Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican says party leader dismissed his warnings of Capitol violence

      by

      The Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger said on Monday he warned the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, about potential violence at the US Capitol on 6 January, but McCarthy dismissed his concerns.“A few days before Jan 6 , our GOP members had a conference call,” Kinzinger said on Twitter. “I told Kevin that his words and our party’s actions would lead to violence on January 6th. Kevin dismissively responded with ‘OK Adam, operator next question.’ And we got violence.”Five people died amid and after scenes of chaos at the Capitol, as supporters told by Donald Trump to “fight like hell” in his attempt to overturn his election defeat broke into the building, in some cases allegedly looking for lawmakers to kill.On Monday, Kinzinger also said he had considered trying to force a vote of no-confidence in McCarthy after the insurrection.“I don’t consider him to be speaking on behalf of the Republican party any more,” Kinzinger told Bloomberg News, adding: “I actually thought the person that should have their leadership challenged was Kevin McCarthy after 6 January because that’s why this all happened.”Kinzinger said he abandoned such plans to keep the focus on the impeachment vote against Trump which followed the insurrection. Ten House Republicans voted with Democrats to impeach Trump for inciting the riot but only seven Republican senators followed, too few to return a guilty verdict.Liz is the one playing defense, for what? Telling the truth and not ransacking the Capitol on 6 January?McCarthy did not immediately comment.Kinzinger has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump and others peddling the “big lie” that there was widespread fraud in the presidential election.But like most of his party McCarthy has sided with a former president whose grip on the party seems set to strengthen this week with the ejection from leadership of Liz Cheney, a Wyoming conservative who has also spoken against him.Kinzinger has been one of Cheney’s few Republican defenders in Congress. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said: “Liz is the one playing defense, for what? What’s she playing defense for? Telling the truth and not ransacking the Capitol on 6 January?“If you think about it from the forest, it’s ludicrous that she’s having to defend herself. That’s insane, but that’s where we are.”Speaking to CBS News on Sunday, Kinzinger said his party was “going to get rid of Liz Cheney because they’d much rather pretend that the conspiracy is either real or not confront it than to actually confront it and maybe have to take the temporary licks to save this party and the long-term [future] of this country”.McCarthy told Fox Business he was endorsing the New York representative Elise Stefanik to replace Cheney in “a position in leadership. As conference chair, you have one of the most critical jobs as a messenger going forward.”Trump weighed in on Monday, issuing a statement in which he said: “The House GOP has a massive opportunity to upgrade this week from warmonger Liz Cheney to gifted communicator Elise Stefanik.”The “warmonger” jibe was in part aimed at Cheney’s father, the former vice-president Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the Iraq war.“We need someone in leadership who has experience flipping districts from blue to red as we approach the important 2022 midterms,” Trump added, “and that’s Elise! She knows how to win, which is what we need!”Trump formally endorsed Stefanik last week. In congressional votes to recognize electoral college results, held in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, Stefanik objected to results from Pennsylvania. She did not object to results from Arizona, as many other Republicans did.Before the votes, she indicated plans to object to results in Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. No senator supported challenges to results from those states, however, so none were mounted.Cheney is set to be replaced in a closed vote on Wednesday. On Sunday, Kinzinger also compared the trajectory of his party to the sinking of the Titanic, saying leaders were not acting responsibly.“We’re like in the middle of this slow sink,” he said. “We have a band playing on the deck, telling everybody it’s fine, and meanwhile as I’ve said, Donald Trump is running around trying to find women’s clothing to get on the first lifeboat.“I think there’s a few of us saying, ‘Guys, this is not good, not just for the future of the party, but this is not good for the future of this country.’”On Monday a new report warned that many lawmakers are receiving threats and worry for their safety after the Capitol was so easily breached by extremist Trump supporters.The Capitol police force was hobbled by inadequateintelligence gathering ahead of time, according to the inspector general, Michael Bolton.The House is holding hearings this week on what went wrong duringthe insurrection, as lawmakers contemplate overhauling congressional security.The Capitol police said that there has been a 107% increase in threatsagainst members of Congress this year compared to 2020 and “providedthe unique threat environment we currently live in, the department isconfident the number of cases will continue to increase”. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Pro-worker’ Republicans are status quo toadies cloaked as populists | Bhaskar Sunkara

