Archive for the ‘Republican’ Category

Sen. Jeff Flake says Republican Party has "lost its way" – CBS News – CBS News

Sen. Jeff Flake says the Republican Party has "lost its way," and is urging members to turn back to what he calls "traditional conservatism" -- after a particularly contentious week in Washington.

"We've given in to nativism and protectionism. And I think that if we're going to be a governing party in the future and a majority party we've got to go back to traditional conservatism," Flake said Sunday on "Face the Nation."

In his new book, "Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle," the Arizona Republican -- who will likely face challenges in his race for reelection next year -- outlines some of his differences with President Trump.

Flake wasreluctant to endorse Mr. Trumpin the days leading up to the 2016 election, criticizing Mr. Trump for his pivots on immigration, a major issue for the senator whose state shares a border with Mexico.

Since then, Flake has taken a tougher stance on Mr. Trump than some other Republicans, in one case urging the FBI to release any tapes of conversations between Mr. Trump andfired FBI Director James Comey.

Flake writes in his new book, "When we excuse on our side what we attack on the other, then we are hypocrites. If we do that as a practice, then we are corrupt. If we continually accept this conduct as elected officials, then perhaps we shouldn't be elected officials."

Asked whether he believes Republican leaders are complicit in this notion if they don't call out the president, Flake responded, "I do think so."

"The last thing you want to do is wake up every morning and see a tweet... You know, it's tough not to just say, 'I'm not going to respond,'" Flake said. "And we can't respond to everything. But there are times when you have to stand up and say, 'I'm sorry. This is wrong.'"

"There are truths that are self-evident," Flake added. "And you've got to stand up and call -- whether it's the White House or other elected officials -- to task when they're-- they're not doing what they should. And I do think that we bear the responsibility, if we're elected officials, to do that."

Flake said the 24-hour news cycle and impact of social media is, in large part, helping drive the Republican Party apart.

"I think certainly the modern media culture values those who yell the loudest," Flake said. "And so the tougher path is frankly to have the kind of demeanor that some people might call boring."

"But you've got to move ahead and tackle the policy issues," he added. "And the problem is this is very much getting in the way of us solving the problems that we've got to solve."

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Sen. Jeff Flake says Republican Party has "lost its way" - CBS News - CBS News

House Republican: US just as focused on data security as Europe – The Hill

LAS VEGAS Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) said Sunday that Europe can't pretend to be more idealistic on privacy issues than the U.S. while many of its nations try to enact laws limiting encryption.

Hurd is one of a sturdy number of legislators including a bipartisan House Judiciary working group on encryption that opposeslaws allowing law enforcement agencies to access all encrypted datain the United States. Proponents believe access would helppreventand solvecrime, including terrorist-related activities.

Europe likes to act like they take privacy more severely than we do. That is patently false, he toldThe Hill at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.This notion we dont take this seriously in the U.S. is wrong.

Current encryption methods make it impossible for law enforcement to access chat apps or files from criminals in a timely manner, even with a warrant. Various U.S. law enforcement agencies have waged periodic efforts to force manufacturers to provide some form of access.

European nations including Germany and the United Kingdom have either enacted or are poised to enact these types of rules.

The terrorism challenges in Europe are really kind of tough, and they may lead the way and carry some of our water on this, said Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Dana Boente at the Aspen Security Forum earlier this month.

But cybersecurity experts people who design secure communication systems and those who develop techniques to hack into those systems universally believe that adding "backdoors" into encryption is a substantial national security threat. Adding new entry points into encryption makes its design far more perilous and far more likely for the system to be cracked by hackers or for the keys to be stolen.

We should be making encryption more secure, not less, Hurdsaid.

European Union courts struck down exemptions allowing the U.S. to store European citizens' data on stateside servers based on privacy concerns. But, claimed Hurd, the threats to privacy caused by an encryption rule demonstrated the EU'strue colors when it came to privacy.

Hurd has experience in security issues both as a former CIA agent and as a former security consultant, including a stint at a cybersecurity consultancy.

He said his trip to DEF CON was, in part, to keep his knowledge of cybersecurity from becoming stale.

DEF CON is the pointy end of the spear. These are the folks that are thinking about the real problems, he said.

DEF CON is the last of three cybersecurity conferences held back-to-back to back in Las Vegas each summer. While the other conferencesare targeted tocorporate cybersecurity providers or a more general security audience, DEF CON appeals to iconoclastic, individual researchers often on the bleeding edge of the field.

Being out here gives me perspective on where policy needs to go, Hurdsaid.

