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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday on The Laura Ingraham Show that some members of the Republican Party have lost their way, as Sen. Jeff Flake said on Sunday, but that it has nothing to do with the populism, xenophobia or protectionism and nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Paul said the party has lost its way because it embraced establishment principles.

If youre going to say, Oh, the days were so much better when we had George Bush versus President Trump, Im not so sure I agree, hecontinued. I think the Cabinet that Trump has put in place is more conservative than even Reagans Cabinet. I think that Trump appointing Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is better than we could have ever hoped from either Bush.

We have given in to nativism and protectionism, Flake said on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday. And I think that, if were going to be a governing party in the future, and a majority party, we have got to go back to traditional conservatism, limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, respect for free trade. Those are the principles that made us who we are.

In response, Paul pointed to GOP senators' repeated betrayal of the Republican Party's campaign promises to repeal and replace Obamacare, as well as the GOP establishment's opposition to President Donald Trump's sweeping tax reform proposal.

"I think there are differing opinions on whether we've lost our way," hesaid. "I think some in our party have, who are less conservative. We promised to repeal Obamacare and then people voted against repealing. So I think there's objective evidence to that."

Paul went on to say that Trump's appointments have "exceeded" his expectations.

"As far as the party losing the way, yeah there a quite a few people who used to be for repealing Obamacare and then voted otherwise. And yeah that concerns me."

Paul noted that the GOP has failed repeatedly to live up to its campaign promises after the American people used the 2016 elections to vote Republicans into the White House and into majorities in both the House and the Senate, and that the GOP has shamelessly squandered the chance the voters gave them.

"My perspective is we need to be true to our conservative principles, and that that's the real danger," hesaid. "I spoke to the Young Americans for Freedom last night. We had about 500 kids. And I started out and I asked them, I said, 'Some people are saying if you like Obamacare you can keep it. These are Republicans saying this. How many of you want to keep Obamacare?' And of course, there's not one hand in the whole audience."

"And yet, some of their politicians up here are saying things like that. Republicans. 'If you like Obamacare, you can keep it,'" Paul continued. "And then there are some who are saying they're no longer for repeal. So yes there is a problem, a problem of people not being true to what they said. People ran entire campaigns saying they would repeal Obamacare, and then came up here and didn't vote to repeal."

When Ingraham asked himif he believed Trump and the GOP leadership members could push the president's tax reform proposal successfully through Congress, the Kentucky senator expressed his doubts that establishment Republicans would fall in line.

"This is once again where you've got conservative versus establishment. The president has put forward a tax cut $2 trillion tax cut that would rival Ronald Reagan's first tax cut. And I think we would unleash enormous growth in our country," Paul said. "It comes to the Hill, and the establishment on both sides says, 'Oh no. We want a tax-shifting bill where we shift the taxes from, you know, one side to the other, but really there's no tax cut.'"

"It's a revenue-neutral bill. And if I tell people that's what we're for, I might just go home because that's not what we ran on," heconcluded. "We ran on cutting taxes, making government smaller. And if government's going to remain the same size and take the same bite out of everybody's check, I just don't know if that's worth it."

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Gage Skidmore, Flickr)

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Rand Paul: 'Some in Our Party' Have Lost Way Because They've Caved - LifeZette

Being Libertarian

Red Dirt Liberty Report: Unprincipled Moderation Being Libertarian When trying to attract members from the center of both the left and the right into libertarianism, it's extremely tempting to carve out a spot in the middle in order to attract the centrists. It's not all a bad strategy, but it's best to be careful not ...

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Red Dirt Liberty Report: Unprincipled Moderation - Being Libertarian

The Liberty Conservative

The Libertarian Split Continues As Blood And Soil Speech Triggers Another Racial Witch Hunt The Liberty Conservative The split between left-leaning and right-leaning libertarians has reached a fever pitch after Jeff Deist, Director of the Mises Institute, gave an iconic speech during his annual Mises University event about blood and soil libertarianism, an idea ...

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The Libertarian Split Continues As Blood And Soil Speech Triggers Another Racial Witch Hunt - The Liberty Conservative

Public Domain"We've been compromised...by forces...of populism and protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia," says Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, about his own Republican Party.

