It’s not a “blue state bailout” but the $1400 is a ginormous waste of $ and I’d have had to consider if it was enough to vote against it to. $ for votes. Sickening.
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It’s not a “blue state bailout” but the $1400 is a ginormous waste of $ and I’d have had to consider if it was enough to vote against it to. $ for votes. Sickening.
What about all the analysis that shows it will have a major benefit to unemployment numbers and GDP over the next 12 months. Isn't that a good reason?
It’s not a “blue state bailout” but the $1400 is a ginormous waste of $ and I’d have had to consider if it was enough to vote against it to. $ for votes. Sickening.
What about all the analysis that shows it will have a major benefit to unemployment numbers and GDP over the next 12 months. Isn't that a good reason?
There are a lot of ways that $ could have been used to do the same.
Fun fact, I live in both his (State) and his wife’s (US) district. The best way to get elected here is to wave an American flag and hold up your Bible.
It’s not a “blue state bailout” but the $1400 is a ginormous waste of $ and I’d have had to consider if it was enough to vote against it to. $ for votes. Sickening.
What about all the analysis that shows it will have a major benefit to unemployment numbers and GDP over the next 12 months. Isn't that a good reason?
There are a lot of ways that $ could have been used to do the same.
I was called last night by what I'm pretty sure was a Republican messaging pollster -- wanting to know how I would view politicians running for office if they supported the Covid package. At first the questions were pretty neutral but they got more GOP-ish the deeper the call went. I was asked whom I give more credit for the development of vaccine -- Trump, Biden, or I'm Not Sure. Because I just *cannot* give Trump credit for anything without throwing up, I said "I'm not sure." The last two questions were -- Which would you rather: the covid package or a puppy? And then the same -- Which would you rather: the covid package, or a pizza? Made me wonder if those were captcha-like questions just to see if I was a real human. I don't know . . . But it looks to me like Republicans are trying to figure out their next move. When they asked my party affiliation, I declared I was an independent, just to throw them off. I mean, technically I am, as I have never paid dues to join the actual D party, so it wasn't really a lie.
edit -- we get these calls on our landline all the time, I assume, because my mom is a senior voter and they think she's one of them. I know she voted for GW, once, and she's probably now on some list from a long ago neighborhood door knock. Who knows really why, but I love getting them.
N.C. Republicans censured their senior senator for voting against Trump. But they are silent on Rep. Madison Cawthorn. By Michael Kranish March 04 at 6:00 AM EST North Carolina’s Republican Party acted quickly last month to censure one of its most senior members, Sen. Richard Burr, for voting to convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. Burr’s vote was “shocking and disappointing,” said Michael Whatley, chairman of the state party. But the state GOP has shown no interest in exploring a similar action against one of its youngest elected leaders, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a pro-Trump freshman who is accused by a number of women of sexual harassment and has a record of making false statements and baseless claims. “I don’t want to talk about that on the record,” Whatley said twice in a brief phone conversation when asked about Cawthorn. Similarly, top members of the national Republican Party have said nothing publicly about the Cawthorn case. A spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) did not reply to a request for comment. The contrasting approach to Burr and Cawthorn starkly illustrates the dichotomy within the Republican Party as it navigates its future after the Trump presidency. Those who are perceived as attacking Trump are being disowned by the party’s leaders. Those who are seen as embracing the former president — notwithstanding serious allegations such as those against Cawthorn — are embraced or at least tolerated. “It is what you would expect from a Trumpified party,” said Peter Wehner, a former official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. “One of the regrettable lessons Republicans have learned from the Trump years is there’s no need to apologize. The shame or embarrassment can get in the way of your political ascendancy. They don’t feel the need to explain themselves because might makes right.” [The making of Madison Cawthorn: How falsehoods helped propel the career of a new pro-Trump star of the far right] Bob Orr, a former elected justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court who was a leading Republican in the state for 45 years, said he switched his party registration to unaffiliated last month after the censure of Burr. He said he could no longer tolerate the party’s allegiance to Trump, and he said he is not surprised that no party leader has raised concerns about Cawthorn. Burr did not respond to a request for comment. “I think hell freezes over before they say something” about Cawthorn, said Orr, a resident of Cawthorn’s 11th District in western North Carolina. Noting that Cawthorn last week was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Orr said: “He’s a Trump ally. He’s a darling of CPAC. And so they are in no way, shape or form going to be saying or doing things that are potentially detrimental to Cawthorn or anybody else that supports Trump.” Cawthorn, who at 25 years old is the youngest member of Congress, was the subject of a recent investigation by The Washington Post, which quoted three women on the record saying that he had acted inappropriately toward them, including one who said he forcibly kissed her in what she called an assault. More than 150 former students and graduates from Patrick Henry College, which Cawthorn attended for one semester before dropping out, signed a letter during the campaign alleging that he was a sexual “predator.” The article also examined a litany of false statements Cawthorn made about his background, including his campaign claim that an auto accident derailed his plans to attend the Naval Academy. In fact, Cawthorn said in a deposition that his application was rejected before the crash. The 2014 accident happened when he was a passenger in a vehicle driven by a friend who said he dozed off at the wheel. Cawthorn said in a 2017 talk at the chapel at Patrick Henry College, which he attended for one semester before dropping out, that his friend fled to the woods and left him to die in the “fiery tomb.” The friend, Bradley Ledford, told The Post in his first interview about the chapel speech that Cawthorn’s account was false and that he pulled him out of the wreckage. Cawthorn, who is partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair as a result of the accident, has declined interview requests from The Post and a number of other media outlets in recent days. But on Tuesday, Cawthorn appeared on the television network Newsmax, which is friendly to pro-Trump Republicans. He was asked by the anchor whether the allegations against him were being raised by Democrats to distract attention from reports that New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) acted inappropriately with a number of women. “Do you see that the political Democrats, socialist operatives at places like CNN and MSNBC and others are trying to use this old story to try to give cover to Governor ‘covid’ Cuomo?” Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo asked Cawthorn. “Oh, absolutely,” Cawthorn responded, referring to “allegations of his own that are coming out. And you know what? I believe that everyone’s innocent until proven guilty, but it just makes so much sense that they’re going to start attacking a Republican because . . . they’re unable to defend their own governor in New York.” [New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says he will not resign, offers new apology for his behavior with women] Cawthorn said on the Newsmax program that the allegations of sexual harassment against him are “patently false.” Cawthorn did not respond to a request for comment. Unlike the silence from Republican leaders about the allegations against Cawthorn, a number of leading Democrats have called on Cuomo to resign or be the subject of an investigation about allegations made by three women. One former aide said Cuomo asked whether she would have a relationship with an older man; a second former aide said he kissed her without consent; and a third woman said he put his hands on her face at a wedding reception and asked whether he could kiss her. Cuomo has apologized for making “people feel uncomfortable” and has said he will cooperate with an investigation to be conducted by an outside law firm selected by New York’s attorney general. In Cawthorn’s case, one woman told The Post that he forcibly kissed her in what she now considers an assault. A second woman said he took her on a drive during which she said Cawthorn became angry when she rejected his advances. A third women, Leah Petree, said that she rejected his offer to go on a “fun drive” because it implied some kind of sexual activity. She said he later called her a “just a little, blond, slutty American girl.” Petree said via email that she hopes members of both political parties will act beyond reproach. “I hope that Rep. Cawthorn’s patterns of sexism, inappropriate behavior, and overall lack of integrity will no longer be tolerated or swept under the rug,” she wrote. “We are & can do better than Rep. Cawthorn. I specifically hope those from my hometown (Asheville, NC) and fellow conservatives will see his true character.” George Erwin, a former sheriff of Henderson County who lined up a number of key endorsements for Cawthorn but has since become disillusioned with him, said he has heard a number of Republicans privately express concerns but said they won’t go public. “I cannot speak for the GOP, but many I have talked to are concerned and feel that all the attention on Cuomo by Republicans and conservative publications, why not Cawthorn?” Erwin said. “They feel that it is hypocritical and that regardless of your party, if someone is a sexual predator, justice needs to prevail. However, if someone is innocent, that, too, should come to light.” Chuck McGrady, a Republican who was a state representative in part of Cawthorn’s district until last year, said he finds Cawthorn to be “embarrassing.” But he said Republican leaders are not likely to criticize Cawthorn because that would lead to questions about loyalty to Trump. Cawthorn is “just mimicking Trump in how he approaches things,” McGrady said. “Step away from the cult of personality and then you get criticized. There seems to be very little in the way of accountability.” The Democratic Party in Cawthorn’s district has called upon Congress to investigate what it called Cawthorn’s seditious behavior, referring to his speech at the same Jan. 6 rally at which Trump spoke before a mob stormed the Capitol. Moe Davis, the Democratic nominee who lost the race to Cawthorn, said via email that Cawthorn’s “role in fomenting an insurrection that got people killed should be investigated as a crime.” So far, however, no such probe has been launched, and no effort has been made by a member of Congress to try to investigate or censure Cawthorn. As reports of Cawthorn’s actions have received more notice in Asheville and other areas that he represents, the campaign for his seat in 2022 is already beginning. The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrera, a member of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners, announced Wednesday that she planned to seek the Democratic nomination. A number of Republicans are privately discussing whether to launch a primary challenge. Cawthorn, meanwhile, on Wednesday authorized the creation of the Cawthorn Triumph Committee, which is designed to raise funds both for his reelection committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee, according to campaign filings and the Triumph group’s treasurer.
