What happens to the Republican Party now? (4 Viewers)

[MT15]

This election nonsense by Trump may end up splitting up the Republican Party. I just don’t see how the one third (?) who are principled conservatives can stay in the same party with Trump sycophants who are willing to sign onto the TX Supreme Court case.

We also saw the alt right types chanting “destroy the GOP” in Washington today because they didn’t keep Trump in power. I think the Q types will also hold the same ill will toward the traditional Republican Party. In fact its quite possible that all the voters who are really in a Trump personality cult will also blame the GOP for his loss. It’s only a matter of time IMO before Trump himself gets around to blaming the GOP.

There is some discussion of this on Twitter. What do you all think?

 

[MT15]

They just have no political awareness at all, do they?

 

[nolaspe]

 

[Eeyore]

 

[Taurus]

I love how he concedes he'll just be "acting" AG. Because all of Trump's next Cabinet would be 'acting', not-officially-confirmed members.

 

[MT15]

There just doesn’t seem to be a “safe” R vote. This woman evidently ran on compassion for victims but has suspended emergency contraception for rape victims? Make that make sense!

 

[Optimus Prime]

from robert reich
============

I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. OK, fascism.

What occurred in Nashville last week is a frightening reminder of the fragility of American democracy when Republicans obtain supermajorities and no longer need to work with Democratic lawmakers.

The two Tennessee Democrats expelled from the Tennessee House were not accused of criminal wrongdoing or even immoral conduct. Their putative offense was to protest Tennessee’s failure to enact stronger gun controls after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville left three 9-year-old students and three adults dead.

They were technically in violation of House rules, but the state legislature has never before imposed so severe a penalty for rules violations. In fact, over the past few years, a number of Tennessee legislators have kept their posts even after being charged with serious sexual misconduct. And the two who were expelled last week are Black people, while a third legislator who demonstrated in the same manner but was not expelled is white.

We are witnessing the logical culmination of win-at-any-cost Trump Republican politics — scorched-earth tactics used by Republicans to entrench their power, with no justification other than that they can.

Democracy is about means. Under it, citizens don’t have to agree on ends (abortion, health care, guns, or whatever else we disagree about) as long as we agree on democratic means for handling our disagreements.

But for Trump Republicans, the ends justify whatever means they choose —including expelling lawmakers, rigging elections through gerrymandering, refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and denying the outcome of a legitimate presidential election.

My friends, the Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.

Wisconsin may soon offer an even more chilling example. While liberals celebrated the election on Tuesday of Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court because she’ll tip the court against the state’s extreme gerrymandering (the most extreme in the nation) and its fierce laws against abortion (among the most stringent in America), something else occurred in Wisconsin on election day that may well negate Protasiewicz’s victory. Voters in Wisconsin’s 8th senatorial district decided (by a small margin) to send Republican Dan Knodl to the state Senate.

This gives the Wisconsin Republican Party a supermajority — and with it, the power to remove key state officials, including judges, through impeachment. Several weeks ago, Knodl said he would “certainly consider” impeaching Protasiewicz. Although he was then talking about her role as a county judge, his interest in impeaching her presumably has increased now that she’s able to tip the state’s highest court.

As in Tennessee, this could be done without any necessity for a public justification. Under Republican authoritarianism, power is its own justification. Recall that in 2018, after Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic governor and attorney general, the Republican legislature and the lame duck Republican governor responded by significantly cutting back the power of both offices............

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[SFIDC3]

from robert reich
============

I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. OK, fascism.

What occurred in Nashville last week is a frightening reminder of the fragility of American democracy when Republicans obtain supermajorities and no longer need to work with Democratic lawmakers.

The two Tennessee Democrats expelled from the Tennessee House were not accused of criminal wrongdoing or even immoral conduct. Their putative offense was to protest Tennessee’s failure to enact stronger gun controls after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville left three 9-year-old students and three adults dead.

They were technically in violation of House rules, but the state legislature has never before imposed so severe a penalty for rules violations. In fact, over the past few years, a number of Tennessee legislators have kept their posts even after being charged with serious sexual misconduct. And the two who were expelled last week are Black people, while a third legislator who demonstrated in the same manner but was not expelled is white.

We are witnessing the logical culmination of win-at-any-cost Trump Republican politics — scorched-earth tactics used by Republicans to entrench their power, with no justification other than that they can.

Democracy is about means. Under it, citizens don’t have to agree on ends (abortion, health care, guns, or whatever else we disagree about) as long as we agree on democratic means for handling our disagreements.

