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For the national Republican Party, this issue gives us the chance to do some good, win back millions of voters weve alienated, and move on to other important areas where we still have the moral high ground.

Some Republican operatives think theyre better off continuing to fight on this front of the culture war, and plenty of Democratic operatives think the same. The partisan vote in the House reflects an unwillingnesson both sidesto negotiate. But gay and trans rights are no longer the wedge issue they were in the early aughts. Times have changed, and Republicans best bet now is to reach a negotiated peace with the other side.

Democrats know the current version of the Equality Act could never pass in the Senate in its current form. And it might seem that in the current environment, common ground is out of reach. But senators of both parties have no chance of portraying themselves as reasonable unless they make a good-faith effort to reach a deal. Democrats cannot clear this hurdle unless they deal fairly with Republicans like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski, as well as conservative Democrat Joe Manchin. As for Republicans, they need to be willing to back an alternative rather than just saying no.

For religious conservatives, and by extension the Republicans who represent many of them, the problem with the current bill is that it appears to threaten their religious freedom and fails to adequately grapple with First Amendment concerns. They cannot support legislation that would imperil their operations, including the vital social services they provide in underserved communities around the country.

Several states have enacted laws similar to the Equality Act in recent years, but always with religious liberty protections. For instance, Rhode Island has a robust anti-discrimination law with reasonable protections for religious groups. These protections ensure that Catholic Social Servicesand any other religious groupscan continue to provide valuable services in the state.

Similarly, Utahs success in passing anti-discrimination legislation offers a path forward. Although its state government is controlled by Republicans at every level, Utah has some of the strongest protections for gay and trans people in the nation. In 2015, with the support of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and state LGBTQ leaders, Utahs Republican legislature passed a comprehensive non-discrimination bill with reasonable protections for religious organizations.

I worked on the campaign to pass it, and found that Republicans were far more open to gay rights if a bill simply respected these protections, and Democrats were able to get behind it as well. It was a fair outcome that both sides liked. As a result, the law has enjoyed widespread support among the public. The people of Utah are tied with Vermont for the second-highest rates of support for LGBTQ non-discrimination protections.

In Congress, instead of working toward such a deal, many Democrats grandstand and posture, insistingwronglythat they can pass the Equality Act as currently written. Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, for instance, has never complained about the religious exemptions in his own states anti-discrimination laws, yet for some reason he draws a line in the sand at the federal level, denouncing any effort to provide similar exemptions in the Equality Act. Meanwhile, most Republicans complain about these missing provisions without offering their support for a bill that included such guarantees.

Utah should serve as a blueprint for both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. The Fairness for All Act, an alternative version of the Equality Act, draws from the popular Utah law. Senate Republicans should introduce this bill and use its language to amend the Equality Act.

Support by Republican lawmakers for these types of changes would deliver a broader win to religious conservatives as well: Perhaps surprisingly, the best and possibly only way to achieve robust religious-freedom protections nationwide is by agreeing to LGBTQ non-discrimination protections, codifying an expansion of civil rights for religion alongside protections for sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

This move would also help Republicans gain back some of the ground they lost with voters over the past several years. Public opinion polling shows that support for LGBTQ civil rights continues to climb, particularly in more educated, suburban districts.

With public support at sky-high levels, a version of the Equality Act will pass eventually. The question is: Which version? And will Republicans take the opportunity to shape it?

Religious conservatives should seize this chance now to influence the process before the culture shifts even more decidedly against them on LGBTQ issues. By making peace on this issue, religious conservatives could get the legal protections they want while also showing themselves to be decent and reasonable peoplewinning them political goodwill for any future disagreements that might emerge, and allowing lawmakers to move on to pressing issues like the crushing federal debt, defeating coronavirus, unaccompanied minors at the border, human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party, crumbling infrastructure and energy independence.

Responsible legislation is within reach, but you cant win if you dont play. Reaching a settlement on these issues is better for people of faith, better for LGBTQ people, and better for the country. Republicans should sit down with Democrats and insist on a deal that works for both sides. Common ground is possible.

Original post:
Opinion | The Republican Case for Federal LGBT Rights - POLITICO

Americans should be worried that the Republican party is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognisable and unacceptable even five years ago, Barack Obama said on Monday.

