Archive for the ‘Republicans’ Category

Republicans getting antsy over special congressional vote–in ruby-red Kansas, of all places – Los Angeles Times

When it comes to national politics, Kansas is about as red as Dorothys famous slippers.

Fewer than a handful of Democrats have been elected to the House in the past generation. Voters havent supported a Democrat for president since 1964.

The last time Kansas sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate was in 1932 nine years before Dorothy and hertransportive footwear showed up in movie theaters.

All of which made it all the more striking this week when national Republicans dumped nearly $100,000 a not-unsubstantial sum by Kansas standards into next weeks special election to fill a vacant House seat in the Wichita area.

The contest for the seat, which opened up when three-term Republican Mike Pompeo stepped down to head the CIA, was expected to be an easy victory under nominee Ron Estes, the state Treasurer.

The fact Republicans feel obliged to conduct a last-minute ad blitz has heartened Democrats and their candidate, attorney James Thompson, even if an upset still seems unlikely. President Trump carried the district by a whopping 60% to 33%.

But, as the Cook Political Report noted, special elections tend to be extremely low-turnout affairs and given Trumps slumping approval and signs of increased Democratic activism, the contest appears more competitive than just a few weeks ago.

On Thursday, the nonpartisan handicappers at the Cook Report moved the race from "Solid Republican" to "Likely Republican."

In a further sign of GOP nervousness, Vice President Mike Pence has recorded a robocall urging Republican voters to the polls, the Washington Examiner reported Friday.

A Democratic upset on Tuesday would be particularly sweet for the party and its supporters, coming in the hometown of Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative bankrolling Koch brothers.

It would also provide an enormous boost walking up to a special election in Georgia on April 18, where Democrat Jon Ossoff has raised a stunning $8 million-plus for his campaign to snatch away a Republican-leaning district in the Atlanta suburbs.

The House seat was vacated when GOP Rep. Tom Price resigned to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

12:20 p.m.: This post has been updated with a report that Vice President Mike Pence has recorded a robocall aimed at GOP voters.

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Republicans getting antsy over special congressional vote--in ruby-red Kansas, of all places - Los Angeles Times

Senate Republicans Deploy ‘Nuclear Option’ to Clear Path for Gorsuch – New York Times


New York Times
Senate Republicans Deploy 'Nuclear Option' to Clear Path for Gorsuch
New York Times
WASHINGTON Senate Republicans on Thursday engineered a dramatic change in how the chamber confirms Supreme Court nominations, bypassing a Democratic blockade of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch in a move that will most likely reshape both the Senate ...
Will Republicans or Democrats suffer politically for what just happened in the Senate? Probably not.Washington Post
Nuking The Filibuster May Hurt Republicans In The Long RunFiveThirtyEight
In history-making showdown, Senate GOP breaks Democratic filibuster of Trump's Supreme Court pickLos Angeles Times
Bloomberg -Fox News -The Boston Globe
all 4,396 news articles »

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Senate Republicans Deploy 'Nuclear Option' to Clear Path for Gorsuch - New York Times

As Latest Health Plan Dies, Republicans Can’t Agree on a Culprit – New York Times


New York Times
As Latest Health Plan Dies, Republicans Can't Agree on a Culprit
New York Times
The left wing among House Republicans doesn't want to compromise or keep their pledge to voters to repeal Obamacare, David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative free-market advocacy group, said in a statement. They've ...
Endgame: Plurality of Republicans now favor single-payer health careHot Air
The GOP's New Health Care Plan Is Doomed Without Moderate RepublicansFiveThirtyEight
Republicans Learn to Love Single-Payer Health CareReason (blog)
CNN -Washington Post (blog) -Los Angeles Times -Gallup
all 625 news articles »

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As Latest Health Plan Dies, Republicans Can't Agree on a Culprit - New York Times

Stephanie Grace: Upcoming session will test whether House Republicans can govern – The Advocate

Republicans in the state House proved they can win. Last year, the party used its majority to break precedent, buck the newly elected Democratic governor and install one of its own as House Speaker.

They proved they can obstruct. Gov. John Bel Edwards has seen a number of his major initiatives, including campaign promises he made in his winning 2015 race, die in unfriendly House committees.

The question that remains, though, is whether they can govern.

