ReportWire

Tag: GOP leaders

  • ‘We’re going to get this job done’: GOP Leaders see narrow path to end partial shutdown Tuesday

    The House is expected to vote today on a funding bill aimed at ending the partial government shutdown, with President Donald Trump urging lawmakers to act swiftly despite Democratic calls for changes to immigration operations.The deal that passed the Senate last week funds the government through the rest of the fiscal year, except for the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers would have until Feb. 13 to negotiate Homeland Security funding and immigration enforcement provisions. On Monday, Trump told both sides in the House to send the bill to his desk without any delays, expressing his desire to see the government reopen as soon as possible. “We need to get the Government open, and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this Bill, and send it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY,” the president wrote on social media.However, many Democrats want to see changes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations before anything is signed.”The American people want to see the masks come off. The American people want to see body cameras turned on, and mandated. The American people want to see judicial warrants,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.House Speaker Mike Johnson argues that requiring immigration officers to remove masks would not have support from Republicans, as it could lead to problems if their personal images and private information are posted online by protesters. Passing this legislation could be a challenge because Johnson is working with a razor-thin majority and can only afford to lose one Republican defection, but he is confident he will pull it off.”We’re going to get this job done, get the government reopened. Democrats are going to play games and the American people can see who really cares,” Johnson said.Lawmakers from both parties are concerned the shutdown will disrupt the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they rely on to help people after deadly snowstorms and other disasters.Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:

    WASHINGTON —

    The House is expected to vote today on a funding bill aimed at ending the partial government shutdown, with President Donald Trump urging lawmakers to act swiftly despite Democratic calls for changes to immigration operations.

    The deal that passed the Senate last week funds the government through the rest of the fiscal year, except for the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers would have until Feb. 13 to negotiate Homeland Security funding and immigration enforcement provisions.

    On Monday, Trump told both sides in the House to send the bill to his desk without any delays, expressing his desire to see the government reopen as soon as possible.

    “We need to get the Government open, and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this Bill, and send it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY,” the president wrote on social media.

    However, many Democrats want to see changes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations before anything is signed.

    “The American people want to see the masks come off. The American people want to see body cameras turned on, and mandated. The American people want to see judicial warrants,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson argues that requiring immigration officers to remove masks would not have support from Republicans, as it could lead to problems if their personal images and private information are posted online by protesters.

    Passing this legislation could be a challenge because Johnson is working with a razor-thin majority and can only afford to lose one Republican defection, but he is confident he will pull it off.

    “We’re going to get this job done, get the government reopened. Democrats are going to play games and the American people can see who really cares,” Johnson said.

    Lawmakers from both parties are concerned the shutdown will disrupt the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they rely on to help people after deadly snowstorms and other disasters.

    Keep watching for the latest from the Washington News Bureau:


    Source link

  • Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again

    Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again

    Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.

    In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income workers without college degrees, older adults in the final years before retirement, and rural communities.

    In the years since then, the number of people in each of those groups relying on the ACA has grown. More than 40 million Americans now receive health coverage through the law, about 50 percent more than the roughly 27 million the ACA covered during the repeal fight in 2017. In the intervening years, nine more states, most of them reliably Republican, have accepted the law’s federal funding to expand access to Medicaid for low-income working adults.

    Read: The real reason Republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare

    “Republicans came very close to repealing and replacing the ACA in 2017, but that may have been their best window before the law had fully taken hold and so many people have benefited from it,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan think tank that studies health-care issues, told me. “I think it gets harder and harder to repeal as more people benefit.”

    Trump’s repeated declarations over the past several weeks that he intends to finally repeal the ACA if reelected surprised many Republicans. Few GOP leaders have talked about uprooting the law since the party’s last effort failed, during Trump’s first year as president. At that point, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. But whereas the House, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, narrowly voted to rescind the law, the Senate narrowly rejected repeal. Three GOP senators blocked the repeal effort by voting no—including the late Senator John McCain, who dramatically doomed the proposal by signaling thumbs-down on the Senate floor. (Trump mocked McCain while calling the ACA “a catastrophe” as he campaigned in Iowa last weekend.)

    Republicans lost any further opportunity to repeal the law in the 2018 election when Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. With the legislative route blocked, Trump instead pursued an array of regulatory and legal efforts to weaken the ACA during his final years in office. But since the 2017 vote, the GOP has never again held the unified control of the White House, the House, and the Senate required to launch a serious legislative repeal effort.

    If Republicans did win unified control of Congress and the White House next November, most health-care experts I spoke with agreed that Trump would follow through on his promises to again target the ACA. Leslie Dach, the founder of Protect Our Care, a liberal group that supports the law, says that he takes Trump’s pledge to pursue repeal seriously, “because he is still trying to overturn the legacy of John McCain, and it’s one of the few things he lost. He doesn’t like to be a loser.”

    Trump hasn’t specified his plan to replace the ACA. But whatever alternative Trump develops will inevitably face one of the main problems that confounded Republicans’ last attempt at repeal: Every plan they put forward raised costs and diminished access to care for core groups in their electoral coalition.

    That was apparent in the contrast between how the ACA and the GOP alternatives treated the individual insurance market. The ACA created exchanges where the uninsured could buy coverage, provided them with subsidies to help them afford it, and changed the rules about what kind of policies insurers could sell them. Key among those changes were provisions that barred insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting health conditions, required them to offer a broad package of essential health benefits in all policies, and prevented them from charging older consumers more than three times the premiums of younger people.

    The common effect of all these and many other requirements was to require greater risk sharing in the insurance markets. The ACA made coverage in the individual insurance market more available and affordable for older and sicker consumers partly by requiring younger and healthier consumers to purchase more expensive and comprehensive plans than they might have bought before the law went into effect. That shift generated complaints from relatively younger and healthier consumers in the ACA’s early years as their premiums increased.

    Every alternative that Republicans proposed during the Trump years sought to lower premiums by unraveling the ACA provisions that required more sharing of risks and costs. For instance, the House GOP plan allowed insurers to charge seniors five times as much as young people, reduced the number of guaranteed essential benefits, and allowed states to exempt insurers from the requirement to cover all applicants with preexisting health conditions.

    One problem the GOP faced was that although this approach might have lowered premiums for the young and healthy (albeit while leaving them with less comprehensive coverage), it would have significantly raised costs and reduced access for the old or sick. “A lot of ‘repeal and replace’ was putting more cost back on people with health-care problems,” Linda Blumberg, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, told me. The Rand Corporation calculated that for individuals with modest incomes, the House GOP plan would have cut premiums for the majority of those under age 45 while raising them for virtually everyone older than 45. The Congressional Budget Office, in its assessment of the House-passed GOP bill, projected that it would nearly double the number of people without health insurance by 2026, and that the greatest coverage losses would happen “among older people with lower income.”

    As I wrote in 2017, the paradox was that the Republican plans would have hurt older working-age adults—a preponderantly GOP-leaning constituency—while lowering costs for younger generations that mostly vote Democratic. I called this inversion the “Trumpcare conundrum.”

    The congressional Republican alternatives to the ACA under Trump also uniformly made deep cuts to Medicaid, the joint state-federal health-care program for low-income people. But GOP constituencies were big winners as well in the ACA provisions that expanded eligibility for Medicaid.

    Until the ACA, Medicaid was generally available only to adults earning less than the federal poverty level. But the law provided states with generous federal financing to expand coverage to low-income individuals earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level. Particularly in interior states, research showed that many of those low-income workers covered under the Medicaid expansion were white people without a college degree, the cornerstone of the modern Republican electoral coalition.

    Another big beneficiary from the Medicaid expansion was rural communities, which have become more reliably Republican in the Trump years. Expanding access to Medicaid was especially important to rural places because studies have consistently found that more people in those areas than in metropolitan centers suffer from chronic health problems, while fewer obtain health insurance from their employer, and more lack insurance altogether.

    The increased number of people covered under Medicaid gave rural hospitals a lifeline by reducing the amount of uncompensated care they needed to provide for patients lacking insurance. “When you go out to the rural areas, frankly most hospital executives, like other business people, they tend to be pretty conservative,” Timothy McBride, a co-director of the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “And they don’t like government intervention. But I would go to see these people and they would say, ‘I’m for Medicaid expansion,’ because they had to deal with the uninsured.”

    The Medicaid expansion also quickly became a crucial source of financing for addiction treatment in states ravaged through the 2010s by the opioid epidemic. Before the ACA, addiction treatment programs relied on “a little bit of block grant money here, a local voucher there, kind of out-of-pocket payments, and a little bit of spit and glue,” Brendan Saloner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies addiction, told me. “Then Medicaid came along, and it provided a much more reliable and stable source of payment.”

    Since the 2017 legislative battle, the ACA’s impact on all these fronts has only deepened. Biden and congressional Democrats both increased the federal subsidies to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges and expanded eligibility to families further into the middle class. Largely as a result, the number of people obtaining insurance through the exchanges soared from about 10 million then to more than 15 million as of this past December.

