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Two members of Congress, two former gubernatorial candidates and former Mayor Rudy Giulianis son will address a gathering of Republican leaders in Albany Monday, as the state party starts to settle its ticket for Novemberof 2022.

NYGOP Chairman Nick Langworthy said in an interview that his singular focus is defeating Gov. Andrew Cuomo in next years statewide elections, adding he hopes for a consensus about his partys candidates before years end.

It is imperative that we get the ball rolling, said Mr. Langworthy.

There are now more than twice as many Democrats in the state as Republicans, and the GOP hasnt won a statewide office since Gov. George Pataki was elected to a third term in 2002. Republicans also lost control of the state Senate majority in 2018, hampering the state partys efforts to raise campaign money.

U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who represents a district in eastern Long Island, on April 8 became the first major GOP candidate to declare a gubernatorial bid. His campaign said he raised $1 million on its first day of operations. In January, Mr. Cuomo reported he had $16.8 million in his war chest.

Link:
New York Republicans Make Their Case to Take on Gov. Andrew Cuomo - The Wall Street Journal

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. Im Lisa Lerer, your host.

In 2005, two senators went on a global tour.

They visited dilapidated factories in eastern Ukraine where workers were taking apart artillery shells. They drank vodka toasts with foreign leaders and local dignitaries in Saratov, Russia. And on the way home, they met Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, at 10 Downing Street in London.

From Russia to Ukraine and Azerbaijan to Britain, one of the men was greeted like a superstar. And it wasnt Barack Obama.

I very much feel like the novice and pupil, Mr. Obama said during the trip, looking out the window as he flew over the Russian countryside.

His teacher? Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, one of a caste of Republican foreign policy mandarins who prided themselves on bipartisan deal-making on matters of global importance. Mr. Lugar was a smart choice for a mentor: Nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks, he worked with Sam Nunn, the Democratic senator from Georgia, to pass legislation that helped destroy surplus stocks of nuclear weapons, keeping dangerous materials from reaching terrorists.

Yet Mr. Lugar would serve only one more term after that trip. Seven years later, Mr. Lugar lost by more than 20 percentage points in a primary battle against Richard E. Mourdock, a conservative Tea Party candidate who attacked his moderate opponent for his willingness to work with Mr. Obama, by then the president. And today, the story of that trip one where an older senator spent weeks tutoring a younger member of the opposing party in the ways of foreign policy feels distinctly sepia-toned.

I was thinking a lot about that history this week, as I watched President Biden announce his decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11. It was a humbling moment for the country, a painful admission that the staggering costs in money and lives of the forever war would never accomplish the mission of ushering in a stable democracy.

But for Republicans, the withdrawal offered another reminder of the partys own unresolved conflict. As I detailed in the paper on Friday, the usual suspects gave the usual responses to the decision. The statements largely mirrored the reception to a pledge last year by former President Donald J. Trump to withdraw by May 1, 2021 though with a bit of added vitriol.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, called it a retreat in the face of an enemy. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said it was dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous and warned that the withdrawal could lead to another terrorist attack. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming called the decision a huge propaganda victory for the Taliban, for Al Qaeda.

But the pushback was hardly overwhelming. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky heralded the move, tweeting, Enough endless wars. And Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah offered various degrees of praise.

Its clear from that divergent response that there is little agreement within the party on a fairly basic question: How do Republicans view Americas place in the world?

The post-9/11, Bush-era, hawkish consensus that guided the party for years is under siege, weakened by Mr. Trumps more transactional, America First foreign policy that rejected the internationalist order that was party orthodoxy for decades.

To the extent that Republican voters care about foreign policy, they are now largely driven by Mr. Trumps interests and isolationist tendencies.

Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, said he saw three foreign policy issues resonating with G.O.P. voters: restricting immigration, taking a tougher stance against China (which many blame for the spread of the coronavirus) and ending foreign entanglements.

Just because Donald Trump is no longer president, that doesnt mean that Republicans arent taking their lead from him on the issue of foreign policy, Mr. Newhouse said.

But those views arent shared by some of the partys leaders and a foreign policy establishment that was effectively exiled from policymaking posts during Mr. Trumps administration.

A small minority believe that we need to make our peace with the populist impulses that have driven President Trumps choices, said Kori Schake, who directs foreign and military policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. But my sense is that an inchoate larger plurality is converging around the notion that we havent done our jobs well enough of explaining to Americans, who dont spend all their times thinking about foreign and defense policy, why the positions that we advocate make the country safer and more prosperous.

This is hardly the only area where Mr. Trump has scrambled Republican orthodoxy by shifting his party in a more populist direction. As I wrote last week, the cracks that he has created between Republicans and their traditional allies in the business community have become a chasm. The huge amount of new spending during his time in office has made it difficult for the party to revert to its traditional position of fiscal responsibility and argue against the huge price tags of Mr. Bidens coronavirus relief and spending bills. On Friday, Mr. Bush published an op-ed article striking a gentler tone on immigration, quite a contrast from Mr. Trump and his calls to build the wall.

