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Nick Calio will remain president of the Air Transport Association (Photo by Scott J. Ferrell)

Nick Calio, the Republican president and CEO of the lobbying group for the U.S. airline industry, will remain on the job despite the transition to the Biden administration.

Calios stay was confirmed by a source with knowledge of the thinking of the board of Airlines for America, which represents seven of the largest passenger airlines as well as three top cargo airlines.

We look forward to Calios continued leadership as the U.S. airline industry looks towards recovery from this unprecedented crisis, A4A said Saturday, in an email.

Speculation regarding Calios continued service has circulated since Joe Biden won election as president on November 3rd.

Calio is a longtime Republican who ran legislative affairs office for both President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Calio took over at A4A in January 2011, moving from a job as a top lobbyist for Citibank. He replaced Jim May at the behest of Glenn Tilton, the former Texaco CEO who became CEO of United Airlines and A4A chairman.

Calio is one of Washingtons top paid lobbyists, collecting about $4 million annually, according to the website Nonprofitlight.com.

The airline industry is a visible one, but it has never had a particularly influential role in Washington. The biggest passenger airlines are not giant companies, relatively speaking, but rather have annual revenue in the $50 billion range. Even the two big overnight cargo carriers, A4A members FedEx and UPS, are bigger: each has annual revenue in the $70 billion range.

Nevertheless, in the coronavirus crisis, airlines did better than many other industries, securing targeted relief packages in both stimulus bills passed by Congress. In March, the Cares Act included $31 billion for airline employees. The December stimulus include $15 billion for airline employees and another $1 billion for employees of airline contractors.

The packages were largely a result of extensive lobbying by airline labor unions, who worked closely with the carriers and A4A.

Labor took it over, but we also had to get the airlines, said a union source who asked not to be named.Once they got on board, Nick has been a great partner. In the past year, theyve done everything we asked.

In fact, Calio has regularly been lauded for an ability to build consensus. But he is not not universally esteemed by airline labor.

Calio has always been seen as highly partisan, said Peter Goeltz, a longtime Democratic lobbyist and former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Goeltz noted that A4A has been stocked with Republicans, including Rebecca Spicer, the wife of former Trump White House Press Secretary spokesman Sean Spicer, as senior vice president of communications, reporting directly to Calio. She also worked in the George W. Bush White House.

With a new administration coming in, theres got to be some wholesale changes at the top of A4A or the air carriers will have to get used to having a little less influence. Goeltz said.

Even working together, A4A and airline labor were unable to get the U.S. Department of Transportation to take a stand on requiring passengers to wear masks or mandating airlines to keep middle seats empty, Goeltz said.

Now, incoming President Biden has said he will require masks on mass transportation and Delta is the only airline that keeps middle seats empty.

According to the A4A website, Under Calios leadership, A4A rebranded and honed its focus on being an influential voice in helping to shape legislative and regulatory policies and priorities that improve air travel for everyone.

Known for his ability to build consensus, Calio focused the re-launched association on working collaboratively with airlines, labor unions, Congress and the Administration to promote safety, security and a healthy U.S. airline industry, the website says.

It also says that as President George W. Bushs principal liaison to Congress, Calio worked closely with the leadership and members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and had the primary responsibility for formulating and implementing White House strategy on all legislative issues. He held the same position during the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, Calio is now vice president of the universitys board of trustees. He also graduated from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

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Airline Industrys Top Lobbying Group Will Retain Its Republican Chief - Forbes

WASHINGTON As lawmakers entered the Capitol on Wednesday for one of the most solemn enterprises in American government, the impeachment of a president, Representative Lauren Boebert was causing a spectacle before even making it into the chamber. She pushed her way through newly installed metal detectors and ignored police officers who asked her to stop so they could check her with a hand-held wand.

This reprised a standoff from the evening before, when Ms. Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado, refused to show guards what was inside her handbag as she entered the building. In both cases, she was eventually granted access, but not before engineering a made-for-Twitter moment that delighted the far right.

After joining her colleagues on Wednesday, Ms. Boebert took to the House floor to denounce the vote on impeachment that passed a few hours later.

Wheres the accountability for the left after encouraging and normalizing violence? Ms. Boebert asked loudly, arguing that Democrats had tolerated excessive violence last summer during the unrest over racial justice. I call bullcrap when I hear the Democrats demanding unity.

