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      Armed … auditors? The IRS becomes the latest target of GOP misinformation

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      Armed … auditors? The IRS becomes the latest target of GOP misinformationSome Republicans have spread false information about how new funds will be used by IRS, stoking outrage and alarming experts The picture that the top Republican painted was both vivid and terrifying. He warned that additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service would lead to armed auditors banging down front doors to squeeze hard-earned dollars from working Americans.“Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa with these?” Senator Chuck Grassley said on Fox News last week.TopicsUS newsAmerica’s dirty divideUS politicsBiden administrationRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      What does the future hold for Liz Cheney? Politics Weekly America | podcast

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      This week, Joan E Greve speaks to the former chair of Republican National Committee Michael Steele about the defeat of Liz Cheney in the Wyoming primary, the state of the GOP after she leaves and why Donald Trump should fear what she does next

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      Archive: NBC, MSNBC, C-Span Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Rick Scott: don’t apply for IRS jobs because Republicans will defund them

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      Rick Scott: don’t apply for IRS jobs because Republicans will defund themRepublican senator also claims in open letter that Democrats plan ‘to defund the actual police and create an IRS super-police force’ The Republican senator Rick Scott has warned Americans not to apply for new positions with the Internal Revenue Service because he says his party will defund them if it takes Congress later this year.Scott, from Florida and head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, also misrepresented the nature of the positions in several ways. He claimed in an open letter that Democrats planned “to defund the actual police and create an IRS super-police force”.That, Scott said, would “not be tolerated by the American people”.But such claims, in response to Democrats’ including funding for new IRS roles in their new domestic spending bill, have been debunked.Referring to spending provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by Joe Biden this week, he wrote: “Democrats in Congress recently passed a bill … which provides $80bn in additional taxpayer money and drastically grows the workforce of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by adding roughly 87,000 new agents.“… This massive expansion of the IRS will make it larger than Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Customs and Border Protection and the state department combined.”According to Politifact: “If the IRS hired all 87,000 new employees at once, and no existing employees left the agency, the IRS would still be about 34,000 employees smaller than the Pentagon, state department, FBI and US Customs and Border Protection combined, according to the best available figures.”Scott also claimed: “the IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them.”As supposed evidence, he included an ad with his letter to voters that political factcheckers have said is being wildly misrepresented. The job ad, for IRS Criminal Investigation agents (a very specific role within the agency), said applicants must be “willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments”.The Associated Press declared of the ad:“A legitimate job ad for special agents within the small law enforcement division of the IRS that works on criminal investigations is being misrepresented online, officials and experts say. The job description does not apply to most potential new employees that the IRS will hire in the coming years. The vast majority of IRS workers are not armed.”Regarding the actual use of the new funds, NBC News reported a memo from Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, to the IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig, that said the new funding would be used to “enforce the tax laws against high net-worth individuals, large corporations, and complex partnerships who today pay far less than they owe”.Scott is a high net-worth individual. In 1997, his healthcare company reached a $1.7bn settlement of federal charges of fraudulent billing and practices. As reported by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Scott emerged “with $300m in stock, a $5.1m severance and a $950,000-per-year consulting contract for five years”.On Thursday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, said: “Hmm, we wonder why the richest man in Congress is so opposed to more IRS agents?”Scott also told voters the new IRS positions would not “offer you the long-term job stability you may expect … put another way: this will be a short-term gig.“Republicans will take over the House and Senate in January, and I can promise you that we will immediately do everything in our power to defund this insane and unwarranted expansion of government into the lives of the American people.”Republicans are favoured to prosper in the November midterms, as the opposition usually does in a president’s first term in office. But successes including passage of the Inflation Reduction Act may have increased Democrats’ chances of holding one or both houses of Congress.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney was purged by the cult of Trumpism. Who is next? | Richard Wolffe

