Tag: GOP

The Rule of Law Or the Shadow of Tyranny

Those old enough to recall the presidential politics of the 1990s may still hear a certain righteous sentence ringing in their ears: “We must uphold the rule of law.”

With irrefutable simplicity, those words were uttered in numbing repetition by the Republicans who pursued Bill and Hillary Clinton for years, at a cost of millions, over “scandals” too baroque and too minor to explain.

To honor the American rule of law, they simply had to investigate Whitewater, an obscure land deal that had lost the Clintons $45,000 in the remotest Ozarks, several years before he entered the White House. To honor the rule of law, they had no choice but to impeach Clinton, a sinner the same as many of them, for lying about his trysts with Monica Lewinsky.

View the complete December 12 article by Joe Conason on the Creators.com website here.

‘Siege warfare’: Republican anxiety spikes as Trump faces growing legal and political perils

Federal prosecutors filed new court papers on Dec. 7 that revealed a previously unreported contact from a Russian to Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. (Melissa Macaya , Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

A growing number of Republicans fear that a battery of new revelations in the far-reaching Russia investigation has dramatically heightened the legal and political danger to Donald Trump’s presidency — and threatens to consume the rest of the party, as well.

President Trump added to the tumult Saturday by announcing the abrupt exit of his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, whom he sees as lacking the political judgment and finesse to steer the White House through the treacherous months to come.

Trump remains headstrong in his belief that he can outsmart adversaries and weather any threats, according to advisers. In the Russia probe, he continues to roar denials, dubiously proclaiming that the latest allegations of wrongdoing by his former associates “totally clear” him.

View the complete December 8 article by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker on The Washington Post website here.

‘Wake up, dudes’ — gender gap confounds GOP women

Republican men and women are deeply divided over how to confront the results of a brutal midterm election that decimated the ranks of female GOP lawmakers in the House.

Most House Republicans have so far shown little appetite for performing an autopsy on the 2018 election cycle and publicly identifying the root of their tough losses, which were stark among female voters, particularly in the suburbs.

But a vocal chorus of Republican women has been sounding the alarm to address what they view as a crisis, calling on party leaders to be more aggressive in devising a strategy to reverse the trend by the next election cycle.

View the complete December 6 article by Melanie Zanona on The Hill website here.

Republicans were upset about election fraud — before it threatened their candidate

The Republican Party in North Carolina has been slow to accept the investigation into potential absentee ballot fraud. Credit: Erika P. Rodriguez, The Washington Post

Dallas Woodhouse, executive chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, spoke with great concern about the issue of election fraud.

It was 2016, and he was talking to a reporter from “This American Life,” the weekly public radio show, about questions being raised regarding signatures on some absentee ballots in Bladen County on the state’s southern border.

A group funded by Democrats in the state had been working on get-out-the-vote efforts in the area, and McCrae Dowless, a Republican soil and water supervisor with a checkered past, had filed a complaint, despite winning reelection.

View the complete December 6 article by Eli Rosenberg on The Washington Post website here.

Are White Evangelicals the Saviors of the GOP?

President Donald Trump attended a worship service at the International Church of Las Vegas in October 2016. Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Key voting group has remained virtually unchanged in its political preferences

Amid all the talk about shifting demographics and political changes over the last decade, one key voting group has remained virtually unchanged: white evangelicals.

According to one evangelical leader, a record number of white evangelicals voted in the 2018 midterms after an inspired turnout effort.

“This is the most ambitious and most effective voter education, get-out-the-vote program directed at the faith-based vote in a midterm election in modern political history,” Faith & Freedom Coalition President Ralph Reed said the day after the November elections.

Roger Ailes ‘Was Never Sorry About Anything’

In her new film, director and producer Alexis Bloom examines the life of the late Republican Party kingmaker and controversial Fox News leader who, before his death, was forced out amid multiple sexual harassment allegations. “He was a heat over light kind of guy,” Bloom tells Political Theater of Roger Ailes. “He dealt in psychological tropes very deftly. He was ruthless.” Even conservative political commentator Glenn Beck, once a Fox host, is astonished by Ailes’ confidence in his own political influence.

View the complete December 5 post by Jason Dick on The Roll Call website here, where you can subscribe to his podcast.

How Trump appointees curbed a consumer protection agency loathed by the GOP

Mick Mulvaney said he expected to be at the CFPB a short time, until Pres. Trump picked a permanent director. In less than a month, he’s turned it’s mission sharply in a new direction. Credit: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post

Mick Mulvaney struck a jovial tone as he introduced the political appointees who would run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. One was nicknamed Dreamboat, he said in an email. Another was Mumbles. A third had been a “Jeopardy!” contestant.

“They are really great people,” Mulvaney, the acting director, wrote in a holiday message to the agency’s 1,600 staffers last December.

The levity now seems like a cruel joke to career officials.

View the complete December 4 article by Robert O’Harrow, Jr.’ Shawn Boburg and Renae Merle on The Washington Post website here.

Trump-led GOP grows increasingly tolerant of racially divisive politics

Rep. Mia Love (R-UT), in a concession speech after losing her reelection, gave a scathing rebuke to the GOP, saying “Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their homes and into their hearts.” Credit: Evan Cobb/Daily Herald, AP

JACKSON, Miss. — Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a racially polarizing election here Tuesday night after never fully apologizing for comments in which she suggested she would be willing to sit in the front row at a public hanging.

Then on Wednesday, Senate Republicans moved to confirm a judicial nominee who, as an attorney, defended a North Carolina voter identification law deemed unconstitutional by a federal appeals court because it sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The back-to-back developments this week offer a stark illustration of the state of the Republican Party and racial politics.

View the complete November 28 article by Matt Viser and Michael Scherer on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s Base Isn’t Enough

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put 2018 a bit ahead of most other modern wave elections, such as 2006 and 1982. Your mileage may vary.

In another important respect, however, the 2018 wave was indisputably unlike any other in recent midterm history: It came with exceptionally high turnout. Turnout is currently estimated at 116 million voters, or 49.4 percent of the voting-eligible population. That’s an astounding number; only 83 million people voted in 2014, by contrast.

This high turnout makes for some rather unusual accomplishments. For instance, Democratic candidates for the House will receive almost as many votes this year as the 63 million that President Trump received in 2016, when he won the Electoral College (but lost the popular vote). As of Tuesday midday, Democratic House candidates had received 58.9 million votes, according to the latest tally by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. However, 1.6 million ballots remain to be counted in California, and those are likely to be extremely Democratic. Other states also have more ballots to count, and they’re often provisional ballots that tend to lean Democratic. In 2016, Democratic candidates for the House added about 4 million votes from this point in the vote count to their final numbers. So this year, an eventual total of anywhere between 60 million and 63 million Democratic votes wouldn’t be too surprising.

View the complete November 20 article by Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight.com website here.

 

Warning signs mount for Trump reelection bid

‘They haven’t gotten his job approval over 50 percent, like Reagan,’ says one GOP pollster.

President Donald Trump has argued that many voters who support him did not vote in the midterm elections because his name was not on the ballot. Credit: Susan Walsh, AP Photo

Donald Trump insists the GOP’s midterm election shellacking had nothing to do with him. Things will be different, he says, when his name is actually on the ballot in 2020.

While it’s true that most presidents who see their party suffer major losses in their first midterm election get reelected anyway, Trump isn’t most presidents — and there are lots of blaring-red warning lights in this month’s election results for his bid for a second term.

Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.