In a new book that borrows a title from Barry Goldwater, an NPR interview, and a no-holds-barred column in Politico, Flake is making the case that the GOP and President Trump are dishonest and disinterested in limiting the size, scope, and spending of government.

He has impeccable credentials as a libertarian-leaning politician who once ran the free-market Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. Flake is a dedicated free-trader and defender of immigration who accompanied Reason on our trip to Cuba in 2016. Since arriving in Congress in 2001, he has passionately attacked the Cuba embargo as misguided, immoral, and ineffective: "We preach the gospel of contact and commerce and trade and travel, yet with Cuba we turn around and say, 'No, it's not going to work there.' It just seemed to be a glaring inconsistency in our foreign policy." An "unapologetic member of the Gang of Eight" that sound comprehensive immigration reform, he is one of the few remaining Republicans in high office to champion higher levels of legal immigration both as a humanitarian gesture and as a practical boon to the country.

Flake tells NPR that his discontent "is a long time in coming. I got here in Washington in 2001.... And we got [President George W. Bush's education overhaul law] No Child Left Behind, which was, I thought, big federal overreach into local education policy. And then we got the prescription drug benefit, which added about $7 trillion in unfunded liabilities. I didn't think that was a very conservative thing to do."

As important, Flake notes,

When we couldn't argue that we were the party of limited government anymore, then that forced us into issues like flag burning or trying to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, things that we wouldn't have done otherwise if we would have been arguing about true principles of limited government or spending.

He says that conservatives need "to be honest with people" about the causes of economic dislocation. While Donald Trump and his fellow populists wail about Mexico and China, Flake stays grounded in reality. "We manufacture twice as much as we did in the 1980s with one-third fewer workers and those productivity gains will continue. Globalization has happened and the question is: Do we harness it for our benefit or are we left behind by it?"

In his Politico piece, Flake ranges close to calling for Trump's impeachment, or at least official censure, writing that "unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility." Flake says that revelations about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election and the president's bromance with Vladimir Putin were among the reasons he's channeling his inner Goldwater. Where should his party go from here?:

First, we shouldn't hesitate to speak out if the president "plays to the base" in ways that damage the Republican Party's ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

No wonder there have been whispers about Trump working to primary Flake, who is up for re-election in 2018.

You might not agree with Jeff Flake on everything, but it's good to see a principled free-market, open-borders Republican going public with his discontent, especially because he's got a strong record of calling out massive expansions of the government going back to his first days in Congress. We need more people like him in Washington, not just the handful we already know (Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Justin Amash, Thomas Massie...).

In 2008, at Reason's 40th anniversary gala in Los Angeles, soon after Barack Obama's and the Democrat's win over John McCain and the GOP Congress, Flake talked about how his party needed to get back to limited-government principles. Take a look:

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Jeff Flake's Conscience Is Good for Libertariansand the Country - Reason (blog)

By Alexandra Filindra and Laurel Harbridge-Yong By Alexandra Filindra and Laurel Harbridge-Yong August 2 at 5:00 AM

President Trumps political missteps have been severely criticized by Democrats, media observers, legal experts and even police chiefs.Some of these scandals have been viewed as so serious that some legislators and observers,such asVox columnist Matthew Yglesias, have declared that FBI Director James B. Comeys dismissal put impeachment on the table.

But despite passing the sanctions against Russia, which implicitly criticized Trumps policies, few Republican legislators have openly criticizedthe president. There have been a few exceptions including Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.)and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) but why havent there been more?

Our studies show that Republicans have good reason to keep their criticism to themselves: Alegislator who rebukes Trump risks losing voter support in the next primary.

As he hosted Senate Republicans for a health-care meeting at the White House, July 19, President Trump said he "worried" whether Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) would support a revised GOP health-care bill that collapsed on July 17. (The Washington Post)

Heres how we did our research

To study how Republican voters might respond to Republican politicians who rebuke Trump, we fielded two experiments in May shortly after news broke about the relevant events. One experiment, fielded in early May, related to the Comey firing, and a second, fielded in mid-May, related to the news that, in a meeting with Russian officials, Trump revealed classified intelligence on the Islamic States strategy in Syria. Respondents were recruited on Amazons MTurk platform and included 144 (in early May) and 197 (in mid-May) self-identified Republicans. While not representative of the national population of Republicans, these samples include similarly sized proportions of people who identify with the party strongly and weakly.