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      Liz Cheney was purged by the cult of Trumpism. Who is next?Richard WolffeThere’s only one purge the country really needs, and that is one that goes all the way to Mar-a-Lago Liz Cheney is both the most coldly calculating and the most principled politician in the land. At least, that’s what Liz Cheney and a whole host of political pundits would have you believe.How else can you explain her suicidal mission to confront the all-powerful, almost-indicted former president who trashes the Espionage Act as easily as the constitution.Of course she stands for democracy, free and fair elections, and all the rest of that ballyhoo. But her resounding defeat in Tuesday’s primary in the near-empty state of Wyoming must mean Something More.So Liz Cheney is obviously, naturally, running for president. Or at least running to stop Trump becoming president. Or at the very, very least, running to become Abraham Lincoln.“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the house before he won the most important election of all,” Cheney said in a concession speech that sounded more like the kickoff of a presidential campaign.“Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”Stirring stuff. But as campaign strategies go, Cheney’s path to the presidency is even less likely than Lincoln’s. Two years ago she won her Republican primary with 73% of her party, and the general election with 69% of the state. This week she failed to crack the 30% mark.Losing more than 40 points of support among your own voters in your home state does not represent a strong foundation for a national campaign.Yes, it’s true – to echo Ronald Reagan’s quip about the Democrats – that Liz Cheney did not leave the Republican party; the party left her.But the Fateful Tale of Liz Cheney is not about whether the Trumpist fever will ever break on the right wingnut fringe of American politics. It’s not a measure of whether Trump is stronger or weaker, closer to prison or the presidency.This story is about the animating nature of Trumpism: the lifeblood of the cult itself. It may have no principle or purpose, but it sure knows how to keep itself busy.In a traditional cult, public adoration of the iconic leader might be enough to keep the mob together. And yes there are plenty of grotesquely Trumpy memes polluting the internet.But this curiously pigmented icon represents a perpetual test for his loving fans and the elected officials who pander to them. Beyond the hush money to porn stars, there is the cozying up to foreign dictators and the nuclear secrets in his basement. Ideology and consistency are almost entirely absent.If you stand for nothing, what are your followers to stand behind?Trump is the least lawful lover of law and order. He is both pro-choice and anti-abortion, pro-outsourcing to China and anti-trade with China, a hawk against Iran and a dove towards Russia, an American nationalist who somehow marries foreigners and buries them on his golf course.This presents something of a challenge to the lickspittles who follow him. You can wait for the latest pronouncement and endorsement, but it’s hard to show your undying enthusiasm for such an unprincipled, unpredictable and untruthful man.That’s why every good cult of personality needs more than a test of loyalty. It desperately needs a good purge. It lives and breathes with the energy of the eternal hunt for the enemy within.Mussolini purged tens of thousands of Italians from his fascist party in the middle of the war for transgressions that ranged from refusing to join his militias to being only lukewarm in enthusiasm for the little man. Peron embarked on a purge of his own party around the same time in Argentina, before his Peronist successors extended the purge in their dirty war against leftists a few decades later.It’s not enough just to love the great leader. You need to demonstrate that love by finding your secret enemies and expunging them from the cult.That’s how a charlatan like Harriet Hageman can seek redemption in Wyoming. Just six years ago, Hageman was – like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and the rest of those principled, family values conservatives – disgusted by Donald Trump.She fought hard to stop his nomination, well after he had won the primary contests of 2016. The party would be weakened, she argued, by “somebody who is racist and xenophobic”. Now she says he is “the greatest president of my lifetime”.At this rate, there won’t be enough superlatives to shower on the DeSantis administration.It’s no coincidence that the power of the purge was a feature of Trump’s time in office. According to Jared Kushner’s execrable new memoir, Breaking History, he was forced to purge several figures in Trump’s inner circle of hell, including a couple of chiefs of staff, a few political strategists and a secretary of state.This is something of a travesty for the true Trumpists, such as Peter Navarro, a trade adviser whose grasp of rational thought is as shaky as his grasp of international economics. Navarro describes Kushner as the true rat in the kitchen, or as he puts it, a “run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve”.The great orthogonal irony of the purging of Liz Cheney is that this kind of sack-based ferret fight was perfected by one Dick Cheney during the previous Republican presidency. It was old man Cheney whose cabal of loyalists did so much to undermine the technocratic Republican establishment so that he could happily invade Iraq in a cakewalk. That was before they turned on one another for their sheer incompetence.Party purges are hard to sustain without a Stalinist grip on power. Instead they tend to consume themselves in the shape of a circular firing squad.Say what you like about Trump’s threat to democracy, but right now the purger-in-chief is consumed with uncovering the rat who told the world about his secret stash of nuclear secrets.It could have been the Secret Service. It could have been the domestic help. Or it could be someone even closer to Trump.One thing is clear: the purge that ended Liz Cheney must not stop in Wyoming. For the sake of our democracy, it needs to go all the way to Mar-a-Lago.People say there’s an old New York Democrat down there who doesn’t believe half the things that come out of his own mouth.
      Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionLiz CheneyDonald TrumpDonald Trump JrRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      What will it mean for Trump – and Biden – if Liz Cheney runs in 2024?