There is very little unity in the G.O.P. right now when it comes to setting a policy agenda. And there doesnt appear to be overwhelming interest in confronting these divides.

During the first months of the Biden administration, Republicans have been consumed with issues like so-called cancel culture, re-litigating the election and corporate wokeness. Those culture-war topics fire up the conservative base, leading to interview requests and campaign cash for Republican candidates and politicians.

But in all of this discussion of conspiracy theories and culture wars, theres little room or apparent desire to sort out what the post-Trump Republican Party stands for on the biggest issues of the day.

Mr. Lugar died in 2019. Just two years later, the bipartisan comity that he championed certainly feels like a relic from a bygone era. Whats far harder to see is whether his partys leaders, activists and voters can find their way to a future where they agree even with themselves.

We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? Well try to answer it. Have a comment? Were all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or message me on Twitter at @llerer.

Thats the number of mass shootings so far in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Heres a small glimpse of the gun violence that the country has already suffered this year.

A perk of the princehood: Designing your own hearse.

Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.

Is there anything you think were missing? Anything you want to see more of? Wed love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

Continued here:
The Republican Retreat on World Affairs - The New York Times

We have been thinking about the Republican Party and how it can come backworthily, constructivelyafter the splits and shatterings of recent years. The GOP is relatively strong in the states but holds neither the White House, House nor Senate and in presidential elections struggles to win the popular vote. Entrenched power centers are arrayed against it, increasingly including corporate America. But parties have come back from worse. The Democrats came back from being on the wrong side in the Civil War.

Some thoughts here on Republicans and immigration.

From Pew Researchs findings on U.S. immigrants, published in August 2020: America has more immigrants than any other nation on earth. More than 40 million people living here were born in another country. According to the governments 2020 Current Population Survey, when you combine immigrants and their U.S.-born children the number adds up to 85.7 million. Pew estimates that most (77%) are here legally, including naturalized citizens. Almost a quarter are not.

Where are Americas immigrants from? Twenty-five percent, the largest group, are from Mexico, according to Pew. After that China at 6%, India just behind, the Philippines at 4%, El Salvador at 3%.

America hasnt had so many first- and second-generation Americans since the great European wave of the turn of the last century. The political party that embraces this reality, that becomes part of it, will win the future.

Follow this link:
Republicans and Immigrants Need Each Other - The Wall Street Journal

After the Republican Party suffered a surprising (well, to Republicans) defeat in the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee famously commissioned an autopsy that tried to analyze how the party had fallen short. It made a range of recommendations, but they were distilled by the headlines and the wishful thinking of certain party elites into a plan for the G.O.P. to win back the presidency mostly by shifting left on immigration.

Then, of course, Donald Trump came along and put that particular vision to the torch.

After Trump went down to his own defeat, it was clear that there wouldnt be a repeat of the autopsy. Not only because the last experience ended badly, but because Trumps narrative would not allow it: To publicly analyze what went wrong for Republicans in 2020 would be to concede that the incumbent president had somehow failed (impossible!), that Joe Bidens victory was totally legitimate (unlikely!) and that the party somehow might need to move on from Trump himself (unthinkable!).

But just because there hasnt been a formal reckoning, thick with focus groups and bullet points, doesnt mean that G.O.P. elites dont have a theory of how to fix their partys problems in time for the next presidential cycle. Its just that this time the theory is less a message than a man: Right now, the partys autopsy for 2020, and its not-Trump hopes for 2024, are made flesh in the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

The proximate cause of the enthusiasm for DeSantis is his handling of the pandemic, and the medias attempted manhandling of him. When the Florida governor began reopening Florida last May, faster than some experts advised, he was cast as a feckless mini-Trump, the mayor from Jaws (complete with open, crowded beaches), the ultimate case study in Florida Man stupidity.

A year later, DeSantis is claiming vindication: His states Covid deaths per capita are slightly lower than the nations despite an aged and vulnerable population, his strategy of sealing off nursing homes while reopening schools for the fall looks like social and scientific wisdom, and his gubernatorial foils, the liberal governors cast as heroes by the press, have stumbled and fallen in various ways.

Meanwhile many media attacks on his governance have fizzled or boomeranged, most notably a 60 Minutes hit piece that claimed to have uncovered corruption in the states use of the Publix supermarket for its vaccination efforts but produced no smoking gun, conspicuously edited out much of DeSantiss rebuttal, and fell afoul of fact checkers. The governors public outrage in response was justified, but he must have been privately delighted, since theres nothing that boosts the standing of a Republican politician quite like being attacked deceptively or unsuccessfully by the press.

