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The group warned they won’t let some of their conservative colleagues call the shots on their own.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Tag: Republicans
Tony Gonzales and a coalition of Hispanic Republicans are warning that a Judiciary border proposal isn’t ready for “prime time.”
Republicans line up against replacing Feinstein on critical committee
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Schumer said he is angling to have a conversation with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about the matter soon — but over the course of Monday, deal-making GOP senators from Collins to Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). lined up in opposition to temporarily replacing Feinstein on the panel.
Republicans’ blockade of the resolution to replace Feinstein will effectively make it tougher for Democrats to confirm more judges — which Biden’s party can normally do unilaterally with a 51-49 majority. The judiciary panel’s chair, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), has repeatedly delayed committee votes on lifetime appointees during Feinstein’s treatment for shingles. Democrats still have some judicial nominees ready for floor votes, but that list will run dry relatively soon without action at the Judiciary Committee.
Schumer said he expects Feinstein to return to the Senate soon and that “We think the Republicans should allow a temporary replacement till she returns. I hope the Republicans will join us in making sure this happens, since it is the only right and fair thing to do.”
But if her absence continues, the pressure on her to resign her seat will rise exponentially, given how high judges are on her party’s priority list.
“I’m sure we’re going to be talking about this as a caucus this week,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “These are the kinds of discussions where you really kind of have to get in the room to think it through. We haven’t started those discussions yet.”
Reshuffling the panel’s roster this week would require unanimous consent from all senators, which means just one Republican could block it. And the Judiciary Committee members opposing a Feinstein replacement on Monday included Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Tillis. All cited Democrats’ goal of confirming liberal judicial nominees.
Cornyn said, “Republicans are not going to break this precedent in order to bail out Sen. Schumer or the Biden administration’s most controversial nominees.”
McConnell hasn’t made a statement on Feinstein yet, but comments from Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) made it even more clear the temporary replacement that the 89-year-old senator sought is a dead end for Democrats.
As Murkowski put it: “We need to respect not only Senator Feinstein, but also our protocols here in the Senate.”
Republicans also noted that Democrats were only maneuvering to replace her on the Judiciary panel, not her other committee assignments. Summing up his party’s position, Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said that “you’re starting to get a flavor that, certainly from Democrats’ standpoint, this is not going to be a slam dunk.”
“The Dems are sort of using this because they want pressure on her to resign. And I think this gives them sort of a lever to do that,” Thune added of Feinstein.
Democrats still haven’t even picked a potential Feinstein replacement. Schumer said he needs to talk to the caucus about who would take her spot on the Judiciary panel, which she was once in line to chair. Durbin said the choice is up to Schumer, but that he’ll be giving recommendations.
With Feinstein absent — and her timetable to ever return to Washington increasingly uncertain — the committee is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. That means judicial nominees without bipartisan support cannot come to the Senate floor without laborious procedural votes to shake them loose. Even then, those votes would face a 60-senator threshold.
And the stakes are extra-high now: Confirming judges is one of the top Senate Democratic priorities given GOP control of the House.
“Tomorrow, this could happen to the Republicans and they could find themselves in a vulnerable position through no fault of their own,” Durbin said Monday. “And I hope that they’ll show a little kindness and caring for their colleagues.”
Feinstein rejected any talk of resigning in a statement last week, asking that she be removed from the committee until she returns to the Senate in order to allow Judiciary’s work to continue.
There is little recent precedent in the Senate to make a temporary replacement on a committee roster, since changes are usually triggered by a lawmaker leaving the chamber entirely. Notably, Republicans said they would take a different approach if Democrats were seeking approval to seat a replacement California senator on committees, rather than a temporary swap for Feinstein.
Describing Feinstein as currently in “a delicate part of her life and her Senate service,” Durbin said Republicans should “stand by her and give her a dignified departure from the committee.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )House Republicans will formally kick off their immigration and border work on Wednesday, but are sidestepping a controversial asylum proposal, for now.
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Nearly 100 people have been killed due to the conflict — and the death toll continues to rise.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )McCarthy’s pitch to shrink food aid drawing skepticism from fellow Republicans
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While praising the intent behind the House GOP efforts to expand work requirements for SNAP, which used to be known as food stamps, top Republican senators have sought to temper expectations about the proposal’s prospects in the upper chamber.