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Susan Walsh-Pool/GettyThis week, the campaign committee for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), received ten notices from the Federal Election Commission flagging discre...
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Can we abolish the filibuster and pass some meaningful voting rights acts and such, before they wreck the system and usher in an era of white power neofascism ruling through stolen gerrymandered minority power and voter suppression. Or will we just go high?
Can we abolish the filibuster and pass some meaningful voting rights acts and such, before they wreck the system and usher in an era of white power neofascism ruling through stolen gerrymandered minority power and voter suppression. Or will we just go high?
Machin and Sinema already said they wouldn't support that. So it's dead.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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Can we abolish the filibuster and pass some meaningful voting rights acts and such, before they wreck the system and usher in an era of white power neofascism ruling through stolen gerrymandered minority power and voter suppression. Or will we just go high?
Machin and Sinema already said they wouldn't support that. So it's dead.
So when republicans get a smarter Trump and reestablish a long term hold on power, I guess we blame Sinema and Manchin, and live with it. Oh joy
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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Iowa governor signs GOP-forced voting changes bill into law
By DAVID PITT
Yesterday
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Monday signed into law a Republican-backed bill that makes it harder to vote early, potentially eroding a key aspect of Democratic campaigns.
Republicans in the House and Senate quickly approved the changes over the opposition of all Democratic legislators. Republicans said the rules are needed to guard against voting fraud, though they noted Iowa has no history of election irregularities and that November’s election saw record turnout with no hint of problems in the state.
Reynolds said election integrity must be protected, claiming the law provides election officials with consistent parameters for Election Day, absentee voting and database maintenance
“All of these additional steps promote more transparency and accountability, giving Iowans even greater confidence to cast their ballot,” she said in a statement after signing the bill.
Democrats said they’re examining their reliance on early voting. In the last election, more than 70% of Democrats voted early.
“We don’t have to wait to get people registered to vote. We don’t have to wait to have Democrats talking with their neighbors in rural and metropolitan areas in the state about how these harmful pieces of legislation are being forced through,” said Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Ross Wilburn.
The law shortens the early voting period to 20 days from the current 29, just three years after Republicans reduced the period from 40 days. It also requires most mail ballots to be received by Election Day, rather than counting votes postmarked by Election Day that arrive by noon on the Monday following the election.
Voting sites will close at 8 p.m. rather than 9 p.m., and county election officials are banned from sending out absentee ballot request forms unless requested. Satellite voting sites also can only be set up if enough voters petition for one, and voters will be removed from active voting lists if they miss a single general election and don’t report a change in address or register as a voter again.
Wilburn said he is talking with the Democratic National Committee about strategies, noting that Republicans across the country are pushing for similar restrictions after former President Donald Trump blamed early voting for his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Although there is no evidence of systematic fraud, lawmakers in 43 states are debating about 200 bills that would limit ballot access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy group.
“What is unique about this year is the volume of bills we are seeing to restrict voting access and the brazenness of the efforts to go after methods of voting that are historically uncontroversial and popular with voters and clearly make it harder for people to cast ballots,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, a lawyer in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.
Political strategist Brenda Kole said Democrats may need to rely more on an old-school approach of volunteers giving people rides to the polls. Kole, who has worked on presidential and gubernatorial campaigns in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, said the party must educate voters about the new restrictions.
“I think that they’ll just adjust their plans and work with what they have to work with,” Kole said.
Democrats may put more emphasis on getting people to vote early in person rather than rely as heavily on mail ballots, said Emily Parcell, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory in Indiana and is now a partner at Wildfire Contact, a Des Moines-based political consultancy.
The tighter deadlines for mail ballots will be a problem if Postal Service issues aren’t worked out, said Parcell, who focuses on direct mail for campaigns nationwide. A requirement that only close relatives, household member or caregivers can drop off ballots means an end to a common practice of church members, friends or neighbors helping early voters, she said.
But Parcell’s biggest concern was the move to close polls an hour early.
“It creates a challenge for anybody in the state that has a full-time job and doesn’t work in the city where they live,” she said.
Despite Democrats' concerns, House Speaker Pat Grassley said he and his Republican colleagues are responding to concerns by their constituents and think potential problems have been overblown.
“I actually look at it from the standpoint that I have faith in Iowans and believe that they are completely capable of getting their ballot requested, getting their ballot turned in or going on the day to vote in which our timelines are not outside the norms and the averages across the country,” Grassley said.
Although opposed to the Iowa measure, Greg Speed, president of the Democratic-leaning America Votes, also expressed optimism the party would adjust.
“Democrats and progressives are very, very good at voter engagement, and voter education,” Speed said. “And we will be back, post-pandemic, knocking on doors, talking directly to our voters about how they will be able to safely, securely cast their vote, even as we fight back against all these suppression efforts.”
Parts of the Iowa law would be blunted by an election bill approved by the U.S. House last week that would require states to automatically register eligible voters and limit states’ ability to purge registered voters from their rolls. However, that bill’s prospects in the Senate appear dim.
___
Associated Press writer Thomas Beaumont contributed to this story.
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GOP struggles to define Biden, turns to culture wars instead
By JONATHAN LEMIRE and JILL COLVIN
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and the Democrats were on the brink of pushing through sprawling legislation with an eyepopping, $1.9 trillion price tag.
But many Republican politicians and conservative commentators had other priorities in recent days. A passionate defense of Dr. Seuss. Serious questions about the future of Mr. Potato Head. Intense scrutiny of Meghan Markle.
The conservatives' relentless focus on culture wars rather than the new president highlights both their strategy for regaining power in Washington and their challenge in doing so. Unlike previous Democratic leaders, Biden himself simply isn't proving to be an easy target or animating figure for the GOP base, prompting Republicans to turn to the kind of cultural issues the party has used to cast Democrats as elitist and out of touch with average Americans.
“There’s just not the antipathy to Biden like there was Obama. He just doesn’t drive conservative outrage,” said Alex Conant, a longtime GOP operative, who worked for the Republican National Committee in 2009 as they labored to undermine then-President Barack Obama.
“They never talk about Biden. It’s amazing,” Conant said of the conservative news media. “I think Fox covered Dr. Seuss more than Biden’s stimulus bill in the week leading up to the vote.”
The challenge is a continuation of the 2020 campaign, when then-President Trump struggled to land a consistent attack on Biden. The branding of Biden as “sleepy” never stuck in the same way as Trump's derision of Hillary Clinton as “crooked” in 2016. Other GOP efforts to define Biden as a radical or to attack his mental acuity also didn't resonate.
