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U.S. Senator John Cornyn speaks to the press at the University of Texas at Austin tower in Austin on June 14, 2019.Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune

BY Jim Henson and Joshua Blank

Texas senior U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is certain to vote to acquit President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, and since Cornyn is up for reelection in 2020, its worth considering how his decision affects his prospects.

As with most things related to Trump, attitudes that are both intense and polarized along partisan lines are likely to motivate voters of both parties if impeachment remains an issue over the next seven months. Given voters attitudes, its hard to imagine Cornyn choosing another path, and just as difficult to imagine how his vote will change the existing partisan dynamic in the 2020 election.

According to University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll data, Cornyns full-throated support for Trump in the Senate impeachment trial has the potential to mobilize both Democrats and Republicans in November along strictly partisan lines. In an October UT/TT Poll, Texas voters with an opinion were evenly split: 43% said Trump had taken actions while president that justified his removal from office; 44% said that he hadnt. Equal shares of Democrats and Republicans, 79%, said that he should or shouldnt, respectively, be removed

Three months and a Senate trial later, opinions have hardly shifted. In response to a similar question included in the Texas Lyceum Poll released last week, 45% of Texans wanted the U.S. Senate to remove Trump from office, while 45% wanted him left in place. A UT-Tyler-Dallas Morning News poll released a few days later similarly found 43% in favor of removal and 48% against. Both polls found splits in the preferences of Democrats and Republicans similar to those in the UT/TT Poll conducted before the impeachment proceedings.

These results should come as no surprise, given the intense opinions that partisans of both parties have toward the president. In October UT/TT polling, 87% of Republicans approved of the job Trump is doing as president, 61% of them strongly approving. At the same time, 90% of Democrats disapproved of his job performance, with a remarkable 83% strongly disapproving. Trump invites strong opinions from both sides, but his ownership of Texas Republicans leaves Cornyn little choice but to sidle up to him. Thats especially true since Cornyns job approval rating among Texas Republicans falls 26 points short of the presidents, at 61% with a comparatively meager 27% strongly approving.

The intensity of these views toward Trump also evident in partisan attitudes toward removing him from office underlines why there is likely no clear advantage here for Cornyn or his yet-to-be-determined Democratic opponent in November. At any moment, Trump has the potential to inspire a spiral of mobilization and counter-mobilization in both parties.

But the impeachment vote is likely to remain salient to partisans in Cornyns reelection effort. His vote in the Senate to exonerate the president ties the incumbent directly to Democrats dislike of Trump their most powerful and, importantly, most widely shared motivating factor. And these issues are salient to Texas Democrats when they think about national problems. When asked about the most important problem facing the country in the October UT/TT Poll, more than a third of Democrats chose either impeachment or political corruption and leadership.

For Trump, and in turn, Republicans, it will be hard to put impeachment in a box and forget about it. A presidency built on the mobilizing power of grievance requires something to be aggrieved about. And impeachment appears to have been a major motivator and cash cow for the president as he rallies his troops against his enemies. The practical political stakes notwithstanding, letting bygones be bygones doesnt describe the presidents personal style, and it seems unlikely that he will quickly forget about this one particularly since his allies in the Senate saw to it that he was not convicted even as some of them acknowledged his wrongdoing.

At every turn, Cornyn will be caught up in the dance of polarized mobilization and counter-mobilization, with Trump calling the tune. The presidents support from all types of Texas Republicans leaves Cornyn attached to Trumps reelection, a situation that, as with so many other Republican senators, no doubt influenced Cornyns decision to side with the president even before the impeachment trial began. Cornyn clearly expects that this is his best bet for remaining in office, even if the music stops.

