US midterm elections 2022

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primaries

      by

      Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primariesVictories underscore the continued political potency of the stolen election myth, with most significant win in Arizona Candidates who question the 2020 election results won a handful of key primaries on Tuesday, underscoring the continued political potency of the myth of a stolen election in US politics.The most significant victory was in Arizona, where Mark Finchem, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, easily won the GOP nomination for secretary of state, placing him one step closer to overseeing elections in a key battleground state.Finchem, who has self-identified with the far-right Oath Keepers, vigorously fought to block certification of Joe Biden’s legitimate victory in Arizona and has sought to overturn it ever since.He told reporters on Tuesday he received a subpoena from the Department of Justice, which is investigating the January 6 attack, about a month ago. He has also been subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating the attack.Finchem joins prominent election deniers in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania who have earned the Republican nomination for positions in which they would wield considerable power over elections.Kansas’ vote to protect abortion rights upends US midterm elections – liveRead moreIn the Arizona gubernatorial primary, Kari Lake, a Trump-backed former news anchor who has made election misinformation a centerpiece of her campaign, narrowly led rival Karrin Taylor Robson on Wednesday morning.Even before she took the lead in ballot counting, Lake, who has already alleged fraud in the vote, claimed victory.“There is no path to victory for my opponent and we won this race, period,” Lake said at her election night party. On Wednesday morning she led by just over 11,300 votes with 20% of the vote left to count.Blake Masters, a Trump-backed US Senate candidate in Arizona who has questioned election results also easily won the GOP primary to take on the Democratic senator Mark Kelly.Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona house who faced censure from his party and Trump’s fury after testifying in front of the January 6 committee, lost his primary for state senate to a Trump-backed challenger.There were other signs of how election conspiracies continue to dominate Arizona politics. In Maricopa county, a Republican candidate for the board of supervisors urged voters to steal pens the county provided to fill out ballots, a nod to a baseless fraud claim promoted on Gatewaypundit, a far-right website.In Michigan, Peter Meijer, one of 10 Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment, lost a primary battle against John Gibbs, who served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration.In a debate last month, Gibbs said there were “mathematically impossible anomalies” in the 2020 race, which is not true. Meijer blasted Democrats for boosting Gibbs’s campaign as part of a strategy to elevate more extreme candidates who might be easier to beat in November.Michigan Republicans nominated Tudor Dixon, a conservative commentator, to take on Gretchen Whitmer for governor. Dixon has said the 2020 election was stolen in Michigan, where Trump lost by more than 150,000 votes, but has been vague about what exactly she says went wrong.In Missouri, Eric Schmitt, who lead a coalition of attorneys general urging the US supreme court to overturn the 2020 election, won the Republican nomination for US Senate. Trump endorsed “Eric” in the race, declining to say whether he was backing Schmitt or another challenger, Eric Greitens.In Washington state, two US House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump appeared to be doing fairly well as votes continued to be counted. With about half of the vote counted, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse were both leading Trump-backed opponents.TopicsRepublicansThe fight to voteUS midterm elections 2022US politicsArizonaMichiganMissourinewsReuse this content More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Lucas Kunce: ‘Populism is about everyday people coming together’

