Tag: Republicans

Climate deniers reveal true fear about Green New Deal: That it will force Republicans to the left

A hiker in Glacier National Park. Credit: Ben Herndon

“Green New Deal-lite.”

Climate science deniers fear the building momentum behind the Green New Deal will force Republicans to introduce their own version of climate action, a so-called “Green New Deal-lite.”

Speaking at a policy forum Wednesday hosted by the Congressional Western Caucus and chaired by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), longtime climate science deniers and opponents of the ambitious climate resolution expressed concerns that calls for climate action will push all politicians to the left.

One of the “dangers” of the Green New Deal, said Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that “by expanding the political spectrum of what’s in the debate, it’s moving the debate left and it’s creating a very large space for a certain class of people, many of them in the Republican Party, to start talking about how we need to have moderate solutions, or reasonable solutions.”

View the complete February 27 article by Kyla Mandel on the ThinkProgress website here.

The Supreme Court looks likely to break the wall of separation between church and state

Credit: Getty Images

They don’t seem to have any idea what to replace it with, though.

It is likely, but not entirely certain, that there are five votes on the Supreme Court to overrule Lemon v. Kurtzman, a nearly half-century-old precedent preventing the government from advancing religion. It is also all but certain that the court will uphold the so-called “Peace Cross,” a 40-foot tall, cross-shaped monument in Maryland. One or two of the liberal justices may even join an opinion favoring the cross, which was erected to honor fallen soldiers from the First World War.

Yet, while several members of the court seemed eager to blow up much of the law preventing the government from advancing a particular faith in two consolidated cases argued on Wednesday — American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association — it is far from clear what will emerge to replace the toppled precedents.

True to form, Neil Gorsuch staked out the most radical possible position, at one point suggesting that plaintiffs who challenge government endorsements of religion shouldn’t be allowed to sue in the first place. As a general rule, a plaintiff must show that they were somehow injured by the party they are suing in order to file a lawsuit, a requirement known as “standing.” Yet Gorsuch suggested that no plaintiff may have standing to challenge a religious display on government property because their only injury is that they take “offense” to the display — and “mere offense” isn’t enough.

View the complete February 27 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.

Republicans are mad that Cohen said Trump is racist. The president’s record speaks for itself.

Michael Cohen, former attorney and fixer for President Trump testifies before the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill February 27, 2019 in Washington, DC. . Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

President Trump has publicly done or said racist things for decades. Republicans are now studiously avoiding his record.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee invited a black federal employee to appear in Michael Cohen’s hearing Wednesday, to make the point that President Donald Trump could not possibly be racist, as Cohen has alleged.

In his opening statements, Cohen said he heard Trump call black people stupid, and claimed the president once asked if any country run by a black person was not a “shithole.” Barack Obama was president at the time, according to Cohen.

Lynne Patton, a Trump appointee in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, stood behind Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), who spoke for her.

View the complete February 27 article by Emily Q. Hazzard on the ThinkProgress website here.

Republicans can’t claim to be the party of national security

The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in April 2016. Credit: Carolyn Kaster, AP

An impressive list of 58 former national security officials — who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents — have released a declaration attacking the fiction that there is an “emergency” along the southern border, justifying President Trump’s power grab. Coming on the eve of Tuesday’s House vote on a resolution to short-circuit the declaration, it makes clear the degree to which Republican lawmakers will endanger national security to stay on Trump’s good side.

The officials state:

At the outset, there is no evidence of a sudden or emergency increase in the number of people seeking to cross the southern border. According to the administration’s own data, the numbers of apprehensions and undetected illegal border crossings at the southern border are near forty-year lows. Although there was a modest increase in apprehensions in 2018, that figure is in keeping with the number of apprehensions only two years earlier, and the overall trend indicates a dramatic decline over the last fifteen years in particular.

They also make clear, “There is no reason to believe that there is a terrorist or national security emergency at the southern border that could justify the President’s proclamation.”

View the complete commentary by Jennifer Rubin on The Washington Post website here.

Republicans Hope to Sway Voters With Labels That Demonize Democrats

WASHINGTON — In the 116th Congress, if you’re a Democrat, you’re either a socialist, a baby killer or an anti-Semite.

That, at least, is what Republicans want voters to think, as they seek to demonize Democrats well in advance of the 2020 elections by painting them as left-wing crazies who will destroy the American economy, murder newborn babies and turn a blind eye to bigotry against Jews.

The unusually aggressive assault, which Republican officials and strategists outlined in interviews last week, is meant to strangle the new Democratic majority in its infancy. It was set in motion this month by President Trump, who used his State of the Union address to rail against “new calls to adopt socialism in our country” and mischaracterize legislation backed by Democrats in New York and Virginia as allowing “a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth.”