Merchandise stands outside Trump’s rallies featured buttons and shirts mocking Clinton and Obama, but few bashing Biden. Clinton, who remains reviled on the right, was featured far more prominently on stage at last month’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida than the current occupant of the Oval Office.
The GOP is focusing more on America's culture wars than on Biden, including a relatively new villain decried as "cancel culture.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted a video of himself reading from Dr. Seuss in the days after the author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery. And former Trump aide Stephen Miller joined others on the right in launching a Twitter defense of Buckingham Palace after Markle, in a blockbuster interview with Oprah Winfrey, alleged racist treatment by an unnamed member of the monarchy.
“It’s gonna take Republicans a few weeks to realize how badly they got rolled on the COVID bill while they wasted all their precious time and energy whining about Dr. Seuss,” tweeted Amanda Carpenter, a former adviser to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Biden's strategy on the culture war issues has been to largely not engage. White House press secretary Jen Psaki danced around questions about Dr. Seuss.
Biden himself has largely stayed gaffe-free, with the exception of his calling decisions by Republican governors to lift mask mandates “Neanderthal,” which generated a brief tempest on the right.
Instead, the West Wing has focused on the relief bill, believing that Americans will reward results, not controversy.
"The cancel culture is a huge meme on the right and it may work with the base, but the base is not the country at large,” said David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Obama. “That is a sideshow right now, the main event is the virus and how quickly are we going to be able to get back to normal.”
Biden, Axelrod said, has remained “a difficult target” for the Republicans.
“He does not engage, he does not personalize his disputes, and while he is pursuing a progressive platform, he does not use the conventional ideological language about it,” Axelrod said. “He’s not a provocative personality.”
Biden, who focused a portion of his campaign trying to win back working-class white voters who left the Democratic Party for Trump, also inherently does not face the racist attacks aimed at Obama or the sexist ones targeted at Clinton.
Much of Trump’s campaign’s vitriol was directed not at Biden, who sold himself as a middle-of-the-road unifier, but soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman of color. Harris, the Trump team argued, would be truly in charge, with Biden a mere “empty vessel” being used to enact others’ radical agendas.
Additionally, Republican efforts to combat Biden have been slowed by the civil war in its own ranks as the party grapples with its direction in Trump’s persistent shadow.
Some Republicans argue it will simply take time for the GOP to organize against Biden, given the honeymoon period most new presidents enjoy. Biden has also staked a lower profile than Obama, making him a less effective foil in uniting Republicans.
“I think that’s just what happens with a new president,” said Josh Holmes, a former aide to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who spearheaded a move to stymie Obama after the 44th president was inaugurated.
“When you lose a big election, there’s sort of a scattering effect, (and) it wasn’t until June or so and the beginnings of the discussion on Obamacare where we were really able to cohesively fight back,” Holmes said. “I think by the spring, you’re dealing with a much more cohesive Republican Party than you are the first couple weeks.”
Republicans believe there will be opportunities to better push back when the White House moves onto thornier issues like immigration, voting rights legislation and a potentially massive infrastructure and jobs bill. Many also believe that the ongoing herky-jerky process to reopen schools for in-person learning could end up damaging Biden.
All the while, the Biden White House is underscoring its attempts at bipartisanship, putting the Republicans on the defensive for not signing onto the broadly popular COVID relief bill.
“Many of the Republicans who voted against this are outliers and are against the grain of what the people in their own districts supported,” Psaki said. “So they may be getting questions about that once relief goes out, once schools are able to upgrade facilities and benefit from these checks.”
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As GOP makes it harder to vote, few Republicans dissent
By STEVE PEOPLES, JONATHAN J. COOPER and BEN NADLER
Today
ATLANTA (AP) — In Arizona, a Republican state senator worried aloud that his party's proposed voter identification requirements might be too “cumbersome.” But he voted for the bill anyway.
In Iowa, the state’s Republican elections chief put out a carefully worded statement that didn't say whether he backs his own party’s legislation making it more difficult to vote early.
And in Georgia, Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan left the room as Senate Republicans approved a bill to block early voting for all but the GOP's most reliable voting bloc. Duncan instead watched Monday's proceedings from a television in his office to protest.
This is what amounts to dissent as Republican lawmakers push a wave of legislation through statehouses across the nation to make voting more difficult. The bills are fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and many are sponsored by his most loyal allies. But support for the effort is much broader than just Trump's hard-right base, and objections from GOP policymakers are so quiet they can be easy to miss.
“It's appalling what’s happening,” said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who condemned the silence of the GOP's elected officials. “There have been no provable, obvious, systemwide failures or fraud that would require the kind of ‘legislative remedies’ that Republican legislatures are embarking on. What the hell are you so afraid of? Black people voting?”
Experts note that most changes up for debate would disproportionately affect voters of color, younger people and the poor — all groups that historically vote for Democrats. But Republicans are also pushing restrictions with the potential to place new burdens on GOP-leaning groups.
It's a startling shift for a party whose voters in some states, such as Florida and Arizona, had embraced absentee and mail voting. Several Republican strategists note the party may be passing laws that only box out their own voters.
“There are multiple states and in multiple demographics where Republicans consistently outperform Democrats in early voting and absentee voting, and they need to be very careful because they could be shooting themselves in the foot to restrict that and make it more difficult,," said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist.
If elected Republicans share these concerns, they have done little so far to slow the momentum of major legislation in competitive states like Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Texas, where Republicans control the state legislature and the governor's office.
Democratic officials, civil rights leaders and voting advocates are horrified.
Martin Luther King III said he spent last weekend in Selma, Alabama, celebrating the 56th anniversary of his father's bloody march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Instead of being a day of celebration, he said, there was a sense that the civil rights movement was sliding backward because of the Republican voting proposals.
“There’s no question about this being a higher level of Jim Crow,” King said in an interview. He said he's worried that little can be done to stop the Republican effort in the short-term.
“I’m not sure what would make Republicans change other than they lose (in upcoming elections,” King added. “There has to be a maximum effort so that does happen. They’re going to get very few votes from community of color.”
Republicans championing the changes insist they're simply trying to help restore public confidence to the U.S. election system. There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020, but polls suggest that many Republicans doubted the outcome of the election after Trump repeatedly declared, falsely, that he was the victim of illegal voting.
In an interview, Trump ally Ken Cuccinelli used an expletive to describe King's suggestion that the new laws are designed to disenfranchise African Americans.
“I take great offense to the idea that I’m trying to keep anybody from voting,” Cuccinelli said. “There’s no reason anybody, no matter what color they are, can’t access this system if they’re a legal and appropriate voter."
In Georgia, the state Senate has voted to limit access to absentee mail ballots to people 65 and over, those with a physical disability and people out of town on Election Day. Legislation passed by the state House would also dramatically reduce early voting hours, limit the use of early-voting drop boxes, and make it a crime to give food or water to voters standing in line.
During Monday's Senate vote, several Republicans who represent competitive metro Atlanta districts didn’t vote, including Sen. Brian Strickland. He had tried to amend the bill in committee to remove provisions scrapping no-excuse absentee voting but was unable to muster enough support.
Strickland said he didn’t vote against the bill because he agrees with much of it, except the provision to end no-excuse absentee voting.
“The idea of going backward on that now and requiring excuses, I think it sends the wrong message,” Strickland said.
If ultimately approved by both chambers of the legislature, the change would end broad no-excuse absentee voting put in place in 2005 by a Republican-led legislature, after more than 1.3 million people voted absentee by mail in November.
In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, on Monday signed a GOP-backed bill that requires voting sites to close an hour earlier and shortens the early-voting period to 20 days from the current 29. Voters will be also removed from active voting lists if they miss a single general election and don’t report a change in address or re-register.
Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, who contradicted Trump’s references to widespread voter fraud last fall and expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic, did not oppose the new law, but he offered no ringing endorsement either after a Latino advocacy group sued Tuesday to stop it from taking effect.