Disclosure: The University of Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribunes journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Analysis: Cornyn's expected vote against impeachment is in tune with Republican voters in Texas - 550 KTSA

After shunning Medicaid expansion, Florida Republicans see the political power of tackling health care

With polls showing health care access and cost among the top issues for voters, House Speaker Jose Oliva is among a chorus of Florida Republicans getting behind President Donald Trumps promise last spring to make the GOP the party of health care. Backed by a scorched earth attack on Big Pharma and the health care industrial complex, Oliva is promoting wide-ranging changes to the states medical landscape. [Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune]

FDA approves first treatment for kids with peanut allergy

Changes could be in store for the state-employee health insurance program. Again. A Senate committee Monday introduced legislation that would make changes to prescription drug benefits, require the state to competitively bid the insurance program to managed-care plans in nine regions and strike a 2017 law that required four different benefit plans to be offered to employees. [Source: Health News Florida]

Whistleblowing surgeon claims hospital system forced him to use in-network radiologists

A Florida orthopedic surgeon is suing Orlando Health and its imaging center, claiming the hospital system fired him for failing to use its own in-network radiologists. Ayman Daouk, MD, also alleges that the eight-hospital chain repeatedly reprimanded him for performing surgery outside of the system. He said these actions violate both the Stark Law and federal anti-kickback statutes and wants the hospital system punished for its business practices, according to the complaint, filed last month in U.S. District Court. More from Radiology Business.

Florida House bill takes aim at 'exorbitant' air ambulance costs

A bill making its way through the Florida Legislature right now could impact how much families have to pay air ambulance companies in the event of a medical emergency. State Rep. Jayer Williamson, R-Pace, filed the bill in November after hearing constituent concerns about extreme and exorbitant costs of air ambulance services. The bill, which has a companion bill in the Senate, would require insurance companies to pay reasonable reimbursement to air ambulance companies so the individual or family who received the life-saving service isnt on the hook for a bill that could reach tens of thousands of dollars. [Source: Pensacola News Journal]

House wants information on managed care mergers

House leaders want health officials to assess the impact that mergers of managed-care companies have on choice and diversity of plans in Floridas Medicaid system. The House included a provision in its proposed 2020-2021 budget that would require the Agency for Health Care Administration, which administers the Medicaid program, to assess the impact of any merger, sale, acquisition or consolidation that results in a plan having, or having control of, more than 30 percent of the Medicaid managed-care enrollment statewide or in any region. [Source: Health News Florida]

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Humana and Welsh Carson to spend $600M on Medicare clinics [Forbes]Health insurer Humana and private equity giant Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe are launching a joint venture to develop primary care centers to treat seniors insured by Medicare Advantage plans.

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After shunning Medicaid expansion, Florida Republicans see the political power of tackling health care - Florida Trend

Great minds may not think alike, but Jersey minds do, at least when it comes to President Trump.

After his rally last week in Wildwood, I wrote a column in which I said: Unlike prior Trump speeches in which he would go on stream-of-consciousness rants that were often hilarious, this time around he showed some message discipline.

Our former governor made the same point when he appeared as a panelist on ABC-TVs This Week with George Stephanopoulos Sunday morning.

I was at the rally that he had in New Jersey on Tuesday night and I'd never seen him stick so close to prompter in all the time I've known him, Chris Christie said.

Hes practical, practical, Christie argued. He wants to win.

Bob Auth agrees. Auth is a Republican assemblyman from Bergen County who declared his support for Trump early in the 2016 primaries, just after Christie dropped out. As a reward for his loyalty, Auth had a seat behind the dais for Trumps speech.

I was able to read the speech on the Teleprompter, he told me. He really stuck to his message. (Check this Politico article on the guy who works Trumps prompter.)

Auth is betting that message will resonate with Jersey voters this year. After Trumps speech, Auth declared his candidacy for the Congressional seat now held by Democrat Josh Gottheimer in the northernmost district in the state.

Auth said he expects the Democrats impeachment of Trump will work against them in Congressional races this year.

I think the way to win this is to remind the people in the Fifth District that the current member of the Congress voted to impeach the president, he said. Now we have to wonder if hes going to vote to impeach him again.

We do indeed. Some top Democrats are calling for The House to continue hearings into Trumps dealings with Ukraine even after the expected dismissal of the original impeachment charges.

Another early Trump supporter, state Sen. Joe Pennacchio of Morris County, said Trump has a big advantage in this cycle that he lacked in the last cycle: a united party behind him.

Last time. there were a lot of dropouts, Republicans who chose not to run, Pennacchio said. This time, Republican candidates have been gearing up. I cant overestimate the impact this impeachment has had on Republicans.

Pennacchio, who is co-chairing Trumps campaign in the state, met with Trump before the speech. He said he made a suggestion that Trump later employed.

I told him he could fill Giants stadium, he said. Actually, he could. He would give them the show of their lives.

