““She gave the state of Wyoming the middle finger.” “He’s a traitor.” “We want a real Republican in there.”
These are just some of the criticisms that Republicans have lobbed at the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. The criticisms haven’t stopped there, either. Trump told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month to “get rid of them all.” And all but one of these 10 representatives have been publicly rebuked by state or local GOP officials. In total, nine already face a primary challenger in 2022.”
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“especially those who hail from more Republican-leaning districts.”
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“It’s early yet, so it’s possible these 10 Republicans curry favor with the party faithful in the coming months, but no matter what they do, their House impeachment vote could still cut their political careers short in the 2022 GOP primaries.”
“even if Trump’s authoritarian bluster rarely cashed out into any real-world seizure of new powers for the president, it was far from harmless. Four years of 100-proof strongman rhetoric may have the effect of building up our tolerance if and when the real thing comes around in a smoother blend. When (at least) half of the political class feels driven by partisan loyalty to defend or downplay open contempt for constitutional limits, it’s likely to make well-planned assaults on those limits that much easier to execute. Donald Trump may yet end up being a “transformational” president, not because of the abuses he managed to carry out but thanks to the dangerous possibilities he revealed.”
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“By excusing or ignoring the 45th president’s disgraceful assaults on democratic norms, Republicans have largely abandoned any principled objection to such moves in the future. If and when an actually competent authoritarian comes along, what will their argument be? “Yeah, but our guy wasn’t any good at it”?”
“Regardless of what Trump does post-presidency, his impact on the conservative base has been profound. According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair. That’s not all that surprising considering the leader of the party is telling his followers that the process was rigged and illegitimate. So whatever direction the GOP goes, they’re going with a Trumpian base and that might be the defining constraint for the party over the next four years.”
“Once upon a time, the Arizona GOP nursed a distinctly individualistic skepticism of government and politicians. Long-time U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater famously wrote, “my aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” A hand-wringing September 2020 Kurt Anderson column in The New York Times held Goldwater responsible for introducing Milton Friedman’s free-market economic ideas to a wide audience during events that “opened the door to libertarian economics.”
Sam Steiger, a colorful five-term member of the House of Representatives, said there were some of his colleagues “you wouldn’t hire to wheel a wheelbarrow.” He ran for governor as a Libertarian in 1982, earning 5 percent of the vote. When he returned to the Republican fold to unsuccessfully seek the party’s 1990 gubernatorial nomination, the Phoenix New Times noted that while he had backed off advocacy of drug legalization, Steiger “is an admitted ‘Libertarian at heart.'”
Those were Republicans you couldn’t really imagine assuring party faithful that a politician “loves” them. Grudging tolerance for an officeholder was more characteristic for their breed.
Since then, however, the Arizona GOP has undergone a strange transformation. It took a distinctly nativist and nationalist turn, best exemplified by Joe Arpaio, who held the office of Maricopa County sheriff for 24 years.
Where Goldwater promoted a Bracero-type temporary worker program to make illegal border crossings less tempting, and Steiger accused the Immigration and Naturalization Service of exaggerating illegal immigration in order to pad its budget requests, Arpaio made border enforcement the focus of his local law enforcement department. He went so far as to ignore a judge’s order to stop detaining people his officers suspected of undocumented status—earning himself a conviction for contempt of court in the process. (Trump pardoned the former sheriff.)”
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“The party isn’t yet entirely consumed by Trumpism. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, has championed old-school issues such as school choice. He’s been savaged by the usual suspects for his relatively light touch in terms of mandated restrictions and lockdowns in response to the pandemic. Ducey also appointed libertarian legal scholar Clint Bolick to serve on the Arizona Supreme Court.
But the governor’s defense of the integrity of the state’s voting process won him a juvenile slap from Kelli Ward, who tweeted #STHU (shut the hell up) at her party’s own elected official. Ward had unsuccessfully challenged the vote tally after the presidential election.
