Archive for the ‘Republicans’ Category

Republicans Needed Backup in the Georgia 6th. They Found It in Nancy Pelosi. – The Weekly Standard

Donald Trump's campaign changed the political playbook in elections across the country. But if Republicans in greater Atlanta retain an imperiled House seat next Tuesday, it will be thanks in so small part to their having called a familiar play.

GOP candidate Karen Handel and a conservative super-PAC advertising against her Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, have invoked House minority leader Nancy Pelosi to define Ossoff as out-of-touch with the district's voters. Handel said during a recent debate that Ossoff's values were "some 3,000 miles away in San Francisco." She called him a "liberal, Pelosi-like" Democrat in a recent interview. And the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super-PAC, has released multiple commercials linking the two. One that it pushed before the first round of voting on April 18 advised voters to "say no to Pelosi's yes man."

The demographics of the district, the Georgia 6th, indicate that such an approach should have legs. It has been reliably Republican for decades, and it remains favorable to the GOP despite recent redistricting that removed some of its reddest real estate. But it's also the sort of suburbia that wasn't gaga about the president in November; Trump won the district by fewer than two percentage points, the worst showing there by a GOP nominee in memory. So as Democrats try to use Trump's name to sink Handel"make Trump furious" was Ossoff's theme when he launched his bidRepublicans have come up with their reply.

According to the CLF, they're backed by sound data. As the Washington Examiner reported in April, "Tying Ossoff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., proved especially effective. In an April poll the group conducted, respondents by a 62 percent to 26 percent margin said they preferred a candidate who would work with Ryan if elected to Congress, over one who would work with Pelosi." The CLF's aggressive last-minute intervention into the April runoff is credited with helping keep Ossoff below a 50-percent threshold that would have secured him the seat outright.

There's potentially a bigger-picture idea for Republicans in bringing up the former speaker: It's unifying. Handel has had the challenge of establishing her independence while not crossing Trump voters. "My job," she told me, "is to be an extension of the 6th district. It's not to be an extension of the White House, with due respect to the president." She otherwise has spoken favorably of Trump, though her casual support isn't a hallmark of her candidacy. While the GOP nationwide still mostly supports the president, the party cannot use him as a rallying cry and expect it to win purple districts, where soft Republicans and undecideds could turn elections.

But Pelosi? There's someone on whom the GOP will always be able to agree. Now let's see how effective she is as a motivating factor, more than six years since she last held the speaker's gavel.

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Republicans Needed Backup in the Georgia 6th. They Found It in Nancy Pelosi. - The Weekly Standard

Russia Investigation and Comey Testimony Cause Republicans to Turn on Each Other – Newsweek

The head of the Republican party clashed with party politicians Sunday over investigations probing whether U.S. President Donald Trumps campaign colluded with Russia, along with the testimony given last week by fired FBI Director James Comey.

I'm calling for an end to the investigations about President Trump's campaign colluding with the Russians, said Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), during an interview with Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.

There's been no evidence of collusion, McDaniel said, adding she didnt think the investigation should continue.

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Her comments followed testimony by former FBI Director James Comey last Thursday regarding why he was fired on May 9 by Trump.

In March Comey testified that the bureau was probing Trumps campaign team and associates as part of a larger investigation looking into how Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election. American intelligence agencies issued a report in January concluding the foreign power worked to help candidate Trump and hurt his rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Read more: Trump could 'go down' because he can't stop 'inapropriately' talking, GOP Senator says

Despite what McDaniel says, finding out whether the Trump team colluded with Russia is central to the Senate Intelligence Committees own investigation into the issue, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, who sits on the committee, said on Sunday.

Obviously, if there was any American, including the president, who tried to interfere in the election or to try to do an obstruction of justice, that would be very important to know, Lankford said in an interview on CBS' " Face the Nation.

Lankford said the bipartisan group is trying to get all the facts out about Russian interference, and whether any Americans tried to assist them, as well as a series of leaks of classified information.

Lankfords Senate Intelligence Committee colleague, Maine Republican Susan Collins, agreed.

