Congressional Republicans Screw Up

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Andrew Solender and Juliegrace Brufke at Axios:

It's 10 minutes of humiliation that will live in House lore.

Why it matters: Even in an era of ousted speakers and wild, daily internal disarray, Tuesday night's back-to-back defeats for House Republicans were epic.Speaker Mike Johnson lost by one vote — a Republican vote! — the first impeachment of a Cabinet official in 148 years.

Then the House rejected the GOP's heavily hyped package of aid for Israel.

Zoom in: House Republicans were fuming and embarrassed after the twin defeats on impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and military aid for Israel — a bill that was a GOP chess move against President Biden.

Carl Hulse at NYT:

Congressional Republicans thought they had set a clever trap for Democrats that would accomplish complementary political and policy goals.

Their idea was to tie approval of military assistance to Ukraine to tough border security demands that Democrats would never accept, allowing Republicans to block the money for Kyiv that many of them oppose while simultaneously enabling them to pound Democrats for refusing to halt a surge of migrants at the border. It was to be a win-win headed into November’s elections.

But Democrats tripped them up by offering substantial — almost unheard-of — concessions on immigration policy without insisting on much in return. Now it is Republicans who are rapidly abandoning a compromise that gave them much of what they wanted, leaving aid to Ukraine in deep jeopardy, border policy in turmoil and Congress again flailing as multiple crises at home and abroad go without attention because of a legislative stalemate.

The turn of events led to a remarkable Capitol Hill spectacle this week as a parade of Senate Republicans almost instantly repudiated a major piece of legislation they had spent months demanding as part of any agreement to provide more help to a beleaguered Ukraine. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and foremost Republican advocate of helping Ukraine, and Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who invested months in cutting the border deal, suggested they would vote to block it on the floor in a test vote set for Wednesday.

It left Senate Republicans, who had mainly avoided the chaos that has consumed House Republicans for the past two years, looking more like their counterparts across the rotunda, rocked by division, finger-pointing and even calls from the far right for new leadership.

The Campaign of the Long Knives

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer at WP:

Donald Trump has promised a presidency of “retribution” if he wins another term in office. Many Republicans fear they might face the brunt of it.

The former president has threatened to have donors to his Republican opponent Nikki Haley “permanently barred” from his orbit. A top adviser has vowed to destroy the career of Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), House Freedom Caucus chairman, after he endorsed another Trump challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Trump campaign has also attempted to condemn former aides who worked for his rivals during the GOP nomination fight and have twisted arms demanding endorsements, telling lawmakers that Trump will remember exactly when they backed him.

“MAGA disowns her and anyone else that associates/works with her,” read a recent Trump campaign social media message targeting the Trump campaign’s 2020 communications director for working last year to elect DeSantis. “TRAITOR!”

...

The former president’s advisers have discussed trying to change personnel at the Republican National Committee to install people they view as more in line with Trump and controlled by Trump’s campaign, according to people familiar with the discussions. It is unclear exactly how they would do this, but Trump said in a Sunday morning interview with Fox Business that there would be changes at the RNC. The former president has discussed trying to immediately remove Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from his Senate leadership post should he be reelected, and he has told advisers that he would want to immediately fire Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed by Trump as FBI director, following multiple federal investigations since he left office.

The DeSantis DIsaster

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended. DeSantis plotzed.

Marc A. Caputo at The Bulwark: 

As told to The Bulwark by more than 20 officials, staffers, contractors, and high-level insiders, the story of Never Back Down’s toxic implosion offers an unusually candid look at the tensions and skulduggery rife in presidential campaigns. High-dollar consultants and Type A personalities knifed each other, often using the media as the blade. Hairline cracks of mistrust broke into compound fractures of headline-grabbing paranoia and recrimination.

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At the center of Never Back Down’s big drama, big ideas, and big spending stood a close Laxalt ally: the star consultant Jeff Roe, his mammoth firm Axiom Strategies, and a web of affiliated companies that accounted for $22 million in Never Back Down’s billing in 2023, according to an internal Never Back Down analysis of campaign finance information filed last Wednesday.

Roe became a target early on for Donald Trump and his supporters, who conducted what some called a “psyop” on DeSantis designed to sow mistrust about the consultant. Unreported until now, the super PAC backing South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott secretly fueled the division—chiefly by discovering and leaking a debate advice memo Roe clandestinely penned for DeSantis. It caused major suspicion inside the DeSantis campaign—and between it and the super PAC—about who the leaker was.

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The publication of the memo furthered internal divisions. Some senior advisers suspected that Roe had caused the document to be intentionally leaked or that it was leaked by some of the Axiom employees or by allies of Roe’s on the campaign staff (yes, they were there, too).

The super PAC, in turn, thought someone in the campaign had leaked the document.

None of it made sense. Because it wasn’t true.

The real culprits were two operatives from Tim Scott’s Trust In the Mission super PAC, which had been trawling the Axiom website in search of just this sort of information hidden by Roe on the web. One of the TIM Pac consultants, Luke Thompson, had firsthand experience with the scenario. He had worked on an Ohio super PAC for J.D. Vance in 2022 and had also posted inside information on a website for the candidate. It was discovered and leaked to Politico by the rival campaign of Josh Mandel, on whose behalf Roe was working.

A year later, turnabout was fair play for Thompson.

