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      SALT Deduction That Benefits the Rich Divides Democrats

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      House Democrats are poised to lift a cap on the state and local tax deduction, a gift to wealthy homeowners in some blue states.WASHINGTON — A plan by House Democrats to reduce taxes for high earners in states like New Jersey, New York and California in their $1.85 trillion social policy spending package is becoming an early political albatross for the party, with Republicans already mobilizing to accuse Democrats of defying their populist principles in favor of cutting taxes for the rich.The criticism offers a preview of the emerging battle lines ahead of next year’s midterm elections and underscores the challenge that Democrats face when local politics collide with the party’s national ambitions to promote economic equity. For Republicans who have defended their 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, the proposal by Democrats to raise the limit on the state and local tax deduction is an opportunity to flip the script and cast Democrats as the party of plutocrats.“I think they’re struggling to maintain their professed support for taxing the wealthy, yet they are providing a huge tax windfall under the SALT cap,” said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, referring to the acronym for state and local taxes. “If your priorities are working families, make that the priority, not the wealthy.”Republicans, looking for ways to finance their own tax cuts in 2017, capped the amount of state and local taxes that households could deduct from their federal tax bills at $10,000. Democrats from high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California have spent years promising to repeal the cap and are poised to lift it to $80,000 through 2030, before reducing it back to $10,000 in 2031. The cap, which is currently set to disappear in 2025, would then expire permanently in 2032.The bill would cut taxes sharply for the next five years by increasing the value of the deduction, but it would mean higher taxes in the following five years than if the cap were allowed to expire. The Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday that over the course of a decade, the changes to the deduction would amount to a tax increase that would raise about $14.8 billion in revenue.The House proposal is likely to change in the Senate, where it has its own champions and detractors. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has embraced a more generous deduction while Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has sharply criticized the House proposal. He joined Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, in negotiating an income cap — as high as $550,000, though that number is in flux — on who can receive the deduction.This week, the National Republican Congressional Committee released survey data that it said suggested most voters in battleground states would be less likely to vote for Democrats who supported a policy that gave tax cuts to rich homeowners in New Jersey, New York and California. It said that the Democratic Party would have “to defend its politically toxic policies which penalize hard working families to reward liberal elites.”Prominent tax and budget analysts have argued that expanding the deduction amounted to an unnecessary giveaway to the rich.According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a family of four in Washington making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deduction as a middle-class family would receive from another provision in the social policy package, an expansion of the child tax credit. Citing calculations from the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the group said that two thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase to the state and local property tax deduction.The proposal has put some Democrats on the defensive.Rep. Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said this week that tax giveaways to millionaires sounded like something that Republicans would have come up with.“Proponents have been saying that the BBB taxes the rich,” Mr. Golden said on Twitter, referring to the bill known as the Build Back Better Act. “But the more we learn about the SALT provisions, the more it looks like another giant tax break for millionaires.”The issue is further complicating passage of the bill, which Democrats are trying to get through both the House and Senate without Republican support. Given their thin majorities in both chambers, Democrats can afford to lose no more than three votes in the House and none in the Senate.Some Democrats in Congress from states with high taxes have made the inclusion of the more generous deduction as a prerequisite for their backing the bill.“There’s a series of competing views on SALT, but I mean, it’s pretty obvious something has to be in there, that’s for sure,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.The unexpectedly tight race for governor of New Jersey was a clear reminder that the state’s high property taxes — and the limit on their deductibility — are high on voters’ lists of worries, strategists and other political observers said.