      by

      InterviewLucas Kunce: ‘Populism is about everyday people coming together’Martin Pengelly Former US Marine with a progressive take on identity and masculinity hopes Missouri Democrats will pick him as their nominee for US Senate Lucas Kunce thinks populism has been given a bad name. “It’s outrageous,” he says, “that people call the Josh Hawleys, the Eric Greitens, the Donald Trumps of the world populist. Populism is about everyday people coming together to have power in a system that’s not working for them. So do that, Josh Hawley. I mean, good Lord, what a charlatan.”Josh Hawley, senator who ran from Capitol mob, mocked by home paperRead moreKunce is running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Missouri, in the fight to take the state’s second seat in Washington, alongside Hawley. The primary is on Tuesday.Kunce’s main challenger is Trudy Busch Valentine, a prominent donor from the Anheuser-Busch brewing dynasty. Kunce’s fundraising has been hugely successful but polling is tight.Kunce has attacked Busch Valentine for representing the donor class, but in conversation he focuses more on attacking Republicans. Hawley, he says, is “always talking about masculinity – this, that, the other – meanwhile, he skitters out of the Capitol from a riot he essentially started. The guy votes for every corporate judge that comes up in front of him. He doesn’t do anything that would actually empower everyday people.“And Donald Trump, I mean, he put the president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, in charge of our economy. That’s not populism. What they do is divide people based on race, religion, where you come from, in a way that doesn’t give everyday people power. They make sure folks are divided so that they don’t have power as a whole against the system that’s not working.“And so I just think it’s a tragedy that we give sort of any sort of populist label to these guys because they don’t want to change the system.”Now 39, Kunce is a Yale law grad who joined the US marines, went to Iraq and Afghanistan and worked in international arms control. He’s a persuasive speaker, even over Google Meet, laptop camera on the fritz.He is for gun control but he is running in gun country. That in part explains an ad in which Kunce holds an AR-15-style assault rifle, makes as if to fire it and then says that unlike potential Republican opponents including Mark McCloskey, the lawyer who infamously pointed such a gun at protesters for racial justice, he doesn’t need to indulge in such macho posturing.Kunce is also for abortion rights, in a state with a post-Roe v Wade trigger law.He grew up in Jefferson City, “in what would be considered a pro-life house and pro-life neighbourhood. That’s what I knew. And then I joined the Marine Corps. I went out and saw what it was like for these countries where they have oppressive Big Brother governments, where women have no rights. I saw what it was like to live in countries where there’s this two-tiered system of rights, where if you have wealth, access and power, the world’s literally your oyster.“And then I see what they did in Missouri here, how these country club Republicans passed the country’s first trigger law, saying abortion is not even available in cases of rape or incest. It’s like they’re willing to do that because they know it’s not going to affect them. Because they’re gonna go out of state, they have the wealth and the means. And so I think that’s messed up. People in my old neighborhood, that’s who’s not gonna have access. We’re gonna have a two-tier system here.The dystopian American reality one month after the Roe v Wade reversalRead more“And I’ve seen people from from my life go through very hard pregnancies I don’t think they should ever have to be forced to go through. People should be able to have that right and opportunity … And so my position is that I will vote to end the [Senate] filibuster and codify Roe v Wade. I think we need to make that happen.”The Republican primary in Missouri is certainly messy, an all-in scrap in which Greitens, a pro-Trump ex-governor who quit in disgrace and is accused of sexual and physical abuse, could yet come out on top.Polling suggests a Missouri US Senate seat remains a stretch for any Democrat. All the same, Kunce has attracted national attention. He says that was a surprise.“I had no expectations going into this. I was a guy nobody knew. I wanted to run a campaign where I rejected corporate Pac money, federal lobbyists’ money, big farm executive money, big fossil fuel executive money. People basically said that wasn’t possible and that was stupid.“And we just decided we’d do it the right way anyway. To actually stand for something and to win and to make sure you only represent people like the ones who took care of me growing up, rather than these folks who are buying off politicians and using them to strip our communities for parts.