“The candidate needs to be able to trust the person running the super PAC [to] use good judgment,” said Thompson, who credited a fellow operative for finding the memo on Axiom’s website. “The super PAC director needs to understand the candidate’s worldview and stay inside of it. Communicating legally via public forums isn’t sufficient—and without trust and discipline, it can be counterproductive.”

Redistricting Battles Continue

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

The ongoing battle over districts shows that gubernatorial and state legislative elections influence the makeup of US House districts.

A state judicial election a year ago may end up being pivotal for control of the House. In April, Shawn Johnson reported at Wisconsin Public Radio:

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz has won a hotly contested race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating former Justice Dan Kelly to give liberals a majority on the court for the first time in 15 years.

The win by Protasiewicz comes at a pivotal time for the court, and for the Democratic voters who carried her to office. Justices are all but certain to hear a challenge to Wisconsin’s pre-Civil War abortion ban, and with a liberal majority, they’re likely to consider a lawsuit that could overturn Wisconsin’s Republican-drawn legislative maps.

Issues are connected, too. Protasiewicz ran on abortion rights.

Rich Kremer at Wisconsin Public Radio:

Gov. Tony Evers has vetoed a set of legislative maps passed by Republican state lawmakers, likely leaving an ongoing dispute over redistricting in the hands of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Republicans based the maps on those Evers submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but they made a handful of changes to prevent GOP incumbents from being drawn out of their current districts.

In his veto message to Republican lawmakers, Evers called the Republican maps “gerrymandered” to protect GOP incumbents and said the “rushed process” lawmakers used to pass them within a 24-hour period resulted in two state Assembly districts that include “non-contiguous territory in violation of our State Constitution.” The contiguity issue was the basis for the Wisconsin Supreme Court declaring GOP-drawn voting districts used in recent elections unconstitutional on Dec. 22.

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The veto wasn’t a surprise, but it means the Democratic governor and Republican-controlled state Legislature aren’t likely to agree on voting maps before the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority picks new legislative districts.

Republicans could try to override Evers’ veto, but they likely lack the numbers. The maps passed the Senate 17-14 and passed the Assembly 63-35. Both margins are short of the two-thirds majority needed for a veto override.

The Akin Ploy in the CA Senate Race

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) secured the nomination of a weak GOP opponent in 2012 by running "attack ads" that made him sound appealing to conservative GOP voters. 

https://youtu.be/ec4t_3vaBMc  She told the story here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/todd-akin-missouri-claire-mccaskill-2012-121262/

In the dozen years since, campaigns and parties have tried the same controversial trick, with mixed results.

I said that Adam Schiff would do the same with Steve Garvey, and he is:

https://x.com/ccadelago/status/1753072507823984940?s=20

Seema Mehta at LAT

Republican Senate contender and former baseball All-Star Steve Garvey is getting a campaign boost from an unlikely source — Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a top rival in the race for the seat once held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Schiff’s campaign released a new ad portraying Garvey, a political novice considered a long shot to win the coveted seat, as his greatest competitor in a close 2024 Senate race that features two other top Democrats: Reps. Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland.

“Two leading candidates for Senate. Two very different visions for California,” a narrator intones, noting later that Garvey “is too conservative for California” and voted for Donald Trump twice.

While the message will turn off Democratic voters in the state, it may increase the former baseball player’s appeal to Republican voters — as it is designed to do, according to two political strategists.

People Don't Know About Trump's Legal Problems

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign, and the impact of Trump's legal problems. New York courts have found that he is a rapist and a fraud.

 Philip Bump at WP:

As it turns out, even major developments often fly under the average American’s radar. New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces. And among those Republicans on whose political support he depends? Consistently, only a minority say they are aware of his lawsuits and charges.

YouGov presented American adults with eight legal scenarios to judge the extent of the public’s awareness. Two were invented: that Trump faces charges related to emoluments or related to drug trafficking. Happily, less than a quarter of respondents said those legal threats actually existed.

The other six were real. The one that was familiar to the most people was the federal classified-documents case that is moving forward in Florida; 6 in 10 Americans said they were aware of that case. The one that had the least awareness was the civil suit in New York in which a judge determined that he’d fraudulently inflated the value of his assets. Just under 50 percent of Americans knew about that.

But the pattern among Republicans is clear. At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

 

Trump Legal Fees and Campaign Finance

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Aaron Blake at WP:

Two of Trump’s political action committees spent a combined $55.6 million on legal costs in 2023, as Trump faces major judgments against him in civil court as well as his continuing defense against four criminal indictments.

That’s about a quarter of all the money raised across Trump’s various committees. And that’s before many of Trump’s most significant legal battles — his criminal trials — truly touch off. Legal spending also accelerated somewhat in the second half of 2023, putting Trump on pace to spend about as much on legal fees in 2024 as his various entities currently have in cash reserves: $70 million.

The impact of the legal spending is particularly acute for Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America. It boasted a $100 million war chest as of early 2022. At the end of 2023, it was left with just more than $5.1 million in cash — after raising just $6 million and spending $26 million on legal costs in the second half of the year.

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And the Republican National Committee is on its worst financial footing in a long time. It had just $8 million in cash at the end of 2023, having spent more than it raised for the year. According to campaign finance expert Rob Pyers, 2023 was its worst fundraising year since 2013 in terms of raw dollars and its worst since 1993 when you adjust for inflation.