Tag: Senate GOP

‘Horrifying’: Sen. Cruz Flew Without Mask From Houston To Dallas

Although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has recently encouraged mask wearing in response to the coronavirus pandemic, some far-right Republicans are still reluctant to wear face masks in public. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, according to AmericaBlog reporter John Aravosis, wasn’t wearing a mask at all during an American Airlines flight from Houston to Dallas on Sunday, July 12 — which is a violation of the airline’s rules.

Aravosis tweeted, “I just confirmed that Ted Cruz went the entire one-hour-eight-minute flight from Houston to Dallas and never put on his mask. So he wasn’t just drinking coffee for a minute.”

Cruz’ defenders have argued that the senator was photographed on the flight when he was drinking coffee. But Twitter user @hossehenad explained, “For those trying to argue that he was drinking, it’s not hard to have a mask on and undo one side to take a sip then put it back on. Most people take their time drinking coffee.” Continue reading.

‘Adapt immediately or find a new job’: Senate GOP confronts fundraising emergency

Democrats’ online fundraising has again caught fire, giving them a boost in November’s fight for the Senate majority.

Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee prepared a slideshow for Senate chiefs of staff full of bleak numbers about the party’s failure to compete with Democrats on digital fundraising. For anyone not getting the message, the final slide hammered home the possible end result: a freight train bearing down on a man standing on the tracks.

The slideshow, obtained by POLITICO, painted a grim picture of the GOP’s long-running problem. Republican senators and challengers lagged behind Democrats by a collective $30 million in the first quarter of 2020, a deficit stemming from Democrats’ superior online fundraising machine. Since then, Democrats’ fundraising pace accelerated further, with the party’s challengers announcing huge second-quarter hauls last week, largely driven by online donors giving through ActBlue, the party’s preferred fundraising platform.

The money guarantees Democrats nothing heading into November 2020. But with President Donald Trump’s poll numbers sagging and more GOP-held Senate races looking competitive, the intensity of Democrats’ online fundraising is close to erasing the financial advantage incumbent senators usually enjoy. That’s making it harder to bend their campaigns away from the national trend lines — and helping Democrats’ odds of flipping the Senate. Continue reading.

‘Historic corruption’: 2 Republican senators denounce Trump’s commutation of Stone

GOP lawmakers have been mostly silent about the commutation.

Sens. Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey condemned Donald Trump’s decision to commute the prison sentence of his longtime confidant Roger Stone — the first elected Republicans to denounce the president’s Friday night move.

“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” Romney (R-Utah) wrote on Twitter Saturday.

GOP lawmakers have been mostly silent about the commutation, which came just after a federal appeals court panel rejected Stone’s last-ditch bid to delay the start of his 40-month prison sentence set to begin next week. Stone was convicted on seven felony charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, including obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements. Continue reading.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed what the GOP’s anti-tax rhetoric is really all about

AlterNet logoNewt Gingrich is usually, and rightly, blamed for destroying American politics, even more than Donald Trump. The former House Speaker didn’t go to Washington in the 1970s to strike deals. He went there to wage soft civil war against the United States.

But if there’s a close second to the title of America’s Worst Person, it probably goes to someone you never heard of. He’s not a politician. He’s not a pundit or bureaucrat. When it comes to influencing the GOP’s attitude toward taxing, spending and budgets, however, it would be hard to find someone more influential than Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform. The name is a misnomer. It doesn’t want to “reform” taxes so much as get rid of taxes on the very, very rich. Norquist is probably most famous for saying, in 2001, that he doesn’t want to abolish government per se. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can … drown it in the bathtub.” Continue reading.

Running Away From Trump

GOP candidates who once watched the president thwart the political futures of Republicans deemed not sufficiently loyal are finding he may bring them down this fall.

A RECENT SENATE campaign ad touts the candidate’s record protecting public lands and national parks and how that’s pleased environmentalists. One ad features his work getting masks from overseas to protect people from the coronavirus and shows his state’s Democratic governor thanking him for his effort. There is no ad highlighting an endorsement or praise from President Donald Trump.

It’s not a typical summer ad campaign from a Republican incumbent fighting for reelection in a highly polarized political environment. But it may be Cory Gardner’s best hope of remaining Colorado’s junior senator after the fall elections – and the only hope Republicans have of hanging onto control of the Senate, experts say.

