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(Reuters) - Dozens of former Republican officials, who view the party as unwilling to stand up to former President Donald Trump and his attempts to undermine U.S. democracy, are in talks to form a center-right breakaway party, four people involved in the discussions told Reuters.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., January 20, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The early stage discussions include former elected Republicans, former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, ex-Republican ambassadors and Republican strategists, the people involved say.

More than 120 of them held a Zoom call last Friday to discuss the breakaway group, which would run on a platform of principled conservatism, including adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law - ideas those involved say have been trashed by Trump.

The plan would be to run candidates in some races but also to endorse center-right candidates in others, be they Republicans, independents or Democrats, the people say.

Evan McMullin, who was chief policy director for the House Republican Conference and ran as an independent in the 2016 presidential election, told Reuters that he co-hosted the Zoom call with former officials concerned about Trumps grip on Republicans and the nativist turn the party has taken.

Three other people confirmed to Reuters the call and the discussions for a potential splinter party, but asked not to be identified.

Among the call participants were John Mitnick, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; former Republican congressman Charlie Dent; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff in the Homeland Security Department under Trump; and Miles Taylor, another former Trump homeland security official.

The talks highlight the wide intraparty rift over Trumps false claims of election fraud and the deadly Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Most Republicans remain fiercely loyal to the former president, but others seek a new direction for the party.

The House of Representatives impeached Trump on Jan. 13 on a charge of inciting an insurrection by exhorting thousands of supporters to march on the Capitol on the day Congress was gathered to certify Democrat Joe Bidens election victory.

Call participants said they were particularly dismayed by the fact that more than half of the Republicans in Congress - eight senators and 139 House representatives - voted to block certification of Bidens election victory just hours after the Capitol siege.

Most Republican senators have also indicated they will not support the conviction of Trump in this weeks Senate impeachment trial.

Large portions of the Republican Party are radicalizing and threatening American democracy, McMullin told Reuters. The party needs to recommit to truth, reason and founding ideals or there clearly needs to be something new.

THESE LOSERS

Asked about the discussions for a third party, Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said: These losers left the Republican Party when they voted for Joe Biden.

A representative for the Republican National Committee referred to a recent statement from Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

If we continue to attack each other and focus on attacking on fellow Republicans, if we have disagreements within our party, then we are losing sight of 2022 (elections), McDaniel said on Fox News last month.

The only way were going to win is if we come together, she said.

The Biden White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

McMullin said just over 40% of those on last weeks Zoom call backed the idea of a breakaway, national third party. Another option under discussion is to form a faction that would operate either inside the current Republican Party or outside it.

Names under consideration for a new party include the Integrity Party and the Center Right Party. If it is decided instead to form a faction, one name under discussion is the Center Right Republicans.

Members are aware that the U.S. political landscape is littered with the remains of previous failed attempts at national third parties.

But there is a far greater hunger for a new political party out there than I have ever experienced in my lifetime, one participant said.

Reporting by Tim Reid; Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Peter Cooney

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Exclusive: Dozens of former Republican officials in talks to form anti-Trump third party - Reuters

Photo: Chip Somodevilla (AP)

As the crisis of rolling blackouts in Texasunfolds this week, some of the states loudest Republican politicians are falsely dragging frozen wind turbines as the cause. But behind every wind energy smear by a Texas politician is a dizzying amount of money contributed by the fossil fuel industry.

Earther looked at whose money is behind the loudest anti-wind voices this week. We used OpenSecrets data as well as individual political donations logged with the Federal Election Commission website to look at donations for Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Sen. John Cornynthree of the Texas politicians sitting in Washington, D.C., who have been most outspoken in their criticism of wind energys supposed role in the blackouts.

All three have continued to scapegoat renewables throughout the week, and looking at their donors, its no surprise. Federal campaign finance data shows more than 30 companies in the oil and gas industry, from multinational names like Exxon and Chevron to local power players like Texas Transeastern and Wildhorse Energy, gave tens of thousands of dollars to Cornyn, Cruz, and Crenshaw over the past year. That includes thousands from individuals employed by those companies as well as largesse from their corporate PACs.