The Arizona Republican Party’s transformation into a Trumpist cult isn’t just antagonizing a governor elected from its ranks, it’s eroding the organization’s support by alienating whole segments of the population. After Flake decided against running for reelection, his former seat went to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. Democrat Mark Kelly defeated incumbent Trumpist Republican Martha McSally (who was appointed) for the other seat in 2020. And, in a squeaker of a vote, the state’s electoral votes went to Joe Biden in the latest presidential contest.”
“Part of what Gingrich was doing was simply destroying the trust of the American people in Congress and really the government, believing that government would do the right thing. You can look at all the polls dating the decline in trust in Congress and government and really all institutions of American life and there’s a noticeable dip in the Gingrich era. So Gingrich brings these nihilistic energies to bear on Congress, and people never look at it the same way again.
You could say Gingrich is the guy who put in place this image of Congress as a “swamp,” something Trump would later play upon. And he brought a kind of partisan polarization to the institution that didn’t really exist before, or at least wasn’t a dominant strain. This is the era where Gingrich really teaches the Republicans to talk about Democrats as the enemy, as corrupt people who don’t have the interests of the American people in mind.
Ultimately, he changes the institution in ways that destroyed the possibility for comity and practical wisdom, and you can see that legacy in Congress today.”
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“Maybe because I am on the right myself, I don’t see these conservative movements as having risen from nothing, or from mere racism or other kinds of unsatisfiable grievances. I tend to see them as inflammations or infections within the body politic that need to be treated. And historically, these movements did succeed in bringing people to power who did then try to use the power of government to address some of the problems that had motivated those movements.
The Tea Party was indicative, in ways I’m not sure we understood at the time, of the growing inequality in American life and the extent to which large parts of the country felt abandoned by the centers of power, the extent to which many Americans had become alienated from their fellow countrymen and their culture. And more should have been done in the Obama years, in hindsight, to address this. And this is not an original thought to me. I think Obama would say the same.
But what the Tea Party movement tended to produce was people who were against government in toto. So when they came to Congress, they weren’t willing to learn the system and accept their roles as junior people on the totem pole and follow the advice of their more pragmatic elders and learn wisdom. They were out to blow the place up. And when they discovered they couldn’t blow the place up, they left. And the ones who stayed on really stayed on with an eye toward doing as much damage to the system as they could.
So the direct line from the Tea Party is to the House Freedom Caucus, which is the most malign element in government, I think, that we’ve seen since the period before the Civil War. And the stated enemy of the Freedom Caucus is not even the Democrats, not even the people they call RINOs. The enemy is bipartisanship and compromise itself. And when you have a significant faction that doesn’t get expelled from a party and is allowed to keep putting this view forward, it completely undermines democracy itself.”
“in 1989, I entered a world where Nebraska straddled the middle of the political spectrum. But since then, the state has drifted so far from the center it’s hard to remember it was ever there. Using DW-NOMINATE data from the congressional vote tallying website Voteview, we can see just how far Nebraska’s political representatives have drifted rightward in the last thirty years. As you can see in the chart below, the average ideology score of Nebraska’s U.S. representatives and senators, as measured by DW-NOMINATE’s first dimension, shifted more than half a point between 1990 and 2020.1 Put in today’s terms, in 1990, the average Nebraskan in Congress was similar in ideology to outgoing Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, a moderate; whereas today she would more closely resemble Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who isn’t the most conservative Republican in Congress (that’s Sen. Mike Lee), but still drifts pretty far to the right on the ideological spectrum.”
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“the Electoral College has always favored smaller states like Nebraska. But it is only somewhat recently that these states have heavily favored Republicans.”