“I’m thrilled we’ve gotten the attention that we’ve gotten for what we’re doing and how Democrats can win in the midwest again – if they take a real straightforward populist message.”Kunce talks of “big, bold investment” in the midwest, of spending the sort of billions previously spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on building “the next generation of energy technology right here, to build out manufacturing, research and development, we’re talking wind and solar but we’re also talking hydrogen, distributed nuclear or modular nuclear, battery technology [and] good union jobs”.Independence, Missouri: tribalism, the flag and 4 July in the age of TrumpRead moreSuch aims are part of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better, progressive and Democratic plans fiercely opposed by big business and the right. Kunce’s description of a “Marshall plan for the midwest”, a reference to US aid for postwar Europe under a Missourian Democratic president, Harry Truman, seems in part a repackaging. He isn’t big on progressive labels. Asked about identity politics, he prefers to talk about class.“My focus is on top-bottom, as far as identity politics go. There are a lot of people who are being used as targets, usually the most vulnerable people in our society, by the shareholder class, these massive corporations who are funding campaigns against trans youth, against gay people, against minority communities. They do whatever they can to fund divisive campaigns in order to make it so we don’t have a top-bottom race.“This is what I was talking about earlier with these charlatans who pretend to be populist but they’re actually dividing people as much as they can. I’m absolutely for protecting communities that are vulnerable. I just don’t want to lose sight of this top-bottom dynamic that’s really killing us and making it so everybody is fighting for crumbs underneath the table rather than actually having to sit at it.”Kunce has been presented as a representative of progressive masculinity, a type of Democrat who might appeal away from the coasts. He connects the issue back to Republican posturing.“It’s crazy. I mean, Mark McCloskey on his AR-15, frightening people who are walking by his house. You don’t even hold it right. He would have burned himself up with hot brass if he’d shot a round. The fakeness here is just incredible. Josh Hawley’s right there too.“Real men aren’t a bunch of posers. They are people like my dad who sacrifice for their family, sacrifice for their community, stay in the first job they ever took out of school for their entire life, even when they’re miserable, because they needed their little girl to have health insurance so that she would survive. People that invest in their community, in their families.“It’s like the guy who inspired me to join the marines. This guy named Al. When I was a kid, we always volunteered at the church soup kitchen. Twice a month we’d go down there … and this guy who ran the kitchen, he was always like, ‘OK, what chores do all the kids want to do?’ And my little sister and I were always like, ‘Oh, we want to do the dishes.’ And Al was always confused about why two kids wanted to do the dishes.‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from ObamaRead more“But at my house with a big family, doing the dishes, man, it was like 40 minutes of standing at the sink, hurting your back, scrubbing hard and drying. Well, the church kitchen had a dishwasher. So doing the dishes was a scam there. You just threw a bunch of stuff in and walked away. I was like, ‘This guy’s an idiot, he thinks we’re doing a chore.’ And so Al figured that out.“And two years later, when he renovated the kitchen in his house, he took his old dishwasher, put it in his pickup truck, drove it to our house and installed it for us, because he remembered that and he wanted to do something for somebody.“That’s what a real man does. That’s masculinity. Al was a marines officer in Vietnam. Never talked about it. Just, you know, quiet fortitude. That’s what I think being a man is and it’s why I joined the Marine Corps and it’s why I think these [Republican] guys are just a bunch of posturing peacocks.”My last question is in part prompted by Kunce’s mention of “quiet fortitude”. Kunce is a fan of Clint Eastwood movies. Which is his favorite?“Unforgiven. Because Unforgiven was such a comeback for the western brand. It brought it back in the early 90s. And I thought that was really cool. I mean, I watch all the old ones. Pale Rider, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly … but I think Unforgiven was just, it was a real comeback story for the genre which I love.”I’m for In the Line of Fire. If Kunce wins on Tuesday, the Republicans will be too.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022DemocratsMissouriUS politicsUS SenateUS CongressinterviewsReuse this content More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The Big Lie review: Jonathan Lemire laments what Trump hath wrought

