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The libertarian-minded Massie has broken with Trump on an array of key issues, which McMurtry has highlighted repeatedly since launching his campaign earlier this month. But Massies new commercial aims to turn the tables on McMurtry, who is branding himself as a staunch Trump ally in lockstep with the president ahead of the May 19 primary.

Hes even worse than a Never Trumper. Todd McMurtry is a Trump hater, says the ad, which opens with a photograph of Massie and Trump flashing grins and thumbs-ups.

Massies commercial then highlights a handful of critical comments McMurtry made about Trump on Facebook, mostly in 2017, the first year of Trump's presidency.

Sad but true. Trump is the epitome of a weak male, said one McMurtry post, read in classic attack-ad fashion by the narrator.

Trump is an idiot, says another.

Hillary is right, McMurtry writes in another comment. He is temperamentally unqualified to be president.

Massies commercial concludes by tying his primary opponent to Hillary Clinton: Siding with Crooked Hillary. Thats Todd McMurtry, the Trump hater.

The race in Kentuckys deeply conservative 4th Congressional District, which spans the northernmost part of the state, underscores how GOP primaries are becoming litmus tests for fealty to Trump. Republican contests in areas from the Philadelphia suburbs to Fort Worth, Texas, are hinging on a simple factor: whether an incumbent House Republican has been sufficiently supportive of the president.

The significance of this test became clear during the 2018 primary season. Former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost reelection to a challenger who highlighted his denunciations of the president. Two other Trump critics, Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, retired rather than face primary challenges from Trump-aligned opponents when their poll numbers sagged after blowups with Trump.

That has led a small group of Republicans, which now includes Massie, to go to great and unusual lengths to dissuade the president from endorsing a primary opponent. Alabama Rep. Martha Roby withdrew her support for Trump after the release of the lewd Access Hollywood tape just prior to the 2016 election, prompting a furious response from local Republicans. So once Trump took office, Roby became a frequent visitor at the White House in hopes of smoothing over her relationship with the president. At the time, Roby was trying to fend off a primary threat from a pro-Trump opponent. She won reelection in 2018 but is retiring in 2020.

Massies ad cuts into the main point of his opponents campaign. McMurtry, one of the attorneys who represented Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann in his defamation lawsuit against several media outlets, has pointed out that Massies voting record is less aligned with Trump less than any other member of the Kentucky congressional delegation, saying that Trump cant rely on our congressmans support.

Running in a district that Trump won by more than 35 percentage points, McMurtry has vowed there will be no daylight between him and the president. Earlier this month, he tweeted out a picture of the Trump Hotel in Washington.

Hoping to see my favorite President, McMurtry wrote.

Its not the first time a candidate has bought advertising time in South Florida hoping to get the presidents attention. Shortly after launching his Democratic presidential campaign last fall, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg ran TV commercials in the area, coinciding with the presidents holiday travel to Mar-a-Lago.

And Massies campaign is making no secret of its intended audience.

We know the president will be in Florida this weekend, and we want him to know that our primary opponent has not been a supporter of his, said Massie campaign manager Jonathan Van Norman.

The Massie campaign is spending around $3,000 to air the commercial during Fox News programs this weekend in the West Palm Beach area, including Fox News Sunday. The spot is expected to air more than 50 times on Fox News over a 36-hour period.

The campaign will also spend $13,000 to run the ad on Fox News in Kentucky from Feb. 1 through Feb. 10.

The McMurtry campaign responded to the ad by pointing to several pieces of legislation and recent votes on which Massie broke with Trump, including a resolution aimed at curtailing the presidents ability to wage war with Iran.

Every time President Trump needs him, Massie stabs him in the back, McMurty campaign manager Jake Monssen said. It would be great if Thomas Massies problem was limited to old Facebook posts. Its not. His problem is his anti-Trump voting record in the House.

While Trump has endorsed several House Republicans who are trying to fight off primaries, aides to the president say he is unlikely to intervene in the Kentucky contest either for or against Massie. While they acknowledge Massie has sometimes opposed the president, they also note that he voted against impeachment in the House.

That has not kept Massie, who is facing the most serious reelection threat of his congressional career, from pursuing a presidential endorsement. Van Norman said the reelection campaign had been seeking Trumps support.

Certainly, Van Norman said, Congressman Massie would welcome an endorsement from President Trump in his race.

Read more:
The extreme measure one House Republican is taking to win over Donald Trump - POLITICO

The sponsor of a bill in the Iowa legislature that would have removed transgender people from the states Civil Rights Act has announced that the proposal wont move forward.

