Tag: Republicans

Republicans grumble over Trump shifting military funds to wall

The Hill logoGOP lawmakers are grumbling over President Trump’s redirection of funds from military construction projects in their states and districts to his promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Their uneasiness stems from this week’s announcement by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that $3.6 billion will be stripped from 127 projects at U.S. bases, including some in states where GOP senators are up for reelection

Congressional Republicans now face the fraught task of assuring their constituents that the projects won’t be canceled while also working with the Defense Department and Democrats to craft legislation that will replenish or “backfill” the funding — all while not coming across as publicly rebuking President Trump..

View the complete September 5 article by Ellen Mitchell and Jordan Carney on The Hill website here.

Republicans fear drubbing in next round of redistricting

Democrats were caught napping in the 2010 election ahead of the last round of redistricting — and it cost them control of Congress for nearly a decade.

Now Republicans are warning the same thing could happen to them.

View the complete September 5 article by Alex Isenstadt on the Politico website here.

The Battle Over the Files of a Gerrymandering Mastermind

New York Times logoAt the heart of a decisive court ruling on Tuesday striking down North Carolina’s state legislative maps was evidence culled from the computer backups of the man who drew them: Thomas B. Hofeller, the Republican strategist and master of gerrymandering, who died last year.

Documents from the backups, which surfaced after his death, were also central to the legal battle over adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. An enormous stash of digital files, covering Mr. Hofeller’s work in almost every state, has yet to be examined.

But in a state court in Raleigh, N.C., another courtroom battle is underway. Its aim is to ensure that those files are never publicly scrutinized.

View the complete September 4 by Michael Wines on The New York Times website here.

How Minnesota Republican operatives are sowing distrust of Muslims

Last year, I was asked by the civil rights group CAIR-Minnesota to research the financing behind a rash of disparaging news coverage of Minnesota’s Muslims. I assumed I’d be cataloging the work of a few small-town bloggers, and that the hard part would be managing expectations.

I smiled, deposited the check, and confined my white-boy skepticism to my notes. It took less than a week of Googling to learn how wrong I was.

Despite the stereotype of a rural “Trump Country” lashing out at immigrants, most of Minnesota’s aggressively negative news about Muslims is produced by a group of Twin Cities donors, policy wonks, and strategists tied to the state’s most powerful Republican organizations.

View the September 4 article by Logan Carroll on The CityPages website here.

GOP fears Trump backlash in suburbs

The Hill logoRepublicans are growing increasingly worried they will lose the suburbs for a second election in a row — this time with President Trump at the top of the ticket in 2020. 

The GOP forfeited the House in 2018, largely after losing suburban women voters, a key voting bloc that turns out at the polls but with whom Trump has proved particularly unpopular since becoming president.

The suburbs could also pose a threat to Trump’s reelection chances as well as a number of vulnerable Senate Republicans facing uphill reelection battles in states such as Colorado, Maine, North Carolina and Arizona. The GOP currently holds a narrow 53-47 majority in the upper chamber.

View the complete August 31 article by Julia Manchester and Scott Wong on The Hill website here.

Comey IG report exposes the hypocrisy of the ‘Russia hoax’ crowd

Washington Post logoTo hear the Trump team tell it, the media’s biggest sin was reporting on potential collusion and obstruction of justice. When special counsel Robert S. Mueller III concluded there was no criminal conspiracy and punted on obstruction, all of it was immediately rendered foolish, overzealous speculation. Reporters who circumspectly detailed key events months and years before Mueller did publicly were suddenly lumped in with pundits who had declared President Trump to be a guilty man.

But many of the same people who objected to this exercise were happy to publicly convict James B. Comey of something he’s now been cleared of. They did so using an unfounded allegation that’s now proved baseless.

A long-anticipated inspector general’s report on Thursday found Comey violated FBI policy by failing to turn over memos after Trump fired him and later leaking details of the memos to the New York Times through an intermediary. Importantly, though, the Justice Department won’t prosecute Comey.

View the complete August 30 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

What would it take for Republicans to deal with climate change?

Washington Post logoClimate change is here. Short of getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, it will take both parties to agree to start legislating seriously on climate change, and so far that hasn’t happened. So will there ever be a tipping point when Republicans will get on board?

There are early signs that, yes, there will be. But maybe not in the near future.

Politico recently reported that a number of GOP lawmakers want to do something about it after years of letting Democrats dominate the issues and conversation, while the New York Timesreported Republican strategists are worried the party could lose voters if it doesn’t turn around on this issue quickly.

View the complete August 29 article by Amber Phillips on The Washington Post website here.

Meltdown On Main Street: Inside The Breakdown Of The GOP’s Moderate Wing

Three weeks after Democrats took control of the U.S. House in the 2018 midterm elections, about 40 reelected and recently defeated lawmakers in the centrist Republican Main Street Caucus gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to sift through the electoral wreckage.

The caucus — then led by Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Jeff Denham of California, Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida and Fred Upton of Michigan — was scheduled to hold its regular meeting with the outside group that inspired its name, the Republican Main Street Partnership, led by president and CEO Sarah Chamberlain.

Founded in the late 1990s, RMSP raises money to support the Republican Party’s moderate wing. GOP lawmakers embraced the RMSP name when, in 2017, it launched the caucus — an official member organization registered in the U.S. House. The member caucus was driven by a desire to counterbalance the weight of the conservative wing inside the House GOP. Lawmakers believe that rebuilding the centrist coalition is key to improving the GOP’s odds of winning a House majority in 2020.

View the complete August 23 article by Susan Davis on the NPR website here.

The ‘Mooch’ Dumps On Trump In Scorching Vanity Fair Interview

While President Donald Trump continues to have many cheerleaders on the right — from Attorney General William Barr to Sen. Lindsey Graham to Fox News’ Sean Hannity — some former champions of Trump have turned into adversaries. One conservative who recently went from Trump defender to Trump foe is former White House Communications Chief Anthony Scaramucci, who doesn’t hesitate to express his disdain for the president in a candid Q&A interview with Vanity Fair’s William D. Cohan.

Asked why he finally turned against the president after being such a vehement defender in the past, Scaramucci told Vanity Fair that he grew fed up with the president’s overwhelming narcissism.

“The red line was the racism — full-blown racism,” Scaramucci asserts. “He can say that he’s not a racist, and I agree with him, OK? And let me explain to you why he’s not a racist, ’cause this is very important. He’s actually worse than a racist. He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so therefore, that’s why he has no empathy.”

View the complete August 18 article by Alex Henderson from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

As mass shootings rise, experts say high-capacity magazines should be the focus

Washington Post logoIt took a shooter all of 32 seconds to spray 41 rounds outside a popular bar in Dayton, Ohio, this month, an attack that killed nine people and injured 27. A lightning-fast response from nearby officers prevented a far higher toll: When police shot him dead, the killer still had dozens of bullets to go in his double-drum, 100-round magazine.

The use of such high-capacity magazines was banned in Ohio up until 2015, when a little-noticed change in state law legalized the devices, part of an overall rollback in gun-control measures that has been mirrored in states nationwide.

With the pace of mass shootings accelerating — and their tolls dramatically increasing — criminologists and reform advocates are more intently focused on limiting access to such accessories as one of the most potent ways to curb the epidemic.

View the complete August 18 article by Griff Witte on The Washington Post website here.