      by

      The Big Lie review: Jonathan Lemire laments what Trump hath wrought The Politico reporter and MSNBC host’s book is an indictment of the former president but also his Republican partyJoe Biden sits in the Oval Office but Donald Trump occupies prime space in America’s psyche. Mike Pence’s most senior aides have testified before a federal grand jury. An investigation by prosecutors in Georgia proceeds apace. In a high-stakes game of chicken, the message from the Department of Justice grows more ominous. Trump’s actions are reportedly under the microscope at the DoJ. He teases a re-election bid. Season two of the January 6 committee hearings beckons.Thank You For Your Servitude review – disappointing tale of Trump’s townRead moreInto this cauldron of distrust and loathing leaps Jonathan Lemire, with The Big Lie. He is Politico’s White House bureau chief and the 5am warm-up to MSNBC’s Morning Joe. He has done his homework. He lays out facts. His book is a mixture of narrative and lament.Lemire contends that Trump birthed the “big lie” in his 2016 campaign, as an excuse in the event of defeat by either Senator Ted Cruz in the primary or Hillary Clinton in the general election. Trump held both opponents in contempt.In the primary, Trump lost Iowa – then falsely claimed Cruz stole it.“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump tweeted.In the general, a half-year later, he dropped another bomb.“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged. I have to be honest.”In the final presidential debate he upped the ante, refusing to say he would accept the electorate’s verdict.“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said. “I will keep you in suspense.”He definitely warned us. Lemire’s first book is aptly subtitled: “Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020.”Then and now, Trump posited that only fraud could derail him. After he beat Clinton in the electoral college, he claimed he actually won the popular vote too. In Trump’s mind, he was the victim of ballots cast by illegal aliens.“In addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted.To those within earshot, he said people who didn’t “look like they should be allowed to vote”, did.To soothe his ego, he appointed a commission headed by Kris Kobach, a nativist Kansas secretary of state, to vindicate his claims. It found nothing.In a blend of fiction and wish-fulfillment, Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser, embarked on flights of fantasy. Spicer declared that Trump’s inaugural crowd was larger than that for Barack Obama. Conway introduced us to alternative facts.Lemire’s indictment goes way beyond that offered by Clinton, who called Trump voters deplorable. He casts the issue as systemic – and punches up. He is angered but does not condescend. The Big Lie is also about elite conservative lawyers, Ivy League-educated senators, Republican House leadership and Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy.Like Gollum in Tolkien’s Rings trilogy, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, wants to get his hands on the speaker’s gavel that badly. Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser and author of the ill-fated “Green Bay Sweep” plan to overturn the election, faces charges of criminal contempt. Such acolytes know exactly what they do.Extremists in Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are vocal totems, empowered by an enraged ex-president and a vengeance-filled base. In such a world it seems no surprise cries of “hang Mike Pence”, makeshift gallows and Confederate battle flags in the halls of the Capitol came to supplant “fuck your feelings”, the mantra of Trump 2016.As expected, Steve Bannon appears in The Big Lie. He loves dishing to the press. It is in his DNA. The former Trump campaign guru and White House aide, now convicted of contempt of Congress, trashes his former boss as a reflexive liar.According to Lemire, Bannon said: “Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything.” On cue, a Bannon spokesperson disputed Lemire’s sources, telling the Guardian they were inaccurate.In Jeremy Peters’ book, Insurgency, Bannon mused that Trump would “end up going down in history as one of the two or three worst presidents ever”. In Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, he described the Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr and a group of Russians amid the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”.And yet Bannon’s role in Trump’s bid to stay in power remains of central interest to the January 6 committee. On 5 January 2021, Bannon announced on-air that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”. He spoke to Trump that morning.Despite his thoroughness, Lemire does omit the role of one group of Republicans in giving the big lie added heft. In May 2021, the Washington Post reported on the efforts of Texas Republicans led by Russell Ramsland, a businessman with a Harvard MBA.After the 2018 midterms, Ramsland and colleagues pressed convoluted theories concerning “voting-machine audit logs – lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities”. Pete Sessions, a defeated congressman, didn’t buy what Ramsland was selling. Trump did.For Trump’s minions, this remains a war over lost place and status.“Republicans need to prove to the American people that we are the party of … Christian nationalism,” says Greene, a first-term congresswoman from Georgia.Like a toxic weed, the big lie has taken root.“It is now part of the Republican party’s core belief,” Lemire writes. Violence and insurrection have become legitimate. “The Big Lie was who they were.”Our cold civil war grows hotter.
      The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020 is published in the US by Macmillan
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US midterm elections 2022reviewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      How a Trump-backed ‘QAnon whack job’ won with Democratic ‘collusion’