The former president warned Americans to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not gonna happen in just one bang but will instead come in a series of steps, as seen under authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland.

Obama was speaking to CNN the night before two Senate committees released a report on the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.

Five people died after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in service of Trumps lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the electoral college and the popular vote was caused by electoral fraud.

Trump was impeached a second time, with support from 10 House Republicans. But Republicans in the Senate acquitted him of inciting an insurrection. He remains free to run for office and has returned to public speaking and hinted about plans for running for the White House again in 2024.

Last month, Republicans blocked the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The Senate report released on Tuesday did not address political questions.

Away from Washington, in states including Texas, Florida and Georgia, Republicans are pursuing laws to restrict ballot access in constituencies likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.

In Washington, opposition from centrist Democrats such as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is blocking federal voting rights protections.

Obama told CNN large portions of an elected Congress [are] going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election.

Some Republicans did speak up against Trumps lie after 6 January, Obama said, praising officials like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state who resisted pressure to overturn Bidens win there, as very brave.

But then, Obama said, poof, suddenly everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it and the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.

My hope is that the tides will turn. But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesnt happen just automatically.

Obama, the first black president, has considered his impact on the American right at length, particularly in his memoir, A Promised Land, which was published after the 2020 election.

He told CNN the rightwing media, most prominently Fox News, was a particular driver of deepening division. Republicans and Democrats, he said, occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.

We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you dont have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues. All that has contributed to that sense that we dont have anything in common.

Asking how do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?, Obama said Americans on either side of the divide needed to meet and talk more often.

The question now becomes how do we create meeting places, he said. Because right now, we dont have them and were seeing the consequences of that.

See original here:
Barack Obama warns Republicans will kill US democracy in series of steps - The Guardian

The estimated cost of the recall election, according to state finance officials, is $215 million statewide, including an estimated $20 million for San Diego County

SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. On the eve of California's highly-anticipated reopening, Republicans who have been critical of Governor Gavin Newsom's handling of the pandemic say it is time for new leadership. Already, more than six dozen candidates have filed paperwork to run in the upcoming recall election.

Monday night, five of those hopefuls, including former Olympian and trans-rights advocate Caitlyn Jenner, spoke in front of hundreds of local Republicans.

Two of the most high-profile candidates vying to take Governor Gavin Newsom's place, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and businessman John Cox, did not appear at the event, organized by the Republican Party of San Diego County.

But those who did take the stage had a unified message: in their view, it is time for new leadership in California.

"Why are we all here?" asked Jenner. "We are running against the corruption and the mismanagement, and it has only been accelerated under Gavin Newsom's rule."

Candidate after candidate took the stage and made their case.

"Gavin Newsom has got to go, and we need real leadership in his place," said candidate Joseph Luciano.

"What we have experienced in California this last year is nothing less than a socialist-communist takeover by the leadership of this state," said candidate Sarah Stephens

Candidate Anthony Trimino talked about his grandfather fleeing Communist Cuba for a better life in the United States.

"My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave right now if he realized this country he was running to is starting to look more and more like the country he was fleeing from," Trimino said.

"We are hearing from the farmers in Fresno, the entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, the moms in Hollywood," said candidate Jenny Rae Le Roux. "There are an unreal number of people who are excited about this election."

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California finds 40% of likely voters say they would vote to remove Newsom from office.

"California lays claim to the lowest [COVID-19] positivity rate in America," Newsom said recently. "Now is not the time to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on a recall effort that is nothing more than a partisan power grab."

The estimated cost of the recall election, according to state finance officials, is $215 million statewide, which includes an estimated $20 million for San Diego County.

The election will be held most likely sometime between September and November, with some Democrats pushing to hold it before the end of summer.

Go here to see the original:
Republican candidates vying to unseat Gov. Newsom in recall election take the stage - CBS News 8

A few hours after Michael Flynn, the retired three-star general and former national-security adviser and convicted felon, told a group of QAnon conspiracists who met in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend that the Biden Administration should be overthrown by force, Democratic legislators in the Texas statehouse, two hundred miles away in Austin, did something remarkable: they stopped their Republican colleagues from passing one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country. Flynns pronouncement and the Republicans efforts rely on repeating the same untruth: that the Presidency was stolen from Donald Trump by a cabal of Democrats, election officials, and poll workers who perpetrated election fraud. No matter that this claim has been litigated, relitigated, and debunked. Based on data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before last years election was about 0.00006 per cent of total ballots cast. It was negligible in 2020, too, as Trumps Attorney General, William Barr, acknowledged at the time.