      by

      JD Vance, author of the bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, wants to be a senator. He’s fresh off a trip to visit Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago and he’s solicited the support of the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel has contributed $10m to a new Pac – Protect Ohio Values – created to support a possible Vance bid for the Senate seat of the retiring Republican Rob Portman next November.While elite donations roll in, Vance is playing up his rightwing-populist credentials to the Republican base, praising Tucker Carlson as “the only powerful figure who consistently challenges elite dogma” and complaining about corporations who have opposed state voter suppression efforts. But Vance has a secret he doesn’t want voters to find out about: in form, and substance, he’s a 1990s Clintonite.Behind a mantra of “opportunity, responsibility, and community” and through institutions like the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Clinton pushed back against liberal orthodoxy within his party. When running for president in 1992, in the same breath he called for an end to “welfare as we know it” and described his hardscrabble upbringing in the little country town of Hope, Arkansas. He admonished “deadbeat fathers” and reminded people that “governments don’t raise children; parents do”, while lamenting the fact that battles for social justice were being lost at home. In other words, he had his cake and ate it too – appealing to popular disgust with inequality, while supporting the economic policies that fueled that inequality, and blaming America’s problems on “welfare cheats” and corporate greed in equal measure.Clinton and the Clintonites – the so-called New Democrats – rejected both Reaganism and welfare-state liberalism. They offered a balanced-budget populism, hoping that free trade and deregulation would boost growth and spur job creation. But unlike Reagan, Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and increased the earned income credit as a mild redistributive measure. As Clinton put it: “Trickle-down economics has sure failed.” Rather than restore government programs, however, he said that the government was “in the way” and had to be radically streamlined. Those within the Clinton administration who hoped to invest in public infrastructure and expand social goods, like the labor secretary Robert Reich, were ignored. The president told voters he could feel their pain, but in practice he preferred the market (and people’s bootstraps) to deliver relief.They offer Americans rhetoric about elites and hard work, but don’t actually take power away from those elitesToday, some of those searching for a new Third Way between a leftward-moving Democratic party and traditional business conservatism have found a home in the post-Trump Republican party. Hillbilly Elegy effectively took Reagan and Clinton-era rhetoric about the culture of poverty and applied it more generally – not just to black Americans, but to poor whites, as well. In the book, Vance describes how his grandparents escaped Appalachian poverty by moving to Middletown, Ohio, during the postwar boom. They and others found good manufacturing jobs and adopted an ethos of hard work and community. But by the time Vance was around, the jobs were gone, poverty was soaring, and drug abuse was rampant.In “a town where 30% of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week”, Vance complained, he could not find “a single person aware of his own laziness”. Yet instead of seeing the Middletown’s malaise as rooted primarily in economic collapse and the failures of free-market policies, Vance mused about a Scots-Irish American culture “that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” Vance wrote. “We buy giant TVs and iPads.”Hillbilly Elegy made quite a splash when it published in 2016, in part because it simultaneously appealed to anxious liberals keen to “understand” Trump voters and to anti-Trump Republicans who wanted to blame Trumpism on what they perceived as sheeplike and undereducated poor whites. At a time when conservative commentators such as National Review’s Kevin Williamson were claiming that white workers weren’t “victimized by outside forces”, but rather had failed themselves through welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy, the New York Times was lauding Hillbilly Elegy’s similar narrative as “a message of tough love and personal responsibility”.Bill Clinton made it; why didn’t you? JD Vance made it; why didn’t you?Today, Vance seems to be setting himself up as the Ohio version of Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who trumpets himself as a champion of the American worker. But Vance’s post-2016 evolution from the media’s chosen interpreter of poor whites and Trump critic (while getting rich as a tech venture capitalist) to the populist Hawley wing of the Republican party didn’t necessitate a policy shift. Sure, he has to tweet more about Dr Seuss now, but Vance’s new model, Hawley, has only a 5% rating from the AFL-CIO, the largest working-class organization in the country.Hawley and Vance try to balance pro-working class appeals with the fact that their party is funded by rich donorsWhen it comes to rhetoric, the new breed of conservative populists – Carlson, Hawley, Vance – love saber-rattling against “cosmopolitan elites”. When it comes to actual policy, they have no interest in challenging corporate power and few plans to invest in working-class communities. Take Vance’s recent opposition to universal childcare, which he called “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent”.Vance’s alternative idea to help American parents, who frequently face a crushing, Catch-22 style choice between giving up their full-time jobs or paying astronomical amounts of money on childcare? Instead of an expanded social wage through a government program, Vance lauds a plan, proposed by Hawley, to give a tax credit to married parents with children under the age of 13. Not exactly transformative, New Deal-style reform to aid struggling Americans; if anything, it’s the kind of tepid, wonkish program that the New Democrats could have very well dreamt up 30 years ago.Recall the words of the then candidate Bill Clinton, who in 1992 pined for “an America in which the doors of colleges are thrown open once again to the sons and daughters of stenographers and steelworkers. We will say: everybody can borrow money to go to college. But you must do your part. You must pay it back.”Like the Clintonites, Republicans such as Hawley and Vance are trying to find a way to balance pro-working class appeals popular with voters with the enduring fact that their party is largely funded by rich donors and powerful business interests. Their solution is to offer Americans rhetoric about elites and the importance of hard work, but not to actually take power away from those elites or, say, enact job programs.It took decades, but millions of voters came to see the New Democrats as frauds. The same, I hope, will be true of the New Republicans. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s grip over Republicans hardens as party cleaves to election ‘big lie’

