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President Trump makes an announcement on the introduction of the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Aug. 2, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is endorsing a resolution from House Democrats to censure President Trump after his response to the violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Reps. Jerry Nadler of New York, Bonnie Watson of New Jersey and Pramila Jayapal of Washington on Wednesday introduced the first censure resolution against the president. The censure movement came a day before Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tennessee, announced he plans to introduce articles of impeachment against the president.

"The president's repulsive defense of white supremacists demands that Congress act to defend our American values," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said in a Friday statement.

"Every day, the president gives us further evidence of why such a censure is necessary," Pelosi continued. "Indeed, with each passing day, it becomes clearer that the Republican Congress must declare whether it stands for our sacred American values or with the president who embraces white nationalism. Democrats will use every avenue to challenge the repulsiveness of President Trump's words and actions."

A censure is a public reprimand, formally disapproving of a public official.

Democrats' criticism of Mr. Trump has intensified since theSaturday white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, which resulted in the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer when a driver mowed down a crowd of counter-protesters. Mr. Trump at first said there was hatred on "many sides."

On Monday, he condemned white supremacism, but on Tuesday, he again blamed "both sides" for the violence and said there were "very fine people" among the attendees protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Pelosi endorses Democrats' resolution to censure Trump - CBS News

On the 14th of August, a left wing mob supported by the Democratic governor pulled down and smashed a century old memorial to the Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina. For days now the liberal media and Democratic Party have refused to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its ally the anarchist AntiFa, as sharing blame with the Alt-Right for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. These organizations, BLM and AntiFa, are the storm troopers of the Democratis Party.

A vote for a Democrat is a vote for anarchy, lawlessness, mob rule, violence, and dictatorship. If the Democratic Party ever gains power in this country again, you can rest assured that your rights as an individual will be subject to the whims of an extremist, left-wing, fascist government. Remember this when you go to the polls. Your very freedom depends on keeping the Democratic Party out of power in this country.

The Democratic Party has shown without any reservation it is not beneath using the tactics used in 1930s Germany to gain control of your lives.

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Beware the Democrats - Dothan Eagle

Democrats in Michigan and a handful of other states need to win some statewide races by 2020. Otherwise, they risk ensuring Republican majorities for another decade--even if Democrats get more votes at election time.

Thats according to David Daley, author of the Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal Americas Democracy. Daley appeared on Michigan Radios Stateside to discuss the book last year. A new paperback version was just released with an epilogue analyzing the 2016 presidential election.

Ratf**ked lays out what Daley calls theREDMAP plan, a surgical by Republican operatives effort to re-draw district lines to the partys advantage after the 2010 census.

Daley says that effort was wildly successful. For proof, he points to Michigan, which he calls one of the most gerrymandered states in America.

In 2012, Democrats in U.S. House and State House races received more votes than Republicans statewide.

Yet Republicans hold large majorities in both delegations: a 63-47 majority in the State House, and 9 out of 14 seats in the U.S. House. Daley attributes that to the REDMAP effort.

Republicans drew masterful lines after the 2010 elections when they took control of the entire state, Daley said. And by having complete control, they were able to draw exactly the lines they wanted without any Democrats in the room.

The technology and the information that mapmakers have at their disposal now is so much better than at any time in the past, you can draw unbeatable lines that last for an entire decade. And thats what has happened so far in Michigan.

In 2012, Daley says Democrats once again received more votes than Republicans in total statewide races. Yet they lost seats in the state legislature.

What changed in between there [and 2008]? The district lines changed, Daley said. And they changed surgically.

Daley says Democrat Mark Schauer, who unsuccessfully challenged Rick Snyder in the 2014 governors race, knows this better than most. He says Schauer was effectively re-districted out of his West Michigan district, as Republicans sought to create a solid majority of safe Republican districts through creative, but very strategic, mapmaking.

Schauer is now working with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, an effort to reverse the bleeding that happened when Republicans gained seemingly bulletproof majorities in state legislatures and on U.S. House maps in a number of key states, including Michigan.

The Democrats really fell asleep at the switch in 2010, and they did not understand what was happening, Daley said. Now Democrats need a strategy to counter that at the state level, and while people like Schauer are aggressive advocates for the cause, hes not sure if Democrats as a whole are on the ball.