      by

      How a Trump-backed ‘QAnon whack job’ won with Democratic ‘collusion’Dan Cox won the Republican nomination for Maryland governor, but the current governor, Larry Hogan, says that was thanks to Democrats promoting extremist opponents they think will be easier prey Dan Cox, an extremist pro-Trump Republican, won his party’s nomination for governor in Maryland last week thanks to “collusion between Trump and the national Democrats”, the current Republican governor said.‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracyRead more“I don’t think there’s any chance that [Cox] can win,” Larry Hogan added, speaking to CNN’s State of the Union.Hogan previously called Cox “a QAnon whack job”.“Collusion” is a loaded word in US politics, in the long aftermath of the Russia investigation, in which the special counsel Robert Mueller scrutinised election interference by Moscow and links between Trump aides and Russia.The battle to succeed Hogan as governor of Maryland might seem small beer in comparison. But the race attracted national attention.Cox, endorsed by Donald Trump, surged past Kelly Schulz, a member of Hogan’s cabinet, to win the Republican nomination.In the Democratic race, Wes Moore, a bestselling author, beat candidates including Tom Perez, a former Democratic national committee chair and US labor secretary.In a midterm election year, Democrats have sought to boost pro-Trump Republicans in competitive states, placing the risky bet that as the January 6 committee remains in the headlines, extremists who support the former president’s lie about electoral fraud in his 2020 defeat will prove unpalatable to voters.Hogan said: “There’s no question this was a big win for the Democratic Governors Association that I think spent over $3m trying to promote this guy [Cox]. And it was basically collusion between Trump and the national Democrats, who propped this guy up and got him elected.“But he really is not a serious candidate.”The New York Times reported the sum spent by the DGA on pro-Cox TV ads at “more than $1.16m”.Hogan’s host, Jake Tapper, pointed out that 142,000 Republicans voted for Cox, a state legislator, “So it’s really Republican voters that did this.”Hogan said: “Yes, well, some of them. I mean, we only have a little over 20% of the people in Maryland are Republican, and only 20% of them showed up at the polls. So it’s about 2% of the people of our state that voted for the guy. And in the general election, I think it’s going to be a different situation.”Hogan has sought to establish himself as a figurehead for anti-Trump Republicans. Asked if he would vote for Moore, he said he would “have to make a decision about that between now and November. But I’m certainly not going to support this guy [Cox]. I said I wouldn’t. He’s not qualified to be governor.”Cox tried to impeach Hogan over his handling of the Maryland Covid response. He has used QAnon-adjacent language and attended a QAnon-linked convention.QAnon is an antisemitic conspiracy theory which among other beliefs holds that the US is run by a cabal of child-molesting cannibals which Trump will defeat.Hogan has said he is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination. He was not drawn further on the matter on Sunday. He did tell ABC’s This Week he thought a Trump 2024 announcement before November, which seems likely, would cost Republicans in the midterms.“We had discussions about that at the Republican Governors Association last week,” he said, “and I think most people are very concerned about the damage it does to the party if he announces now.“And, you know, it may help in very red states or very red districts. But in competitive places and purple battlefields, it’s going to cost us seats if he were to do that.” Hogan said he thought Trump’s “ego probably can’t take another loss – after all he lost to Joe Biden, which is hard to do – but he likes to be the center of attention”.Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House by Luke Harding – reviewRead moreOn CNN, Tapper cited Liz Cheney, another anti-Trump Republican and possible presidential hopeful who seems set to lose her US House seat in Wyoming, and asked if Hogan felt Trump was winning the battle for the soul of his party.“There’s no question that we lost a battle and we’re losing a few battles,” Hogan said. “But the fight is long. It’s long from being over.“I mean, we have another couple of years before the next [presidential] election. In November of ’20, I gave a speech at the Reagan Institute saying, ‘There’s going to be a long battle for the heart and soul of the Republican party and this is just the beginning.’“I think, in November, we’re going to have a different story, when a lot of these fringe candidates lose. And then we’re going to have to start thinking about, between November’s election and the election two years later, what kind of a party are we going to be? And can we get back to a more Reaganesque big tent party that appeals to more people?“Or are we going to double down on failure?”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022MarylandRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party

