Tag: Republican Party

The Story Senator Michael Enzi (R - WY) announced over the weekend that he will not run for re-election next year. This means there will...

Good Monday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today. This is the story behind the relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden. • Attorney General William P. Barr and congressional Democrats clashed on Sunday over his scheduled testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this week, with Mr. Barr threatening to skip the session and the panel’s chairman threatening to subpoena him. • As House Democrats return to Washington after a two-week recess, they will find a Capitol consumed by the Mueller report. But rank-and-file Democrats are not being propelled by their constituents into impeaching the president. • Guantánamo Bay as nursing home: With no sign that the prison will close, the Pentagon has begun planning for detainees to grow old at the American military base in Cuba. • As Washington wrestles with Mr. Trump’s refusal to grant more disaster relief to Puerto Rico, farmers affected by disaster elsewhere have been left in limbo. • Mr. Trump on Saturday repeated an inaccurate claim about doctors “executing babies.” Here’s the truth. • Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, hosted the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, breaking from the tradition of featuring a comedian.

Erin Schaff for The New York Times WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans see the special counsel’s report — with its stark evidence that President Trump repeatedly impeded the investigation into Russian election interference — as a summons for collective inaction. Republicans in the upper chamber, who would serve as Mr. Trump’s jury if House Democrats were to impeach him, reacted to the report’s release with a range of tsk-tsk adjectives like “brash,” “inappropriate” or “unflattering.” Only Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called out the president’s behavior as “sickening.” Yet no Republican, not even Mr. Romney, a political brand-name who does not face his state’s voters until 2022, has pressed for even a cursory inquiry into the findings by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that the president pressured senior officials, including the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II and the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, to scuttle his investigation. “I consider this to be, basically, the end of the road,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who once tried to thwart Mr. Trump’s presidential nomination and now serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has the authority to investigate Mr. Mueller’s findings. “But there is a difference between unflattering and something that can and should be prosecuted.” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, has been as critical in private of Mr. Trump’s actions as Mr. Romney has been in public, but he, too, said it was time to move on. “While the report documents a number of actions taken by the president or his associates that were inappropriate, the special counsel reached no conclusion on obstruction of justice,” Mr. Portman said in a statement. That is factually accurate; in releasing his findings a week ago, Mr. Mueller laid out about a dozen instances in which the president may have obstructed justice, but he left it to Congress to reach that conclusion, counseling “that Congress has authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of his authority.” House Democrats responded by ramping up committee investigations, kicking off what is likely to be a long, rending intraparty debate over impeachment. Next week, a bipartisan group of eight Senate and House leaders are scheduled to review an unredacted version of Mr. Mueller’s findings when they return from their spring recess. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, said he had no plans to investigate — and has even suggested that if he pursues a new inquiry it would be to focus on allegations that federal law enforcement agencies conducted surveillance of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. But he added that Mr. Trump had “every right to feel good” about Mr. Mueller’s report. “When is it appropriate to misuse power so that you’re using your federal assets to go after a political opponent?

But according to a new report from Motherboard, Twitter has avoided censoring white supremacists out of fear that it could impact the accounts of Republican politicians. Twitter hasn’t made the same commitment to rid itself of white supremacist content, the speaker later said in another conversation confirmed by Motherboard, because it could have a similar effect on the accounts of Republican politicians. To do so for white supremacist content would inevitably impact Republican accounts because of the extent to which white supremacist and white nationalist rhetoric has bled into American political discourse. On Tuesday, CEO Jack Dorsey met with Trump at the White House hours after Trump took to the platform to complain that “they don’t treat me well as a Republican,” that Twitter is “very discriminatory,” that it is “hard for people to sign on” and that it is “[c]onstantly taking people off list.” Thank you for the time. Last August, Dorsey drew criticism for his decision to apologize to conservative activist Candace Owens after a Twitter Moment labeled her a “far-right” personality. Thanks for calling out.” At a Turning Point USA event in London a few months later, Owens said Hitler’s ambitions were “OK” until he wanted to take them outside of Germany’s borders. I want to apologize for our labeling you “far right.” Team completed a full review of how this was published and why we corrected far too late (12 hrs after). “[There’s an] intentional conflation by a bunch of conservatives to say that white supremacist accounts and average Republican accounts are the same thing,” Collins said of conservatives who claim bias. It should be in the interest of conservatives to try to make a delineation between white supremacist content and [conservative content].” One prominent Republican politician whose account may be hard to distinguish from those of white supremacists is Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who has regularly promoted white supremacists and neo-Nazis. “There is a very strong conviction on this side of the aisle that the algorithms are written with a bias against conservatives,” he told Google CEO Sundar Pichai at a congressional hearing in December.