But for Trump Republicans, the ends justify whatever means they choose —including expelling lawmakers, rigging elections through gerrymandering, refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and denying the outcome of a legitimate presidential election.

My friends, the Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.

Wisconsin may soon offer an even more chilling example. While liberals celebrated the election on Tuesday of Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court because she’ll tip the court against the state’s extreme gerrymandering (the most extreme in the nation) and its fierce laws against abortion (among the most stringent in America), something else occurred in Wisconsin on election day that may well negate Protasiewicz’s victory. Voters in Wisconsin’s 8th senatorial district decided (by a small margin) to send Republican Dan Knodl to the state Senate.

This gives the Wisconsin Republican Party a supermajority — and with it, the power to remove key state officials, including judges, through impeachment. Several weeks ago, Knodl said he would “certainly consider” impeaching Protasiewicz. Although he was then talking about her role as a county judge, his interest in impeaching her presumably has increased now that she’s able to tip the state’s highest court.

As in Tennessee, this could be done without any necessity for a public justification. Under Republican authoritarianism, power is its own justification. Recall that in 2018, after Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic governor and attorney general, the Republican legislature and the lame duck Republican governor responded by significantly cutting back the power of both offices............

MSN

www.msn.com

Again, he is spot on.....

 

[bird]

Again, he is spot on.....

Break it up. There not only is not a “United“ States of America, there never was. Oh, on occasion communitarian action took place but those instances were few and far between.

 

[Optimus Prime]

More than 20 years ago, a top Republican Party communications adviser wrote a memo that essentially told the GOP how to make Democrats look like fearmongers.

The adviser was Frank Luntz, the topic was global climate change, and the problem was to keep Republicans from looking like they didn’t care about the environment. Luntz advised the GOP to create doubt about climate science and say, “we must not rush to judgment before all the facts are in.”

“You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate,” Luntz wrote.

So, they did.

Denial became the GOP’s response to global warming despite growing certainty among scientists and the growing realization among military and defense officials that climate change threatens national and international security.

By 2007, a committee of recently retired generals and admirals published a report assessing the national security implications of global warming. They concluded climate change is a “threat multiplier” that could trigger the failure of weak governments and instability in some of the world’s most volatile regions. By 2014, the recognition that climate change is a threat multiplier appeared in various Pentagon and national security reports............

Unfortunately, Republicans are still getting bad advice. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, reportedly sent a memo to every Republican in Congress advising them to disregard the latest “alarmist report” from the IPCC, which warned the world is still not on track to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are vowing to chisel away at the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) and its $370 billion investment in clean energy, the most significant act of Congress to address climate change. Congress passed it without a single Republican vote. Instead, House Republicans passed their first bill of the current session, including a proposal to cut $27 billion from the law’s clean-energy funds. They warned of more cuts to come. They called their bill “the first bite of the apple,” and “just the beginning.” However, such attempts are “dead on arrival” in the Senate which is controlled by Democrats.

Ironically, red states will be among the IRA’s biggest beneficiaries. Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas were the leading states in wind power last year. Texas, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina are among the top states for clean energy jobs. A Politico analysis found about two-thirds of the clean energy projects announced since the IRA became law are planned in Republican congressional districts. Republicans control nine of the top 10 congressional districts with existing or planned renewable energy manufacturing plants.

As the Democratic National Committee put it, the GOP “voted no, took the dough.”

It’s well past time for Republicans in Congress to accept a few realities:

· Climate change is a real and present danger to domestic well-being and national security

· It’s getting worse: Left unaddressed, its consequences will be catastrophic

· It doesn’t care whether its victims are Republicans or Democrats

· Our response must be guided by science because politics do not guide science

· They should leave the IRA untouched rather than tearing it down simply because it was a Democrats’ bill...........

Red states win with Inflation Reduction Act — GOP wants to kill it anyway

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

Tenure of new Michigan GOP chair who spread Beyoncé paganism conspiracy theory is off to a rocky start | CNN Politics

After the Michigan Republican Party faced intense backlash for using Holocaust imagery on its social media to oppose what it says are Democrats’ restrictive gun proposals, the new chair of the state GOP party did not apologize – in fact, she doubled down on the party’s post.

www.cnn.com

Head of the Republican party in Michigan says that having sex with a demonically possessed individual can leave you possessed:

“If a person has demonic possession — I know it’s gonna sound really crazy to me saying that for some people, thinking like what?!” Karamo said in September 2020. “But having intimate relationships with people who are demonically possessed or oppressed — I strongly believe that a person opens themselves up to possession. Demonic possession is real.”

