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      Bush: ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideals show pro-Trump Republicans ‘want to be extinct’

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      Ahead of a special election on Saturday to replace a Texas congressman who died after contracting Covid-19, former president George W Bush said the ascendancy of supporters of Donald Trump suggest Republicans “want to be extinct”.The special election is in the sixth district, whose Republican representative, Ron Wright, died in February. Twenty-three candidates will compete: all but one of the 11 Republicans are tied to the apron strings of Trump, the former president who still dominates the party.One candidate, the former wrestler Dan Rodimer, promises to “make America Texas again” and has said “commies in DC are ruining America”.Trump has endorsed another – Susan Wright, the former congressman’s widow who the former president said on Saturday “will be strong on the border, crime, pro-life, our brave military and vets, and will always protect your second amendment”.The one Republican not expressing fealty to Trump, former marine Michael Wood, told CNN he was “afraid for the future of the country”, given his party’s adherence to Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, its reluctance to condemn those who rioted at the Capitol on 6 January in support of that lie, and the prevalence of conspiracy theories such as QAnon.“I felt like I had to stand up,” Wood said. “Somebody needed to stand up and say this isn’t what the Republican party should be.”Nonetheless, it is. In a CNN poll released on Friday, 70% of Republicans said Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to be named president. Biden won more than 7m more votes than Trump and took the electoral college 306-232, the same score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.Bush is promoting a new book, a collection of portraits and stories of immigrants. In an interview released on Friday by the Dispatch, an anti-Trump conservative podcast, he was asked about recent moves by pro-Trump extremists to form a congressional caucus promoting “Anglo-Saxon traditions”.“To me that basically says that we want to be extinct,” he said.If such trends continued, Bush said, in three to five years “there’s not going to be a party. I mean I read about that and I’m saying to myself, ‘Wow, these people need to read my book.’ And I mean, it’s like saying when I was running for governor of Texas, you’ll never get any Latino votes because you’re Republican. And I said you watch. And I worked hard.“And the key thing was to let them know that I could hear their voice. I mean, democracy is great in that sense. And the idea of kind of saying you can only be Republican ‘if’, then the ultimate extension of that is it ends up being a one-person party.”Asked if he agreed with “more than 50%” of Republicans who think the election was stolen, Bush said: “No. I guess I’m one of the other 50%.“By the way, I’m still a Republican, proud to be Republican. I think Republicans will have a second chance to govern, because I believe that the Biden administration is a uniting factor, and particularly on the fiscal side of things. So, you know, we’ll see. But I know this – that if the Republican party stands for exclusivity, you know, used to be country clubs, now evidently it’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything.”Wood, the anti-Trump Texas Republican, said he voted for Trump in 2020. But he also said he thought “the party is going to get to where I am eventually. I want that to happen without having to lose and lose and lose. Political parties sometimes only get the message they need to try something different after a string of losses. I think we should do that now as opposed to doing it after we lose in the midterms or lose another presidential election.”The Texas sixth district has trended towards Democrats in recent elections but remains unlikely to flip.Earlier this week, Trump told Fox Business he was “100% thinking about running” in 2024.Rodimer, the former wrestler who is among the top money raisers in the field in Texas, told CNN: “President Trump is still the leader of the Republican party. I don’t think he’s going to go anywhere, ever. I hope he doesn’t. If he runs again, I’ll be fired up, I’ll be excited.” More

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      As Biden glides past 100 days in office, Republicans can’t seem to land a punch | Richard Wolffe

