Archive for the ‘Republicans’ Category

Trump Ballot Eligibility Ruling Elicits Mixed Reactions Ahead of Super Tuesday – The New York Times

The U.S. Supreme Court brought certainty on Monday to a primary season muddled by confusing and divergent state-level rulings by deciding unanimously that the 14th Amendment did not allow states to disqualify former President Donald J. Trump.

But reaction to the ruling showed that the challenges to Mr. Trumps candidacy had hardened political dividing lines and angered Republicans who saw the lawsuits as an antidemocratic attempt to meddle in the election. And the ruling was handed down as voters in more than a dozen states prepared for Super Tuesday primaries.

It motivated people to get involved, said Brad Wann, a Republican Party caucus coordinator in Colorado, the first of three states to disqualify Mr. Trump, and the state at the center of the Supreme Court case. They feel like the Democrats in this state are trying to take basic rights away. People are talking at coffee shops, at churches, saying we cannot let this happen.

The ballot challenges, which were filed in more than 30 states, focused on whether Mr. Trumps efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat disqualified him from holding the presidency again. The cases were based on a clause of the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War, that prohibits government officials who engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office.

On Monday, all nine Supreme Court justices agreed that individual states could not bar candidates for the presidency under the insurrection provision. Four justices would have left it at that. A five-justice majority, in an unsigned opinion, went on to say that Congress must act to give that section force.

In Illinois, where the Supreme Courts decision overtook a finding by a state judge last week that Mr. Trump was ineligible, many voters said Mr. Trump belonged on the ballot.

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Trump Ballot Eligibility Ruling Elicits Mixed Reactions Ahead of Super Tuesday - The New York Times

Republicans want earmarks for their districts but vote against spending bills – The Washington Post

Despite their public posture of advocating for lower government spending, House Republicans have billions more at stake in the bills to fund federal agencies than any other voting bloc on Capitol Hill.

Of the four congressional caucuses, House Republicans have stuffed the bills that fund the federal government with more than $4.5 billion worth of narrow projects in their districts, commonly known as earmarks. Thats more than half a billion more dollars than their next closest competitor, the Democratic caucus in the Senate.

Yet, when the first chunk of spending bills hit the House floor in a few days, Republicans expect to struggle to round up votes for a legislative package even though they will include almost all of their earmarks. On Thursday, just 113 Republicans, about 54 percent of their caucus, voted for a stopgap bill averting a partial government shutdown, while all but two Democrats supported the bill.

Remarkably, it will have to be Democrats who unlock the gusher of federal earmarks into House GOP districts. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is only expected to deliver little more than a third of the vote needed in favor of the overarching legislation that will provide full-year budgets for agencies.

Its the latest example of what Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in her last two years as speaker, dubbed the vote no and take the dough phenomenon among Republicans.

With earmarks once considered the gateway drug to congressional corruption, the tea party-driven House GOP majority banished them in 2011 from funding bills after Justice Department investigations landed several lawmakers in prison and dozens more former staff received felony sentences.

But as the work of the House and Senate Appropriations committees languished year after year, leading to a pair of weeks-long shutdowns last decade, Democrats decided to bring earmarks back when they held the majority, starting with the 2022 fiscal year.

The idea was to instill rank-and-file lawmakers with personal skin in the appropriations game, setting up a detailed process to weed out ethical conflicts and require local support for what are now formally called community funding projects.

Requests were initially limited to 10 or fewer, and the overall funds were limited to 1 percent of the total budgets for federal agencies.

Democrats nearly universally embraced these projects, but House Republicans were reluctant. Barely half of them requested earmarks in 2022, while former congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), then the minority leader and part of the leadership team that banned them a decade earlier, declined these funds.

But after they won the majority in late 2022, House Republicans voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to continue the earmark process exactly as Democrats had reestablished it.

According to analyses by CQ Roll Call and Bloomberg Government, about two-thirds of House Republicans stand ready to collect earmarks from the latest work by the Appropriations Committee.

Unlike McCarthy, Johnson fully embraces earmarks, having requested more than $100 million for military bases in the past three years in his district.

Has this transformation helped Republicans learn the ropes and support the overall legislation?

To some degree, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a veteran member of the spending committee, told reporters Thursday.

As they wrote their own sharply partisan funding outlines last summer, House Republicans had several very close votes, which, without earmarks, might have failed to win a majority.

Its hard to vote against a bill when the committee and staff have done everything they can to try to address the issues that you want to address, Simpson said.

