Tag: GOP

GOP takes aim at Comey, Brennan

Republicans are targeting former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan as they seek to bring more attention to what they say was an unfair investigation of President Trump launched in the Obama administration.

The effort to spotlight the intelligence officials comes as Democratic calls to impeach President Trump rise in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s first public remarks about his investigation.

The White House says the real controversy is the investigation of Trump that preceded Mueller’s probe, an argument Democrats contend is just a conspiracy theory peddled in order to distract from his presidential woes.

View the complete June 1 article by Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.

A dead man just revealed the Trump administration’s plans to rig elections for white Republicans

They don’t believe in democracy.

A longtime Republican operative urged Trump administration officials to add a question to the 2020 census form that hasn’t been asked since the Jim Crow era, knowing full well that including this question “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” according to a document filed in federal court on Thursday.

The Trump administration did add the question, which asks whether census respondents are U.S. citizens, at the urging of Dr. Thomas Hofeller, a Republican master in the dark arts of political mapmaking who passed away last summer. It also produced documents which falsely claimed that the question would “ensure that the Latino community achieves full representation in redistricting.”

Last January, a federal court ordered the citizenship question removed from the census form, citing numerous violations of laws laying out the process the government must use if it wishes to change that form. Notably, Judge Jesse Furman wrote in his opinion striking down the citizenship question, the administration’s stated reason for adding the question “was pretextual” — that is, the administration said that it added the question to help protect voting rights, when it was really up to something else altogether.

View the complete May 30 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.

Sen. Ron Wyden is tired of Republicans ignoring election security

The Oregon Democrat wants to lift the issue out of the “traditional Washington bicker fest.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is tired of Republicans ignoring election security.

“[W]hat happened in 2016 could be really small potatoes compared to 2020,” said Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Intelligence Committee.

Wyden is especially concerned that, as he said, “all of the political muscle is on the other side trying to protect the status quo.” Now he’s hoping to take his message straight to voters.

View the complete May 22 article by Joshua Eaton on the ThinkProgress website here.

GOP faces new challenge in 2020 abortion fight

Republicans hoping to paint Democrats as extreme on abortion in the lead-up to the 2020 elections are facing a major obstacle in the wake of Alabama’s restrictive new law.

Democratic presidential candidates are seizing on the state’s ban, which has no exemptions for rape and incest, arguing that it shows President Trump and Republicans are the ones who are out of step with average Americans, and that they want to make abortion illegal at all costs.

And while Trump and GOP leaders have distanced themselves from the Alabama law, Democrats say the president’s policies and judicial nominations have essentially encouraged states to pass such bans.

View the complete May 22 article by Jessie Hellmann on The Hill website here.

Republicans are freaked out by Justin Amash’s call to impeach Trump

Looks like he struck a nerve.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) over the weekend broke with his fellow Republican colleagues after reading special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. His conclusions: Attorney General William Barr had badly misconstrued the report’s contents in his representations of the material and President Donald Trump had committed acts that, to his mind, had crossed the “threshold of impeachment.”

Along the way, Amash had harsh words for his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, suggesting that not many of them had “even read Mueller’s report,” and that “their minds” had been “made up based on partisan affiliation — and it showed.”

As if to underscore this, Amash’s fellow Republicans have heaped scorn upon the five-term congressman. And naturally, Trump led the way on his favorite medium, Twitter — referring to Amash as a “loser” and a “lightweight.”

GOP Paid Fox News Pundits Over $500K For Speeches

A new report from Media Matters for America reveals Trump’s favorite right-wing pundits at Fox News have brought in more than $500,000 from the Republican Party.

The report tracked the flow of funds from Republican state parties to several of the network’s biggest names and found Fox News pundits regularly getting paid for speeches since 2007, calling it an “ethical disaster.”

Traditional journalistic outlets prohibit intermingling between on-air personalities and party politics — MSNBC once disciplined then-host Keith Olbermann for donating to Democratic candidates. But while Fox has sometimes given lip service to opposing party-pundit financial arrangements, the speeches have continued for a decade.