“I’m sure it won’t be easy,” said John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, noting his party will get a second bite at the apple later this year during the farm bill reauthorization process.
A GOP Senate aide, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, was less diplomatic: “I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We’re going to live in reality over here.”
Senate Republicans have been voicing similar skepticism since House Republicans began privately pitching new proposals to rein in SNAP last year, after they won back the chamber in November.
Asked about the prospects for such measures in the next Congress, Sen. John Boozman (Ark.) the top Republican on the Agriculture Committee, which oversees SNAP, said in an interview a week after the 2022 midterms that the effort “would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes,” a nod to the threshold needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.
And, given the GOP’s unexpectedly slim majority in the House, there’s no guarantee such controversial proposals could even get out of the lower chamber, Boozman pointed out. “You look at the margin in the House,” he said, “It might be difficult to pass it in the House.”
McCarthy and his team are now confronting that reality as they try to hold together their own caucus vis-a-vis the debt ceiling negotiations with the White House. McCarthy, Graves and other top House Republicans have briefed most of the caucus on their plans in a series of calls that stretched into the weekend. So far, leaders have avoided key defections by staying away from too much detail — for example, they have yet to outline a specific plan to close the so-called “loopholes” in the existing SNAP work requirements, which Republicans complain primarily blue states are using to waive some work requirements. Taking a tough line would please the most conservative GOP members, but alienate Republicans from swing districts, and vice versa.
Already, the talk of shrinking SNAP, which currently serves 41 million low-income Americans, is raising pressure on many Republicans that represent districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. Several of those members have raised internal concerns, especially about proposals from their colleagues that would add work requirements for some low-income parents who have children under 18 living at home, according to two other people involved in those conversations, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal caucus matters. A handful of GOP freshmen from New York, one of the states that consistently asks the federal government to waive some work requirements for SNAP recipients, are in an especially tricky spot. Constituents have begun pressing them to oppose efforts that would further restrict SNAP and other key assistance following the loss of key pandemic-era aid — which Biden administration officials argue helped keep the country from falling into a deeper hunger crisis in the wake of Covid-19.
At a farm bill listening session in Rep. Marc Molinaro’s (R-N.Y.) upstate district last Friday, local farmers, food bank operators and anti-hunger advocates urged lawmakers to defend and even expand current SNAP programs.
One state administrator called for “easing burdensome and complicated work and reporting requirements” to provide better access to the program, as the administration’s pandemic-era pause on certain SNAP work requirements is set to end in July. A food bank operator warned of a looming “hunger cliff” in the country as families continue to reel from the fallout of Covid-19. She urged members of Congress “not make decisions on the back of the most vulnerable people.”
Eric Ooms, vice president of the New York branch of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s leading agricultural lobby, told the lawmakers who attended the listening session not to think of SNAP as a “city thing,” noting that the program is a key lifeline to low-income Americans in rural areas where food insecurity “is higher than it’s ever been.”
Molinaro, who says his family relied on food stamps during his childhood, has indicated general support for some SNAP reforms, saying he understands the “inefficiencies” of the program through his experience as a former county executive charged with overseeing it. But he has declined to say if he would support the proposals to expand work requirements that his colleagues have been pushing for months.
In his closing remarks on Friday, Molinaro sounded a note of support for SNAP but indicated only the most needy should get aid — an argument Republicans have used in their campaign to reduce the size of the program.
“Yes, those that struggle the hardest need to know that they have the support, not only of SNAP, but of other wrap-around services,” he said.
Derrick Van Orden, a Trump-aligned Republican who represents a swing district in Wisconsin, spoke during the listening session of his family’s struggle with poverty and reliance on food stamps when he was a child. While he acknowledges some flaws in the current system, he said, “I’m a member of Congress because of these programs.”
“There’s a lot of people who have not gone to bed hungry at night, and I have. And there’s no place for that in America,” Van Orden said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Opinion | Abortion Is Terrifying Republicans
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You could say the Republican fight or flight instinct is kicking in, except it’s none of the former and all of the latter.
It’s like the nature show set in the Serengeti when all the gazelle sense lions in the vicinity and freeze in place, their heads in the air on high alert, waiting to make their next move — but pretty certain someone’s getting taken down, no matter what direction they run.