Thats a very old-school view of congressional politics, when it was understood that if lawmakers had millions of dollars designated for their individual districts, they were expected to support the overall legislation.

Yet dozens of Republicans will probably thumb their nose at that traditional view in the next few days.

Take Rep. Tim Burchett (Tenn.), who was one of eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy as speaker in early October after McCarthy allowed a stopgap funding bill to pass mostly with Democratic votes to avoid a shutdown. He voted no, again, on Thursday on the very brief stopgap bill.

Burchett has warned Americans will lose our country over the national debt, but he still submitted roughly two dozen earmark requests worth more than $50 million, ranging from $2.5 million for the East Tennessee Childrens Hospital to $5.4 million to refurbish a Knoxville concert amphitheater to $100,000 to boost genetic testing for state law enforcement.

Members just need to be able to stand up and defend each and every one of them, Burchett said. You know, if we need a hospital, we need a hospital. We need a road? We need a road. And that is a duty of government.

Does he feel more invested now in voting for either of the two upcoming funding packages, totaling almost $1.7 trillion, since his projects will be included?

I dont have any obligation at all, Burchett said.

Democrats grew irritated last summer as House Republicans steered such a huge amount of earmarked funds in their direction.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, oversaw the relaunch more than two years ago. Back when only half of Republicans requested them, the distribution represented a close to 2-to-1 value for the majority.

The dollar amount was predicated on the number of requests, DeLauro told reporters Thursday.

But Republicans took that split and adopted it as precedent for the majority party. They awarded themselves more than 62 percent of all earmarks, according to The Washington Posts Jacob Bogages analysis in January, easily the largest haul.

Senate Democrats have claimed close to $4 billion in earmarks while Senate Republicans stand to get $3 billion. House Democrats will get more than $2.7 billion.

After about a third of their members declined these projects, House Republicans are dividing up the biggest earmark pie with far fewer lawmakers than their Democratic counterparts.

That results in, according to the CQ Roll Call analysis, a gusher of funds for those House Republicans wanting earmarks.

Of the 100 largest recipients of earmarked dollars in the House, 97 are Republicans.

And House Republicans have looked out for their politically vulnerable members 10 of the 16 GOP lawmakers representing districts that favored President Biden in 2020 have collected earmark hauls that place them in the top third of the entire House, according to CQ Roll Call.

House Republicans also limited earmark requests to just seven of the 12 annual bills, eliminating projects from some more liberal-leaning measures like the one that funds the Departments of Labor, and Health and Human Services. They also nixed earmarks for the Defense Department, caving to far-right lawmakers who accuse Pentagon leaders of becoming woke.

They even blocked three community projects Democrats had won initial approval for, because they funded LGBTQ+ projects.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) had his $1.8 million request for an LGBTQ+ community center in Philadelphia approved and then blocked, so he instead worked with DeLauro and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the Senate Appropriations chair, along with his states Democratic senators, to get $1 million for the project in the Senate bill.

Democrats believe their vetting process has stood up over the past few years and that only political reasons prompted these actions.

The nature of the projects and reviewing them has been very positive, DeLauro said.

Some staunch conservatives even regard earmarks as the constitutionally mandated role of Congress, with lawmakers better suited to know their districts needs than agency bureaucrats.

One such Republican is Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), another of the eight who voted to oust McCarthy in early October. He initially requested a whopping $141.5 million for a naval air base in his Florida Panhandle district, which would have been one of the largest earmarks in the House this year.

The old-school ethos on Capitol Hill might have led to punishing Gaetz, who led the effort to first block McCarthys ascension to speaker in January 2023. Instead, his request was honored, at a reduced rate, for $50 million, which places him among the top 15 recipients in earmark funds.

He, however, regularly votes against the Appropriations Committees bills, just as he did on Thursday by voting no on the stopgap bill.

Simpson wishes more Republicans would embrace his panels work given that so many have a lot at stake for their districts.

He wonders if many Republicans will vote no in the next few weeks, even as they take the dough in earmarks.

I dont know. Well see, he said.

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Republicans want earmarks for their districts but vote against spending bills - The Washington Post

On Israel, Trump Is Even Worse Than Biden – The Intercept

Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives during a Get Out the Vote rally in Greensboro, N.C., on March 2, 2024. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To understand the state of American politics today when it comes to Gaza, Israel, and Palestine, just look at the very different ways in which the House of Representatives handled the cases of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, and Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican.

Tlaib was punished for her views on Israel and the war in Gaza. Mast was not.

Its not hard to figure out why.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, was censured by the Republican-controlled House in November after she posted a video of protesters in Michigan chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Israels supporters claim the chant is code for a desire to wipe the Jewish state off the map, but Tlaib responded that it was just an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.