    Similarly, a majority of the 31 states that had expanded Medicaid by 2017 were solidly Democratic-leaning. But the nine additional states that have broadened eligibility since then include seven that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

    That has not only increased the total number of low-income workers covered through the Medicaid expansion (from about 16 million then to well over 24 million now), but also broadened the red-state constituency for the ACA. McBride estimates that the federal government has annually pumped $2 billion into the health-care system in Missouri alone since voters there approved a Medicaid expansion in 2020. The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently calculated that the likelihood of rural hospitals closing was more than twice as high in the states that have refused to expand Medicaid than in those that have. Simultaneously, the amount of funding that Medicaid provides for the treatment of substance abuse has at least doubled since 2014, allowing it to serve nearly 5 million people, according to calculations by Tami Mark, a distinguished fellow in behavioral health at RTI International, a nonprofit independent research institute.

    Even more fundamentally, Blumberg argues, the pandemic showed the ACA’s value as a safety net. Through either the exchanges or Medicaid, the law provided coverage to millions who lost their job, and insurance, during the crisis. “This law was critical in protecting us from unforeseen circumstances even beyond the value that people had seen in 2017,” she told me. “If we had not had that in place, we would have seen massive amounts of uninsurance and people who could not have accessed vaccines and could not have accessed medical care when they became sick.”

    For all of these reasons and more, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, told me that he believes it’s a mistake for Trump and the GOP to seek repeal once again. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, remains critical of the ACA, which he says has not done enough to improve the quality of coverage or control costs.

    But, he points out, during the Trump years, Republicans succeeded in repealing some of the law’s elements that they disliked most, including the tax penalty on uninsured people who did not buy coverage. “I don’t think we should be happy with the current system,” Holtz-Eakin told me. “But it’s not fruitful to try to roll the clock back to 2010.”

    Beyond the policy challenges of excising the ACA from the health-care system, the political landscape also appears less hospitable to a renewed repeal drive. In 2017, KFF polling found that the share of Americans who viewed the law favorably only slightly exceeded the share dubious of it; in the group’s most recent survey measuring attitudes toward the law, more than three-fifths of Americans expressed favorable views, while only slightly more than one-third viewed it negatively. Support for individual provisions in the law, such as the ban on denying coverage because of preexisting conditions or the requirement that insurers allow kids to stay on their parents’ plans through age 26, runs even higher in polls.

    Read: Republicans are trapped by preexisting conditions

    Yet even with all these obstacles, Trump’s promise to seek repeal again virtually ensures another round of the ACA war next year if Republicans win unified control of the federal government. By historical standards, that’s a remarkable, even unprecedented, prospect. Though Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, had opposed the creation of Medicare, for instance, no Republican presidential nominee ever proposed to repeal it after Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1965.

    If Trump wins the nomination, by contrast, it would mark the fourth consecutive time the GOP nominee has run on ending the ACA. (Among Trump’s main competitors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also promised to produce an alternative to the ACA, and Nikki Haley, who has spoken less definitively on the topic, might feel irresistible pressure to embrace repeal too.) Congressional Republicans may have been surprised that Trump committed them to charging up that hill again, but that doesn’t mean they would refuse his command to do so. “He wants to reverse a loss and take it off the books,” Dach told me. “And we’ve learned that that party follows him. It’s not like they are going to stand up against him, especially in the House. They will destroy the law if they can.”

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • The House Republicans Who Have Had Enough

    The House Republicans Who Have Had Enough

    House Republicans didn’t exactly have a banner year in 2023. They made history for all the wrong reasons. Last January, they presided over the most protracted election for speaker in a century, and nine months later, for good measure, lawmakers ejected their leader, Kevin McCarthy, for the first time ever. Last month, the House expelled one of its own, George Santos, for only the sixth time.

    The rest of the year wasn’t any more productive. Thanks in part to Republican discord, the House passed fewer bills that became laws than any other year in decades. And for the few important measures that did pass, GOP leaders had to rely on Democrats to bail them out.

    Republican lawmakers have responded by quitting in droves. After the House spent much of October fighting over whom to elect as speaker, November saw more retirement announcements than any single month in more than a decade. Some members aren’t even waiting for their term to end. McCarthy resigned last week, depriving the party that fired him of both his experience and, more crucially, his vote. Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, a Republican, and Brian Higgins of New York, a Democrat, are each leaving for new jobs in the next several weeks. (Santos would have stuck around, but his colleagues had other ideas.)

    Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans

    A roughly equal number of members from each party plan to forgo reelection this year. But the most powerful departing lawmakers are Republicans: The chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Kay Granger of Texas, is leaving after a quarter century in Congress, and the head of the Financial Services Committee, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, will end his 20-year House career next year.

    Still, some Republicans are leaving after just a few years in Congress, including Representatives Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Debbie Lesko of Arizona, both former state legislators. For them, serving in Congress simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—not when your party can’t seem to figure out how to govern. “People don’t engage with each other,” Lesko told me. “They just make speeches.”

    Here are the stories of four Republicans who are calling it quits at different stages of their career: McHenry, a onetime rabble-rouser who became a party insider; Brad Wenstrup, an Army podiatrist whose House tenure spanned from the Tea Party to Donald Trump; Spartz, a conservative with an impulsive streak; and Lesko, a Trump loyalist who never quite found her way in Washington. Taken together, their departures reflect the rising frustrations within a Republican Party that has floundered in the year since it assumed power in the House—a year in which it has spent more time fighting than governing.

    Debbie Lesko

    On October 17, after House Republicans had just tanked their third choice for speaker, Representative Debbie Lesko finally decided she’d had enough: She wouldn’t be seeking reelection. The 65-year-old grandmother of five had been planning to stay for one more term, but the ouster of Kevin McCarthy and the weeks of chaos that followed changed her mind. “It kind of put me over the top,” Lesko told me.

    Lesko had higher hopes for Congress back in 2018, when she won a special election to represent a safely Republican seat north of Phoenix. “Perhaps I was naive,” she conceded. Lesko prioritized border security during her first campaign and managed to get one border-related bill signed into law while Trump was president and Republicans controlled the House in 2018, but her legislative goals have fallen short since then. In the Arizona state legislature, she had served in the leadership and chaired two powerful committees. “I was used to getting things done in a bipartisan fashion,” Lesko said. The House proved to be far more difficult terrain. As a Trump ally, Lesko found few willing Democratic partners after the GOP lost control first of the House majority in 2018 and then of the presidency in 2020.

    In Arizona, Lesko said, lawmakers actually debated bills and amendments on the floor of the House and Senate; in Washington, by contrast, members just deliver speeches written for them by their young staff. “We don’t listen to each other,” Lesko lamented. “We just go in and read a statement.” She bemoaned the “lack of civility” and the hurling of personal insults between members in both parties. (When I asked if Trump had contributed to the incivility, she said, “I would prefer he not attack people personally, but he does a great job.”)

    Lesko told me she enjoyed most the days she spent interacting with constituents back home, but over six years, they could not make up for the family time she gave up on cross-country flights and on fundraising. “If I felt we were getting a whole lot accomplished, I would sacrifice it,” she said. Instead, Republicans spent a week in January 2023 fighting over their speaker and then did it all over again in October. “That certainly didn’t make me feel like I wanted to stay,” she told me.

    Patrick McHenry

    Representative Patrick McHenry introduced himself to much of America last year as a very frustrated man. The North Carolina Republican opened his unlikely stint as House speaker pro tempore with a memorable slam of the gavel—a brief eruption of anger aimed at the rump group of Republicans who had dethroned his ally, Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

    Read: ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children’

    When McHenry arrived in Congress nearly two decades ago, he might have counted as one of the renegades. He was a brash 29-year-old who liked nothing more than to pick fights with Democrats on cable news. After his first term, however, McHenry began to shift his strategy and redraw his image. He wanted to become a serious legislator, capable of using influence in Congress to affect public policy. “I realized that my actions were not enabling my goal, so I changed how I operated,” he told me. He became less of a partisan brawler and more of an inside player, studying the institution and how leaders in both parties wielded power. “My early years in Congress were like graduate school,” McHenry said.

    McHenry is leaving with a reputation as a widely respected if not-quite-elder statesman (he’s only 48). He serves as the chair of the Financial Services Committee and acted as one of the GOP’s top negotiators of perhaps the most significant bill to come out of Congress last year, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which prevented a debt default and ordered modest budget cuts. McHenry is retiring in part because he has to give up the committee gavel he so enjoys; Republican term limits allow most members to hold top committee posts for up to six years.

    He also passed up a bid for a more permanent promotion. At one point in October, some of the same Democrats who had chafed at McHenry’s bombast as a young lawmaker were open to the idea of him serving as speaker. McHenry told me he’d wanted to be speaker earlier in his career, but not anymore. He refused entreaties to seek election as speaker or even to use his temporary position to try to pass legislation. “It would have been to the institution’s detriment and, frankly, even to mine,” he told me. “So I decided the best course of action is to want for nothing during that time period, and that meant resisting the opportunity to use power.”

    When McHenry announced his retirement from the House two months later, he insisted that he was departing with none of the bitterness people might assume he carried. “I truly feel this institution is on the verge of the next great turn,” he said in his statement. When I asked him what gave him hope, he tried to put a positive spin on the dysfunction and disenchantment that have plagued Congress for years. “The operations of the House have been under severe pressure for a while,” McHenry said. “We have an institution that is struggling to perform in the current political environment.” He then made a prediction: “There’ll be significant changes that will happen in the coming congresses to make the place work.”

    He won’t be around to see them. The GOP’s term limits for committee leaders is an often-underappreciated reason for turnover in the party’s House ranks, but McHenry declined to seek a waiver so he could stay atop the Financial Services Committee. “I’m going to honor our rules,” he said. He hasn’t decided what comes next: “This chapter is closing, and I’ve got another chapter ahead of me.”