Much of what has happened since Dobbs is what you’d expect after a longstanding national legal regime on abortion is lifted and the states are given the freedom to decide their own policies. There has been a sorting out toward a new political and policy equilibrium, with red and blue states occupying different poles of the spectrum, and purple states up for grabs.
The good news for Republicans is that there are more restrictions on abortion in place than at any time in the last 50 years, and they still took a majority in the House in last year’s midterms, if smaller than expected.
There is broad sentiment for more restrictions than existed under Roe, but location and specifics matter immensely.
In Indiana and in much of the South, Republicans have passed sweeping abortion bans and paid no discernible political price for it.
In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a six-week ban on abortion in 2019. It went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and Kemp won reelection handily in a race where the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, made abortion a major issue. In Texas, the details differ, but the story is much the same. The GOP-controlled Florida House takes up a six-week abortion ban on Thursday that Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign after it’s passed.
But especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, the issue has been a debacle for the party, and it has suffered notable losses elsewhere, with perhaps more in the offing.
One lesson should be that Republicans can’t just run and hide on an issue that has been of defining importance to their base and that Democrats are going to hammer them on regardless of how they try to minimize it.
Another is that outside of the Deep South, complete bans can’t be defended politically, and the traditional exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother are essential; polling for anti-abortion groups shows that even Republicans and conservatives don’t support prohibitions without the exceptions, which account for a tiny proportion of abortions.
What is required is a meeting somewhere in the middle between an anti-abortion movement that has to embrace incremental change and a Republican establishment that has to be willing to fight.
The Michigan and Wisconsin disasters stemmed from statutes that no one would have written in the post-Dobbs environment. Michigan had a 1931 law still on the books, and Wisconsin’s dated from 1849. These complete bans with narrow exceptions went too far for these purple or blue states, and Republicans were inevitably going to get hurt by their association with them.
In Kansas last year, a ballot measure that said the state’s constitution “does not create or secure a right to abortion” went down to a stinging defeat — the vagueness of the proposal allowed opponents to fill in the picture by arguing it would clear the way for a total ban.
Republicans should be pushing for restrictions that go as far as a state’s voters are willing to accept, and no further, while being absolutely clear about the details. This will require keen political judgment and shrewd tactics, both of which are hard to muster in the midst of a panic.
The other obvious imperative for the GOP is to try to focus attention on the extremism of the Democratic maximalist position on abortion, which is out of step with public opinion (Gallup finds that only 35 percent of people say abortion should be legal with no restrictions). Republican candidates who emerged unscathed on the issue last year had some success in flipping the script this way.
In the current controversy over the abortion pill, that means hitting the Biden administration for attempting an end run around an 1873 law prohibiting the use of the mail to deliver an “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used in an abortion, as a way to undermine abortion restrictions in red states.
While the Republican record fighting ballot measures to guarantee access to abortion is dreadful in the post-Dobbs era — they’ve lost everywhere — they are going to have to do more of it. Emboldened Democrats are getting referenda on the ballot in a number of red states over the next two years. A signature battle will be a vote to write abortion rights into the state constitution in Ohio later this year. If opponents defeat the measure, it will be on the strength of arguments that the amendment will end up making parental consent laws impossible and go further than the pre-Dobbs abortion regime.
Make no mistake: In many places, Republicans are simply seeking to neutralize the Democratic political advantage on the issue and fight to a draw. If this is unsatisfying and discomfiting, it’s still better than the pre-Dobbs context when the politics were easier but it was impossible to get any meaningful restrictions done. Yes, it would have been better if Republicans had spent a little more time during the prior half-century contemplating what they’d do if Roe fell, but here we are.
If there’s one thing that should be clear, it’s that fear — no matter how natural or visceral — is no substitute for careful thought and considered action.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )DeSantis wants a 6-week abortion ban. These Republicans say no.
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“The only thing red in our district is our sun burns,” said state Sen. Alexis Calatayud, a Miami-area Republican who voted against the abortion bill last week when the full Senate approved it.
Calatayud said she voted against the measure because thousands of her constituents in the blue stronghold of Miami don’t support such a restrictive law. Despite being a Republican, she’s still beholden to the will of the voters.
Republicans hold supermajorities in the Florida Legislature, so the few GOP lawmakers who reject the measure have no power to stop or even slow its passage. But their opposition shows how abortion remains a tough issue for the party, especially after Republicans nationally underperformed in the 2022 midterms in part because the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade energized Democratic and swing voters.