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      According to Republicans, Joe Biden was supposed to be sleepy, senile and socialist. He was also allegedly a puppet of secret powers – unlike his predecessor, who acted like the puppet of a former KGB officer.Sean Hannity of Fox News claimed, last month, to be worried about Biden’s cognitive health.This is quite something, coming from Hannity. He began a recent interview, with a Florida man by the name of Donald Trump, as follows:“I know a lot of people that are around you every day. This is what they are all telling me: You are working as hard as you did when you were in the White House, except you play a little golf more. That you’re keeping an insane schedule, seven days a week. You really don’t stop.”In one sense, it’s true that Trump keeps an outrageous schedule. In that same sense, he’s working as hard as he ever did.These are the dog days of the Republican resistance. As President Biden passes his 100th day in the White House, there’s little sign of a Tea Party rising up, as there was for the last new Democratic president. There are no green shoots of a growing coalition of grassroots anger and business astro-turf.There may be a universal expectation that Republicans will win back some part of Congress next year. But even with such overweening confidence, with a 50-50 tied Senate, the Republican party is remarkably incapable of stopping an allegedly faltering president who is, in fact, rapidly remaking the country and its reputation across the world.The challenge for Biden’s critics is not merely that he is nothing like their caricature of a walking communist corpse. It’s that he’s always been at the dead center of the Democratic party: a spirit level finding the most balanced point between wherever the left and right stands.That’s a Pennsylvania/Delaware Democrat for you: a liberal conscience who also knows his votes come from the white suburbs. Back in the day, Biden was for civil rights, but he was also against court-ordered busing to desegregate schools. He was the senate judiciary chairman who led the 1994 crime bill that vastly expanded the prison population. He was also the senate judiciary chairman who successfully blocked the supreme court nomination of conservative judge Robert Bork, who would likely have voted to overturn abortion rights and civil rights.What does his first 100 days as president tell us about Joe Biden? He’s the same split-the-difference centrist he always was, with more of an eye on what will sell to the suburbs than the stuff progressive dreams are made of.He’s a president who staged a climate summit, accelerated US targets for carbon emissions, and is proposing huge spending on green infrastructure. But he’s also a president who doesn’t sign up to the Green New Deal.He’s a president who won’t support defunding the police or anything that resembles it. But he’s also a president whose attorney general is investigating two police departments with appalling records on justice for people of color.Extreme, he is not. You can’t say that with a straight face about this Republican party. This is a supposedly conservative group whose extremist base idolizes a failed one-term president and thinks there wasn’t much wrong with a violent insurrection that tried to hang its own vice-president.Back in the 1980s, when Biden was admiring Britain’s Labour leader, the cultural warriors of liberalism and socialism were caricatured – not least by the rightwing Murdoch press – as the “Loony Left”. By that measure, today’s Republican party is barely on planet earth.Take Larry Kudlow, until recently Trump’s director of the White House National Economic Council. Kudlow used to yap about the markets on CNBC television. He now yaps about the markets and politics on CNBC’s arch-rival channel, Fox Business – which is, like its sister channel Fox News, not very interested in reporting on the subject of its own name.Kudlow read a scripted monologue to camera this week – scripted and edited, no doubt – that perfectly captured where the dead center of the Republican party is today, in the earliest stage of the Biden era.“Speaking of stupid,” Kudlow declared, “there’s a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to – get this – America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy and animal-based fats. OK, got that? No burger on July 4th. No steaks on the barbie. I’m sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts? So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag.”Speaking of stupid, the man who led Trump’s economic policy doesn’t know what goes into beer. He also doesn’t know how delicious grilled Brussels sprouts are.The Trumpified brains of Republican leaders are trying – really hard – to make sense of the planet Biden lives on. They somehow believe that Democrats are the ones who are outlandish radicals who don’t believe in American traditions.Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, told Punchbowl News on Monday that Democrats were retiring from Congress – like Republicans last year – because they know they are headed for defeat. “They’re voting for the most socialist agenda they’ve seen. They’re unpopular in the aspects of it, and they’re ignoring the crisis along the border. Those are not prospects of why they can win reelection,” he explained.McCarthy hit on a core truth about Biden’s Democrats: they know they have narrow majorities and could easily lose Congress in 2022. But his conclusion is something as outlandish as plant-based beer: “In ’94 and 2010, at the beginning of those years, they didn’t believe the majority was at play in the nation. I believe it is, and the Democrats, I think, believe it is too,” he said. “That’s why they’re going so far left, knowing that they’re gonna lose it.”You could listen to Joe Biden and say he’s going so far left. But only if you drink a lot of plant-based alcohol first.Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday will certainly go far: $1.8 trillion gets you a long way down the road you’re headed. But is it really socialist to pay for roads and bridges and childcare?Republicans will try to pretend it is, for sure. But they risk sounding strangely out of touch with the reality of the suburban voters who will decide their fate in those congressional elections next year.They risk looking sleepy, supercilious and seditionist. It’s not a good look. More

