Joe Biden, the Axe Files, and the Changing of the High Court: How Democrats Reinforced the Senate Cortez-Massto-Axelrod

A seniorCNN political commentator and host of the “The Axe Files” was an advisor to President Barack Obama and a strategist for his two presidential campaigns. His own opinions are expressed in this commentary. CNN has more opinions on it.

That politician was Joe Biden, who whispered that salty line (in fuller form) to then-President Barack Obama a dozen years ago at the signing of the Affordable Care Act, only to have it captured on a hot mic.

If Biden had shouted it from the rooftop of Cambodia, where he was attending the Asian summit, Democrats would have their control of the US Senate back.

It was the third turn in an election week in which Democrats scored surprise victories across the country.

The Republicans were expected to take the House. Now if they get there, it’s clear it will be by the barest of margins — a slim majority hard to control and difficult to defend when the House is up again in two years.

Senate Republicans also were confident going into Election Day about their chances to break the 50-50 deadlock that has given Democrats control of the Senate on the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote. Now Harris’ vote may not even be needed if Democrats and Sen. Raphael Warnock tackle Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff on December 6 and claim a 51st seat.

If the Democrats control the Senate, they’ll have control over the agenda on the floor and in committees.

Even if the Republican House blocks some major Biden initiatives, the Senate has the authority to confirm judicial nominations and key executive appointments.

McConnell and his Senate majority changed the history by allowing Trump and not Obama to fill the vacancies on the Supreme Court.

Barrett and the two other conservative justices Trump named have profoundly reshaped the high court and opened the door to radical decisions such as the ruling that upended abortion rights, a half-century after the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed them. The backlash may have been caused by the Democratic victories in Nevada and other states this year.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/nevada-democrats-senate-cortez-masto-axelrod/index.html

The First Presidential Reelections in the United States and Their Implications for the Future of American Democracy and the World’s First Prime Minister

After losing his majority in the 1945 parliamentary elections, the Prime Minister is said to have received assurances from his wife that it was a blessing.

Republicans moved in ways that were predicted by the fundamentals, with a Democratic president who had low approval ratings and ruled during times of poor economic indicators. However, in a few keys states and races Democratic candidates outperformed those indicators. The Republicans were defeated by running low quality candidates in some key races.

Normally, midterm elections are harsh on the party of incumbent presidents, particularly when public views of the economy and that President’s performance are negative. The Democrats lost big in past elections.

But this year, the typical referendum on the ruling party and President became equally a judgment of the opposition and its putative leader, Trump. It was a repudiation of election denialism, extremism and coarseness.

Republican politicians who have stuck with Trump despite knowing better because of fear and opportunism didn’t lose that verdict. Watching their quick post-primary exodus from his camp, led by Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media empire, has been something to behold. Losing is not allowed for them, but respecting democracy and decency is.

Trump is an unparalleled escape artist, and his continued sway with primary voters will hold some Republican politicians in place. He insisted that if they cooperated with Biden in Congress it would be against the law. But fear of Trump must now be weighed against the cost of Trump, and the result may be that more Republicans in Congress will have a freer hand to work with Biden on select issues. That would be a very good thing for the country.

The verdict from Nevada came while Biden was overseas, meeting with his peers from around the world and poised for a sidebar meeting with China’s Xi Jinping.

The President might have been hobbled going into these discussions by a thumping in the midterms. It would have intensified growing doubts among our allies and adversaries about the durability of American democracy and about Biden’s political viability.

The people had their say, thumbed their nose at the purveyors of conventional wisdom and dealt a blow to Trump and extremists and election-denying Republicans.

The Fate of Trump: What Do We Really Want to Learn from the Results of Florida and New York, and How Much Have We Learned About It?

Both Begala and Celinda Lake were against it. “We should leave this to Republicans to nominate their own Trump,” Lake said by email.

If Democrats truly worry about the fragility of American democracy, they should not take any steps that would facilitate Trump’s return to office, even if that means a higher chance that they lose the presidency. Considering the risks to democracy should he win the election, the slightly higher probability of Trump holding the presidency is hardly worth it.