    Brad Wenstrup

    This much is clear: Representative Brad Wenstrup is not leaving the House out of frustration with Washington gridlock. “I reject the notion that this has been a do-nothing House of Representatives,” he told me. Wenstrup proceeded to read from a list that he said ran to 20 pages of bills that the narrow Republican majority had advanced through the lower chamber of Congress over the past year. Most of these measures are gathering dust in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the fact that a onetime outsider like Wenstrup would be defending an embattled institution so fervently is itself something of a revelation.

    Wenstrup won election to the House a decade ago as a Tea Party–backed insurgent, having defeated an incumbent Republican in a surprising 2012 primary challenge from the right. He’ll leave next year as a leadership loyalist, positioned in the ideological center of a GOP conference that has grown decidedly more conservative in the past decade. He voted for the debt-ceiling deal in June, despite having criticized his first Republican opponent during their campaign for backing a similar bipartisan agreement. “Am I a conservative? Yes,” he said. “Did I try to advance common sense? Yes. Did I try to establish myself as a statesman? Yes.”

    Read: ‘We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate.’

    Wenstrup has become an institutionalist in other ways too. His biggest complaint—a common one among small-government conservatives—is that federal agencies have taken too much power from Congress, evading proper oversight and interpreting laws beyond the intent of the legislators who wrote them. “We have to bring back Schoolhouse Rock,” Wenstrup said, recalling the cartoon that taught a generation of Americans a somewhat-idealized version of legislative sausage-making. “A bill on Capitol Hill gets signed by the president. That’s the law. Agencies don’t get to change it.”

    An Iraq War veteran who served as a combat surgeon, Wenstrup, 65, started his family later than most and has two young children in Ohio. He told me he had decided that this term would be his last in the House before any of the speaker tumult of the past year: “I decided that I wanted to make sure that I raised my kids, not someone else.”

    Victoria Spartz

    Good luck trying to predict Representative Victoria Spartz’s next move. The Indiana conservative is leaving Congress next year after just two terms—assuming she sticks with her plan.

    That hasn’t always been the case during Spartz’s short tenure in the House. She is fiercely protective of her options, and she has made her name by going her own way. At one point this fall, she threatened to resign her seat if Congress did not create a commission to tackle the federal debt. “I cannot save this Republic alone,” she said at the time. (Congress has created no such commission, but Spartz isn’t leaving quite yet.)

    Spartz, 45, is the only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, and she assumed a prominent role in the GOP after Russia’s invasion in 2022. Her nuanced position on the conflict has defied easy characterization. While cheering for Ukraine’s victory, she sharply criticized its prime minister, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a time when much of the West was rallying to his side. Spartz has accused Zelensky of “playing politics and theater” and demanded an investigation of one of his top aides. When members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee traveled to Ukraine on an official visit without her—she doesn’t serve on the panel—Spartz paid her own way and “crashed” the trip. She supports more U.S. aid to Ukraine, but not without conditions, and she believes that the funding must be more targeted toward heavy military equipment rather than humanitarian assistance. “Ukraine must win this war,” she told me, “but wars are won with weapons, and we need to be much faster, much tougher, and better.”

    Spartz again proved to be a wild card during the House’s recurring struggles over picking a speaker. During the 15 rounds of balloting last January, she supported Kevin McCarthy on the first three turns, then voted “present” eight times before returning to McCarthy for the final four rounds. In October, she voted with McCarthy’s critics to bring up a resolution to oust him as speaker, but on the climactic vote, she stuck with McCarthy. “Kevin wasn’t a bad guy. He just didn’t like to govern,” Spartz said.

    Midway through Spartz’s first term, Politico reported on high staff turnover in her congressional office, quoting former aides who described Spartz as a quick-tempered boss who frequently yelled at and belittled her underlings. Spartz made no effort to deny the accounts, telling Politico that her style was “not for everyone.” After winning a second term that fall, however, Spartz quickly announced that she would not seek office in 2024—forgoing both a third bid for the House and open statewide races for governor and Senate in Indiana.

    Her departure, she insisted to me, represents a break from politics, and not a retirement. “Sometimes it’s good to take some time off,” Spartz said. She denied that any of the drama of the past two years—the war in Ukraine, the speaker fights, criticism of her management—contributed to her decision to leave. Her children are now teenagers, Spartz said, and she wants to spend more time with them.

    Still, Spartz doesn’t quite seem at peace with her plans. Given her past shifts, I asked if she still might change her mind and run again. She wouldn’t, she said, but with a caveat: “Unless I get real upset!”

    Given the volatility of the past year in Congress, that’s a threat it would be wise not to ignore.

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

    What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

    This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

    Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.

    Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.

    As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.

    The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.

    This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.

    Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

    Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”

    Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”

    Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.

    Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”

    This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.

    The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.

    Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.

    Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

    Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.

    Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.

    In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.

    McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

    But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.

    In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.

    Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.

    Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • The House GOP’s Investigation Conundrum

    The House GOP’s Investigation Conundrum

    The list of investigative priorities for the House Judiciary Committee that the incoming chairperson, Jim Jordan, sent to the Justice Department earlier this month reads like an assignment sheet for Fox News.

    And that was before Jordan, with incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, repeatedly insisted the FBI had colluded with “Big Tech” to undermine former president Donald Trump by “suppressing” information about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.

    It was also before reports surfaced that Kevin McCarthy, in his bid to secure the votes as speaker, promised far-right members of his caucus that he would authorize investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of the insurrectionists who rioted in support of Trump on January 6. This was also before McCarthy threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

    Two months before taking power, the new House Republican majority has signaled that its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters. But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races. That contrast captures why the GOP’s plans for aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden may present as much political risk for the investigators as it does for the targets.

    Read: The new majority

    House Republicans and their allies are confident that the investigations will weaken Biden in advance of the 2024 presidential election. “This is not just superficial stuff—this is damaging stuff,” former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me.

    But the new majority’s focus on airing echo-chamber conservative obsessions risks further stamping the GOP as the party of Trump precisely as more Republican leaders and donors insist the recent election results demonstrate the need to move beyond him.

    “All these folks are coming out saying, ‘Turn the page; move forward’ … and I think this is really a problem if some of these [House] members are going to continue to look back and embrace Trump at a time when we saw the most Trumpian candidates get their heads handed to them,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent told me.

    The choices confronting GOP leaders on what—and how—to investigate encapsulates the much larger challenge they will face in managing the House. This month’s midterm election left the GOP with a House majority much smaller than it expected. The results also created a kind of split-personality caucus operating with very different political incentives.

    Most incoming House Republicans represent districts in Trump country: 168 of them hold seats that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more in 2020. Another three dozen represent more marginal Republican-leaning seats that Trump carried by fewer than 10 points two years ago.

    But the GOP majority relies on what will likely be 18 members (when all the final votes are counted) who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. Eleven of those 18 are in New York and California alone—two states that will likely become considerably more difficult for Republicans in a presidential-election year than during a midterm contest.

    For the Republicans from the hard-core Trump districts, demonstrating a commitment to confronting Biden at every turn is crucial for preempting any possible primary challenges from their right, says the Democratic consultant Meredith Kelly, a former communications director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But, as Dent told me, the Republicans precariously holding the Biden seats have the “polar opposite” incentive: “They need to have bipartisan victories and wins.”

    Amid that cross-pressure, many analysts second the prediction of outgoing Democratic Representative David Price of North Carolina, a political scientist who has written several books about Congress, that the new GOP House majority is not likely to pass much legislation. The problem, Price told me, is not only the partisan and ideological fracture in the GOP caucus, but that its members do not have “an agenda that they campaigned on or they are committed to.”

    All members of the GOP caucus might agree on legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts, to promote more domestic energy production, or to increase funding for border security. But resistance from the Republicans in blue and purple districts may frustrate many of the right’s most ambitious legislative goals, such as repealing elements of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passing a national ban on abortion, and forcing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

    With their legislative opportunities limited, House Republicans may see relentless investigation of Biden and his administration as a path of least resistance that can unite their caucus. And, several observers in both parties told me, all sides in the GOP are likely to support efforts to probe the White House’s policy record. Such targets could include the administration’s handling of border security, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how it is allocating the clean-energy tax credits and loan guarantees that the Inflation Reduction Act established.

    But Republicans have already indicated they are unlikely to stop at such conventional targets.

    Jordan, in his letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month, warned of coming investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of Project Veritas; allegations that the department has targeted conservative parents as “domestic terrorists” for their actions at school-board meetings; and the department’s decision making in the choice to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.

    At the press conference last week with Jordan, Comer declared that evidence from the GOP’s investigation of Hunter Biden’s business activities, including information obtained from his laptop, “raises troubling questions about whether President Biden is a national-security risk.”

    Jordan, asked at that press conference about the reports that McCarthy has committed to an investigation of the prosecution and treatment of the January 6 rioters, refused to deny it, instead repeating his determination to explore all examples of alleged politicization at the Justice Department. At one point, Jordan, an unwavering defender of Trump through his two impeachments, delivered an impassioned attack on federal law enforcement that reprised a long list of familiar Trump grievances. “When is the FBI going to quit interfering with elections?” Jordan excitedly declared.