She’s a medical journalist and former publicist with no political background, but Bronx native Ruth Papazian, 61, sees it as her duty – however much a long shot – to swipe the seat of 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2020 congressional elections. “It became clear that if I didn't step up to fight for our district, we'd end up with yet another passive Republican candidate who didn't bother to campaign,” Papazian told Fox News. “And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn't lived in the district since early childhood. Those of us who stuck it out, and actually live here, care about our future, and need representation.” Ocasio-Cortez used her deceased father’s Bronx condo on her voter registration since 2012, but has since denied reports that she doesn’t live in the Manhattan borough. Meanwhile, Papazian – the daughter of Egyptian immigrants who currently lives with her widowed mother – has accused the headline-making freshman representative of never responding to concerned people in the district “who have serious questions about her unrealistic and unworkable policies,” and claims that she “has a mostly unstaffed office in Queens, and when constituents call her office in DC to ask for help, they get phone recordings with full message boxes.” But for this Bronx Republican, it is the incumbent’s economic policies that are the driving force behind her own political aspirations. “It has been galling listening to Ocasio-Cortez push really hackneyed big government ideas that have failed around the world. These include her Green New Deal and Medicare for all,” Papazian said. It is a middle-class district, because our families came here, worked hard, bought houses, and flourished. Many of us come from families that escaped socialism. She also argued that Jet Blue and the airports are the biggest employers in the Queens part of the Ocasio-Cortez district and that her Green New Deal, “which would get rid of air travel, would make tens of thousands of well-paid avionics workers jobless.” Papazian said that she has established an “exploratory committee” to begin crafting her running plans, and will file her official papers with the Federal Election Commission in the next few months.

On the Republican side, the field of primary challengers against President Trump is not deep. So far, only one Republican has stepped up to take on the president: former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Another potential Republican challenger to President Trump…

The Story: William Weld, a Harvard and Oxford alum who served two terms as Governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s, announced last week that he...

Republican-voting voters from Fayetteville to Charlotte will vote May 14 for a Republican nominee. Boatloads of cash are coming into the special 9th Congressional District election, according to government records and news accounts. The McCready campaign also has a $250,000 debt leftover from the 2018 race, when McCready lent it the money. Leigh Brown Republican Leigh Brown had $38,880 in receipts and just over $1,200 in disbursements as of March 31. The Charlotte Observer reported the PAC is making a $1.3 million television ad buy for Brown. Through March 31 Bishop had spent $6,300. Stony Rushing Republican Union County Commissioner Stony Rushing had $36,300 in donations and about $15,740 in spending. She had $2,500 in spending. The deadline to register to vote on May 14 is Monday. Keynote speaker: Candidate Dan McCready.

Erin Schaff/The New York Times WASHINGTON — House Democrats vowed on Friday to pursue the revelations in the special counsel’s report on President Trump but drew little Republican support in a nation still deeply polarized over the investigation that has dogged the White House for two years. “Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, challenged the credibility of Mr. McGahn’s account later on Friday. “It can’t be taken at face value,” he said in an interview. “It’s a mystery why Rudy Giuliani feels the need to relitigate incidents the attorney general and deputy attorney general have concluded were not obstruction,” said the lawyer, William A. Burck. “But they are accurately described in the report.” On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential candidates condemned the president’s conduct and called for action against him. Mr. Trump’s critics called it a devastating indictment of a candidate willing to profit from the help of a foreign power and a president who repeatedly sought to disrupt or end the investigation even if he was not charged with violating the law. The subpoena issued on Friday by Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, escalated a fight with Mr. Barr over what material Congress is entitled to see from the investigation even as Democrats continued to pummel the attorney general for effectively serving as the president’s defense lawyer. “The department will continue to work with Congress to accommodate its legitimate requests consistent with the law and long-recognized executive branch interests.” Mr. Barr redacted about 10 percent of the report, blacking out information that would divulge secret grand jury evidence, expose classified intelligence, compromise continuing investigations, or invade the privacy or damage the reputation of “peripheral third parties.” Democratic leaders on Friday rejected Mr. Barr’s offer to show just select leaders a version with only the grand jury material redacted. “The attorney general stands ready to testify before our committee and to have the special counsel do the same.

Directionally, the overall policy posture is center-right. The president retains the firm support of most Republican voters. Under the January 1973 Paris peace accords, North Vietnam recognized the continued existence of a non-Communist government in Saigon, while the United States confirmed its own ground force departure. Nixon’s critics have long argued that he had no interest in or expectation of supporting South Vietnam’s continued independence with American ground troops gone. Reports indicate that key outlines of a possible settlement include the withdrawal of U.S. troops, and a promise from the Taliban never to attack the United States. In the year following his re-election, revelations of Richard Nixon’s criminal misconduct over the Watergate affair consumed his presidency. In the end it was stalwart conservatives like Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who told the president directly that his impeachment and removal were certain. Congressional Democrats will therefore continue aggressive investigations on a number of matters, including Trump’s tax returns, his inauguration committee, the Trump organization, obstruction of justice, and possible campaign finance violations. Second, U.S. party politics are considerably more polarized than they were in Nixon’s day, and this obviously affects the process in more than one direction. The nature of Donald Trump’s character and personality is furthermore that he will always fight back against such allegations with the ferocity of a wild honey badger.