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Six months after seizing complete control of the federal government, the Republican Party stands divided as ever plunged into a messy war among its factions that has escalated in recent weeks to crisis levels.

Frustrated lawmakers are increasingly sounding off at a White House awash in turmoil and struggling to accomplish its legislative goals. President Trump is scolding Republican senators over health care and even threatening electoral retribution. Congressional leaders are losing the confidence of their rank and file. And some major GOP donors are considering using their wealth to try to force out recalcitrant incumbents.

Its a lot of tribes within one party, with many agendas, trying to do what they want to do, Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) said in an interview.

The intensifying fights threaten to derail efforts to overhaul the nations tax laws and other initiatives that GOP leaders hope will put them back on track. The party remains bogged down by a months-long health-care endeavor that still lacks the support to become law, although Senate GOP leaders plan to vote on it this week.

With his priorities stalled and Trump consumed by staff changes and investigations into Russian interference in last years election, Republicans are adding fuel to a political fire that is showing no signs of burning out. The conflict also heralds a potentially messy 2018 midterm campaign with fierce intra-party clashes that could draw resources away from fending off Democrats.

Its very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their President, Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday afternoon, marking the latest sign of the presidents uneasy relationship with his own party.

Winning control of both chambers and the White House has done little to fill in the deep and politically damaging ideological fault lines that plagued the GOP during Barack Obamas presidency and ripped the party apart during the 2016 presidential primary. Now, Republicans have even more to lose.

In the 50 years Ive been involved, Republicans have yet to figure out how to support each other, said R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the founder of the American Spectator, a conservative magazine.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans are increasingly concerned that Trump has shown no signs of being able to calm the party. What Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) called the daily drama at the White House flared again last week when Trump shook up his communications staff and told the New York Times that he regretted picking Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general.

This week was supposed to be Made in America Week and we were talking about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Dent grumbled in a telephone interview Thursday, citing White House messaging campaigns that were overshadowed by the controversies.

[At the White House, an abrupt chain reaction: Spicer out, Scaramucci and Sanders in]

As Trump dealt with continued conflicts among his staff which culminated Friday in press secretary Sean Spicer resigning in protest after wealthy financier Anthony Scaramucci was named communications director he set out to try to resolve the Senate Republican impasse over health care.

The president had a small group of Republican senators over for dinner last Monday night to talk about the issue. But the discussion veered to other subjects, including Trumps trip to Paris and the Senates 60-vote threshold for most legislation, which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he will not end. That didnt stop Trump from wondering aloud about its usefulness.

He asked the question, Why should we keep it? recalled Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who attended the dinner.

Two days later, some Republican senators left a White House lunch confused about what Trump was asking them to do on health care. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the next day that while the president made very clear that he wants to see a bill pass, Im unclear, having heard the president and read his tweets, exactly which bill he wants to pass.

The White House says the president prefers to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. McConnell has also raised the prospect of moving to only repeal the law. Neither option has enough votes. Nevertheless, McConnell plans to hold a vote early this week and bring the push to fulfill a seven-year campaign promise to its conclusion, one way or the other.

One of the things that united our party has been the pledge to repeal Obamacare since the 2010 election cycle, said White House legislative affairs director Marc Short. So when we complete that, I think that will help to unite the party.

Trumps allies on Capitol Hill have described the dynamic between the White House and GOP lawmakers as a disconnect between Republicans who are still finding it difficult to accept that he is the leader of the party that they have long controlled.

The disconnect is between a president who was elected from outside the Washington bubble and people in Congress who are of the Washington bubble, said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), who works closely with the White House. I dont think some people in the Senate understand the mandate that Donald Trumps election represented.

Trump issued a casual threat at the Wednesday lunch against Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who has not embraced McConnells health-care bill. Look, he wants to remain a senator, doesnt he? Trump said in front of a pack of reporters as Heller, sitting directly to his right, grinned through the uncomfortable moment.