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“So what’s driving Nebraska’s (and other states’) rightward shift? In part, it has to do with the nationalization of American politics. Since the 1990s, Democratic voters have moved to the left on issues such as health care and immigration, while Republicans have become more likely to identify as conservative as their moderate candidates have dwindled. And in turn, this nationalization and polarization has made it more difficult for local candidates to successfully create their own platforms. For example, as governor and senator, Nelson often broke from his own party in an attempt to attract conservative voters, taking stances like advocating for a “hard barrier” to prevent illegal immigration or supporting various anti-abortion measures. But the days of candidates creating their own platforms are largely over, and the share of registered Democratic voters in Nebraska has also dropped.”
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“This trend extends to lower levels of government, too, like the state legislature and city councils. Republican state lawmakers have also tried to eliminate prenatal care and repeal in-state tuition for immigrants, while giving local police the power to question the immigration status of anyone they suspect of living in the country illegally. A few towns have even passed ordinances that formally ban undocumented immigrants from renting property. All this is happening in a state that, until recently, settled a high number of refugees.
Meanwhile, on the education front, Republican lawmakers have leaned into national Republicans’ growing aversion toward public education, trying to eliminate Nebraska’s democratically elected board of education, while perpetual tax cuts and exemptions have led to two-thirds of Nebraska’s school districts receiving no general financial assistance from the state, which has contributed to public schools in rural Nebraska having “the most inequitable [state aid] distribution in the nation,” according to a nationwide study by the think tank, The Rural School and Community Trust. This is all in a state where Republicans once implemented income and sales taxes to increase K-12 schools’ funding, among a host of other progressive legislation.
But lest one think the effects of nationalization have completely remade states like Nebraska, many Nebraskans disagree with the GOP’s positions. Through ballot initiatives, for instance, Nebraska voters have approved a higher minimum wage, Medicaid expansion and casino gambling, even though Republicans officials, who continue to cruise to statewide victories, have opposed these measures.”
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““If you ask people to vote for things that might be in their own interest, and you explain the issue to them in one paragraph on the ballot, they will vote for the thing that is good for them,” said Ari Kohen, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But you can’t ask them to give up their party affiliation.”
People are reluctant to switch parties, but they can be swayed to change their mind about a specific cause, particularly when an issue is presented outside of a partisan context. State Sen. Tony Vargas, a Democrat in Omaha, told me that he thought Medicaid expansion passed — even though Nelson encountered a brouhaha over a similar issue just eight years prior— because it wasn’t tied to a particular politician or party. “If our ballot said ‘expanding Obamacare,’ I feel like people would have voted against it,” Vargas said. “Instead, we said ‘expanding Medicaid and addressing the gap.’ … It’s a lot harder to attack the issue. It’s much easier to attack the person.””
“In the hours after Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy (LA) and Richard Burr (NC) joined five other Republican senators in voting to convict former President Donald Trump on an article of impeachment for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection, the state Republican parties in Louisiana and North Carolina wasted no time laying down a marker that the GOP still belongs to Trump.
The LAGOP and NCGOP each quickly censured Cassidy and Burr for their votes. In a statement posted to Twitter, the LAGOP wrote that it “condemn[s], in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump,” while NCGOP chair Michael Whatley released a statement denouncing Burr’s vote as “shocking and disappointing.”
Trump won both Louisiana and North Carolina in 2020. Cassidy was loyal to Trump throughout Trump’s term in office, but began to distance himself during the impeachment trial, perhaps feeling emboldened by the fact that he just won reelection for another six-year term. Following his vote, he posted a remarkably succinct video statement in which he said, “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.””
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“the fact that seven of the 50 Republican senators voted for Trump’s conviction indicates his hold over members of his party in that chamber has weakened since he was in office, the quick censures of Cassidy and Barr are reminders that his popularity among grassroots Republicans remains strong.
The series of censures also points to a worrying dynamic that will be at play if Trump decides to run again in 2024. After all, if publicly inciting a violent attack on the legislative branch of the federal government isn’t enough to prompt state-level Republicans to break with him, then what, if anything, would?”