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      What will it mean for Trump – and Biden – if Liz Cheney runs in 2024?Trump Republican adversary could make a symbolic impact in the ‘moderate’ party lane – but she could also take votes from Biden When Liz Cheney left the podium at a Wyoming ranch on Tuesday night, clapped and cheered by supporters, a Tom Petty song boomed out beneath the Teton mountains: “Well, I won’t back down / No, I won’t back down / You could stand me up at the gates of hell / But I won’t back down.”The woman who has emerged as Donald Trump’s most implacable Republican adversary had suffered a landslide defeat in a primary election to decide Wyoming’s only seat in the US House of Representatives.But unlike the former president, who loves to play victim, Cheney refused to dwell in political martyrdom after her act of self-sacrifice. In a 15-minute speech beside a dozen hay bales, a red vintage Chevrolet truck and four US national flags, she made clear that, while Trump had won the battle, the war for the soul of the party rages on.“This primary election is over,” Cheney acknowledged to a crowd that, with aching symbolism, included her father, former vice-president Dick Cheney. “But now the real work begins.”She invoked Abraham Lincoln, who lost congressional elections before ascending to the presidency and preserving the union. The vice-chair of the congressional January 6 committee warned that Trump and his enablers pose an existential threat to democracy and urged Americans of all stripes to unite.To many in the crowd – who had wined and dined in a hospitality tent with a country and western band for entertainment – it sounded awfully like the launch of a presidential campaign.Heath Mayo, 32, a lawyer, said: “On the question about the future of the party, there are few people making an argument counter to the prevailing Trumpism argument. She’s the only one that can make it. I hope she runs for president in 2024. She needs to be on that stage making that argument again, even if she loses. Keep making the argument.”Carol Adelman, 76, who hired a 22-year-old Cheney for the US Agency for International Development, said that “of course” she would like see Cheney run for the White House in 2024. Alan Reid, 60, who works in finance, agreed: “Who else? Who’s better? I don’t see anybody from any party that shows the leadership that Liz shows.”Cheney’s political future became a little clearer on Wednesday when she launched a leadership political action committee with the name “The Great Task”. Her spokesperson told the Politico website: “In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic.”In a TV interview, Cheney confirmed that she is “thinking about” a run for president in 2024 and will make decision “in the coming months”.As the fall of the Cheney dynasty in Wyoming demonstrated, she would stand almost no chance of winning a Republican primary. But if the field is crowded and divided, for example between Trump, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and former vice-president Mike Pence, she could make a symbolic impact in the “moderate” lane.And as the January 6 hearings have shown, Cheney would relish nothing more than standing on a debate stage with Trump and prosecuting the case against him directly in prime time.Alternatively, the three-time congresswoman could run as an independent candidate in the general election. This could peel crucial moderate votes away from Trump in battleground states, helping his Democratic opponent, presumably President Joe Biden.But there might also be a danger that she would take votes from Biden, in particular those crossover Republicans who supported him in 2020 because of their hostility to Trump. Democrats would be anxious to avoid a repeat of 2000 when the third party “spoiler” Ralph Nader was blamed for costing Al Gore the election.Cheney, who has vowed to do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, would be equally wary of such a scenario unless, as some critics suspect, ambition and ego are competing with her nobler impulses.Robert Talisse, an expert in contemporary political philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote in an email: “If Cheney seeks the GOP nomination against Trump, she’ll be crushed. If Trump’s not seeking the nomination, he’ll still get to select the nominee.“If she runs as an independent against Trump, she’ll probably siphon off a significant number of conservative voters who won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, but also can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump.”The calculation would take place in the context that reports of Trump’s weakening grip on the Republican party have been greatly exaggerated. She is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him: eight have lost their primary or retired, while only two stand a chance of surviving to the next Congress.Indeed, as Cheney exits the stage, at least for now, Sarah Palin, who paved the way for Trump, is making a comeback. On Tuesday, with his endorsement, she advanced to the November general election in the race for Alaska’s lone House seat. The journeys of these two fiftysomething women neatly sum up where the Republican party is at.But as Cheney noted in her remarks, pro-Trump election deniers are rising all over the country. It has proved a winning formula in primaries that reward the loudest voices but could yet backfire on the party in the midterm elections, where centrist voters are put off by extremism. Republicans may blow their chances in the Senate with several radical candidates who are heavy on celebrity but light on gravitas.For now, Trump will feel that Tuesday demonstrated that revenge is a dish best served Maga. But Adam Kinzinger, Cheney’s Republican colleague on the January 6 committee, is confident that she will not yield. Echoing Tom Petty, he told the MSNBC network: “She’s very determined, very dogged, and she will chase Donald Trump to the gates of hell.”TopicsLiz CheneyUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2024US midterm elections 2022analysisReuse this content More

