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Javier E

Opinion | The Last Thatcherite - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...z-truss-kwasi-kwarteng-uk.html

politics history crisis economics policy culture uk

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.
  • The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”
  • ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies
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  • the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.
  • Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.
  • As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Britain needed a leap of faith to restore itself.
  • While the Gen X Thatcherites didn’t scrimp on data, they also saw something ineffable at the root of British malaise. “Beyond the statistics and economic theories,” they wrote, “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.”
  • “Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping.
  • They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kon
  • Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium.
  • Over the subsequent four decades, Thatcherites at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (which Margaret Thatcher helped set up) described the struggle against both the Labour Party and the broader persistence of Socialism in the Communist and non-Communist world as a “war of ideas.”
  • Thatcherism began in the 1970s. Defined early as the belief in “the free economy and the strong state,” Thatcherism condemned the postwar British welfare economy and sought to replace it with virtues of individual enterprise and religious morality.
  • There’s something tragicomic, if not tragic, about capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to.
  • The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party.
julia rhodes

For Russian TV Channels, Influence and Criticism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-influence-and-criticism.html

debate ukraine nytimes russian criticism influence

shared by julia rhodes on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • “Experts,” he intoned, “are more and more comparing the actions of these nationalists with those who came to power in Germany in the 1930s.”
  • The United States and its allies had poured resources into creating a dangerous far-right force now closing in on worried citizens in the east of the country.
  • The authorities in Kiev slammed the government-operated Russian channels’ depictions as incitement to war this week, prompting at least one Ukrainian cable operator to stop broadcasting all three.
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  • “If you watch some of the shows that go on during the day, it’s harkening back to the heroic deeds of the Soviet Army, liberating the Crimea and Sevastopol,” said Vladimir V. Pozner, host of a political talk show on Channel One. “You begin to be very antsy — is this the buildup to something else? Is this not preparing the population for what ultimately will be the use of force?
  • Abby Martin, a Washington-based anchor from Russia Today, a state-owned, English-language cable news network, created a stir by denouncing Russia’s intervention during a broadcast on Monday. Margarita Simonyan, the channel’s editor in chief, sent her a message saying that what she had said was “not in line with our editorial policy,” she said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “We have never made a secret of the fact that we reflect Russia’s position,” she said.
  • Her decision was followed late Wednesday by the on-air resignation of a second anchor, Liz Wahl, who said she could “not be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin.”In a statement, Russia Today said “the usual course of action” was to address grievances with the editor, or “quit like a professional.” Ms. Wahl’s resignation was, the statement said, “nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.”
  • Irek Murtazin, a Russian blogger, took umbrage when a state newspaper reported that the upper house of Parliament had “unanimously” approved the use of military force in Ukraine, publishing screen shots that showed that only 90 of the body’s 166 members had voted. “It is a sign that the Russian elite is not as monolithic as it is presented to us,” he said. Ms. Borodina said the fact-checking was a new phenomenon, as bloggers and others turn a critical eye on television.“People just didn’t watch television before,” she said. “Falsifications have always been there.”
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Javier E

The Tories once had a radical fringe. Now it is the whole party | Aditya Chakrabortty |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-government-brexit-extremists

tories radical party uk politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • hey have shrunk into being the party of southern England. And even there, the hold is slipping. This January, a senior government minister told the Sun of a new rule, coined while out canvassing, that “If you knock on a door and they have books on their shelves, you can be pretty sure these days they’re not voting Tory.
  • Voting Tory is for one’s dotage, as health secretary Matt Hancock remarked this week, voting Tory is now “something people start to do when they get their winter fuel allowance”
  • May’s would-be replacements know that to stand a chance, they must sound as extreme as possible. Liz Truss was a remainer; now she garbles speeches about the supermarkets’ unpatriotic dearth of British cheese. Fellow former remainer Jeremy Hunt warned only last summer that leaving Europe without a deal would be “a mistake that we would regret for generations”;; today he jabs at Brussels like a mini-Francois
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  • A three-time Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, defined his party’s purpose as “hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility … The fear that radicalism may triumph is the only final cause that the Conservative party can plead for its own existence”
  • his party has today been hijacked by the radicals. It no longer has space for the Keynesianism of Rab Butler or the liberalism of Francis Pym. It is the home of the radical right. That defines the Brexit project; it is also the dying embers of Thatcherism.
Javier E