Senate Bill 7 was stymied at the last minute, when Democrats in the Texas House walked out, depriving Republicans of a quorum. The legislation is full of what are becoming standard suppression tacticsmost of which burden people of color, who in 2020 overwhelmingly voted Democraticand includes measures that would, for example, allow a judge to overturn an election result simply if a challenger claimed, without any proof, that fraudulent votes changed the outcome. Sarah Labowitz, of the A.C.L.U. of Texas, called the bill ruthless. Texas was already the most difficult state in which to cast a ballot, according to a recent study by Northern Illinois University. In 2020, voter turnout there was among the lowest in the nation. Even so, with nonwhites making up more than sixty per cent of the population under twenty, Texas is on its way to becoming a swing state. S.B. 7 is intended to insure that it doesnt. Governor Greg Abbott has promised to call a special session of the legislature to reintroduce it.

Since January, Republican lawmakers in forty-eight states have introduced nearly four hundred restrictive voting bills. What distinguishes these efforts is that they target not only voters but also poll workers and election officials. The Texas bill makes it a criminal offense for an election official to obstruct the view of poll watchers, who are typically partisan volunteers, and grants those observers the right to record videos of voters at polling places. In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for technical infractions, such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the rolls. In Florida, workers who leave drop boxes unattended, however briefly, can be fined twenty-five thousand dollars. In Georgia, poll watchers can challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters.

Even before the pandemic, sixty-five per cent of jurisdictions in the country were having trouble attracting poll workers. The threat of sizable fines and criminal prosecution will only make that task harder, and thats clearly the point. Polls cant operate without poll workers. Voters cant vote if there are no polling places, or if they cant stand in hours-long lines at the sites that are opennot to mention if other means of casting a ballot, such as by mail, have been outlawed.

What began as thinly veiled attempts to keep Democrats from voting has become a movement to undermine confidence in our democracy itself. How else to understand the recount under way in Maricopa County, Arizona (which gave Joe Biden the state), six months after the election was certified? Despite an audit in February that showed no malfeasance, Republicans in the Arizona Senate took possession of the countys more than two million ballots and turned them over to a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, which has no election-audit experience. The firms C.E.O. had reportedly tweeted that he was tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. Its unclear who is paying for the recount, which was supposed to have concluded last month. According to the Arizona Republic, recruiters for the project were reaching out to traditionally conservative groups. At least one of the recounters was at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally outside the U.S. Capitol. Some have been examining ballots for bamboo fibres, which would purportedly prove that counterfeit ballots for Biden were sent from South Korea. The official chain of custody has been broken for the voting machines, too, which could enable actual fraud, and may force the county to replace them.

Its easy to joke about conspiracy hunters searching for bits of bamboo. But the fact is that more than half of Republicans still believe that Trump won, and a quarter of all Americans think that the election was rigged. Republicans in at least four other statesNew Hampshire, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvaniaare now considering recounts. Soon, Trump will begin to hold rallies again and will use them to amplify his Big Lie lie; he has reportedly suggested that he could be back in the White House in August, after the recounts are completed. The real, and imminent, danger is that all the noise will make it easier for a cohort of Americans to welcome the dissolution of the political system, which appears to be the ultimate goal of the current Republican efforts.

Last Tuesday, in a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, Biden vowed to fight like heck to preserve voting rights, and he deputized Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the charge. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he would bring the For the People Act to a vote this month. Among other provisions, the act mandates automatic voter registration, prohibits voter intimidation, and reduces the influence of dark money in elections. If it became law, and survived the inevitable legal challenges, it could stop much of the Republican pillage, and perhaps prove the most pivotal piece of legislation in a generation.