Heller is up for reelection in a state that Trump lost to Hillary Clinton and where Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) was the first Republican to expanded Medicaid under the ACA. Heller later brushed the moment off as President Trump being President Trump.

But some donors say they are weighing whether to financially back primary challengers against Republican lawmakers unwilling to support Trumps aims.

Absolutely we should be thinking about that, said Frank VanderSloot, a billionaire chief executive of an Idaho nutritional-supplement company. He bemoaned the lack of courage some lawmakers have shown and wished representatives would have the guts to vote the way they said they would on the campaign trail.

[Trump threatens electoral consequences for senators who oppose health-care bill]

Its not just the gulf between Trump and Republican senators that has strained relations during the health-care debate. The way McConnell and his top deputies have handled the legislation has drawn sharp criticism from some GOP senators.

No, said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), when asked last week whether he was happy with the way leadership has navigated the talks.

As he stepped into a Senate office building elevator the same day, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) would not respond to reporter questions about how good a job McConnell has done managing the health-care push. He flashed a smile as the door closed.

McConnell has defended his strategy, saying the process has been open to Republican senators, who have discussed it in many lunches and smaller meetings. Still, when it came time to write the bill, it was only McConnell and a small group of aides who did it. There was no outreach at all to Democrats, who have been united in their opposition.

In the House, the prospect of passing a 2018 budget this summer and a spending bill with funding for the Mexican border wall that Trump has called for remain uncertain, even though Republicans have a sizeable majority in the chamber. GOP disagreements have continued to erupt during Speaker Paul D. Ryans (R-Wis.) tenure. There are also obstacles in both chambers to achieving tax reform, which is expected to be among the next significant GOP legislative undertakings.

Trump critics said the ongoing controversies over Russian interference in the 2016 election and probes into potential coordination with the presidents associates would make any improvement in relations all but impossible in the coming months, with many Republicans unsure whether Trumps presidency will survive.

The Russia stories never stop coming, said Rick Wilson, a vocal anti-Trump consultant and GOP operative. For Republicans, the stories never get better, either. There is no moment of clarity or admission.

Wilson said Republicans are also starting to doubt whether the bargain they made that they can endure Trump in order to pass X or Y can hold. After a while, nothing really works and it becomes a train wreck.

[Its an insane process: How Trump and Republicans failed on their health-care bill]

Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate, said Trumps battles with Republicans are unlikely to end and are entirely predictable, based on what Trumps victory signified.

His nomination and election were a hostile takeover of the vehicle of the Republican Party, Stone said. He added, When you talk to some Republicans who oppose Trump, they say they will keep opposing him but cant openly say it.

Some Republican lawmakers have been pained to talk about the president publicly, fearful of aggressively challenging their party leader but also wary of aligning too closely with some of his controversial statements or policy positions. Instead, they often attempt to focus on areas where they agree.

On foreign policy, I think he very much is involved in a direction thats far more in alignment since hes been elected with a bulk of the United States Senate than during the campaign, said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Amid the discord, there are some signs of collaboration. The Republican National Committee has worked to build ties to Trump and his family. In recent weeks, Trumps son Eric, his wife, Lara, and RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, among other committee officials, met at the Trump International Hotel in Washington to discuss upcoming races and strategy.

That meeting followed a similar gathering weeks earlier at the RNC where Trump family members were welcomed to share their suggestions, according two people familiar with the sessions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Yet the friction keeps building. Among Trumps defenders, such as VanderSloot, who said the president is trying to move the ball forward, there are concerns he is picking too many fights with too many people. I think hes trying to swat too many flies, VanderSloot said.

The broader burden, some Republicans say, is to overcome a dynamic of disunity in the party that predates Trump and the current Congress. During the Obama years, it took the form of tea party-vs.-establishment struggles, which in some cases cost Republicans seats or led them to wage risky political feuds.