Republicans have won more votes for congress than the democrats, but the democrats won more votes by virtue of their strength in certain House races. The Democrats have not been able to get their supporters back to vote in large numbers despite showing strong showings with Latino voters. The strength of the Republicans in Florida and New York was incredible, and they are two of the largest states. So absolutely, both parties have outcomes to celebrate and liabilities to watch.

There is not one narrative to come out of this election. While we usually think about nationalization, in this election, we saw quite significant differences across states. The pre- election polls for Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were better than they were thought to be. Democrats should be happy. But they did much worse than expected in Florida and New York. So which lesson is the best?

Conversely, “Republicans may be suffering a representational penalty in rural areas similar to the penalty Democrats have suffered in urban districts,” Trende wrote, noting that

Republicans may not be a good idea to appeal to Trump voters without him on the ballot. The types of people who are excited for Trump don’t seem to be excited about their endorsements.

In other words, it isn’t just that moderates and independents were scared off by extremist candidates; MAGA voters themselves were not fully animated by their own candidates. Donald Trump is the candidate that they would like to see.

should take comfort in their prospects or feel in good shape nationally. Close elections lead to a divided electorate. Ultimately, I believe turnout is going to matter more than persuasion.

This was in many ways an expected result. The polls and models performed well. The Democrats exceeded expectations, but they are better in seats than in votes.

The parties, Tausanovitch continued, “are very evenly matched and this doesn’t look like it is on a path to change quickly. This election was close. I expect the next election to be close as well. Trump-endorsed candidates, he acknowledged,

There’s no reason to think that the Trump-focused Republican Party cannot win. He almost did in 2020. The election will be close if he is the nominee.

Republican Party elites are becoming more worried about the possibility of a Trump candidacy. I asked Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, what would happen if Trump is the nominee, and he replied by email: “Assuming that the economy is out of the ditch by the end of ’23, I would have to believe a Trump nomination would be devastating.”

In a clear slap at Trump, Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — the Republican who handily won re-election while Maggie Hassan, the Democratic senator, beat the Trump protégé Don Bolduc, her Republican challenger — told a Nov. 18 meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition: “I have a great policy for the Republican Party. Let’s quit supporting unelectable candidates in our primaries and get behind winners who can close the deal in November.

The risk of revolt from the conservative wing will make choosing a speaker very difficult, even if McCarthy is the one to claim the prize. That was the formula that ultimately led to premature retirements by the previous two GOP speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Davis notes that McCarthy is in a tough spot. Dent believes the Speaker would face a more precarious situation than his predecessors because the party had a smaller margin of victory in the House.

Any party that takes over the House in January will have a fragile governing mandate, due to the small GOP majority. It would have been more comfortable if the party’s ideological fight had been waged by pro-Donald Trump extremists.

But it also reflected Greene’s growing personal power, after she broke with some radical GOP members and lined up to support McCarthy’s speakership. After coming to Congress as a fringe figure, and quickly losing her committee assignments over her past retweets of violent rhetoric against Democrats, Greene now promises to be one of the most prominent faces of the new GOP majority. A lot about her position can be deduced from the fact that she is allowed to make offensive comments to people without fear of censure from her party leader. And it also shows that while Trump’s power may be waning elsewhere after a lackluster launch of his 2024 campaign, his influence over his followers in the House, like Greene, remains strong.

Once an avuncular and smooth-talking GOP rising star, McCarthy has adopted some of the confrontational defiance of the “Make America Great Again” movement, seeming to seek out soundbite clashes with the press as badges of honor.

The urgency of the year-end $mu$-year budget crisis pushed by Senator Corbyn McCarthy on the challenge of the threat of China

This is one reason why the current year-end tussle over whether to fund the government for a full year – a bipartisan framework agreement for which was announced Tuesday night – or for just a few months is so critical since it could dump a fiscal crisis on the lap of a weak and easily manipulated new speaker next month.

Today McCarthy faces resistance from the opposite pole of his caucus-a circle of hard-right conservatives who have pledged not to support him, at least on the first ballot. Many in the party establishment still believe that even if conservatives initially block McCarthy, he will ultimately succeed – largely because there is no other alternative likely to draw broader support across the party.

So showing voters in 2024 that GOP governance addressed key problems like inflation and the economy will be important. McCarthy has said he will create a committee to examine the threat posed by China, but most of his recent rhetoric has focused on investigations of the Biden administration and the desire of the conservatives to get rid of Alejandro Mayorkas.