Cornyn, who was reelected last fall, was a big recipient of industry money. Between 2019 and 2020, Cornyn raked in more than $50,000 from Marathon Petroleums PAC and $25,000 from natural gas infrastructure company Sempra Energys PAC, as well as $25,000 from utility giant NextEnergy and $40,000 from Koch Industries. He also did well with oil and gas power players individually: CEOs or other key executives of Western Refining, Hunt Oil Company, Chief Oil and Gas, Walter Oil and Gas, Magnolia Oil and Gas, Occidental Petroleum, Cox Oil, Hilcorp Ventures and Kinder Morgan all donated $50,000 or more each to PACs associated with Cornyns campaign in the last election cycle.

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Crenshaw, who ran for reelection in the House, also made out handsomely from the industry last cycle. The oil and gas industry overall donated $453,247 to Crenshaw last year ($311,947 from individuals, $141,300 total from PACs). Oil and gas was his largest industry donor by PAC money, including $10,000 each from Energy Transfer, Valero Energy, Occidental Petroleum, and Marathon Petroleum.

Cruz wasnt up for reelection last year, but the industry didnt forget about him. He still bagged $14,000 from Chevrons PAC and $10,000 from Exxonsa little spending money, we guessas well as tens of thousands of dollars in individual contributions from employees of 30 oil and gas companies. All told, these three Texas Republicans alone snagged more than $1.1 million from the industry in the 2020 election cycle.

But it wasnt just these three Texans in the nations capital doing dirty work for fossil fuels. On Tuesday, as millions in his state suffered through the cold and without power, Gov. Greg Abbott made an appearance on Sean Hannity where he ripped into renewables. The blackout shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America, Abbott told Hannity. Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis....It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.

And lets not forget Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who just last week was busy preparing a bill that would blacklist businesses based on their friendliness to fossil fuels. For Texas two head honchos, we used individual contributions pulled from state-level data logged on the site Transparency USA, and found some real Easter eggs from the industry.

Abbott and Patricks PACs share a bunch of big individual fossil fuel donors. Syed Javaid Anwar, the CEO of Midland Energy, was Abbotts top donor between 2019 and 2020, giving a total of $1,617,500 to his PAC. The CEO also gave generously to Patrick, kicking his PAC just under $250,000 over that same time period. Douglas Scharbauer, an heir to a West Texas oil, ranching, and race horse fortune, gave a total of $350,000 to the lieutenant governors PAC in 2019, while another oil heir, Ray Lee Hunt, also pitched in generously with donations of $500,000 to the PACs of Abbott and $250,000 to Patrick. (Hunt also gave more than $63,000 to Cornyns PAC.) Not to be outdone, Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, kicked $500,000 to Abbotts PAC and $200,000 to Patricks in the same time period. Warrens firm is behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, and he has said talking about the pipeline is like talking about my son.

Whats happening in Texas right now is a perfect storm of poor planning, crazy weather, and a widespread government failure to prepare the electric grid. Fossil fuels had a big part to play in how this disaster went down as natural gas and coal sources failed at multiple points, from energy sources themselves freezing to pipelines shutting down. The Texas grids terrible setupa lack of integration with other states to ensure a consistent power supply, lagging weatherization updates, predatory pricing habitscant be tied to one source, but politicians like Crenshaw, Cruz, and Abbott are choosing to hammer down on renewables while blessing fossil fuels, similar to how theyve reacted during Californias blackouts in recent years. While its impossible to say why, their donations tell a pretty damning story hereand research has shown donors make it rain on politicians who do their bidding.

The fossil fuel industry has also made it clear that it sees wind power in Texas as a threat to its business. A panel on Texas windpower convened at the wind industrys key summit in 2019 addressed this issue directly. People are spending millions of dollars to hobble the wind industry, moderator Chris Tomlinson, a Houston Chronicle columnist, said at the panel, claiming that there are lobbyists in Austin who have been told to spend nearly half their time opposing the wind industry.

When such a large-scale screw up like this happenswhen lives are lost and people sufferwe have to examine what those in control of the status quo have to lose, and what changes they are advocating. The fossil fuel industry is fighting to keep its control over a rapidly changing energy landscape, and part of their strategy is giving as much as possible to those in charge, particularly Republicans. Even though experts across the board agree that we need a clean energy grid thats reliable and have even created a popular plan for how to get there, conservative politicians with loud platforms are blocking serious discussion, let alone action.The longer the industry keeps the political system captured and the more these people lie, the more likely it is well see even more death and chaos ahead.

Dhruv Mehrotra contributed reporting to this piece.