Lol

 

[bird]

Tenure of new Michigan GOP chair who spread Beyoncé paganism conspiracy theory is off to a rocky start | CNN Politics

After the Michigan Republican Party faced intense backlash for using Holocaust imagery on its social media to oppose what it says are Democrats’ restrictive gun proposals, the new chair of the state GOP party did not apologize – in fact, she doubled down on the party’s post.

www.cnn.com

Head of the Republican party in Michigan says that having sex with a demonically possessed individual can leave you possessed:

“If a person has demonic possession — I know it’s gonna sound really crazy to me saying that for some people, thinking like what?!” Karamo said in September 2020. “But having intimate relationships with people who are demonically possessed or oppressed — I strongly believe that a person opens themselves up to possession. Demonic possession is real.”

Lol

Sure, demonic possession is real. The Republican Party is evidence of that.

 

[MT15]

I guess Trump is giving a doozy of an interview on Tucker. Many many moments.

 

[MT15]

Tucker‘s face, for once, is totally appropriate, while still being very punchable, lol:

 

[MT15]

 

[MT15]

 

[Optimus Prime]

Interesting article
=============
LOUISVILLE — I really like Louisville and its people, culture, restaurants, schools. But I think often about whether my family and I will end up moving somewhere else in a few years.

The Republican state legislators who dominate Kentucky’s government hate Democrats, Democratic-led cities and liberal values — and are constantly trying to undermine all three. Millions of left-leaning Americans like me live in red states like this one, where the Republican officials are imposing Trump-style policies and looking to “own the libs” whenever possible.

“I’ve talked to so many people lately where the conversation is some version of, ‘Okay, so where are we moving? Where can we go?’” said Teri Carter, a Democratic-leaning writer who lives in nearby Anderson County, referring to her friends who live in red states.

I used to think the Republican legislators in Kentucky just had different policy priorities than people like me. After all, most of them represent smaller, more White and less densely populated areas than Louisville.

But as I have watched them more closely, I have come to realize these Republicans revel in attacking Democrats and liberals and probably would prefer if we just left the state.


The just-completed session of the state’s legislature was full of new laws that won’t fix any of Kentucky’s problems but instead seem aimed at annoying Democratic voters.

For example, Republican lawmakers eliminated dental, hearing and vision benefits under Medicaid and halted the automatic withdrawal of union dues from teachers’ paychecks, while keeping in place such withdrawals for police and firefighters’ unions.

That provision’s only purpose is to weaken the state’s teacher unions, who back Democrats, while bolstering the more conservative law enforcement ones……….

This session wasn’t an unusual one. Every year, Kentucky Republicans pass provisions attacking Louisville, as well as Lexington, our other major left-leaning city, and Democratic-leaning constituencies across the state. Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was elected in 2019 in this very red state, largely because then-Republican Gov. Matt Bevin was considered even by conservative voters here to be mean and petty.

But the Republicans in the statehouse still have huge majorities in both houses of the legislature, in part because of very aggressive gerrymandering. So they override most of Beshear’s vetoes, including pushing through the anti-transgender, Medicaid and teacher unions laws this week.

Nor is Kentucky’s situation unique. Red states across the country are blocking policies adopted in Democratic-controlled cities and imposing policies on those cities that large majorities of their residents oppose.

In most of these instances, including in Kentucky, the dynamics are both racial and partisan: Republican officials, who are nearly all White and elected by an overwhelmingly White group of voters, are dominating Democratic mayors, as well as city council and school board members, who are generally elected by a coalition of voters of color and White liberals and moderates..........

I get that Republican voters in California and New York also dislike the policies of their states’ governments. And their Democratic-controlled state governments impose policies on Republican-led cities.

My concern is not about general principles of home rule or local rights, but with the specific agenda of today’s Republican officials, one that seems more about controlling people with liberal values than helping anyone: abortion bans; sweeping anti-transgender laws; strict regulations on education about race and LGBTQ issues; voting restrictions; hostility toward labor unions; cuts to social services; constant attacks against universities.

Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, wrote in a recent essay that the Republican Party of today echoes some of the worst political movements of America’s past. “MAGA is the modern incarnation of a reactionary, nativist faction that has been with us since the nation’s founding. … The Faction has given itself different names over time — Confederates, Southern Democrats, Dixiecrats, the tea party, and now MAGA Republicans — but it hasn’t changed its basic supremacist commitments,” said Podhorzer.