How Elizabeth Warren Learned to Fight - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...can-conservative-democrat.html

role model candidate 2020 election presidency

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Mr. Pryor still recalls that even among good high school debaters, there was something different about his teammate Liz. “She wanted to be the best,” he said last month. “She wanted it more than I did. She wanted it more than anybody did.”
  • in her early life and as a young adult, Ms. Warren was not bucking the system or the conservative community she inhabited. She was striving within it, using it to launch herself out into the world.
  • She fought to go to college out of state, but dropped out at 19 when her high school boyfriend reappeared with a proposal for marriage. That moment reflects the central struggle of her early life, a tension between her ambitions in the world versus her understanding of a woman’s role in the home.
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  • “Have you ever been around someone who has to be in charge, who has to be the one that everybody looks up to?” said Danice Bowers, who now works in a school library in Shawnee, Okla. “That was Betsy Herring.”
  • Her mother pressed for the family to move from Norman to Oklahoma City so their daughter could attend what she saw as the best school around. That was Northwest Classen, a modern building of glass and brick that had a reputation for academic excellence. It had a German club, a Spanish club and a Great Books club, even its own amateur radio station. The Herring family settled just a few blocks away.
  • “The Summer of Love hadn’t reached us,” Mr. Pryor, a high school debate teammate, said of Oklahoma in the 1960s. “When you saluted the flag, it was emotional. You believed we were right to fight the Communists in Vietnam. It was not right to doubt the government. This was the era we grew up in. We were true believers at that point.
  • The experience at age 12 left Ms. Warren with the belief that honest people help themselves — that when trouble arrives, they tug on the dress, blow their nose, and walk to Sears. That assumption guided her research on personal bankruptcy in her early years as a law professor.
  • “She was extremely conservative at the time,” said Dr. Cochran, whose father was working in Democratic politics. She said Ms. Warren would joke about her friend’s Democratic leanings. “She would ask me what other subversive organizations I was a member of besides the Democratic Party.”
  • The dominant culture, regardless of political party, was conservative — a pride in country and an emphasis on family that Ms. Warren was steeped in
  • When she was 12, her father had a heart attack. Ms. Warren describes what happened next in “A Fighting Chance.” He came home from the hospital changed. He ate poached eggs with the yolks taken out and got yelled at if he tried to lift grocery bags. His job as a salesman for Montgomery Ward was downgraded to commission-only. Pauline, who was 50 then, had to go to work for the first time in her married life
  • By Ms. Warren’s own account, her parents were not the types to talk politics around the dinner table. As for the war, it was personal for them in another way: Don Reed, Ms. Warren’s oldest brother, was flying combat missions in Vietnam.
  • By her senior year, her classmates recalled, she was a debate team star. Her exceptional ability to focus, rare among the teenage boys she was going up against, had made Northwest Classen one of the best teams in the state. Ms. Warren and her partner, Mr. Johnson, would go on to win the state championship their senior year. She was particularly good at rebuttal — taking apart the other side’s argument in four minutes.
  • But she took her home economics studies seriously, too. As a senior, she won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award, memorizing the butterfat content of heavy cream and how to tie off a lazy daisy stitch, according to “A Fighting Chance.”
  • Judy Garrett, Ms. Warren’s sophomore English teacher, who remembers her as “the smartest student I ever had,” went on Ms. Warren’s website after she realized what her star pupil had gone on to do.
  • “Great teachers inspire students in so many ways,” she wrote. “I was skinny and young (I’d skipped a grade) and so sure everyone else had something I didn’t have and didn’t understand. I remember how you taught foreshadowing and how you said I didn’t have to go steady with a boy to be someone (a lesson I didn’t learn for about another 15 years). You were pretty and confident and calm. I so much wanted to be a teacher, and you were part of the reason.”
Javier E