    David Frum: Another flop from GOP Productions

    Jordan doesn’t even represent the outer edge of conservative ambition to use House investigations to settle scores for Trump. Earlier this week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted that when Republicans take the majority, they “should take over the @January6thCmte and release every second of footage that will exonerate our Patriots!”

    That might be a bridge too far even for McCarthy. But as he scrambles to overcome conservative resistance to his bid for speaker, he has already shown deference to demands from the Trump-country members who constitute the dominant block in his caucus. One example was the report that he promised Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that he would allow some investigation into treatment of the January 6 rioters. Another came in his appearance along the Texas border this week. McCarthy went beyond pledging oversight of the Biden administration’s border record to raise the much more incendiary (but also Fox-friendly) notion of impeaching Mayorkas.

    Dent, the former GOP representative, told me that on all these fronts, House Republicans risk pushing oversight to a confrontational peak that may damage its members from marginal seats at least as much as it hurts Biden—particularly if it involves what he described as airing Trump grievances. “These rabbit holes are just fraught with political peril in these more moderate districts,” Dent said.

    Democrats hope that the coming GOP investigations will alienate more voters than they alarm. Several Democratic strategists told me they believe that the focus on so many conservative causes will both spotlight the most extreme Trump-aligned voices in the Republican caucus, such as Jordan and Greene, and strike swing voters as a distraction from their kitchen-table concerns.

    Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist now serving as a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a group mobilizing to respond to the investigations, told me the GOP inquiries will inexorably identify the party with the same polarizing style of Trump-like politics that voters just repudiated in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. “We saw in this election that voters reject the Trump playbook and MAGA politics, but that is exactly what they will see in these hearings,” he said.

    Congressional investigations always carry the risk of disclosures that could hurt or embarrass Biden and other officials. And whatever they find, investigations also promise to divert significant amounts of the administration’s time and energy. The White House has already staffed up a unit in the counsel’s office dedicated to responding to the inquiries. Cabinet departments are scrambling to do the same.

    Recognizing the potential political risk, several Republican representatives newly elected in Biden districts have already urged their party to move slowly on the probes and instead to prioritize action on economic issues. Their problem is that McCarthy already has given every indication he’s likely to prioritize the demands for maximum confrontation from his caucus’s pro-Trump majority.

    “If past is prologue, Kevin McCarthy will fall much on the side of the ruby-red Republican base and the pro-investigation, pro-culture-war side,” Kelly says. “He’s never proven able to stand up to the fringe.” And that means the new members from Biden-leaning districts who have provided the GOP its narrow majority have reason to sweat almost as much as the Biden administration over the swarm of investigations that House Republicans are poised to unleash.

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • In Arizona, Shouts of ‘Fraud’ Again

    In Arizona, Shouts of ‘Fraud’ Again

    PHOENIX, Ariz.—The Watchers tend to show up at sundown—or so I’d heard. And yesterday evening, I went looking for them. Around 7 p.m., at a ballot drop-off site next to a juvenile-detention center in Mesa, just east of Phoenix, I sat on a concrete bench and waited under the parking lot’s bright lights. A steady stream of cars drove through, and people hopped out to slip their green mail-in-ballot envelopes into the big metal box. After two hours, the Watchers arrived: three women in camp chairs, sitting far enough away in the semi-darkness to not be easily noticed. Each peered at the ballot box through a set of binoculars.

    Here in Maricopa County, there have been a few reports of such citizen surveillance operations: people keeping an eye out for so-called mules, who might be stuffing stacks of illegitimate ballots into the boxes. Sometimes, these Watchers have carried guns. When I approached the women, they declined to tell me their names. They all looked to be in their early 60s—around my mom’s age, I kept thinking—and were bundled up against the chilly desert air. They sat around a folding table on which sat travel mugs and a single bag of kettle chips. The trunk of their SUV was open in order, I assume, to obscure their license plate.

    “We’re just doing our due diligence,” one of them told me. I asked if they were looking out for voters dropping off multiple ballots. “Well, it’d have to be more than a couple, because people drop them off for their family,” another said, without looking away from her binoculars. So how was it going? I asked. The third woman, wearing a green visor over her curly hair, looked at me and shrugged: “It all seems like it’s on the up and up so far.”

    For the past two years, Maricopa County has served as the beating heart of America’s emergent election-denial movement—ever since then-President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden here in 2020. Back then, “Stop the Steal” groups protested for weeks to overturn the closer-than-expected results, and a noisy partisan review of the results kept national media attention on Arizona for nearly a year—until even that clown show of an inquiry concluded that Biden had, in fact, won.

    Read: Bad losers

    By Monday night, on the eve of another election, GOP leaders in the state had spent so long fanning the flames of conspiracy theory that many voters were anticipating trickery. Election Day may once have been a moment to celebrate democracy and savor the ritual of taking part in the political process. But to visit Maricopa County today is to visit a place on high alert.

    “We have enough security to invade a small country,” one county leader told me at the Tabulations and Elections Center, which attracted angry protests in 2020 and is now surrounded by heavy plastic Jersey barriers. The day before, Sheriff Paul Penzone had told the press that plainclothes police officers would be present at every voting location all Election Day—and that they would exercise a “zero tolerance” policy toward anyone threatening voters or poll workers, he said.

    At that same press conference, county leaders aimed to get a head start on debunking some of the false narratives that might emerge in the coming days. Bill Gates, the chair of the county board of supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, reiterated that a days-long vote count does not indicate any fraud; that voting machines are tested for accuracy and are not susceptible to hacking; and that ballots are reviewed and processed by a bipartisan team of election workers.

    Already on Election Day, though, those careful efforts at transparency and heading off mistrust were undermined by the most unfortunate error: Early this morning, tabulation machines in roughly 20 percent of Maricopa County’s more than 200 polling sites stopped working. Voters at these centers have had to choose whether to put their ballots in a secure box to be counted later at the Tabulation Center in downtown Phoenix or to travel to a different polling location to cast a vote. (The root of the machines’ malfunctioning had been identified and begun to be resolved by late afternoon, according to the county elections department.)

    Whatever voters choose, their ballots will be counted, county officials have assured. But the damage has been done. The problems have understandably frustrated voters—and, perhaps more dangerously, tossed an enormous hunk of raw meat into the ravening jaws of the election conspiracists. “They are incompetent and/or engaging in malfeasance just like in 2020,” the state GOP chair Kelli Ward tweeted this morning. She and others have suggested that the tabulators seemed to be malfunctioning only in conservative areas. Kari Lake, the Republican running for Arizona governor, told reporters that she chose to vote in a liberal area “because we wanted to make sure we had good machines.”

    Read: The radical fringe that just went mainstream in Arizona

    Trump, always eager to take advantage of an election-fraud narrative, has weighed in too. “People of Arizona, don’t get out of line until you cast your vote,” the former president posted on Truth Social. “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY. Don’t let it happen!”

    A few hours after the tabulation news came in this morning, Gates and Richer delivered another impromptu press conference, and shared a video showing voters what a tabulation machine looks like and explaining that all valid ballots, regardless of how they’re submitted, will be counted. Shortly after 4 p.m., in a statement posted to Twitter, Richer apologized for the machine errors and reiterated his commitment to assisting voters. The statement immediately garnered hundreds of replies. A few thanked Richer for his transparency. But many just used one word, in all caps: “RESIGN.”

    There was always a decent chance that Election Night in Maricopa County would culminate, once again, in angry protests outside the county recorder’s office and shrill allegations of coordinated fraud. Now, whether Republicans win big tonight or not, that outcome seems likelier than ever.

    Elaine Godfrey

    Source link

  • The Inside Story of the GOP on January 6

    The Inside Story of the GOP on January 6

    Mitch McConnell froze when a Capitol Police officer rushed into the Senate chamber carrying a semiautomatic weapon. The majority leader had been so engrossed in the Electoral College debate happening before him that he hadn’t realized anything was amiss—until pandemonium erupted.

    Mere moments before, Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail had subtly entered the room and beckoned the vice president away from the dais where he was overseeing proceedings, a rarity for agents who usually loitered outside the doors. A hum spread through the chamber as staff shut down the debate, whispering to senators that “protesters are in the building.”

    “This is a security situation,” a security officer said into the microphone on the dais. “We’re asking that everyone remain in the chamber. It’s the safest place.”

    Suddenly, armed guards were racing to McConnell, hurriedly escorting him out of the room. With no access to a cellphone or television—neither was allowed in the Senate—McConnell had no idea what was happening, but he certainly had a guess. During a brief break in the January 6 Electoral College proceedings, he had caught a few televised snippets of Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse. The outgoing president, who had been spewing falsehoods that the election had been stolen from him, was spinning up his supporters, encouraging the thousands who had come to Washington to take their protest to the Capitol.

    Earlier that afternoon, McConnell had once again implored his GOP colleagues to stand down in objecting to the Electoral College. From a lectern in the Senate chamber, he noted that there was no proof of fraud on the level Trump was alleging. And he argued that “if this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

    Outside, unbeknownst to McConnell, at least 10,000 Trump supporters were besieging the Capitol. Agitators had broken through a series of flimsy bike racks marking the Capitol’s outer perimeter and begun scaling the sides of the Capitol building, chanting, “We want Trump! We want Trump!”