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      Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?

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      Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?The lawyer appears to be the ideal candidate to carry Trump’s rightwing banner into the midterms – but she hasn’t always been aboard his train A conservative lawyer with a passion for thwarting environmentalists, Harriet Hageman would appear to be an ideal candidate to carry Donald Trump’s rightwing banner into November’s midterm elections.On Tuesday night she beat the incumbent and member of Wyoming’s political royalty, Liz Cheney, for the thinly populated western state’s solitary seat in the US House of Representatives.Liz Cheney considers run for president after Republican primary defeatRead moreAfter trouncing Cheney, Trump’s most vocal critic within the Republican party, Hageman, 59, has a clear run at election success. In an overwhelmingly red state, Cheney defeated her Democratic challenger in 2020 by a margin of almost three votes to one.Hageman, however, has not always been such an enthusiastic passenger aboard the Trump train.Her stance has shifted from calling him “the weakest candidate” in the 2016 primaries, when she attempted to help maneuver the Texas senator Ted Cruz into the Republican presidential nomination, to “the greatest president of my lifetime” when she eagerly embraced Trump’s endorsement as his chosen candidate to topple Cheney, his latest bete noire.Neither is this her first foray into politics. She was a losing candidate in Wyoming’s 2018 contest for state governor, finishing a distant third to the eventual winner, Mark Gordon, and one other in the Republican primary, with barely 20% of the vote.Hageman’s political positions are rooted in the minutiae of her career as a trial lawyer representing Wyoming’s ranchers, and advocating for energy industries against federal protections for water, land and the endangered gray wolf.A 1989 graduate of the University of Wyoming’s college of law, her most successful case, according to the New York Times, was persuading a judge in 2003 to block regulations from Bill Clinton’s presidency protecting millions of acres of national forests from road-building, mining and other development.She is a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry, telling supporters at a campaign event earlier this month that coal was an “affordable, clean, acceptable resource that we all should be using”.She has previously also angered activist groups including Defenders of the Wild for her positions on endangered species.In 2017, as an attorney for the ultra-conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, she praised a US appeals court for cutting through “emotional arguments” and upholding the delisting of gray wolves.The following year, the Sierra Club accused Wyoming of “waging a war” on wolves through hunting and allowing a “scorched earth” policy that threatened the species’ recovery from near-oblivion.Hageman was late in her campaign in converting to Trump’s false assertion that his 2020 election defeat by Joe Biden was fraudulent.In her victory speech on Tuesday night, she said: “Wyoming has spoken on behalf of everyone who is concerned that the game is becoming more and more rigged against them.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022WyomingUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpLiz CheneyfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney considers run for president after Republican primary defeat