The 'Let the Elderly Die' Chorus - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/the-let-the-elderly-die-chorus

old death pandemic gop economy

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • what the coronavirus crisis has revealed about many Republicans and conservative commentators—and what they care about most—has not been pretty.
  • whether stay-at-home, social-distancing practices should be stopped sooner than medical experts recommend. This is an urgent policy matter that touches on some profound moral questions.
  • if people don’t take their health seriously or if they make risky financial decisions, they shouldn’t always expect government to step in to save them.
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  • In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, however, some Republicans and conservative commentators have begun to make an argument more radical than “people will die.” It’s this: People should die.
  • Patrick apparently sees a dilemma—two options and no other choices: Either we try to save people now, including the elderly, and risk immense damage to the economy, or we get back to work immediately and get the economy moving again by letting the elderly die, perhaps even encouraging them to welcome death for the greater good.
  • Especially troubling is that some of the people who are making the case that we should intentionally concede lives to the coronavirus—especially the lives of the elderly, the disabled, the vulnerable, the infirm—are prominent figures in the pro-life movement
  • a number of people who have built their careers on being pro-life have abandoned that, converting to prosperity gospel by way of Bishop Trump.
  • Consider the argument posed by Rusty Reno in the pages of the magazine he edits, the largely conservative Catholic First Things. Reno criticizes New York governor Andrew Cuomo for saying “I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” To Reno, Cuomo’s statement represents a “disastrous sentimentalism” because “there are many things more precious than life.”
  • Responding to Reno’s article, Erick Erickson writes: It is sad to see a religious publication try to cast the extraordinary effort of stopping a global pandemic [as] “demonic.” But that is what it does. It cheapens the effort to save lives as sentimental and essentially advances a materialistic approach of wanting to make money and let people die because people are always going to die. Now, of course, the writer knows he is doing this so he chooses to denounce materialism while essentially advocating for it.
  • And in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, Jared Lucky powerfully rebuts Reno’s argument, pointing out that “today’s quarantine restrictions complement centuries of Christian response to epidemics.
  • Few Christians would ask for this cup, but we must drink it—to serve God by serving our neighbors, and to grow closer to God through the contemplation of death. . . . Quarantine is . . . a costly act of service that meets the urgent human needs of our neighbors. That service may involve going to work—at a hospital or a testing center—or staying home. But make no mistake: these sacrifices are not a surrender to death. They are a sacrifice to the God who gives life.
  • you need not be a cynic to wonder whether it is mostly driven by a desire to protect the president.
  • Certainly the medical and economic stakes are, in Trump’s own mind, jumbled together with the political calculus for his re-election, as he made clear in a typically paranoid, anti-media tweet on Wednesday:
  • Thankfully, not everyone in the Republican leadership and conservative punditry has adopted the view that we should sacrifice the vulnerable by prematurely ending social distancing and getting back to work. Here, for example, is Wyoming representative Liz Cheney:
Javier E

Trump barrels toward calamity - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...pandemic-plan-survival-fittest

trump response pandemic crisis failure

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • With all the foresight of Napoleon invading Russia and all the caution of George Pickett charging the Union lines, Trump barreled ahead Tuesday with his plan to send Americans back to their workplaces — and, consequently, their airplanes, subways and restaurants — within 19 days, even as the rapidly spreading pandemic builds toward a peak.
  • “We’re opening up this incredible country,” he declared midday in the Rose Garden to Fox News interviewers, hours after the World Health Organization declared a “very large acceleration” of coronavirus infections in the United States, raising the prospect of this country becoming the pandemic’s new epicenter.
  • “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” Trump declared. He went on to say he “wasn’t happy about” his public health experts’ recommendations, but he reluctantly accepted two weeks of restrictions because “we would have been unbelievably criticized for not doing it.”
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  • If Trump succeeds in getting Americans to mix again in public at the height of the pandemic (many governors are unlikely to be so foolhardy with their constituents’ health), he will be risking the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions
  • Just a week into his tepid embrace of social distancing, he’s ready to abandon the fight against the virus and instead force Americans to accept a new strategy for dealing with a pandemic: survival of the fittest.
  • It won’t work: The economy won’t bounce back if people don’t feel safe. “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus,” Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the third-ranking House Republican said on Twitter.
  • It’s bad politics. As bodies of the elderly pile up, "GOP" will forever stand for something different: Get Old People.
  • The annual chance of dying in a car crash is about 1 in 8,000. Seasonal flu mortality is 0.1 percent.
  • Above all, it’s immoral. Trump will be condemning to death the most vulnerable 1 or 2 percent who get the disease — and everybody else who can’t get medical care for heart attacks or injuries because hospitals are full.
  • “What is this, some modern Darwinian theory of natural selection?” asked an incredulous New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. “We are going to fight every way we can to save every life that we can,” the Democrat added.
  • Trump seems to be acting in near-total ignorance. “You can’t compare this to 1918,” he said of the great pandemic. “That was a flu where if you got it, you had a 50/50 chance or very close of dying.” In fact, the 1918 influenza mortality rate was 2.5 percent. The WHO puts coronavirus mortality at 3.4 percent, though that’s likely to fall.
  • Trump blithely proclaimed that “we can socially distance ourselves and go to work.” He suggested more hand-washing and less hand-shaking. “We lose thousands of people a year to the flu; we never turn the country off,” he said. “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents; we didn’t call up the automobile companies to say, ‘Stop making cars.’ ”
  • It’s illogical: If he really sees things quickly returning to normal, what’s the point of a $2 trillion emergency spending package?
  • Americans understand this. Seventy-two percent think it will take months or longer for the virus to be contained, a CBS-YouGov poll found. Americans can see it took China three months to control the virus with severe measures.
  • “This cure is worse than the problem,” he said. “In my opinion, more people are going to die if we allow this to continue.”On the basis of that uninformed speculation, a reckless Trump would sign death warrants for millions.
cartergramiak