That dynamic was much different in Florida, however, Republicans picked up seven new GOP members in the state House and four in the Senate. DeSantis also won the state by historic margins, even in traditionally Democratic areas like Miami.
When Florida lawmakers last year passed a 15-week ban on abortions that offers no exceptions for victims of rape and incest, only one Republican, state Rep. Rene “Coach P” Plasencia of Orlando, voted against it. He later resigned a few months before he was term-limited out of office.
House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell (D-Tampa) said the difference this year is that more Republicans are realizing the consequences of the six-week ban, which does have exceptions for victims of rape, incest and human trafficking up to 15 weeks of pregnancy.
“They know and understand, like we do, that at six weeks most women don’t even know they’re pregnant,” Driskell said. “This is effectively an outright ban.”
At least 12 other states have enacted six-week bans, including neighboring Georgia. The Florida bill, once DeSantis signs it into law, will effectively end the state’s reputation as a safe haven for people seeking abortions in the South. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe last year, at least 4,000 people have traveled to Florida to get abortions from as far away as Texas and Alabama, where abortion is prohibited at any stage of pregnancy.
In addition to its exceptions, the six-week ban includes a provision that would give $5 million to the state Department of Health for programs that promote causes such as contraception, and $15 million for programs that support mothers who give birth.
Republican state Rep. Mike Caruso of Delray Beach told POLITICO he will vote “no” Thursday on the six-week ban, while GOP Rep. Traci Koster of Tampa previously rejected the bill during a March committee vote. She did not respond to requests for comment this week.
“I don’t think the bill takes into consideration certain religious rights,” Caruso said on Wednesday. “And based on that, and some other things, I’m going to be down on the bill.”
Several faith-based groups filed legal challenges last year against the state’s 15-week abortion ban, arguing that it violates the constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion, among other things.
“I do not like this bill,” Caruso said.
The Republicans who vote against it, however, are unlikely to face any blowback from their caucus. The vast majority of the 84 House Republicans are expected to vote for the six-week ban, and Florida GOP Speaker Paul Renner told reporters on Wednesday that some Republicans in Democratic districts must still represent their constituents.
“We have members who will likely not be able to support the bill because they are a good representative of their district. And that’s not where their district is.” Renner said. “We respect those differences in our caucus.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Adams lashes out at national Republicans for casting city as crime-ridden
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The historic indictment of the former president by the Manhattan district attorney brought hundreds of protesters last week to the Manhattan criminal courthouse.
Meanwhile Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, a darling of progressive Democrats for his criminal justice reform policies, has drawn the ire of House Republicans, who say the top prosecutor should focus on violent offenders instead of Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush money scheme. They plan to hold a so-called “field hearing” in New York City next week on violent crime.
Adams criticized House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for his hearing’s singular focus on New York City when “crime in congressional Republican areas per capita is through the roof.” He faulted southern states for the “proliferation of guns” flowing to major cities.
The hearing is the latest move by House Republicans to pressure Bragg, who is pursuing 34 felony charges accusing Trump of falsifying business records to bury damaging allegations of an extramarital affair during the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
The House GOP recently subpoenaed a former Manhattan prosecutor who criticized aspects of Bragg’s investigation. Bragg sued to block it, calling the move a “campaign of harassment.”
The House Judiciary Committee’s scheduled hearing on violent crime pledges to “examine how Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s pro-crime, anti-victim policies have led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents.”
Adams said the committee hasn’t communicated with city officials to prepare for the hearing that will be held in a lower Manhattan federal building.
“This is just an extension of Donald Trump campaigning and it really makes no sense,” Adams said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Republicans facing a reckoning later this week
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“Talking at the NRA meeting in Indianapolis then going to the RNC meeting in Nashville all fits together,” said Paul Helmke, the former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., and president and CEO of the Brady Center/Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “You’re giving a single unified message: You don’t brook dissent or disagreement on guns.”
The cattle calls in Indiana and Tennessee, on the books for months and aimed at reaffirming core principles for the party, come at a moment when there are growing questions from within about its direction. Inside the party’s headquarters, there has been recognition that Republicans need to change their message on abortion with pollsters arguing for a more moderate tack. And among some committee members, there is a belief that the GOP’s image could be bolstered if it lessened its strident opposition to gun safety measures, especially among a group of voters who are just engaging in national politics.
