Republicans gain footing for Senate showdown
On Tuesday, voters headed to the polls for midterm election primaries in North Carolina, Indiana and Ohio. Republican contenders backed by the Washington establishment, like Senate candidate...
By: PBS NewsHour
The Republican Party, also commonly called the GOP (for "Grand Old Party"), is the second oldest existing political party in the United States after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the KansasNebraska Act, which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy. The Party had almost no presence in the South, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.
With its election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and its success in guiding the Union to victory and abolishing slavery, it came to dominate the national political scene until 1932. The Republican Party was based on northern white Protestants, businessmen, small business owners, professionals, factory workers, farmers, and African-Americans. It was pro-business, supporting banks, the gold standard, railroads, and tariffs to protect industrial workers and industry.
Under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, it emphasized an expansive foreign policy. The GOP ("Grand Old Party"), as it is often called, lost its majorities during the Great Depression (192940). Instead, the Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt formed a winning "New Deal" coalition, which was dominant from 1932 through 1964. That coalition collapsed in the mid-1960s, partly because of white Southern Democrats' disaffection with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Republicans resurged, winning seven of the 10 presidential elections 1968 to 2004, with Ronald Reagan as the party's iconic conservative hero.
The GOP expanded its base throughout the South after 1968 (excepting 1976), largely due to its strength among socially conservative white Evangelical Protestants and traditionalist Roman Catholics. As white Democrats in the South lost dominance of the Democratic Party once federal courts declared the Democratic White Primary elections unconstitutional, the region began more taking on the two-party apparatus which characterized most of the nation. The Republican Party's central leader by 1980 was Ronald Reagan, whose conservative policies called for reduced government spending and regulation, lower taxes, and a strong anti-Soviet foreign policy.
It began as a coalition of anti-slavery "Conscience Whigs" and Free Soil Democrats opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, submitted to Congress by Stephen Douglas in January 1854. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states, thus implicitly repealing the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36 30 latitude, which had been part of the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by Free-Soil and Abolitionist Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South.
The Act was supported by all Southerners and by Northern "Doughface" (pro-Southern) Democrats, and by still other northern Democrats persuaded by Douglas' doctrine of "popular sovereignty". In the North the old Whig party was almost defunct. The opponents were intensely motivated and began forming a new party.[1]
The new party went well beyond the issue of slavery in the territories. It envisioned modernizing the United States emphasizing giving free western land to farmers ("free soil") as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best lands, expanded banking, more railroads, and factories. They vigorously argued that free-market labor was superior to slavery and the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism this is the "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" ideology.[1]
The Republicans absorbed the previous traditions of its members, most of whom had been Whigs; others had been Democrats or members of third parties (especially the Free Soil Party and the American Party or Know Nothings). Many Democrats who joined up were rewarded with governorships.[2] or seats in the U.S. Senate[3] or House of Representatives.[4] Since its inception, its chief opposition has been the Democratic Party, but the amount of flow back and forth of prominent politicians between the two parties was quite high from 1854 to 1896.
Historians have explored the ethnocultural foundations of the party, along the line that ethnic and religious groups set the moral standards for their members, who then carried those standards into politics. The churches also provided social networks that politicians used to sign up voters. The pietistic churches emphasized the duty of the Christian to purge sin from society. Sin took many formsalcoholism, polygamy and slavery became special targets for the Republicans.[5]
The Yankees, who dominated New England, much of upstate New York, and much of the upper Midwest were the strongest supporters of the new party. This was especially true for the pietistic Congregationalists and Presbyterians among them and (during the war), the Methodists, along with Scandinavian Lutherans. The Quakers were a small tight-knit group that was heavily Republican. The liturgical churches (Roman Catholic, Episcopal, German Lutheran), by contrast, largely rejected the moralism of the Republican Party; most of their adherents voted Democratic.[5]
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History of the United States Republican Party - Wikipedia ...