      by

      Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party In two new books, a partisan warrior and a repentant operative paint an alarming portrait of a party gone rogueIn 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, a Republican party led by Newt Gingrich recaptured the House of Representatives. Eventually, scandals of his own making, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and a drubbing in the 1998 midterms forced Gingrich to step down. But he did not leave public life.Newt Gingrich: Democrats are trying to ‘brainwash the entire next generation’Read moreThe former Georgia congressman ran for the presidential nomination in 2012, seamlessly adapted to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, and kept on publishing all the while. His latest book, the catchily titled Defeating Big Government Socialism, comes as his party anticipates another congressional takeover in November.Tim Miller is another long-term Republican operative, if not a frontline politician. He served in a number of GOP campaigns, demonstrating media savvy and a knack for opposition research. After Jeb Bush left the presidential race in 2016, Miller emerged as vocal Trump critic. Now, in the footsteps of Never Trumpers Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens, he has penned a political memoir. His subtitle – A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell – refers to a route many would say was partly paved by Gingrich.The former speaker’s new book is heavy on familiar bombast and predictably short on introspection. Its opening pages deliver a familiar beat-down of China and its financial allies.“Many of our elites refuse to even recognize the threat from Beijing,” Gingrich writes. “For many, it is because they make so much money from China.”He would have done better to check his own financial disclosures.By 2018, Newt and Callista Gingrich – ambassador to the Vatican under Trump – had invested at least $100,000 and possibly as much as $250,000 in certificates of deposit issued by the Bank of China.For what it’s worth, Trump maintained a bank account in China. Further, in such spirit of US-Sino amity, the late Sheldon Adelson funded Gingrich’s 2012 presidential run with $20m, courtesy of the blackjack tables and roulette wheels of his casino in Macau.In other words, Gingrich was cool with China until he wasn’t. Government records also show a $368,334 advance for a book with a simple working title: Trump vs China.Gingrich has long known that reality need not be a constraint. He has compared himself to William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister who was in office for nearly 19 years, rather than Gingrich’s four as speaker. Gingrich has also suggested Brad Pitt should play him onscreen.A little more substantively, Gingrich uses his new book to demand fiscal responsibility, hammering Joe Biden and the Democrats for budgetary profligacy. The first chapter is titled “Big Government Socialism Isn’t Working and Can’t”. Once again, Gingrich should have thought twice.Gingrich’s presidential run to nowhere doubled as a poor man’s Trump University – the scheme by which Trump pulled in money for a product somewhere between shoddy and non-existent. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, “No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.”As for extravagance, in 2011 Gingrich maintained a credit line of between $250,001 and $500,000 at Tiffany’s, the Fifth Avenue jeweler.On the page, Gingrich also blames the left for America’s high Covid death rate – despite significantly lower post-vaccine mortality in Democratic states. So it goes: at a recent rally in Alaska, Trump declined to use the word “vaccine”, lest he anger the crowd.In Congress, Gingrich wrapped himself in gun rights, opposing the assault weapons ban in Clinton’s 1994 anti-crime bill and subsequently sending a written promise to the National Rifle Association that no gun control legislation would be considered as long as he was speaker.The assault weapons ban expired almost 20 years ago. As Gingrich’s latest book comes out, mass shootings fill the headlines. To the author, no matter: “The Founding Fathers insisted on the second amendment so that armed citizens would make a dictatorship impossible.”Amid all this, Gingrich calls for civility. In case folks forgot, he was the speaker who shut down the government in a snit after he was seated in the back of Air Force One en route to the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and also called Hillary Clinton a bitch. How will his speakership be remembered? The late Robert Teeter, pollster to George HW Bush, accurately observed: “Gingrich makes a great backbencher.”So to Tim Miller. Like Lot’s wife, he cannot resist looking back. At the same time, he is overly repentant. But his attempt to explain why he stuck with the Republican party for as long as he did is revealing.Miller lets us know that he is gay, married and a dad. His rationales for rejecting his party are understandable but not necessarily satisfying. For him and other Republican operatives, the game was fun – until it wasn’t. The metamorphosis of the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump occurred in broad daylight, a train wreck a long time coming. The Never Trumpers could have spoken out sooner.As long ago as 1968, clashes between demonstrators and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic convention offered a glimpse of simmering cultural tensions. At the same time, the discontent and racism voiced by the Alabama governor George Wallace found a home with a Republican party following Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. Fast forward three decades and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Pat Buchanan’s quests for the presidency revealed the darker impulses of the pre-Trump right.Working-class resentment and pitchfork populism appeared long before the Iraq war and the great recession. The rise of Trumpism seems entirely predictable.Miller does deliver a searing indictment of officials and appointees who became Trump’s enablers, listing no less than 11 categories. His portraits of Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator, and Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, are devastating.“More than anything,” he writes, Graham “just wanted to be on the golf cart next to Trump. To be on the right hand of the father. Whether or not Trump did as Graham asked was merely icing on the cake.”Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative factsRead moreAs reward for doubling as a human doormat, Graham now battles a subpoena from prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, concerning his part in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The senator cloaks himself in congressional immunity and invokes the constitution. It turns out he was fine with attempting to subvert an election but doesn’t like the idea of appearing before a grand jury. Funny, that.As Miller puts it, the same obsequious spirit made Spicer a peddler of lies for the ages, “happy to put up with Trump’s lunacy as long as he became a star. He didn’t see anything wrong with shining a poison apple … And you’d better believe he’d do it all over again.”Both Gingrich and Spicer may get another chance to ride the Trump rodeo. The 45th president is gearing up for 2024. By then, Biden and Gingrich will be octogenarians, Trump 78. Who says America is no country for old men?
      Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future is published in the US by Center Street

      Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell is published in the US by Harper
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020reviewsReuse this content More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris urges voters to elect a ‘pro-choice Congress’ in midterms

      by

      Kamala Harris urges voters to elect a ‘pro-choice Congress’ in midtermsVice-president highlights that down-ballot contests at local level would also be central to restoring abortion rights Vice-President Kamala Harris renewed pleas to voters ahead of the midterm congressional races to elect pro-choice candidates, as the Biden administration continues to face criticism from progressives over a perceived lackluster response to the recent landmark supreme court decision striking down federal abortion rights in the US.In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Harris urged voters to elect a “pro-choice Congress” in November and highlighted that down-ballot contests at the local level would also be central to restoring abortion rights in certain parts of the country.“You don’t have to advocate or believe that this is right for you or your family, but don’t let the government make the decision for her family, whoever she may be,” Harris said in a pre-recorded interview. “It means state offices, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general. It means local races, who’s going to be your DA, who’s going to be your sheriff, enforcing laws that are being passed to criminalize medical health providers, and maybe even the women who seek the service.”On Friday, Joe Biden signed a limited executive order designed to protect access to reproductive health services by expanding access to emergency contraception and bolstering legal services to support people who cross state lines to seek an abortion.But for many abortion advocates and progressive Democrats, the president’s measures do not go far enough. The administration has, for example, resisted calls to use federal land in anti-abortion states to facilitate terminating pregnancies, or subsidizing travel to people forced to travel in order to access services.At least nine US states have banned abortion in the wake of 6-3 supreme court ruling that overturned the Roe v Wade decision that had enshrined the procedure as a constitutional right since 1973. The ruling makes it likely that around half the country – 26 states – will eventually outlaw abortion in some way.The decision followed Donald Trump’s installation of three rightwing justices to the supreme court, paving the way for a conservative super majority on the court.Harris, then a US senator, voted against the former president’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. And she said on Sunday she had never believed assurances made in private and public by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh that they respected the precedence of the Roe decision.“I start from the point of experience of having served in the Senate,” Harris said. “I never believed them. I didn’t believe them. So I voted against.”Asked if the Democrats should have done more to enshrine the right to abortion into federal law when the party controlled both chambers of Congress, Harris responded: “We certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled. And that’s why I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real unsettled times.”Democrats have faced criticism for fundraising drives off the back of the supreme court decision and recent polling indicates their party still faces a tough day at the ballot box in November, with Biden’s approval ratings plummeting and the party looking set to lose its majority in the House of Representatives.On Sunday, Harris sought to quell calls for Biden to serve just one term as president before allowing a new Democratic nominee to contest the 2024 election.“Listen to President Biden,” Harris said. “He intends to run. And if he does, I intend to run with him.”TopicsKamala HarrisUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats hope to tap anger over Roe in November midterms – will it work?