“Every life matters,” said Oscar Brock, an RNC member from Tennessee. “Including those three 9-year-old kids in Green Hills,” the neighborhood in Nashville where they were shot and killed at school. Brock said he believes the party is suffering among swing voters on the issue of guns and abortion.
But while a corner of the party has begun pushing for nuance, others are making the case for staying the course on long-held policies.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37-year-old presidential candidate and wealthy biotech entrepreneur, warned that the party would not succeed “by compromising on its core principles.”
“We should be at once unapologetic on principles, and also live up to the principle instead of just uttering the slogan,” he said in an interview this week.
Ramaswamy suggested the party neither increase abortion access nor tighten gun laws, but instead take steps to make it easier for women to obtain child care or “tap into Social Security early” to fund a family. On guns, Ramaswamy, a father of two young children, said the GOP should get serious about funding armed guards in every school — and “none of us should tolerate kids being killed.”
It’s not uncommon for there to be disagreement within Republican ranks over whether to shore up the party’s standing with the base or adjust and moderate to appeal to independent voters. But the latest round of debate has taken on greater importance after a series of poor election performances, including a Democratic win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. And it has been sparked by a series of events, including those recent mass shootings and a Trump-appointed federal judge’s ruling to suspend the FDA’s approval of a commonly used abortion pill.
The fissures were on vivid display Tuesday in deep-red Tennessee. After previously resisting calls for red flag laws — including from former President Donald Trump in 2019 — Republican Gov. Bill Lee publicly urged the state Legislature to pass a version of it, and announced he would sign an executive order strengthening background checks for firearm purchases.
Lee’s news conference, which came as a surprise even to GOP legislative leaders, followed a shooting March 27 that killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at a Nashville Christian school. Lee said one of his wife’s closest friends — with whom she was planning to have dinner that night — was murdered.
It was a remarkable illustration of a GOP official moving swiftly to try and sand down the party’s image. Less clear is whether a GOP-controlled Legislature that has worked for years to roll back gun regulations will heed the governor’s call to act.
Republicans in the Legislature were already facing the reality that their plan to expel two Democratic House members for protesting the state’s gun laws inside the Capitol had backfired. One of the expelled members, Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville, quickly returned to his seat on Monday after being reappointed by local officials. The other, Justin Pearson of Memphis, is expected to return later this week.
But that wasn’t the only front on which the party was showing signs of retrenchment. On the topic of abortion, Republican anxieties have been building for months.
Last week, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel declared that the party had a “messaging issue” surrounding abortion, citing recent GOP losses. The New York Times, meanwhile, reported on Tuesday that the RNC has been circulating a memo showing that voters are more comfortable with a 15-week abortion ban — even as state GOP lawmakers, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, embrace far more restrictive measures. Left unsaid in the article was that the memo had been put together back in September, well before the midterm elections.
“She was right,” said Brock, referring to McDaniel’s call for a party messaging shift on issues such as abortion. “And yet she got shouted down by the hardcore pro-life wing of the electorate. And I’m sorry that happened.”
The party’s divides on the issue of abortion have erupted into clearer view since last week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race and Friday’s ruling by the Trump-appointed Texas federal judge on mifepristone. Within hours of the ruling, the only likely 2024 GOP candidate to issue a statement of support was former Vice President Mike Pence. No other GOP candidates have commented on the matter.
Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America, an anti-abortion group, said it was the silence itself, not the ruling, that was making life hard for Republicans.
“It’s foolish not to take these issues head on. They paint our side as extremist when there aren’t any counternarratives,” said Nance.
Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), a donor who operates Greater Georgia, a GOP voter outreach group in her purple Southern state, agreed, arguing that Democrats calling for gun reform and expanded abortion access are “gaslighting the issues that Americans care about, which is the economy, crime, education, open borders, fair elections.”
A Republican pollster who has conducted surveys on the issue but declined to speak on the record said the problem was that party officials were “not articulating our position very well and so voters in the absence of information fill the void with what’s provided to them, and it’s largely provided by Democrats.”