“My office will continue providing resources to help every eligible Iowan be a voter and understand any changes in election law," Pate said. "Our goal has always been to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”
And in Arizona, Republicans introduced dozens of bills to impose new restrictions on voting, many of them targeting the vote-by-mail system that accounts for about 80 percent of Arizona’s ballots.
Some of the most aggressive proposals have died unceremoniously. House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, quietly buried a bill that would have allowed the Legislature to overturn presidential election results and appoint its own Electoral College representatives. But other measures are advancing, some with the support of Republicans who acknowledge discomfort.
The Arizona Senate this week voted to require identification such as a driver’s license number or a copy of a utility bill to be included with mail ballots. Republican Sen. Tyler Pace said he worried it would reduce ballot secrecy and pose a serious barrier to the many voters who don’t have a printer at home.
“The problem is every single way you look at that it gets cumbersome,” Pace said during the bill debate.
Meanwhile, Steele warned Republican officials that they would face a fierce political backlash in next year's midterm elections and beyond if they continue to make it harder for some voters to participate in elections.
“If you’re silent, you’re complicit. You’re complicit in disenfranchising African American voters in key jurisdictions across the country,” Steele said. “They will rue upcoming elections if they stay on this course."
___
Peoples reported from New York and Cooper reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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There is rising unease among some conservatives about the increasing aggressiveness of Republicans in state legislatures to tighten election laws and erect obstacles to voting.
Many GOP lawmakers have doubled down on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and are using that false narrative as a pretext for restricting or eliminating early voting and vote-by-mail in the name of preventing future cheating. In Georgia, for example, the Republican-controlled Legislature is looking to eliminate early voting on Sundays, which critics say is a clear effort to stymie the ability of Black churches to get congregants to the polls after services.
But some Republicans believe making it harder to vote will actually backfire at a time when the GOP base is becoming more diverse and dependent on working-class voters. Although Donald Trump lost the presidential election by some 7 million votes, Republicans note that he overperformed among people of color — including immigrants and their immediate descendants. He also did surprisingly well among Black men, in addition to the working-class white voters who powered him to victory in 2016.
Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Megan Varner/Getty Images, AP
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“The joke is that the GOP is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of,” the progressive voting analyst David Shor told Politico after the election.
But people of color and working-class Americans are the demographic groups most likely to feel the sting of onerous voting restrictions. And that fact is convincing some conservatives that new restrictions won’t be the boon to the GOP’s electoral fortunes that they have been in the past.
“Restricting who can vote by absentee ballot will actually detrimentally impact Republicans,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk radio host in Georgia, told Yahoo News. “Take, for example, north Georgia. Republicans there love to vote by absentee, which is why the Georgia GOP pushed to get rid of excuses back in the mid-2000s.”
David Kochel, a Republican consultant who ran Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s successful reelection campaign last year, expressed reservations as well.
“That’s my fear. The problem is, we don’t have the data to know. I think these restrictions could come back to haunt the party, but we just don’t know enough,” he said.
Other dissident conservatives want to persuade the GOP that making it harder to vote gives it no partisan advantage, erodes its credibility and is inconsistent with conservative principles.
“Republicans are in a bad place, because I think they find themselves arguing, in essence, that there ought to be fewer voters, which is, in my view, wrong, and also the wrong place to be as a political matter,” said Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s not good for the party to think that way. It should think, 'How do we win more votes in a more diverse society?' rather than, 'How do we let fewer people vote in a more diverse society?'” he said. “And it’s not good for our democracy.”
Demonstrators in Atlanta expressing their opposition to state bills that would tighten voting restrictions. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
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Experts on democracy from academia have also warned against the GOP’s push for new voting restrictions, which has accelerated over the last decade as state legislatures moved to create new challenges for voters and used advances in technology to draw increasingly unfair boundaries for congressional districts. A host of new restrictions came at the state level after the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, in a decision known as Shelby v. Holder.
“When a ruling party bends the rules to suppress opposition votes or rig the political playing field, a country can no longer be said to be a democracy, no matter how much it may allow freedom of the press and association,” said a January letter signed by over 80 expert analysts of democracy, including a few notable conservative authors and academics.
Levin said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast, that he is making election reform a focus this year of his department at AEI, which will encourage the GOP to see more participation both as the right democratic approach and as politically desirable.
“We are gearing up for a major effort to bring the right to the table on election reform issues, and to help conservatives see the case for some experimentation with ideas like ranked-choice voting and for an approach to election administration that combines a desire to have more secure elections with a desire to have more Americans voting,” Levin said. “That will include scholarly work, popular publications and private and public convenings to help such arguments get heard and considered.”
Levin has most recently hired scholars John Fortier and Kevin Kosar, who are focused on election-system design and election administration.
“We’ve got to pursue both greater access to the ballot — especially for the sake of more equal access to the ballot, and Republicans have to see that this is not against their interests, and that in any case it’s right — and greater election integrity, and a feeling of greater security that the votes that are being counted are legitimate votes,” Levin said.
However, like many conservatives, Levin is opposed to the Democratic election reform bill recently passed by the House, the For the People Act, or H.R. 1. His discomfort revolves mostly around the nationalization of voting laws, rather than leaving it up to individual states.
Election Day 2020 in Ruckersville, Va. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
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“Taking over the state's definitions of what ID requirements look like, of what absentee voting looks like, of the length of time that you can do early voting, the reasons why, and the ways in which you can remove names from the voter rolls, the question of whether people who've been incarcerated should be voting, I think on all those individual questions, on quite a number of them, I myself would come down on the same side as H.R. 1,” Levin said. “But I don't think they should be decided by Congress.”
He also said he thinks that if Democrats abolish the filibuster to pass H.R. 1, as many activists and intellectuals and even issue experts are now urging them to do, it would do more harm than good.
“To impose these national standards in a partisan way, where only Democrats in Washington have voted for this, but now, in your Republican majority state, these are the rules, is a recipe for a massive loss of public trust in elections, way beyond anything that we've seen in the last few cycles. And that worries me more than anything,” Levin said.
His concern is similar to the one expressed by Sarah Repucci, vice president of research and analysis at Freedom House, a U.S.-based nongovernmental human rights organization.
Repucci oversaw the publication of the 2021 “Freedom in the World” report that was released last week, which found grave declines in democratic freedoms around the globe, including here in the U.S.
The Freedom House report endorsed many of the individual ideas contained in H.R. 1, such as expanding no-excuse vote-by-mail and early voting, getting rid of gerrymandered congressional districts, enacting same-day registration or universal automatic registration, creating more places to vote and restoring voting rights to felons once they have served their time and been released. But Repucci also said Freedom House believes it is essential that election and democracy reform proposals get passed with bipartisan support.
“Politicizing democracy itself is one of the most damaging things we can do,” she said.
This is a bitter pill to swallow for many Democrats, who say they’ve been forced to move forward unilaterally on expanding voting rights by decades of Republican intransigence on the issue. They note that Republicans have often used claims of fraud as justification for voting restrictions, even after the GOP’s most authoritative experts on voting unequivocally concluded last year that two decades of searching for cheating had yielded very little evidence.
“The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged,” wrote Benjamin Ginsberg, who for more than 20 years was one of the GOP’s fiercest election attorneys and led attempts to root out cheating.
And then if there were any doubt that claims of fraud were being abused, Trump fueled his reelection effort with a campaign of baseless lies about cheating for months before the election, and then used the confusion he had created to justify an attempt to overturn the results.
The fact that many Republicans around the country continue to propagate Trump’s fabricated narrative as they crack down on voting makes it very difficult for Democratic lawmakers to accept that reforms should be pursued on a bipartisan basis. And some Republicans say they understand the Democrats’ reluctance to work with them on the issue.
The GOP “is hemorrhaging credibility by perpetuating the mythology that there was rampant fraud” in the 2020 election, said Josh Penry, a Colorado Republican consultant who was House minority leader in the state Legislature. “You lose all your credibility tilting at windmills, which undermines your ability to make the case on large issues.”