Nine GOP state representatives introduced HF 2164, which proposed removing gender identity as a protected class under theIowa Civil Rights Act. Now, Republican Rep. Steven Holt who chairs the Iowa House Judicial Committee presiding over the hearings for the bill has announced that the bill wont be considered any further.

Related: State legislatures are filled with anti-LGBTQ measures, thanks to a religious right playbook

Its dead, Holt said. It just would have had a lot of unintended consequences.

Rep. Dean Fisher (R) sponsored the proposal to address a whole host of issues that he claims transgender people cause the state. He cited examples such as ensuring trans women inmates in the state are housed in womens facilities and trans women athletes competing with fellow women, although neither of those have widely reported issues in Iowa.

Fisher also expressed hope that removing trans people would pave a way to allow Iowa medical providers to remove gender affirming surgery as a Medicaid-approved procedure.

Gender identity had been included in the states civil rights act by amendment since 2007. Several civil rights groups, including the ACLU, were highly critical of the proposal, saying it would set the clock back in Iowa.

Discriminating against transgender people or any Iowans will not make them, or us, go away or stop being who they are, Mark Stringer, ACLU Iowa executive director, told NBC News. Well continue to remind legislators of the obvious: Transgender people already do exist; they arent going anywhere; and they have large communities of Iowans fighting for equality and dignity right alongside them.

While Holt does not disagree with his fellow Republicans proposal, but knows it would not get the support to pass in the Iowa House of Representatives. The only group known to support the proposal was the evangelical Christian group The Christian Leader, which also opposes same-sex marriage.

In 2018, Iowa Republicans filed a bathroom bill that would have amended the states civil rights act to allow employers and business owners to ban transgender people from bathrooms and other facilities. That bill also did not pass.

See the original post here:
Iowa Republicans give up on removing transgender people from state's civil rights protections - LGBTQ Nation

House Republicans have convinced their most conservative members to support a forthcoming plan for the federal government to address climate change.

Republicans have long been skeptical of federal efforts to curb climate change. But now, even conservative Republicans are embracing a clean energy innovation legislative agenda, primed for release this spring and advanced by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his top energy and climate lieutenants.

Climate denial is a bad political strategy, said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a 37-year-old member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and an ally of President Trump. At some point, you have to be for something to fix it.

Republicans, alarmed by polling showing vulnerability among young and suburban voters, sidelined the most strident and skeptical conservative outside groups to recognize climate change as an urgent problem requiring a response to the liberal "Green New Deal," according to more than a dozen Republican representatives and others familiar with congressional GOP plans.

The major themes of the pending agenda are capturing carbon dioxide (through technology and planting trees), curbing plastic waste, exporting natural gas, and promoting resilience or adaptation to sea-level rise and other effects of climate change.

You can call it political calculus or representing the people you represent, said Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a 35-year-old freshman Republican from Texas. It's absolutely true a lot of people have concerns about the environment, and we do need a message for them."

To land on a message that appealed to everybody, Republicans had to navigate potential fault lines among themselves by setting aside difficult questions and sticking broadly to a free market approach.

What we are asking our members to do is to double down on what's actually worked to reduce emissions, and those are, by the way, conservative solutions, said Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, the top Republican on the select climate committee created last year by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So its not that weve gone out there to the Freedom Caucus to say, 'We are asking you to take a hard left turn.'"

That stay-in-the-lines strategy meant rejecting carbon taxes and regulations in favor of repackaging support for tax subsidies and funding of new science and technologies into a low-risk (and to critics, low-reward) proposal for limiting climate change. It also meant clearing the way for using more fossil fuels, the biggest contributor to climate change.

Fossil fuels aren't the enemy, Graves said. Its emissions. So lets devise strategies that are based on emissions strategies, not based on eliminating fossil fuels.

The concession to fossil fuels means the Republican agenda wont be able to match the ambition of Democratic plans that call for decarbonizing the economy by 2050, a timeline suggested by U.N. scientists. Republicans have no plans to set a target for reducing emissions, arguing renewables and energy storage arent advanced enough and that carbon capture technologies for fossil fuels arent widespread enough.

Its refreshing to hear that some Republicans are finally acknowledging that climate change is real and an emergency, but we simply cannot innovate our way out of this existential threat, said Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Nonetheless, to longtime observers of climate politics, the unified Republican acceptance of a federal role in combating global warming represents a significant step that could open the door for bigger bipartisan action in the future.