    Capitol Police tried to push them back with riot shields, dispensing tear gas into the crowd. But they were quickly overwhelmed by the swelling mob, which turned their flagpoles—bearing a mix of Confederate, American, Trump, and “Don’t Tread on Me” banners—into makeshift lances and spears.

    McConnell’s detail whisked him down to the Capitol basement and through the snakelike tunnels that weaved through the complex. As his staff updated him on the unraveling situation, officers hurried him away to an underground parking garage and shoved him in a car to get him off the property. As McConnell’s SUV pulled away from the Capitol grounds, his aides pulled up pictures and videos on their phones to show their boss the chaos outside.

    Read: America is running out of time

    McConnell was dumbfounded. For the first time in more than two centuries, the Capitol was under siege.

    In a small private room off the side of the Senate chamber, Pence was refusing to evacuate. Despite the rioters coursing through the hallways outside, when his Secret Service detail told him it was time, he said no. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents tried again. Once again, Pence refused. “The last thing I want is for these people to see a motorcade fleeing the scene,” he said. “That is not an image we want. I’m not leaving.”

    As Pence resisted his Capitol evacuation on January 6, Trump continued to taunt him on Twitter. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” he wrote. “USA demands the truth!”

    Two minutes later, Pence’s Secret Service agents stopped giving him a say in the matter. Pointing to the glass panels on the chamber door, they told the vice president they could not protect him or his family there.

    “We need to go!” a Secret Service agent said.

    The officers managed to get Pence as far as the basement garage of the Capitol before the vice president began protesting his evacuation again. His security detail implored him to at least sit inside the armed limousine they had standing by. Again, Pence adamantly refused.

    Standing in the parking garage, Pence turned to his longtime chief of staff, Marc Short, to devise a plan. Trump, by design or by circumstance, wasn’t responding to the chaos unfolding above their heads inside the Capitol. Someone needed to act presidentially and end this madness.

    “Get Kevin McCarthy on the phone,” Pence instructed. Short pulled up his cell and pressed the call button.

    McCarthy, for his part, was on the phone with Trump. He screamed into the receiver at the president as his detail spirited him away from the Capitol, where protesters had overrun his office. Bombs had been discovered at the Republican and Democratic National Committees, the House minority leader told Trump. Someone had been shot.

    “You’ve got to tell these people to stop,” he said.

    Trump wasn’t interested. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” he replied blithely.

    When Trump told McCarthy that the rioters must “like Trump more than you do,” the GOP leader fumed. How many times had he bent over backwards to protect the president? How many times had he buried his head in the sand when he knew the president’s actions were wrong? Trump owed him—and all House Republicans—an intervention to stop the attack. Their lives were on the line.

    “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” McCarthy yelled. Trump told McCarthy that antifa was behind the violence, not his own supporters. McCarthy was aghast.

    “They’re your people,” McCarthy said, noting that Trump supporters were at that very moment climbing through his office window. “Call them off!”

    As his car sped away from the Capitol, McCarthy tried to come up with a plan. He called the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, begging him to get to the White House and make Trump put an end to the violence. McCarthy began to think about trying to reach Trump via television. Maybe if he took to the networks, he could break through by calling the president out publicly.

    Before McCarthy could do anything, his phone rang. It was Pence. McCarthy told the vice president what Trump had just said to him.

    This is the story of Republican leaders’ rude awakening on January 6, as they realized that despite their past loyalty to Trump, their party leader would do nothing to save them. GOP leaders had spent four years defending Trump through an impeachment and an endless stream of scandals. But on the day they needed him most, the president did nothing to help even his loyal rank and file escape violence.

    Although Republicans have since rallied behind the former president, that day, the chasm between GOP leaders and Trump could not have been wider. From their lockdown off campus, in a series of previously unreported meetings, McConnell and other GOP leaders would turn to their Democratic counterparts for assistance in browbeating the Pentagon to move the National Guard to send armed troops to the Hill. Together, the bipartisan leaders of Congress, agreed in their conviction that Trump was stonewalling if not outright maneuvering against them, joined forces to do what the president would not: Save the Capitol.

    At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump sat in a dining room abutting the Oval Office, watching television coverage of his devotees storming the Capitol. Multiple aides were rushing in and out, begging him to make a public statement calling for peace. “This is out of control,” Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, told Trump, imploring him to send a white flag via Twitter. His daughter Ivanka also kept running in and out of the room, pleading with her father to call off the riot. “Let it go,” she pleaded with her dad, referring to the election.

    Even Trump’s son Donald Jr., who had urged Trump’s followers to “fight” at the rally that morning, had been alarmed by the chaotic scene at the Capitol. From the airport, before he departed town, he had tweeted, “This is wrong and not who we are. Be peaceful.” He also texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to get his dad to stop the violence.

    “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP,” he texted. “We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

    Don Jr. wasn’t the only one appealing to Meadows. Fox News personalities such as Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity begged the White House chief of staff to get the president to call off the crowds. Down the hall, Meadows’s staff warned him that Trump’s supporters “are going to kill people.”

    Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Trump begrudgingly issued a tweet calling on his supporters to “please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement.” As far as Trump was concerned, the riot was Congress’s problem, he told his aides. It was their job to defend the Capitol, he said, not his. Perversely, the riot had actually buoyed Trump’s hopes that he might be able to strong-arm his way to overturning the election. When the chaos started to unfold, he began calling his GOP allies in Congress—not to check on their well-being, but to make sure they didn’t lose their nerve about objecting to the election results.

    Across the Capitol campus, in a large Senate conference room guarded by cops, tensions were reaching a boiling point. The typically even-keeled Mitt Romney was lambasting Josh Hawley, blaming him for triggering the riot by endorsing Trump’s outlandish election objections. Lindsey Graham, Trump’s closest ally in the chamber, flew into a fit of rage at the “yahoos” who had invaded the Hill and screamed at the Senate sergeant-at-arms, who was hiding in the safe room with them.

    “What the hell are you doing here? Go take back the Senate!” Graham barked at the chamber’s top security official. “You’ve got guns … Use them!”

    Graham only grew angrier upon hearing a rumor that started circulating among Trump allies in the room: that the president was refusing to send in troops to help secure the Capitol. From their lockdown, he tried to call Trump to get clarity. When the president didn’t answer, Graham phoned Ivanka, asking her whether her dad was intentionally keeping the National Guard from responding to the crisis. He couldn’t see any other reason it was taking so long for reinforcements to arrive.

    Ivanka assured Graham that this wasn’t the case, but Graham was still furious at Trump’s nonchalant response to hundreds of his followers laying waste to the Capitol. He pressed Ivanka to get her dad to do more. He then called Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and threatened that Republicans would forcibly remove Trump from office using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment if the president continued to do nothing. Lisa Murkowski was equally shaken as she waited out the violence. The Alaska Republican had been in her private hideaway office in the Senate basement when the riot had begun. All of a sudden, she had heard someone stumbling into the bathroom next to her office and heaving into the toilet. Peeking outside, she saw a bathroom door open and a police officer washing his face in the sink.

    “Can I help you?” she asked, surprised. “Are you okay?”

    The officer had paused and looked up at her, his eyes red and swollen nearly shut from what appeared to be tear gas.

    “No, I’m okay,” he said almost frantically, racing out of the bathroom. “No, I’ve got to get out there. They need my help.”

    As she waited out the violence, hoping the marauders wouldn’t find her, Murkowski could still hear the police officer’s retching, playing like a track on repeat, over and over in her head.

    A couple of miles away, at a military installation along the Anacostia River, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were trying to figure out what was going on with the National Guard. The speaker and the minority leader had been evacuated to Fort McNair, along with the other most senior lawmakers in Congress from both parties. Since the moment they’d arrived, they had turned their holding room into a command center for their desperate operation to save the Capitol.

    Sitting around a large break room with a leather couch so worn that it was held together with red duct tape, Pelosi and Schumer tried to make sense of the unfolding situation. Pelosi had been ushered away so quickly that she’d left her cellphone on the House chamber dais. Schumer had his antiquated flip phone out and was calling his rank-and-file members and aides, asking for updates. Every few minutes, their Capitol security details hovering in the hall would race into the room with a bit of news. Lawmakers in both chambers had been led to secret holding rooms in the congressional office buildings, though there was no telling if the mob would follow and find them. There were reports that some of the rioters were armed. And a group of Pelosi’s aides had barricaded themselves in a conference room, hiding under a table as rioters yelled, “Where’s Nancy?” and tried to kick down the doors. One of Steny Hoyer’s top aides was calling him frantically, insisting that the leaders clear the Capitol.

    A large projection screen had been lowered and tuned to CNN. The leaders gaped as, for the first time, they took in the full scene outside the Capitol. It looked like a war zone—with Congress on the losing side. Outnumbered cops clashed with protesters. Rioters were breaking down doors and shattering windows. Police were getting sprayed with tear gas.

    “This is all Trump’s fault!” Hoyer cried out helplessly, to no one in particular. Pelosi agreed. The man who started all of this, she reminded them grimly, still had control of the nation’s nuclear codes.

    “I can’t believe this,” she said indignantly. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

    Elsewhere in D.C., the head of the National Guard had put armed troops on buses as soon as the Capitol Police chief alerted him to the riot underway at the Capitol. But he had still not received required orders from the Pentagon to deploy them. Troops in Virginia and Maryland were ready to move, the Democratic leaders were hearing—yet they too had not received the green light.

