As a senator from Texas, Cruz has championed his state’s voter-ID law, the strictest in the country. The law—which allows voters presenting a handgun permit to cast a ballot, but not those with a student ID—has been blocked by federal courts on three occasions. Cruz’s website featured a petition calling on supporters to tell Obama:…
Tag: gop
2016 Republican Candidates Voters First Forum | Video | C-SPAN.org
All current or likely Republican presidential candidates were invited to take part in a “Voters First Republican Presidential Forum” on the campus of St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. This event was the first opportunity to hear all of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates on one stage. The candidates appeared one at a time, answering questions determined…
Officials: Kansas Faces $279M Budget Gap By July
For the next fiscal year, the new projection was $5.8 billion in revenues — short of the nearly $6.2 billion that legislative researchers had been assuming in their unofficial forecasts. The projected shortfall of $436 million is about 7 percent, and higher than the $282 million gap estimated unofficially. The new revenue projection for the…
Right vs. Left in the Midwest
MINNESOTA and Wisconsin share much more than bone-chilling winters: German and Northern European roots; farming; and, until recently, a populist progressive tradition stretching back a century to Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob La Follette and the birth of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But in 2010 these cousin states diverged. By doing so they began a natural experiment that…
Boehner Too Embarrassed to Defend Extortion
The most telling thing about Boehner’s remarks is their brevity. The Speaker spoke for about five minutes, responded briefly to one question, and bolted out the door. Obama’s disquisition earlier today may have been long over an hour and professorial. But he was able to defend his position against questions, engage counterarguments, and marshal facts…
Republican Court Unpacking Plan Takes Judicial Manipulation to a New Level
Republicans in the Senate have made no secret of their efforts to block the President’s constitutional responsibility to appoint federal judges. They have filibustered unquestionably qualified nominees, like Caitlin Halligan. And their obstruction of the confirmation process kept several nominees waiting more than a year for a vote. In fact, on average, our judicial nominees…
The GOP’s dangerous Obamacare strategy
In today’s New York Times, Jonathan Weisman and Robert Pear report on a peculiar problem faced by the Affordable Care Act: Republicans who’re unable to repeal it also refuse to permit any tweaks or technical correction that would help it work better. In fact, they’re creating new problems by withholding implementation funds. This is…
Virginia GOP Nominee For Attorney General Would Force Women To Report Their Miscarriages To Police
If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain R had become law. And yet,…
Fellow Progressives: The IRS ‘Scandal’ Is a Crock and You Should Fight Back
Here’s what the IRS has been looking for. The biggest political farce on earth is the extraordinarily naïve perception that a Tea Party 501 (c) (3), the right-wing entity that sprung up nationwide, fully nurtured and politicized in a matter of weeks, hasn’t been in daily violation of the letter and spirit of what…
Obama Parries With House GOP on Budget, Immigration
President Barack Obama continued his push for a grand bargain, an immigration overhaul and the rest of his agenda in a meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday, but GOP leaders immediately shut the door on any compromises that would include new taxes. Obama appealed to Republicans to come to the table on a bipartisan budget…
Ryan in Fantasyland
Voters might not have focused on the fact that Ryan’s original plan wouldn’t have produced a balanced budget until today’s high-school students reached middle age, but the true deficit hawks in the House Republican caucus certainly noticed. They demanded a budget that reached balance much sooner. Hence Ryan’s revised plan, which claims to accomplish this…
The Group Behind CPAC Has a White-Nationalist Problem
Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Sarah Palin will be headlining, but 20 percent of the panelists this year will be African American, according to CPAC bean counters. And the CPACers proudly point to the prominent role of Latinos and women on various panels. Yet the CPAC organizers have neglected one important task as they attempt to…
With Budget, GOP Lawmakers Renew Push To Undo Health Law
The budget plan for 2014 being advanced by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., includes a proposal to give states more authority over Medicaid. Meanwhile, the bill being considered by the Senate to fund the federal government through the end of this year does not include the funds for the exchanges that the administration wanted. The Washington Post:…
Sequestration And How The ‘Liberal Media’ Keep Blaming Obama For Republican Behavior
As key observers have noted in recent days, the facts on sequestration are not in dispute: Obama has made repeated offers to meet Republicans in the middle with a proposed deficit reduction plan built around a mix of spending cuts, reform to entitlement programs, and revenue increases. Republicans have countered by saying they will not…
Obama Reaches Out to GOP on Spending
President Barack Obama is following through on his search for a “caucus of common sense” with that rarest of presidential commodities — his own time. The president’s poor relationships with most rank-and-file congressional Republicans are well-known. He rarely calls lawmakers personally — something that was especially true in the past year and a half as…
Democrats Racially Diverse; Republicans Mostly White
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 89% of Republican self-identifiers nationwide in 2012, while accounting for 70% of independents and 60% of Democrats. Over one-fifth of Democrats (22%) were black, while 16% of independents were Hispanic. These results are based on more than 338,000 interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking in 2012, and…
Grand Theft Election
President Barack Obama won a commanding victory in this November’s elections, defeating Republican candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by nearly 4 percentage points in the popular vote. In doing so, President Obama became the first president to twice win more than 51 percent of the popular vote since President Dwight D. Eisenhower did so…
How Republicans Plan To Rig The Next Presidential Election, In Six Pictures
Yesterday, Virginia Republicans took the first step to move a GOP plan to rig the Electoral College forward in that state. Similar plans are under consideration in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The Republican election rigging plan targets blue states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012, and changes the way they allocate electoral votes…
Think Obama’s a huge spender? Then you need to see these two charts.
The takeaway, Drum says, is that “total government spending didn’t go up much during the Clinton era, and it’s actually declined during under President Obama. In the last two decades, it’s only gone up significantly during the Bush era, the same era in which taxes were cut dramatically.” But some said Drum’s chart was a…
Scott in a very bad position
40% of Republicans would prefer someone else Scott’s approval rating is just 33%, with 57% of voters disapproving of him. Scott’s numbers had gradually improved over the course of 2012, but these numbers represent a regression from early November when he was at a 37/48 spread. Scott meets with near universal disapproval from Democrats (21/71)…