      by

      Ron DeSantis was exultant. “The way Florida did it I think inspires confidence; I think that’s how elections should be run,” the state governor told reporters last November. “Rather than us be at the centre of a Bush v Gore in 2020, we’re now being looked at as the state that did it right.”This boast of a smoothly run election just six months ago makes DeSantis’s actions this week all the more curious. The governor suddenly found it necessary to impose sweeping reforms that limit mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes – and signed the new law live on the Fox News network on Thursday with no other media allowed.It was perhaps the most brazen example yet of a renewed assault on American democracy crafted and led by former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies, electrified by the false claim “the big lie” of a stolen election in 2020.Far from losing influence over the party, critics say, Trump has in fact burrowed far into its DNA so that the two are now all but inseparable. And far from treating the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol as a catharsis to break the spell, Republican-controlled state legislatures are using his false claim of election fraud to justify a sweep of anti-democratic measures across America.On Friday the Texas house of representatives backed a bill to bar election officials from sending voters unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, while giving party-affiliated poll watchers greater access to voting sites. Restrictions on voting rights have also been signed into law in Georgia and Iowa with similar moves afoot in Ohio and Michigan. Activists warn that people of colour will be disproportionately prevented or discouraged from voting.Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for Common Cause, which campaigns for expanded voter access, told the Associated Press: “We are seeing the strong effect of President Trump’s big lie. We are seeing the Republican party go all-in on supporting him and his lies. We are seeing them use this opportunity to create deliberate barriers to voting for Black and brown voters. It’s un-American.”We are seeing the Republican party go all-in on supporting him and his liesHopes that Trump would fade quietly into retirement and golf at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida were shattered last week. Having remained relatively marginal during Joe Biden’s first hundred days, which restored a calm of sorts to Washington, the former president launched a new web page and posted several tirades reviving his preposterous claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 election.Notably he challenged Democrats and the media’s use of the label “the big lie” as shorthand for his bogus allegations of election fraud, stating: “They are right in that the 2020 Presidential Election was a Big Lie, but not in the way they mean.” His own definition, he said, is the stolen election itself, “the greatest Fraud in the history of our Country!”, even bigger than the Russia investigation and his two impeachments.Trump’s characteristically judo-like move – flipping the weight of his opponents against them – was reminiscent of the way he appropriated the phrase “fake news”, once used to describe misinformation widespread on the web, and weaponised it to go after the media.The 45th president also used his playbook to sow doubt and distrust by egging on his supporters’ legally meaningless investigations of an election that he lost by 7m votes six months ago. The Republican-controlled senate in Arizona, for example, has ordered a private recount of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, hiring a Florida-based contractor called Cyber Ninjas.The justice department has expressed concern about ballot security and potential voter intimidation arising from the extraordinary audit. Katie Hobbs, Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, warned in a letter that parts of the recount “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories”, including one that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Asia using paper with bamboo fibres.But the former commander-in-chief is deadly serious about it. Maggie Haberman, Washington correspondent for the New York Times, tweeted: “Trump is obsessed with the controversial Arizona audit and has told people he thinks it could undo the election.” In fact the audit cannot change the outcome of the election because the results were certified months ago in the state and Congress.In another statement this week, Trump recycled his spurious claims of late night vote “dumps” in Michigan and Wisconsin and demanded a review. Perhaps most bizarrely, he also saluted Windham, a town of 14,000 people in New Hampshire, where it transpired there had been an undercount of Republican votes in the election for the state legislature.It would be easy for sceptics to dismiss 74-year-old Trump as a sore loser ranting into the void. But according to a CNN poll, 70% of Republicans believe that Biden did not win enough legitimate votes to be president. From the 30 state house controlled by Republicans to the party leadership in Capitol Hill, Trump’s power and influence now appear absolute and fealty to the “big lie” is the ultimate test of devotion.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas this week proudly tweeted a photo of himself dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, assuring fans: “He’s in great spirits!” Dissenters, by contrast, face hostility and political exile. Senator Mitt Romney, the sole Republican to vote to impeach Trump twice, was loudly booed and called a “traitor” at a Utah Republican party convention.Liz Cheney, the party’s number three in the House of Representatives, is set to be ousted this week after urging colleagues to renounce the “cult of personality”. Senator Lindsey Graham countered that Republicans cannot “move forward” without Trump, telling Fox News: “I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made a determination that the Republican party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”Cheney voted to impeach Trump after the US Capitol riot that left five people dead but her greatest offence appears to be denouncing “the big lie” for “poisoning our democratic system” and her call for true conservatives to abide by the rule of law. This is tantamount to heresy in the Republican party of 2021.Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman and senior adviser on the House oversight committee, said: “What we’re seeing is the new really ideological core of the Republican party is fidelity to this lie that fueled an insurrection attempt on January 6. It’s something that I think is even bigger than Trump at this point because it’s really rooted in truth versus lies and it says a lot that the only ‘transgression’ that Liz Cheney is guilty of is telling the truth about the results of a free and fair election.“When that is cause to purge somebody from your leadership ranks, what that says about your party is that you are codifying your status as an anti-democratic force in America. The things that are happening here are so radical that if they were happening anywhere else in the world, we would call that a lurch towards extremism, a lurch towards the ingredients that result in terrorism.”The imminent demise of Cheney suggests that Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House, and other senior Republicans have concluded that throwing in their lot with Trump is key to winning next year’s midterm elections, which often depend on a party’s most committed supporters.There was evidence for this in Texas last weekend when Susan Wright, the widow of the first member of Congress to die after contracting Covid-19, advanced to a House runoff for her late husband’s seat with Trump’s endorsement, whereas an avowed anti-Trump candidate crashed and burned.Now, as his return to the spotlight gathers pace, the reality TV star turned politician is set to endorse more “America first” candidates committed to “election integrity” and return to campaign rallies. He is also said to be considering another run for the White House in 2024 – a further stress test of America’s perilously fragile democracy.Tara Setmayer, a political analyst and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “They learned no lessons whatsoever and it’s clear that the Republican party can no longer be considered a party that supports our American democracy. It’s no longer a party that values our constitutional institutions because everything that Donald Trump represents and what he continues to spew – implying that there was some massive fraudulent election that delegitimises Joe Biden – is so antithetical to everything that the Republican party claims to stand for.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans gear up to oust Liz Cheney as punishment for criticizing Trump