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How Much the Oil and Gas Industry Paid Texas Republicans Who Are Lying About Wind Energy - Gizmodo

The moves are the latest in a series of censures and disciplinary actions doled out to lawmakers deemed to be critical of the former president in the wake of the Capitol riot. Trump, acquitted Saturday of inciting the insurrection, still has broad support among Republican voters and state and local parties have lashed out at elected officials who have been critical of his actions.

In Wyoming, the state party voted to censure Rep. Liz Cheney for her House vote to impeach Trump. The Arizona Republican Party recently censured Republican Gov. Doug Ducey after he opted not to back Trump's bid to subvert the election results. The Arizona party also censured Cindy McCain, GOP Sen. John McCain's widow, and former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake after they backed Joe Biden for president.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) listens during a news conference in Washington, D.C. | Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images

Sen. Ben Sasse, one of the seven Senate votes against Trump, is also facing potential censure from the Nebraska GOP central committee for his harsh criticism of the presidents efforts to overturn the election results.

Sasse, who was also censured by the committee in 2016 for being insufficiently supportive of Trump, responded last week by releasing a direct-to-camera video denouncing a brand of politics marked by the weird worship of one dude.

Yet it was Cassidy who received the harshest rebuke Saturday.

Four days earlier, the state party described itself as profoundly disappointed when Cassidy joined five other Republicans to vote that the Senate trial was constitutional. Cassidy defended that vote, arguing Trump's defense team did a "terrible job."

The Louisiana GOP's executive committee said Saturday in a statement that it voted unanimously to censure Cassidy for his vote to convict.

"We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump," the party added in a tweet. "Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him."

Cassidy defended his vote in a two-sentence statement.

"Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty, the senator wrote.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) listens during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. | Greg Nash/Pool via AP

The chair of the North Carolina Republican Party called Burr's vote to convict Trump "shocking and disappointing." Burr, who is not running for reelection in 2022, was the only one of the seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump who voted earlier in the week that the trial was unconstitutional.

"North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing," Michael Whatley wrote in a one-sentence statement.

Burr said he still thinks the trial was unconstitutional, but since the Senate voted the trial was constitutional, he respected that vote as "established precedent."

"As I said on January 6th, the President bears responsibility for these tragic events," Burr said in a statement Saturday explaining his decision. "The President promoted unfounded conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the integrity of a free and fair election because he did not like the results. As Congress met to certify the election results, the President directed his supporters to go to the Capitol to disrupt the lawful proceedings required by the Constitution. When the crowd became violent, the President used his office to first inflame the situation instead of immediately calling for an end to the assault."

Lawrence Tabas, Pennsylvania GOP chair, was also critical of Toomey's vote.

I share the disappointment of many of our grassroots leaders and volunteers over Senator Toomeys vote today," Tabas wrote in a statement. Tabas called the trial an "unconstitutional theft of time and energy that did absolutely nothing to unify or help the American people.

Toomey, who is not running for reelection in 2022, explained his decision in a lengthy Twitter thread, saying that he voted for Trump for president in November because of his administration's "many accomplishments" but that Trump betrayed the Constitution and his oath of office.

"A lawless attempt to retain power by a president was one of the founders greatest fears motivating the inclusion of the impeachment authorities in the U.S. Constitution," Toomey wrote. "Unfortunately, his behavior after the election betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him."

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Party leaders rip Republicans who voted to convict Trump - POLITICO

The gerrymandering report bookends other analyses, by the Brennan Center and others, documenting how state-level Republicans have introduced some 165 proposals in 33 states this year that would make voting more difficult. These include imposing new voter-identification laws, rolling back access to mail balloting and early-voting periods, and adding new hurdles to the voter-registration process. H.R. 1 and a new VRA, if they become law and survive legal challenges, would preempt almost all of those moves as well.

Read: The decision that will define Democrats for a decade

Given the likelihood that, absent federal intervention, red states will enact severe gerrymanders and new obstacles to voting, the decision about whether to end the Senate filibuster to pass these two bills could shape the future of American politics more than anything else Democrats do in the next two years. If the filibuster remains in place, [H.R. 1] dies in the Senate, Dan Pfeiffer, the former White House communications director for Barack Obama, wrote this week. If that happens, the Republicanswho represent a shrinking minority of Americanswill likely return to power and control politics for the next decade or more.