      by

      Democrats hope to tap anger over Roe in November midterms – will it work?Analysts say more voters should turn out in the wake of the supreme court ruling – but that could help Republicans too “This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” Joe Biden told American voters in the wake of the US supreme court’s decision to scrap abortion rights.The US president was merely echoing a chorus of Democrats urging voters to elect pro abortion-rights lawmakers in November’s midterm elections in a bid to wrest greater control of Congress and perhaps allow abortion rights to be enshrined in legislation.Contraception, gay marriage: Clarence Thomas signals new targets for supreme courtRead moreBut it is also a tactic to try and inject Democratic voters with a sense of urgency and activism as the midterms approach, as currently the political establishment expect Biden and the Democrats to face a defeat at the hands of a resurgent Republican party.Until Roe fell – triggering a slew of Republican-led states to immediately move to ban abortion – Biden and his party have appeared moribund, and down in many polls. Buffeted by immense trouble passing a domestic agenda and hit by soaring inflation, Biden’s popularity has plummeted.But will the fall of Roe help Democrats reverse course on what looks like their current path to defeat? Or could the decision also help motivate the Republican base as the supreme court’s decision revealed the benefits to them of using power?Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democrat strategist, said it was too soon to know how far the court’s momentous decision to return the abortion issue to individual US states would go toward shaping voter’s priorities in November.“In states that Democrats do well generally, this will motivate turnout. In states where they do not do well, it will also motivate turnout – but not for the Democrats,” he says. “The issue is purple states, like Michigan, Georgia and Nevada, where you have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.”Four months out from November, voters are signaling that their priorities are rising crime, and inflation that has seen basic living costs shoot up for money, especially when it comes to gas prices.“If the question is will abortion help swing the election, the answer is probably not, though it could help in states where there’s a reasonable balance between Democrats and Republicans,” Sheinkopf says.“The presumption is that more women will turn out – but that depends on what’s going in those states at the time. People will make their decisions based on what’s most personal to them,” he adds. “Six or seven dollars a gallon of gasoline, a sense that things are out of control as the Democrats run the country, an increase in homicides nationally, may be better motivators for a majority of voters than Roe v Wade.”Sonia Ossorio, the president of Now [National Organization for Women] New York, said: “I don’t see how this cannot energize voters. Women are fed up. Formula shortages, childcare shortages, gas prices, losing their jobs in unprecedented numbers during the pandemic, and now having our reproductive freedom gutted by the supreme court.“The response we’re getting is unprecedented in my two decades in the women’s rights movement.”The court’s decision establishes political battlegrounds for abortion across the 50 states. Already, many with conservative-leaning legislatures are banning or poised to ban many or most abortions. Nearly 400 abortion-related laws have been passed across US states since 2009, with 85% designed to restrict, regulate or oppose access, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.Kelsy Kretschmer, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of a study examining women’s voting patterns, says it’s not clear that the decision will be help Democrats in a measurable way.“A significant proportion of white women are conservative and form the backbone of the pro-life movement and this is the thing they often care the most about. For Democrats, if you lose half of white women, you don’t have a winning majority of women,” she said.There are splits, too, over abortion rights even within Democrat-aligned voters, where conservative Democrats may oppose federal funding for abortion.At the same time, Kretschmer says, abortion rights have always been part of the Democratic platform. “It’s a core tenet of the Democratic party and most understand that outlawing abortion completely is a non-starter.”But predicting how Friday’s ruling will affect November’s vote is outside the scope of prior experience. When Roe v Wade was decided in 1971, abortion did not play the public role in plays now.“The research is quite clear that people don’t make voting decisions about abortion rights. People tend to have strong opinions one way or the other, but it doesn’t tend to affect their vote choice,” Kretschmer says.But she points out that this was prior to this moment in which Roe vs Wade may only be among the first of the women’s rights dominos to fall or could open the way to repealing rights around contraception and marriage equality. “The hope is among Democrats and the feminist movement in general, this time will be different and enough to shake people out of complacency about it,” she said.She added: “We’ve never really had a moment like this, where something so woven into basic political and civic life was ripped out all at once. That moment for abortion is now and we’ve just never seen it before. So the hope is just that – that this is a watershed moment.”Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, certainly sees it that way. Voting for Democrats in November, she said, is the only way to try and reverse the fall of Roe – or prevent even worse things happening.“Be aware of this: The Republicans are plotting a nationwide abortion ban. They cannot be allowed to have a majority in the Congress to do that,” Pelosi said. “A woman’s right to choose, reproductive freedom, is on the ballot in November.”TopicsUS newsUS politicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More