The answer is likely to come in the upcoming legislative session, when the lower chamber's GOP majority will have a chance to show that it can finally help stabilize the state's tax code and put the budget on surer footing or else confirm critics' complaints that it can't, or simply won't.

House leaders have made the case that the vote to elevate Republican state Rep. Taylor Barras as speaker over Edwards' chosen candidate, Democrat Walt Leger III, amounted to a show of legislative independence. But now that they've won that independence, they need to figure out what to do with it.

This year, that means deciding whether their primary aim is to stymie Edwards, who has introduced a comprehensive and controversial proposal to restructure the tax system, or to push through their own ideas.

Edwards' proposal swaps out some tax breaks for lower overall income tax rates. The governor's also pushing a new tax on commercial activities, a phase-out of the corporate franchise tax and an expansion of sales tax to cover many transactions that are currently exempt. The governors plan seeks at least enough recurring revenue to offset $1.3 billion in expiring temporary taxes, including a one-cent sales tax increase that now gives Louisiana the highest combined state and local sales tax in the country, and to steer the state away from what's become known as the fiscal cliff.

The cliff that lawmakers are staring down is actually there because Republicans in the House insisted on putting it there. Facing a crisis situation last year, they pushed to adopt an added penny of sales tax until 2018, with the aim of forcing the Legislature's hand on broader tax reform. They also supported creating a blue ribbon task force, which has issued a number of recommendations that found their way into Edwards' package. A notable exception is the commercial activities tax, which the administration proposed on its own.

With the task force report out and the penny tax set to expire next year, though, GOP lawmakers as a whole have neither endorsed the group's recommendations nor offered their own.

Barras told The Advocate's Tyler Bridges last week that a number of Republicans plan to offer bills, and that the sum total would constitute something of a plan.

State Rep. John Schroder, a candidate for state treasurer who authored the bill to create the task force, is now focusing more on reducing spending.

So is Lance Harris, the House's Republican Caucus Chair, who said that the GOP would support some bills but that I never said wed release (the party's fiscal plan) to the public. Meanwhile, several people who attended a recent GOP retreat told Bridges that Harris didn't seem to want to produce a comprehensive Republican-backed plan at all.

Edwards calls all of this a cop-out.

"The only thing you hear from them is no, without a plan, the governor said. He's also criticized Republicans for talking up the idea of spending cuts but not offering a plan on that either.

Unless and until the House leadership shows its hand, it'll be hard to argue with Edwards' criticisms.

Conservatives in the state House staged a coup of sorts in January 2016: Dispensing with tra

Their position, in fact, isn't that different from that of Republicans in Washington who now control both Congress and the presidency, and are still struggling to come up with an agenda beyond opposing what former President Barack Obama supported.

One congressman from Florida, Republican Tom Rooney, put it in particularly blunt terms: Ive been in this job eight years, and Im wracking my brain to think of one thing our party has done thats been something positive, thats been something other than stopping something else from happening, he told The Atlantic.

You've got to wonder how many Louisiana lawmakers can relate.

Follow Stephanie Grace on Twitter, @stephgracela.

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Stephanie Grace: Upcoming session will test whether House Republicans can govern - The Advocate

Republicans Tearing Each Other to Pieces Over Trumpcare Debacle – New York Magazine

(L-R) Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus. Not pictured: what theyre holding in their left hands. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

In the wake of their failure to repeal Obamacare, Republicans have quickly pivoted to their next priority: maneuvering to pin the blame on each other for the failure. Some of the infighting has pitted Republicans in the Executive branch against those in the House. Some of it has pitted White House aides against each other. What follows is a guide to the latest developments in the partys fratricidal conflict.

President Trump wishes he didnt try to pass health-care reform before he tried infrastructure and tax cuts. According to CNN, Trump said he expressed regret at attempting to push through a health-care repeal effort before working on tax reform or an infrastructure package both areas in which hes better versed than health care. (Trump does not actually understand infrastructure policy or tax policy well at all, but he believes he does, which is not the case with health-care reform.)

Trump is trying to pass health-care reform anyway. The White House held a meeting last night with House leaders pressing upon them the need to pass a bill quickly. A House aide said Pence and other White House officials painted a dire political picture of what would happen if Republicans fail to act on health care, reports the Washington Post, which describes the meeting as intense.

