Tag: GOP

GOP fears Biden’s low-key campaign is paying off

The Hill logoJoe Biden hasn’t held a press conference in 77 days, but Democrats aren’t feeling much pressure to put their presumptive presidential nominee front and center at the moment.

Biden has, for the most part, kept a low profile throughout the coronavirus pandemic and weeks of demonstrations for racial justice across the country. Over that time, Biden has built up a healthy lead in the polls and emerged as the heavy favorite for now to be the next president.

Meanwhile, Republicans have watched with growing alarm as President Trump’s polling numbers have fallen to frightening new lows for an incumbent. Continue reading.

Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall

Washington Post logoAFTER A shambolic election two years ago — and several examples of poorly run primaries leading up to this week — one might have imagined that Georgia would have prepared better for its Tuesday primary vote. Instead, polling places in and around Atlanta were swamped and lines stretched for hours as poll workers struggled with new voting machines and sanitation procedures. Georgia’s experience confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the sort of Election Day incompetence that has for years been a sad fixture of American democracy, threatens the integrity of the November presidential election. There is hardly anything more important than getting voting procedures and technology right over the next five months.

Unfortunately, many Republican politicians continue to manipulate voting rules for partisan advantage, exploiting the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress voting. The latest example is in Iowa. The state held a notably successful primary last Tuesday that smashed turnout recordsdespite the closure of many polling places, in large part because the state’s Republican secretary of state sent every voter an absentee ballot application. That allowed local officials to consolidate in-person voting locations without causing the sorts of massive backups that marred primaries in Wisconsin, the District and Georgia. Continue reading “Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall”

‘Carnage,’ ‘radicals,’ ‘overthrow the government’: How Fox and other conservative media cover the protests

Washington Post logoConservative news outlets and pundits covering the protests erupting across the country this week have mostly emphasized images of destruction and chaos, blaming “organized” elements for the mayhem and framing President Trump’s calls for a military response as necessary to gain order.

Echoing Trump, some were quick to attribute the violence, without much evidence, to “antifa,” a loosely knit faction of far-left activists known for physically confronting far-right radicals that Trump tried to designate a domestic terrorist organization on Sunday.

“Unfortunately, far-left radicals unleashed this carnage, this destruction across American cities,” Sean Hannity, Fox News Channel’s most popular prime-time opinion host, said on Monday night. His colleague Laura Ingraham went so far as to call it an attempt to “overthrow” the government. Continue reading.

Trump asserts his power over Republicans

The Hill logoPresident Trump is strengthening his grip on the Republican Party as they head into the heat of an election season that Democrats want to make a referendum on Trump and his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Trump flexed his muscle on Capitol Hill last week by scuttling bipartisan legislation to extend the intelligence surveillance powers that had passed the Senate easily and was expected to pass the House.

Once Trump threatened on Wednesday to veto the measure, Republican support in the lower chamber fell away quickly, forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-Calif.) to pull the bill from the schedule. Continue reading.

We Have No More Excuses For Trump Voters

The past several days have offered a kaleidoscope of a Trump-addled America, a telling, if depressing, pastiche: Amy Cooper’s bigoted entitlement; the homicidal tactics of Minneapolis police officers; the knowing encouragement of the president, who has mounted his second campaign on the same foundation of rank prejudices and crude stereotypes as his first. It adds up to a portrait of a nation unwilling to retreat from its racist history, unable to chart a path toward a future that pays tribute to its more egalitarian founding creed.

President Donald J. Trump is merely a symptom, not a cause, not the sickness itself. During his first campaign, I worried less about his outrageous conduct and inflammatory rhetoric — he is, after all, just one malign actor — and more about the millions who danced to his music, rejoiced in his racist diatribes, sang in his chorus.