View the complete May 20 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

The abortion debate is not about the sanctity of life — it’s about corporate capitalism

A declining birthrate is driving the war on abortion rights. Our ruling capitalists know they are doomed if women cannot be forced to reproduce.

On Wednesday, the day it was announced that the U.S. birthrate fell for the fourth straight year, signaling the lowest number of births in 32 years, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the most draconian anti-abortion lawin the country. That the two developments came at the same time could not have been more revelatory.

The ruling elites are acutely aware that the steadily declining American birthrate is the result of a de facto “birth strike” by women who, unable to afford adequate health insurance and exorbitant medical bills and denied access to paid parental leave, child care and job protection, find it financially punitive to have children. Not since 1971 have births in the United States been at replacement levels, considered to be 2,100 births per 1,000 women over their lifetimes, a ratio needed for a generation to replace itself. Current births number 1,728 per 1,000 women, a decline of 2% from 2017. Without a steady infusion of immigrants, the U.S. population would be plummeting.

“The effort to block birth control and abortion is not about religion nor about politicians pandering to a right-wing base, nor is it a result of prudery, nor is it to punish women for having sex,” Jenny Brown writes in her book “Birth Strike: Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work.” “It is about the labor of bearing and rearing children: who will do it and who will pay for it.”

View the complete May 20 article by Chris Hedges from Truthdig on the AlterNet website here.

‘Gift from God’ — and other reasons why rape is not rape, according to Republicans

Alabama conservatives’ decision to nullify a woman’s right to choose has galvanized the pro-choice movement, in no small part due to the draconian level of cruelty shown by (predominantly) male lawmakers. The new law makes performing an abortion illegal after a “fetal heartbeat” can be detected. This “heartbeat” can be detected around 6 weeks—long before many women even discover they are pregnant. One of the distinguishing aspects of this new law is that Republicans made sure that there were no exemptions for rape or incest. Republican Rep. Terri Collins told reporters, “I have prayed my way through this bill.” Didn’t pray hard enough for my liking.

But this nod to praying and God is something that has driven every aspect of the convoluted conservative Christian position on abortion laws throughout our country. And Republicans across the country have frequently professed their distaste for women and women’s rights, specifically surrounding sexual assault for a very long time. So the fact that conservatives in Alabama are outlawing abortions across the board should come as no surprise. Here are some reminders of what conservatives think about rape.

There was the Republican from Maine, Lawrence Lockman, who explained that if a woman had a right to an abortion, then rape wasn’t rape. 

“If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”

View the May 19 article by Walter Einenkel from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship

The logic of Alabama’s abortion law should permit you to claim a fetus on your taxes and collect insurance if you miscarry.

Alabama has joined the growing number of states determined to overturn Roe v. Wade by banning abortion from conception forward. The Alabama Human Life Protection Act, as the new statute is called, subjects a doctor who performs an abortion to as many as 99 years in prison. The law, enacted Wednesday, has no exceptions for rape or incest. It redefines an “unborn child, child or person” as “a human being, specifically including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.”

We ought to take our laws seriously. Under the laws, people have all sorts of rights and protections. When a state grants full personhood to a fetus, should they not apply equally? Continue reading “If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship”

Republicans take $400k from casino mogul accused of sexual assault

In accepting the cash, the party says Steve Wynn has denied wrongdoing and not faced criminal charges.

The national Republican Party has accepted nearly $400,000 in donations from disgraced ex-casino mogul Steve Wynn — a move that comes just over a year after he was accused of sexually harassing or assaulting employees over a decade-long period.

Wynn gave $248,500 to the Republican National Committee and $150,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in April, according to two people familiar with the contributions. The donations are set to be disclosed publicly later this month.

Wynn, a longtime Republican Party donor whose net worth has been pegged at nearly $3 billion, stepped down as chairman of Wynn Resorts in January 2018 following accusations that he engaged in an extensive pattern of sexual misconduct toward female employees at his Las Vegas casino. Wynn, 77, also resigned his post as RNC finance chairman.

View the complete May 17 article by Alex Isenstadt on the Politico website here.