I cant believe I have to say this, she added, but Palestinian people are not disposable.

Tlaibs censure was a symbolic act that has no substantive impact on her ability to function in Congress, but that wasnt the point. House Republicans just wanted to embarrass her and politically marginalize any congressional support for the Palestinian people. House Democrats briefly sought to censure Mast for comparing Palestinians to the hundreds of thousands of German civilians carpet bombed into oblivion by the Allies in Nazi Germany during World War II. His implication was that Palestinians deserve to be obliterated for the crimes of Hamas, just as German civilians were annihilated for the crimes of Hitler and the Third Reich. I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, he said. I dont think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians during World War II.

The motion to censure Mast was introduced in the House last November, at the same time the Republicans were going after Tlaib. But while the censure motion against Tlaib succeeded, the motion against Mast was quietly withdrawn.

Ever since, Mast has doubled down on his anti-Palestinian rhetoric without facing any consequences. He even wore an Israeli military uniform to a Republican conference meetingon Capitol Hill. When questioned about it by reporters, he said that since Tlaib displays a Palestinian flag outside her office, he thought he should wear his old Israel Defense Forces uniform. A U.S. Army veteran who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2010, Mast briefly volunteered with the IDF in January 2015, performing support functions like packing medical kits. Virtually every other Republican in Congress shares Masts views and would gladly don an IDF uniform if they had one.

Earlier this year, Mast expanded on his comments about Palestinian civilians, saying that even Palestinian babies are not innocent and are thus legitimate targets. It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters, he told Code Pink protesters. When asked about images of Palestinian infants being killed in Israeli attacks, he said these are not innocent Palestinian civilians.

The contrasting outcomes of the Tlaib and Mast cases highlight an undeniable fact: The American political establishment still strongly favors Israel over the Palestinians. But if Donald Trump gets back into the Oval Office, he and his MAGA Republicans like Brian Mast will be even worse.

Trump is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims. During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was freaking evil, but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of our great fighters. Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdads Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.

After the October 7 Hamas attack, Trump was briefly critical of Netanyahu and blurted out that Hezbollah was very smart. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has battled Israel on its northern border with Lebanon. Trump was immediately and roundly attacked by other Republicans for his comments, and he quickly renewed his long-standing pledge to align the United States fully with Israel. If hes reelected, he will give Israel unalloyed support for all-out war, and he will do so with the wholehearted backing of the Republican Party.

Republicans support for Israel is matched or exceeded by their hatred for Palestinians. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who was secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, has proposed legislation that would prevent Palestinians from entering the United States and trigger the mass deportation of those already here. It would ban those holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority from obtaining U.S. visas, while mandating the removal of Palestinian passport holders already living here.

Many Republicans express their unwavering support for Israel in biblical and apocalyptic terms. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Christian evangelical, made his first public appearance after being elected House speaker last October at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he said that God is not done with Israel.

It is dangerous to get between evangelicals and their theology. Trump recognizes their importance to his political success, and his support for Israel is a way to satisfy his evangelical Christian base. No president has done more for Israel than I have,Trump claimed in 2022. Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.

At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump pushed through a provision in the party platform ending GOP support for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state. Now, Trump and Republicans agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel can no longer agree to a two-state solution. In any future arrangement Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan, Netanyahu said in January. This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do? This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel.

Thats fine with Trump and Republicans like Brian Mast.

Read our complete coverage

Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. Whats more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White Houses approach to Israel. Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire; such new pressure from the Biden administration appears to be working, as Israel and Hamas now seem closer to an agreement.

Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a ceasefire or a Palestinian state. Mast has harshly attacked Biden for continuing to support a two-state solution, dismissing the idea by saying that a Palestinian state would be run by terrorists.

There are limits to Bidens support for Netanyahu. Trump and the Republican Party have none.

Correction: March 4, 2024 8:26 p.m. ET An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the organization that Trump called very smart. It was Hezbollah, not Hamas.

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On Israel, Trump Is Even Worse Than Biden - The Intercept

Analysis | Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn’t want – The Washington Post

Hunter Bidens appearance in front of investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees unfolded a bit like a Bruce Lee movie.

Republican legislators and interviewers challenging the presidents son on the House majoritys behalf would throw out an allegation, often one thats been worn smooth after tumbling around in the right-wing media universe for the past year or two. And Biden would invariably swat it away, stripping off the layers of innuendo that had been applied by Donald Trump and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) or Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or any of myriad Fox News commentators.