The standoff at the metal detectors was a characteristic stunt by Ms. Boebert. She is only 10 days into her term but has already arranged several episodes that showcased her brand of far-right defiance as a conspiracy theorist who proudly boasts of carrying her Glock handgun to Washington. She is only one of 435 House members, but Ms. Boebert, 34, represents an incoming faction of the party for whom breaking the rules and gaining notoriety for doing it is exactly the point.

In the same way Republicans leaders had to adapt to the Tea Party over a decade ago, House leaders must now contend with a narrow but increasingly clamorous element of the party that not only carries Mr. Trumps anti-establishment message but connects with the voters who are so loyal to him and so crucial to future elections.

In the process, Ms. Boebert and her cohort have exasperated other lawmakers and Republicans.

There is a trend, in both parties, of members who seem more interested in dunking on folks on social media and appearing on friendly cable networks than doing the work of legislating, said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist and former press secretary for the former House Speaker John Boehner. They seem to see public service as more performance art than a battle of policy ideas.

In recent days, Ms. Boebert and a group of other freshman Republicans, including the QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a 25-year-old freshman who claimed he was armed during the Capitol riots, have questioned or outright flouted guidelines meant to protect lawmakers from violence, intruders or the spread of the coronavirus.

Their fluency in social media, access to conservative television and talk radio platforms and combativeness with reporters on live television allows them to gain notoriety in nontraditional ways.

There used to be a level of gatekeeping that went on with how members developed a profile when they got to Washington, said Kevin Madden, a strategist who served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Usually you had to work for it and earn that notoriety. Now its given to you with one YouTube video.

In an introductory video of sorts that she released last week, Ms. Boebert was shown walking against a Washington backdrop with a gun holstered at her waistline. I refuse to give up my rights, especially my Second Amendment rights, she said to the camera.

In her short time in office, Ms. Boebert has already sparred with a Republican colleague over security lapses at the Capitol last week and expressed interest in bringing her gun to work. Her Twitter account was temporarily suspended after she spread the falsehood that the presidential election was rigged.

She also faced criticism, and some demands that she resign, for tweeting out information about some lawmakers locations during the siege at the Capitol by a violent mob last week.

The behavior exhibited by Ms. Boebert and some of her fellow freshman Republicans prompted Timothy Blodgett, the Houses acting sergeant-at-arms, to send a memo to lawmakers on Tuesday notifying them that security screenings would be required for members seeking access to the chamber and that lawmakers who declined to wear masks would be removed from the House floor. Several Republicans responded by yelling that their rights were being violated as they passed through the metal detectors, behavior that has exasperated Democrats.

I dont know what the consequences are going to be for people who hold power and dont ever want to be held accountable, Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, told NPR on Wednesday about lawmakers who bypassed security measures in the Capitol. He added that defiance by lawmakers was a sign of how obnoxious things have become for some of these folks who were supporting Donald Trump. The rules dont apply to them.

Ms. Boebert unofficially started her campaign for Congress in September 2019 in Denver, announcing to the Democratic presidential candidate Beto ORourke that he would not be taking one of the most potent symbols of rural autonomy: her guns.

I was one of the gun-owning Americans who heard you speak regarding your Hell yes, Im going to take your AR-15s and AK-47s, Ms. Boebert said to Mr. ORourke at the time. Well, Im here to say hell no, youre not.

She has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy group, though she has tried to temper that by saying she is not a follower.

Ms. Boebert was running a restaurant in Colorados ranch country where she encouraged the servers to openly carry guns when she stunned the states Republican establishment by defeating a five-term incumbent in the primary and then winning the general election.

She was so inexperienced, said Dick Wadhams, the former head of the Colorado Republican Party. I dont think she even knew she had no chance, which turned out to be a good thing for her. She caught everyone by surprise.

So far, she has had the same effect on Washington. On Wednesday, the Capitol Police and Ms. Boeberts office declined to respond to requests about whether she had actually been carrying a gun either time she had trouble getting into the chamber. Ms. Boebert has said that she has a concealed carry permit, issued through the District of Columbia, for her gun and has claimed on Twitter that she has the right to freely carry within the Capitol complex, which is not true.

On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department did not respond when asked if Washingtons police chief, Robert J. Contee III, had met with Ms. Boebert to explain the districts gun laws to her, as he had said he would do last week.

Ms. Boebert has frequently defended her behavior as one of the reasons she was elected. Just as Mr. Trump has done with his base, she tells her followers that she is fighting for them. As for her right to carry a gun, she has written on Twitter that self-defense is the most basic human right.