“As Covid kind of recedes, taxes are taking its place as the top issue in New Jersey,” said Michael DuHaime, a Republican political strategist with Mercury Public Affairs.The SALT cap “essentially resulted in a pretty large tax increase for a lot of families” in the suburbs of New York City, Mr. DuHaime said. With Democrats in power, those homeowners are counting on some relief, he said.Now that former President Donald J. Trump is out of office, New Jersey has “reverted to its mean” of being deeply concerned about the state’s affordability, said Julie Roginsky, a strategist who advised Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, during his first campaign in 2017. The average homeowner in the state pays about $10,000 in property taxes, she said, with the cap hitting about one-third of New Jersey residents.“I think it’s absolutely a line in the sand that some of these vulnerable members of Congress need to draw,” Ms. Roginsky said.Several Democrats who represent affluent suburban areas where most homeowners pay much more than $10,000 a year in property taxes will face stiff challenges in the midterm election next year, strategists said. Their short list of vulnerable House members include Josh Gottheimer, Mikie Sherrill and Tom Malinowski from North Jersey, and Andy Kim, who represents part of the Jersey Shore, all of whom support raising the SALT cap.If the Democrats can engineer a change to the SALT deduction that is retroactive to cover 2021 taxes, those incumbents can campaign on having provided a tax cut, Ms. Roginsky said. But if they fail, their Republican opponents — like Thomas Kean Jr., a state senator who is challenging Mr. Malinowksi — will be able to use that against them, she said.Several House Democrats who represent affluent suburbs, including Mikie Sherrill, whose district includes part of Montclair, N.J., are expected to face stiff challenges in next year’s elections.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“It may not play well in Vermont or in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, but if you’re Nancy Pelosi, you understand that the road to your majority runs through places like suburban New Jersey and suburban California and suburban New York,” Ms. Roginsky said.Ben Dworkin, the director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., cited the unexpectedly close race for New Jersey governor this year. He noted how effective Mr. Murphy’s challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, was in playing to voters’ feelings about the state’s high taxes.“He hammered home that issue,” Mr. Dworkin said.Public polling leading up to that election showed that affordability in general was the “top issue” in the state, he said.Biden’s ​​Social Policy Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 6A proposal in flux. More

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      Just How Bad Is It Out There for Democrats?

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      Democratic support has plunged nationally in recent months. Exactly how far it has fallen is hotly debated in both parties.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.In the heady aftermath of Republicans winning the Virginia governorship this month, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader who hopes to become speaker after the 2022 midterm elections, made a bold claim at the Capitol.“If you’re a Democrat and President Biden won your seat by 16 points, you’re in a competitive race next year,” McCarthy declared. “You are no longer safe.”It was, by most measures, more bullish hyperbole than sincere prognostication. There are 276 House seats that Biden won by less than that — far more than Republicans have held in nearly a century. (As of now, Democrats hold a narrow 221-213 majority.)But there was also an undisputed truth undergirding McCarthy’s braggadocio: Democratic support has plunged nationally in recent months. The party’s loss in Virginia was just the most consequential example.Exactly how far and fast Democratic popularity has fallen is hotly debated in both parties.Virginia was one key data point: The election showed a Republican improvement of 12 percentage points, from Biden’s win in the state a year ago by 10 points to Democrats’ loss of the governorship this month by two points. The governor’s race in New Jersey swung toward Republicans by a similar margin.Still, few strategists, Democrat or Republican, believe the Democratic brand’s collapse nationally has been quite that complete and widespread.Among campaign insiders, one popular measurement that is closely tracked to gauge the mood of the electorate is the “generic ballot test.” That is when pollsters ask voters whom they would prefer to serve in Congress — a Democrat or a Republican, with no names attached.For years, Democrats continuously have held an edge in this metric.Until now.For the first time since January 2016, Republicans are now preferred, according to the FiveThirtyEight public polling average. FiveThirtyEight’s average has swung 4.6 points in the last six months toward the G.O.P.Just how bad is it out there for the Democrats? A Washington Post/ABC News poll last weekend showed Republicans in the strongest position on this measure in the poll’s four-decade history. On Thursday, a poll from Quinnipiac University of registered voters said 46 percent wanted G.O.P. control of the House, compared with 41 percent for Democrats.The same trend is showing up in private surveys. The National Republican Congressional Committee’s internal polling this month showed that Republicans in battleground districts had improved by seven percentage points since the beginning of the year. So-called generic Republicans began the year three points behind Democrats; now they are ahead by four points.