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Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado was the first Republican in Congress last year to cut an ad promising to stand up to Donald Trump and six months into the presidency, he has tried to live up to that promise, bucking the president on immigration, health care and other issues.

As Republicans try to defend their House majority next year, lawmakers like Mr. Coffman are trying to find that elusive middle between being a Republican and being a Trump Republican.

For Mr. Coffman, who said last year that he didnt care for [Mr. Trump] much, little has changed. He is vowing to keep bucking the president when he wants, including voting against the American Health Care Act and trying to chart a more lenient path for illegal immigrants.

Mike Coffman has a long track record of independent leadership challenging big spenders in both parties and putting the interests of his constituents first. As Mike has said before, he will stand with President Trump when he agrees with him and stand up to him when he thinks hes wrong, said Tyler Sandberg, campaign adviser to Mr. Coffman.

Mr. Coffman won his district by 9 percentage points last cycle in the same region where Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton topped Mr. Trump by 9 points.

Some Republicans say thats a good sign: Voters are willing to split their ticket and reward congressional Republicans even if they do not support Mr. Trump. One party strategist said that if incumbents such as Mr. Coffman can win swing districts when Mrs. Clinton or Barack Obama is on the ballot, then they are strong enough to win midterm elections.

Others said that might not be the case next year.

The Republican majority could not be any worse than it is right now, said David Flaherty, CEO of Magellan Strategies in Colorado. He said Republicans like Mr. Coffman will need to switch up their campaign strategies now that Mr. Trump is in the White House, and they can no longer sell themselves to voters as checks on government.

Instead, its Democrats who will be able to portray themselves as checks on a runaway Republican Party.

The generic ballot test when voters are asked if they would vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their districts congressional election next year is tilting toward Democrats by 9 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics average of polls.

Mr. Coffman is one of nearly two dozen Republicans representing districts Mrs. Clinton won last year.

Another is Rep. Barbara Comstock, Virginia Republican, whose district stretches from the Shenandoah Valley to the Washington suburbs. Ms. Comstock won her district in November by 6 points, and Mrs. Clinton won it by 10 points.

Mr. Coffman and Ms. Comstock voted against Republicans American Health Care Act and have voiced criticism of Mr. Trumps other policies.

I did not support the AHCA today because of the many uncertainties in achieving those goals. As the process moves forward, I hope that we can continue to work together to fix our broken health care system, Ms. Comstock said in a statement after the May vote.

Democrats, though, said each lawmaker has plenty of votes to gut Obamacare that they will have to explain.

Coffman is extremely vulnerable in 2018, especially in a district that was carried by Hillary Clinton and has seen an explosion of civic activism, Morgan Carroll, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party, said in a statement.

Democrats also said opposing Mr. Trump on some high-profile issues isnt enough for voters who want to see a broader resistance.

Congresswoman Comstock is stuck between a rock and a hard place, said Cole Leiter, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She can pretend to be a moderate and isolate herself from her base voters or march lockstep with her party and confirm for families who have rejected the Trump-Washington Republican agenda who she really is. Its an untenable position.

Ms. Comstock has voted for Mr. Trumps position 97 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEights count. Mr. Coffmans record is slightly less lockstep but still at 94 percent.

Nathaniel Gonzales, editor of Inside Elections, said Republicans are still looking for that elusive spot that shows independence but doesnt alienate Trump supporters.

I think every Republican member is playing a game of Survivor and trying to get the right equation to get re-elected. Barbara Comstock tried to distance from the president, but she also needs voters who like the president, Mr. Gonzales said.

Early polling suggests competing influences at work. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month found a slight majority of voters 52 percent want Democrats to take control of Congress next year, but Republicans and Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their candidates.

Democrats say they have much better odds than Republicans because of Mr. Trumps historically low approval ratings and because the party in power usually loses some seats in midterm elections.

Republicans are in a race to the right to see who can be the Trumpiest candidate. Voters in Colorado understand that a vote for the Republican Party in 2018 is a vote for the Trump agenda of giving more tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and then sticking middle-class and working families with the bill, Ms. Carroll said.

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Republican incumbents in swing districts try to find right distance from Trump - Washington Times

A Republican congressman from Colorado on Monday declared that the Republican Party is dead, arguing itno longer has a vision for a better America.

In an op-ed for The Denver Post, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said the party that once had the blood of the people coursing through its veins is not pursing conservative policies.

After eight years of assuring that unified Republican government would allow for conservative policy, our Republican Congress has accomplished little, except for passing a spending bill that shackles the aspirations of future generations with crippling debt, Buck wrote.

We care about the meaningful. We have a vision for the meaningful, Buck said, speaking for Coloradans.

If we can pass a balanced budget amendment, a responsible spending bill, and reforms of our health care system, of our tax system, of our entitlement system, and of our immigration system, then we can begin to fulfill the one-time destiny of this party, a destiny to offer hope and prosperity to the people of this great nation.