Whether or not there was collusion, collaboration, cooperation between the Russians and members of President Trump's campaign team, she told CNN's " State of the Union," would remain the focus on their investigation.

Comey testified last Thursday that during an unusual one-on-one meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in February the president asked him to let go an investigation into fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn was sacked for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian officials the day before he met with Comey at the Oval Office.

Flynn is the subject of one strand of the FBIs investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

The Republicans have also disagreed about whether or not this one-on-one meeting was improper.

Lankford called the meeting inappropriate.

It is awkward, he said, to have the president of the United States sitting down with the leader of the FBI to ask direct questions, and for the issue to come up about the Michael Flynn investigation.

Investigations into whether President Donald Trump's campaign team colluded with Russia are dividing Republicans. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Collins agreed that the meeting which Trump initiated was inappropriate, but that Comey should have pushed back and said we cannot be having discussions like this because the independence of the FBI is really important.

Comeys testimony has brought many legal scholars to the conclusion that Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice for efforts to quash the investigation.

Collins said she believed Comey when he testified that he felt pressured by the president to drop the Flynn investigation. But she said this doesn't eliminate the possibility that there was a misinterpretation of Trumps words.

McDaniel went a step further to say that we don't know what happened in these conversations and that Comeys testimony was simply his version of events.

Ahead of Comeys testimony McDaniel created an opposition team operation made up of 60 staffers inside the RNC to defend the president, sending out thousands of tweets on social media with the hashtag #bigleaguetruth.

I feel like the truth is not getting out there, McDaniel said. And so, we're going to push harder, because we want to make sure that the American people are hearing a different narrative and the right set of the right version of what's happening.

McDaniel said the investigations into Russias interference in the election should run their course, but any investigation of collusion needs to end.

The American people want it to stop, she said. This is a fishing expedition to try and run out the clock for the Democrats hoping to make gains in 2018.

Trumps Attorney General Jeff Sessions is set to testify to the Senate behind closed doors in response to Comeys testimony on Tuesday, June 13.

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Russia Investigation and Comey Testimony Cause Republicans to Turn on Each Other - Newsweek

AARP targets more Republicans in new healthcare ad buy – Washington Examiner

AARP is targeting 11 GOP senators, including key centrists, to oppose the House-passed healthcare bill that would raise premiums for seniors.

The ad campaign expands a May effort that ran ads targeting five senators, calling for the House-passed American Health Care Act to be scrapped. The expansion comes at a pivotal time as Senate leadership hopes to vote on a healthcare bill by the end of July.

AARP is targeting Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Joni Ernest and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Dean Heller of Nevada, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker of Tennessee, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

The list includes some key centrists who will be critical to the GOP leadership's hopes of passing its own version of the American Health Care Act before Congress' August recess.

Heller and Flake are up for re-election in 2018. Heller, Portman and Capito are pushing leadership for a seven-year phaseout of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion.

AARP, the nation's biggest seniors lobby, has been opposed to the American Health Care Act for some time, angry over a proposed change to premiums for senior citizens in insurance plans on the individual market.

Obamacare allowed insurers to charge seniors three times the amount they charge a younger person. The American Health Care Act would increase that to five times.

"Our members and other Americans over age 50 are very worried about legislation that would raise their premiums through what is, in effect, an age tax," said AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond.

It is not clear what pieces of the legislation the Senate will keep, including the age-rating ratio.

AARP also derided problems with Medicaid and hurting "protections for people with pre-existing conditions."

A controversial last-minute amendment to the legislation, which passed the House last month by a 217-213 vote, let states opt out of community rating mandate. States could get a waiver that would let insurers charge sicker people more money.

House Republicans say that $23 billion included in the legislation for high-risk pools could help offset any increases. A recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office said that money wasn't enough to offset major increases for people with pre-existing conditions such as cancer or diabetes.

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AARP targets more Republicans in new healthcare ad buy - Washington Examiner

Republicans Tell Trump to Come Clean on Possible Comey Tapes – TIME

(WASHINGTON) Fellow Republicans pressed President Donald Trump on Sunday to come clean about whether he has tapes of private conversations with former FBI Director James Comey and provide them to Congress if he does or possibly face a subpoena, as a Senate investigation into collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice extended to a Trump Cabinet member.