Politico goes farther. It was really bad, one source says.They were in total meltdown, total chaos mode. Priebus may or may not have threatened Ryans job if the bill fails:

Priebus may get fired. One reason for the intensity of the meeting may be that Priebus himself is at risk of being sacked if the health-care bill does not pass. According to several people familiar with Trumps thinking, reports CNN, if this latest health-care gambit fails, Priebus is likely to catch the blame and could be shown the door.

Trump is also angry at Steve Bannon. The chief strategist urged Trump to ram a bill through the House and dare members to oppose it, eventually culminating in a humiliating retreat. Bannons demotion from his position on the National Security Council is universally seen as a public rebuke by the president.

Bannon is fighting back against his internal enemies. Bannon has lashed out at Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn, his internal rivals for Trumps ear. Bannon is calling Cohn Globalist Gary, according to CNN, an apparent reference to Cohns background at Goldman Sachs. (Bannon also worked at Goldman Sachs, but sees himself as less of a rootless cosmopolitan international-banking elitist.)

Jonathan Swan reports, the hatred between the two wings is intense and irreconcilable, and that the Bannonites believe the liberals another Bannonite term for the conventional Republicans advising Trump, who are not liberal staged a coup and will turn Trump into a conventional squish who betrays the very voters who brought him to power. The Jared wing thinks the Bannonites are clinically nuts. Evidence suggests both sides are correct.

[Steve] recently vented to us about Jared being a globalist and a cuckHe actually said cuck, as in cuckservative, one administration official told the Daily Beast. (Cuckservative is an alt-right term, derived from cuckolding, to impugn mainstream conservatives as metaphorically or sexually impotent. The term also refers to the white-supremacist fixation with the white race losing its identity through miscegenation.)

According to Swan, Bannon is threatening to use his connections to right-wing media moguls to attack his adversaries. Steve has developed strong and important relationships with some of the most powerful right-leaning business leaders, a close Bannon ally outside of the White House tells Swan. I see some bad press in [Jareds] future.

The civil war is percolating down through the bureaucracy. According to another Politico story, many or even most agencies are riven with conflicts between Trump loyalists, who expected high positions in the administration, and regular Republicans, who have largely supplanted them.

There are people who moved here and signed a year lease, one longtime campaign staffer tells Politico. They got nothing for their loyalty to Trump. Were pissed off. Were angry. There are people who cant even look us in the eye because they know theyre [screwing] us.

The actual reasons for the failure of the health-care bill boil down to two things: first, the irreconcilable tension between public desire for more generous coverage and conservative demands for less, and the complete policy ignorance of the president, which made intra-party negotiation prohibitively difficult.

Obviously, those are not explanations Trump wants to hear. At the moment, he appears to be leaning toward the answers supplied to him by Kushner and Cohn. Bannon is reportedly telling people, I love a gunfight. But you dont bring a gun to the Night of the Long Knives.

This Golden Revival of Girls Is Notable Mostly for Putting All Four Girls in the Same Scene

A Brief Fact Check of Trumps Claim to Have Enjoyed 13 Weeks of Historic Success

The strikes would likely kill Russian soldiers and mark 180-degree shift in the White Houses policy towards Syria.

The House district represented by Mike Pompeo looked unassailable just days ago. No more.

It has not been successful or 13 weeks.

The president is reportedly weighing military action in Syria.

Its been tried, and it didnt work the first time.

The Trump administration has assembled a long list of popular, left-wing policies that it has shown no intention of actually trying to pass.

Its the Night of the Long Knives for the fine-tuned machine.

The long-awaited GOP move to force confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and future nominees by a simple majority has finally happened.

The boats dont yet have names, so the citys second-graders are tasked with picking them.

And in the process, ensures its published on news sites across the world.

Nunes will leave the gig to spend more time defending himself against ethics charges.

The presidents eldest son says the politics bug bit him.

To prepare for his meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump is relying on the expertise of his son-in-law, an oil executive, and a 93-year-old man.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights calls it ISISs largest mass killing of 2017.

It hurt the Democrats in the short run. But new polling confirms that the ACA gave the left a permanent advantage in the health-care debate.

Hes been clashing with Jared Kushner, and the President Bannon meme is said to be getting to Trump.

Making evidence-free accusations has worked out pretty well for him, so he probably wont.

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Republicans Tearing Each Other to Pieces Over Trumpcare Debacle - New York Magazine