In 2016, I would not have accused every voter who cast a ballot for Trump of racism. Some were one-percenters bent on protecting their riches; some were lifelong Republicans leery of crossing party lines; some were Bernie Bros who couldn’t curb their misogyny and vote for Hillary Clinton. Still, there were many who eagerly followed after a man who defamed Mexicans, denounced Muslims and claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Continue reading.

A recipe for fascism: The GOP has given up on the central purpose of political parties

AlterNet logoAccording to Jonathan Swan, Jared Kushner has taken on yet another task:  “a radical overhaul of the Republican platform.” Apparently Kushner wants to reduce it from 58 pages down to a single card that people can fit into their pockets. Rather than a document outlining policy statements, he wants it to be more of a mission statement that “looks something like the 10 principles we believe in.”

Kushner’s efforts are the perfect example of how the entire GOP is about to complete its journey toward being the post-policy party. What the president’s son-in-law wants to accomplish is to turn the Republican Party platform into a public relations document rather than a policy statement. That aligns perfectly with what I reported recently about the Trump campaign website, which contains no issue statements or policy proposals, but is simply dedicated to selling campaign merchandise and raising money from contributions.

The pathway to becoming the post-policy party didn’t begin with Donald Trump. The process started back in the 1970s when Richard Nixon revived the party by adding southern Dixicrats to the base via the Southern Strategy. Then, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Paul Weyrich brought Christian nationalists into the fold, primarily by exploiting the Roe vs Wade Supreme Court ruling. That allowed the GOP to use grievance politics (i.e. “cultural issues”) to keep their base in line while continuing their policy agenda of shrinking the federal government, lowering taxes, gutting regulations, and implementing military adventurism abroad. Continue reading.

A grandiose collective paranoid fantasy: It’s time to speak honestly about the GOP’s evolution into a conspiracy cult

AlterNet logoOne of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all. Continue reading.

What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals.

Washington Post logoHILLSBORO, OHIO — Polls conducted since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic find that Democrats take the virus more seriously than Republicans, and are more willing to support restrictive government edicts in response to the outbreak. Most of those pontificating from the left conclude that Republicans get bad information from President Trump, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, to name a few, and therefore aren’t as worried as they should be.

Blaming so-called right-wing media for the strikingly different attitudes between the GOP and Democrats is in this case too simplistic. The Republican Party has long been home to conservatives and libertarians, who have a natural resistance to any governmental expansion of reach and authority over citizens. For many, if not most, Republicans, “give me liberty or give me death” is not outdated rhetoric.

Most Republicans are appalled at how casually governors — in their view — trampled the Constitution at the behest of state and federal health departments. As one small business owner in Tennessee said of the lockdowns, “If constitutional rights can be taken away whenever there is a crisis, then they are not rights at all — they are permissions.” Continue reading..

Why Trump, GOP are running into trouble in Arizona

The Hill logoPresident Trump and Republicans are running into trouble in Arizona, where polls show them trailing in both the presidential race and in a key Senate battle that could help determine the balance of power in the upper chamber.

Arizona has been a reliably Republican state in presidential and Senate contests and has only voted for a Democratic president once in the past 70 years, when former President Clinton won the state in 1996.

But things are changing. Continue reading.

Religious exemptions are gutting civil rights protections, advocacy groups warn

The Trump administration’s expansion of “religious freedom” is coming at the expense of LGBTQ rights, according to a new report.

The Trump administration’s expansion of religious exemptions is undermining civil rights protections and codifying discrimination against marginalized groups — particularly LGBTQ people — according to a reportreleased Monday by three research and advocacy groups.

>Using a combination of new rules, legal interventions and newly created divisions, the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor and State have all taken steps to advance “religious liberty,” often at the expense of LGBTQ rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for American Progress and the Movement Advancement Project argue in their report.

“The many proposals to allow religious discrimination are consistent with the trend of the administration to undercut civil rights broadly,” Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the ACLU, told NBC News. “The administration is taking the position that religious freedoms give you a right to discriminate.” Continue reading.