“The central fact of American politics today is that one of the country’s two major political parties is broken. Not merely wrong, but broken in a fundamental way, hostile to democracy and incapable of serving as a good-faith partner in governing.
Trump repeatedly attempted to overturn a legitimate election, an effort that culminated in inciting a mob that threatened the lives of members of Congress. Yet Republicans in that body cannot bring themselves to inflict the appropriate constitutional punishment for this kind of offense even after he has left office and is no longer needed to get judges confirmed and tax cuts passed.
Democracies require accountability to function. Political elites must be held responsible for grievous errors and punished accordingly. The GOP’s decay has destroyed this possibility — but the Senate trial is a necessary step toward fighting back.”
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“It will show that, even in the dramatic case of outright insurrection against the US government, the country’s political system is incapable of holding elites accountable largely due to one party’s extreme partisanship. Demonstrating this will serve as a justification for people, Democrats and civil society alike, to take more dramatic steps to repair American democracy down the line — including pushing for significant reforms of the political system.”
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“To really fix America, Democrats need to engage in a kind of partisan warfare: They need to inflict costs for past misbehavior not only on Trump, but on the Republican Party that enabled him. Most fundamentally, they need to roll back the anti-democratic practices — like extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics — that permit Republicans to remain competitive while appealing primarily to the most reactionary elements of the American public.
There are no costs that politicians pay attention to more than electoral ones. And if Republicans can’t win in the future by embracing leaders like Trump, they won’t be so comfortable excusing anti-democratic abuses down the line.
The tactics Democrats will need to employ in doing this — most notably, radically revising the filibuster to allow the passage of pro-democracy legislation along party lines — will seem extreme. But they will be more justifiable, including to moderate Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) — in a world where it’s clear that the normal levers of political accountability are broken. It is a way of showing that radical procedural reforms really are a “last resort.”
So failing to convict Trump again will further underscore that impeachment is a paper tiger, at least for Republican presidents. But that horse is already out of the barn. Trying and failing once again, when the anti-democratic offense is much greater and the cost to Republicans for convicting is much lower, will help underscore just how deeply complicit they are in the events of January 6 — and build the case for others, Democrats and non-politicians alike, to punish them accordingly.”
“State legislators in 28 states have filed 106 bills restricting the franchise thus far in 2021 — and the overwhelming majority have come from Republicans. Compare that to last year at this time: Then, only 35 such bills had been filed in six states.
“We are seeing a backlash,” says Eliza Sweren-Becker, the report’s lead author. “Rather than going out and trying to persuade voters, we’re seeing legislators trying to shrink the electorate in order to ensure job security for themselves.”
The proposed legislation largely falls into two categories: bills that either increase the difficulties individual Americans would face absentee voting or that give officials greater leeway to shrink the voter pool. Some are attempts to roll back voting rights expansions necessitated by the pandemic; others are retreads of policies Republicans have pushed before, like expanded voter identification laws.”
“Liz Cheney was once considered the future of the GOP. Now she’s fighting to keep her political career alive.
After voting to impeach Donald Trump last week, the highest-ranking woman in the House GOP finds herself at risk of losing her leadership post; staring down a pro-Trump primary challenge; and censured by some of her own party back home in Wyoming.
The most immediate threat to Cheney — a push by Trump loyalists to oust her as conference chair — has gained momentum inside the House GOP, although the process is complicated and could still sputter out. But at least 107 Republicans, or just over a majority, have communicated to the leaders of that effort that they would support removing Cheney from leadership on a secret ballot, according to multiple GOP sources involved in the effort. Others are threatening to boycott future conference meetings if she remains in power.”
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“If Cheney does lose her post, it will be the latest sign that the Trumpification of the Republican Party isn’t stopping anytime soon, even after the ex-president flew off to Mar-a-Lago with a disgraced legacy in Washington. Some say the Cheney fight has already become a proxy battle for the heart and soul of the splintered GOP.”