This included epic battles against well-known foes, like an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), or repeated, extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). But at no point was a question left unanswered including through an invocation of the Fifth Amendment or, to an objective observer, left answered with obvious incompletion.

The discussion was centered on the Republican effort in the ongoing impeachment inquiry to demonstrate that President Biden had benefited financially from Hunter Bidens business endeavors and, they hoped, that the elder Biden had used his position as vice president to that end. They were unsuccessful in making that case from the hearings first moments.

I did not involve my father in my business, Hunter Biden said in his opening comments, not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist, never. His position did not diverge from that at any point; instead, he frequently invoked this same claim over and over again as a means of cutting off one of the familiar lines of inquiry with which he was presented.

The effect, in reading a transcript of Wednesdays hours-long interaction, is of a man repeatedly trying to get his accusers to see a forest instead of a smattering of trees.

Hunter Bidens testimony centered heavily on two themes. First, the closeness of his family, having been drawn together by the tragic deaths of his mother and, later, his brother. This is why he always took his fathers calls, he said, and why he would always welcome his father to join him at dinners.

I can't count the number of times my dad stopped to have dinner with me and my family, he testified including at a cafe that was situated between the White House and the vice-presidential residence.

The other was that Joe Biden was a career politician.

My dad has been a United States Senator since I was 2 years old, Biden said at one point. My whole life has been this.

His point? That glad-handing strangers and dropping into events was part of his father's daily life and therefore his own.

At one point, a questioner pressed Biden to admit that there was a suspicious pattern in his father having met people with whom Hunter Biden or his partners ended up doing business. Biden rejected that framing.

The pattern I see is that you literally have no evidence whatsoever of any corruption on the part of my father, he said. And therefore what you're trying to do is you're trying to make every single thing in business that I was ever involved in somehow corrupt.

Gaetz, during his lengthy inquisition of Biden, attempted to portray several occasions in which Joe Biden called his son during a meeting or stopped by a dinner as implicating the president in his sons business. Hunter Biden turned the question around.

If my father was to sit down here today and he was to call me right now and I was in and I put him on the speakerphone, does that mean that he had a meeting with you, Mr. Gaetz? he asked.

Yeah, Gaetz replied.

Gaetz later tried to suggest that since Hunter Biden sometimes covered his fathers tab, that his and his fathers finances were pretty interwoven. (Will the record show that were all laughing? Biden attorney Abbe Lowell interjected.)

No, our finances arent interwoven, Hunter Biden said in response. What are interwoven is that were a family.

Over and over, interlocutors presented Hunter Biden with the sorts of suspicious-sounding tidbits that have been the crux of the Republican argument for months. And, over and over, he offered credible responses.

Biden was asked, for example, whether he was aware that money hed transferred to his uncle James Biden might have been reused by his uncle to repay a loan to his father.

This is the most ridiculous thing that I mean, so far, Biden replied. Are you saying to me, do I understand the fungibility of dollars? Do I understand that there is a I mean, what is it? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Its all based upon a fallacy?

He noted that the deal at issue was centered on building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Louisiana that, according to him, would have created 17,000 jobs.

Mentioning this had a different purpose: to bolster his credentials and, by extension, the validity of his having been hired to participate in these agreements in the first place. He fleshed out the specifics of several of them in a similar way, including offering details of his relationships with prospective partners, both close and contentious.

Id put my rsum up against any one of you, in terms of my responsibility, he challenged the lawmakers at one point.

Those deeply immersed in the lore of Joe Bidens putative corruption will find any number of the allegations dismissed in Hunter Bidens testimony, not that they will believe his (sworn) testimony if they were to read the transcript at all. They would also note two particular targets of Hunter Bidens ire: Donald Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner and Hunter Bidens former associate Tony Bobulinski.

Kushner served as a repeated point of comparison for Biden: Republicans were quizzing him on his father stopping by a dinner one evening when Kushner pulled in $2 billion after leaving the White House?

A legislator asked him whether he'd worked for foreign governments.

I never worked for a country, he replied. I am not Jared Kushner.

Bobulinski, whose testimony has been repeatedly cited by Republicans as their probe has progressed, was dismissed by Hunter Biden as only briefly involved in his endeavors and as having been bounced for being unreliable. Among the transgressions, he said, was that Bobulinski had hoped to gain leverage over the Biden family name, something that Hunter Biden found particularly offensive.

He had no faith in this person that I had just met, Tony Bobulinski, he said, who was presented to me as some Wall Street whiz kid that was going around, throwing around my name, and throwing around my family's name.

