 27 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

GOP hopes dim on reclaiming House

The Hill logoThe 2020 election is more than a year away, but some Republican lawmakers are pessimistic about their chances of winning back the House.

President Trump’s approval ratings in key swing states are under water. Infighting on the GOP leadership team and a notable retirement have raised questions about the party’s campaign strategy.

And Republicans acknowledge that many of the at-risk Democratic freshmen in Trump districts are going to be difficult to beat as they resist calls for impeachment and stay focused on kitchen-table issues such as health care and infrastructure.

View the complete June 19 article by Scott Wong and Juliegrace Brufke on The Hill website here.

Trump’s promise to release a ‘phenomenal’ healthcare plan has Republicans nervous

Donald Trump is getting ready for another healthcare push, and his fellow Republicans are unthrilled. Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “we already have the concept of the plan” for “phenomenal health care” that will be “less expensive than Obamacare by a lot.” This plan will be announced in “about two months. Maybe less,” he told Stephanopoulos at one point, or “a month,” as he told him a few sentences later.

What has Republicans nervous here is that their past efforts to overturn Obamacare and pass their own plan haven’t gone so well, on policy or politics, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to change. “The president has repeatedly promised something better than the A.C.A. but has never come up with a plan himself, and the congressional plans he endorsed were definitely not better for everyone,” as the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt very politely put it. Not only that, but “the challenge has been that the president has not only avoided proposing a specific plan, but has made promises that no plan could ever fulfill.”

Once Trump comes out with an actual plan, Democrats can highlight the distance between it and the promises he’s been making all along. So, as The New York Times puts it, “nervous Republicans worry that putting out a concrete plan with no chance of passage would only give the Democrats a target to pick apart over the next year.” That’s after health care was a key issue that helped Democrats win the House in 2018—and as Democrats now organize around the issue: “Over the weekend, 140 House Democrats, more than half of the party’s caucus, held events or online town halls to talk about health care, their largest coordinated action in districts since winning the majority.”

View the complete June 17 article by Laura Clawson from the Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Juan Williams: Trump’s incredible shrinking GOP

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

So let’s take a look at the front page of newspapers after Democrats take the stage in Miami next week for two primary debates.

I’m telling you those pictures will bring me tears.

For the first time in my life, the field of presidential candidates for a major political party looks like America — a racially diverse country.

View the complete June 17 commentary by Juan Williams on The Hill website here.

The GOP is no longer the party of business

I don’t know if the Republican Party’s top strategists are focused on what’s happening to the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom or not, but the business community should be paying attention. The Tories were almost exterminated in the parliamentary elections for the European Union, winning only four seats in all of England, Scotland, and Wales. A new YouGov poll of a potential UK parliamentary election shows the Tories pulling 19 percent, even with Labour and behind both the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats (24 percent) and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (22 percent).

The Tories will have a harder time clawing back support than Labour because they’re still expected to deliver a Brexit deal, and they probably cannot accomplish that task. The business community is looking at a Conservative Party that can no longer represent them in a minimally acceptable way. The Tories will either crash out of the European Union with no deal (as the Brexit Party demands) or they’ll cede their position as a major party. The Labour Party can adjust to the surge for the Liberal Democrats by adopting a more coherent and consistent Remain position.

In America, the Republican Party has basically been taken over by a Brexit-type mentality, and the president’s decision to ramp up tariffs on Mexican goods is going to cause the same kind of economic chaos and hardship as a No-Deal Brexit will cause for the United Kingdom.

View the complete June 2 article by Martin Longman from The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

In January, Virginia GOP killed bill to ban sales of large-capacity magazines

NOTE:  During the 2019 Minnesota legislative session, the GOP-controlled state senate would not allow sensible gun law bills to come to the floor.

A Virginia bill designed to ban sales of large-capacity magazines similar to those used by the Virginia Beach gunman died in committee in January on a party-line vote.

The fate of the legislation, SB1748, was so widely expected that the outcome drew virtually no public attention. For more than 20 years, Republicans and a few rural Democrats in the General Assembly have killed almost every measure aimed at restricting gun ownership.

The GOP blocked a major push for gun control after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, where 33 people died. They chose instead to respond to that shooting by joining Democrats to enact mental-health reforms.

View the complete June 1 article by Robert Mc Cartney on The Washington Post website here.