Donations Surge for Republicans Who Challenged Election Results - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fund-raising-capitol-riot.html

politics Culture US biden election trump GOP

shared by cartergramiak on 19 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the challenges to President Biden’s victory in their chamber, each brought in more than $3 million in campaign donations in the three months that followed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
  • Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia who called the rampage a “1776 moment” and was later stripped of committee assignments for espousing bigoted conspiracy theories and endorsing political violence, raised $3.2 million — more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.
  • Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a freshman who urged his supporters to “lightly threaten” Republican lawmakers to goad them into challenging the election results, pulled in more than $1 million. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado — who like Ms. Greene compared Jan. 6 to the American Revolution — took in nearly $750,000.
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  • Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, took in $1.5 million, and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has started an organization to lead the Republican Party away from fealty to Mr. Trump, raised more than $1.1 million.
  • Campaign filings show nearly a dozen lawmakers have made payments of $20,000 or more to security companies in the past three months, including Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who voted to convict Mr. Trump; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who gave a harrowing account of the riot; and Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California and one of the impeachment managers against Mr. Trump.
Javier E

Opinion | Jeff Flake: Congresswoman Cheney, I know how alone you must be feeling. Hold ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ke-liz-cheney-republican-party

gop truth nonsense trump history crisis Culture Politics

shared by Javier E on 12 May 21 - No Cached
  • No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.
  • It seems a good time to examine how we got to a place where such a large swath of the electorate (70 percent of Republican voters, according to polling) became willing to reject a truth that is so self-evident.
  • This frog has been boiling for some time now. The Trump period in American life has been a celebration of the unwise and the untrue.
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  • In January 2018, three years before the Capitol insurrection, I said the following on the Senate floor:
  • From the ugly tolerance of the pernicious falsehood about President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the bizarre and fanatical fable about the size of inauguration crowds, to the introduction of the term “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, the party’s steady embrace of dishonesty as a central premise has brought us to this low and dangerous place.
  • “Mr. President, let us be clear. The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”
  • It is elementary to have to say this, but we did not become a great nation by believing or espousing nonsense, or by embracing lunacy. And if my party continues down this path, we will not be fit to govern.
rerobinson03

Opinion | Three Paths to Containing Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-2024.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Last fall and winter, the president of the United States attempted, with ineffectual strategy but violent consequences, to pressure Republicans to overturn an election that he quite clearly lost.
  • The first theory, held by many liberals and centrists and a few anti-Trump conservatives, is that we’re in a continuing emergency that will end in one of two ways: Either a Democratic Congress will enact far-reaching electoral reforms that decisively weaken the current G.O.P., or else Trump and his supporters will make a more effective and destructive bid to steal the 2024 election.
  • Under this theory, non-Trumpist Republicans should be speaking out constantly, in the model of Liz Cheney, against the threat Trump poses to democracy. The Biden White House should give up on bipartisanship and spend its capital trying to kill the filibuster and go big on voting rights. And Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema should be reminded daily that it will be their fault when the crisis comes.
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  • If the emergency theory seems despairing, the moderate theory seems like it could benefit from a little more strategic thinking, especially about what kind of legislation would prevent some future subversion of the vote. (A reform to the bafflingly complex Electoral Count Act of 1887 seems like a place to start.)
  • This is the point when I’m supposed to tell you which of these three approaches will actually Stop Trump and which will ignominiously fail. But the frustrating truth is that as adaptations to the unprecedented weirdness of the Trump phenomenon, all three attitudes — maximalist, moderate and deliberately inactive — seem somewhat reasonable.
katherineharron