While its true that eight House Republicans voted for a Democratic cap-and-trade bill in 2009, only one, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, is still in Congress. (2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain also backed cap and trade). After Democrats lost the House in 2010, Republicans spent most of the next decade running away from climate change mitigation proposals such as carbon taxes.

People on the far-left, for political reasons, want to mock this and diminish it, but put in context, it's undeniable this is a historical and positive development, said Carlos Curbelo, a centrist former House Republican who co-founded the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in 2016 before losing his Florida seat in 2018.

McCarthy, who represents an agricultural district in California, recognized the politics were changing when House Republicans became the minority party in 2019.

He quickly tasked Graves and the Republican staff of the climate committee, along with Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the GOP leader of the Energy and Commerce Committee, to develop a strategy for combating climate change.

The three led a Republican caucuswide meeting this month, attended by more than 100 members.

House Republican aides said there was little opposition to the plans in the meeting, during which 50 or so members spoke.

Its encouraging to see some of these ideas gaining momentum on Capitol Hill, said Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, a Freedom Caucus member who was a skeptic of federal government action to combat climate change. Gosar said he now supported commonsense solutions to combating our changing climate.

The conference meeting was the culmination of individual interactions Graves said he held throughout the past year with members ranging from Freedom Caucus to the centrist Tuesday Group.

Separately, Walden engaged in a similar exercise, hosting two dozen Republican members of the energy committee in his office shortly after Democrats took control of the House. He said that all agreed, when polled, that climate change was a problem that requires a GOP-led response.

There wasn't a science denier among us, said Walden, a former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee who is retiring in 2020.

In December, Energy and Commerce Republicans unveiled a package of a dozen short-term bills to address climate change, some new but most old, including measures to boost carbon capture, advanced nuclear technology, and energy storage.

Some of those bills could be a part of the broader Republican caucuswide climate package.

There is an enormous comfort level when you say you are doing what's working, Graves said.

Another conservative, Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona, said its been natural for Freedom Caucus members to support the climate agenda, given the emergence of solar in Sunbelt states such as his and wind in rural conservative states. He denied conservatives were shifting their views at all, blaming Democrats for dominating the discourse related to climate change and defining Republicans as skeptics.

I am one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus, and yet for years now, Ive been doing presentations talking about the disruptive clean energy technology that is rolling out, Schweikert said. That is a revolution that our brothers and sisters on the Left don't want to know about because it blows up their control-freak agenda.

Outside conservative groups and more liberal GOP members left out of negotiations, however, promise to test House Republicans projection of unity.

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, dismissed McCarthys effort as a toothless messaging agenda of wasting taxpayer dollars to pay off special interests and nutty plans to plant a trillion trees.

I would have to be convinced that global warming is a crisis and that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced before supporting such a package, Ebell said.

Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida, one of only two House Republicans who support a carbon tax, says he, too, has not been consulted by McCarthy, Graves, or Walden.

"They are not ready to talk about the things I am ready to talk about, so they probably didn't ask me," Rooney said.

Gaetz, meanwhile, met with Graves as recently as this week to discuss the climate agenda, which he wishes did more to confront fossil fuel use.

"Of course, we need to use less fossil fuels," Gaetz said. "For those who don't believe we should use less fossil fuels, what are we innovating toward?"

The White House is also unlikely to endorse the House Republican plan and has not been consulted on it, according to a Trump administration official. Despite modifying his rhetoric when asked about climate change, Trump has not proposed addressing it.

These are Kevin McCarthys bills, the Trump administration official said. "They are messaging bills and all about the next election, and thats great. But the president has been pretty clear he cares about affordable energy, energy independence, and clean air and clean water. He is not particularly obsessed about climate change.

Walden insists House Republicans have struck the right chord.

"We have found harmony between good policy and good politics," he said.

Read the original:
How House Republicans won over conservatives to gain consensus on a climate agenda - Washington Examiner