    At 3:19 p.m., just over an hour after the Capitol was breached, the Democratic leaders connected via phone with top Pentagon brass and demanded answers. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy insisted that his superior, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, had already approved mobilization of armed National Guard units. But seven minutes later, the besieged House sergeant-at-arms told them the opposite: He was still hearing from D.C. Guard leaders that no such order had been given.

    Hoyer was getting a similar message from Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, who had 1,000 National Guard troops on standby, ready to move. In a frantic phone call, Hoyer tried to explain to Hogan that the Pentagon had given those troops permission to mobilize—the top Army brass had just told Schumer so. But Hogan protested.

    “Steny, I’m telling you, I don’t care what Chuck says,” the governor said. “I’ve been told by the Department of Defense that we don’t have authorization.”

    The Democratic leaders looked at one another, alarmed. What the hell was really going on? They asked each other the unthinkable: Could the problem be Trump? Was it possible that the president of the United States was telling the military to stand down—or worse, helping to orchestrate the attack?

    Down the hall, Kevin McCarthy was working other channels. Pacing the conference room where GOP leaders were sequestered at Fort McNair, he screamed at Dan Scavino, a top White House aide who often handled Trump’s Twitter account. The tweet Trump had put out around 2:30 p.m. calling for calm was not good enough, McCarthy insisted. They had to do more to stop the violence.

    “Trump has got to say: ‘This has to stop,’” McCarthy growled into the phone. “He’s the only one who can do it!”

    In the GOP room, McConnell; his No. 2, John Thune; House Minority Whip Steve Scalise; and other GOP lawmakers were also on the phones trying to figure out what was happening. It was clear that McCarthy’s appeals to Trump were falling flat. They would need to find a way to work around the president—the man they had collectively defended for four years—if they wanted to get the National Guard to the Capitol.

    The GOP leaders, however, could not figure out who was in charge. They kept returning to basic questions: Who had the authority to order in the troops? Was it the Army secretary? Was it the acting defense secretary? Did they need Trump’s approval?

    Since he had arrived at Fort McNair, McCarthy had ordered his aides to get him on as many television networks as possible. He kept darting in and out of the room to take their calls, hoping Trump would be watching one of the channels he was speaking on.

    “This is so un-American,” McCarthy said in a Fox News appearance at 3:05 p.m., attempting to shame Trump into acting. “I could not be sadder or more disappointed with the way our country looks at this very moment.”

    Adam Serwer: Fox News hosts knew–and lied anyway

    At one point between television hits, McCarthy announced to the room that he had finally won a concession from the White House: Trump, after much begging, had begrudgingly agreed to record a video calling for calm. The news, however, was not particularly reassuring to the Republicans in the room. The president was entirely unpredictable. Would such a video help—or make it worse? they asked each other. And what of the Guard?

    Off in the corner, Scalise was scrolling through Twitter on his iPad, looking at images of the  Capitol. One photo in particular made him stop short: a rioter rappelling down the wall of the Senate chamber and onto the rostrum where Mike Pence had been presiding. Scalise held his device out so McConnell could see.

    “Look, they’re in the Senate chamber,” he said.

    McConnell’s face paled.

    Since the evacuation, McConnell had been torn between feelings of disbelief and irrepressible anger toward Trump for fomenting the assault. The Capitol had been his home for decades. The members and the staff who worked there might as well have been his family. Yet the president had put them all in mortal danger. McConnell’s aides had been texting his chief of staff, who had accompanied him to Fort McNair, about the situation at the Capitol as it grew more precarious. Rioters were banging on their office doors, claiming to be Capitol Police officers to try to gain entry. Others were scaling the scaffolding outside their windows, trying to peer inside. In the hallway outside their barricaded doors, staffers could hear a woman praying loudly that “the evil of Congress be brought to an end.”

    McConnell knew that his aides had been coordinating with Schumer’s office from their lockdown, working their Rolodexes to summon help from the federal agencies. They had been calling and sending cellphone pictures of the chaos to anyone and everyone they knew at the Pentagon and Justice Department. They’d even roused former Attorney General Bill Barr and his chief of staff to use internal channels.

    “We are so overrun, we are locked in the leader’s suite,” McConnell’s counsel Andrew Ferguson had whispered to Barr’s former chief from his hiding place, keeping his voice down so as not to be heard by rioters. “We need help. If you don’t start sending men, people might die.”

    McConnell knew that appealing to Trump directly would be a waste of time. He hadn’t spoken with the president since December 15, the day McConnell publicly congratulated Joe Biden for winning the election. Trump had called him afterward in a rage, hurling insults and expletives. “The problem you have is the Electoral College is the final word,” McConnell had told him calmly. “It’s over.”

    McConnell didn’t bother calling Trump again. Even on the morning of January 6, he purposefully ignored a phone call from the president, believing he could no longer be reasoned with. So when the Capitol came under attack, McConnell focused on getting in touch with military leaders, leaving it to his chief of staff to communicate with Meadows to enlist the White House’s help to quell the riot—if they would help at all.

    An FBI SWAT team had arrived at the Capitol campus just as the leaders of Congress were being escorted into Fort McNair. But McConnell knew they would need more manpower to stop the rampage. It was why he called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, to implore him to help dispatch the Guard. But as far as McConnell could tell, the Guard still wasn’t moving.

    As the duty officers at Fort McNair tried in vain to hook up a television so the Republicans could watch the latest scenes of destruction at the Capitol, McConnell huddled with his staff around a telephone, trying to reach the Pentagon. “I have the majority leader on the line,” McConnell’s aide announced, trying to connect her boss with Acting Defense Secretary Miller. They were promptly put on hold, infuriating GOP lawmakers in the room who couldn’t understand why the Pentagon was dodging their inquiries.

    Around 3:40 p.m., an hour and a half after the breach occurred, McConnell’s patience gave out. He stormed out of the room and crossed the hall to find Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer. “What are you hearing?” McConnell asked his Democratic counterparts as the other GOP leaders followed him into the room. “Do you know what the holdup is with the Guard?”

    They didn’t know any more than he did. At a loss, Pelosi and Schumer had just signed off on a joint statement demanding that Trump call for an end to the violence. Everyone knew it was little more than a gesture. It was time to bring the combined weight of all four congressional leaders to bear on the administration.

    “Get Miller on the phone,” someone barked.

    As aides worked to set up the call, the Republicans who had just entered the room stared at the CNN footage on the projector screen. It was the first time they’d witnessed the enormity of the scenes at the Capitol on anything larger than their phone or tablet screens. The footage rolling in was shocking: Rioters, having ransacked the building, were now taking selfies and cheering. They were stealing historic artifacts as keepsakes; one even carried away the speaker’s lectern, waving with glee at the camera. On one end of the Capitol, protesters were storming the Senate chamber and rummaging through senators’ desks. On the other, insurrectionists were doing the same in Pelosi’s office.

    “That’s my desk!” one Pelosi aide blurted out when an image of a man sitting in her chair with his feet propped up by her computer flashed on the screen. “They’re going through my desk!”

    Hoyer, still furious, started lecturing Scalise that the riot was the GOP’s fault for enabling Trump.

    “This isn’t the time for that,” Scalise retorted. “Right now, we need to get the chamber back, secured and open.”

    McConnell, Schumer, and the other lawmakers, meanwhile, stood by awaiting the call. Amid the chaos of the afternoon, two special elections in Georgia had been officially called for the Democratic candidates. That meant Schumer’s party would be taking control of all of Washington—and he would soon be taking McConnell’s job. McConnell had already congratulated Schumer on his forthcoming promotion.

    A few minutes later, huddled around a cellphone, the leaders jointly excoriated Miller for his snail-like response to what had all the markings of a coup at the Capitol. It was perhaps the first time since Trump took office that the congressional leaders had presented such a united front. Why hadn’t troops been sent in already? they demanded to know. Where was the National Guard?

    “Tell POTUS to tweet, ‘Everyone should leave,’” Schumer insisted, yelling into the device over speakerphone.

    “Get help in ASAP,” McConnell said firmly. “We want the Capitol back.”

    Miller stammered that Pentagon leaders needed to formulate a “plan” before they moved troops.

    “Look, we’re trying,” Miller said. “We’re looking at how to do this.”

    His vague answer did not suffice. There was no time to waste, the leaders insisted, as they pressed him to say how soon armed troops would arrive. After demurring several times, Miller finally gave them a partial answer: It could take four hours to get the National Guard to the Capitol, and up until midnight until the building could be cleared.

    At that, Schumer lost it.

    “If the Pentagon were under attack, it wouldn’t take you four hours to formulate a plan!” he roared. “We need help now!”

    Scalise pressed Miller to tell them how many troops they could expect to arrive. When again the secretary declined to answer, Pelosi exploded.

    “Mr. Secretary, Steve Scalise just asked you a question, and you’re not answering it,” she said. “What’s the answer to that question?”

    But Miller simply dodged again, murmuring that they were trying their best.

    That the most powerful nation in the world didn’t have a plan in place to protect its own Capitol from attack was unthinkable to the leaders. And the fact that Miller was refusing to give clear answers appalled them. There was only one other person in Washington who might have more sway than they did. Hanging up on Miller, they reached out to their last hope: It was time to call Pence.

