Tag: Republicans

Trump antagonizes both parties on trade

President Trump is facing fire from all sides following his decision to impose new tariffs on exports from Mexico unless that country curbs illegal immigration into the United States.

Republicans caught off guard by the surprise move said it went beyond Trump’s authority and warned it would imperil the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade that the White House is pressing Congress to approve.

“Following through on this threat would seriously jeopardize passage of USMCA, a central campaign pledge of President Trump’s and what could be a big victory for the country,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said shortly after the announcement on Thursday.

View the complete May 31 article by Niv Elis 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.

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.

Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump

Dear Republican Party,

I have never been part of you, but you have been part of my family for decades. I was 10 years old when my father decided to stop being a Democrat and instead become a Republican. From that point on, you were a frequent guest at our dinner table — and an unwelcome one to me. I wanted to talk about my science project on the human heart, or the mean girls at school who teased me for being too tall and for wearing glasses. Instead, much of the conversation was about how the government was taking too much out of people’s paychecks for taxes and how it was up to the Republicans to keep government from getting too big.

You went from an annoying presence at the dinner table to a powerful tornado, lifting up my family and depositing us in the world of politics, which no one ever escapes. I know it’s not completely your fault. My father’s passion for America, his commitment to try to make a difference in the country and the world, and his gentle yet powerful command over crowds that gathered to hear him speak made his ascent to the presidency all but inevitable. He would have gotten there one way or another; it just happened to be as a Republican.

View the complete April 30 commentary by Patty Davis on The Washington Post website here.

A place for the GOP to mull life after Trump

The Niskanen Center promotes the “free-market welfare state”

Jerry Taylor, a former climate-change skeptic, was chatting recently about the future of the Republican Party when he sat up in his chair inside the sixth-floor offices of the center-right think tank he runs and extended his hand to two portraits flanking him, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, two giants of the Republican Party. “Our ideas are not so alien to the GOP,” he insisted.

Perhaps, but the ideas that he and his think tank, the Niskanen Center, are promoting — which they describe as the “free-market welfare state” — are still having a hard time finding a home in the party of Donald Trump.

It is a dark time for those who consider themselves either “Never Trumpers” or moderates. “That community now has been blown apart,” admitted Taylor, who assesses the prospects for the modern Republican Party thusly: “Right off a cliff and into a pile of radioactive rubble.”

View the complete May 1 article by Jonathan Miller on The Roll Call website here.

For GOP, Playing Constitutional Hardball Is Playing With Fire

President Donald Trump’s latest salvo at Congress, threatening to thwart oversight and block testimony from executive branch witnesses, is a serious breach of political norms. With the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, it is clear that Trump thinks no one should be able to hold him accountable — and he’s trying to force adherence to that principle by using aggressive stalling and blocking tacts with the Democratic lawmakers who were elected to stand up to him.

But these tactics from Trump shouldn’t surprise us. His attempt to undermine the Constitution’s checks and balances is part of a long-standing Republican strategy of seizing power through aggressive abuse of legal loopholes — a strategy known as constitutional hardball.

Legal scholars Joseph Fishkin and David E. Pozen outlined the concept in a notable paper on the topic:

View the complete April 29 article by Cody Fenwick on the National Memo website here.

When Will The Republican Party Push Back Against White Nationalism?

Two horrific acts of terrorism were committed this weekend against non-Christians. One by an Islamophobic Christian supremacist terrorist mistakenly targeting Sikhs (again), and one by an anti-Semitic white supremacist terrorist spouting “replacement theory” smears.

In the first case, a man whose father was a pastor and who was suffering mental illness in part due to service in Iraq, drove into a family of Sikhs in Sunnyvale, California, allegedly believing they were Muslims. A 13-year-old girl is now in a coma and fighting for her life. The terrorist was allegedly on his way to a Bible study group and praising Jesus when authorities caught him.

In the second, a white supremacist took credit for an arsonist attack against a mosque last month, only after gunning down several people at a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one and injuring three.

View the complete April 28 article by David Atkins with The Washington Monthly on the National Memo website here.

Maria Butina acted as an ‘access agent’ recruiting willing Republicans — and she wasn’t alone: sentencing documents

On Friday, the government filed sentencing guidelines for Russian agent Maria Butina. Despite speculation that Butina’s connections with the NRA and Republican politicians might net her no more than a suspended sentence and a deportation back to Russia—where she can expect something of a hero’s welcome—the government instead asked for an 18-month sentence on a single count of conspiracy. They describe her as “not a spy in the traditional sense of trying to gain access to classified information to send back to her home country” but insist that Butina’s actions were “for the benefit of the Russian Federation, and those actions had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”

The sentencing document details both Butina’s actions, how they compare to others sentenced for the same crime, and why the government is seeking a sentence solidly in the middle of the potential range. But appended to the sentencing guidelines is an addendum authored by the former head of the FBI Counterintelligence Division. And that addendum doesn’t just explain why Butina’s actions are significant, they provide a window into something that has so far gone almost without mention in the post-Mueller report period—the counterintelligence investigation of Russian actions. Continue reading “Maria Butina acted as an ‘access agent’ recruiting willing Republicans — and she wasn’t alone: sentencing documents”