I dont doubt that. Back in 2016, with virtually no organization, Trump could draw tens of thousands of people to a rally with just a tweet. Filling Metlife Stadium might take two or three tweets. But that would be the extent of the challenge.

Pennacchio compared Trumps rhetorical skills to those of Ronald Reagan another Republican who was not beloved by the party leaders until he got elected president.

Like Ronald Reagan, he talks like us, he said. Hes mad at the same things were mad at and he wins.

Reagan of course went on to win 49 states in his 1984 re-election effort. Trumps not likely to do anything like that. But he should win the states he won last time, Pennacchio predicted. He offered a quiz:

What state that he won last time do you think hes going to lose this time? Name one.

Id say that depends on which Democrat runs against him. And that depends on how you define Democrat. There are a couple of leading contenders for the Democratic nomination who have some rather shaky party credentials.

Senator Bernie Sanders has run his races in Vermont as an independent. Meanwhile former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg first ran for that office in 2001 as a Republican and later became an independent.

As Christie put it on that talk show, He was Republican when it was convenient, and was cuddled up to Rudy Giuliani.

Bloomberg then became an independent and is now running as a Democrat. Christie opined that because of that party-switching, I don't think there's any chance, any chance that Mike Bloomberg is the Democratic nominee.

On this point, Christie and I part company. If Sanders continues his recent success in the polls, there will be a Stop Bernie movement in the Democratic Party just as there was a Stop Trump movement in the GOP last time around.

If Sanders comes into the first ballot with the most delegates but not a majority then on the second ballot the so-called super-delegates get to vote. Those delegates might conclude that the best way to beat a wealthy New Yorker is to nominate a New Yorker whos a whole lot wealthier.

As Christie noted, Trump is practical. Will his opponents be?

Stay tuned.

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Chris Christie and Jersey Republicans like their chances after the impeachment effort | Mulshine - NJ.com

For years now weve known that Donald Trump lied and cheated in his business dealings. We know thatat minimumhe welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election and that he obstructed justice to thwart the investigation of those efforts. We know that he extorted the Ukrainian president to get dirt on his political opponent and then covered it up by obstructing investigations in congress.

What wasnt clear until last week is how far the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, would go to enable the presidents abuse of power. It has now become clear that not only will they exonerate Trump, but they also refused to call witnesses who would document his guilt. That is why so many people are beginning to contemplate the demise of our democracyand rightly so. Facing that possibility raises the question of how Republicans got to the point that they are willing to risk our democracy for the sake of Donald Trump.

Any attempt to explore the historical roots of current events is an endless process. Thats because there are no periods (as in punctuation) in history. Focusing on one point in history as the cause inevitably leads to an exploration of what led up to that moment, sending us back even further to find its antecedents.

But I believe there are two significant inflection points when Republicans made choices that led them to be willing to exonerate the most corrupt president in our countrys history. One of those moments came in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater 486 to 52 in the electoral college. That led Republicans to complete the process of abandoning their support for civil rights and launch an effort to regain the partys competitiveness by appealing to white grievance. Here is how Nixons strategist, Kevin Phillips, described the so-called Southern Strategy.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they dont need any more than that but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. Thats where the votes are.

In other words, for Republicans, the votes were with white people whose racism could be triggered by dog whistles, such as an appeal to states rights and law and order. That strategy worked. Richard Nixon won handily in 1968 and in a landslide in 1972.

The second infection point came with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Just as significant as the emergence of this countrys first African American president was the fact that he was elected after the entire Republican policy agenda was in shatters. The Bush-Cheney administration had demonstrated the folly of the partys policies in both the foreign and domestic arena with the invasion of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, and the emergence of the Great Recession.

At that point, Republicans decided to completely abandon the idea of having a policy agenda (other than tax cuts for the wealthy) and go all-in on obstructing anything the Democrats attempted to do. In order to justify that decision, they cast aside the dog whistles and openly inflamed the xenophobic fears of their white base with attempts to paint the first African American president as a dangerous extremist who didnt love America.

That decision became even more pronounced in the reaction to Mitt Romneys loss in 2012. Recognizing demographic trends, the Republican National Committee issued an autopsy that called on the GOP to do more to win over Hispanic[s], Asian and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Indian Americans, Native Americans, women, and youth[s]. On the other hand, Michael Anton warned that 2016 was the flight 93 election.