Upstate Republicans gather to eat pizza and talk politics

Updated: 11:19 PM EST Jan 31, 2020

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IN THE MARCH 24TH PRESIDENTIAL PEPPERONI AND POLITICIANS MIXED TOGETHER AT A PIZZA PARTY FOR NEW VOTERS. >> JOHN LYON SAYS GREENVILLE REPUBLICANS ARE LOOKING FOR NOVEL WAYS TO ENGAGE A NEW GENERATION. >> U.S. CONGRESS MEMBER WILLIAM TIMMONS SPENT PART OF THE NIGHT ENGAGING THE VERY YOUNG AND OTHERS NEW TO THE VOTING PROCESS. >> THEY ARE THE NEXT GEN RATION. WE NEED TO MAKE SURE THEY ARE CONTINUING OUR PROGRESS AND BUILDING ON IT. THAT IS PART OF THE MESSAGE, AND I AM HAPPY THEY ARE HERE. IT IS A GREAT TURN-OUT. >> THE PIZZA AND PLAYBOOKS PARTY ALSO DREW LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR PAMELA EVANS AND OTHER STATE AND LOCAL LAWMAKERS TO MEET AND GREET. >> BEING A MOM, I KNOW IF I WANT TO GET MY KIDS ENGAGED AND AT THE TABLE, FOOD IS A REALLY GOOD THING TO DO. I THINK THIS WAS A GREAT IDEA, HAVING SOME PIZZA AND FELLOWSHIP AND GETTING EVERYBODY TOGETHER. >> IT STARTED AT MY OFFICE, AND THEN IT JUST KEPT GETTING BIGGER AND BIGGER WHERE WE SAID WE HAD WE ARE GET A BIGGER VENUE. IT HAS BALLOONED INTO A BIGGER EVENT THAN ORIGINALLY PLANNED. >> BRIGNACING OVER 100 TO GREEN VALLEY COUNTRY CLUB, MANY OF THEM COLLEGE STUDENTS. >> PIZZA, IT IS A FREE FOOD. AS A COLLEGE STUDENT, THAT IS A VERY BIG PLUS. MEETING WITH POLITICIANS, IT GIVES YOU A VERY GOOD PERSPECTIVE ON THEM. >> I WANT TO BE A YOUNGER PERSON TO COME TO THEM AND GIVE THEM POSITIVE FEEDBACK AND SAY YOU ARE DOING A FANTASTIC JOB AND PLEASE KEEP IT GOING. >> THOSE HERE WERE CHALLENGED TO TALK TO 10 OTHER PEOPLE ABOUTED POLIT

Upstate Republicans gather to eat pizza and talk politics

Updated: 11:19 PM EST Jan 31, 2020

Upstate Republicans gather to eat pizza and talk politicsNearly a hundred people gathered Friday night to attend the event "Pizza and Palmetto Politics" at the Green Valley Country Club in Greenville. Lieutenant governor Pamela Evette and U.S. congressman William Timmons were among those in attendance. Organizer Steve Shaw tells us the event was a way to engage college students in the election process.(Watch full story above)

Upstate Republicans gather to eat pizza and talk politics

Nearly a hundred people gathered Friday night to attend the event "Pizza and Palmetto Politics" at the Green Valley Country Club in Greenville.

Lieutenant governor Pamela Evette and U.S. congressman William Timmons were among those in attendance.

Organizer Steve Shaw tells us the event was a way to engage college students in the election process.

(Watch full story above)

See the article here:
Upstate Republicans gather to eat pizza and talk politics - WYFF4 Greenville

Thousands of Twitter users have embraced a new hashtag to share why they chose to abandon the Republican Party.

#ILeftTheGOP was among the top trending topics Monday on Twitter, as people gave a range of reasons and dates for their decisions to opt out of the party. Many cited the Republican Partys nomination of Donald Trump for president or specific decisions made by Trump during his presidency as the stimulus for their departure.

Political commentator Cheri Jacobus kicked off the hashtag Sunday night with her own declaration that shed left the GOP in July 2016 when Trump became the Republican nominee for president.

Christian author Susan Bagwell chimed in with her reasoning on Monday. #ILeftTheGOP because they no longer represent me or my values as a Christian or a conservative. Theyre p***y-grabbing, lying, hateful, immoral weasels. Im a happy Independent, now. No party owns my vote. It has to be EARNED! she wrote.

Sophia A. Nelson, an author, opinion writer and political strategist, said she reached her turning point just this month.

I left the GOP January 2020 because I am appalled at the GOP Senators lack of courage and excuses to Convict & Remove TRUMP, she wrote.

Some people pointed to Trumps 2017 endorsement of Alabama Senate hopeful Roy Moore as a catalyst. The president threw his support behind Moore even though the candidate was facing multiple allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate conduct from teenage girls and women. Media strategist Kurt Bardella, who formerly worked as a spokesperson for Breitbart News, the Daily Caller and multiple Republican politicians, shared an opinion column he wrote for USA Today at the time, announcing that the Moore endorsement was the last straw for him as a Republican.

Other former Republicans explained the reasons for their departure prior to the Trump presidency.

Heres some of the commentary:

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Ex-Republicans Are Inundating Twitter With Reasons Why They Quit The Party - HuffPost