“Some of (the GOP candidates) will definitely outperform” Trump at the ballot box, with endangered Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine the most likely to do so, says Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “The question is, at what point is the weight too heavy for them to reach the surface? It’s the difference between being able to pull a 5-pound weight and being able to pull a 200-pound weight. He’s a 200-pound weight.” Continue reading.

Republicans fear backlash over Trump’s threatened veto on Confederate names

The Hill logoSenate Republicans fear President Trump is putting them into a political no-win situation by threatening to veto a popular defense policy bill over bipartisan language to rename military bases named after Confederate generals.

GOP lawmakers are trying to wave the president off his veto threat and may end up delaying the bill to avoid a political disaster before Election Day.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday urged Trump not to veto the $740.5 billion bill over a provision sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) mandating the secretary of Defense rename military installations named after Confederate generals. Continue reading.

Senate Republicans defend Trump’s response on Russian bounties

The Hill logoSenate Republicans are defending President Trump’s handling of intelligence claiming that Russia’s military intelligence units offered bounties to Taliban militants to kill U.S. troops, arguing the evidence of bounties has not received sufficient verification.

Trump has come under sharp criticism since Saturday for not issuing a forceful response to the allegations or vowing to get to the bottom of the claims. Instead, the president has waved off media reports as “fake news” and suggested the story is meant to make Republicans “look bad.”

Trump claimed in a tweet Sunday night, “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks.” Continue reading.

Republicans’ desperate efforts to deflect blame from Trump over Russia’s bounties look pathetic

AlterNet logoSenate Republicans are once again caught between their allegiance to Donald Trump and their traditional opposition to Russia—now with the added practice of Taliban paying militants to kill U.S. troops. Republicans are making the appropriate noises about being angry at the bounties on U.S. forces and the need to get tough on Russia, but that involves a lot of dodging and evading the big questions about what Trump knew and when he knew it.

Sens. Cory Gardner and Thom Tillis, both facing extremely tough reelection campaigns, are both calling for Russia to be named a state sponsor of terrorism. Neither appears to have much to say about Trump, though.

Sen. John Cornyn, facing a somewhat less challenging reelection, did have something to say about Trump—an attempt to exonerate him. Continue reading.

Senate removes measure demanding campaigns report foreign election help

WASHINGTON – A measure requiring presidential campaigns to report any attempts by foreign entities interfering in U.S. elections was stripped by Senate Republicans as a condition of passing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in a “backroom deal” Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA., said Tuesday.

The NDAA, which is being debated on the Senate floor this week, will include the Intelligence Authorization Act but not the amendment requiring campaigns to report foreign help to the proper authorities after that provision was stripped from the bipartisan defense bill.

Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that his Republican colleagues had forced the deletion of the foreign assistance reporting provision as part of a condition to combine the intelligence legislation with the annual defense policy bill. Continue reading.

The GOP traded its principles for conservative judges. It was a bad deal.

Washington Post logoIf Republicans lose the White House in 2020, they’ll have to ask whether they paid too high a price

President Trump has retained support from many Republicans and conservatives thanks to a Faustian bargain: So long as Trump stacks the judiciary with friendly judges, they’ve been willing to look the other way when Trump pushes trade protectionism, ditches entitlement reform, or woos Russia’s President Vladimir Putin — positions out of step with recent conservative orthodoxy. As David Harsanyi argued for the Federalist, “The question was,” for conservatives, “ ‘What’s scarier, a Trump presidency or a progressive Supreme Court?’ ”

Former George W. Bush administration attorney John Yoo said that he had deeply conservative friends “who would normally be utterly turned off by a guy like Trump,” yet supported him “only because of [the] appointment to Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s vacancy” on the Supreme Court. Conservative fixation with judges doesn’t only include the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. Noting that the Supreme Court hears a tiny fraction of the cases decided by appellate judges, Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt challengedTrump’s conservative critics to “reconcile their vehement opposition to him with their love of the Constitution. The latter is most definitely benefiting from the president’s massive impact on the federal bench, one that extends far beyond Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

Conservatives may have felt the bargain paid off last week, when Trump clinched his 200th judicial confirmation faster than any president since Jimmy Carter. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) tried to spike the ball when he said the milestone marked “a sea change, a generational change on the federal bench,” and that “Republicans are stemming this liberal judicial tide that we’ve lived with in the past.” Continue reading.