Hurd and fellow congressman Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) gave one presentation on Saturday and will give a second on Sunday. Those are two of the five panels being given by current government officials.

I want the people here to know that there are people in government that care about this stuff, Hurdsaid.

He said he had visited a number of DEF CON sub-conferences, known as villages, including ones focusing on hacking voting machines and automobiles, both of which he praised.

Hurd has focused on other cybersecurity issues while in office including IT modernization and workforce shortages. He said he was excited to see children as young as nine at the conference learning to hack and hopefully preparing to fill a widening skills gap of cybersecurity talent.

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House Republican: US just as focused on data security as Europe - The Hill

Republicans’ failure to ‘repeal and replace’ Obamacare may cost them at the ballot box – Washington Post

(Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)

The Republican Partys seven-year quest to undo the Affordable Care Act culminated Friday in a humiliating failure to pass an unpopular bill, sparking questions about how steep the costs will be for its congressional majorities.

While lawmakers have not completely abandoned the effort, they are now confronting the consequences of their flop. Not only has it left the GOP in a precarious position heading into next years midterm elections, but it also has placed enormous pressure on the party to pass an ambitious and complex overhaul of federal taxes.

Strategists argued for months that Republicans risked more by not acting and alienating their conservative base than by passing an unpopular repeal bill that could turn off swing voters. They now live in the worst of both worlds with nothing to show for seven years of campaign promises, even though dozens of vulnerable lawmakers cast votes that could leave them exposed to attacks from Democrats.

This is an epic failure by congressional Republicans, said Tim Phillips, president of the conservative Koch network group Americans for Prosperity. But its time to pivot to tax reform. Theres no time to pout.

In the moments after the bare-bones repeal bill failed early Friday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said it was time to move on. But there seemed to be little stomach afterward among Republicans on Capitol Hill for acknowledging outright failure on their top campaign promise.

Lawmakers did agree, however, that when they return to Washington after Labor Day, they must succeed in their rewrite of the tax code after seven months that have seen too many of their top agenda items untouched.

Weve asked the voters for a lot, said Rep. James B. Renacci (R-Ohio), who is leaving Congress after his current term to run for governor. Theyve given us the House. Theyve given us the Senate. Theyve given us the presidency. Its time to give them something back and get something done.

Off the Hill, the collapse of the repeal effort has left conservative activists fuming about how the GOP could have flinched and pondering payback for the party establishment particularly several moderate senators who voted for ACA repeal legislation when it had no chance of becoming law only to balk when it did.

In campaign after campaign since the ACA was enacted in 2010, GOP candidates used pledges to repeal and replace Obamacare to gain majorities in the House and Senate, and President Trump promised to unravel the law as one of his first acts in office.

Instead, Republicans have continually failed to coalesce around an alternative vividly demonstrated by the dramatic failure of the skinny repeal on the Senate floor early Friday morning. They appear trapped in the fallacy of sunk costs: Having invested so much political capital in the ACAs repeal, they cannot possibly abandon it.

Numerous House lawmakers leaving a closed-door Republican conference meeting hours after the Senate bill collapsed said that efforts to undo the increasingly popular health law would have to continue.

I am disappointed and frustrated, but we should not give up, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) declared.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the leader of an influential bloc of House conservatives, insisted a deal was still within reach and said hed approached key senators. And while Trump said he would let Obamacare implode, he also urged senators on Twitter to jettison their filibuster rules to pass really good things.

But key figures warned Republicans to move on before the health morass sinks the rest of the partys agenda most importantly, the tax overhaul.

Quarantine it, said Josh Holmes, a GOP strategist and former chief of staff to McConnell who coined the repeal and replace mantra in 2010. You can let it destroy your entire agenda and your entire party as a result of inaction by continuing to dwell on something that, frankly, theyve proven unable to do.

But conservative activists have been furious in the aftermath of the repeal vote and have cast about for ways to punish those they consider responsible.

The three Republican senators who cast the decisive votes on Friday Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are largely immune to immediate electoral consequences. Murkowski, who withstood public pressure from Trump, is less than a year into a six-year term; McCain, also reelected last year, is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer; and Collins, who has not faced a serious primary threat since 1996, next stands for reelection in 2020 and is considering a run for governor next year.

But activists are still angry that several other Republican senators Dean Heller (Nev.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Rob Portman (Ohio), as well as McCain and Murkowski voted for an ACA repeal measure in 2015, when President Obama was certain to veto it, but opposed an almost identical measure this week knowing Trump could sign it into law.

That level of cynicism is breathtaking, even in the political world, said Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, which helped drive the public backlash to the ACA ahead of the 2010 Republican congressional wave.