    In the parking garage in the basement of the Capitol, Pence listened as the congressional leaders beseeched him to help dispatch troops to the Capitol. As vice president, he had no authority to assume Trump’s powers as commander in chief and give orders to the secretary of defense. But he couldn’t understand why the Guard wasn’t already on its way. Something had to be done.

    “I’m going to get off this call and call them, then call you right back,” Pence told the lawmakers, hanging up to dial Miller and Milley.

    Next to him, Pence’s brother, Greg, and his chief of staff, Marc Short, were still seething at how cavalierly Trump had abandoned them. They had read the president’s most recent Twitter attack against Pence on their phones in the Senate basement, fuming that in the heat of the riot, the president had chosen to stir up more vitriol about the vice president instead of calling to check on him. Trump’s conspiratorial advisers were also emailing Pence’s team, telling them that the riot was their fault for not helping overturn the election. It was outrageous.

    The vice president, however, didn’t have time to dwell on the slights. When they’d first arrived in the garage, he had phoned McCarthy and McConnell, then Schumer and Pelosi, to make sure they all were safe. He didn’t bother dialing Trump. Short, however, angrily called Meadows to tell the White House that they were okay. And in case he or anyone else was wondering, Short added, “we are all planning to go back to the Capitol to certify the election tonight.”

    Meadows didn’t object. “That’s probably best,” he replied.

    At the White House, aides were gradually giving up hope that the president would do anything useful to restore order at the Capitol, though by mid-afternoon, the pressure on Trump to act was relentless. Republican lawmakers; longtime Trump allies, including Barr and former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; and conservative influencers such as Ann Coulter reamed him publicly. Even former President George W. Bush had issued a reprimand. Trump ignored all of them.

    As they worked the phones, Pence’s staff heard that a high-level meeting had been convened at the White House to discuss the chain of command and how to get the National Guard moving. The fact that the administration could not figure out who was in charge as the Capitol was overrun was beyond alarming—though, in the estimation of Pence and his team, Trump at any point could have picked up the phone and forced the Pentagon to move faster. That he hadn’t, they all agreed, spoke volumes. And because of that—and the Hill leaders’ desperation—Pence knew it was time for him to step up.

    At 4:08 p.m., Pence called the acting defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mustering his most commanding tone, he gave an order that was technically not his to issue.

    “Clear the Capitol,” he said. “Get troops here. Get them here now.”

    Back in lockdown at Fort McNair, McConnell was issuing orders of his own.

    “We are going back tonight,” he insisted to Pence and Pentagon officials on a 4:45 p.m. phone call with Hill leaders. “The thugs won’t win.”

    The vice president’s order to the military seemed to have finally snapped things into place. Pence had let congressional leaders know that armed Guard troops were on the way. It would take another half hour for them to arrive.

    McConnell had always delighted in good political combat. But when the votes were in, he believed in accepting outcomes with dignity. There was no dignity in what had happened that day—only embarrassment for the Republican Party. And McConnell was just that: embarrassed. Trump didn’t even have the decency to be sorry. That afternoon, as congressional leaders joined forces across party lines to get reinforcements to the Capitol, the president had been egging on his supporters.

    “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred land-slide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Remember this day forever!”

    Even in the video he released calling for “peace,” Trump praised his followers for revolting against a “fraudulent election,” calling them “very special” and adding, “We love you.”

    It was too much for McConnell to stomach. After the senator had spent four years trying to accommodate the president’s demands, Trump had threatened his Capitol, and McConnell was finally done with him. Congress had to certify Biden as the next president, and they had to do it that night, in prime time, he insisted. The whole country had to know that Trump had lost, and that his gambit to cling to power had failed.

    There was one major impediment to McConnell’s plan. Capitol Police were saying the building would not be secure enough to welcome lawmakers back that night. They had to sweep the chamber for bombs and ensure that no straggling rioters were hiding in a bathroom—and there was no way to do that quickly. Defense officials had even suggested busing lawmakers to Fort McNair to certify the election that night from the military base.

    To McConnell, waiting until morning was entirely out of the question. He knew that the vice president and other leaders had his back. They were just as adamant as he was that Trump’s flunkies would not push Congress out of its own Capitol. Pence had even offered the Capitol Police his own K-9 unit to help sweep the building faster.

    Given the sensitivity of the discussion, the congressional leaders had gathered in a smaller space down the hall, away from the probing eyes and ears of aides and other lawmakers who had joined them at Fort McNair. Within minutes, Pelosi had lit into the military brass, accusing them of ignoring the blaring warning signs of coming violence in the days before the attack.

    “Were you without knowledge of the susceptibility of our national security here?” Pelosi demanded of Miller, her patience dwindling.

    From the January/February 2022 issue: A party, and nation, in crisis

    “We assessed it would be a rough day,” Miller said. “No idea it would be like this.”

    For a brief, resolute moment on January 6, the GOP’s leaders were prepared to do whatever they needed to do to bring Trump to heel. Pence acted that day to restore peace. Party affiliation made no difference to Republican leaders as they worked with Pelosi and Schumer to save their rank and file.

    But these flashes of defiance were fleeting. Mere days later, when Democrats moved to impeach Trump for inciting the riot, Republicans balked. Both McCarthy and McConnell voted against impeachment, and Pence, whose aides had steamed about Trump while in hiding, barred his staff from testifying at Trump’s second trial. In the months since, GOP leaders have done their utmost to bury the truth of what happened that day—leaving Republican voters with the distinct impression that Trump and his followers did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, as the country contends with the protracted consequences of their whiplash, Trump is plotting a return to the White House.

    This article has been adapted from Rachael Bade and Karoun Dimirijan’s new book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump.

    Rachael Bade

    Source link

  • What Democrats Don’t Understand About Ron Johnson

    What Democrats Don’t Understand About Ron Johnson

    APPLETON, Wisconsin—Senator Ron Johnson was midway through a rambling speech on all that’s wrong with America—his villains included runaway debt, the porous southern border, gender-affirming medical treatment, and FDR’s New Deal—when he paused for a moment of self-reflection.

    “It’s a huge mess,” Johnson said of the country. “I really ought to have the people who introduce me warn audiences: I’m not the most uplifting character.”

    A few people in the not-quite-packed crowd at the FreedomProject Academy, a drab, low-slung private school, chuckled. The 67-year-old Republican, stumping for a third term in the Senate, was speaking at an event that his campaign had not advertised to reporters. It was sponsored by an affiliate of the John Birch Society, the right-wing advocacy group now headquartered a mile down the road in Appleton. When attendees arrived, they found on their chairs a flyer promoting a six-week seminar on the Constitution. Part one? “The Dangers of Democracy.”

    In the audience, several dozen mostly older, white conservatives seemed to share Johnson’s sense of national doom. They nodded along as Johnson assailed journalists (“highly biased” advocates who “lie with impunity”) and teachers (“leftists”), as he accused President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats of “fundamentally destroying this country.” He lamented the “injustice” suffered by people awaiting trial on charges of storming the Capitol on January 6. When Johnson trumpeted his fight on behalf of “the vaccine injured” and his promotion of discredited COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, he received a hearty round of applause.

    Among Senate Republicans up for reelection this fall, Johnson is the Democrats’ top target, and the race is one of several that could determine which party holds a majority next year. Wisconsin is perhaps the nation’s most closely divided state: Fewer than 25,000 votes separated the two major-party candidates in each of the past two presidential elections. But Johnson isn’t racing toward the political center in the campaign’s home stretch, and he might not need to.

    Read: Democrats’ No. 1 target for 2022

    Johnson made a fortune as a plastics executive in nearby Oshkosh before winning his Senate seat in 2010. He reminded the crowd in Appleton that he’d made two promises during that initial campaign: that he would always tell the truth and that, as he put it, “I’ll never vote—and by extension I’ll never conduct myself—with my reelection in mind.” Democrats would vigorously dispute that Johnson has kept his first commitment. They might not contest that he’s kept the second.

    After a rather unremarkable first term in the Senate, Johnson over the past few years has turned into a master of the controversial and the cringeworthy. He’s spent much of the pandemic peddling conspiracy theories about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. He became entangled in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump and later told reporters he had ignored a warning from the FBI that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. Johnson also became involved in the events that led to Trump’s second impeachment: The House Select Committee investigating January 6 revealed that Johnson’s chief of staff had tried to hand then–Vice President Mike Pence a slate of fake electors from Wisconsin. Johnson has downplayed the attack on the Capitol, saying that the riot was not an insurrection and that he would have been concerned had those who stormed the building been “Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters” rather than Trump supporters.

    At the same time, Johnson’s popularity has plunged. A Morning Consult poll published this week found that just 39 percent of Wisconsin voters approved of his performance, giving him the second-lowest home-state rating (behind only Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader) of any senator in the country. The Johnson of 2022 is unrecognizable to some Republicans who championed his first two campaigns and who saw him as a staunch but not extreme conservative, a politician more like Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan than Trump. “There’s no question that the Ron Johnson who ran in 2010 and 2016 was not the conspiracy theorist that you see now,” Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative-radio host in Wisconsin who co-founded The Bulwark, told me. Sykes has many theories about the cause of Johnson’s transformation. But it boils down to a simple conclusion: “Trump broke his brain.”

    Yet if Johnson this year is the Senate’s most electorally vulnerable Republican, he’s also proving to be among its most resilient. He scored a come-from-behind reelection victory after GOP leaders abandoned his campaign in 2016. In the past few weeks, he’s erased a summertime polling deficit to take a slim lead over his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, and give Republicans a better shot at reclaiming the Senate majority. Johnson led 52 percent to 46 percent among likely voters in a survey released yesterday by Marquette University Law School.