It was a sign of escalating fallout from riveting testimony from Comey last week of undue pressure from Trump, which drew an angry response from the president on Friday that Comey was lying.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in for sharp questioning by senators on the Senate Intelligence committee Tuesday. Whether that hearing will be public or closed is not yet known.

"I don't understand why the president just doesn't clear this matter up once and for all," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a member of that committee, referring to the existence of any recordings.

She described Comey's testimony as "candid" and "thorough" and said she would support a subpoena if needed. Trump "should voluntarily turn them over," Collins said.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., also a member of that committee, agreed the panel needed to hear any tapes that exist. "We've obviously pressed the White House," he said.

Trump's aides have dodged questions about whether conversations relevant to the Russia investigation have been recorded, and so has the president. Pressed on the issue Friday, Trump said "I'll tell you about that maybe sometime in the very near future."

Lankford said Sessions' testimony Tuesday will help flesh out the truth of Comey's allegations, including Sessions' presence at the White House in February when Trump asked to speak to Comey alone. Comey alleges that Trump then privately asked him to drop a probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn's contacts with Russia.

Comey also has said Sessions did not respond when he complained he didn't "want to get time alone with the president again." The Justice Department has denied that, saying Sessions stressed to Comey the need to be careful about following appropriate policies.

"We want to be able to get his side of it," Lankford said.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said "there's a real question of the propriety" of Sessions' involvement in Comey's dismissal, because Sessions had stepped aside from the federal investigation into contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. Comey was leading that probe.

Reed said he also wants to know if Sessions had more meetings with Russian officials as a Trump campaign adviser than have been disclosed.

Trump on Sunday accused Comey of "cowardly" leaks and predicted many more from him. "Totally illegal?" he asked in a tweet. "Very 'cowardly!'"

Several Republican lawmakers also criticized Comey for disclosing memos he had written in the aftermath of his private conversations with Trump, calling that action "inappropriate." But, added Lankford "releasing his memos is not damaging to national security."

The New York City federal prosecutor who expected to remain on the job when Trump took office but ended up being fired said he was made uncomfortable by one-on-one interactions with the president just like Comey was. Preet Bharara told ABC's "This Week" that Trump was trying to "cultivate some kind of relationship" with him when he called him twice before the inauguration to "shoot the breeze."

He said Trump reached out to him again after the inauguration but he refused to call back, shortly before he was fired.

On Comey's accusations that Trump pressed him to drop the FBI investigation of Flynn, Bharara said "no one knows right now whether there is a provable case of obstruction" of justice. But: "I think there's absolutely evidence to begin a case."

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Intelligence committee, sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, urging him to investigate possible obstruction of justice by Trump in Grassley's position as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Feinstein is the top Democrat on that panel and a member of both.

She said Sessions should also testify before the Judiciary Committee, because it was better suited to explore legal questions of possible obstruction. Feinstein said she was especially concerned after National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers refused to answer questions from the intelligence committee about possible undue influence by Trump.

Feinstein said she did not necessarily believe Trump was unfit for office, as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has asserted, but said he has a "destabilizing effect" on government.

"There's an unpredictability. He projects an instability," Feinstein said. "Doing policy by tweets is really a shakeup for us, because there's no justification presented."

In other appearances Sunday:

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said he would take Trump up on his offer to testify under oath about his conversations with Comey, inviting the president to testify before the Senate.

Feinstein acknowledged she "would have a queasy feeling, too" if Comey's testimony was true that Loretta Lynch, as President Barack Obama's attorney general, had directed him to describe the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton's email practices as merely a "matter" and to avoid calling it an investigation. Feinstein said the Judiciary Committee should investigate.

Sessions stepped aside in March from the federal investigation into contacts between Russia and the campaign after acknowledging that had met twice last year with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. He had told lawmakers at his January confirmation hearing that he had not met with Russians during the campaign.

Sessions has been dogged by questions about possible additional encounters with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

As for the timing of Sessions' recusal, Comey said the FBI expected the attorney general to take himself out of the matters under investigation weeks before he actually did.