When Senate Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and [Dianne] Feinstein oppose getting rid of the filibuster, Pfeiffer added, they are deciding to make it more likely that their time in the majority is ever so brief.

Li told me that, in some respects, partisans may have less opportunity now for aggressive redistricting than they had after the 2010 census, though that may not be true in key states. States draw new lines for congressional districts after each decennial census, and that process is shaped by a complex convergence of legal and political factors.

Republicans leverage over the process seems slightly reduced since the 2010 redistricting. Parties have the greatest freedom to manipulate the lines in states where they control redistricting without input from the other sidealmost always because they hold both chambers of the state legislature and the governorship. (Some states deny the governor any role.) After the 2010 census, Republicans enjoyed this level of control over the drawing of 213 congressional districts. They used their authority to impose extremely one-sided gerrymanders in states including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.

This time, Republicans hold complete control in states that will draw up to 188 districts. (Democrats, by contrast, completely control the maps in states with up to 74 seats.) The number of seats Republicans will oversee has diminished because they lost unified control of government in some statesincluding Wisconsin and Pennsylvaniaand because Michigan transferred control of redistricting from the state legislature to an independent commission. Additionally, in GOP-controlled Ohio, voters approved an initiative that created redistricting standards that could impede, though not eliminate, gerrymandering.

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The GOP Cheat Code to Winning Back the House - The Atlantic

Trumps lawyers excused it and gave Republican senators their rationale for acquittal by talking about free speech, but that cast the president of the United States the most powerful person in the world, entrusted with the security of his country as just any old crank spouting off. It minimized his station. It trivialized the stakes. It also overlooked that its not OK to yell fire in a crowded theater, though Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, reminded them of that, describing Jan. 6 as a case where the town fire chief whos paid to put out fires sends a mob not to yell fire! in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire.

The lawyers also turned history on its head, essentially bookending Trumps presidency by minting the precise sorts of alternative facts that Kellyanne Conway smugly heralded at the start. Unlike the left, President Trump has been entirely consistent in his opposition to mob violence, one of his lawyers, Michael van der Veen, said, scaling new summits of preposterousness. Trump blessed mob violence at his campaign rallies. He blessed mob violence in Charlottesville, Va. Hes against mob violence the way Im against spaghetti carbonara. Which is to say that he thrills to it and eats it up.

Both before and during the Senate trial, Trumps defenders asserted that theres no clear causal link between his malfeasance and that police officers screams. But the House Democrats effectively destroyed that argument by documenting not only Trumps words in the days, hours and minutes before the mob attacked but also his long, painstaking campaign to erode trust in democratic processes, so that if those processes didnt favor him, his supporters were primed to junk them. Hes a study in slow-motion treason. Jan. 6 was simply when he slammed his foot down on the accelerator.

It was also, in retrospect, the climax that his presidency was always building toward, the inevitable fruit of his meticulous indoctrination of his base, his methodical degradation of American institutions, his romancing of right-wing media and his recruitment of the most ambitious and unscrupulous Republican lawmakers. At his behest, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and several other Republican senators promoted the lethal falsehood that the election was fraudulent, yet that didnt disqualify them from sitting as jurors to render a foregone verdict on a man whose delusions they had already endorsed. What a system. What a farce.

They were distracted, cavalier jurors at that. Rick Scott, who of course voted not guilty, was seen studying and then fiddling with a map or maps of Asia. Dare we dream that hes plotting his own relocation there? Hawley, who also voted not guilty, at one point moved to the visitors gallery above the Senate floor and did some reading there, his feet propped up, his lanky body a pretzel of petulance. What happened to Republicans respect for authority? What happened to basic decency and decorum?

Clinton was a supposedly unendurable offense against that, but then along came Trump, and Republicans decided that decency and decorum were overrated. Truth, too. Heck, everything that they claimed to stand for in the Clinton years was now negotiable, expendable, vestigial. Nothing was beyond the pale.

But that footage was beyond the pale. Did you really look at it, Senators Hawley, Scott and Cruz (yet another not guilty)? Did you see the blood and the terror on that police officers face? Do you honestly contend that theres no connection between Trumps lies refined over years, repeated incessantly and rendered in the most incendiary fashion possible and the officers pain?

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Opinion | Trumps Republicans, Brought to Their Knees - The New York Times