There was a separation between Republicanism and conservatism long before he won the White House, said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele. The glue has been coming apart since Reagan.

Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

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Republicans are in full control of government but losing control of their party - Washington Post

Despite the states reputation as a conservative bastion, the Republican speaker of the Texas House refused to pass a number of conservative reforms during the regular biennial legislative session, as a result, the states governor has called lawmakers back for the first special session since he was elected as governor.

Gov. Greg Abbott called the legislature back after conservative fallout, spurred by legislative inaction, following the close of the regular session.

Items like ethics reform, property tax reform, school choice, and the renewing of a commission that ensures doctors in the state remained licensed were left unaddressed, mostly due to a House blockade under the leadership of Speaker of the state House Joe Straus.

Conservatives in the state have been pushing for repeal for some time. Two legislative sessions in a row, legislation has passed the Texas Senate only to be obstructed in the House.

In 2015, Texas last legislative session, a bill was filed to end the practice.

Although it passed through the State Senate, stall tactics often used by Straus to kill legislation blocked the bill from advancing.

Using one of the members of his governing coalition, Texas state Rep. Byron Cook, Straus delayed the bill until there was no chance of it passing the full House before the final deadline.

House leadership has a history of holding conservative reforms hostage because of union cash. Though most union campaign contributions went to Democrats, public unions spent more than $1.6 million on Texas legislators during the most recent campaign cycle.

Overall, Speaker Straus received the most of those dollars, bringing the bulk of union contributions during his speakership to over a quarter of a million dollars. After Straus, the second highest Republican was Cook.

Those who control how legislation moves through the House are more than willing to give in to union demands so they can enjoy their continued support. A letter released by one of the unions following the last legislative session shows how much they value Straus and Cook.

State Representative Byron Cook is Chairman of the powerful State Affairs Committee and is closely aligned with Joe Straus, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. Last session, our friend Byron Cook led the effort that stopped further consideration of the bill that would have ended payroll deduction of union dues.

The letter goes on to urge members to support Cook at the polls for his reelection as he felt his seat was vulnerable.

After the bill to end union dues collection was killed last session, activists spent the interim voicing their desire to see the issue reconsidered.

The states Lt. Gov. created a task force to further explore union dues reform, two million primary voters voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposition to end the practice, and delegates to the states 2016 GOP convention passed a plank calling for its end as well.

The proposition, while non-binding, passed by 83 percent to 17 percent, and the convention plank passed by 96 percent.

Even Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has weighed in on the issue. Norquist sent a letter to lawmakers in April urging them to vote YES on the House and Senate versions of the bill.

Legislators had their marching orders, the large majority of Texans wanted them to ban government entities from collecting dues.

As expected, the Senate passed the bill without a hitch. But again, the House was the impediment to its final passage. Indeed, despite being a priority of the governor, it didnt even receive a committee hearing in the House.

Unions oppose the legislation because they claim it is a union-busting measure, but in reality it just stops government from performing a function that it shouldnt be doing in the first place.

An argument often used is that it is easier and more secure for their members to have dues deducted through government rather than any of the other methods offered by private companies.

That is simply untrue, the notion that government provides a more user-friendly and secure method than the private sector is laughable. Government systems are often the target of data breaches and hackers, many of which are successful.

As a matter of fact, two of the ten largest data breaches happened to Texas government entities.

In 2011, the Texas Comptrollers office discovered a breach that made the personal information of 3.5 million Texans public, costing taxpayers over $1.8 million. In 2012, personal information of 6.5 million Texas voters was compromised mistakenly by the Texas Attorney Generals Office.

Aside from those large hacks, the Texas Department of Public Safety, Dallas Police Department, and Texas Police Chiefs Association have all been hacked.

With as many advancements that have been made in online banking, it takes no more than a few clicks, similar to setting up a direct deposit or auto-pay for bills, to sign up for dues deduction.

