President Biden’s bid to secure bipartisan support for his $2.25 infrastructure package is off to a rocky start.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a close Biden ally, says there will be only one month set aside to hammer out a deal with Republicans and right now it’s nowhere near to happening.
Biden is already sniping with key moderates such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Continue reading.
Having recently signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 — a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief/economic stimulus package — President Joe Biden is now promoting an ambitious infrastructure plan. Many Republicans, not surprisingly, are railing against the plan. Liberal economist Paul Krugman discusses their opposition this week in his Times column, stressing that Republicans have no meaningful objections to it — they simply want to see Biden fail as president.
“Republicans have been having a hard time explaining why they oppose President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan,” Krugman explains. “Their real motives aren’t a mystery. They want Biden to fail, just as they wanted President Barack Obama to fail, and will once again offer scorched-earth opposition to anything a Democratic president proposes. And they’re especially opposed to public programs that might prove popular, and thereby help legitimize activist government in voters’ minds.”
Because “laying out those true motives” would not “play well with the electorate, Krugman writes, Republicans are “looking for alternative attack lines”—for example, arguing that “most of the proposed spending isn’t really infrastructure.” Continue reading.
Former President Trump on Thursday endorsed Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) for 2022 reelection — despite the fact that Johnson has not publicly announced he will actually launch a bid.
Between the lines: Johnson made a vow when first elected to the Senate that he would only serve two terms. His second term will end in 2022. But the senator in recent months hasn’t completely sworn off the idea of another term.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a longtime ally of the business community, now finds himself in a tricky position of having to manage the GOP’s increasingly awkward relationship with corporate America.
McConnell, in a major break from character, earlier this week slammed companies such as Major League Baseball, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola for criticizing Georgia’s new election law, which President Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
The GOP leader called that a complete mischaracterization and has repeatedly pointed to a Washington Post analysis giving Biden “four Pinocchios” for “falsely” claiming Georgia’s statute ends voting hours earlier. Continue reading.
Republicans from all levels of government in this country have made little secret in recent years of the fact that their political power derives almost exclusively from a longstanding, and largely successful, effort to manipulate the electoral process to their exclusive benefit. Extreme partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, allegations of electoral fraud — they’re all tools the GOP and its conservative allies use to maximize the “right” kind of votes (that is: people who vote for them) at the expense of, y’know, actual democracy.
But if the GOP’s semi-whispered reverence for restricted voting was a poorly kept secret before, the past few days have been like turning a dog whistle into a full blown bullhorn. We’ve gone from subliminal, to liminal, to super-liminal in record time.
Speaking with WLOX last month, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, claimed without evidence that the Biden administration is “basically employing all the federal agencies, universities, and colleges to register as many folks as they can via this automatic voter registration.” It’s possible Watson was talking about the Democrats’ For The People Act, which, while not a Biden administration bill, does indeed tackle automatic voter registration. Continue reading.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday backed off his stern warning that companies such as Major League Baseball, Delta and Coca-Cola should stay out of high-profile political fights after they criticized Georgia’s new election law.
“I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday. They’re certainly entitled to be involved in politics. They are. My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill,” McConnell said Wednesday at a press conference in Paducah, Kentucky.
The GOP leader softened his tough talk from earlier in the week, when he warned that companies would face “serious consequences” if they become “a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country.” Continue reading.
Political parties often respond to electoral defeat by spending time contemplating, with varying degrees of seriousness and success, why they lost and how they need to change their approach to win in the future. Following President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, for example, the Republican Party commissioned and published a 100-page report which pinned the blame on Mitt Romney’s weakness with Hispanic voters and called for a more benign policy toward undocumented immigrants. But the party backed off after a revolt by prominent right-wing media commentators, and in 2016, Donald Trump seized the GOP nomination and eventually the presidency with a nativist campaign that both halves of the 2012 Republican ticket criticized as racist.
GOP leaders are trying to avoid a similar scenario in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat. They are circulating a memo that seeks to chart the party’s course by keeping it closely aligned with the former president — and with Fox News.
The document represents another datapoint in the ongoing merger of the right-wing media and Republican politics. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, Fox served as the GOP’s communications arm. With Trump’s ascent, the feedback loop between the network and the administration gave Fox unrivaled influence. Now, the Republican Party seems to have completely capitulated to the whims of its propagandists. Continue reading.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has lashed out at corporations involving themselves in politics this week — a development that makes it seem as if politics has entered an alternative reality.
For his entire career, McConnell has been assiduous in courting big business and has been a staunch defender of corporate interests.
He has been a stalwart opponent of campaign finance reform and, roughly a decade ago, expressed approval of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. The court’s 2010 ruling bestowed upon corporations many of the rights to free speech enjoyed by individual citizens and loosened restrictions on political donations. Continue reading.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that companies could finance election spending, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) celebrated the prospect that corporate America would enter — and influence — the political fray.
“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” he said in a statement at the time. He hailed the decision, Citizens United, as “an important step” in “restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.”
But just over a decade later, McConnell has a different message for companies: Unless it involves money, they had better stay quiet. Continue reading.
The NAACP’s expanded suit will include more members of Congress, and the amended complaint adds additional information regarding the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
A federal lawsuit alleging that former President Donald Trump, his lawyer, and far-right extremists at the U.S. Capitol conspired to deprive Americans of their civil rights by disrupting the count of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory with the Jan. 6 riot is expanding this week.
Lawyers for the NAACP, which brought the suit early this year on behalf of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), are set to file an amended complaint on Wednesday adding 10 new plaintiffs, two people familiar with the matter saie. The new plaintiffs will include other members of Congress, and the amended complaint is said to include additional information about the deadly Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C., which then-President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani are accused of inciting, the sources added.
The addition of new plaintiffs was first reported by The New York Times on Tuesday. Continue reading.