    Johnson’s resurgence has frustrated and even confounded Democrats, who worry that a well-funded and vicious crime-focused ad campaign is dragging down their nominee in a pivotal battleground. But they may be underestimating the depth of Johnson’s appeal and misjudging whether his supposedly unpopular stands hurt him as much as they thought.

    Oddly enough, the one topic Johnson didn’t bring up in Appleton was his opponent, Barnes. With help from national Republicans, Johnson is pummeling Barnes on the airwaves, spending millions to convince Wisconsinites that the 35-year-old vying to be the state’s first Black U.S. senator is a criminal-coddling radical. The ads seek to exploit positions on which even some Democrats concede that Barnes is vulnerable; his support for ending cash bail has come under particular scrutiny following a Christmas-parade massacre last year in Waukesha, when a suspect who was out on bail for domestic violence allegedly killed six people and injured dozens more after driving his SUV into a crowd.

    The GOP ads strike many Barnes supporters as clearly racist. One spot from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that calls Barnes a “defund-the-police Democrat” depicts him in front of a wall spray-painted with graffiti alongside two other Democrats of color, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Another uses similar imagery and flashes the words dangerous and different next to Barnes.

    If the barrage is angering Barnes, he’s good at hiding it. Despite his relative youth, he’s been running for office for a decade. When I sat down with him after a speech in Sheboygan, Barnes was effortlessly on message. Johnson’s ads, he told me, were “some of the worst I’ve seen in any election cycle, anywhere.” And he acknowledged that “the unprecedented sums of money” funding them represented the biggest obstacle he faced between now and the election.

    Despite this assessment, however, Barnes seemed relatively unperturbed by their content. He refused to label them racist, as many of his supporters do, and he dismissed the attacks on him as evidence that Johnson had done little in the Senate worth promoting. “Unlike Ron Johnson, I can talk about things that I want to do to actually help people,” Barnes said. “And that’s what people want to hear day to day.”

    Barnes won election as lieutenant governor in 2018 after four years in the state legislature. His bid for the Democratic Senate nomination had been competitive for months, but Barnes ultimately consolidated the party’s support when, one by one, his opponents withdrew and endorsed him days ahead of the August primary. He has close ties to the progressive, labor-oriented Working Families Party, having delivered its response to Trump’s State of the Union address in 2019. Barnes frequently highlights his devotion to unions—“My dad worked third shift” is a constant refrain—as a way to connect with Black workers in and around Milwaukee and to make inroads with more culturally conservative white laborers elsewhere in the state, many of whom backed Trump.

    Barnes’s supporters see him as a once-in-a-generation talent, and he comes across as warm and easygoing on the stump. “Hello, Senator, our future president!” one older woman fawned as she shook his hand before he spoke to a crowded union hall in Sheboygan. “Oh no,” Barnes replied. “This is stressful enough.”

    Although Barnes is running ads attacking Johnson on abortion and economic issues, many of his commercials are much sunnier spots clearly designed to reassure Wisconsin voters that he’s not the “dangerous” radical Republicans are making him out to be. In one he’s pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket, and in another he’s unpacking groceries. “Ron Johnson’s at it again, lying about my taxes,” Barnes says while making himself a PB&J in another ad. The strategy is reminiscent of the campaign that Reverend Raphael Warnock ran in Georgia in 2020, when he relied on cheery ads featuring a beagle, Alvin, to counter nasty GOP attacks aimed at scaring off white suburban voters.

    Democrats I spoke with applauded Barnes’s ads. But as the polls have shifted toward Johnson in recent weeks, they lamented that Johnson’s race-baiting message was succeeding, and worried that Barnes’s campaign of reassurance, although necessary, was insufficient. “Get aggressive. Get dirty like they do,” Fred Hass, a 76-year-old retired union worker, said in Sheboygan when I asked what he wanted to see from Barnes.

    “I don’t think he has the luxury to spend all his time on reassurance,” David Axelrod, the former top adviser to Barack Obama, told me, referring to Barnes. “He shouldn’t fight with one hand tied behind his back, and I think he almost has to be on offense here.” (When I asked him about this criticism, Barnes defended his decision to focus equally, if not more, on himself. “Your opponent being bad isn’t enough,” he said. “You’ve got to tell people what you stand for.”)

    No politician has succeeded in Wisconsin quite like Obama did, a fact that complicates the question of how much race is a factor in Barnes’s recent slide. Obama’s 14-point victory in 2008—he won by seven points in 2012—remains the largest margin for any presidential candidate in Wisconsin in the past half century. (It’s also unmatched by any contender for Senate or governor in the years since.) Every other presidential contest in this century has been decided by less than a single point. In 2018, the Democrat Tony Evers—with Barnes as his running mate—defeated the Republican Scott Walker’s bid for a third term as governor by fewer than 30,000 votes. With that in mind, the only prediction that both Democratic and GOP operatives are willing to make is that the Johnson-Barnes race will be close. (The Republican bidding to oust Evers, Tim Michels, declared at a recent rally that he’d win in a “Wisconsin landslide,” which he then defined as “probably like three points.”)

    Although Wisconsin has earned its reputation as a 50–50 swing state, it does not habitually elect leaders who hug the political center and historically has embraced ideologues from both the left and right. The home of Robert La Follette and the Progressive Party of the early 20th century soon became the state that twice sent the anti-communist demagogue Joseph McCarthy to the Senate. More recently, as Wisconsin veered left to embrace Obama, it also voted again and again for Walker, who amassed one of the most conservative records of any governor in the country. No state has two senators as ideologically mismatched as Wisconsin’s Johnson and the Democrat Tammy Baldwin, a progressive and the first openly LGBTQ woman elected to Congress. “There’s a little bit of political schizophrenia in Wisconsin,” Sykes said.

    Read: ‘I Am Stunned’: Wisconsin democrats’ improbable victory

    Given the polarized and closely divided electorate, political strategists see a vaningishly small population of swing voters, perhaps 100,000 or 150,000 out of about 3.5 million statewide. Johnson, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, clearly sees his path to victory in turning out the conservative base and disqualifying Barnes in the eyes of that sliver of persuadable voters.

    The hope of Barnes’s campaign in the final stretch—and the biggest threat to Johnson’s—is embodied in a man named Ken.

    Ken lives in a suburb of Green Bay, in an area that shifted, along with much of the state, ever so slightly to the left between Trump’s victory in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020. On the first Saturday in October, a pair of Barnes canvassers were knocking doors as I trailed along. Not many people were answering, and the few who did politely turned them away.

    Then the canvassers approached a group of three middle-aged white men who were enjoying beers on a patio in back of one of the houses on their list. Anyone familiar with the demographic divide in modern politics would have taken one look and assumed they were Trump (and by extension, Johnson) voters. They did not appear eager to talk politics, and after a few curt replies, Nicole Slavin, a sales manager who had experience canvassing, bid them a polite goodbye and began to back away.

    Seeking confirmation of our hunch, I asked which candidate they were supporting, and Ken (he declined to provide his last name) spoke up and said he had already returned his ballot by mail. “The only reason—the only reason—I voted for Evers and Barnes was the abortion decision,” Ken said. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revived an 1849 Wisconsin law banning abortion in most cases, which the GOP-controlled legislature has refused to repeal or modify. “It’s almost like sending women back 50 years, what they’re talking about,” Ken said. A longtime Republican, he told me he voted for Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in the last election. “I don’t care about all the other crap, but that was one thing that really stood out,” he said of the abortion ruling.

    Slavin was pleasantly surprised, but she told me she had met several people in the past few months who cited abortion as the driving factor in their support for Democrats. Conversations like those, and voters like Ken, are giving the party some hope that anger over the Dobbs decision will change the electorate in Wisconsin, much as it turned what was expected to be a close August referendum in Kansas into a landslide win for supporters of abortion rights.

    About an hour before Slavin hit the doors, Barnes had launched a statewide “Ron Against Roe” tour aimed at shifting the focus of his campaign away from Johnson’s attacks on him and back toward friendlier turf. A few days later, Barnes launched a new TV ad hitting Johnson for backing a national ban on abortion and for saying in 2019 that if people don’t like abortion restrictions in their state, they “can move.”

    Johnson has since called for a statewide referendum on abortion, a position he highlighted when Barnes attacked him on the issue during a debate last week. But his 2019 comment was, to Johnson’s critics, just one more example of his lurch out of the political mainstream over the past few years—a shift for which Democrats hope Wisconsinites hold their senator accountable. To them, he is one more Republican who lost his mind in the Trump era. Johnson’s supporters see in him a conservative iconoclast who hasn’t wavered. “Wisconsinites like independent people, and that’s why I think Ron Johnson is going to win,” Representative Glenn Grothman, a Republican who represents Johnson’s home, in Oshkosh, told me. “Anybody who thinks that Ron Johnson has changed is just a partisan reporter.”

    Whether Johnson has changed could ultimately prove less important than whether the events of the past several months, and the abortion decision in particular, have changed Wisconsin voters and what they care about. Johnson has proudly stood against public opinion plenty of times before, with few tangible consequences. The next few weeks will decide whether this year, and this issue, will be different.

    Russell Berman

    Source link