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s generic ballot testing this month also shows Democrats trailing — albeit by two points. Party officials said that actually was an improvement from some other recent months. The D.C.C.C. declined to say what its polling showed at the start of the year.Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who is chairman of the House Republican campaign arm, said in an interview that the N.R.C.C.’s private polling at the start of the year measured Biden’s approval rating as 10 percentage points higher than his disapproval rating. Now, Emmer said, it’s the reverse: Biden’s disapproval is 10 points higher.Emmer offered a less hyperbolic version of McCarthy’s prediction of exactly how many Democrats are at risk in 2022. “The experts are telling me that any Democrat who sits in a seat Joe Biden won by 10 points or less a year ago is vulnerable,” Emmer said.That is still roughly 250 seats. “We will win the majority,” Emmer said flatly, “but we’re going to let the voters tell us how big that’s going to be.”The indicators for Democrats are not quite as sour everywhere.My colleague Nate Cohn wrote earlier this week in the newsletter about two House special elections in Ohio, where Democrats finished only about three percentage points behind Biden’s performance.That is erosion, but it’s not as politically catastrophic.And in Pennsylvania, a Supreme Court vacancy was contested with millions of dollars in spending. In some ways, the contest functionally pitted a generic Democrat against a generic Republican, because even the most engaged voters know little to nothing about candidates for the judiciary.The Republican candidate won by 2.6 percentage points — in a state Biden carried by 1.2 points in 2020. That represented a nearly four-point improvement for Republicans.To summarize, various data points show a range of possibility for Democratic decline: somewhere between three to 12 percentage points. None of the possible outcomes bode well for holding the House in 2022 or maintaining control of a Senate now equally divided between 50 Democratic-aligned senators and 50 Republicans.Perhaps what is giving Democrats the most solace is the calendar. It is 2021 still and not 2022.Democrats also hope they will have more to sell in the coming year — Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure package on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday, and a $1.85 trillion social policy and climate change bill is winding its way through Congress — and more time to sell it.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the D.C.C.C., has pushed for both the president and Democratic members of Congress to more forcefully pitch what they have already passed this year. As he told my colleague Trip Gabriel this month: “My message is ‘free Joe Biden.’ That campaign needs to start now before the next crisis takes over the news cycle.”Maloney said it was understandable that voters hadn’t given Democrats credit for the large economic recovery measure that passed earlier in the year or for the new infrastructure spending.“We don’t expect them to know if we don’t tell them,” he said this week on Capitol Hill. “So we’re going to tell them.”Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Pelosi confident of Build Back Better plan’s passage as bill advances

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      Pelosi confident of Build Back Better plan’s passage as bill advancesDemocrats have a slim majority on the $2tn package that would offer reduced costs for child care and prescription drugs House Democrats on Thursday moved to advance an ambitious $2tn domestic policy package that would overhaul large swaths of the American economy, with House speaker Nancy Pelosi confident they would ultimately deliver the second pillar of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.“This is historic; it is transformative,” Pelosi said during a press conference on Thursday, as lawmakers debated the measure on the House floor.After months of gridlock and intra-party warring, Pelosi expressed optimism that the House was on the cusp of passing the measure, just two weeks after the House gave final approval to a separate effort investing in the nation’s aging infrastructure.‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loomRead moreWith their paper-thin majority, Democrats can spare only a handful of defections on the package, called Build Back Better. Party leaders had hoped to pass the measure in tandem with the infrastructure bill, but a last minute objection from a small band of centrist Democrats concerned over the cost of the package derailed those hopes.Pelosi said the House would proceed to a vote on the measure following the release of a cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as requested by the group of centrists. The agency said it would complete the analysis on Thursday.The package, which would spend nearly $2tn over 10 years, is expansive: it aims to dramatically reduce child care costs, provide universal pre-kindergarten for children, lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, expand Medicare to cover hearing aids and provide the largest ever investment in efforts to combat the climate crisis.Biden argues that the plan is fully paid for by a slew of new proposals targeting millionaires and big corporations that currently pay nothing in federal tax.Even if the House approves the legislation on Thursday, it faces a complicated path forward in the Senate, where any single Democrat could upend the fragile state of negotiations.Two of the Senate’s 50 Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have not yet committed to supporting the package, even as negotiators reshaped the climate and tax portions of the package to meet their demands.Opening the debate on Thursday, Democrats touted the historic nature of the legislation. Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chair of the House budget panel, which played a critical role in shaping the package, said any single element of the bill alone would be significant, but together they represent the “most consequential legislation for American families since the New Deal”.“It’s a hell of a bill,” he said.Democrats and Republicans sparred on the House floor over the economics of the plan. Republicans assailed it as reckless spending that would exacerbate the trend of rising inflation and slow economic growth. Democrats argued the opposite, that the bill would actually combat inflation while relieving many of the financial stressors Americans face, such as the cost of child care and prescription drugs.Though many of the bill’s provisions remain broadly popular, including among Republicans, boiling economic discontent have sent Biden’s approval ratings tumbling.Despite a mass vaccination campaign, falling unemployment and legislative achievements that include the passage of a nearly $2tn relief package in March and the bipartisan public works bill this month, 63% of Americans say he has not accomplished much after 10 months in office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.Facing daunting challenges in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are hopeful that enacting Biden’s agenda in full will bring something of a reversal of fortunes for the party. TopicsUS politicsBiden administrationHouse of RepresentativesDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Inciting violence begets violence’: Paul Gosar censured over video aimed at AOC

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      ‘Inciting violence begets violence’: Paul Gosar censured over video aimed at AOCTrump loyalist removed from committee assignments for video showing him killing Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden The House delivered an extraordinary rebuke of congressman Paul Gosar on Wednesday, by formally censuring the Arizona Republican and removing his committee assignments for posting an animated video that depicted him killing Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Joe Biden.Gosar, a loyalist of Donald Trump and one of the most far-right members of Congress, sat in the chamber and listened as his colleagues debated the censure against him – the harshest form of punishment the chamber can mete short of expulsion.“This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech before the vote. “This is about what we are willing to accept.”“What is so hard about saying that this is wrong?” she asked.03:04The sanction was approved on a largely party-line vote, 223 to 207, with all Democrats and just two Republicans – Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois – voting in favor. Gosar was also stripped of his membership on the House Oversight Committee, where he serves alongside Ocasio-Cortez, and the Natural Resources Committee, which deals with issues critical to his state.Shortly after the vote, Gosar was called to stand in the “well” of the chamber as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi read aloud the resolution. The formal ritual, intended as a public rebuke of the censured member, was over moments later. Republicans encircled Gosar, shaking his hand and patting him on the back.Gosar posted the video earlier this month from his congressional Twitter account, asking, “Any anime fans out there?” The video, which Gosar called a “cartoon” and has since removed, depicts the Arizona congressman as an anime character slashing another figure with the face of Ocasio-Cortez in the neck with a sword. The cartoon version of Gosar then menaces his swords at Biden.The censure comes just 10 months after pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January hunting for lawmakers and threatening to “hang” the vice-president. As supporters of continue to Trump lash out and threaten Republican lawmakers who they deem insufficiently loyal, party leaders have become increasingly tolerant of violent rhetoric within their ranks.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, condemned Republicans’ overwhelming silence as “outrageous”.“These actions demand a response,” she said.House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republican leaders have refused to publicly condemn Gosar for sharing the video and urged their caucus to oppose the sanction.McCarthy called the censure vote an “abuse of power” by Democrats, designed to distract from their legislative agenda and other national issues, such as rising inflation and immigration. He also accused Democrats of imposing a double standard that failed to hold members of their own caucus accountable for controversial rhetoric.Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California who introduced the resolution, said partisanship was not the issue.“Inciting violence begets violence,” said Speier, a survivor of the 1978 Jonestown massacre. “Let me be clear, if a Democrat did the same thing, I would introduce the same resolution.”