I am not completely convinced the party has a winning strategy, or that they have much of a strategy right now at all, Daley said. They have to really rebuild the party in places where it has atrophied and been completely hollowed out. And I dont see those efforts underway right now.

Daley warns that if Democrats "cant find a way to get a seat at the table in redistricting after 2020, they will not have another shot at these maps until 2031."

There are a couple of alternative possibilities, though. Michigan is one of a handful of key states with citizen-led efforts to tackle gerrymandering, and that effort cleared one hurdle this week.

The Board of State Canvassers approved ballot language from the group Voters Not Politicians. They advocate a ballot proposal that would put re-districting power into the hands of a non-partisan committee. The group now has 180 days to gather more than 315,000 signatures to put the measure closer to the 2018 ballot.

Daley calls that effort, and similar initiatives in other states, an incredibly positive development.

You are now seeing in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in North Carolina, a real renewal of efforts to be sure that our elections are fair, that our votes matter, and that politicians do not have the power to choose their own voters, he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court could also weigh in on the matter. Daley says courts have never set a standard for when partisan gerrymandering becomes unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court has agreed to take up a Wisconsin case, Gill v. Whitford, that gives it an opportunity to do so.

Whatever happens, Daley says partisan gerrymandering of any kind is deeply dangerous and toxic for a democracy. People want their elections to be fair.

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Author: Democrats--or someone else--need to take on Michigan gerrymandering by 2020 - Michigan Radio

Bill Barrow, Associated Press

Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP

Trump remarks could sidetrack Democrats from other issues

ATLANTA (AP) President Donald Trump's widely criticized response to white supremacist violence in Virginia has left Democrats in a quandary: how to seize the moral high ground without getting sucked into a politically perilous culture war.

Democrats have denounced Trump for blaming "both sides" for deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, more recently, for defending Confederate monuments.

But the party faces a complex task: While addressing race and history in ways that reflect the party's values, Democrats also need to focus on issues like jobs and the economy that resonate with a wider range of voters, including white independents, ahead of the 2018 midterm election.

The party has been looking to answer Trump's populism by crafting its own middle-class brand, yet Democratic leaders across multiple states now are pushing to take down Old South monuments like the one that ostensibly sparked the events in Charlottesville, and three rank-and-file House Democrats want to pursue a congressional censure of the president.

In interviews this week before his resignation was announced Friday, White House strategist Steve Bannon gleefully suggested Democrats are falling into a trap.

"I want them to talk about racism every day," Bannon told The American Prospect, a liberal magazine. "If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

Trump himself has called Confederate memorials, most of them actually erected decades after the Civil War, "beautiful statues" that reflect "our nation's history and culture."

Polls taken after last weekend's violence offer some evidence backing Bannon's and Trump's view. While polls found widespread disgust with white supremacists, a Marist Poll for NPR and PBS found that just 27 percent of adults queried believe Confederate monuments "should be removed because they are offensive." About two out of three white and Latino respondents said they should remain, as did 44 percent of black respondents.

Andrew Young, a Democrat, civil rights leader and former U.N. ambassador, warned this week that the monuments are "a distraction." He told reporters in Atlanta it is "too costly to refight the Civil War."

Boyd Brown of South Carolina, a former state lawmaker and onetime member of the Democratic National Committee, says Democrats are right to oppose Confederate monuments and criticize Trump's remarks. "He tweets something crazy, we react and we're not wrong," Brown said. But "we have to talk about a lack of jobs and education in poor districts, voter suppression laws. Ask why Medicaid funding is always the target. And then explain how all those things hurt more than just African-Americans."

Trump upset Democrat Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support from white voters, particularly working-class whites who possessed a combination of economic frustration and racial resentments salved by Trump's promises of immigration controls, law-and-order and a booming economy.

Clinton, meanwhile, concentrated so much on Trump's deficiencies and outlandish statements that her own policy proposals received less attention. That's a problem that has beset Trump rivals since he first declared his candidacy: All the attention focused on Trump even unflattering stories prevent them from getting out their own messages.

Brian Fallon, who was spokesman for Clinton's campaign, said Democrats shouldn't let that happen after Charlottesville.

"As horrifying as what the president has said is, you have to have an affirmative agenda," he said.