In Colorado, Ms. Boeberts district covers much of western Colorado, a sprawling, politically diverse landscape of mesas and jagged mountains that includes liberal enclaves like Aspen and Telluride as well as often overlooked towns where cattle ranching, mining and natural gas drilling pay the bills. For generations, the district elected deeply rooted local men who, whether Democrat or Republican, tended to be cowboy-boot-wearing moderates focused on the local economy and natural resources.

Once a reliably red state, Colorado flipped with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and Republicans have struggled to regain a foothold. Democrats now hold both Senate seats, the state House and the governors office.

Republicans seeking to keep viability in the state regard Ms. Boeberts behavior warily.

I think most Republicans here are still behind her, Mr. Wadhams said. But she cant just pick fights in Washington. She has got to pay attention to the issues in her district, too: in water, natural resources, mining. If she doesnt do that, shes in real trouble.

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A Republican Lawmaker for Whom the Spectacle Is the Point - The New York Times

For a number of Republicans who have long been skeptical of Mr. Trump, the events of the last two months have been clarifying. From his initial refusal to concede defeat and his relentless attacks on Republican state officials, which undermined the partys hopes for winning the Georgia Senate seats, to savaging lawmakers and his own vice president just hours before the Capitol riot, Mr. Trump has proved himself a political arsonist.

Trump is a political David Koresh, said Billy Piper, a former chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, referring to the cult leader who died with his followers during an F.B.I. siege in Waco, Texas. He sees the end coming and wants to burn it all down and take as many with him as possible.

The violence in Washington appeared to embolden an array of Republican lawmakers, including some who took office only days ago, to condemn Mr. Trumps political recklessness and urge the party toward a different course. The partys humiliating double losses in Georgia, the day after Mr. Trump appeared at a rally there, also served to punctuate the growing peril for Republicans in the fastest-growing, more culturally diverse parts of the country, which are on track to amass more political power in the coming decade.

The party faces a threat to its financial base, too. Several of the most powerful business federations in Washington denounced the chaos this week in stinging language, including an extraordinary statement from the normally nonpolitical National Association of Manufacturers that suggested Mr. Pence invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.

Representative Tom Reed of New York, who has emerged as a leader of more moderate Republicans in the House, said Thursday that the party needed to begin not worrying about base politics as much, and standing up to that base. He argued that Republicans should pursue compromise legislation with Mr. Biden on issues like climate change, and forecast that a sizable number of Republicans would take that path.

If that means standing up to the base in order to achieve something, theyll do it, Mr. Reed predicted.

Mr. Reed warned his party that the Democrats would depict the G.O.P. as a dangerous party in 2022 if they did not rebut that charge.

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Republicans Splinter Over Whether to Make a Full Break From Trump - The New York Times

Noteworthy Republicans in the House, like Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. John Katko, voted to impeach President Donald Trump. USA TODAY

WASHINGTONRep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, voted to impeach President Donald Trump on Wednesday, leading a list of Republicanswho backed the president's removal after blaming him for incitinga deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol last week.

Trump will leave power as the first president in the nations 245-year history to be impeached twice. The vote to impeach Trump was 232 to 197, the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.

There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution, Cheney said in a statement Tuesday, declaring: "I will vote to impeach the President."

SENATE: Impeachment trial likely won't begin until Biden sworn in

Cheney, R-Wyo., was the highest-ranking Republican to back Trump's removal from office. She noted that the Jan. 6 attack, which resulted in five deaths, including a Capitol Police officer, aimed to obstruct America's democratic processes and caused "injury, death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic."

For that, Cheney saidthe president alone was to blame.

The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing, she said in a statement. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.

Nine other Republicans also voted to impeach Trump:

In this Dec. 17, 2019 file photo, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., speaks with reporters at the Capitol in Washington.(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP)

Katko, a former federal prosecutor and moderate Republican who endorsed Trump for reelection, said he reviewed the facts and reached his own conclusion.

"To allow the President of the United States to incite this attack without consequence is a direct threat to the future of our democracy,"Katko said in a statement. "For that reason, I cannot sit by without taking action. I will vote to impeach this President."

Kinzinger, a former Air Force veteran who served multiple tours overseas, said there was "no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection."

More: House passes measure calling on Pence to invoke 25th Amendment; Pence says he will not

"I will vote in favor of impeachment," he wrote in a statement.

Upton, a moderate, joined the group Wednesday, saying he would have preferred censuring the president, but he had decided"it is time to say: Enough is enough."