So DeSantis has a good narrative for the Covid era but his appeal as a post-Trump figure goes deeper than just the pandemic and its battles. The state he governs isnt just a test case for Covid policy. Its also been an object lesson in the adaptability of the Republican Party in the face of demographic trends that were supposed to spell its doom.

When the 2000 election famously came down to a statistical tie in Florida, many Democrats reasonably assumed that by 2020 they would be winning the state handily, thanks to its growing Hispanic population and generational turnover among Cuban-Americans, with an anti-Castro and right-wing older generation giving way to a more liberal younger one. But instead Floridas Democrats keep falling short of power, and the Republicans keep finding new ways to win, culminating in 2020, when the Trump-led G.O.P. made dramatic inroads with Hispanics in Miami-Dade County and took the state with relative ease.

DeSantiss career has been a distillation of this Florida-Republican adaptability. Born in Jacksonville, he went from being a double-Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law) to a Tea Party congressman to a zealous Trump defender who won the presidents endorsement for his gubernatorial campaign. A steady march rightward, it would seem except that after winning an extremely narrow victory over Andrew Gillum in 2018, DeSantis then swung back to the center, with educational and environmental initiatives and African-American outreach that earned him 60 percent approval ratings in his first year in office.

Combine that moderate swing with the combative persona DeSantis has developed during the pandemic, and you can see a model for post-Trump Republicanism that might might be able to hold the partys base while broadening the G.O.P.s appeal. You can think of it as a series of careful two-steps. Raise teachers salaries while denouncing critical race theory and left-wing indoctrination. Spend money on conservation and climate change mitigation through a program that carefully doesnt mention climate change itself. Choose a Latina running mate while backing E-Verify laws. Welcome conflict with the press, but try to make sure youre on favorable ground.

This is not exactly the kind of Republicanism that the partys donor class wanted back in 2012: DeSantis is to their right on immigration and social issues, and arguably to their left on spending. But the trauma of Trumpism has taught the G.O.P. elite that some compromise with base politics is inevitable, and right now DeSantis seems like the safest version of that compromise Trump-y when necessary, but not Trump-y all the time.

Of course all of this means that he may soon attract the ire of a certain former president, who has zero interest in someone besides himself being the party front-runner for 2024. And the idea that a non-Trump front-runner could be anointed early and actually win seems at odds with everything weve seen from the G.O.P. recently.

Then, too, having the press as your constant foil and enemy isnt necessarily a plus if they manage to come up with something genuinely damaging. There is a resemblance between DeSantis and Chris Christie, who looked like a 2016 front-runner before certain difficulties involving a bridge intervened.

Still, if you were betting on someone who could theoretically run against Trump, mano a mano, and not simply get squashed, I would put DeSantis ahead of both the defeated Trump rivals (meaning Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) and the loyal Trump subordinates (meaning Mike Pence or Nikki Haley). Not least because in a party that values performative masculinity, the Florida governors odd jock-nerd energy and prickly aggression are qualities Trump hasnt faced before.

The donor-class hope that Trump will simply fade away still seems nave. But the donors circling DeSantis at least seem to have learned one important lesson from 2016: If you want voters to say no to Donald Trump, you need to figure out, in a clear and early way, the candidate to whom you want them to say yes.

See more here:
Opinion | Ron DeSantis Is the Republican Autopsy - The New York Times

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and other members of a Republican delegation attend a press conference after a tour around a section of the U.S.-Mexico border on a Texas Highway Patrol vessel in Mission, Texas, U.S., March 26, 2021. REUTERS/Go Nakamura

Five Republican senators introduced a bill on Wednesday to strip Major League Baseball of its immunity to antitrust law, saying the legal shield wasnt deserved after the league moved its All-Star game away from Georgia to protest a law that could make it harder to vote.

Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Lee introduced the bill in the Senate, Lee's office said in a statement. A version of the bill was also introduced in the House of Representatives by a group of Republican lawmakers.

"If Major League Baseball is going to act dishonestly and spread lies about Georgia's voting rights bill to favor one party against the other, they shouldn't expect to continue to receive special benefits from Congress," Cruz said in a statement, saying that MLB has enjoyed a special exemption from antitrust laws that other professional sports leagues do not.

MLB could not be reached immediately for comment.

MLB said earlier this month that it would move its All-Star Game out of Georgia to protest the states new voting restrictions.

Major League Baseball won exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act under a 1922 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which determined that professional baseball is not interstate commerce, according to a 2019 article in the Wake Forest Law Review. MLB's exemption has protected the league in its exclusive contracts for airing home team games on local cable television networks, the article said.

Under a bill passed by Congress in 1998, the Curt Flood Act, MLB did, however, lose its antitrust exemption related to labor issues.

Other professional sports leagues enjoy more limited antitrust exemptions.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Excerpt from:
Republicans want to yank baseball's antitrust immunity after MLB reaction to Georgia voting law - Reuters