Colorado runs its elections entirely by mail, and Penry was in the Legislature when the state enacted this innovation. “The whole argument about mail ballots was really an effort to set up a narrative by Trump for the loss. The fact that some are still on it is terribly misguided,” he said.
Penry recommended that the GOP focus on election security efforts that would bolster confidence in the system like “more audits, more sunshine and transparency, more rigor.”
“Those are good policies, and they’re good fights to pick,” he said. “Getting rid of voting on Sundays? Are you kidding me?”
And yet Republicans are already denouncing H.R.1 in the strongest terms. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said it was “written in hell by the devil himself.”
Democrats say voting restrictions are clearly intended to have a partisan effect — even if they hurt the GOP in the long run.
“The bluntness of the Republicans’ voter suppression agenda may backfire on them in a few key areas, but there is no doubt that their policies are designed to overwhelmingly make it harder for voters who typically support Democrats, especially in communities of color. They have publicly admitted as much several times, and the data bears that out,” said Adam Bozzi, a spokesman for End Citizens United, an advocacy group fighting for campaign finance and election reform.
“It says a lot about the lack of faith they have in their party's ideas and the lack of regard they have for American democracy that they are willing to force through these discriminatory, antidemocratic laws in an effort to hold onto their waning political power,” he said.
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I've never understood the gripe about having to show ID to vote. we have to. it's not an issue here. we have to pay for our ID's. why is it considered voter suppression in the US when it isn't here?
(commence partisan blasting)
"Oh Canada...you're beautiful when you're drunk" -EV 8/14/93
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knIWglEeZJI
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edit -- we get these calls on our landline all the time, I assume, because my mom is a senior voter and they think she's one of them. I know she voted for GW, once, and she's probably now on some list from a long ago neighborhood door knock. Who knows really why, but I love getting them.
Doesn't all the whining about "cancel culture" by the qtRUmplicans make them all snowflakes?
I'll have to bring that up at my next George Soros funded meeting under Comet Pizza
By Michael Kranish
March 04 at 6:00 AM EST
North Carolina’s Republican Party acted quickly last month to censure one of its most senior members, Sen. Richard Burr, for voting to convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. Burr’s vote was “shocking and disappointing,” said Michael Whatley, chairman of the state party.
But the state GOP has shown no interest in exploring a similar action against one of its youngest elected leaders, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a pro-Trump freshman who is accused by a number of women of sexual harassment and has a record of making false statements and baseless claims.
“I don’t want to talk about that on the record,” Whatley said twice in a brief phone conversation when asked about Cawthorn.
Similarly, top members of the national Republican Party have said nothing publicly about the Cawthorn case. A spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) did not reply to a request for comment.
The contrasting approach to Burr and Cawthorn starkly illustrates the dichotomy within the Republican Party as it navigates its future after the Trump presidency. Those who are perceived as attacking Trump are being disowned by the party’s leaders. Those who are seen as embracing the former president — notwithstanding serious allegations such as those against Cawthorn — are embraced or at least tolerated.
“It is what you would expect from a Trumpified party,” said Peter Wehner, a former official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. “One of the regrettable lessons Republicans have learned from the Trump years is there’s no need to apologize. The shame or embarrassment can get in the way of your political ascendancy. They don’t feel the need to explain themselves because might makes right.”
[The making of Madison Cawthorn: How falsehoods helped propel the career of a new pro-Trump star of the far right]
Bob Orr, a former elected justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court who was a leading Republican in the state for 45 years, said he switched his party registration to unaffiliated last month after the censure of Burr. He said he could no longer tolerate the party’s allegiance to Trump, and he said he is not surprised that no party leader has raised concerns about Cawthorn. Burr did not respond to a request for comment.
“I think hell freezes over before they say something” about Cawthorn, said Orr, a resident of Cawthorn’s 11th District in western North Carolina. Noting that Cawthorn last week was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Orr said: “He’s a Trump ally. He’s a darling of CPAC. And so they are in no way, shape or form going to be saying or doing things that are potentially detrimental to Cawthorn or anybody else that supports Trump.”
Cawthorn, who at 25 years old is the youngest member of Congress, was the subject of a recent investigation by The Washington Post, which quoted three women on the record saying that he had acted inappropriately toward them, including one who said he forcibly kissed her in what she called an assault.
More than 150 former students and graduates from Patrick Henry College, which Cawthorn attended for one semester before dropping out, signed a letter during the campaign alleging that he was a sexual “predator.”
The article also examined a litany of false statements Cawthorn made about his background, including his campaign claim that an auto accident derailed his plans to attend the Naval Academy. In fact, Cawthorn said in a deposition that his application was rejected before the crash.
The 2014 accident happened when he was a passenger in a vehicle driven by a friend who said he dozed off at the wheel. Cawthorn said in a 2017 talk at the chapel at Patrick Henry College, which he attended for one semester before dropping out, that his friend fled to the woods and left him to die in the “fiery tomb.” The friend, Bradley Ledford, told The Post in his first interview about the chapel speech that Cawthorn’s account was false and that he pulled him out of the wreckage.
Cawthorn, who is partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair as a result of the accident, has declined interview requests from The Post and a number of other media outlets in recent days.
But on Tuesday, Cawthorn appeared on the television network Newsmax, which is friendly to pro-Trump Republicans. He was asked by the anchor whether the allegations against him were being raised by Democrats to distract attention from reports that New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) acted inappropriately with a number of women.
“Do you see that the political Democrats, socialist operatives at places like CNN and MSNBC and others are trying to use this old story to try to give cover to Governor ‘covid’ Cuomo?” Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo asked Cawthorn.
“Oh, absolutely,” Cawthorn responded, referring to “allegations of his own that are coming out. And you know what? I believe that everyone’s innocent until proven guilty, but it just makes so much sense that they’re going to start attacking a Republican because . . . they’re unable to defend their own governor in New York.”
[New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says he will not resign, offers new apology for his behavior with women]
Cawthorn said on the Newsmax program that the allegations of sexual harassment against him are “patently false.” Cawthorn did not respond to a request for comment.
Unlike the silence from Republican leaders about the allegations against Cawthorn, a number of leading Democrats have called on Cuomo to resign or be the subject of an investigation about allegations made by three women.
One former aide said Cuomo asked whether she would have a relationship with an older man; a second former aide said he kissed her without consent; and a third woman said he put his hands on her face at a wedding reception and asked whether he could kiss her. Cuomo has apologized for making “people feel uncomfortable” and has said he will cooperate with an investigation to be conducted by an outside law firm selected by New York’s attorney general.
In Cawthorn’s case, one woman told The Post that he forcibly kissed her in what she now considers an assault. A second woman said he took her on a drive during which she said Cawthorn became angry when she rejected his advances. A third women, Leah Petree, said that she rejected his offer to go on a “fun drive” because it implied some kind of sexual activity. She said he later called her a “just a little, blond, slutty American girl.”
Petree said via email that she hopes members of both political parties will act beyond reproach. “I hope that Rep. Cawthorn’s patterns of sexism, inappropriate behavior, and overall lack of integrity will no longer be tolerated or swept under the rug,” she wrote. “We are & can do better than Rep. Cawthorn. I specifically hope those from my hometown (Asheville, NC) and fellow conservatives will see his true character.”
George Erwin, a former sheriff of Henderson County who lined up a number of key endorsements for Cawthorn but has since become disillusioned with him, said he has heard a number of Republicans privately express concerns but said they won’t go public.
“I cannot speak for the GOP, but many I have talked to are concerned and feel that all the attention on Cuomo by Republicans and conservative publications, why not Cawthorn?” Erwin said. “They feel that it is hypocritical and that regardless of your party, if someone is a sexual predator, justice needs to prevail. However, if someone is innocent, that, too, should come to light.”
Chuck McGrady, a Republican who was a state representative in part of Cawthorn’s district until last year, said he finds Cawthorn to be “embarrassing.” But he said Republican leaders are not likely to criticize Cawthorn because that would lead to questions about loyalty to Trump.