Herrera Beutler announced late Tuesday she would vote to impeach, saying her party "will be best served when those among us choose truth." She slammed Trump's "pathetic denouncement" of the violence during the riots.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats applauded Republicans for backing the effort.

"Good for her for honoring her oath of office," Pelosi said of Cheney.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., similarly applauded Cheney, calling her a "person of principle."

Newhouse on Wednesdaybecame the first Republican to announce on the House floor that he would support impeaching Trump.

Last week there was as domestic threat at the door of the Capitol and he did nothing to stop it, Newhouse said.

That is why with a heavy heart and clear resolve, I will vote yes on these articles of impeachment, he said to applause from the Democratic side of the House.

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Throughout Trump's presidency, Cheney has remained a loyal Republican vote but has repeatedly come out against the president over his rhetoric and some foreign policy decisions.

In recent months, Cheney's criticisms of the president havegrown stronger. She's taken veiled jabs at Trump over his refusal to wear a mask, publicly asked him to stop using his Twitter account to accuse an MSNBC media host of murder and pushed Trump for answers after media reports surfaced showing Russians had offered bounties to the Taliban for killed U.S. troops.

And before backing Trump's removal, Cheney vehemently opposed pro-Trump efforts by some of her Republican colleagues to object to counting Electoral College results in certain swing states, saying on Twitter that "Congress has no authority to overturn elections by objecting to electors. Doing so steals power from the states & violates the Constitution."

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Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/12/liz-cheney-house-republicans-say-theyll-vote-impeach-trump/6647030002/

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The 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump: 'There has never been a greater betrayal by a president' - USA TODAY

The terrifying mob attack on the Capitol on Wednesday, among its many effects, quickly shifted focus from the other big news of the week: the runoffs for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, giving Democrats control of Congress.

Like a lot of recent political events, the Georgia runoffs are more significant the further you zoom out the lens. In one sense, the results were not that unpredictable. The final polling averages showed both Democrats ever-so-slightly ahead, and it was clear that the races were shaping up in such a way as to make the Democrats extremely competitive.

[Related: How Democrats Won The Georgia Runoffs]

But the Georgia runoffs were full of practical and symbolic significance. They exposed the limitations of the Republican coalition, with or without President Trump, leaving the party further in the electoral wilderness its not clear where the Republican Party goes from here, especially in the wake of the violent insurrection by Trump supporters at the Capitol.

First, the significance of Georgia specifically. Ill spare you some of the boilerplate about the more obvious implications, but having a Senate majority is a big deal. It means that Democrats should be able to confirm Supreme Court justices and President-elect Joe Bidens Cabinet. Theyll likely be able to pass additional COVID-19 stimulus legislation at the very least, along with other budgetary policies through reconciliation. Other policy changes would require eliminating the filibuster unlikely or getting cooperation from enough Republicans. But at least Democrats will have the chance to bring to the floor election-reform bills like H.R. 1 and policies like Puerto Rico statehood, giving them a fighting chance instead of having Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squash them from the start.

And symbolically? Well, its Georgia. With the possible exception of Texas, no other state has been as much of a symbol of an emerging Democratic coalition of college-educated white voters and high turnout among Black voters and other minority groups. Both Warnock and Ossoff are breakthrough candidates, not the moderate, white Blue Dogs that Democrats have traditionally nominated in Georgia. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, will become the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democrat ever to serve in the U.S. Senate from the South. Ossoff will become the youngest senator elected since Biden, in 1973, and the first Jewish senator elected to the U.S. Senate from the South since the 1880s.

Then theres the fact that the runoffs came during a lame-duck period in which in a predicate to Wednesdays violence Trump and other Republicans tried to overturn and subvert the results of the election and undermine faith in the democratic process. If Republicans get the message that anti-democratic actions have negative electoral consequences, they may be less inclined to push democracy to the brink in the future.

[Related: Trump Helped Take Extremist Views From The Fringes Of Society To A Mob Attacking The Capitol]

Republicans may not take away that lesson, though. One school of thought is that because Warnocks and Ossoffs wins were narrow once all votes are counted, Warnock should win by around 2 percentage points and Ossoff by about 1 point we shouldnt make too much of them.

I dont find this convincing. The way political actors react to elections is usually based on who wins and loses, not on their margins of victory. For example, nobody thought that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were brilliant politicians because they only narrowly lost in key Electoral College states.