      by

      Infighting within the Republican party is set to come to a head this week, goaded on by the ghostly figure of former president Donald Trump in his Mar-a-Lago hideout in Florida.House Republicans are gearing up to oust Liz Cheney on Wednesday from her position as the party’s number three leader in the chamber.Her removal would come as punishment for her public criticism of Trump with regard to his role in inciting the 6 January Capitol insurrection and his “big lie” that last year’s presidential election was stolen from him.Cheney was one of 10 Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Trump for “incitement of insurrection”.Leading Republicans took to the political talk show circuit on Sunday to express support or opposition to the congresswoman from Wyoming. Critically, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader who has in the past stood up for Cheney, made their break-up official when he told Fox News that he was endorsing Cheney’s rival Elise Stefanik for the number three post.“What we’re talking about is a position in leadership. As conference chair, you have one of the most critical jobs as a messenger going forward,” McCarthy told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.Jim Banks, an Indiana congressman who chairs the largest Republican caucus in the House, attempted to justify the action against Cheney on grounds of “party discipline”.“Republicans are almost completely unified by a single mission to oppose the radical, dangerous [Joe] Biden agenda – any other leader who is not focused on that needs to be replaced,” he said.Pressed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Banks was unable to hold up appearances for long. Asked whether he still questioned whether Biden won the presidential election “fair and square”, Banks said that he stood by his decision on 6 January to object to certifying the electoral college votes in several states.“I have serious concerns about how the election was conducted, that’s why I objected on January 6 – I’ll never apologise for that,” he said.Stefanik, a representative from New York who is now frontrunner to take over from Cheney, has a paradoxically much more moderate voting record than the woman she would replace. Significantly, Stefanik has been preferred because she has gone along with Trump’s lies about the “stolen” election, despite officials calling it the most secure in US history.As Cheney’s fate comes to a head, the fall-out from Trump’s false claim that the vote count was rigged against him continues to destabilise the Republican party. Several states, including Texas, Georgia and Florida, have moved aggressively to restrict access to the ballot box in ways that will especially impact communities of color, under the same discredited theory of “voter integrity”.In Arizona, Republican party leaders have brought in an audit firm called Cyber Ninjas, which has no expertise in election monitoring, to examine how the presidential vote was conducted in Maricopa county.Part of the exercise involves checking to see whether 40,000 ballots cast for Biden contain traces of bamboo – according to a conspiracy theory that would indicate they were smuggled in from Asia.As Trump’s enduring grip over his supporters roils the party, rare individuals still publicly defend Cheney. Bill Cassidy, US senator from Louisiana, told NBC News’ Meet the Press that “there’s a whole group of folks that agree with Liz Cheney … for us to win in 2022 and 2024, we need everybody. We need those who feel as Liz.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans cry big tech bias – on the very platforms they have dominated

