Category Archives: Republicans

US sets records for Covid deaths and hospitalizations as it nears 14m cases – live updates

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Senator Marsha Blackburn invokes Chinese stereotype a racist tweet

Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee received swift backlash Thursday for a racist tweet invoking the history of China to allude to a stereotype of cheating.

China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing. Some things will never change...

While recognizing Republican criticism, Donald Trump still refused to back down from earlier calls to repeal Section 230, a provision of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that protects tech firms from liability over third-party content. In a tweet, the president called it a “must.”

Looks like certain Republican Senators are getting cold feet with respect to the termination of Big Tech’s Section 230, a National Security and Election Integrity MUST. For years, all talk, no action. Termination must be put in Defense Bill!!!

.@realDonaldTrump I fully support you on this. Please don’t back down. The freedom and future of our country is at stake. https://t.co/A5EPgvAuqX

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Donald Trump suggests 2024 presidential bid: ‘I’ll see you in four years’

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President makes comments to Republicans at a White House reception, where video shows dozens of people crammed together without masks

Donald Trump has floated the idea of running for president again in 2024 at a holiday reception at the White House on Tuesday evening.

“It’s been an amazing four years,” Trump told the crowd, which included many Republican National Committee members. “We’re trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”

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US justice department investigating ‘bribery-for-pardon’ scheme – live

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What is it about the French Laundry?

Another California politician, San Francisco mayor London Breed, is under fire after it was revealed that she attended a birthday party at the three-star Michelin restaurant in Napa Valley – just one night after governor Gavin Newsom did the same.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to shorten its recommendation for how long individuals should quarantine after being exposed to someone with Covid-19, the AP reports.

Since the pandemic began, the CDC has recommended that individuals quarantine for 14 days after exposure. The new recommendations, which could be released later tonight, will recommend that individuals quarantine for 10 days after exposure, or seven days if they test negative for the disease.

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Trump lawyer: ex-election security chief Krebs should be ‘taken out and shot’

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Joe DiGenova condemned for ‘mob attorney’ remark made on podcast shown on conservative Newsmax TV

A former head of US election security who said Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden was not subject to voter fraud should be “taken out at dawn and shot”, a Trump campaign lawyer said.

Related: Trump's fraud claims undermine democracy, ex-US election security chief says

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‘He understands Washington’: Joe Scarborough finds echoes of Truman in Biden

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The Morning Joe host, author of a new book on Harry S Truman, sees parallels in the two presidents’ efforts to rebuild

Joe Scarborough had been discussing Joe Biden’s cabinet, Donald Trump’s delusions and America’s battered claim to be the indispensable nation when the conversation took an unexpected turn.

“I knew yesterday morning it was Mika’s and my anniversary and she said nothing and about five o’clock in the afternoon I walked in and I said, ‘Is today a special day for you?’” Scarborough shared with his TV guests last Wednesday. “She goes, ‘Yeah, I guess, whatever.’”

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Can dozens of new Republican congresswomen change the face of the GOP?

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Moving away from a white- and male-dominated party is the only way for it to survive, pollster says

Kat Cammack was raised on a cattle ranch by a working class single mother. She was the third generation of her family to go into business as a sand blaster. And at 32, she is about to become the youngest Republican woman in the US Congress.

“I think a lifetime of experiences has shaped me to be a Republican and a conservative,” said Cammack, elected to an open seat in Florida. “There has been a stereotype about the Republican party, that it was the Grand Old Party, that it was your grandfather’s political party of choice. The election in 2020 has definitely helped push back on that narrative.”

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Biden wants to extend an olive branch to Republicans. He shouldn’t | Joshua Craze and Ainsley LeSure

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Biden must choose whether to build a post-white America – or to placate the white supremacist project of the Republican party

Shortly after Biden was declared president-elect, he announced that he would reach a hand across the aisle. “We must stop,” he said, “treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” This is the Biden playbook at work, honed through years of compromises made with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell: appealing to the Republican elite in office, while trying to appeal to moderate Republicans on the ground.