Nearly seventy per cent of Americans favor measures in the bill, but its unlikely to gain the support of Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat, let alone of enough Republicans to clear the sixty-vote hurdle imposed by the filibuster. So far, to Bidens evident annoyance, Manchin and another Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, oppose eliminating the filibuster. Its up to Democratic leaders to impress upon their colleagues that their legacies, and that of their party, are now entwined with the survival of American democracy.

See original here:
The Republicans Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona - The New Yorker

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the GOP collectively decided to make Anthony Fauci, M.D., public enemy number one, having found in the veteran immunologist the perfect target through which to whip up their base and take the spotlight off the fact that the then president had let the virus gain a foothold in the country while actively lying about it at every turn. Fauci, of course, is everything conservatives hate: An educated man of science with not one but two degrees, he committed what Republicans believe was a capital offense when he failed to back up everything Donald Trump said about the disease, including the part about treating it by freebasing bleach. While tiresome and dangerousFauci and his family required a security detail at one pointthe ridiculous attacks and conspiracies, like that Fauci invented the coronavirus and is part of a secret cabal with Bill Gates and George Soros to profit from vaccines have had little impact. Fauci remains employed by the government, and by all accounts Joe Biden is happy with his work.The president and the administration feel that Dr. Fauci has played an incredible role in getting the pandemic under control and being a voice to the public throughout the course of this pandemic, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week.

But like the living embodiment of a QAnon forum, Republicans, Trump, and Fox News now appear to believe theyve found some kind of smoking gun showing Fauci is somehow responsible for the virus, based on the fresh interest in the lab-leak theory (which the doctor himself is supportive of investigating, which you wouldnt think he would be if he was implicated in the whole thing, a slight wrinkle conservatives will probably explain at a time and place TBD). So naturally, theyre amping up their attacks like hes the second coming of Benghazi/Hillary Clinton/Pol Pot.

Per Axios:

President Trump plansto make Anthony Fauci a top target at upcoming rallies, using increased attention to the Wuhan lab-leak theory as a weapon against an official long viewed as more trustworthy. Why it matters: Trump and conservative media have made Fauci an improbable face of the opposition, trying to give him the cartoon-villain status once accorded to former Sen. Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, orin Trumps caseHillary Clinton. Trump amped uphis longtime Fauci rants yesterday in a statement calling for COVID reparations from China: The correspondencebetween Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!

Fox News prime-time stars are [also] amping up their Fauci rants based on new questions about COVIDs origins. [A]ll the smirking moronsin the American news media changed their view completely overnight, Tucker Carlson said last night, 24 hours after saying Fauci should be criminally investigated. LORD FAUCI EXPOSED,said one Tucker graphic. Another dubbed him Lord Fauci, Patron Saint Of Wuhan. Sean Hannityjumped the gun last night with a graphic calling new revelations the FALL of FAUCI.

Reality check: The theory most experts still believe to be most likely is that the virus was transmitted from a bat to some other species of animal, then to humans.Thats what happened with plenty of other viruses.

Incidentally, none of the people calling for the director of theNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to basically be tried for war crimes have expressed the slightest interest in any investigation whatsoever into the events of January 6 and in fact have lost their collective shit over the prospect of anyone digging into the that day, and the lead-up, too closely.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Financial Times, Fauci himself said China should release medical records for nine people whose sicknesses could shed some vital light onto the question of COVID-19s origins. I have always feltthat the overwhelming likelihoodgiven the experience we have had with SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, bird flu, the swine flu pandemic of 2009was that the virus jumped species, Fauci said. But we need to keep on investigating until a possibility is proven. As for the possibility he or his organization might actually be responsible for the virus because they provided a small amount of funding to the Wuhan lab, Fauci, like most sane people, believes the idea is absurd. Are you really saying that we are implicated because we gave a multibillion-dollar institution $120,000 a year for bat surveillance? he asked.

Mike Pence continues to be weirdly understanding about that time Donald Trump nearly had him killed

Was the former V.P. thrilled about the insurrection that took place as he was attempting to certify Joe Bidens win, which involved Trump supporters chanting Hang Mike Pence? No, but hes not going to let it come between him and the 45th president, whom he continues to hold in high regard. Per The Washington Post:

Read more:
Republicans Are One Week Away From Starting a Lock Her Up Chant for Anthony Fauci - Vanity Fair