Collins and Feinstein spoke on CNN's "State of the Union and Lankford and Schumer appeared on CBS' "Face the Nation." Reed was on "Fox News Sunday."

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Republicans Tell Trump to Come Clean on Possible Comey Tapes - TIME

Neil Buchanan: Republicans Wriggle On the Hook Making Excuses for Trump – Newsweek

This article first appeared on the Dorf on Law site.

In the aftermath of former FBI Director James Comey's dramatic sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week, it is clear that the Republicans are not yet ready to void their deal with the devil.

Republican senators on the committee went to embarrassing lengths to defend Trump, and the rest of the party seems perfectly content to let Trump try to declare victory and walk away.

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This raises a question that we can address from at least two different angles: What did we really expect? That is, what did we think would happen at the hearing?

More broadly, for those of us who are not at all surprised that Trump has proved himself unfit for office again and again, what have we been expecting for the last six months, or even two years?

When we expressed fears about Trump being president, is this even close to what we thought would be happening?

On the immediate question of Comey's testimony, much of the odd post-hearing optimism on the Republican side is a simple result of there having been no game-changing moments at the hearing.

Republicans were able to float various defenses of Trump, including efforts to impugn Comey's motives and methods. As weak as those arguments were, that is not the point. All they had to do was hope for anything but the worst, and in that they were not disappointed.

Republicans are well accustomed to having to keep a straight face while making fatuous arguments. They are unashamed of their own oddball ideology-driven positions (climate denialism, tax cuts that pay for themselves, that a sitting president has no right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and on and on), and they have now become similarly inured to responding to Trump's many outrages.

In short, Republicans are practiced at making bad arguments, and yesterday was no exception. Paul Ryan tried to say that Trump is simply new to politics, so his interference with the FBI's investigation of Russia's election meddling was merely a rookie error.

Nice try. "Your honor, my client had never been in a bank before. He didn't know that you couldn't just take the money and run."

Donald Trump in the East Room at the White House on February 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. Mario Tama/Getty

On a different tack, the Republicans on the committee tried to claim that Trump did not try to shut down the entire Russia investigation, asking Comey only to lay off Michael Flynn. As Elizabeth Goitein wrote in The New York Times : "Imagine defending Nixon by pointing out that he didnt erase every tape he created and didnt order a break-in of every facility used by Democratic operatives."

Imagine a situation in which there are six different avenues that a prudent investigator would follow. Now imagine that the president says: "You can follow these five as far as you want, but don't follow that one." Has he attempted to block the investigation? Even if it ended up being possible to find everything via the other five routes, the president's intervention is still an attempt to obstruct the investigation.

By far the funniest trial balloon that Republicans pushed at the hearing was the idea that Trump never directly ordered Comey to stop. Many people have pointed out how unnecessary it is for powerful people to use specific words. It is only necessary to say that you hope something will happen, and your underlings will know what to do.

What would Republican senators say if they heard a guy in a dark suit and shirt say, "Make sure that Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes"? "Gee, maybe he only means that we should buy his friend Luca some aquariums filled with exotic species of fish and have them installed in his bedroom. How nice!"

Or how would they interpret this: "You've got a nice army base here, Colonel. We wouldn't want anything to happen to it." What would the senator from Idaho say? "Why, thank you. I feel the same way. Have a great day!"

In any event, the right-wing mediaverse has convinced Republicans that the only impeachable offenses are criminal offenses. This continues to be clearly wrong, as I pointed out in a column last week, because "high crimes and misdemeanors" as grounds for impeachment is not limited to chargeable crimes.

Although I noted in that column that those four words high crimes and misdemeanors are to be read together as a term of art, it is worth noting that the word "high" in that context refers to the position of the wrongdoer, not the seriousness of the offense. That is, we are talking about wrongdoing by people who hold high office.

Of course, if Trump is guilty of criminal behavior that could be charged by a grand jury, then that is obviously sufficient to justify impeachment. This is why some of Trump's detractors have focused on the elements of the crime of obstruction of justice.