“Threatening and showing the killing of a member of this House. Can’t that appall you?” asked House majority leader Steny Hoyer, staring at the Republican side of the aisle. “Do you have no shame?”Far from being chastened, Gosar was defiant.“No matter how much the left tries to quiet me, I will continue to speak out,” he said. He did not apologize and instead insisted that the video was not intended as a threat.Democrats argued that depictions of violence and violent rhetoric from public officials can incite actual violence, pointing to the insurrection at the US Capitol as an example.“We cannot dismiss representative Gosar’s violent fantasies as a joke, because in this decade, in this American, someone’s going to take him seriously,” said congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat from Pennsylvania.Gosar, a dentist who was first elected in 2010, has been tied to white nationalist and rightwing militia groups. In Arizona, his own siblings have appeared in campaign videos urging voters to remove their brother from office. On 6 January Gosar objected to the certification of Arizona’s electors for Biden. In the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol, the Arizona congressman amplified the “Big Lie” conspiracy that baselessly claims the election was stolen from Trump. He has since defended the rioters and falsely claimed that the insurrection was a leftwing provocation.In its history, the House has censured members on nearly two dozen occasions, only six of which occurred in the last century.The most recent censure was in 2010, after a lengthy congressional investigation found congressman Charlie Rangel, a Democrat of New York, guilty of a series of ethics violations. Pelosi presided over the censure of Rangel, a member of her own caucus, and a majority of his party supported the sanction.Earlier this year, House Democrats took the unprecedented step of ousting Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Trump ally from Georgia, from her committee assignments for spreading dangerous and hateful conspiracy theories.Ocasio-Cortez has tied Gosar’s behavior to a larger pattern of abuse and harassment by Republican members of Congress. In a floor speech last year, Ocasio-Cortez publicly denounced congressman Ted Yoho of Florida for calling her a “fucking bitch” during a heated exchange over rising crime rates and poverty.In the resolution, Democrats excoriate Gosar for targeting Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress.“Violence against women in politics is a global phenomenon meant to silence women and discourage them from seeking positions of authority and participating in public life, with women of color disproportionately impacted,” it states.TopicsHouse of RepresentativesAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Wyoming Republican party stops recognizing Liz Cheney as member

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      Wyoming Republican party stops recognizing Liz Cheney as memberState party votes to reject congresswoman after she voted to impeach Donald Trump over insurrection role The Wyoming Republican party will no longer recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the GOP in a rebuke over her vote to impeach Donald Trump over his role in the 6 January insurrection.The vote by the state party central committee followed votes by local GOP officials in about one-third of Wyoming’s 23 counties to no longer recognize Cheney as a Republican.The vote is the group’s second formal rebuke for her criticism of Trump. In February, the Wyoming GOP central committee voted overwhelmingly to censure Cheney, Wyoming’s lone US representative.Cheney has described her vote to impeach Trump as an act of conscience in defense of the constitution. Trump “incited the mob” and “lit the flame” of that day’s events, Cheney said after the attack.It was “laughable” for anybody to suggest Cheney isn’t a “conservative Republican”, said Cheney’s spokesperson, Jeremy Adler, on Monday.“She is bound by her oath to the constitution. Sadly, a portion of the Wyoming GOP leadership has abandoned that fundamental principle and instead allowed themselves to be held hostage to the lies of a dangerous and irrational man,” Adler added.Cheney is now facing at least four Republican opponents in the 2022 primary, including the Cheyenne attorney Harriet Hageman, whom Trump has endorsed. Hageman in a statement called the latest state GOP central committee vote “fitting”, the Casper Star-Tribune reported.“Liz Cheney stopped recognizing what Wyomingites care about a long time ago. When she launched her war against President Trump, she completely broke with where we are as a state,” Hageman said.In May, Republicans in Washington DC removed Cheney from a top congressional GOP leadership position after she continued to criticize Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him re-election.Cheney had survived an earlier attempt to remove her as chairwoman of the House Republican conference, a role that shapes GOP messaging in the chamber.TopicsRepublicansWyomingHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressUS politicsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican senator won’t condemn Trump for defending chants of ‘Hang Mike Pence’

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      Republican senator won’t condemn Trump for defending chants of ‘Hang Mike Pence’
      John Barrasso, Senate No 3, dodges Capitol attack questions
      Retiring representative Gonzalez predicts new Trump coup
      Is Trump planning a 2024 coup?