McCarthy was asked by CNN if she thought she was being facetious when she said that. His attitude was consistent with his attempts to change the history of the most serious attack on US democracy in the modern era, which he said was Trump’s fault.

The same dynamic was at play when McCarthy declined to directly criticize the ex-president for meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes at a dinner also featuring Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye, who has recently made a string of antisemitic remarks. In a histrionic performance at the White House after meeting Biden and other congressional leaders last month, the House Republican leader falsely claimed that Trump had condemned Fuentes four times, when he hadn’t done so once.

The white house meeting McCarthy was reported to have had signaled to him that he was open to a large bill. McCarthy told his members that he was a “Hell no” on such a measure, after McConnell declared it to be “broadly appealing”.

Why the next two years can be very different, but what are we going to learn from the hearings? A warning on the California GOP about a long-shot bid for the top job

It seems that the next two years may be characterized not just by intense partisan divides, but also by a profoundly dysfunctional GOP heading into the presidential election.

One thing the California Republican does have going for his dreams of the top job is the fact that there so far is not a strong alternative to his candidacy. A long-shot bid by the former head of the Freedom Caucus has begun.

No matter how they resolve Tuesday’s vote choosing the next speaker of the House, Republicans appear poised to double down on the hard-edged politics that most swing state voters rejected in last November’s midterm election.

Dent, like Davis, believes that aggressive investigation will produce worthwhile revelations, including some that are inevitably uncomfortable for the Biden administration. But Dent acknowledges the potential for the hearings to backfire on Republicans if they appear shrill or focused on far-right grievances and conspiracy theories. Dent says the way you do things and the tone matter. They can find a lot of issues that are not going to play well. With the public. The speaker is going to be in this position to have to mediate these disputes constantly.”

Two Midterms for the Republicans: The New York and California Democrat-Laborative Podhorzer Insights on Biden 2020

In 1923, the only time more than one ballot was needed to pick a speaker was when Republicans held only a narrow majority. Then the complication was that a minority of left-leaning progressive Republicans initially resisted conservative incumbent Speaker Frederick Gillett.

“I think he prevails because there is no other candidate with his experience and fundraising ability and at the end of the day the party base will close ranks because nothing happens until you have a Speaker: No investigations… nothing,” former GOP Rep. Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote me in an email. The majority of the conference is loyal to him.

Dach is a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project which is a Democratic-aligned group that responds to House investigations of the Biden administration. “I think the die on the next two years has been cast by giving these people the power and the podium.”

Dach and other Democrats believe that the House majority will reinforce the GOP’s reputation as the party of hardline Trump allies by allowing them to pursue conservative grievances.

The real show is going to be these extreme liberals, insists Dach. “Every day that they are on a committee, every day they are on television, is a bad day for the entire Republican Party.”

But in bending to the confrontational and culture war politics preferred by those members, McCarthy is ensuring problems for the 18 House Republicans who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. More than half of those are in New York and California alone – states where the turnout in the presidential year of 2024 will likely favor Democrats more than in 2022.

Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, notes that the GOP has cumulatively lost enormous ground in those states since Trump took office.

There was only one Democratic governor in those five states when he made his inauguration speech, and four Democratic Senators, no speaker of the state assembly or majority leader in the Senate in those states, according to Podhorzer. “In a month, four of the five states will have Democratic governors, 9 of the 10 Senators are Democrats, and three of the state legislative chambers are led by Democrats.” Democrats in those states have won since 2016 because they aren’t going to vote for Republicans.

“It was two midterms happening at the same time – depending on whether you were in a place where that new bubble of Democratic voters believed they had to come out to beat MAGA again,” Podhorzer argued.

Rep. Jim Jordan, a former House Freedom Caucus Chairman, and a long-time friend of Joe Biden: The second floor fight for House leadership

Conservative hardliners nominated Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio on Tuesday to be speaker of the House during the chamber’s second and third votes amid the floor fight for House leadership.

McCarthy’s opponents coalesced in a second round of voting behind Jordan, who used to coordinate these types of rebellions but who is now a McCarthy-backer with his eye on the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee.

A majority of at least 218 votes is needed to be elected speaker. The tally for the first ballot in the speaker vote was 203 for McCarthy, 10 for Rep. Andy Biggs and six for Jordan – with three Republicans voting for other candidates.