Cawthorn is “just mimicking Trump in how he approaches things,” McGrady said. “Step away from the cult of personality and then you get criticized. There seems to be very little in the way of accountability.”
The Democratic Party in Cawthorn’s district has called upon Congress to investigate what it called Cawthorn’s seditious behavior, referring to his speech at the same Jan. 6 rally at which Trump spoke before a mob stormed the Capitol.
Moe Davis, the Democratic nominee who lost the race to Cawthorn, said via email that Cawthorn’s “role in fomenting an insurrection that got people killed should be investigated as a crime.” So far, however, no such probe has been launched, and no effort has been made by a member of Congress to try to investigate or censure Cawthorn.
As reports of Cawthorn’s actions have received more notice in Asheville and other areas that he represents, the campaign for his seat in 2022 is already beginning. The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrera, a member of the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners, announced Wednesday that she planned to seek the Democratic nomination. A number of Republicans are privately discussing whether to launch a primary challenge.
Cawthorn, meanwhile, on Wednesday authorized the creation of the Cawthorn Triumph Committee, which is designed to raise funds both for his reelection committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee, according to campaign filings and the Triumph group’s treasurer.
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Susan Walsh-Pool/GettyThis week, the campaign committee for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), received ten notices from the Federal Election Commission flagging discre...
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
By Meagan Flynn and Michael Scherer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/klacik-gop-campaign-donations/2021/03/02/76300fde-7077-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Seriously, any fucking repubs on here want to discuss policy? Yuk, yuk what the fuck?
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
I misunderstood the one article I read. Johnson did in fact stay for the 10 hr 44min reading....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
great, so we can find another hawley to fill that seat...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Monday signed into law a Republican-backed bill that makes it harder to vote early, potentially eroding a key aspect of Democratic campaigns.
Republicans in the House and Senate quickly approved the changes over the opposition of all Democratic legislators. Republicans said the rules are needed to guard against voting fraud, though they noted Iowa has no history of election irregularities and that November’s election saw record turnout with no hint of problems in the state.
Reynolds said election integrity must be protected, claiming the law provides election officials with consistent parameters for Election Day, absentee voting and database maintenance
“All of these additional steps promote more transparency and accountability, giving Iowans even greater confidence to cast their ballot,” she said in a statement after signing the bill.
Democrats said they’re examining their reliance on early voting. In the last election, more than 70% of Democrats voted early.
“We don’t have to wait to get people registered to vote. We don’t have to wait to have Democrats talking with their neighbors in rural and metropolitan areas in the state about how these harmful pieces of legislation are being forced through,” said Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Ross Wilburn.
The law shortens the early voting period to 20 days from the current 29, just three years after Republicans reduced the period from 40 days. It also requires most mail ballots to be received by Election Day, rather than counting votes postmarked by Election Day that arrive by noon on the Monday following the election.
Voting sites will close at 8 p.m. rather than 9 p.m., and county election officials are banned from sending out absentee ballot request forms unless requested. Satellite voting sites also can only be set up if enough voters petition for one, and voters will be removed from active voting lists if they miss a single general election and don’t report a change in address or register as a voter again.
Wilburn said he is talking with the Democratic National Committee about strategies, noting that Republicans across the country are pushing for similar restrictions after former President Donald Trump blamed early voting for his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Although there is no evidence of systematic fraud, lawmakers in 43 states are debating about 200 bills that would limit ballot access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy group.
“What is unique about this year is the volume of bills we are seeing to restrict voting access and the brazenness of the efforts to go after methods of voting that are historically uncontroversial and popular with voters and clearly make it harder for people to cast ballots,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, a lawyer in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.
Political strategist Brenda Kole said Democrats may need to rely more on an old-school approach of volunteers giving people rides to the polls. Kole, who has worked on presidential and gubernatorial campaigns in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, said the party must educate voters about the new restrictions.
“I think that they’ll just adjust their plans and work with what they have to work with,” Kole said.
Democrats may put more emphasis on getting people to vote early in person rather than rely as heavily on mail ballots, said Emily Parcell, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory in Indiana and is now a partner at Wildfire Contact, a Des Moines-based political consultancy.
The tighter deadlines for mail ballots will be a problem if Postal Service issues aren’t worked out, said Parcell, who focuses on direct mail for campaigns nationwide. A requirement that only close relatives, household member or caregivers can drop off ballots means an end to a common practice of church members, friends or neighbors helping early voters, she said.
But Parcell’s biggest concern was the move to close polls an hour early.
“It creates a challenge for anybody in the state that has a full-time job and doesn’t work in the city where they live,” she said.
Despite Democrats' concerns, House Speaker Pat Grassley said he and his Republican colleagues are responding to concerns by their constituents and think potential problems have been overblown.
“I actually look at it from the standpoint that I have faith in Iowans and believe that they are completely capable of getting their ballot requested, getting their ballot turned in or going on the day to vote in which our timelines are not outside the norms and the averages across the country,” Grassley said.
Although opposed to the Iowa measure, Greg Speed, president of the Democratic-leaning America Votes, also expressed optimism the party would adjust.
“Democrats and progressives are very, very good at voter engagement, and voter education,” Speed said. “And we will be back, post-pandemic, knocking on doors, talking directly to our voters about how they will be able to safely, securely cast their vote, even as we fight back against all these suppression efforts.”
Parts of the Iowa law would be blunted by an election bill approved by the U.S. House last week that would require states to automatically register eligible voters and limit states’ ability to purge registered voters from their rolls. However, that bill’s prospects in the Senate appear dim.
___
Associated Press writer Thomas Beaumont contributed to this story.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and the Democrats were on the brink of pushing through sprawling legislation with an eyepopping, $1.9 trillion price tag.
But many Republican politicians and conservative commentators had other priorities in recent days. A passionate defense of Dr. Seuss. Serious questions about the future of Mr. Potato Head. Intense scrutiny of Meghan Markle.
The conservatives' relentless focus on culture wars rather than the new president highlights both their strategy for regaining power in Washington and their challenge in doing so. Unlike previous Democratic leaders, Biden himself simply isn't proving to be an easy target or animating figure for the GOP base, prompting Republicans to turn to the kind of cultural issues the party has used to cast Democrats as elitist and out of touch with average Americans.
“There’s just not the antipathy to Biden like there was Obama. He just doesn’t drive conservative outrage,” said Alex Conant, a longtime GOP operative, who worked for the Republican National Committee in 2009 as they labored to undermine then-President Barack Obama.
“They never talk about Biden. It’s amazing,” Conant said of the conservative news media. “I think Fox covered Dr. Seuss more than Biden’s stimulus bill in the week leading up to the vote.”
The challenge is a continuation of the 2020 campaign, when then-President Trump struggled to land a consistent attack on Biden. The branding of Biden as “sleepy” never stuck in the same way as Trump's derision of Hillary Clinton as “crooked” in 2016. Other GOP efforts to define Biden as a radical or to attack his mental acuity also didn't resonate.
Merchandise stands outside Trump’s rallies featured buttons and shirts mocking Clinton and Obama, but few bashing Biden. Clinton, who remains reviled on the right, was featured far more prominently on stage at last month’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida than the current occupant of the Oval Office.
The GOP is focusing more on America's culture wars than on Biden, including a relatively new villain decried as "cancel culture.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted a video of himself reading from Dr. Seuss in the days after the author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery. And former Trump aide Stephen Miller joined others on the right in launching a Twitter defense of Buckingham Palace after Markle, in a blockbuster interview with Oprah Winfrey, alleged racist treatment by an unnamed member of the monarchy.
“It’s gonna take Republicans a few weeks to realize how badly they got rolled on the COVID bill while they wasted all their precious time and energy whining about Dr. Seuss,” tweeted Amanda Carpenter, a former adviser to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Biden's strategy on the culture war issues has been to largely not engage. White House press secretary Jen Psaki danced around questions about Dr. Seuss.