Still, Fallon praised Democratic efforts to keep Trump and Republicans on the defensive over the president's response even if it doesn't help them politically.

"Sometimes it's important to take a stand regardless of the electoral impacts," he said, noting that Clinton delivered a speech last year warning of white nationalists' rise alongside Trump's campaign.

Democrats have tried various tactics to press the Charlottesville issue. Besides the push to censure Trump and remove monuments, they are planning voter organization drives across the United States.

Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, and candidate for governor, is among the Democrats calling for monuments to be moved to museums or cemeteries.

Gillum, who is black, says Democrats must argue "these monuments have been weaponized. We can't pretend that didn't happen."

The issue is reminiscent of South Carolina's decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds in 2015 after a white gunman killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston. Then-Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican who is now Trump's United Nations ambassador, declared the flag untenably divisive after the wide distribution of photos showing the killer clutching it.

"She was focused on leading the state through a grieving process so it could begin healing," recalls Rob Godfrey, one of her top aides at the time.

But Godfrey notes Haley never considered jettisoning other Old South relics.

"That was going to drive people apart," Godfrey says.

___

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Trump remarks could sidetrack Democrats from other issues - SFGate

RICHLAND, Ky.

Several months after losing her state legislative seat representing a district outside of Lexington in Madison County, Rita Smart still feels the pinch of the loss.

A former Democratic member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, Smart is sitting in the parlor of the beautifully appointed bed and breakfast, The Bennett House, that she owns and runs with her husband. She says: It was tough. I lost by 76 votes. Her voice trailed off at the mention of the remarkably close totals.

By all accounts, she was a competent legislator. She is a small business owner and previously spent three decades working for the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture.

She is polite, circumspect, and bewildered. I just cannot understand how I lost, she said.

In truth, she didnt her party did. The Democratic Party brand has suffered broadly in the middle of the country in the past few years, largely on the backs of its pull left under the presidency of Barack Obama. While progressivism fit well for Democrats in urban areas, it fell flat and was widely rejected in places like Madison County.

It is not that voters liked or loved Republicans or found them more virtuous; it is that they found Democrats less aligned with their values, more likely to look down their nose at them and not at all interested in listening to their plights.

Republicans at least made it OK to be in a church pew every Sunday, own a gun for protection and hunting, and not share all of their money with everyone else.

Kentucky Republicans were handed a bucket of ice water last fall when they won the state House in a landslide that fit in nicely with their previous wins in the governors office and the majority in the state Senate.

The last time Republicans held the majority in the Kentucky House was in 1921. Before the Democrats lost it last fall, it was the last lawmaking chamber in the South still controlled by a Democratic majority.

Smart wasnt the only one to lose her seat. The speaker of the Kentucky House lost, along with 15 other incumbent Democrats. This was an honest-to-goodness wave election in this state, preceded by wave elections in 2010 and 2014 that placed Republican majorities in state legislative bodies across the country, as well as in the U.S. House and Senate. Democrats have lost more than 1,100 legislative seats since 2009.

That is a lot of voter angst toward one party. The question is, when will the Democrats be ready to learn from it? The answer is unclear. Activists in the party seem more than happy to keep going left, but do they go at their own peril? They seem to believe that Hillary Clinton was rejected because she was not left enough, ignoring the fact that most of the middle of the country where the election was won and lost is pretty moderate.

Smarts loss to Republican C. Wesley Morgan last year was not about her not representing her state and her district well; it was about the image the national party projects, and voters in the middle of the country have been rejecting that for nearly a decade.

The Democrats currently lack the ability to win back power because their concentration of power is located in 94 counties across the country, according to an analysis by Dave Wasserman, U.S. House editor of The Cook Political Report.

If the Democrats were to branch out and employ a message and language that suit voters in Madison County, representatives like Smart would still be working in the state legislature and likely continuing to do a good job.

They still havent found their center nearly one year after Donald Trump stunned most Democrats. If they find it, Republican seats will start to winnow away. If not, the Republican Party will still chip away at seats like Smarts in every state across the country.

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. Contact her at info@creators.com.

2017, Creators.com

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Salena Zito column: Democrats need a new message - and not just in Kentucky - Richmond.com