Republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida speaks at the Student Action Summit in Tampa, July 22 (Gage Skidmore)
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has become former president Donald Trump’s most likely rival for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024.
DeSantis won reelection with almost 60 percent support on Tuesday, up from 50 percent in 2018 and by the widest margin in a Florida gubernatorial election in forty years.
Florida’s members of Congress benefited. Senator Marco Rubio was reelected with 58 percent support, up from 52 percent in 2016. Florida Republicans gained three seats in the House of Representatives.
Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8, 2021 (Victoria Pickering)
59 percent of Americans believe Democrats will “open the US-Mexico border” if they win the election on Tuesday. 53 percent worry they will cut police funding.
They won’t. Nor will they step up border enforcement or raise police budgets, and they should: illegal border crossings and violent crime are rising. But only far-left extremists believe in open borders and defunding the police. Few have been nominated by Democrats. Even fewer will win elections.
The other half of the country sees Republicans as the extremists: 56 percent believe a Republican Congress would ban abortion and overturn democratic elections.
There is more justification for those beliefs. Many Republican candidates support a federal ban on abortion. Many were complicit or silent when Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. But the party is divided on both questions.
More than anything, the results of the CBS poll reveal that Democrats and Republicans believe the worst about each other.
What about the 40 percent of Americans who identify with neither party? (more…)
The United States Capitol in Washington DC, December 10, 2019 (Unsplash/Julien Gaud)
Two years ago, Republicans avoided a debate about their party’s principles by copy-pasting their 2016 manifesto and slapping Donald Trump’s name on it.
I had hoped Trump’s defeat might repudiate what he stood for, and bring Republicans back to the center-right, but that hasn’t happened.
Worse, the Trump wing is the only one with a plan to move forward. Senate leader Mitch McConnell has resisted outlining a governing agenda for a Republican Congress. House leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” — modeled on Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” that returned Republicans to a majority in 1994 — is a summary of ambitions few could disagree with: create good-paying jobs, curb wasteful government spending, fund border security, lower the price of gasoline, strengthen Medicare and Social Security. But none of McCarthy’s “plans” answer the obvious question: how? Which means they aren’t plans, but slogans.
Only the Republican Study Committee, formerly a fringe faction in the House of Representatives that has come to encompass three in four members, has made concrete proposals in the form of a counterbudget.
I read all its 122 pages, so you don’t have to. But first: why Republicans need a plan. (more…)
Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida, January 25, 2020 (Unsplash/Christian Lambert)
What happened to the party of free enterprise?
In Florida, Republicans are revoking Disney World’s self-government and not even pretending it’s anything but retaliation for the company’s opposition to their education policy.
“I will not allow a woke corporation based in California to run our state,” Governor Ron DeSantis said. “Disney has gotten away with special deals from the state of Florida for way too long.”
Disney World is Florida’s largest employer and manages its own utilities, including firefighting, garbage collection and water reclamation, in the so-called Reedy Creek Improvement District. It can also build homes and attractions without permission from the state or local government.
The arrangement dates from the 1960s, when Disney committed to develop the former swampland into a theme park and town.
The entertainment giant drew DeSantis’ ire when it came out against his Parental Rights in Education law. It prohibits teaching gender identity and sexual orientation to children under the age of 10 in ways that are not “age-appropriate” — without specifying what age-appropriate means. Critics have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Whatever the merits (for the record, I think schools should teach what they think is best, parents should be able to send their kids to whichever school they think is best, and the Florida law is at a minimum poorly written), punishing a company, or indeed anyone, for their beliefs is an overreach. It is neither conservative nor liberal, and the sort of thing we’d expect in China, not the United States.
It is also rushed. DeSantis does not appear to have thought through what will happen to the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s $1 billion in debts. Taxpayers could be on the hook.
Workers clean the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in the early morning of January 8 (Victoria Pickering)
Liz Cheney, the number-three Republican in the House of Representatives, will vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting an attack on the United States Capitol and attempting to overturn the election of Joe Biden.
So will Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse of Washington; Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio; John Katko of New York, a former federal prosecutor; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an Air Force veteran; and Peter Meijer and Fred Upton of Michigan.
Charlie Baker, Larry Hogan and Phil Scott, the Republican governors of Massachusetts, Maryland and Vermont, support impeachment.
American president Donald Trump attends a meeting in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018 (Office of the President of the Republic of Finland/Juhani Kandell)
Democrats in the United States are urging Vice President Mike Pence and members of the cabinet to remove Donald Trump from power under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
That could be a mistake.
It would be constitutionally dubious. The Twenty-fifth Amendment allows a majority of the cabinet to replace a president who has become incapacitated. It wasn’t designed to topple a president who is still technically able to carry out his duties.
It can be argued Trump has proved himself “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” by inciting a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Wednesday in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election. But I can think of a dozen more examples of Trump’s behavior from the last year alone that proved his unfitness for office.
More worrisome than potentially setting a bad precedent is that a cabinet coup would add fuel to the fire of the stab-in-the-back myth Trump and his supporters are already writing. It could give the outgoing president just the pretext he needs to lead an insurgency against the next government of the United States. (more…)
American president Donald Trump answers questions from reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, July 18, 2019 (White House/Shealah Craighead)
Donald Trump’s attempt to cling to power has been going no better since we last checked in. He is trying to steal the election, as I expected he would, but there are still officials, including Republicans, who care more about doing the right thing than humoring the president.