Biden himself has largely stayed gaffe-free, with the exception of his calling decisions by Republican governors to lift mask mandates “Neanderthal,” which generated a brief tempest on the right.
Instead, the West Wing has focused on the relief bill, believing that Americans will reward results, not controversy.
"The cancel culture is a huge meme on the right and it may work with the base, but the base is not the country at large,” said David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Obama. “That is a sideshow right now, the main event is the virus and how quickly are we going to be able to get back to normal.”
Biden, Axelrod said, has remained “a difficult target” for the Republicans.
“He does not engage, he does not personalize his disputes, and while he is pursuing a progressive platform, he does not use the conventional ideological language about it,” Axelrod said. “He’s not a provocative personality.”
Biden, who focused a portion of his campaign trying to win back working-class white voters who left the Democratic Party for Trump, also inherently does not face the racist attacks aimed at Obama or the sexist ones targeted at Clinton.
Much of Trump’s campaign’s vitriol was directed not at Biden, who sold himself as a middle-of-the-road unifier, but soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman of color. Harris, the Trump team argued, would be truly in charge, with Biden a mere “empty vessel” being used to enact others’ radical agendas.
Additionally, Republican efforts to combat Biden have been slowed by the civil war in its own ranks as the party grapples with its direction in Trump’s persistent shadow.
Some Republicans argue it will simply take time for the GOP to organize against Biden, given the honeymoon period most new presidents enjoy. Biden has also staked a lower profile than Obama, making him a less effective foil in uniting Republicans.
“I think that’s just what happens with a new president,” said Josh Holmes, a former aide to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who spearheaded a move to stymie Obama after the 44th president was inaugurated.
“When you lose a big election, there’s sort of a scattering effect, (and) it wasn’t until June or so and the beginnings of the discussion on Obamacare where we were really able to cohesively fight back,” Holmes said. “I think by the spring, you’re dealing with a much more cohesive Republican Party than you are the first couple weeks.”
Republicans believe there will be opportunities to better push back when the White House moves onto thornier issues like immigration, voting rights legislation and a potentially massive infrastructure and jobs bill. Many also believe that the ongoing herky-jerky process to reopen schools for in-person learning could end up damaging Biden.
All the while, the Biden White House is underscoring its attempts at bipartisanship, putting the Republicans on the defensive for not signing onto the broadly popular COVID relief bill.
“Many of the Republicans who voted against this are outliers and are against the grain of what the people in their own districts supported,” Psaki said. “So they may be getting questions about that once relief goes out, once schools are able to upgrade facilities and benefit from these checks.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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ATLANTA (AP) — In Arizona, a Republican state senator worried aloud that his party's proposed voter identification requirements might be too “cumbersome.” But he voted for the bill anyway.
In Iowa, the state’s Republican elections chief put out a carefully worded statement that didn't say whether he backs his own party’s legislation making it more difficult to vote early.
And in Georgia, Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan left the room as Senate Republicans approved a bill to block early voting for all but the GOP's most reliable voting bloc. Duncan instead watched Monday's proceedings from a television in his office to protest.
This is what amounts to dissent as Republican lawmakers push a wave of legislation through statehouses across the nation to make voting more difficult. The bills are fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and many are sponsored by his most loyal allies. But support for the effort is much broader than just Trump's hard-right base, and objections from GOP policymakers are so quiet they can be easy to miss.
“It's appalling what’s happening,” said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who condemned the silence of the GOP's elected officials. “There have been no provable, obvious, systemwide failures or fraud that would require the kind of ‘legislative remedies’ that Republican legislatures are embarking on. What the hell are you so afraid of? Black people voting?”
Experts note that most changes up for debate would disproportionately affect voters of color, younger people and the poor — all groups that historically vote for Democrats. But Republicans are also pushing restrictions with the potential to place new burdens on GOP-leaning groups.
It's a startling shift for a party whose voters in some states, such as Florida and Arizona, had embraced absentee and mail voting. Several Republican strategists note the party may be passing laws that only box out their own voters.
“There are multiple states and in multiple demographics where Republicans consistently outperform Democrats in early voting and absentee voting, and they need to be very careful because they could be shooting themselves in the foot to restrict that and make it more difficult,," said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist.
If elected Republicans share these concerns, they have done little so far to slow the momentum of major legislation in competitive states like Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Texas, where Republicans control the state legislature and the governor's office.
Democratic officials, civil rights leaders and voting advocates are horrified.
Martin Luther King III said he spent last weekend in Selma, Alabama, celebrating the 56th anniversary of his father's bloody march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Instead of being a day of celebration, he said, there was a sense that the civil rights movement was sliding backward because of the Republican voting proposals.
“There’s no question about this being a higher level of Jim Crow,” King said in an interview. He said he's worried that little can be done to stop the Republican effort in the short-term.
“I’m not sure what would make Republicans change other than they lose (in upcoming elections,” King added. “There has to be a maximum effort so that does happen. They’re going to get very few votes from community of color.”
Republicans championing the changes insist they're simply trying to help restore public confidence to the U.S. election system. There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020, but polls suggest that many Republicans doubted the outcome of the election after Trump repeatedly declared, falsely, that he was the victim of illegal voting.
In an interview, Trump ally Ken Cuccinelli used an expletive to describe King's suggestion that the new laws are designed to disenfranchise African Americans.
“I take great offense to the idea that I’m trying to keep anybody from voting,” Cuccinelli said. “There’s no reason anybody, no matter what color they are, can’t access this system if they’re a legal and appropriate voter."
In Georgia, the state Senate has voted to limit access to absentee mail ballots to people 65 and over, those with a physical disability and people out of town on Election Day. Legislation passed by the state House would also dramatically reduce early voting hours, limit the use of early-voting drop boxes, and make it a crime to give food or water to voters standing in line.
During Monday's Senate vote, several Republicans who represent competitive metro Atlanta districts didn’t vote, including Sen. Brian Strickland. He had tried to amend the bill in committee to remove provisions scrapping no-excuse absentee voting but was unable to muster enough support.
Strickland said he didn’t vote against the bill because he agrees with much of it, except the provision to end no-excuse absentee voting.
“The idea of going backward on that now and requiring excuses, I think it sends the wrong message,” Strickland said.
If ultimately approved by both chambers of the legislature, the change would end broad no-excuse absentee voting put in place in 2005 by a Republican-led legislature, after more than 1.3 million people voted absentee by mail in November.
In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, on Monday signed a GOP-backed bill that requires voting sites to close an hour earlier and shortens the early-voting period to 20 days from the current 29. Voters will be also removed from active voting lists if they miss a single general election and don’t report a change in address or re-register.
Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, who contradicted Trump’s references to widespread voter fraud last fall and expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic, did not oppose the new law, but he offered no ringing endorsement either after a Latino advocacy group sued Tuesday to stop it from taking effect.
“My office will continue providing resources to help every eligible Iowan be a voter and understand any changes in election law," Pate said. "Our goal has always been to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”
And in Arizona, Republicans introduced dozens of bills to impose new restrictions on voting, many of them targeting the vote-by-mail system that accounts for about 80 percent of Arizona’s ballots.
Some of the most aggressive proposals have died unceremoniously. House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, quietly buried a bill that would have allowed the Legislature to overturn presidential election results and appoint its own Electoral College representatives. But other measures are advancing, some with the support of Republicans who acknowledge discomfort.
The Arizona Senate this week voted to require identification such as a driver’s license number or a copy of a utility bill to be included with mail ballots. Republican Sen. Tyler Pace said he worried it would reduce ballot secrecy and pose a serious barrier to the many voters who don’t have a printer at home.
“The problem is every single way you look at that it gets cumbersome,” Pace said during the bill debate.
Meanwhile, Steele warned Republican officials that they would face a fierce political backlash in next year's midterm elections and beyond if they continue to make it harder for some voters to participate in elections.