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      How Biden’s firm line with Republicans draws on lesson of Obama’s mistakes

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      Joe Biden started his presidential campaign with promises to be a unifying force in Washington who would help lawmakers come together to achieve bipartisan reform. But over his first 100 days in office, Biden’s message to Republicans in Congress has been closer to this: get on board or get out of my way.This willingness to go it alone if necessary appears to be a hard-won lesson from the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Democrats negotiated with Republicans on major bills only to have them vote against the final proposals.It has also prompted some – especially on the left of the Democratic party – to make early comparisons between Biden and Obama that favor the current president as a more dynamic, determined and ruthless political force for progressive change than his old boss.Just three months into his presidency, Biden has already signed the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, which did not attract a single Republican vote in Congress. Delivering his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Biden signaled he was willing to take a similar approach to infrastructure if necessary.“I’d like to meet with those who have ideas that are different,” the president said of his infrastructure plan. “I welcome those ideas. But the rest of the world is not waiting for us. I just want to be clear: from my perspective, doing nothing is not an option.”Even though he has much smaller majorities in Congress than Obama did in 2009, Biden has decided to take a much more audacious approach. The Biden strategy centers on acting boldly and quickly to advance his legislative agenda. And if he has to abandon bipartisanship along the way, so be it.The numbers behind Biden’s proposals tell the story of this bold strategy.While the 2009 stimulus bill that Obama signed into law amid the financial crisis cost about $787bn, Biden’s coronavirus relief bill came in at $1.9tn. The president’s two infrastructure proposals, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, would cost a collective $4tn.The size and scope of these policies have signaled that Democrats are intent on learning from the Obama-era stimulus bill talks, when Republicans successfully negotiated to get many provisions taken out of the final legislation. Democrats have blamed the watered-down legislation for their massive losses in the 2010 midterms.“I don’t just blame Obama. I could blame all of us – everybody,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, recently told writer Anand Giridharadas.Schumer said Democrats had made two crucial errors in allowing Republicans to “dilute” the stimulus bill and drag out negotiations over the Affordable Care Act. “We’re not going to make either of those mistakes,” Schumer said.Republicans are taking notice of Democrats’ new no-nonsense approach. In his response to Biden’s address on Wednesday, the Republican senator Tim Scott accused the president of further dividing the country by passing major legislation without bipartisan support in Congress.“President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted,” Scott said. “But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”Biden and his team have insisted their proposals are bipartisan, pointing to surveys showing the coronavirus relief package enjoys the support of a broad majority of Americans, including many Republicans. They accuse Republican lawmakers of being out of touch with the needs of their constituents.“The most game-changing change in the dynamic that this White House has done is redefining bipartisanship to mean among the public and not among DC politicians,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.Green and other progressive strategists expressed hope that these widely popular policies will pay dividends in next year’s midterms, allowing Democrats to avoid their disastrous showing in 2010.“There are two huge regrets of the Obama administration,” said Reed Hundt, a member of Obama’s transition team and the author of A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions.“We didn’t spend enough to get the economy to be fully recovered by 2010, and we disastrously lost the House,” Hundt said. “And regret number two is we never made up for it over eight years.”Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, said the 2009 stimulus negotiations demonstrated the potential danger of prioritizing bipartisanship over progressive change.“It’s a lesson learned because, if you don’t push far enough on a major issue everyone cares about, then the compromise working with Republicans ends up being something that doesn’t satisfy the base,” Allison said.But Allison also made a point to emphasize that Biden is operating under much different circumstances than Obama was when he became president. Most notably, Biden arrived in office on the heels of Donald Trump, who made hardly any attempts to win over Democrats in Congress.“It’s really, really different times. We didn’t have the experience of a Trump,” Allison said of Obama’s early presidency. “There wasn’t quite that sense of urgency, whereas I think now there’s that expectation we got to get things done, and we need to get them done this year.”Obama also faced the unique challenge of being a barrier-breaker as the first African American president. Obama has acknowledged that the hurdles he faced in making history affected his ability to negotiate with Republicans, such as the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, and even affected his choice of Biden as his vice-president.Obama writes in his memoir, A Promised Land, “One of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary – in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen – was my awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice-president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.”Over his first 100 days in office, Biden seems to have used his image as the centrist “Uncle Joe” to his advantage – something that Obama obviously could not do.“There’s probably a large range of things that, had the exact policies been proposed by a President Bernie Sanders, they would face a lot more obstacles,” Green said. But he was quick to add, “There’s also a range of things that Biden will not propose that a more progressive president would have proposed.”John Paul Mejia, a spokesperson for the climate group Sunrise Movement, echoed that point, saying Biden still had a lot of work to do to meet the demands of the progressive coalition that helped put him in office.“While there is some sigh of relief for the president accomplishing or beginning to accomplish some popular demands, that’s really the floor that we’re examining right now,” Mejia said. “In order to truly deliver to the fullest extent of the crises that we face right now, we need a lot more.”On infrastructure specifically, Mejia said Biden should aim to spend much more money to combat climate change and build a green economy. While the president’s American Jobs Plan calls for $2.3tn in spending over eight years, Mejia and other progressives, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, say the US should be looking to invest $10tn over 10 years.While Ocasio-Cortez has applauded Biden’s legislative approach so far, she has also emphasized that the president – and Americans in general – should not forget the activists who pushed him on major policy and helped get him elected.“Not enough credit is given to the countless activists, organizers and advocates whose relentless work is why we are even hearing anything about universal childcare, white supremacy as terrorism, labor and living wages tonight,” Ocasio-Cortez said after Biden’s speech on Wednesday. “Yet we cannot stop until it’s done. Keep going.” More