[Why did Trump win? More whites and fewer blacks actually voted.]

In each study, respondents who identified as Republicans were split into two groups. All were told about the relevant action and Trumps justification for it.

In the first group, respondents were then told that the Republican leadership echoed Trumps justification. In the second group, however, respondents were told that the Republican leadership condemned the presidents action. We then asked follow-up questions, which we will look atbelow.

Republican voters were more willing to disapprove of the presidents actions if their partys leaders criticized him.

First, we asked respondents whether Trump did the right thing or the wrong thing.

In both experiments, respondents in the second group who had been told that GOP leaders had criticized the president were more likely to say that Trump had done the wrong thing.

[Its time to bust the myth. Most Trump voters were not working class.]

You can see this in the graph below, which shows our results from the Comey experiment. When told that GOP leaders backed Trump, 59 percent of respondents said Trump did the right thing, and only eightpercent said he had done the wrong thing. When told that Trump was rebuked by congressional leaders, 49 percent said he did the right thing, while the number who saidhe did the wrong thing jumped to 25 percent.

Results were similar when we asked about Trump giving classified information to a visiting Russian delegation. The share of Republicans who said Trump did the wrong thing increased from 21 percent, when told GOP leaders supported the president, to 42 percent, when told GOP leaders rebuked the president. This suggests that partisans are more likely to be critical of their leader when the party is critical.

But voters were also critical of their partys leadership.

Second, we asked respondents how much they agreed with the Republican leaderships response. What we found might worry GOP officials who criticize Trump.

When told that the Republican Party leadership supported Trump, voters were significantly more likely to support their leaders than when told that theyd been critical of the president. In the Comey experiment, on a scale from 0 to 1, Republican voters average agreement with their leadership fell from 0.66 to 0.51. In the intelligence experiment, Republican voters average agreement with the party leadership fell from 0.62 to 0.55.

[Thanks to Trump, Germany says it cant rely on the U.S. Heres what that means.]

In another question, we also found that those in the second group were less likely by about 0.12 and 0.07 on the 0 to 1 scale, for the Comey and intelligence studies, respectively to say they thought the Republican Party response was appropriate than those in the first.

Trumps approval rating stayed the same,whether supported or rebuked byother Republicans.

Third, we checked on whether this theoretical Republican rebuke affected Trumps approval rating. It didnt. Even when voters were told that GOP leaders had criticized Trump, it didnt affect their overall approval of the president.

But rebuking the president looked politically risky for members of Congress.

Fourth, but only in the intelligence-sharing experiment, we asked respondents how they would vote in the general election and whether they would support their senator in the next primary if their senator signed on to the leaderships response, positive or negative.

As you can see in the graph, few Republicans would abandon their partys nominee in the general election. But Republican voters who said theyd support their Republican senator in the primary dropped from 88 percent to 77 percent for senators who supposedly signed on to this theoretical rebuke. These numbers do not include respondents who said not sure for how they would vote in the general election; the not sure group was about the same for both groups.

Not surprisingly, Trump supporters were more likely to say they wouldnt support a primary candidate who had criticized the president. For instance, among respondents who had tepid feelings about Trump rating him at 40 on a 100-point feeling thermometer being told that their senator had rebuked Trump did not significantly affect whether the voter said theyd support him or her in the primary.

But among more fervent Trump supporters those who gave him an 80 on the feeling thermometer their likelihood of supporting the senator in a primary election fell from 97 percent to 75 based on whether they were told he/she supported or criticized the president. Thats a statistically significant difference of 22 percentage points.

Although not a typical Republican in any way, Trump has cultivated a strong personal following among the Republican base. Loyalty to Trump may lead strong partisans to penalize Republican critics as disloyal. Recent reports suggest that some Republicans who dislike Trump are leaving the party. That means the hold that Trump has on the remaining base may be even more of a problem for critics within the party.

Alexandra Filindra is associate professor of political science andpsychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where her research focuses on the effects of race and ethnicity on public policy. Find her on Twitter @aleka1971.

Laurel Harbridge-Yong is associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University andauthor of Is Bipartisanship Dead? Policy Agreement and Agenda-Setting in the House of Representatives(Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Originally posted here:
This is why more Republicans in Congress haven't criticized Trump - Washington Post