Collins says she was 'appalled' Utah Republicans booed Romney and GOP not led by 'just ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

gop

shared by katherineharron on 03 May 21 - No Cached
  • Sen. Susan Collins said Sunday that she was "appalled" to see fellow Republican Sen. Mitt Romney was booed by members of his state party for his votes to convict Donald Trump
  • Romney was booed Saturday at the Utah Republican Party organizing convention and narrowly avoided being censured by his state party for his votes in Trump's impeachment trials.
  • Collins said Sunday that the GOP is "not a party that is led by just one person" and needs to "be accepting of differences in our party."
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  • Collins also defended Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the third ranking House GOP leader who voted to impeach Trump earlier this year, as "a woman of strength and conscience."
  • Collins was one of seven Republican senators who joined with Democrats in voting to convict Trump at the conclusion of his second impeachment trial. Trump was acquitted of inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6.
rerobinson03

These Are the Republicans Who Supported Impeaching Trump - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-impeaching-donald-trump.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The vote came exactly one week after the Capitol was breached by an angry mob of Trump loyalists.
  • In 2019, not a single Republican voted in favor of impeachment. House Republican leaders said they would not formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach the president this time. Here are the Republicans who voted to impeach on Wednesday.
  • Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.
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  • Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back the impeachment proceedings.
  • Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the president’s role in an insurrection that caused “death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.”
  • Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”
  • “There is no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection,” he said
  • Representative Fred Upton of Michigan issued a statement saying that he would vote to impeach after President Trump “expressed no regrets” for what had happened at the Capitol.
  • Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State said that she would vote to impeach because she believed that the president had acted in violation of his oath of office.
  • A sixth Republican, Representative Dan Newhouse of Washington State, announced his plans to vote for impeachment during a debate on the topic in the House on Wednesday.
  • Mr. Newhouse said that others, “including myself, are responsible for not speaking out sooner — before the president misinformed and inflamed a violent mob.”
  • What he concluded, he said, was that President Trump “helped organize and incite a mob that attacked the United States Congress in an attempt to prevent us from completing our solemn duties as prescribed by the Constitution.”
  • Representative Peter Meijer, a freshman congressman from Michigan, said in a statement that the president had “betrayed and misled millions with claims of a ‘stolen election’” and that during the riot at the Capitol he “shrank from leadership when the country needed it most
  • In a statement, Mr. Rice had a blunt critique of President Trump. “I have backed this President through thick and thin for four years,” he said. “I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But, this utter failure is inexcusable.”
  • After casting his vote to impeach, Representative David Valadao of California said on Twitter that “President Trump was, without question, a driving force in the catastrophic events” that took place at the Capitol.
katherineharron

One day until Trump's second impeachment vote: What happens now - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