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      Senate Republicans balk at plan to highlight Black history in US schools

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      Dozens of Senate Republicans have called on the Biden administration to withdraw what they say is a “divisive” proposal that would place greater emphasis on slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in history and civics lessons in US schools.The lawmakers zeroed in on the proposal’s mention of the New York Times’ Pulitzer prize-winning 1619 Project.The project, which traces US history from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia, was a frequent target for the Republican right in Congress and Donald Trump, who sought instead to promote “patriotic” education.In the latest salvo of a burgeoning culture war over race, 39 Republicans, led by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said proposed education department policy would divert established school curricula toward a “politicized and divisive agenda” fixated on the country’s flaws.“Young Americans deserve a rigorous understanding of civics and American history,” the Republican senators wrote in a letter to the education secretary, Miguel Cardona, released on Friday.“They need to understand both our successes and our failures. Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us.”The proposed policy would support teaching that “reflects the breadth and depth of our nation’s diverse history and the vital role of diversity in our nation’s democracy”, according to a notice posted on a government regulation website.It would encourage schools to adopt projects that incorporate “the systemic marginalization, biases, inequities and discriminatory policy and practice in American history”.A spokesman for the US education department said institutions were acknowledging America’s “legacy of systemic inequities” and noted that the department welcomes comments on the proposal until 19 May.The Republicans’ letter came two days after Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, declared that “America is not a racist country” in his response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress. Scott also defended a Republican voting law in Georgia Democrats have denounced as a return to Jim Crow segregation.The Republican party, which remains fractured after Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, has sought to brand Biden as a divisive leader controlled by leftists. More

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      ‘We’re not sworn enemies’: Liz Cheney defends herself for fist-bumping Biden

