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Chris Christies 15 percent approval rating the lowest recorded for any governor in New Jersey could drop even lower, perhaps into the single digits. | Andrew Mills/NJ Advance Media via AP

Most New Jersey Republicans have been unfailingly loyal to Gov. Chris Christie over his nearly eight years in office.

By Matt Friedman

07/07/2017 05:00 AM EDT

It was already tough being a Republican in deep blue New Jersey when Chris Christie took office in 2010, and the governor hasn't made things any easier for his party during nearly eight tumultuous years in office.

Now, on the way out, Christie has thrown yet another hurdle in his fellow Republicans' path: a state government shutdown and a trip to the beach that turned into a public relations disaster.

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It's a bitter bill for some New Jersey Republicans who have been unfailingly loyal to Christie and who had hoped the governor, with his 15 percent approval rating, would finish out the last six months of his second term quietly and leave office.

Christie made demands on Democrats who control the state Legislature for a bill to restructure the states largest health insurer, a move that ultimately led to a three-day state government shutdown. Then, a photo of the governor lounging with his family and friends on a beach that was closed to the public because of the shutdown went viral.

Were not in good shape financially or in the publics eye, Republican state Sen. Christopher Kip Bateman said. Its going to be a very difficult year for Republicans.

Republicans failed to gain any seats in the Legislature even as Christie scored a landslide re-election victory in 2013. Some grumbled that the governor had cut a deal with Democratic political boss George Norcross the patron of Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney to keep Norcross' machine from working against Christie in exchange for the governor's inactivity on the legislative campaign trail. Christie denied it.

I can only speak for myself and say that I believe there has been an unholy alliance between Governor Christie and Senator Sweeney, which I dont believe is in the best interest of the people I represent in Atlantic County or this state," said Republican Assemblyman Chris Brown, who's running for state Senate in one of New Jersey's most competitive legislative districts.

Again and again over the last eight years, Republicans have taken difficult votes so as not to override the governors vetoes sometimes reversing their previous "yes" votes on uncontroversial bills that, had Christie signed them, would have damaged his presidential ambitions. Those votes helped cost the GOP four seats in the state Assembly in 2015.

That's not all.

New Jersey Republicans stood by Christie during the Bridgegate scandal, even as some of his closest aides and allies were implicated. Most supported his ill-fated presidential bid, even after he drained state GOP resources laying the groundwork for it, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for Christie's flights aboard private jet flights around the country out of party coffers, after it had shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bridgegate-related legal fees.

As of April, the Republican State Committee had less than $30,000 on hand and more than $39,000 in debt, yet paid nearly $12,000 for the governor and his staff to stay at a five-star hotel in Washington, D.C., for President Donald Trumps inauguration.

And after all that, some fear the governor salted the earth for Republicans with that one trip to the beach last weekend. Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who has served under Christie during his entire time in office and is the party's nominee to succeed him as governor, even released a statement saying the beach visit was beyond words.

I was disappointed he didnt understand the message he was sending by enjoying a beach he closed for everybody else, said Brown, the GOP assemblyman.

Still, there are few New Jersey Republicans who will speak out publicly against the governor, who, by the nature of his office, retains extraordinary powers that can make their political lives difficult if they openly criticize him. But the frustration has long been palpable, often expressed in private conversations.

Bateman, the Republican state senator, saw the judicial nomination for an ally of his held up by Christie because he had gone against the governor, voting with Democrats several times to override Christie's vetoes.

Im glad I took some of the votes I did, where I voted to override him in several cases where I thought it was right, even down to Planned Parenthood funding, Bateman said. I was taken to the woodshed more than once.

During part of the three-day shutdown, Assembly Republicans appeared to have had a message: They were unified while Democrats were consumed by infighting over whether to concede to Christies demands.

The beach picture ensured that narrative wouldnt take hold.

As much as he (wanted) to spread the responsibility over to the Assembly and (Speaker Vincent) Prieto, hes the guy that generates the most media and hes the guy caught sunning himself on the beach when everyone else was denied access, said Krista Jenkins, director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll.

Christies 15 percent approval rating the lowest recorded for any governor in New Jersey could drop even lower, perhaps into the single digits, Jenkins said.

The optics of this are terrible, she said. Yes, its certainly possible.

Christie said last month he didnt care about his approval rating since hes not seeking re-election. But theres evidence its hurting Guadagno.

In a June Quinnipiac University poll, a majority of voters 54 percent said Guadagnos time serving under Christie made their opinions of her more negative. By contrast, 56 percent said Democratic nominee Phil Murphys background as a high-ranking Goldman Sachs executive did not affect how they felt about him. The poll also showed Murphy leading Guadagno 56 percent to 26 percent.

At the same time, New Jersey Democrats have improved their massive voter registration advantage in the state. There are now 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, up from 700,000 at the beginning of Christies first term.