But when asked if there was anyone in the party singing the right tune on the issue, the pollster would only name only Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, Mace has repeatedly sounded the alarm that the GOP is wrong on abortion, and on Monday told CNN that the FDA should ignore the Texas judge’s ruling.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Bragg sues House Republicans over ‘campaign of harassment’ amid Trump probe
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The new litigation was filed in federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee. It stems from the first subpoena issued in a sweeping House GOP investigation into Bragg’s office. Republicans launched their probe, led by Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Administration Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), while rallying to Trump’s side ahead of his indictment.
Vyskocil replied to Bragg’s lawsuit Tuesday afternoon, indicating that she would not grant his motion for a temporary restraining order. Instead, she ordered Bragg to serve the lawsuit on Jordan by 9 p.m. Tuesday and for Jordan and the committee to respond to the filing by April 17. Vyskocil said she would hold a hearing on April 19.
Meanwhile, Jordan and members of his committee will take their defense of Trump to a new height by heading to New York on Monday, ramping up their public pressure campaign against Bragg. And the Ohioan quickly took to Twitter to push back on Bragg’s suit.
“First, they indict a president for no crime,” Jordan wrote. “Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.”
The three GOP lawmakers have also been quietly preparing for a potential court battle. They warned in a March response to Bragg’s office that they believed any subpoena would survive a “three-prong test” previously laid out by the Supreme Court that is meant to “determine the legal sufficiency of a congressional subpoena.”
Pomerantz told Jordan and the Judiciary Committee on March 27 that he would not testify voluntarily, citing an instruction he received from Bragg’s office earlier in the month. That instruction came in a letter, dated March 25, in which Bragg’s general counsel, Leslie Dubeck, told Pomerantz that the Judiciary Committee subpoena raised “concerns about federalism, state sovereignty, the limits on congressional power, and the purpose and legality” of the probe.
The battle over Pomerantz could also portend a more prolonged fight between House Republicans and Bragg’s office. Jordan sent a letter on Friday to Matthew Colangelo, senior counsel to the New York County District Attorney’s Office, requesting closed-door testimony. (He took a similar step with Pomerantz before issuing his subpoena.)
And Jordan hasn’t ruled out subpoenaing Bragg himself. Judiciary panel staffers were already laying some of the groundwork for that step, but their timeline is in limbo amid a volley of letters back-and-forth with Bragg’s office. Responses from the DA’s office have not ruled out cooperating and instead pushed for more details on what the three GOP lawmakers would want to discuss as part of any sitdown interview.
Pomerantz began working on investigations into Trump under former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and continued after Bragg took office in December 2021. However, Pomerantz and a colleague abruptly resigned about two months later, with reports quickly emerging that Bragg had balked at launching the wide-scale tax-and-insurance fraud prosecution of Trump that Pomerantz favored.
Two months ago, Pomerantz released a book accusing Bragg of abandoning a winnable criminal case against Trump. Just before the book was published, Bragg sent the author and the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, a letter urging a delay and warning that Pomerantz had a duty to clear any manuscript about his work in advance with Bragg’s office.
The book was published as scheduled, and Pomerantz insisted he’d abided by his duties. “I am confident that all of my actions with respect to the Trump investigation, including the writing of my forthcoming book, are consistent with my legal and ethical obligations,” he said in a statement at the time.
Bragg never sued to block Pomerantz’s book or interviews he granted in connection with its release. However, the district attorney’s new lawsuit does seek orders forbidding the former prosecutor from complying with the House subpoena. It’s unclear whether the DA will ask the judge for a broader order that limits Pomerantz’s ability to discuss his interactions in the office.
Bragg also used his lawsuit to swing back at Trump’s attacks on him, noting that they led to threats to his office.
“Mr. Trump in particular has threatened New York officials with violent and racist vitriol,” Bragg’s filing states. “These statements have had a powerful effect. District Attorney Bragg has received multiple death threats. In one instance, he received a package containing suspicious white powder with a note making a specific death threat against him.”
Bragg’s lawsuit features a chronology of Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee’s public statements attacking the DA and bashing the investigation of Trump, which he says betrays the political nature of the GOP investigation. He contends that those Republican statements are evidence that the committee lacks a “legitimate legislative purpose” for probing his office — and is instead using it to punish a political adversary engaged in a criminal investigation.