Having stretched out its hand to the Republicans, the center of the Democratic party then turned to its real enemy – the left that it blames for its poor showing in the election. Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger led the charge, contending that “no one should ever say ‘defund the police’ ever again”. Despite the fact that progressive candidates did well across the ticket, and Biden ran a campaign modelled on Hilary Clinton’s neoliberal program, centrist Democrats blamed the core demand of the Black Lives Matter movement for alienating moderates. In centrist Democrats’ telling, the problem is the left – and the answer is to reach out to that poor soul, the moderate Republican.

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Republicans are right: democracy is rigged. But they are the beneficiaries | Stephen Holmes

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Conservatives relish the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth around rigging – because it distracts attention from their minority rule

The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.

Related: How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key | Bernie Sanders

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Bernstein names 21 Republican senators who privately expressed contempt for Trump

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  • Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Chuck Grassley are listed
  • Senators’ ‘craven public silence helped enable Trump’

The veteran Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has publicly named 21 Republican senators he says have “repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for [Donald] Trump and his fitness” for office.

As Trump continued to try to subvert the results of a presidential election he clearly lost to Joe Biden, Bernstein said on Twitter he was “not violating any pledge of journalistic confidentially [sic]”.

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Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

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A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters.

It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016.

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America is being subjected to a stress test – and Republicans are failing | Robert Reich

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Most elected Republicans are refusing to stand up to Trump. Their cowardice is one of the worst betrayals of public trust in the history of our republic

Financial regulators subject banks to stress tests to see if they have enough capital to withstand sharp downturns.

Related: Let's count the ways Donald Trump has tried to subvert this election, shall we? | Richard Wolffe

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‘He made a connection’: how did Trump manage to boost his support among rural Americans?

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Despite overall defeat, Trump boosted his support in the Iowa heartland and some say sounded the death knell for the ‘country club Republican’ party there

Just a few months ago, Neil Shaffer thought Iowa was lost to Donald Trump.

“I was worried. We were in the midst of Covid and the economy wasn’t doing so good and Trump wasn’t handling the Covid interviews very well, and I was thinking this is gonna be a bloodbath,” said the farmer and chair of a county Republican party in the north-east of the state.

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‘Integrity still matters’: the unlikely Republican standing up to Trump’s voter fraud lies

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The Georgia secretary of state tells the Guardian he’s received death threats for pushing back against the president’s claims

Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.

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‘Pathetic’ Trump denounced over Krebs firing as campaign presses for recounts

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  • Senior House Democrat says Trump ‘views truth as his enemy’
  • Campaign seeks recounts and investigations in key states

Donald Trump was condemned by opponents on Wednesday for firing the senior official who disputed his baseless claims of election fraud, as the president pressed on with his increasingly desperate battle to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

Related: Biden to consult with frontline workers as US approaches 250,000 coronavirus deaths – live

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End the odes to political ‘civility’. Do you really think Republicans will reciprocate? | Jan-Werner Mueller

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If they’re going to achieve anything the next two to four years, Democrats must not fall for the trap of ‘bipartisanship’

For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, “We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.

Related: Obama scolds 'petulant' Trump but reveals conservative sympathies

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How Trump’s presidency turned off some Republicans – a visual guide

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As our maps and charts show, Trump not only lost to Joe Biden – he lost to other Republicans on the ballot

After four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, many voters who typically vote Republican turned against him.

For example, in Winnebago county, Wisconsin, about 72% of voters cast their ballot for the Republican House candidate – either Glenn Grothman or Mike Gallagher, depending on where they live. But just 52% cast their vote for Trump.

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Twitter and Facebook CEOs to testify on alleged anti-conservative bias

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Senate hearing was called in response to how the companies’ platforms handled a New York Post article about Joe Biden

The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook are taking the stand Tuesday to testify, again, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on their platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were subpoenaed in October to appear at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in order to “review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election”.

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Georgia’s secretary of state says Lindsey Graham suggested he throw out legal ballots

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Brad Raffensperger says the Republican senator asked if he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in certain counties

Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.

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Biden warns ‘more people may die’ if Trump refuses to cooperate on transition – live

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According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, if Donald Trump wants a statewide recount, he will have to pay $7.9m.

The president lost the state by more than 20,000 votes - which means a recount is very unlikely to change the fact that he lost. Even if a recount, miraculously, left Trump ahead in the state, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes are not enough to change the election outcome.

Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told the Washington Post that senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina was among several members of his party who pressured him to toss out legally cast ballots so that Trump could win the state.

From the Post:

In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.

The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

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