Jordan is a high-ranking conservative, a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and has served as its first chair from 2015 to 2017. He was a ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. The position of ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee was taken away from him by the new GOP-controlled House.

Jordan is a close ally of former President Donald Trump. After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Trump refused to concede while making claims of election fraud, Jordan supported lawsuits to invalidate the election results and voted not to certify the Electoral College results.

What Did Jill Filipovic Tell Us About the GOP in 2021? A Response to the Fringe’ after the January 6 Attack’

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter @JillFilipovic. The opinions that are expressed in this commentary are of her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Democrats were thrilled when they voted for Jeffries to be speaker despite being in the minority. He succeeded Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House, who led House Democrats for two decades.

But the Republican House majority is a narrow one, and Republican candidates far underperformed expectations in the midterms, as a promised red wave was more of a small but toxic red tide. The party has unfortunately moved so far toward conspiracy and the cult of former President Donald Trump that many of its most loyal members, including Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, are unwilling to join.

She was one of the few Republicans who voted for McCarthy. These are people with views extreme enough and divorced enough from reality that they would have once been called “fringe.” But how fringe is a view if it’s held by more than a dozen elected members of Congress?

He seems to understand just how damaging Trump and the cult of personality around him has been to the GOP – his private phone calls made in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, made clear that he worried that members of his own party were endangering other lawmakers with their rhetoric – but then chooses to empower those dangerous members anyway.

And McCarthy, who in the early days after the January 6 attack said Trump bore responsibility for it but didn’t support his impeachment, and who helped usher conservative extremists into office and then protect them once there, is experiencing the all-too-predictable outcome of handing power to the unhinged.

The McCarthy House Speaker Vote What Matters: The Story of Jim Jordan and his Rebellious Opposition to the Speaker’s Representation

Nobody knows how this will end. See CNN live for the latest from the day. Lawmakers have to regroup after their third round of voting for a speaker.

There is a story about how 20 Republican lawmakers are unwilling to back the man, despite their demands. The votes started with 19 holdouts, but grew to 20 in the third vote.

When Donalds decided to support Jordan, some of McCarthy’s support started to show in the third vote.

Donalds joined the original 19 people, including people like Georgia’s Gaetz, and Texas’ Roy.

The CNN analyst, moderate Republican and former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, said that Jim Jordan was always the ring leader of rebellions and he had trained these guys well.

“Now he ostensibly is trying to get these guys to back off and they won’t. Dent said, “This is the most crazy thing I’ve ever witnessed on the House floor because he was the quintessential rebel and he can’t control them.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/03/politics/mccarthy-house-speaker-vote-what-matters/index.html

The Electoral Correlator, the First Republican Speaker and the Future of the Senate: A Picture Opportunity About Bipartisanship in Kentucky

Republicans will find a way to unite behind someone like McCarthy or another. A floor fight in 1923 took nine votes. The votes could go on for months before the war began.

Gaetz, in nominating Jordan before the second round of voting, stood right in front of McCarthy and accused him of having “sold himself” in the quest for the speaker post.

This drama is a sideshow and presage a difficult year for the speaker in which the debt ceiling must be raised to avert an economic meltdown.

CNN anchor John King said the Republicans must figure out what they are going to do. The governing party of the House of Representatives cannot come to a consensus on who should lead them. Do not even think about immigration, what we will do about inflation or the border, America’s place in the world.

That’s all on hold until they find a leader. There will be a photo opportunity about bipartisanship in Kentucky on Wednesday, as House Republicans wrestle with how to convince their members who have no interest in the system to vote for them.

The longest-serving Senate party leader in history will be joined by the governor of Kentucky and the president of the country to announce new funding for the upgrade of a bridge. There will be Republicans and Democrats at the event.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in the US Congress in 2021, will give the region a key piece of infrastructure, Beshear told Kate on Tuesday.

The statement that there is no partisan debate about the bridge is very positive, Beshear said. He later added the bipartisan quintet would “announce that we’ve done the right thing for our people. It is pretty refreshing.”

He’ll have to find a way to work with whomever Republicans ultimately choose to be their speaker and to find a way around the lawmakers who have no problem grinding the government to a halt.