“Last February, the county chairs were less supportive of Trump than Republican primary voters as a whole. Yet as time went on, and Trump consolidated support among rank-and-file voters, the chairs fell in line. It’s a reflection of the state of the GOP that has existed since 2016 when Trump first snatched the nomination away from the establishment and took over the Republican Party.
In the pre-Trump era, GOP leaders clearly played more of a role in steering the direction of the party. The 2012 campaign is instructive: Many different candidates were briefly the favorites of rank-and-file Republican voters, from Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum. But throughout the cycle, party elites’ money and endorsements stayed focused on Mitt Romney, and that’s who got the nomination. This year’s ongoing survey of county chairs illustrates how Republican elites are now more responsive to the grassroots rather than the other way around — either because they lack the interest or the ability to do anything else.”
“It was the last vote for Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the conservative hard-liner who was all but banished from the party after he insisted that its leaders stop spreading lies about the 2020 election and accept that former President Donald Trump lost. He resigned from Congress on Friday, leaving his seat empty for now.
Buck voted “no” on the spending bill, and said he’d have voted “hell no” if possible. But despite his unassailable fiscal conservative credentials, he lost his stature on the right for insisting his party reject the stolen-election claims, reflecting a new litmus test.”
“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.
But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”
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“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”
“The fact that the House of Representatives has not had a vote on aid to Ukraine is the most successful military operation of this war. Nothing compares to the fact that the United States is not voting on giving Ukraine $60 billion of aid, which has passed the Senate and has the president’s approval…That is now shaping the battlefield more than anything else.”
“Like the party itself, McDaniel made changes and accommodations to aid and ally with Trump. Much has been written about her decision to drop her maiden name, Romney, at Trump’s behest. But the more consequential choice McDaniel made was to help move the party away from its establishment bearing — from which she herself came — into one that echoed Trump’s political fancies. She stood by him even after he threatened to form his own party, spread conspiracies about widespread fraud, lost the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn those results.”
“The Ukrainians are losing thousands of people because they don’t have enough ammunition…political game in Washington, it’s an election year…thousands of people are dying because of this.”
“Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma spoke on Wednesday about the political challenges he’s encountered while serving as the top GOP negotiator on a bipartisan border security deal.
In a speech shortly before the expected failure of the deal, Lankford bemoaned the fact that some fellow Republicans were objecting to the bill for purely political reasons.
“Some of them have been very clear with me,” Lankford said of his GOP colleagues, “they have political differences with the bill. They say it’s the wrong time to solve the problem. We’ll let the presidential election solve this problem.”
Lankford went on to say that a “popular commentator” — without naming any names — threatened to “destroy” him if he negotiated the deal during a presidential election year, regardless of what was in it.
“I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election,” Lankford recounted the commentator saying.
“By the way, they have been faithful to their promise, and have done everything they can to destroy me,” he added.”