“If you’re silent, you’re complicit. You’re complicit in disenfranchising African American voters in key jurisdictions across the country,” Steele said. “They will rue upcoming elections if they stay on this course."
___
Peoples reported from New York and Cooper reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.
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There is rising unease among some conservatives about the increasing aggressiveness of Republicans in state legislatures to tighten election laws and erect obstacles to voting.
Many GOP lawmakers have doubled down on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and are using that false narrative as a pretext for restricting or eliminating early voting and vote-by-mail in the name of preventing future cheating. In Georgia, for example, the Republican-controlled Legislature is looking to eliminate early voting on Sundays, which critics say is a clear effort to stymie the ability of Black churches to get congregants to the polls after services.
But some Republicans believe making it harder to vote will actually backfire at a time when the GOP base is becoming more diverse and dependent on working-class voters. Although Donald Trump lost the presidential election by some 7 million votes, Republicans note that he overperformed among people of color — including immigrants and their immediate descendants. He also did surprisingly well among Black men, in addition to the working-class white voters who powered him to victory in 2016.
“The joke is that the GOP is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of,” the progressive voting analyst David Shor told Politico after the election.
But people of color and working-class Americans are the demographic groups most likely to feel the sting of onerous voting restrictions. And that fact is convincing some conservatives that new restrictions won’t be the boon to the GOP’s electoral fortunes that they have been in the past.
“Restricting who can vote by absentee ballot will actually detrimentally impact Republicans,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk radio host in Georgia, told Yahoo News. “Take, for example, north Georgia. Republicans there love to vote by absentee, which is why the Georgia GOP pushed to get rid of excuses back in the mid-2000s.”
David Kochel, a Republican consultant who ran Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s successful reelection campaign last year, expressed reservations as well.
“That’s my fear. The problem is, we don’t have the data to know. I think these restrictions could come back to haunt the party, but we just don’t know enough,” he said.
Other dissident conservatives want to persuade the GOP that making it harder to vote gives it no partisan advantage, erodes its credibility and is inconsistent with conservative principles.
“Republicans are in a bad place, because I think they find themselves arguing, in essence, that there ought to be fewer voters, which is, in my view, wrong, and also the wrong place to be as a political matter,” said Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s not good for the party to think that way. It should think, 'How do we win more votes in a more diverse society?' rather than, 'How do we let fewer people vote in a more diverse society?'” he said. “And it’s not good for our democracy.”
Experts on democracy from academia have also warned against the GOP’s push for new voting restrictions, which has accelerated over the last decade as state legislatures moved to create new challenges for voters and used advances in technology to draw increasingly unfair boundaries for congressional districts. A host of new restrictions came at the state level after the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, in a decision known as Shelby v. Holder.
“When a ruling party bends the rules to suppress opposition votes or rig the political playing field, a country can no longer be said to be a democracy, no matter how much it may allow freedom of the press and association,” said a January letter signed by over 80 expert analysts of democracy, including a few notable conservative authors and academics.
Levin said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast, that he is making election reform a focus this year of his department at AEI, which will encourage the GOP to see more participation both as the right democratic approach and as politically desirable.
“We are gearing up for a major effort to bring the right to the table on election reform issues, and to help conservatives see the case for some experimentation with ideas like ranked-choice voting and for an approach to election administration that combines a desire to have more secure elections with a desire to have more Americans voting,” Levin said. “That will include scholarly work, popular publications and private and public convenings to help such arguments get heard and considered.”
Levin has most recently hired scholars John Fortier and Kevin Kosar, who are focused on election-system design and election administration.
“We’ve got to pursue both greater access to the ballot — especially for the sake of more equal access to the ballot, and Republicans have to see that this is not against their interests, and that in any case it’s right — and greater election integrity, and a feeling of greater security that the votes that are being counted are legitimate votes,” Levin said.
However, like many conservatives, Levin is opposed to the Democratic election reform bill recently passed by the House, the For the People Act, or H.R. 1. His discomfort revolves mostly around the nationalization of voting laws, rather than leaving it up to individual states.
“Taking over the state's definitions of what ID requirements look like, of what absentee voting looks like, of the length of time that you can do early voting, the reasons why, and the ways in which you can remove names from the voter rolls, the question of whether people who've been incarcerated should be voting, I think on all those individual questions, on quite a number of them, I myself would come down on the same side as H.R. 1,” Levin said. “But I don't think they should be decided by Congress.”
He also said he thinks that if Democrats abolish the filibuster to pass H.R. 1, as many activists and intellectuals and even issue experts are now urging them to do, it would do more harm than good.
“To impose these national standards in a partisan way, where only Democrats in Washington have voted for this, but now, in your Republican majority state, these are the rules, is a recipe for a massive loss of public trust in elections, way beyond anything that we've seen in the last few cycles. And that worries me more than anything,” Levin said.
His concern is similar to the one expressed by Sarah Repucci, vice president of research and analysis at Freedom House, a U.S.-based nongovernmental human rights organization.
Repucci oversaw the publication of the 2021 “Freedom in the World” report that was released last week, which found grave declines in democratic freedoms around the globe, including here in the U.S.
The Freedom House report endorsed many of the individual ideas contained in H.R. 1, such as expanding no-excuse vote-by-mail and early voting, getting rid of gerrymandered congressional districts, enacting same-day registration or universal automatic registration, creating more places to vote and restoring voting rights to felons once they have served their time and been released. But Repucci also said Freedom House believes it is essential that election and democracy reform proposals get passed with bipartisan support.
“Politicizing democracy itself is one of the most damaging things we can do,” she said.
This is a bitter pill to swallow for many Democrats, who say they’ve been forced to move forward unilaterally on expanding voting rights by decades of Republican intransigence on the issue. They note that Republicans have often used claims of fraud as justification for voting restrictions, even after the GOP’s most authoritative experts on voting unequivocally concluded last year that two decades of searching for cheating had yielded very little evidence.
“The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged,” wrote Benjamin Ginsberg, who for more than 20 years was one of the GOP’s fiercest election attorneys and led attempts to root out cheating.
And then if there were any doubt that claims of fraud were being abused, Trump fueled his reelection effort with a campaign of baseless lies about cheating for months before the election, and then used the confusion he had created to justify an attempt to overturn the results.
The fact that many Republicans around the country continue to propagate Trump’s fabricated narrative as they crack down on voting makes it very difficult for Democratic lawmakers to accept that reforms should be pursued on a bipartisan basis. And some Republicans say they understand the Democrats’ reluctance to work with them on the issue.
The GOP “is hemorrhaging credibility by perpetuating the mythology that there was rampant fraud” in the 2020 election, said Josh Penry, a Colorado Republican consultant who was House minority leader in the state Legislature. “You lose all your credibility tilting at windmills, which undermines your ability to make the case on large issues.”
Colorado runs its elections entirely by mail, and Penry was in the Legislature when the state enacted this innovation. “The whole argument about mail ballots was really an effort to set up a narrative by Trump for the loss. The fact that some are still on it is terribly misguided,” he said.
Penry recommended that the GOP focus on election security efforts that would bolster confidence in the system like “more audits, more sunshine and transparency, more rigor.”
“Those are good policies, and they’re good fights to pick,” he said. “Getting rid of voting on Sundays? Are you kidding me?”
And yet Republicans are already denouncing H.R.1 in the strongest terms. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said it was “written in hell by the devil himself.”
Democrats say voting restrictions are clearly intended to have a partisan effect — even if they hurt the GOP in the long run.
“The bluntness of the Republicans’ voter suppression agenda may backfire on them in a few key areas, but there is no doubt that their policies are designed to overwhelmingly make it harder for voters who typically support Democrats, especially in communities of color. They have publicly admitted as much several times, and the data bears that out,” said Adam Bozzi, a spokesman for End Citizens United, an advocacy group fighting for campaign finance and election reform.
“It says a lot about the lack of faith they have in their party's ideas and the lack of regard they have for American democracy that they are willing to force through these discriminatory, antidemocratic laws in an effort to hold onto their waning political power,” he said.
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