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Colorado GOP rep declares: 'The Republican Party is dead' - The Hill

President Trump tweeted July 28 that his homeland security secretary, retired Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, is replacing Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff. (Victoria Walker,Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

The ouster (or resignation, depending on whom you listen to) of Reince Priebus as President Trumps chief of staff last week served as another tug of the crowbar splitting Trump away from the party he ostensibly leads. Priebus came to the White House from the Republican Partys senior-most position; his departure, coupled with the departure of Sean Spicer as press secretary, means that Trumps administration is without two of its strongest ties to the Republican National Committee.

And, as Tim Alberta noted in an article for Politico over the weekend, it means that the administration hardly has strong ties to the party at all. Alberta writes:

Looking around Trumps inner circle, there is communications director Anthony Scaramucci, a political novice who in the past donated to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who used Breitbart to try and burn the Republican Party to the ground; National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, a lifelong Democrat; director of strategic communication Hope Hicks, who has zero history with GOP politics; and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, a pair of self-professed Manhattan progressives.

Of Trumps closest advisers, Alberta adds, only Mike Pence has any association with the Republican Party.

Contrast that with July 2009, when President Barack Obama was building out his team. His interim communications director was Anita Dunn, whod worked in Democratic politics for years. Senior adviser David Axelrod had done the same. His National Economic Council director was Larry Summers, whod served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. Adviser Valerie Jarrett had worked for Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, which is how she knew the Obamas.

But the relative distance between Trumps team and the GOP goes a bit further than that. We reviewed his and Obamas Cabinet members at this point in each presidents first term. Obamas team had a greater percentage of lifelong Democrats than Trumps team doeslifelong Republicans. Obama hadmore staffers whohad never given to the opposing party. And Obamas team had more people with experience in elected office, federal appointments or working for Democratic Party organizations than did Trump.

Our full analysis by person:

Even the Obamastaffers without experience at the federal level often had experience at the state level, including EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan. Several had experience or appointments under Republican presidents.

To Albertas point, though, Trumps most senior advisers lack ties to the GOP, save Pence. This was hugely beneficial to Trump on the campaign trail, allowing him to position himself as an outsider unbeholden to the party that provided his glide path to the presidency. In office, though, its less helpful. Trump now has no one in his inner circle who knows how to twist arms to get things done on Capitol Hill. (Pences efforts in that regard, including a midnight visit to the Senate floor last week in hopes of castingthe tiebreaking vote on a Senate health-care measure, havenot proved very effective.) The input Trumpreceives from his senior team will lack the perspective of the party he leads.

Save for passing legislation a big exception there may be a plus side to this distance. Trump ran as the populist everyman whowould deliver on all of the things that Americans say they want but which never seem to happen in Congress. If Trump were to start trying to effect change that crosses party lines and incorporates the concerns of Democrats as well as Republicans, he might have some success.

But thats not really the space Trump occupies. His opposition to the party doesnt stem from his being a centrist, bridging the gap between left and right. Hehas repeatedly shown that his opposition is like Bannons: much further to the right than the party mainstream is mostly willing to go. Trump isthe most successful Fox News-watching tea partyer in American political history, and thats why hes distant from the rest of the party.

The consolation for Republicans? That second chart, showing how, outside of Trumps inner circle, there are a lot of party stalwarts who are in positions to affect the functioning of the executive branch. Not as robustly partisan as Obamas 2009 White House, but at least Trumps Cabinet is friendlier to the GOP than is the West Wing.

See more here:
Here's how untethered the Trump administration is from the Republican Party - Washington Post

That is on Page 5. On Page 6, he notes that Trump is in the regular habit of destabilizing the American people, not just foreign leaders. On Page 29, he says the word Orwellian seems quaint now, inadequate to our moment. On Page 30, he denounces the embrace of alternative facts at the highest levels of American life, adding that it creates a state of confusion, dividing us along fissures of truth and falsity and keeping us in a kind of low-level dread.

He also offers a shockingly astute insight into Trumps modus operandi and modus vivendi during the presidential campaign. Far from conservative, Flake writes, the presidents comportment was rather a study in the importance of conflict in reality television that once you introduce conflict, you cannot de-escalate conflict. You must continually escalate.

No wonder the senator wrote this book in secret. As a Republican member of Congress, he is declaring Trump a domestic and international menace. Other conservatives in the news media and strategist class have been saying just this for well over a year, of course, but they dont depend on a radicalized base to keep their jobs. Flake is the first elected official to cross this particular rhetorical Rubicon, and he seems to be imploring his colleagues to follow. He offers a despairing, unsparing indictment of everyone in Congress who went along with Trumps election.

We pretended that the emperor wasnt naked, he writes. Even worse: We checked our critical faculties at the door and pretended that the emperor was making sense.

Conscience of a Conservative takes its title directly from Barry Goldwaters 1960 manifesto. Like Goldwater who was also a Republican senator from Arizona Flake bemoans the crisis facing conservatives, and like Goldwater, he believes that conservatives have only themselves to blame.