If you havent noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988, he wrote, averring that the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us. He blamed the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners, which had placed Democrats on the cusp of a permanent victory.The GOPs efforts to broaden its coalition, he thundered, were an abject surrender.

The election of Trump was a definitive rejection of the RNC autopsy recommendations and an embrace of Antons suggestion that it was time to storm the cockpit or die.

Those decisions left the GOP without a coherent agenda other than a common heritage. As Yoni Appelbaum writes:

A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic questionand at some point, the numbers no longer add up.

Whether consciously or subconsciously, Republicans know that the United States is on a path to the inevitable day when their numbers no longer add up. As Zachary Roth wrote, the response to those facts led them to decide that being outnumbered doesnt have to mean losing. The calculation was that they could maintain their power at the expense of our democratic norms and institutions.

But as Appelbaum notes, something more fundamental to our democracy broke.

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed

[Conservatives] are losing faith that they can win elections in the future. With this come dark possibilitiesWhen a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it haswhatever the cost.

In his book Trumpocracy, David Frum identified the cost Republicans are willing to pay when he wrote that, if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

That is the challenge we face today. After casting aside policy and ideas in favor of ethnonationalism, the Republican Party is now in the process of rejecting democracy as their only alternative for survival. What that portends, as Appelbaum suggested, are some dark possibilities that will remain, even if Trump is defeated in November.

If you enjoyed this article, consider making a donation to help us produce more like it. The Washington Monthly was founded in 1969 to tell the stories of how government really worksand how to make it work better. Fifty years later, the need for incisive analysis and new, progressive policy ideas is clearer than ever. As a nonprofit, we rely on support from readers like you.

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How the Republican Party Became a Threat to Democracy - Washington Monthly

In a column for the New York Times as well as in an interview with CNNs Christiane Amanpour which can be seen below Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman unloaded on members of the Republican Party as zombies and soulless opportunists working in tandem with Donald Trump to ruin the U.S. economy.

Riffing off his new book, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future, he writes, Is this the week American democracy dies? Quite possibly.

Posing the separate question of how the U.S. reached such a crucial point, he put forward his zombie theory.

A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating peoples brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse, he wrote before adding, And all of the really important zombies these days are on the right. Indeed, they have taken over the Republican Party.

According to the economist, it all began with what has become known as voodoo economics.

Back in 1980 George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagans extravagant claims about the effectiveness of tax cuts voodoo economic policy. Everything that has happened since has vindicated his original assessment. Deficits ballooned after Reagan cut taxes; they shrank and eventually turned into surpluses after Bill Clinton raised taxes, then ballooned again after George W. Bushs tax cuts, he wrote adding that despite its failures it has become the guiding principle under Republican administrations and has only worsened under the leadership of Donald Trump.

Voodoo economics has become unchallengeable doctrine within the Republican Party. Even fake moderates like Susan Collins justified their support for the 2017 Trump tax cut by claiming that it wouldreduce the budget deficit. Predictably, the deficit actually exploded, and now exceeds $1 trillion a year, he explained. Its important to realize that the zombification of the G.O.P. isnt a recent phenomenon, something that happened only with Trumps election. On the contrary, zombies have been eating Republican brains for decades What recent events make clear, however, is that zombie ideas havent eaten just Republicans brains. They have also eaten the partys soul.

It takes a certain kind of person to play that kind of game namely, a cynical careerist. There used to be Republican politicians who were more than that, but they were mainly holdovers from an earlier era, and at this point have all left the scene, one way or another. John McCain may well have been the last of his kind, he elaborated. A result of decades of zombification is a Republican caucus that consists entirely of soulless opportunists (and no, the fact that some of them like to quote Scripture doesnt change that fact).

The columnist goes onto note that one might expect some Republicans to admit that they cant continue down this road but that it will never happen while Trump is president.

What weve learned, however and perhaps more important, what Trump has learned is that there is no line. If Trump wants to dismantle democracy and rule of law (which he does), his party will stand with him all the way, he concluded.

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Nobel economist Paul Krugman: Zombie Republicans are soulless opportunists and using Trumps rule to destroy the US - AlterNet