The problem is that focusing on the criminal aspect can inadvertently lead people to believe that chargeable crimes are necessary and not merely sufficient for impeachment. In the end, grounds for impeachment are whatever members of Congress decide they are. (Heck, Senator Arlen Specter decided to draw from Scottish common law in the Clinton impeachment trial.)

The broader issue is that Republicans are already, in a strange way, running out the clock on the Trump presidency. They approached the Comey hearing as an opportunity to muddy the waters enough to say that they are not required to impeach Trump, for any of a number of embarrassingly weak reasons. If they can keep the clock moving, they might be able to get the public to think that what is happening is not so bad. And the band plays on.

So what was I expecting, going into yesterday's hearing? I admit that I considered it a non-zero probability that some kind of cataclysm would occur, but it is no surprise that things proceeded in what we now must admit is the new version of normality. Republicans have majorities in both houses, and they know that their base will punish them for abandoning Trump. As long as both of those things continue to be true, all else follows.

As I noted at the top of this column, however, there is a broader way to ask the question, "What were we expecting?" From the day that Trump announced his candidacy through his improbable nomination and non-majority electoral victory, people have been predicting that Trump will be a disaster as president. They were obviously right in a broad sense, but is what we are seeing what we thought we would be seeing?

I ask this question because I am one of the people who has long been sounding the alarm regarding Trump's existential threat to constitutional democracy, most prominently in a column last June. Similarly, people like David Brooks of The New York Times have been saying for months that Trump would almost certainly be impeached, probably within his first year in office.

Having gone back to reread what I wrote in that column and elsewhere, however, it is striking just how difficult it was to offer examples of impeachable things that Trump might do.

Trump's obvious disdain for the rule of law made it easy to believe that he would do anything that struck his fancy and then either deny doing it or say, "Come and stop me if you can!" Yet it was surprisingly difficult to imagine (much less predict) what has actually come to pass.

In response to Republicans' reassurances that their congressional leaders would be able to control Trump's worst impulses, I once asked how that would work. What if Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan went to the White House to tell Trump that he could not do something, but Trump had them arrested?

But that is such an extreme example that it does not really fit into the pattern that we are now seeing. I honestly expected that Trump and his people would be careful about toeing the line while they were in the process of undermining constitutional democracy. I certainly did not, for example, expect them to brazenly violate the emoluments clause or to laugh at ethics rules.

Instead, I expected that they would try to suppress votes (and they are) in order to make future elections sham events. I expected them to change rules to make money even more dominant in politics. Until they had consolidated power sufficiently to be untouchable, however, I did not expect them to be sloppy.

And maybe that is the answer. Maybe this Comey hearing was the definitive signal that the Republicans have concluded that Trump is truly and completely untouchable. Have we reached the point where Trump's boast about being able to shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue without consequence has become almost literally true?

I certainly hope not. In any case, it is also possible that this is merely an intermediate phase. Some probably most Republicans will stick with Trump to the bitter end. Others, however, might have their limits.

When you have a president who, less than five months into office, has already tried to derail an FBI investigation (and was eager to fire someone in order to do it), who has put national security at risk by revealing intelligence information to foreign governments, and who shows no awareness that the rules or norms of government must apply to him, you are looking at a ticking time bomb.

Most significantly, Trump responded to the unanimous conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia which certainly qualifies as a hostile foreign power had tried to interfere in U.S. internal affairs by saying, "Nothing to see here." Comey or no Comey, Flynn or no Flynn, this is the kind of thing that a president is supposed to care about, not sweep under the rug in the service of his own ego.

At some point, some Republicans and it only needs to be a few are finally going to ask what it really means for a president to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." A president who demands complete loyalty to himself, rather than to the rule of law, cannot be trusted to uphold that oath.

Neil H. Buchanan is an economist and legal scholar and a professor of law at George Washington University. He teaches tax law, tax policy, contracts, and law and economics. His research addresses the long-term tax and spending patterns of the federal government, focusing on budget deficits, the national debt, health care costs and Social Security.

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Neil Buchanan: Republicans Wriggle On the Hook Making Excuses for Trump - Newsweek