Election officials in all states counted all the votes, despite cries from Trump and his supporters to stop the count in states where he was ahead before mailed-in ballots could be counted.
Secretaries of state and governors, regardless of party, certified the results in all states, despite appeals from Trump and his supporters to overturn the popular will where the outcome was close and appoint electors for the president, rather than Joe Biden.
86 judges of both parties threw out lawsuits brought by Trump and Republicans to discard postal ballots or otherwise invalidate the election results.
All nine justices of the Supreme Court, including the three appointed by Trump, refused to even hear a lawsuit brought by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to overturn the election in four other states.
The Electoral College met in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. There were no faithless electors. Republican activists claiming to be electors in Michigan were barred from the state capitol, where the actual electors cast their votes for Biden.
Trump’s last (legal) opportunity to remain in power will be on January 6, when Vice President Mike Pence reads out the Electoral College votes in Congress. But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has already called on his members not to raise objections on that day. (more…)
United States Capitol in Washington DC, January 15, 2017 (DoD/William Lockwood)
American centrists are optimistic. With Republicans likely to retain control of the Senate for at least the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency — unless Democrats manage to flip not one, but two Georgia Senate seats in January — a new era of bipartisanship may be on the horizon.
Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic senator from West Virginia, tells The New York Times he sees a “golden opportunity to bring the country back together and for us to work in the middle.”
James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee of the moderate center-right Niskanen Center argue unified government is overrated. Most legislation is passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Scott Lincicome of the conservative anti-Trump website The Dispatch finds that the economy tends to perform better when the parties split Congress and the presidency. Fortune magazine agrees.
This is the triumph of hope over experience. (more…)
American president Donald Trump boards Marine One outside the White House in Washington DC, July 31 (White House/Tia Dufour)
More than a month ago, I warned Donald Trump would try to steal the American election by depressing Democratic turnout, discounting postal ballots, changing the outcome in the Electoral College and possibly throwing the election to Congress.
Now that he has lost, and few elected Republicans are repeating his lie that Democrats stole the election, it seems that — hopefully for the last time — I overestimated Trump’s ability to put autocratic words into action. (more…)
Portrait of Donald Trump in West Des Moines, Iowa, January 23, 2016 (Tony Webster)
Former vice president Joe Biden could still win America’s presidential election, but Donald Trump’s performance in the wake of a deadly pandemic, hugely negative polls and a mainstream media almost universally hostile to him shows that cultural and political elites in the United States keep getting things wrong. (more…)
The United States Capitol in Washington DC, December 10, 2019 (Unsplash/Julien Gaud)
My hope was that Republicans would lose Tuesday’s election decisively and decide they had no future as a far-right movement. (Donald Trump’s Republican Party has more in common with the European far right than with Britain’s Conservative Party or Germany’s Christian Democrats.)
That now seems unlikely.
Trump and Joe Biden could be neck and neck in the Electoral College. Not enough university-educated and suburban voters, who have been trending away from the Republican Party, supported Democrats in the Sun Belt to color Florida, Georgia and North Carolina blue. (Arizona could be the exception.)
White voters without a college degree in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin may once again decide the outcome of the presidential election, validating the strategy of Trump and Trumpists, which is to appeal to working-class grievances. (more…)
American president Donald Trump attends a meeting in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018 (Office of the President of the Republic of Finland/Juhani Kandell)
President Donald Trump’s (not so) shocking coronavirus diagnosis had all the markings of the fabled “October surprise” American election-watchers look for every four years.
In the world of geopolitical forecasting, you would call an October surprise a “Red Dragon”: something rare, highly impactful, yet to an extent foreseeable. This contrasts with a “Black Swan”, which comes out of nowhere.
Trump getting COVID was certainly a Red Dragon: wandering around campaign events without wearing a mask and taking only the barest precautions, it was more surprising that it took him so many months to contract the disease.
From the standpoint of who will win the election, the diagnosis seems to only have reinforced Joe Biden’s lead, not undercut it. Polls suggest Americans have little sympathy for the president, and his maskless bravado on Monday on the White House balcony surely won’t convince them that this is a man who takes the pandemic, and his own health, seriously.
Could another October surprise flip the script for Trump?
Voters wait outside a convention center in Rochester, Minnesota, where American president Donald Trump is giving a speech, October 5, 2018 (Lorie Shaul)
Donald Trump and the Republicans have been in power for nearly four years, yet everything that’s wrong in America is somehow Joe Biden’s fault.
180,000 Americans have died of coronavirus, because Trump couldn’t be bothered to deal with the crisis. 10 percent of Americans are out of work, more than during the Great Recession.
Nobody mentioned either during the four days of the Republican National Convention.
Trump insisted Biden would be the “destroyer of America’s jobs.” (more…)
Asked about riots in America’s major cities, Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump’s outgoing political advisor, told Fox News:
These are Democratically-led cities and most with Democratic governors. It’s not Donald Trump’s watch.
(That didn’t stop Trump from deploying federal troops to Portland over the objections of the city’s Democratic mayor and Oregon’s Democratic governor in June.)
The suggestion that the president isn’t responsible for the whole country, but only to those parts that are loyal to him, is outrageous.