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      Liz Cheney considers run for president after Republican primary defeatWyoming congresswoman says ‘It’s something I’m thinking about’ after losing to Trump-backed challenger Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has announced she is considering her own run for the White House in an all-out effort to prevent Donald Trump from winning another term as US president.Liz Cheney loses Wyoming Republican primary to Trump-endorsed rivalRead moreCheney decisively lost her Republican primary race on Tuesday night and will lose her seat in the US Congress.The Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman beat Cheney by almost 40 points as Wyoming voters took revenge for her voting to impeach Trump and for focusing on her role on the January 6 House select committee.The panel, of which Cheney is vice-chair and one of only two Republicans, is investigating Trump’s role in fomenting the insurrection at the US Capitol by his supporters on 6 January 2021, in a vain attempt to stay in office following his defeat by Joe Biden.Cheney was asked on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday morning whether she was thinking of running for president. She did not respond to the question directly but, when pressed a second time, admitted she was.“It’s something I’m thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” she said.On Tuesday night she said she would “do whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office”. After her loss to Hageman by almost 60,000 votes was confirmed, aides revealed the former House number three planned to set up her own political action committee.“In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our republic, and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,” Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler told Politico Playbook.NBC confirmed on Wednesday that it will be named The Great Task, which was the title of Cheney’s final pitch to Wyoming voters, and features in the closing sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.On Wednesday, Cheney laid out her priorities for the next few months before leaving the House in January.Beyond “representing the people of Wyoming”, she said: “We have a tremendous amount of work left to do on the January 6 committee. And also, though, I’m going to be making sure that people all around this country understand the stakes of what we’re facing, understand the extent to which we’ve now got one major political party, my party, which has really become a cult of personality.“We’ve got to get this party back to a place where we’re embracing the values and the principles on which it was founded. And talking about fundamental issues of civics, fundamental issues of what does it mean to be a constitutional republic.”Cheney, daughter of former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney, attacked both Trump and the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, the architect of her ousting from the party’s House leadership in May 2021 after she denounced the former president’s false claims of a stolen election. She expressed her belief that “the Republican party today is in very bad shape”.“Donald Trump has betrayed Republican voters. He’s lied to them. Those who support him have lied to them and and they’re using people’s patriotism against them,” she said.“They’re preying on people’s patriotism. Kevin McCarthy made his decision a few weeks after January 6, knowing what he knew about Donald Trump’s role in the assault on the Capitol, when he went to Mar-a-Lago and said we’re going to welcome him back into the party. To me, that’s indefensible.“I believe that Donald Trump continues to pose a very grave threat, a risk to our republic, and I think defeating him is going to require a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and independents. That’s what I intend to be a part of.”To some in the crowd of supporters on Tuesday night – gathered in an open field beside a red vintage Chevrolet truck, four US national flags, a dozen hay bales and a hospitality tent – it already sounded like the launch of a presidential campaign.They welcomed the prospect out of both principle and pragmatism: Cheney would have little chance of winning but could peel crucial votes away from Trump.Heath Mayo, 32, a lawyer, said: “There are few people making an argument counter to the prevailing Trumpism argument. She’s the only one that can make it. I certainly hope she’s not done. I hope she runs for president in 2024.”Carol Adelman, who hired a 22-year-old Cheney for the US Agency for International Development, noted that the congresswoman received a John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award from the JFK Library earlier this year. “We need that, not the profiles in cowardice that the Republican party has today. Ultimately, they will go.”Alan Reid, 60, who works in finance, said of a possible presidential run: “Who else? Who’s better? I don’t see anybody from any party that shows the leadership that Liz shows.”But a Cheney candidacy could pose a dilemma for Democrats who recall that she voted in line with Trump’s position 93% of the time during his presidency, according to the FiveThirtyEight website.Marci Shaver, a registered Democrat, switched to Republican in 2016 so she could vote against Cheney; this time she switched to Republican so she could vote for Cheney.She explained: “I was so impressed with her integrity on the committee and the way she has stood firm, knowing damn well she was going to lose this election. I was born and raised here and this is the kind of integrity that Wyomingites, when I was growing, totally respected. For them to dismiss that in this election just breaks my heart.”Bill Sniffin, publisher emeritus of the Cowboy State Daily news site in Wyoming, wrote in a blogpost: “Liz Cheney’s concession speech sounds a lot more like the announcement of someone planning to run for president in 2024 than an admission of defeat back here in 2022.”He added: “This is not the end of Liz Cheney. This is the beginning. Stay tuned.”Trump remains the favorite among Republicans for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More