congress

shared by katherineharron on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The next few days are going to be long, but by the end of Wednesday, we expect that President Donald Trump will be impeached a second time.
  • The US Capitol has become a fortress in Washington as Democrats -- keenly aware that a new President will be inaugurated in just eight days -- grapple with how to curtail the damage that could be done by the outgoing man in the White House.
  • there is no stopping impeachment now.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Senate Democrats are working through how it might unfold and President Joe Biden is acknowledging that his opening days in office may be divided between his agenda to bring the country together and a Senate impeachment trial that will continue to keep the country divided.
  • at 11 a.m. ET, the committee is going to begin debate on Rep. Jamie Raskin's bill urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
  • The House Committee is the hottest ticket in town Tuesday.
  • For context, the last impeachment Rules debate lasted about eight hours.
  • The House will pass the rule to govern the debate on the impeachment article Tuesday night at some point. When that occurs is not clear. But, Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET, the House will meet to begin consideration of the article of impeachment on the House floor. Exact timing for final vote Wednesday TBD.
  • Democrats are confident there will be at least a handful of Republicans voting with them on impeachment Wednesday. All eyes are on No. 3 Republican Liz Cheney who has made no secret of her frustrations with President Donald Trump over the years, but comes from conservative Wyoming.
  • she told colleagues on a conference call Monday evening that Wednesday's impeachment vote is a "vote of conscience," a source told CNN.
  • Also watch Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois. And, Rep. Peter Meijer, a Republican who told CNN on Monday night "I had a break on Wednesday around 4:17 p.m. ... The one person who could tamp down the rhetoric , the one person who could have put an end to that violence, the President, he put out that video that said ..'we love you, you're special. Come home."
  • don't expect dozens of Republicans to vote for impeachment, but these alternatives aren't coming to the floor in a Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives.
  • Yes, moderate Republicans are calling for censuring the President. Pelosi made it clear on the Democratic caucus call Monday that censure wasn't on the table. The majority of her caucus is backing impeachment.
  • At this point there are two votes coming to the House floor where Republicans can register their anger with Trump's actions. They can vote for Raskin's bill on the 25th Amendment or they can vote for impeachment. That's it. Democrats don't want to give them an out card or another option.
  • Right now, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to use a rarely used procedural move to get McConnell to bring back the Senate with him and force a trial. The move only requires McConnell and Schumer to be on the same page, but the expectation as of now is McConnell isn't going to agree with it.
  • As the House charges ahead, there is a growing realization in the Senate, that an impeachment trial of Trump cannot be put off for 100 days. Instead, the plan that is beginning to make the most sense is one in which the new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would divide each day in half. In the morning, the Senate would move ahead with confirming Biden's Cabinet and begin work on his stimulus package. In the afternoon, the Senate would reconvene as a court room where former President Donald Trump is on trial. Biden alluded to this Monday noting that it was his "hope and expectation."
  • Alan Frumin, the former Senate parliamentarian, Monday night who told CNN that he didn't believe there was anything precluding Schumer from dividing the day like that, essentially allowing the Senate to double track. In essence, only having a few hours in the morning could delay Biden's agenda.
  • Senate rules simply say that once the trial starts at 12 p.m. ET every day the Senate should be in trial, but "the adjournment of the Senate sitting in said trial shall not operate as an adjournment of the Senate, but on such adjournment, the Senate shall resume the consideration of its legislative and executive business."
  • At first, members thought they could potentially dispose of the articles quickly if they came to the Senate, but while there are no rules governing how long a trial has to be, members also don't want to make a sham out of the process. Essentially, if the Senate Democrats have to have a trial, if Pelosi is going to send them over, many members are arguing they need to do it right. That means expect this trial to last days, not hours.
katherineharron

House to vote on resolution calling to remove President Trump from office by the 25th A... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

riots

shared by katherineharron on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The House of Representatives is expected to vote Tuesday on a measure calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office through the 25th Amendment in the wake of the violent siege of the US Capitol last week.
  • The resolution, brought forward by Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, calls on Vice President Mike Pence "to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties of his office."
  • Approval of the resolution by the Democratic-led House will stand as a symbolic rebuke to the President as many lawmakers are furious and reeling from the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • It comes as House Democrats are now moving rapidly toward impeaching the President for a second time as a result of the insurrection, which Trump incited after repeatedly making false claims that the election had been stolen from him
  • House Democrats plan to vote Wednesday to impeach Trump
  • Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, told colleagues on a conference call Monday evening that Wednesday's impeachment vote is a "vote of conscience,"
  • The House will vote Tuesday evening on the resolution urging Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, and then will plan to vote Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET on the impeachment resolution, Hoyer said.
  • Invoking the 25th Amendment would require Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote to remove Trump from office due to his inability to "discharge the powers and duties of his office" -- an unprecedented step. Pence has so far given no indication that he would take that action.
  • Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called Pence a day after the Capitol attack to discuss the 25th Amendment -- but Pence never took the call after they were on hold for 25 minutes.
  • In her statement on Monday, Pelosi said that as a "next step," House Democrats "will move forward with bringing impeachment legislation to the Floor."
  • Pelosi accused House Republicans of "enabling the President's unhinged, unstable and deranged acts of sedition to continue," adding, "Their complicity endangers America, erodes our Democracy, and it must end."
anonymous