      A senior Senate Republican refused four times on Sunday to condemn Donald Trump for defending supporters who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” during the deadly assault on the US Capitol on 6 January.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreTrump made the comments about his vice-president, who did not yield to pressure to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, in an interview with ABC’s chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl.John Barrasso of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, appeared on ABC’s This Week. He was asked: “Can your party tolerate a leader who defends murderous chants against his own vice-president?”“Well,” said Barrasso. “Let me just say, the Republican party is incredibly united right now and … I think the more that the Democrats and the press becomes obsessed with President Trump, I think the better it is for the Republican party. President Trump brings lots of energy to the party, he’s an enduring force.”He also said the party was focused on elections and policy debate, not the past.His host, George Stephanopoulos, said: “So you have no problem with the president saying, ‘Hang Mike Pence’ is common sense?”“I was with Mike Pence in the Senate chamber during 6 January,” Barrasso said. “And what happened was they quickly got Vice-President Pence out of there, certainly a lot faster than they removed the senators. I believe he was safe the whole time.“I didn’t hear any of those chants. I don’t believe that he did either. And Vice-President Pence came back into the chamber that night and certified the election.”Stephanopoulous said: “We just played the chants. I’m asking you if you can tolerate the president saying ‘Hang Mike Pence’ is common sense.”“It’s not common sense,” Barrasso said, before pivoting to Trump’s lie that the election was subject to widespread voter fraud.“There are issues in every election,” he said. “I voted to certify the election. And what we’ve seen on this election, there are areas that needed to be looked into, like what we saw in Pennsylvania. We all want fair and free elections. That’s where we need to go for the future.”Stephanopoulos said: “But you’re not going to criticise President Trump for those views?”Barrasso said: “I don’t agree with President Trump on everything. I agree with him on the policies that have brought us the best economy in my lifetime. And I’m going to continue to support those policies.”Karl released more snippets of his interview with Trump. Asked if reports he told Pence “you can be a patriot or you can be a pussy” were accurate, Trump said: “I wouldn’t dispute that.”Trump also said he thought Pence could have sent electoral college results back to the House – the overwhelming majority of constitutional scholars say he could not – and said: “I don’t know that I can forgive him.”“He did the wrong thing,” Trump said. “Very nice, man. I like him a lot. I like his family so much, but … it was a tragic mistake.”Trump’s flirtation with another White House run has seen critics within the GOP subject to primary challenges, political ostracisation and even death threats.Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio voted for Trump’s impeachment over the Capitol attack. Like Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of only two Republicans on the House select committee investigating 6 January, Gonzalez will retire next year.He told CNN’s State of the Union he feared Trump was formulating plans for a coup.“I think any objective observer would come to this conclusion: that he has evaluated what went wrong on 6 January. Why is it that he wasn’t able to steal the election? Who stood in his way?“Every single American institution is just run by people. And you need the right people to make the right decision in the most difficult times. He’s going systematically through the country and trying to remove those people and install people who are going to do exactly what he wants them to do, who believe the big lie, who will go along with anything he says.“I think it’s all pushing towards one of two outcomes. He either wins legitimately, which he may do, or if he if he loses again, he’ll just try to steal it but he’ll try to steal it with his people in those positions. And that’s then the most difficult challenge for our country. It’s the question, do the institutions hold again? Do they hold with a different set of people in place? I hope so, but you can’t guarantee it.”Gonzalez said he “despised” most Biden policies and would never vote Democratic.Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguishedRead moreBut he said: “The country can’t survive torching the constitution. You have to hold fast to the constitution … and the cold, hard truth is Donald Trump led us into a ditch on 6 January.“… I see fundamentally a person who shouldn’t be able to hold office again because of what he did around 6 January, but I also see somebody who’s an enormous political loser. I don’t know why anybody who wants to win elections would follow that … If he’s the nominee again in ’24 I will do everything I can to make sure he doesn’t win.“… 6 January was the line that can’t be crossed. 6 January was an unconstitutional attempt led by the president of the United States to overturn an American election and reinstall himself in power illegitimately. That’s fallen-nation territory, that’s third-world country territory. My family left Cuba to avoid that fate. I will not let it happen here.”Trump issued a statement on Sunday, repeating lies about election fraud and alluding to the indictment of his former strategist Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, for ignoring a subpoena from the 6 January committee, and legal jeopardy faced by others including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.“American patriots are not going to allow this subversion of justice to continue,” Trump said, adding: “Our country is going to hell!”TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpRepublicansUS politicsUS SenateUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More