      by

      When Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook was upheld this week, the howls of bias could be heard from Republicans far and wide. Those shrieks, ironically, came mostly on social media.Republicans have spent recent years criticizing Facebook and Twitter, demonizing them as biased against the right. But they, not Democrats, have been the most enthusiastic embracers of social media, and the most successful in harnessing its potential.Between 1 January and 15 December last year, right-leaning Facebook pages accounted for 45% of all interactions on Facebook, according to a study by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit which monitors US media.Rightwing pages earned nearly 9bn likes or comments, MMFA found, compared to 5bn interactions on left-leaning pages. Conservative pages account for six of the top 10 Facebook pages that post about US political news.The years-long dominance on Facebook has translated to notable successes – most memorably in 2016, when Donald Trump’s win was propelled by his social media reach. “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” Brad Parscale, the digital director of the 2016 Trump campaign, said in the aftermath of the election.“Twitter for Mr Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.”Those successes appeared to have been forgotten in the last week, when prominent Republicans, including Texas senator Ted Cruz and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, condemned Facebook in particular. The platform angered the right with its decision to uphold Trump’s post-insurrection suspension, even though a long-term decision has been punted down the road.“If the big tech oligarchs can muzzle the former president, what’s to stop them from silencing you?” Cruz said.“If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next. A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech,” was McCarthy’s take.Cruz and other Republicans have been accusing Facebook of bias for years – even as the platform was propelling Trump to victory, while being criticized on the left for being slow to remove rightwing lies or conspiracy theories.“Because Republicans have such a disproportionate amount of influence on these platforms and engagement, the real effect is that by constantly crying bias, it works the refs in such that they don’t enforce the rules against them in a consistent way,” Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA, said.“Or they’re less likely to take action against cheaters and bad actors, because they don’t want to deal with the blowback of what happens when I take off one of these accounts.”Carusone pointed to how Facebook dealt with groups promoting QAnon, a conspiracy movement that alleges a group of global elites are involved in paedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children. It took until October last year for the network to finally ban groups, pages or Instagram pages which “represent” QAnon, despite the theory having been promulgated for years.Joe Romm, author of How To Go Viral and Reach Millions and editor-in-chief of Front Page Live, a news site “dedicated to elevating fact-based stories” said that for Republicans, claiming that they are oppressed by media is a consistent narrative.“It’s part of the overall strategy of playing the victim,” Romm said. “Donald Trump showed that it’s part of the overall strategy of: accuse your opponents of doing what you’re doing before they can accuse you.“And so it just makes it so much harder, because if you accuse them first, then when progressives then accurately say: ‘Oh, we’re being disadvantaged on social media,’ no one is going to believe it, because they bought into this big lie that the conservatives are being punished on social media.”As Republicans have cried foul, several rightwing politicians have even written books about such perceived bias – the most recent by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a millionaire Yale law school graduate turned earthy, blue collar, man of the people.Hawley wrote The Tyranny of Big Tech after claiming he had been censored and canceled by social media. The hypocrisy of the book’s claim that big tech is suppressing conservative thought was exposed by Hawley himself this week, however, when he used Twitter, one of the companies he rails against, to giddily proclaim that his book had been “a bestseller all week” on Amazon – another company he opposes.The claims of conservative bias are only like to continue as the 2022 midterms approach, but experts sayany bias is actually against the other side.“I would say that, in fact, big tech right now is biased against liberals – the thumb is on the scale for those who put out the rightwing lies,” Romm said.“The thing that the social media apps want to do is keep you on their site. That’s what they care about. They don’t care about the truth, they care about keeping you on their site.“So the way things are set up, if you can stir up anger, and get people to comment, and engage and send out shares and say: ‘This is outrageous’, then you’ve got a big advantage in the algorithm. So what the social media sites have done is create a system that favors the most outrageous statements.”Ironically, some of those most outrageous statements are set to come against the leaders of the Republican party railing against the social media giants.“I think the right will leverage this moment to make big tech the new Hillary,” Carusone said. “And that’s going to be a galvanizing force for them leading into 2022 and then again in 2024.” More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      The recall circus is back: Schwarzenegger’s 2003 win and the fight to oust Gavin Newsom