Three U.S. House Republicans declare support for impeaching Trump | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...impeaching-trump-idUSKBN29H0JJ

ushouse gop trump impeachment

shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump’s iron grip on his party showed further signs of weakening on Tuesday as at least three Republicans, including a member of the House leadership, said they would vote to impeach him after his supporters stormed the Capitol.
  • Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, said: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,”
  • no trial could begin until the chamber returns from its recess on Jan. 19.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • McConnell believes the impeachment effort will make it easier to purge Trump from the party, the Times said.
  • “What I said was totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters as he left for a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border wall near Alamo, Texas, his first public foray since the assault on the Capitol. “I want no violence.”
hannahcarter11

McConnell Privately Backs Impeachment as House Moves to Charge Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-backs-trump-impeachment.html

trump impeachment mcconnell

shared by hannahcarter11 on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Senator Mitch McConnell has concluded that President Trump committed impeachable offenses and believes that Democrats’ move to impeach him will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party, according to people familiar with Mr. McConnell’s thinking.
  • Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican in the House, announced her intention to support the single charge of high crimes and misdemeanors, as other party leaders declined to formally lobby rank-and-file lawmakers to oppose it.
  • Even before Mr. McConnell’s position was known and Ms. Cheney had announced her plans, advisers to the Senate Republican leader had already privately speculated that a dozen Republican senators — and possibly more — could ultimately vote to convict Mr. Trump in a Senate trial that would follow his impeachment by the House.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • While he has said he is personally opposed to impeachment, he and other party leaders did not mount an official effort to defeat the push, and Mr. McCarthy was working on Tuesday to build support for a censure resolution to rebuke the president for his actions.
  • After four years of backing the president at nearly every turn and refusing to condemn even his most extreme behavior, party leaders were racing to distance themselves from a president many of them now regard as a political and constitutional threat.
  • “It is true that the president’s remaining term is limited — but a president capable of fomenting a violent insurrection in the Capitol is capable of greater dangers still,” they wrote. “He must be removed from office as swiftly as the Constitution allows. He must also be disqualified to prevent the recurrence of the extraordinary threat he presents.”
  • The Republican Party’s rapid turn against Mr. Trump unfolded as the House met into the night on Tuesday to debate and vote on a resolution formally calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip the president of his powers, a move that Mr. Pence shot down hours before the House passed it along party lines.
  • In a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Pence argued that the amendment was meant to address medical emergencies or presidential “incapacity” and that using it as “a means of punishment or usurpation” would set a “terrible precedent.”
  • In a veiled reference to impeachment, he urged Congress “to avoid actions that would further divide and inflame the passions of the moment” and pledged to work in “good faith” with Mr. Biden’s transition team.
  • Mr. Trump has shown no trace of contrition. On Tuesday, in his first public appearance since the siege of the Capitol, he told reporters that his remarks to supporters at a rally that day — in which he exhorted them to go to the Capitol and “fight” so Republicans would reject the election results — had been “totally appropriate.”
  • Mr. McConnell has indicated he wants to see the specific article of impeachment that the House is set to approve on Wednesday, and to hear the eventual arguments in the Senate. But the Senate Republican leader has made clear in private discussions that he believes now is the moment to move on from Mr. Trump, whom he blames for causing Republicans to lose the Senate.
  • “Our nation was founded precisely so that the free choice of the American people is what shapes our self-government and determines the destiny of our nation.”
  • On Monday, Mr. Biden telephoned Mr. McConnell to ask whether it would be possible to set up a dual track that would allow the Senate to confirm Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees and hold a Senate trial at the same time, according to officials briefed on the conversation who disclosed it on the condition of anonymity. Far from avoiding the topic of impeaching Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell said it was a question for the Senate parliamentarian, and promised Mr. Biden a quick answer.
  • “The bottom line is that Leader McConnell has the ability to call us back into session and we can then move to convict Donald Trump, draw on the impeachment trial and try him,” Mr. Schumer told reporters in New York. “And that’s what we hope McConnell will do.”
  • For Mr. McConnell and other Republicans, the crisis offered an opportunity to bar Mr. Trump from seeking the presidency again in 2024, as he has repeatedly mused with allies about doing.
  • But that prospect has created a conundrum for Republicans who, understanding the deep affection for Mr. Trump among a powerful segment of their party’s core supporters, are concerned they could pay a steep political price for abandoning him.
  • Mr. Biden has made clear, in public and private, that he will not oppose the Democratic push to impeach Mr. Trump, even though his advisers and some lawmakers in his party are concerned about the impact it could have on his first days in office.
xaviermcelderry