Some Texas teachers associations, like the Houston Federation of Teachers, are already transitioning its members to a non-government dues collection method.

Starting in August, all 6,000 members of that union will be transferred from the government dues collection program to automated bank draft that will deduct dues after their pay has been deposited in their accounts. If the government system is easier and more secure, why make the transition when there is no state government mandate to do so?

Through their complacency with this current process, lawmakers are allowing government to be involved in a partisan fight.

Unions use dues to pay for lobbyists who often lobby for legislation that negatively impacts small businesses, like minimum wage laws.

Also, they use funds for organizing efforts like rallies and protests like their ongoing, summer-long organized effort called the Summer of Resistance. The effort is meant to promote rallies, protests, and demonstrations to oppose Texas sanctuary city law.

The arguments made against reforming this practice are selfish, the sole reason Texas unions are fighting to keep it in place is because they dont want their membership to consciously have to pay their dues. Requiring them to make the decision every pay period, quarter, or year means that members would be more likely to question what benefits they are receiving in exchange for the dues they are paying.

This legislation does not prohibit or limit anyones ability to join a union, restrict speech, or actions of that union, it simply requires them to collect their own dues the way that the private sector does.

Because of the states biennial legislature, Texans usually have to wait two years to reconsider reforms that their legislators failed to address. This time, they are being given a second chance to address this and many other issues.

With the special session currently underway, time will tell if lawmakers will side with the will of voters or if union influence will prevail.

Charles Blain is the executive director of Restore Justice USA, a criminal justice reform project of Empower Texans. He campaigned for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2014 and has a background in public policy. Follow him on Twitter @cjblain10

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

Read more from the original source:
Why is a Texas Republican blocking union reforms? - The Hill (blog)

Rand Paul has helped to block Republican efforts to introduce a new health bill. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Rand Paul, one of the conservative senators who has helped to hold up Republican healthcare reform, on Sunday derided the current Senate bill as a monstrosity and a porkfest and said he would not vote for it to proceed to debate this week.

With Donald Trump telling senators to stay in Washington until they have a replacement for Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act (ACA), majority leader Mitch McConnell is reportedly looking to hold a vote to proceed to debate as early as Tuesday.

McConnell must attempt to win over conservatives such as Paul, of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, who oppose government intervention in the insurance market.

Moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine have expressed opposition to the bill in terms of its $800bn cuts to Medicaid, the government programme that supports the young, elderly, poor and infirm.

The real question is what are we moving to, what are we opening to debate to, said Paul on CNNs State of the Union. Last week the Senate leadership said it would be a clean repeal, like the 2015 bill that we all voted for, and I think thats a good idea.

Obama vetoed the 2015 repeal, one of a succession of attempts by Republicans in Congress to bring down his signature legislative achievement.

Trump, eager for legislative success after six months in office without it, first said this week that the ACA should be repealed before a replacement was ready; then said it should simply be allowed to fail; then demanded a replacement at the same time as a repeal.

Paul continued: The alternative is the Senate leadership bill that doesnt repeal Obamacare, is Obamacare-lite and is loaded with pork, its become a porkfest where theyre dumping billions of dollars into pet projects for individual senators. Im not for that.

Ive told them I will vote for a motion to proceed if we proceed to a clean repeal vote. If it fails they can put up their monstrosity that they want to put forward, but Im not for that because Im not for the taxpayer subsidising private industry.

Speaking to CBSs Face the Nation, Collins said uncertainty over what would be voted on this week was not a good approach to facing legislation that affects millions of people and one sixth of our economy.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said this week that repeal of the ACA without a replacement would lead to 32m Americans losing health insurance in the next decade.

The CBO score on the Senate healthcare bill put that figure at 22m. Republican healthcare proposals remain extremely unpopular with the voting public.

On Friday, the Senate parliamentarian threw another obstacle in the Republicans way. The chief rules adviser to the upper chamber said several provisions of the bill including the defunding of Planned Parenthood were not eligible for the 51-vote threshold of the budget reconciliation process and would have to attract 60 votes to pass.