      by

      When California granted its voters the ability to recall a sitting governor, back in 1911, it meant to offer a stern reminder to over-entitled elected officials that they serve the people, not the other way around.The reality, though, has been a lot less edifying.Californians have voted in a governor recall election only once, in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger unseated the unpopular Democratic incumbent Gray Davis. Both then, and now as Gavin Newsom finds himself against the ropes, the process has been driven by showbiz carnival barking and partisan sound and fury as much as it has by the high-minded democratic ideals of the Progressive Era.Last time, more than 250 people applied to run, and 135 of them ended up on the ballot, including a porn star, a 100-year-old woman sponsored by a discount store, a bounty hunter, a sumo wrestler, the Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt (who, in a wheelchair, said he’d prefer to be paralyzed from the neck down than paralyzed, like Davis, from the neck up), and the former child actor Gary Coleman.It didn’t help that the election rules, which had gone untested for close to a century, virtually guaranteed a freak show of candidates and platforms lured by a low entry bar and the promise of a single winner-take-all contest. With no requirement to win the support of a majority of the voters, the foreshortened campaign season was primed to reward attention-seeking over substance.Schwarzenegger himself reveled in the circus atmosphere, telling the late-night TV host Jay Leno as he announced his candidacy that it was the toughest decision he’d made since going for a bikini wax in 1978. He showed up to only one debate and spent considerably more energy recycling well-worn lines from Terminator movies than he did articulating policy positions.Schwarzenegger enjoyed frontrunner status from the get-go, and at the time that served to conceal a deeper truth: that the recall election offered a backdoor for the Republican party to attain statewide office in a solid blue state that had otherwise largely shut them out. The recall was initiated by a group of conservative tax protesters upset over rising budget deficits, but the party quickly took control of the process and pushed it in a different direction – to take power first and figure out what to do with it only after.Davis was a colorless, relatively unpopular establishment politician whom the Republicans nevertheless couldn’t beat when he ran for re-election in November 2002. When the budget crisis of early 2003 gave critics an opening to collect recall signatures, however, he suddenly looked a lot more vulnerable.Republican party leaders understood they needed to stir up just enough popular resentment against the political establishment to keep the governor below 50% in the recall election. Then, the concurrent replacement vote would put the incumbent party, the Democrats, at a distinct disadvantage, with Davis excluded by definition and no other heavyweight Democrat wanting to risk looking disloyal to him.The Republicans ran this playbook to perfection.Many senior Democrats begged Senator Dianne Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor, to run in the replacement race so they’d have a viable alternative to the Schwarzenegger celebrity juggernaut. But Feinstein demurred, leaving the lightweight lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante, as the last Democrat standing. Davis lost the recall by more than 10 points, and Schwarzenegger trounced Bustamante by a similar margin.We can’t be completely sure yet what to expect in 2021, because recall petition signatories have until 8 June to withdraw their names if they wish. If their number dips below 1.5m from more than 1.6m confirmed last week by the California secretary of state’s office, unlikely as it seems, the recall will be off again.Only after 8 June are the floodgates of multiple candidacies likely to open. Still, the media are already feasting on the fact that Caitlyn Jenner, the trans former Olympic athlete and step-parent to the Kardashians, is running as a populist celebrity Republican. Her first ad positions her as a “compassionate disrupter” in the Schwarzenegger mould, but many political analysts see her, rather, as a torchbearer for Donald Trump in a state that preferred Joe Biden for president by a staggering 29 points.Jenner has yet to attain anything close to frontrunner status, and she may not even be the strongest Republican in the race – a title that probably goes, for now, to the more conventional and more centrist former San Diego mayor, Kevin Faulconer.But Jenner’s early entry suggests once again that California Republicans who know they can’t reach 50% in a conventional statewide race will milk the opportunity for all it is worth.The party is banking once again on fuming resentment against the Democrats in Sacramento – a “throw out the bums!” mentality fueled by the frustrations of the Covid-19 pandemic, economic crisis, homelessness and other social ills.Even if the Republicans succeed, though, it’s unclear how strong a mandate they can claim. Schwarzenegger did not reach 50% of the vote but he came very close, with a more than respectable 48.6%. The Republican contenders so far, though, seem unlikely to meet that bar, in large part because Republican support in California has dropped significantly in the intervening 18 years. John Cox, a perennial losing Republican candidate in California statewide races now running again, won 38% of the vote to Newsom’s 62% in the 2018 gubernatorial election. That same dismal 38% could easily see him, or Faulconer, or Jenner claim the governor’s office in a winner-take-all recall.Such realities have inevitably, triggered impassioned debate about the meaning of “popular government” as defined by California’s 1911 constitution. The concern of many good government groups, as well as Democrats keen to retain their monopoly grip on California’s statewide offices, is that a process designed to be an honest check on abuse of power has instead become an orgy of special-interest maneuvering and stealth politics by a minority party. (Very similar criticisms surface regularly about California’s ballot initiative process, another brainchild of the Progressive Era, which often degenerates into a slugfest between well-financed corporate interests and much poorer non-profit advocates who have to rely on guerrilla PR tactics and positive media coverage to fight back.)On the other side of the ledger, plenty of observers think that a recall, even one as messy and colorful as the 2003 drama, is a sign of democratic health and believe that voters are more than capable of sorting out which candidates are viable and which are not.Jerry Brown, who served as the California governor in the 1970s and 1980s and ultimately returned to the job in 2010, memorably told a television interviewer in 2003 that it was easy to overstate the importance of experience. “I’ve been there, I can tell you what it is,” he said. “It’s not like, you know, fixing a complicated airplane engine. It takes some intelligence. It takes common sense. It takes some character, some understanding and concern about what is needed by California. And there are a lot of people that can do that.”That spirit of reaction against an entitled political class clearly prevailed 18 years ago. Whether voters will take the same attitude now, given the mixed results of the Schwarzenegger governorship and the deep unpopularity of the Trump presidency with its “I alone can fix it” mantra is another matter.Gray Davis was ultimately undone by time – his poll numbers kept worsening from the time the recall qualified for the ballot until election day. Newsom, on the other hand, has time on his side. At the height of the pandemic last winter he found himself in significant difficulty, harangued by reports that his children were attending private school in person while most California public schools remained closed and that he had whooped it up at Napa Valley’s pre-eminent luxury restaurant, the French Laundry, in defiance of his own lockdown rules.Now, though, the pandemic has eased, the vaccine rollout has gained steam, public school students are returning to their classrooms, and the economy is recovering. The most recent polls suggest Newsom will survive the recall with relative ease. The election, however, is unlikely to take place before October or November, which leaves plenty of time for new things to go wrong. Drought, wildfires, a resurgence of the pandemic – all are eminently possible in the state where disaster movies were invented.Schwarzenegger himself counts both Newsom and Jenner as friends – making him an unusually conciliatory Trump-era Republican, but his attitude to the recall is unequivocal. “I hope as many people as possible are jumping into the race,” he told the late night host Jimmy Kimmel last week. “Anyone has a chance, because I think the people are dissatisfied with what is going on here in California.” More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans tried to overturn the election. We can’t just forget that | Robert Reich