The contexts are different, naturally. In 1960, liberalism was ascendant; the problem, Goldwater wrote, was that conservatives seemed unable to demonstrate the practical relevance of their philosophy free markets, limited government, a strong defense. Today, conservatism is ascendant, at least in name, with Republicans controlling both the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government. But it has been drained of precisely the principles Goldwater cherished, principles to which Flake very badly wants to return and for which he rebuilds a case. What, Flake wonders, would Goldwater have made of a Republican commander in chief who threatens to dismantle free trade agreements, undermines his own intelligence agencies and cozies up to autocrats?

Flake doesnt take much of a stab at explaining why a significant portion of the electorate came to embrace such a presidential candidate. But the senator does try to explain why his fellow conservatives did, tracing the winding path of how gamesmanship replaced statesmanship in Washington. Among the many culprits: redistricting, the roaring lobbying industry and Gingrich, whom he considers the Typhoid Mary of todays politics-of-personal-destruction epidemic. In exchange for control of the executive branch, Flake argues, congressional Republicans turned a blind eye to an unstable figure who put American institutions and values at risk. If this was our Faustian bargain, he writes, then it was not worth it.

This book will no doubt make Flake the baron of the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit, should he want the title, and a momentary darling of the left. (Not that the left shares anything in common with him politically. His politics are basically anathema to the left.) And Conscience of a Conservative has an undeniable rhetorical power it is fluid, well written, mature in tone. But Flake also has the material power to change things. How reconcilable are his words with his deeds?

In the Senate, Flake has shown himself to be a pleasant fellow of integrity. He tweeted warmhearted congratulations to his friend Tim Kaine when Hillary Clinton selected him as her running mate; he condemned the lock her up chants at Trump rallies; he worked on the bipartisan Senate immigration bill in 2013. In his book, he says outright that he never voted for Trump. A recent essay in The Atlantic by McKay Coppins gives a good window into his character. Growing up on an Arizona cattle ranch in a Mormon family of 13 certainly helps build one.

But Flake has also cast most of his votes in favor of Trumps policies. Just last week, he voted for the bill to repeal Obamacare without replacing it, and then he voted for the hastily assembled skinny repeal.

On that point, he seems to be at odds with his book, in which he specifically cautions Republicans against engineering a sloppy repeal of Obamacare behind closed doors. Legislation executed without hearings and written by only one side is always a bad idea, regardless of who does it, he writes.

The primary intellectual failing of Conscience of a Conservative is that it doesnt untangle the dysfunction in Washington from the dysfunction of his own party. Republicans havent just embraced Trumps nativism and politics of resentment because its politically expedient. Many Republicans have peddled anti-immigrant sentiment for years, and a return to Goldwaters principles probably wouldnt remedy that; the rejection of free trade agreements also has complex roots.

But if you take Flake at his word, its not just Republican principle thats at stake right now. Its democracy itself, imperiled less by one mans philosophical incoherence (Flakes word) than by his disrespect for our institutions and his highly erratic character. Which means that its the moral duty of Flakes colleagues to act.

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos, Flake writes. But members of Congress can. Too often we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, Someone should do something! without seeming to realize that that someone is us, he writes.

What he has in mind, he does not say. I hope someone will ask him.

Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @jenseniorny

A version of this review appears in print on August 1, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Republican Senator Condemns Trump.

Read more from the original source:
Republican Senator Jeff Flake Rails Against Trump, but to What End? - New York Times

Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) will not seek reelection next year after serving in the House since 1988, a spokesman confirmed to The Hill on Monday.

Duncan said in a statement to the Knoxville News Sentinel that he wanted to spend more time at home in Tennessee. Between Duncan and his father, who previously held the 2nd District seat, the family has represented the Knoxville area for more than half a century.

"I have decided I wanted to spend less time in airports, airplanes and traveling around the district and more time with my family, especially my nine grandchildren, who all live in Knoxville, Duncan said.I love my job, but I love my family more.

Duncan saidhe had been considering retirement before his reelection last year.

Since then, in part, because people knew or assumed that I might be thinking about retiring, I have never had so many people urging me to run again, Duncan said. Also, because of the recent attacks against me from the far left, my support among the conservative Republican base has never been more enthusiastic. I am grateful for their kind expressions of support. However, now is the time for me to move on to the next chapter of my life.

The Knoxville News Sentinel noted that Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett, a Republican, is expected to announce later this week that hes running for Duncans seat.

The district is considered a GOPstronghold. President Trump won 65 percent of the vote there in 2016, compared to just under 30 percent for Democratic nominee Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonTrump dictated statement for son on Russia meeting: report Kate Hudson mocks Scaramucci: 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' Tennessee Republican wont seek reelection to House MORE.

Duncans most notable vote may have been the one he cast against authorizing the Iraq War in 2002. He was one of just six Republicans to oppose then-President George W. Bush on that vote.

Herecalled in an interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel four years ago that he wasnt convinced that Saddam Husseins regime presented an imminent threat. He initially faced fallout for the vote but has since felt vindicated as public opinion toward the war changed.

"What had been a very unpopular vote slowly, slowly, slowly became, if not my most popular vote, certainly one of my most popular," Duncan said in the interview.

Read more here:
Tennessee Republican won't seek reelection to House - The Hill