View the complete February 17 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times website here.

Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

This interview with historian and author Rick Perlstein originally appeared in the Berlin daily Neues Deutschland and is posted on the National Memo website.

After Trump won the election you published an essay titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” How did Trump’s election change your view of American conservatism?

The conservatives’ own story about their evolution has been that there were two streams of conservative political activity in the US: one that was extremist and conspiratorial, often viciously racist and even violent. And then there was a mainstream movement that policed those boundaries, associated with the figure of William F. Buckley and the magazine National Review. That mainstream conservatism, as the story goes, had largely prevailed, and the extremist elements were pretty much vestigial. What Trump demonstrates is that those much more feral streams in the movement never really went away. Knowing about Trump, it was a lot easier to see in retrospect how often that extremist underbrush was part of the story.

Is Trump even a conservative in the traditional sense?The National Review published an issue during the 2016 primaries titled “Against Trump,” in which various conservative intellectuals stated that a true conservative could not support Trump, because he violated conservative principles.

Yes, but if you look at the National Review website in the years before that, pretty much everything nasty and politically grotesque that we associate with Trump could be seen in National Review, too.

View the completeFebruary 2 post here.

NRA shows signs of decline, even in Trump’s America

<,em>Members of the Patriot Prayer Group sing the National Anthem during an “open carry” rally in Seattle on May 20. Credit: Karen Ducey, Getty Images)

But the group isn’t letting up on its adversarial and sometimes snarky tone

The influence of the National Rifle Association, the nation’s highest-profile Second Amendment-rights organization and a longtime powerhouse against gun-control laws, is showing signs of potential decline.

The NRA’s own tax forms show a dip in revenue. And even as the group, now under the leadership of new president Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, continues to spend big money on federal lobbying and political campaigns, its opponents in the gun-control movement, after decades of ever more deadly mass shootings and seemingly random incidents of gun violence, have been on the rise.

During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, gun-rights groups spent some $9.9 million on outside political efforts, nearly all of that from the NRA, while gun-control groups invested a record high of $11.9 million, according to a tabulation from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics

View the complete February 1 article by Kate Ackley on The Roll Call website here.

Republicans seize on liberal positions to paint Democrats as radical

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) defended a bill Jan. 31 that would loosen restrictions on late-term abortions. (Reuters)

Sen. Kamala D. Harris is raising the possibility of eliminating private health insurance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats are floating new and far-reaching plans to tax the wealthy. In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam voiced support for state legislation that would reduce restrictions on late-term abortions.

Democrats, after two years largely spent simply opposing everything President Trump advocated, are defining themselves lately in ways Republicans are seizing on to portray them as far outside the American mainstream.

Casting Democrats as a scary and radical force is giving a fractured Republican Party a common thrust at a time when Trump’s standing even within his own party has started to dip. And it is giving Democrats a bit of the heartburn that Republicans have been grappling with for more than two years.

View the complete January 31 article by Matt Viser on The Washington Post website here.

Republicans want Trump to keep out of border talks

Republicans are urging President Trump to step back, for now, from the negotiations to prevent a second partial government shutdown.

The president is offering a running, real-time commentary about the conference committee tasked with breaking the months-long stalemate between the White House and congressional Democrats, frustrating lawmakers who worry Trump is complicating already difficult talks.

In a tweet on Thursday, Trump warned that Republicans on the panel might be “wasting their time.”

View the complete January 31 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

All About That Base

President Donald Trump, pictured here with (from left) John Barrasso, John Thune, Mike Pence, Roy Blunt and Mitch McConnell,. Credit: Alex Brandon, AP Photo

Republicans in Congress are sticking with President Trump to please party loyalists, but that could cost them in future elections.

HIS APPROVAL RATINGS are abysmal. Americans overwhelmingly blame him for the government shutdown. A special prosecutor’s investigation has resulted in prison terms for several of his administration and campaign operatives, and may result in more. Cabinet secretaries have been forced to resign, other top officials have left in protest, and Democrats who just regained power on Capitol Hill are talking impeachment. Foreign allies are exasperated with him.

On paper, President Donald Trump ought to have the least amount of political capital in modern presidential history. The approval numbers alone would normally lead members of Congress to avoid the president like he’s a communicable virus.

But Trump, entering the second half of his first term, retains a remarkable level of control over his party, even among those he has personally – and publicly – insulted. The extraordinary dynamic is making it even harder for Congress and the White House to come to some kind of agreement to end the punishing, monthlong government shutdown that is now imperiling everything from housing assistance to farmer support to federal tax refunds.

View the complete January 25 artile by Susan Milligan on The U.S. News and World Report website here.