It's not their name to screw up, he added at one point. It's mine.

This relates to where Hunter Bidens testimony was the shakiest. He indicated that, thanks to those decades of being immersed in his fathers world, he was sensitive to keeping his father at arms length.

One thing that we that I was fully aware of my entire life, is that my dad was an official of the United States Government, he said, and there were very bright lines that I abided to and that I was very, very cognizant of. And made certain that I never engaged with my father in asking him to do anything on my behalf or on behalf of any client of mine.

That may be, but it has also been demonstrated that he at times specifically sought to invoke his father, including in a text message in which he falsely implied that his father was sitting beside him. (He said he was probably intoxicated when it was sent and that he was more embarrassed of this text message, if it actually did come from me, than any text message Ive ever sent.)

Toward the end of his deposition, Biden deflected one of Gaetzs questions about the specifics of his picking up a bill for his father by noting how deep his questioners were having to dive to find things that looked suspicious.

Its not incumbent upon me to point to you to something that doesnt exist, Biden said. Its incumbent upon you to create something, to come up with something based upon the voluminous evidence that youve collected, which shows no involvement.

The forest remains uninteresting to those trying to build a case for impeaching President Biden. In his testimony, Hunter Biden did an effective job of also explaining why the trees Republicans had focused on werent that important either.

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Analysis | Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn't want - The Washington Post

Reflecting Congressional divisions over U.S. involvement with Ukraine, Republicans are more reluctant than … – AP-NORC

February 29, 2024

Two years after Russias invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Congress is divided over continuing aid to help Ukraine in its war against Russia. The public is also split along party lines.

Overall, 4 in 10 adults think the U.S. government is spending too much on aid to Ukraine. Three in ten say they are spending too little and a third think the amount is about right. Roughly half of Republicans (55%) think the government is spending too much money on military aid to Ukraine whereas 44% of Democrats think the government is spending too little.

Support for sanctions on Russia has remained steady. Last November, 63% supported economic sanctions on Russia. Today, 63% support such sanctions. Democrats are more likely to support sanctions (74%) than Republicans (52%). Four in ten adults support accepting Ukrainian refugees into the United States. Democrats are also more likely to support accepting Ukrainian refugees (61%) than Republicans (27%).

Foreign policy on the Russia-Ukraine war has become a partisan dividing line. Most Democrats see it as a priority for the U.S. government to prevent Russia from gaining more territory in Ukraine and to help Ukraine regain territory that is currently occupied by Russia. Less than half of Republicans agree.

At the two-year anniversary of Russias invasion, the publics outlook on the outcomes of the war are pessimistic. Only 13% are extremely or very confident that Ukraine can win the war against Rusia. Another 36% are somewhat confident and 49% are not too or not at all confident.

While many agree with the foreign policy goals of the United States regarding the conflict, few, regardless of party identification, are extremely or very confident about any positive results. Twenty-two percent say the United States should take a more involved role in the war between Russia and Ukraine, while 36% say it should have a less active role, and 40% think the United States involvement is at about the right level.

About a third of adults (35%) are concerned that the war between Russia and Ukraine will lead to a bigger conflict in Europe. Forty percent are worried that the United States will be drawn into a war with Russia. Democrats and Republicans have similar concerns about the possibility of broader conflicts.

Sixty-one percent of adults think being part of NATO, the military alliance between the United States, Canada, and many European countries, is good for the United States. This is similar to the 65% who said the same in April 2022, shortly after the war began. Democrats are more likely to support NATO membership (78%) than Republicans (50%).

Fifty-six percent of adults would support deploying U.S. troops to defend a NATO ally if it was attacked by Russia, which falls under Article V in the NATO military alliance. Despite former President Trumps remarks last week that he would not defend a NATO ally if it failed to meet defense spending targets, about half of Republicans support sending troops to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia.

Seventy-nine percent of adults have an unfavorable opinion of Vladimir Putin, who received international criticism last week after the death of political opponent Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony. Although few in either party are favorable, Republicans are more likely to have a favorable opinion (14%) than Democrats (3%).

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is viewed more positively 43% of adults have a favorable opinion, 22% unfavorable, and 35% dont know enough about him to say. These opinions are divided by partisanship. Sixty-two percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion of the Ukrainian leader compared with 32% of Republicans.

The nationwide poll was conducted February 22-26, 2024 using the AmeriSpeak Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,102 adults. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.1 percentage points.

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Reflecting Congressional divisions over U.S. involvement with Ukraine, Republicans are more reluctant than ... - AP-NORC