As unpopular as Christie is, Mike DuHaime, the governor's chief strategist in both his gubernatorial elections and presidential campaign, said Christie won't be the center of this year's gubernatorial election.

I think we have to look at this in a much bigger picture sense. The election is going to be in five months, DuHaime said. The things that will be much more impactful ... at that point is whats going on between Murphy and Guadagno, whats going on at the national level and the individual legislative races.

DuHaime said that if New Jerseyans elect Murphy, giving Democrats control of the governors office as well as both houses of the Legislature even Guadagno has acknowledged Democrats will retain control of the Legislature theyll warm up to Christies legacy.

I feel good about where the party is, DuHaime said. If you go forward a year from now, if were not successful in the governors race, I think people will look back on these days and say boy it was nice when we had a Republican governor.'"

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Christie kicks sand in NJ Republicans' faces, once again - Politico

Republicans finally seem to be figuring outthat taking health care from the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich isnt exactly popular.

Indeed, less than 20 percent of people support the Senates plan, which would do just that. Ithas been enough to make some Republicans startconsidering what for them is the ultimate heresy: What if they didn't cut taxes as much as possiblefor wealthy investors? What if, instead, they used some of that money to cover a couple million more people and keep costs down a little more for everybody else kind of, you know, like Obamacare does?

Now, as big a positional shift as that would be on health care, it actually wouldn't be one on taxes. That's because whatever taxes Republicans don't cut in their health-care bill, they can cut in their tax reform one. That might sound pretty obvious, but it's not. Republicans had thought that they couldn't do that at least not in a way that was worth doing because of the special rules for passing a bill with less thana filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.They've realized, though, that they can just. . . change those rules, and do one big tax cut later rather than breaking it up into two smaller ones. That certainly seems to be what Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) washinting at when he said that Obamacare's taxes on investment income should not be repealed in this bill. Notice that he's not saying that they should not be repealed at all just that now is not an auspicious time.

The idea, of course, is that cutting taxes for the rich after you've taken health care from the poor doesn't look as bad as doing them all at once, because one isn't explicitly paying for the other. It's the difference between class antagonism and class war.

But, again, that's only as far as appearances go. If Republicans really do make it easier for themselves to cut taxes, then they can get all the ones they want even if they don't get any now. How would that work? Well, the important thing to understand is that Republicans can cut taxes with just 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60 it takes to beat a filibuster as long as they meet one, and only one, condition: that they don't add to the deficit outside of the budget window. Their tax cuts, then, either have to be fully paid for, or else arrive with an expiration date.

The Republicans' time-crunched effort to pass a health-care bill is hitting a lot of resistance in the Senate. The Post's Paige Cunningham explains five key reasons the party is struggling to move their plan forward. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Republicans, though, don't want to waste control of government they may seize only once every 15 years on tax cuts that would last only 10.They want a more permanent victory than that. Which, strange as it may seem, is where their health-care bill comes in. Republicans, you see, know there aren't enough tax loopholes they're willing to close to pay for all the tax cuts they're waiting to enact. So they need to find other "pay-fors" on which they could agree pay-fors such as health-care spending cuts. Think about it like this: If Republicans use $700 billion of Medicaid cuts to cover the cost of their tax cuts, then that's $700 billion in tax breaks they don't have to get rid of.

That, at least, was the plan until they found an even more politically palatable way to pay for their tax cuts than by taking an ax to Medicaid. That's not paying for them. Why would they do that when it would mean their tax cuts would have to be temporary? Because it turns out that they can change the definition of temporary to something that's a lot closer to permanent. The trick is that although their tax cuts have to be paid for past the budget window, there's nothing that dictates the length ofthat budget window. It's 10 years now, but it could be 15 or 20 or even 30 years if they wanted it to be and some of them, like Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), do.

Not paying for their tax cuts would really solve their problem for how to pay for their tax cuts. Republicans could stop tryingto throw 15 million people off Medicaid to cover the cost of cutting the tax on investment income from 23.8 to 20 percent for people making $250,000 or more. Or trying to come up with any tax loopholes they'd be willing to close something thathas eluded them so far let alone a few trillion dollars' worth of them. Instead, they could get back to their Bush-era basics: passing a deficit-financed tax cut and then announcing how much they hate deficits whenever Democrats win back the White House. After all, why go through the unpleasant business of paying for things when you could skip all thatand still get tax cuts that would last until almost the middle of the century?

Or, as Republicans call it, fiscal responsibility.

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Republicans say they might not cut taxes for the rich. Don't believe them. - Washington Post

A red light for low-wage workers in St. Louis.

Rian Castillo via Flickr

On Aug. 28, St. Louis may become the first city in the United States to see its minimum wage fall, from $10 an hour to $7.70 an hour, as the Missouri statehouse enables a pay cut for some 35,000 workers.

Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slates Moneybox.

Thats the date when a new state pre-emption law, drafted specifically to target St. Louis, is scheduled to take effect. The Missouri measure will override the citys own minimum wage increase, which was implemented in May after a two-year court battle, and end a three-month period during which fast food, retail, and other workers in the city were required to be paid hundreds of dollars in additional income.

Republican-run states forcing Democrat-run cities to not raise the minimum wage is a story weve seen before, of course. Alabama thwarted Birminghams efforts in February of last year; Ohio stopped Cleveland in December. More than a dozen other states have passed pre-emptive pre-emptions, abolishing municipal wage laws before any cities or counties consider them. GOP politicians usually say minimum wage ordinances wont actually help workers, but they also defend the pre-emptions in principle, because they preserve a uniform regulatory environment.

St. Louis is a unique case. Shortly after the city passed its minimum wage law in 2015, the Legislature passedover the veto of then-Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrata pre-emption law to abolish all municipal wage laws not in effect onAug. 28, 2015, the exact day the city passed the ordinance.* But it was immediately enjoined in a lawsuit filed by local business interests that went all the way to the state Supreme Court. In May, that body decided St. Louis did have the authority to enact a wage law.

So the Missouri Legislature went back and drafted a more specific law that would squash the local ordinance. The idea was to fast-track it in March, before the local wage hike took effect. Thanks to the quirky practices of Jefferson City, though, Democratic state senators managed to stall the measure, forcing Republicans to use a procedural measure to jam the bill through in the waning hours of the session last week.

The St. Louis policy was projected to give an immediate raise of about $2,400 a year to approximately 35,000 workers, before $10 went up to $11 on Jan. 1, 2018. Broadly speaking, theres a lot of debate over how local wage floors affect employment markets, worker income, hiring, and hours. (Read my colleague Jordan Weissmanns piece on the complex effects of Seattles $12 to $13 minimum wage.)

One thing is clear, though: Minimum wage hikes are popular. More than half of all registered voters supported a $15 wage floor in 2016, according to Pew, much higher than what St. Louis had targeted. And the idea of taking away a raise that has already been given seems particularly cruel; Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who believes the local ordinance will kill jobs, will not attach his signature to the bill, allowing it instead to pass without it. (There is no pocket veto in Missouri.)

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Local control is most important, except when the locality is doing what you don't want. More...

A template for St. Louis progressives going forward? Deep-red Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, threatened in January of 2016 to withhold funding from cities like Tempe, Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix that had considered or passed various types of worker protections. In November, Arizona voterswhile voting for a Republican senator and for Donald Trumpopted to enact a statewide minimum wage increase at the ballot, tying Duceys hands.Now thats a uniform regulatory environment.

*Correction, July 9, 2017: This post originally misspelled Jay Nixons last name.

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St. Louis Gave Workers a Wage Hike. Missouri Republicans Are Taking it Away. - Slate Magazine (blog)

And these numbers translate into dramatic positive impacts on real lives. A few days ago the Indiana G.O.P. asked residents to share their Obamacare horror stories; what it got instead were thousands of testimonials from people whom the A.C.A. has saved from financial ruin or even death.

How do Republicans argue against this success? You can get a good overview by looking at the Twitter feed of Tom Price, President Trumps secretary of health and human services a feed that is, in its own way, almost as horrifying as that of the tweeter in chief. Price points repeatedly to two misleading numbers.

First, he points to the fact that fewer people than expected have signed up on the exchanges Obamacares insurance marketplaces and portrays this as a sign of dire failure. But a lot of this shortfall is the result of good news: Fewer employers than predicted chose to drop coverage and shift their workers onto exchange plans. So exchange enrollment has come in below forecast, but it mostly consists of people who wouldnt otherwise have been insured and as I said, there have been large gains in overall coverage.

Second, he points to the 28 million U.S. residents who remain uninsured as if this were some huge, unanticipated failure. But nobody expected Obamacare to cover everyone; indeed, the Congressional Budget Office always projected that more than 20 million people would, for various reasons, be left out. And you have to wonder how Price can look himself in the mirror after condemning the A.C.A. for missing some people when his own partys plans would vastly increase the number of uninsured.

Which brings us to Republicans efforts to obscure the nature of their own plans.

The main story here is very simple: In order to free up money for tax cuts, G.O.P. plans would drastically cut Medicaid spending relative to current law, and they would also cut insurance subsidies, making private insurance unaffordable for many people not eligible for Medicaid.

Republicans could try to make a case for this policy shift; they could try to explain why tax cuts for a wealthy few are more important than health care for tens of millions. Instead, however, theyre engaging in shameless denial.

On one side, they claim that a cut is not a cut, because dollar spending on Medicaid would still rise over time. What about the need to spend more to keep up with the needs of an aging population? (Most Medicaid spending goes to the elderly or disabled.) La, la, la, we cant hear you.