The 48 Senate Democrats are united in their opposition to Republican attempts to repeal the ACA.

On Saturday, Trump included healthcare in a sequence of 10 morning tweets, writing: The Republican senators must step up to the plate and, after seven years, vote to repeal and replace. Next, tax reform and infrastructure. WIN!

Obamacare is dead and the Democrats are obstructionists, no ideas or votes, only obstruction. It is solely up to the 52 Republican senators!

He then included healthcare in a speech to a military audience in Norfolk, Virginia marking the launch of the USS Gerald R Ford, a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

You can call those senators to make sure you get healthcare, the president said, a political remark that some observers deemed inappropriate.

Ben Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Obama, tweeted that Trumps words were a huge deal. Obama (or Bushes) never would have done this. Violates most fundamental norms separating military and politics.

The president is committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new White House press secretary, on Sunday on ABCs This Week. Inaction is not an option and the president was making that clear yesterday and speaking not just to the people in the room but to the American people.

On CBS, White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was asked if Trumps mixed messaging on healthcare could damage the Republican push for reform.

Trumps contradictory tweets, Scaramucci said, showed the president signaling over the top of the mainstream media.

He basically wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, he said. He knows thats the best thing for the American people. It turns out that he may not be able to get that done with a recalcitrant Congress.

Read more:
Latest Republican health bill 'a porkfest, a monstrosity', Rand Paul says - The Guardian

Demonstrators protesting the Senate GOPhealthcare legislation were escorted out of Sen. Cory GardnerCory GardnerProtesters interrupt Senate Republicans speech over healthcare Interior recommends preserving Colorado site's monument status Overnight Energy: Exxon sues feds over M fine | Deputy Interior pick advances | Oil concerns hold up Russia sanctions push MOREs (R-Co.) speech addressing healthcare at a conservative conference on Friday.

Video shows police escorting protesters, who were chanting save our liberty, no cuts to Medicaid during Gardners speech, out of the room.

Here's video of the moment when people interrupted Sen. Gardner and when the police showed up to escort them out. pic.twitter.com/eLaKChOxty

The protesters were from a disability advocate group known as Atlantis ADAPT, according to The Denver Post.

Denvers NBC affiliate KUSA reported two protesters were escorted out.

No arrests were made, according to Denver police.

The latest healthcare protests come after Gardner was subpoenaed to appear in court for cases of five protesters who were arrested at his Denver office.

Gardner is one of many Senate Republicans facing heat for the conferences ObamaCare repeal and replace legislation.

Major portions of the bill require 60 votes, according to the Senate parliamentarian, meaning they most likely will not survive on the Senate floor.

- This post was updated at 10:56 a.m.

See the article here:
Protesters interrupt Senate Republican's speech over healthcare ... - The Hill

Minutes after a bipartisan coalition of California lawmakers voted to extend the states landmark climate change policy for another decade, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown stood in front of a bank of television cameras and compared the plan to one championed 30 years ago by GOP icon Ronald Reagan.

Back then, the Republican president helped negotiate the Montreal protocol to curb the release of gases that were destroying the ozone layer, persuading Republicans to join Democrats in approving an insurance policy that made economic sense in case environmentalists were right. Brown said the California cap and trade program the Legislature approved Monday night won support for a similar reason.

This is an insurance policy, he said. I think the business community, to a great extent, sees that and agrees with where were going.

Indeed, though major business groups have fought against California climate policies in the past, they backed the plan to extend cap and tradea five-year-old marketplace in which companies buy and sell permits to emit greenhouse gases. Business support prompted some Republicans to favor the legislation as well, leading to a bipartisan vote that notches a win for Browns environmental agenda. In fact some progressive groups complained that the bipartisan negotiations had resulted in a monstrosity of a plan overly favorable to corporate interests.

