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As the author of a book-length love letter to big business, I have long viewed the Republican Party as more aligned with corporate America than are Democrats. Thats certainly the case from a rhetorical standpoint, and on policy as well: It was former President Donald Trumps administration, after all, that pushed through a significant cut in the corporate income tax rate.

Yes, the real picture is much more complicated. Big business typically wants more high-skilled immigration, which Democrats tend to favor, and the Democratic Party at times has done more for free trade than have Republicans.

In any case, all that has changed. Many U.S. big businesses have sided with Democrats on some aspects of the culture wars, and leading members of the Republican Party have responded with vitriol. In the span of just a few years, they have gone from making apologies for big business to making threats against it.

The final straw may have been Major League Baseballs decision last week to relocate the All-Star game to Denver from Atlanta over concerns about a new voting-rights law in Georgia. Many Republicans in the state favored the changes, and the response from some Republicans in Congress was to start talking about revoking baseballs antitrust exemption.

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This is what it has come to in 21st-century America: Left-wing activists bully corporations through social media, while right-wing critics threaten them with the law.

Baseballs relocation of the All-Star game was very likely a business rather than a political decision. If the game had proceed in Atlanta, some of the players undoubtedly would have spoken out against the new voting law or boycotted the game. The event might have been dominated by politics. So baseball followed a common crisis-management strategy, deciding to take one public-relations hit now instead of having to confront a slow drip of unpleasant revelations over the next several months.

There is a simple solution for the Republican Party, if it is interested: Give up its opposition to such voting laws. Even if it opposes some parts of the laws, or if the negative aspects of the laws have been exaggerated, it hardly seems worth the price to be pushed into these ideological corners. Practically speaking, the best evidence suggests that such laws may not be a big deal anyway.

There is also something about baseball itself. This is the institution that so helped race relations in America by clearing the path for Jackie Robinson. You dont have to agree with MLBs every decision to see its overall social influence as strongly positive. It is hardly a historical villain in need of restraint.

Beyond sports, there is more evidence of a falling-out between Republicans and big business. When more than 100 major corporate leaders had a conference call last week to discuss what to do about the voting laws in Georgia and elsewhere, J.D. Vances response was the social-media equivalent of pounding the table with his shoe. Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons, tweeted the best-selling author and likely Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio. We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and its time for choosing.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, meanwhile, has put forward a trust busting plan to rein in big business. The plan seeks to beef up antitrust prosecution and eliminate mergers and acquisitions for firms of $100 billion or more in value. It is something you might expect from the far left wing of the Democratic Party, not a leading Republican senator.

Of course this isnt a serious proposal. Do Republicans really want to see Democratic administrations have the dominant hand in antitrust decisions for four or maybe more years? Does the U.S. want to stop major pharmaceutical firms from acquiring smaller, more innovative companies with drugs of potential importance? Hawleys bill is meant to send a message: Nice business youve got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it. It is both a plea and a threat about big businesss leftward slide.

I am not seeking to debate Georgias voting rights bill, nor those of any other state. But I do know a little about sports. Baseball has long been the least political and most traditional of Americas pastimes, and it has a relatively old fan base. So the question Republicans might want to ask themselves is not how to punish Major League Baseball. Its how to get it back. Right now, Republicans are moving in exactly the wrong direction.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Tyler Cowen at tcowen2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

See the article here:
Republicans Will Regret Their Breakup With Big Business - Bloomberg

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