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      Liz Cheney, the embattled No 3 ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, has been forced to defend herself for having fist-bumped Joe Biden during his address to Congress this week.Cheney, who has come under sustained attack from within her own party for having been one of very few Republicans to criticize Donald Trump for inciting the 6 January Capitol insurrection, posted on Twitter that she strongly disagreed with the Democratic president’s policies.“But when the President reaches out to greet me in the chamber of the US House of Representatives, I will always respond in a civil, respectful & dignified way. We’re different political parties. We’re not sworn enemies. We’re Americans.”The by now notorious fist bump, that lasted less than two seconds, came as the president was making his way to the podium before his first speech to a joint chamber of Congress on Wednesday. Despite the fact that Biden made similar gestures to many around him, his contact with such a high-ranking and controversial Republican sent sparks flying.“The video of Biden fist-bumping Cheney is going to be used by every Trumpist who wants Cheney to lose her seat next year as evidence that she is a Republican In Name Only (Rino) and a sellout of conservative principles,” remarked CNN’s Chris Cillizza.Sure enough, the moment was gleefully seized by Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. “So glad she’s in the GOP leadership,” he snarked. “I guess they wanted to be more inclusive and put Democrats in there too?!?”The elder Donald Trump has relentlessly baited Cheney after she became one of only 10 Republicans to vote for his impeachment for inciting violent insurrection on the US Capitol on 6 January. This week he slammed her as a “warmongering fool”.With Trump keeping up the pressure, Cheney is reported to be facing grumbles from inside the congressional Republican group about her leadership position. Relations with the top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, are stressed, with McCarthy remaining a Trump acolyte while Cheney continues to criticize the former president.In her home state of Wyoming, Cheney is also facing a primary challenge from several local Republicans seeking to oust her in fealty to Trump. Cheney told Punchbowl News that she was confident she would survive the contest and that she was standing firm.“Anybody who wants to get in that race and who wants to do it on the basis of debating me about whether or not President Trump should have been impeached, I’ll have that debate every day of the week,” she said. More

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      Florida lawmakers pass new voting restrictions mirroring Georgia and Michigan

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      The Florida legislature has passed tight new voting restrictions, placing the crucial swing state at the forefront of a nationwide wave of Republican efforts to suppress turnout on the back of Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.The bill, which closely mirrors similar Republican ploys in Georgia and Michigan, is likely to make it more difficult for millions of voters to have their democratic say. The new barriers to voting are expected to particularly impact minority communities.The legislation introduces a plethora of new hurdles to voting by mail in the wake of the surge in mail-in voting by Democrats in the 2020 election. It also imposes restrictions on providing water to citizens standing in line to cast their ballot.Black lawmakers expressed dismay when the bill passed on Thursday night. The Democratic representative Angela Nixon said she was “distraught and disheartened”, the Washington Post reported.“You are making policies that are detrimental to our communities,” she told her Republican peers.Fellow Democratic lawmaker Anna Eskamani told the Miami Herald: “We had, as the Republican governor said, one of the best operated elections in the country, and yet today, the majority party through last minute maneuvers passed a voter suppression bill.”As Eskamani highlighted, the move by Florida Republicans to clamp down on voting is especially awkward, even by the contorted logic that the Republican party has deployed in states across the country. The restrictions were passed in the name of “voter integrity”, following the former president’s false claim that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.Yet in Florida, Republicans boasted – and continue to boast – about how well the presidential race was conducted. Trump won the traditional battleground state, which commands a critical 29 electoral college votes, by about 3%.Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was caught by his own contradictory rationale when he told Fox News on Thursday night that he would now sign the bill into law. “So we think we led the nation,” he said, referring to how the 2020 ballot went in his state, “but we’re trying to stay ahead of the curve to make sure that these elections are run well.”Florida’s attack on voting rights forms part of a staggering assault by Republicans on the heart of American democracy. According to the Brennan Center, which monitors voting rights, about 361 bills containing restrictive provisions have been introduced in what its analysts call “a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud”.The Florida bill focuses especially on voting by mail. It targets the use of drop boxes in which mail ballots can be deposited, and forces voters to reapply for mail ballots every two years rather than four – a move which critics fear will sow confusion and suppress turnout.The attack on mail-in voting is ironic given that the state has a long track-record of using that electoral method without any notable challenges. In several previous cycles, mail-in voting was used predominantly by Republican voters with no objections raised.But in 2020 there was a steep increase in Democratic voters who turned to casting their ballots by mail as a safety measure in the pandemic. Out of a total of more than 11m Floridians who voted in the presidential race, almost 5m did so by mail – about 44%.Suddenly, the practice of voting by mail has become a threat to voter integrity, according to the Republican party. More