To bolster that position, Bragg cites the Supreme Court’s decision in another Trump-related matter: Democrats’ yearslong effort to get the former president’s financial records from his accounting firm, Mazars USA. In its opinion, the court endorsed Congress’ sweeping power to investigate matters it plans to legislate, but acknowledged some limits on that power.
“The purported legislative purposes Chairman Jordan has invoked to support the subpoena are unsupported, speculative, specious, and/or unconstitutional. The subpoena is more broad than reasonably necessary to support any claimed congressional objective,” Bragg’s office contends.
But courts have long been wary of policing Congress’ investigative power, and even more loath to delve into the mindset of individual lawmakers who are pursuing politically explosive investigations. However, Bragg’s lawsuit may tie up Congress’ ability to garner testimony and information related to the Trump probe while it plays out in court.
Erica Orden contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )No Wisconsin wake-up call: Republicans go full steam ahead on abortion restrictions
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DeSantis, Donald Trump’s chief rival in the Republican presidential primary, has said he will sign the bill. Once he does — and if North Carolina Republicans act, too — abortion would be largely illegal throughout the South. It will all but guarantee that the topic will become a defining point in the 2024 campaign.
“It’s obviously a bad issue for Republicans,” said Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist who has conducted extensive focus groups with Republican voters.
Republicans know by now that the politics of abortion in the post-Roe v. Wade era are unfavorable to them. They have since seen the stunning defeat of an anti-abortion measure in heavily-Republican Kansas last year, and continuing through a less-than-red-wave midterm.
On the issue of abortion, “we are at a disadvantage, 100 percent,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist in Wisconsin who oversaw George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign in the state.
But even as Donald Trump himself has said the party went too far with abortion restrictions, there has been little appetite in the broader GOP for pulling back. Public opinion overall favors abortion rights, with even many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying the procedure should be legal in most cases. But among the activist base — including many Republicans who spent decades laboring to overturn Roe — the issue remains a litmus test that features prominently in GOP primaries. The 15-week bans that seemed extraordinarily aggressive just one year ago now are considered half-measures.
“The majority of [state] representatives are in safe seats, so they’re more worried about primaries where social issues play to the base,” said former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat last year. “They’re not really worried about those people running statewide.”
“It’s a very selfish game,” he added.
If Wisconsin is any indication, it may also prove to be enormously destructive to the GOP. In that swing state on Tuesday, liberals flipped the ideological balance of the Supreme Court with Janet Protasiewicz’s lopsided victory over conservative former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly.
Abortion wasn’t the whole story. Money and candidate quality may have mattered more, Graul said. But it was a big part of it — in a state that has a controversial, 19th-century abortion ban on the books, and where Protasiewicz campaigned heavily on abortion rights.
Some Republicans looking ahead to 2024 are already sounding the alarm.
Earlier this week, Jon Schweppe, policy director at the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, warned on Twitter that “Republicans need to figure out the abortion issue ASAP. We are getting killed by indie voters who think we support full bans with no exceptions.”
He urged them to “suck it up” and unite behind Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposed 15-week abortion ban, hoping to blunt Democrats’ criticisms of more restrictive measures.
“I want to ban abortion,” Schweppe said in an interview on Thursday. “That’s a long-term goal. I think almost every pro-lifer will tell you that’s the case. We believe it’s murder. But you know, you’re not going to get there overnight, and you’re not going to get there by doing something that’s against the will of the American people.”
He added: “If the pro-life movement doesn’t get their shit together, ultimately, Republicans are going to say, ‘Well, we have to get elected, and the pro-life movement is a liability.”
Longwell’s focus groups would appear to bear that out. Abortion, she said, is often the first example voters raise when explaining why they view a candidate as “extreme.” And as Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and the midterms laid bare, that designation is deadly in a general election.
“The gap between what base voters demand on abortion, on election denialism, on fidelity to Trump — the gap between that and what swing voters are up for has gotten very wide,” Longwell said. “You always had to do a general election pivot, but it’s turning from a pivot into a massive leap.”
For Democrats, it’s becoming an ongoing political gift — a cudgel they will use to hit Republicans in the run-up to 2024.
Citing what he called Wisconsin’s experience with “the nightmare that Republicans want to inflict on the entire country,” Ben Wikler, the state Democratic Party chair, said, “the political impact of it represents a tectonic shift.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