On the other side even I was shocked by this one senior Republicans like Paul Ryan dismiss declines in the number of people with coverage as no big deal, because they would represent voluntary choices not to buy insurance.

How is this supposed to apply to the 15 million people the C.B.O. predicts would lose Medicaid? Wouldnt many people drop coverage, not as an exercise in personal freedom, but in response to what the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates would be an average 74 percent increase in after-tax premiums? Never mind.

O.K., so the selling of Trumpcare is deeply dishonest. But isnt that what politics is always like? No. Political spin used to have its limits: Politicians who wanted to be taken seriously wouldnt go around claiming that up is down and black is white.

Yet todays Republicans hardly ever do anything else. Its not just Donald Trump: The whole G.O.P. has become a post-truth party. And I see no sign that it will ever improve.

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Attack of the Republican Decepticons - New York Times

Welcometo Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield. Subscribehere.

Topspin

The Illinois Republican Party heavily funded by Gov. Bruce Rauner has worked for years to tell voters that Democrats wanted to raise state taxes.

Then a bunch of the party's own lawmakers voted for a tax hike and bucked the governor's override. Shortly after, Rauner's hand-picked state GOP chairman released a statement sharply critical of them.

After all we have accomplished together, it is astonishing that these legislators would now turn their backs on taxpayers across the state, the statement from party Chairman Tim Schneider read in part. I am confident voters will hold those politicians accountable for choosing Mike Madigan over the people of Illinois.

Assuming Schneider isn't suggesting he wants Democrats to defeat those Republicans, the statement suggests those GOP lawmakers could face primary opponents next spring.

On Sunday, 15 House Republicans voted for the tax hike. By Thursday's override, there were 10. In the meantime, Rauner had vowed to do"everything possible"to prevent the override.

To make up for the Republicans that changed their minds, four Democrats who had originally voted to reject the tax hike changed theirs. The GOP lawmakers that jumped off the proposalcited talks with constituents.

The more than one thousand calls, emails and Facebook messages I have received have been about 10 to 1 opposed to any more taxes. The message from my constituents has been loud and clear that they do not want a tax increase so I had to oppose this plan with a permanent tax increase, state Rep. John Cavaletto, R-Salem, said in a statement.

Republican Rep. C.D. Davidsmeyer of Jacksonville said that since the first vote he "had many conversations with constituents and laid out the facts as well as the possible ramifications of not having a budget."

At least one of the Republicans who voted for both the tax hike and the override anticipated a primary challenge immediately.

"For me right here today, right here, right now, this is the sword that I'm willing to die on," Rep. Michael Unes, a Republican from East Peoria, said after the first vote. "And if it costs me my seat, so be it."

What's on tap

*Mayor Rahm Emanuel's schedule says he'll be out in the morningto talk about progressin separating the lakefront bike and pedestrian trails.

*Gov. Rauner has no public schedule.

*State lawmakers have gone home after overriding the governor's budget veto.

From the notebook

*Emanuel doesn't engage McCarthy:Mayor Emanuel wouldnt engage directly Thursday with the possibility former Police Supt. Garry McCarthy could run against him for mayor.

Emanuel was leaving a brief news conference when he was asked about a potential McCarthy challenge following a Tribune story noting McCarthy supporters are passing out campaign buttonsfor him. McCarthy, who the mayor fired in late 2015 during the fallout from the Laquan McDonald police shooting video, did notrule out taking on Emanuel in 2019.

The mayor returned to the mic, but immediately pivoted to talking about his goals for the remainder of his second term.

Look, heres my thing. I know what my job is, in the next two years, to make sure theres more thriving community and neighborhood investments, make sure that we have education investments like this that have not only (a) rising graduation rate but every child is 100 percent college-ready and 100 percent college-bound, Emanuel said after handing out grants to small-business owners at a school in Back of the Yards. Those are my priorities, those are my focus; and thats what Im going to focus on. And theres nothing else really to say. Thanks. (John Byrne)

*Quick spins: State Sen. Daniel Biss' campaign for governor announced an endorsement from fellow Sen. David Koehler of Peoria. ... From the Champaign News-Gazette: Longtime Illinois House fixture former state Rep. Bill Black of Danville is considering a return to politics. ... The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform announced an event it's holding July 12 in Chicago called"Illinois: A state divided?"

*On the Sunday Spin: ChicagoTribune political reporter Rick Pearsons guests are state Rep. Steve Andersson of Geneva, the Republican House floor leader; Democratic Rep. Carol Sente of Vernon Hills; and Christopher Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs for the University of Illinois. The Sunday Spin airs from 7to 9 a.m. on WGN 720-AM.

Read more from the original source:
Morning Spin: Will Republicans who bucked Rauner face primary challenges? - Chicago Tribune