      by

      America prefers to look forward rather than back. We’re a land of second acts. We move on.This can be a strength. We don’t get bogged down in outmoded traditions, old grudges, obsolete ways of thinking. We constantly reinvent. We love innovation and disruption.The downside is a tendency toward collective amnesia about what we’ve been through, and a corresponding reluctance to do anything about it or hold anyone accountable.Now, with Covid receding and the economy starting to rebound – and the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol behind us – the future looks bright.But at the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, let me remind you: we have lost more than 580,000 people to Covid-19. One big reason that number is so high is our former president lied about the virus and ordered his administration to minimize its danger.Donald Trump also lied about the results of the last election. And then – you remember, don’t you? – he tried to overturn the results.Trump twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.Several Republican members of Congress encouraged the attempted coup by joining him in the big lie and refusing to certify the election.This was just over four months ago, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our memory.Last Tuesday, the Washington Post hosted a live video chat with the Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before the attack.But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley’s new book on the “tyranny of big tech”. It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley’s sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation “for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers” and as “a fierce defender of the constitution”.Last week, CBS This Morning interviewed the Florida Republican Rick Scott, another of the senators who tried to overturn the election by not certifying the results. But there was no mention of his sedition. The CBS interviewer confined his questions to Biden’s spending plans, which Scott unsurprisingly opposed.Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also repeatedly appear on major news programs without being questioned about their attempts to undo the results of the election.What possible excuse is there for booking them if they have not publicly retracted their election lies? If they must appear, they should be asked if they continue to deny the election results and precisely why.Pretending nothing happened promotes America’s amnesia, which invites more attempts to distort the truth.Trump’s big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify new laws that restrict votingOn Monday, Trump issued a “proclamation” seeking to co-opt the language of those criticizing his falsehoods. “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as the BIG LIE!” he wrote, repeating his claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that President Biden is illegitimate. Most Republican voters believe him.Trump’s big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify new laws that restrict voting. On Thursday, hours after Florida installed new voting restrictions, Texas’s Republican-led legislature pushed ahead with its own bill that would make it one of the hardest states in which to cast a ballot.The Republican-controlled Arizona senate is mounting a private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa county – farming out 2.1m ballots to GOP partisans, including at least one who participated in the 6 January raid on the Capitol.The Republican party is about to purge one of its leaders, the Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, for telling the truth.It is natural to want to put all this unpleasantness behind us. We are finally turning the corner on the pandemic and the economy. Why look back to the trauma of the 2020 election?But we cannot put it behind us. Trump’s big lie and all that it has provoked are still with us. If we forget what has occurred, the trauma will return, perhaps in even more terrifying form. More