But its also not clear that these races really had any business being close to begin with. Consider the following:

Indeed, after Georgia, Republicans track record in the three general elections (2016, 2018, 2020) plus the various runoffs and special elections that took place under Trump now starts to look mediocre:

So, it hasnt been a terrible time to be a Republican running for office, but it hasnt been a good one, either. Typically, a party would be looking to move beyond a one-term president who had cost his party control of both houses of Congress. Actually, thats being kind: Typically, a party wants nothing to do with a losing presidential candidate.

When it comes to Trump, though, that calculation isnt necessarily so simple because of his tendency to punish his intraparty adversaries: Republicans who tried to cross him, such as former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, were sometimes forced to retire rather than face the presidents wrath in a primary.

Yet the GOP has done especially poorly in Trump-era elections without Trump on the ballot, too. Republicans lost the popular vote for the U.S. House by 8.6 points in 2018 without the president on the ticket. And while some Republicans are blaming Trump for their losses in Georgia, the fact is that Perdue won the plurality of votes in November with Trump on the ballot but lost to Ossoff without him. Tuesdays loss came primarily because of lower turnout, especially in red, rural counties where Trump can bring voters to the polls.

To step back a bit, the success of an electoral strategy basically comes down to four dimensions:

In Trump-era elections, Republicans have tended to do well along two of these dimensions and poorly along the other two. Namely, Trump gets very high turnout from his base. Whats just as important, rural white voters who are the core of that base have far more power in the Electoral College and U.S. Senate than their raw numbers would imply, making their coalition electorally efficient. Hence, their strategy has performed well along dimensions No. 1 and No. 4.

Conversely, Trump is extremely motivating in turning out many parts of the Democratic base (dimension No. 2). And hes a big turn-off to swing voters, or at least hes proven to be after four years in office (dimension No. 3). After narrowly beating Clinton among independent voters in 2016, Trump lost them to Biden by 13 points in November. Swing voters also havent been very happy with the GOP with or without Trump on the ballot: They backed Democratic candidates for the U.S. House by 12 points in 2018. Republicans have had especially big problems with suburban swing voters, including in places that were once GOP strongholds.

Well have to wait and see, but the violence at the Capitol last week may only exacerbate the GOPs problems on dimensions No. 2 and No. 3. In the few polls conducted since, solid majorities of Americans overall, including almost all Democrats and a majority of independents, said the storming of the Capitol represented a threat to democracy. Similar shares of Democrats and independents said Trump and congressional Republicans bore at least some blame.

[Related: Storming The U.S. Capitol Was About Maintaining White Power In America]

Republicans are in a fairly precarious position. At best, they are often fighting to a draw, and one that would often be a losing strategy without the structural advantages built into the system for rural voters. And if Republicans dont get spectacular turnout from their base, everything else potentially starts to crumble. Even a modest decline in turnout from people who are pro-#MAGA but not necessarily part of the traditional Republican base can leave the GOP in a losing position.

Nor do Republicans have any sort of obvious role model for how to achieve consistent electoral success. The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, saw his second term in office end with landslides against Republicans in 2006 and 2008. A series of recent presidential nominees associated with the party establishment (Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole) all lost their elections, meanwhile. You really have to go back to Ronald Reagan for an example of an unambiguously broad and successful Republican electoral coalition, and that was a generation ago. Republicans who cast their first votes for Reagan at age 18 in 1984 will be 58 years old in 2024.

This doesnt mean Republicans are helpless, by any means. Under McConnell and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, their congressional agenda has also been largely unpopular. If youre consistently pushing positions that a majority of the public opposes, youre liable to pay a price for it. Republicans structural advantages (especially in the Senate), and Trumps ability to drive turnout in the places where those structural advantages matter, served as cover for a minoritarian agenda.

For all that said, the tendency of the opposition party to regain ground at the midterms is very strong. One would not want to bet that much against the GOP winning back one or both houses of Congress in 2022. (The House, where Republicans should pick up some seats from redistricting, might actually be the better bet than the Senate, where Democrats have a relatively favorable map.)

After last week, though, Im not sure Id want to place a lot of money on the GOP in 2022, either. If the Georgia runoffs served as a quasi-midterm, they might suggest that the GOP cant count on the sort of gains that a party typically wins in midterms. As in the primaries leading up to 2010, the GOP is likely to have some vicious intraparty fights, possibly leading it to nominate suboptimal candidates in some races. And with the violence last week and Republican efforts to contest the Electoral College outcome in Congress, Democrats may be very motivated again in 2022, feeling not unreasonably as though democracy itself may be on the line.

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Georgia Was A Disaster For Republicans. Its Not Clear Where They Can Go Next. - FiveThirtyEight