With Fox News and radio talk-show hosts urging Republicans to make Benghazi a central issue in Washington, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner cautioned his colleagues to take a different approach.
After agreeing to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attacks in Libya, Boehner warned Republican lawmakers that grandstanding on the issue risked provoking a voter backlash, according to two people at a private meeting yesterday attended by the speaker. They described the discussion on condition of anonymity.
Its a very two-edged sword, said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who also was at the meeting and worked for the partys House campaign committee before winning his congressional seat in 2002.
Boehners advice reflects concern among Republicans that in probing Benghazi, the peril at the polls is at least as strong as the chance for political gain. That could prove especially so if it appears the party is talking about the deaths of four Americans in the attacks mainly as a way to win votes.
One measure of the uncertainty in Republican ranks: Benghazi-related advertisements have been run on behalf of just three candidates since the beginning of last year, all of them in Republican primaries, according to New York-based Kantar Medias CMAG, which tracks advertising.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican up for re-election this year, aired an ad last month that included footage of him saying President Barack Obama misled the nation on Benghazi. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, mentioned Benghazi in two spots en route to a March primary win.
Benghazi ads accounted for 0.5 percent of the 227,119 overall campaign spots tracked by CMAG.
Democrats are pushing back. They say the select committee is a political exercise aimed in part at weakening Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time of the attacks and a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.
Democratic leaders are weighing boycotting the panel. Some, including the head of the House Democratic campaign arm, Representative Steve Israel of New York, deride the committee as a stunt and say they want no part of it. Others, including Representative Henry Waxman of California, say Democrats need to be part of the proceedings to effectively fight back.
Congress started investigating the Benghazi attacks less than a month after they occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, spotlighting the Obama administrations erroneous initial claim that the violence stemmed from spontaneously inspired demonstrations over an anti-Islamic video.
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Benghazi Committee Possible Risk for Republicans, Clinton
WASHINGTON -- House Republicans on Wednesday moved toward an election-year special investigation of the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Libya, brushing aside Democratic concerns over the panel's scope and composition. The Obama administration, meanwhile, accused Republicans of "political motivation" after they issued a fundraising email linked to the Benghazi probe.
Ahead of a Thursday vote to rubber-stamp the establishment of the Benghazi select committee, House Speaker John Boehner vowed that the examination would be "all about getting to the truth" of the Obama administration's response to the attack and not be a partisan, election-year circus. "This is a serious investigation," he said, accusing the president and his team of withholding the true story of how militants killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012.
Democrats pondered a boycott while waiting for Boehner to respond to a demand from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that he scrap his plan for a committee of seven Republicans and five Democrats. Democrats insisted membership should be evenly split, and urged time and cost constraints for a forum they likened to a "kangaroo court" designed only to drum up GOP support ahead of the November elections.
The committee's establishment is assured in the GOP-run House. But Republicans, too, expressed an interest in securing Democratic participation. They've made Benghazi a central plank of their strategy to wrest control of the Senate from the Democrats later this year. An inquiry that can be presented as bipartisan would have greater credibility with voters beyond the conservative base.
Republicans insist the White House, concerned primarily with protecting President Barack Obama in the final weeks of his re-election campaign, misled the nation by playing down intelligence suggesting Benghazi was a major, al-Qaida-linked terrorist attack. They accuse the administration of stonewalling congressional investigators ever since, pointing specifically to emails written by U.S. officials in the days after the attack but only released last week.
On Wednesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest pounced on congressional Republicans for seeking campaign money off the investigation, describing a fundraising email earlier in the day as a "pretty good indication of political motivation."
The National Republican Congressional Committee's pitch said the GOP was "moving fast" to hold Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton "accountable for their actions" on the night of the Benghazi attack. It vowed that "no one will get away" from the select committee and asked people to become a "Benghazi Watchdog" by donating money.
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House Republicans move to establish Benghazi investigation
Will Republicans feel the heat on unemployment benefits YouTube
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Will Republicans feel the heat on unemployment benefits YouTube - Video