That the Democratic governor celebrated its passage by invoking Reagan, the legendary conservative, signals the political surprise underlying the fight over how to stem global warming: the Republican case for cap and trade. Its hard to imagine it on the national stage, with Republicans in Washington challenging the veracity of climate science and President Donald Trump pulling the country out of an international agreement to slow global warming.

But in California, a deep blue state leading the charge to curb climate change, the question for many Republicans isnt whether global warming is happeningits what kind of policies are best to address it.

I know for some, theyre going to look at this and say what in the world is going on? Why are Republicans talking about something like cap and trade? Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley said following the vote Monday night.

Well Ill tell you, we believe that markets are better than Soviet-style command and control. We believe that markets are better than the government coercing people into doing things that they dont want to do. We believe that businesses in California want to do the right thing, which is why we supported cap and trade.

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Most Republicans disagreed with himthe bill won support from just eight of 38 Republican legislators, and all but a handful of Democrats. The GOP divide revealed a split between business-aligned Republicans who favored cap and trade, and others who rejected it with a Trump-style message of economic populism. Assemblyman Travis Allen, a conservative Republican from Huntington Beach who is running for governor next year, called cap and trade a continuation of California Democrats attack on the working middle class and the poor of this state, because it will cause fuel prices to go up.

But polluting industries that participate in cap and tradeoil companies, utilities, food processors and othersbroadly agree that cap and trade will cost less than the alternatives. Thats because last year, California enshrined in state law a goal to slash greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 40 percent between 2020 and 2030. Business groups fought hard against the bill establishing that goal because it will make operations more expensive for companies that send climate-warming gas into the air. But they lost that fight, and with the target now set, cap and trade appeals to businesses as a way to maintain some flexibility while they work to reach the collective emissions reduction goal.

Once (the law) was in place and we had the goals that we must reach, it was all about finding the least expensive path for our economy, said Gino DiCaro, vice president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which opposed the plan to lower emissions last year but supported this years cap and trade bill.

Without cap and trade, many business groups said, the state could impose requirements for slashing emissions that would be more onerous on business, speculating that air board bureaucrats could cook up tougher regulations or a new carbon tax that would cost a lot more than cap and trade.

DiCaro pointed to research showing that costs would go up three times as much without cap and trade if the state came up with other ways to reduce emissions. The California Chamber of Commerce also supported the cap and trade extension, even though its been challenging the program in court for years. Spokeswoman Denise Davis said the Chamber has backed cap and trade since it was first envisioned in 2006 and that its lawsuit only focused on whether the auction component of cap and trade amounted to an illegal taxan argument the courts rejected.

Even though most Republican lawmakers opposed the bill to extend cap and trade, those who voted for it argued that it was good for business. And by negotiating with Brown over many months, Mayes, the Assembly Republican leader, was able to extract key concessions that made a vote for cap and trade more enticing to some GOP lawmakers. The package of bills includes the repeal of a firefighting fee on rural homeowners that Republicans have long tried to scrap, a tax break for energy companies pursuing clean energy projects, the extension of a sales tax break for manufacturing companies, and a constitutional amendment that could give Republicans more say in 2024 on how to spend cap-and-trade revenues.

After the bill passed, the California Business Round Tablea consortium of the states largest employerslaunched a series of social media ads thanking the eight Republicans who voted for cap and trade. But a bitter backlash was brewing among conservative Republicans, with one publicly calling on Mayes to resign.

Yet former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican who signed the 2006 bill that led to the creation of Californias cap and trade, took to Facebook to thank Mayes for following in the footsteps of great Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who fought for his own cap and trade program to repair the ozone layer.

I hope Republicans around the country can learn from the example of Assemblyman Mayes and his fellow Republicans that we can fight for free market policies to clean up our environment for our children at the same time we fight for a booming economy.

CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

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Latest California innovation: A Republican case for cap and trade - LA Daily News