Trump Impeachment Live: The Latest - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...impeachment-trump

Trump Biden president-elect

shared by xaviermcelderry on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A group of President Trump’s most strident allies in the House is calling on Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, to resign from her leadership post after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, dramatizing the bitter rifts within the party and setting up a messy internal feud that could define its future.
  • Ms. Cheney was one of 10 Republicans to break with the party on Wednesday and vote to charge the president with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in urging on a mob that stormed the Capitol.
  • Ms. Cheney has brushed aside calls to step down, saying that she was “not going anywhere” and calling her break with Mr. Trump “a vote of conscience.” Several Republicans, including some members of the Freedom Caucus, have begun to circle the wagons around her.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The House on Wednesday voted for a historic second impeachment of President Trump, approving 232 to 197 a single article citing his role in whipping up a mob that stormed the Capitol last week. But as his fellow Democrats denounced the assault and Mr. Trump’s incitement of the rioters, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has maintained a studied cool, staying largely removed from the proceedings and keeping his focus on battling the coronavirus pandemic, reviving a faltering economy and lowering the political temperature.
  • A man who was photographed holding a Confederate battle flag inside the U.S. Capitol last week during the riot was arrested Thursday in Delaware, two law enforcement officials said. The man, Kevin Seefried, was wanted by the F.B.I., which had sought help from the public to identify him and had widely circulated a dispatch plastered with images of him.
  • A retired firefighter from Chester, Pa., was also arrested on Thursday after he was identified as the man seen in a video throwing a fire extinguisher at police officers during the riot. The man, Robert Sanford, is charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer engaged in the performance of official duties and civil disorder among other crimes.
xaviermcelderry

Opinion | Has Trump's Reckoning Come Too Late? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-second-impeachment.html

Trump

shared by xaviermcelderry on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said in a statement, adding, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
  • Trump now becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he’s always deserved.
  • hen a mob incited by the president ransacked the Capitol, killing one policeman and pummeling others, it also tore down a veil. Suddenly, all but the most fanatical partisans admitted that Trump was exactly who his fiercest critics have always said he was.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was “hamstrung” in trying to investigate white nationalists. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,” said Gomez.
  • The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
  • “We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them,” said President Trump. He urged his minions to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the place where Congress was meeting to certify the election he lost: “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
  • It is not yet clear who Raskin will be up against. Prominent law firms have refused to represent Trump in his postelection legal fights, and Bloomberg News reports that lawyers who have defended the president in the past don’t want to do so anymore. For four years, as Trump has brought ever more havoc and hatred to this country, many have wondered what it would take to dent his impunity. The answer appears to be twofold: Committing sedition, and losing power.
  • Trump now becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he’s always deserved.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 17 Jan 21
       
      he made history
  • The House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report quotes, at length, the speech that Donald Trump gave to his devotees on Jan. 6 before many of them stormed the Capitol, baying for execution.
  • Banks promised to stop lending to him. Major social media companies banned him. One of the Trump Organization’s law firms dropped it as a client. The coach of the New England Patriots rejected the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the P.G.A. pulled its namesake tournament from a Trump golf course. Universities revoked honorary degrees. Some of the country’s biggest corporations, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pledged to withhold donations from congressional enablers of his voter fraud fantasy. Bill de Blasio announced that New York City would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run two ice rinks and other concessions worth millions annually.
  • Throughout his presidency, Republicans pretended not to hear what the president was saying. For the last few months, Republican election officials in Georgia have spoken with mounting desperation of being barraged with death threats as a result of Trump’s ceaseless lies about the election, but national Republicans did little to restrain him. There was no exodus away from the president and his brand when, during the debates, he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
  • That is part of the work of the second impeachment. This impeachment may be as much a burden for Democrats as for Republicans; a Senate trial would surely postpone some of the urgent business of the Biden administration. It has gone forward because Democrats had no choice if they wanted to defend our increasingly fragile system of government.
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