    • 213 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans want to purge Liz Cheney for refusing to kiss the ring of Trumpism | Geoffrey Kabaservice

      by

      Odds are that the erstwhile Republican party comrades of Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming will soon vote to purge her from the ranks of their leadership. Cheney, who occupies the third-highest position in the House Republican Conference and is the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, survived a similar removal effort in early February, after she was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former president Donald Trump. At the time, House Republicans decided to retain Cheney as conference chair by a 145-61 margin, while the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, told reporters that “Liz has a right to vote her conscience.”But that was three months ago, when even Republican leaders like McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell acknowledged that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” (in McConnell’s words) for provoking the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 Januaryin an attempt to overturn the election. Since then, however, the Republican base has continued to uphold Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him and have pushed to remove any party officeholders who say otherwise. A recent CNN poll confirmed that 70% of Republicans say Biden did not win enough votes to be president and half believe (without evidence) that solid proof of Trump’s victory exists.So congressional Republicans, always reluctant to stand up against Trump and his supporters, are edging toward the view that Cheney must go. Her crime, as they see it, is that unlike McConnell and McCarthy she did not fall silent about Trump in the aftermath of impeachment and publicly declared that she would not support him if he were to run for the presidency again in 2024. As Trump has howled for Cheney’s political demise, internal Republican criticism of her has mounted. McCarthy has openly withdrawn his support for her. She has responded with a defiant op-ed in the Washington Post calling on Republicans to “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality” and support the creation of a bipartisan, fact-finding commission to investigate the 6 January attack on the Capitol.Republican critics of Cheney aren’t wrong, exactly, when they say she’s being divisive. Focusing on the Biden administration’s overreach, rather than waging an intra-party debate over Trump, would give the Republican party a better chance of retaking the House majority in 2022.But unity on those terms would amount to putting party over country in the worst possible way. Cheney was absolutely correct when she told the former House speaker Paul Ryan, at a recent conservative conference, that Republicans can’t embrace the view that the election was stolen: “It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can’t whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump’s Big Lie … What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.”Republican hopes that this anti-democratic movement within their ranks can be ignored or will somehow go away are futileTrump’s fraudulent claim of a stolen election, and his continuing efforts to undermine the legitimacy of his successor, is an intense and very real danger to American democracy. In the recent observation of Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for ex-president George W Bush, “the lie of a stolen election is the foundational falsehood of a political worldview”, one that makes facts and evidence irrelevant and encourages “distrust of every source of social authority opposed to the leader’s shifting will”.Republican hopes that this anti-democratic movement within their ranks can be ignored or will somehow go away are futile. It will have to be confronted sooner or later, and the plausible outcomes become more ominous the longer the confrontation is deferred. If Cheney’s Republican colleagues resent that her resolve makes them look like cowards by contrast, voting to retain her in her leadership post would be a small step in the direction of integrity.Even Republicans who prefer to place party over country should consider that under these circumstances purging Cheney inevitably will amount to choosing Trump and his lies over what Cheney called “critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work – confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law”. How will that look to the college-educated middle-class voters whose revulsion from Trump in 2018 and 2020 gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress and the White House? For that matter, how will defenestrating the sole woman in the party’s congressional leadership help Republicans shore up their declining support among female voters?Many Democrats in the grip of their own version of party-over-country consider Cheney’s likely downfall a form of karmic retribution. It’s true that Liz Cheney is as deeply conservative as her father, the former vice-president under George W Bush. It’s also true that both Cheneys, in different ways, played a role in marginalizing the Republican party’s once-robust moderate wing, and that the party’s resulting monolithic ideological rigidity made it ripe for Trump’s authoritarian-populist takeover.But in this moment of national crisis, the critical factor on which a politician must be judged is his or her commitment to liberal democracy. It’s irrelevant that the leading candidate to replace Cheney as conference chair, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, once had a reputation for moderation and bipartisanship. She now endorses Trump’s massive lie of a stolen election, and that negates anything else she has ever stood for. I hope that Americans from both sides of our widening partisan divide who share a common interest in preserving democracy can come to see the necessity of uniting around that principle, at least, before it’s too late.
      Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More