Tag: Republicans

How Republican lies and hypocrisy hit an all-time high

AlterNet logoLast week, before Trump’s buffoonish cave on his attempt to hijack the census, Greg Sargent wrote about Attorney General William Barr’s emerging role as Trump’s enabler in undermining the rule of law — first in the census case, then in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

The connection between the two is straightforward, according to University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley. “In both, Barr directed his lawyers to make bad-faith arguments, just because Trump said so,” Bagley told Sargent. “That’s a blow to the integrity of the Justice Department and a threat to the rule of law.”

As with much else about the Trump administration, the bad-faith arguments are nothing new; Republicans have long been the party of bad faith. The most notorious Supreme Court decisions of recent years — from Bush v. Gore through Shelby County, Citizens United and more — can all be attributed to bad faith arguments and actions by the justices involved.

View the complete July 14 article by Paul Rosenberg from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Conservatives scramble to spin CBO analysis showing clear benefits of minimum wage increase

AlterNet logoEver since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the United States’ first national minimum wage in 1938, there have been Republicans and fiscal conservatives insisting that minimum wages are a job killer. FDR, however, told Republicans to relax — a mandatory 25 cents per hour wouldn’t destroy the U.S. economy or hamper the success of his New Deal — and 81 years later, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study is showing that increasing the national minimum wage to $15 per hour would be economically beneficial. Naturally, fiscal conservatives are scrambling to spin the study to their liking.

The benefits, according to the CBO: Americans living belong the poverty line would see a 5.3% earnings increase, and wages would rise for up to 27.3 million workers. Workers already making more than $15 per hour would likely see their wages rise as well.

That’s the positive part of the CBO’s cost/benefit analysis, which also found that under a $15 minimum wage, Americans would be paying about 0.3% more for goods and services. Business owners would see a higher overhead if they started paying employees more.

View the complete July 11 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Republicans count on Rep. Tom Emmer to reclaim U.S. House majority

The job as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee has thrust the Delano Republican into the brawling heart of national politics.

WASHINGTON– Republicans have a whole lot riding on Rep. Tom Emmer.

The three-term Minnesota congressman, still a relative newcomer to Capitol Hill, is leading his party’s effort to reclaim the House majority that Democrats snatched away last year. Control of the House has let Democrats stymie President Donald Trump’s policy agenda and mount multiple investigations into his administration.

The job has thrust the Delano Republican into the brawling heart of national politics.

As chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Emmer occupies the fourth-highest leadership post in the 198-member House Republican Conference. His mission is to recruit the candidates and raise the cash his party needs to gain at least 18 House seats and retake the majority in 2020.

View the complete July 6 article by Patrick Condon on The Star Tribune website here.

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.

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.

Here’s why the right abandons Democracy in favor of authoritarianism

There is a theme that has been emerging since the Tea Party was formed in reaction to Barack Obama’s election. It has most recently been articulated in response to the online exchange between Sohrab Ahmari and David French. As I noted previously, Andrew Sullivan did a good job of summarizing Ahmari’s position.

He wants the state to act boldly “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”…

He wants to shut down the primacy of individual autonomy in a country where different people can coexist with others of radically different politics or faith…

View the complete June 18 article by Nancy LeTourneau from Washington Monthly on the AlterNet 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.

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.

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.