Similarly, liberal writer Steve Phillips, in his 2022 book, “How We Win the Civil War,” argued, “The ideological, philosophical, and in some cases, actual descendants of the Confederates are waging an unrelenting … war to keep what was once a white nationalist country from becoming a multiracial democracy.”

You might find such language overheated. I think Phillips and Podhorzer are right. That means I’m living in a state that’s on an immoral, anti-Black, intolerant policy course.........

That’s why some left-leaning thinkers think the real problem is that there aren’t enough people like me who have moved from a blue place to a red one. In his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know,” New York Times columnist Charles Blow called for a reverse migration of Black people back to the South, in part to flip these states to the Democrats. I respect Blow. He is Black and moved from New York City to Atlanta a few years ago, practicing what he preaches. But I am very uncomfortable suggesting people move to places where the politicians in charge hate them, in hopes of some change in power down the line...........

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/30/kentucky-red-state-progressives-black-second-great-migration/

 

[Taurus]

Interesting article
=============
LOUISVILLE — I really like Louisville and its people, culture, restaurants, schools. But I think often about whether my family and I will end up moving somewhere else in a few years.

The Republican state legislators who dominate Kentucky’s government hate Democrats, Democratic-led cities and liberal values — and are constantly trying to undermine all three. Millions of left-leaning Americans like me live in red states like this one, where the Republican officials are imposing Trump-style policies and looking to “own the libs” whenever possible.

“I’ve talked to so many people lately where the conversation is some version of, ‘Okay, so where are we moving? Where can we go?’” said Teri Carter, a Democratic-leaning writer who lives in nearby Anderson County, referring to her friends who live in red states.

I used to think the Republican legislators in Kentucky just had different policy priorities than people like me. After all, most of them represent smaller, more White and less densely populated areas than Louisville.

But as I have watched them more closely, I have come to realize these Republicans revel in attacking Democrats and liberals and probably would prefer if we just left the state.


The just-completed session of the state’s legislature was full of new laws that won’t fix any of Kentucky’s problems but instead seem aimed at annoying Democratic voters.

For example, Republican lawmakers eliminated dental, hearing and vision benefits under Medicaid and halted the automatic withdrawal of union dues from teachers’ paychecks, while keeping in place such withdrawals for police and firefighters’ unions.

That provision’s only purpose is to weaken the state’s teacher unions, who back Democrats, while bolstering the more conservative law enforcement ones……….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/30/kentucky-red-state-progressives-black-second-great-migration/

Federal representation is fixed until 2030. The more Dems that can be convinced to leave, the more secure GOP power becomes.
They might even pick up a few seats in Congress and turn a purple state red.
These targeted laws are on purpose.

 

[coldseat]

Interesting article
=============
LOUISVILLE — I really like Louisville and its people, culture, restaurants, schools. But I think often about whether my family and I will end up moving somewhere else in a few years.

The Republican state legislators who dominate Kentucky’s government hate Democrats, Democratic-led cities and liberal values — and are constantly trying to undermine all three. Millions of left-leaning Americans like me live in red states like this one, where the Republican officials are imposing Trump-style policies and looking to “own the libs” whenever possible.

“I’ve talked to so many people lately where the conversation is some version of, ‘Okay, so where are we moving? Where can we go?’” said Teri Carter, a Democratic-leaning writer who lives in nearby Anderson County, referring to her friends who live in red states.

I used to think the Republican legislators in Kentucky just had different policy priorities than people like me. After all, most of them represent smaller, more White and less densely populated areas than Louisville.

But as I have watched them more closely, I have come to realize these Republicans revel in attacking Democrats and liberals and probably would prefer if we just left the state.


The just-completed session of the state’s legislature was full of new laws that won’t fix any of Kentucky’s problems but instead seem aimed at annoying Democratic voters.

For example, Republican lawmakers eliminated dental, hearing and vision benefits under Medicaid and halted the automatic withdrawal of union dues from teachers’ paychecks, while keeping in place such withdrawals for police and firefighters’ unions.

That provision’s only purpose is to weaken the state’s teacher unions, who back Democrats, while bolstering the more conservative law enforcement ones……….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/30/kentucky-red-state-progressives-black-second-great-migration/

This is exactly how I feel living in San Antonio.