Only Heller faces reelection next year, however, and he has yet to attract a conservative primary challenger despite emerging as a key swing vote who pushed to reduce the scope of the Senates efforts.

Adam Brandon, president of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks, said Heller opened himself wide open to a primary challenge: By bending over backwards to save Medicaid expansion, to preserve the fastest-growing entitlement program in the United States, what conservative, Republican, libertarian constituency were you serving?

Brandon, whose group deemed the turncoats Freedom Frauds, said the events of the past months have revealed a party with a double standard in handling its right flank versus its more moderate faction.

Had the Senates leading conservatives tanked the health bill, he said, they would be recruiting someone to primary Mike Lee and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, but thats not happening with Collins, McCain and Murkowski. He also suggested that the committee chairmanships held by the trio ought to be at risk.

In the House, the political challenge posed to Republicans is the opposite: Dozens of members targeted for defeat by national Democrats voted for the American Health Care Act, the GOP bill judged by the Congressional Budget Office to result in higher premiums for older and sick Americans.

Democrats made clear they intend to use that vote in their 2018 campaigns, even if the bill was never ultimately made law.

House Republicans cant turn back time and undo the morally bankrupt vote they took to kick 23 million Americans off their health insurance, impose an unfair age tax and cause skyrocketing premiums, said Tyler Law, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Speaker Ryan and all House Republicans own their disastrous bill, and it will certainly haunt their imperiled Republican majority in 2018.

On the flip side, House Republicans who cast votes for the bill cannot point to any finished product that might motivate more conservative voters. Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, insisted that the circumstances surrounding the health bill would actually work to the GOPs benefit.

Our base knows what we did, Stivers said. But it also isnt going to become law, so ... I think they have a hard time really punishing our members for some theoretical details.

A handful of moderate Republican lawmakers said Friday they would be open to pursuing a bipartisan fix to the ACA. But for most rank-and-file Republicans, the approach is simple: Never say die.

Its only a defeat if we surrender, said Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). Look, the U.S. Navy was devastated at Pearl Harbor, but three years later the Japanese surrendered to us. ... The history books of America are marked by us rebounding from defeat and turning it into victory. Were going to keep pushing.

Inside the closed-door conference meeting Friday, Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine) showed his colleagues clips of early Atlanta Falcons touchdowns in this years Super Bowl a game won by the New England Patriots after a furious 25-point comeback.

Plenty of House members showed a willingness to hang the health bills failure on the Senate, which due to its filibuster rules has yet to take up or pass dozens of significant House bills. In a final meeting before a five-week summer recess, Ryan told his colleagues that they represented the most functional branch of government.

But several House members said they were skeptical House Republicans would be able to separate themselves from the other chamberss failure and feared that they, too, would suffer from a dejected GOP base.

Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), who represents a blue-collar downstate district Democrats are heavily targeting in 2018, said he rarely encounters a constituent who airs frustrations with a particular chamber.

They never say, Well, its the Senate or the House. What they say it is, Its Congress, he said. I cant change who the Senate is, okay? But I can keep doing my job, and thats what I intend to talk about.

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Republicans' failure to 'repeal and replace' Obamacare may cost them at the ballot box - Washington Post

Trump marks new Kelly era with sharp attack on Republicans – Politico

The beginning of General John Kellys era in the White House looks indistinguishable from the end of the Reince Priebus era.

After pushing out his diminished chief of staff Friday afternoon and replacing him with Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general and outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security, President Donald Trump began his Saturday as he has many weekend mornings when he is not playing golf: on Twitter, casting blame elsewhere for the setbacks of the week.

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In a series of tweets, Trump railed against the Senate for failing in its second attempt to overhaul Obamacare, which left the president with no legislative accomplishment to point to six months into his administration. The very outdated filibuster rule must go, Trump wrote on Twitter, noting that Republicans look like fools by allowing 8 Dems to control the country.

Its not the first time Trump has suggested ending the legislative filibuster -- and its something Senate Republicans have immediately dismissed when he has raised the idea in the past. In May, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that ending the legislative filibuster was flat out not going to happen. Republican Sen. John Kennedy added at the time: Im not going to support a change in rules. The Founding Fathers set it up this way.

But for Trump, the legislative process was the scapegoat for his biggest legislative setback to date -- one that thrusts him into August with Republicans on the Hill trying to start from scratch on repealing and replacing Obamacare, while many in the White House want to move on to tackle tax reform.

After Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) voted against the Republican healthcare bill late Thursday night, Hill staffers braced themselves for the president to take out his anger on McCain, a former Trump antagonist who earlier this month announced he has brain cancer. Trump was uncharacteristically quiet on that front. But on Saturday morning, it was McConnell whom he singled out, instead, on his Twitter feed.

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Budget reconciliation is killing R's in Senate, Trump tweeted. Mitch M, go to 51 Votes NOW and WIN. IT'S TIME!

Nowhere in Trumps tweets urging Republicans to MAKE CHANGE! and switch to a 51 majority vote did he acknowledge that the failed Republican legislation only had 49 votes.

Though Republicans hold a 52-seat majority in the Senate, three GOP senators -- Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Susan Collins and McCain -- broke from the ranks and voted, along with Democratic lawmakers, to strike down the so-called "skinny" Obamacare repeal legislation. McConnell was trying to pass the legislation through budget reconciliation, which would have only required a simple majority of votes to pass.

8 Dems totally control the U.S. Senate, Trump tweeted on Saturday. Many great Republican bills will never pass, like Kate's Law and complete Healthcare. Get smart!

The morning tweetstorm appeared motivated primarily by the failure of the healthcare bill, and by Trump's frustrations with the legislative process and particularly with McConnell, who White House officials said told them to stay out of the healthcare fight and let the tactician of the Senate handle the nuts and bolts of pushing through the legislation.

But it also came after a two-week stretch of chaotic changes in the White House. A week ago, press secretary Sean Spicer resigned abruptly from his position, after Anthony Scaramucci, a former hedge fund manager and Trump campaign fundraiser, was named communications director. Scaramucci, who opened his tenure in the White House with a profane rant to a reporter from the New Yorker about Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon, has vowed a broad overhaul of the communications shop, that will include firing anyone thought to be a leaker.

Son-in-law Jared Kushner, meanwhile, spent the first half of last week in closed-door sessions with the House and Senate intelligence committees being grilled about his dealings with Russian operatives during the campaign and the transition. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to publicly berate his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who has drawn the president's ire for recusing himself from the ongoing Russia investigation. That tiff has forced a split in his own party as Republicans inside and outside the administration warn the president of the folly of firing one of his earliest campaign supporters.

And lost in all the noise coming from inside Trumps White House was an announcement from North Korea that its latest intercontinental ballistic missile test showed that the entire mainland of the United States is now within striking range.

But the president has something on the calendar to buck up his flagging spirits. In the middle of the turbulent week of changes, many of them long discussed and overdue, Trumps campaign announced the president would travel to West Virginia on Thursday to participate in one of his favorite activities: a good, old-fashioned campaign rally.

Brent Griffiths contributed to this report.

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Trump marks new Kelly era with sharp attack on Republicans - Politico

The Republican tax reform effort just won some important support – CNBC

The Koch groups are expected to provide key financial support and political pressure for lawmakers as they return to their home districts next month seeking to demonstrate progress on one of the centerpieces of the Republican agenda. The groups said they are planning to organize grass-roots events across the country as well as invest in paid ads.

Monday's event will also include volunteers working phone banks to urge lawmakers to pass comprehensive tax reform. On Thursday, Freedom Partners began highlighting 10 senators who previously had supported changes to the tax code, starting with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Together, the groups already have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital ads targeting members of the tax-writing committee in the House this summer.

But the Koch groups and Republican leadership have not always been on the same page.

The groups were among the most vocal opponents of the border adjustment tax, which would have allowed U.S. companies to deduct the cost of domestic production but not imports effectively raising the cost of foreign goods. GOP leadership argued the provision was critical to keeping U.S. companies from moving overseas and also raised a trillion dollars in revenue to help pay for a lower corporate tax rate.

But the Koch groups dubbed the measure a new tax on consumers, even organizing a protest against House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady as he delivered a speech at a Washington hotel. AFP spent six figures on a cable TV ad this spring that compared the measure to the taxes in the Affordable Care Act, while Freedom Partners funded research on the state-level impact of the border adjustment tax.

On Thursday, the Republican leadership announced in a joint statement with the White House that it would abandon the measure to focus on the broader goals of tax reform. Freedom Partners cheered the move as a "welcome step."

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Brady said he planned to retreat next month with members of his committee and the Senate to Rancho del Cielo in California, which served as a vacation home for President Ronald Reagan, to begin work on a tax bill.

"It shows we are uniting behind bold principles of tax reform," Brady said. "It makes clear there is an urgency to deliver it this year, and it's clear the president is fully committed to this tax reform approach."

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The Republican tax reform effort just won some important support - CNBC