Daily Kos

Stephen Colbert says goodbye to Jeff Sessions by eating him on live TV

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 7:50 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 19:50

Screen_Shot_2018-11-08_at_9.05.08_AM.png

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert took on the news that Donald Trump had fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday. After covering that Sessions’ resignation letter implied that he was fired, Colbert reminded the audience that this was not a big surprise, considering the two men’s history together.

Trump has made no secret of his feelings about Sessions. He’s called Sessions a “‘traitor,” “a dumb Southerner,” “Mr. Magoo,” and perhaps most humiliating of all, “member of my administration.”

But Colbert never lets Jeff Sessions off the hook for being the horrendous person Jeff Sessions is.

No word what Jeff Sessions is going to do next. I assume he’s going to spend more time with his family separation policy.

Colbert then gave his audience a real tasty treat by bringing out the recently fired Sessions to say his goodbyes.

Arkansas man faces multiple felony 'terroristic threatening' charges for threats to CNN

Jen Hayden

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 7:20 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 19:20

Benjamin Craig Matthews mugshot after being charged for making terroristic threats against CNN

An Arkansas man has been arrested and charged with 18 different counts of making threats aimed at CNN’s Don Lemon, Rep. Maxine Waters, Planned Parenthood, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Michael Avenatti and more. The Baxter County Sheriff’s office picked up 39-year-old Benjamin Craig Matthews of Mountain Home, Arkansas. His charges include five counts of “felony terroristic threats.”

More from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

In one call, according to the affidavit, Matthews asked the CNN switchboard operator, "Could I be directed to DL's dead body hanging from a tree?"

Another time, Matthews asked if his call could be directed to "pipe bombs for DL."

In another call, Matthews spoke of "bloody pictures of DL cut up in small pieces, like the movie Saw," according to the affidavit from Sgt. Brad Hurst with the Baxter County sheriff's office.

Matthews is facing a slew of charges.

Matthews has been charged with five counts of felony terroristic threatening, four counts of misdemeanor terroristic threatening and nine counts of harassing communications, which is a misdemeanor.

It must be noted that Matthews targets are the very same media personalities and Democratic politicians who are frequently targeted by Donald Trump. Barely a week after a Trump fan sent more than a dozen pipe bombs to Trump critics, Donald Trump once again stood at the presidential podium and outrageously pointed his finger at CNN’s Jim Acosta and once again exclaimed that CNN was reporting “fake news” and Trump once again declared Jim Acosta an “enemy of the people.”

What did Susan Collins get back home for her Kavanaugh betrayal? A 9-point approval drop

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 6:50 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 18:50

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 21: Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh meets with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in her office on Capitol Hill on August 21, 2018 in Washington, DC. The confirmation hearing for Judge Kavanaugh is set to begin September 4. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images) — Susan Collins with the man who represents her future political undoing, Brett Kavanaugh.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) traded her reputation and principles away for the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court fight for an overall loss of 9 points in her approval rating. Morning Consult polled Maine and found that " the political ground has shifted beneath her ahead of a potential 2020 re-election run."

Forty-five percent of Mainers approve of her job performance post-Kavanaugh, a 9-point drop since Morning Consult last surveyed over the summer. She picked up a lot of Republicans: "68 percent approved and 25 percent disapproved—a net 43-point jump." She could make that shift because Republicans disliked her before, displeased with her general bipartisany persona and her anti-Obamacare repeal vote.

She's 32 points underwater with Democrats, having gone from a 39 percent disapproval to a miserable 63 percent bad rating. She's not likely to be able to court many of them as she has in the past. She's fared slightly better with independents, her disapproval rating jumping just 4 points from 31 to 35, but her approval dropping from 56 to 41 points. An awful lot more independents have decided they're undecided about what they think of her.

The "Kavanaugh bump" for the Republican base was pretty short-lived, so we'll see how long they still like Collins, given the hardest core of them have looked on her as a sellout for most of her career. She burned bridges with many of them long ago.

The bridges she just burned with Democrats, with Independents, and particularly with women, her staunchest supporters, aren't going to be rebuilt. Every heinous decision out of the Supreme Court that Kavanaugh signs on to is going to rebound on her, forever. Between that and the $3.7 million war chest that the grassroots has raised to hand over to her 2020 Democratic challenger, she's going to have a very uncomfortable two years. We'll make sure of that.

Motel 6 agrees to settle for millions after turning over Latino guest information to ICE

Gabe Ortiz

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 6:20 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 18:20

MESA, AZ - FEBRUARY 28: Honduran immigration detainees sit in a holding cell before boarding a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), deportation flight bound for San Pedro Sula, Honduras on February 28, 2013 in Mesa, Arizona. ICE operates 4-5 flights per week from Mesa to Central America, deporting hundreds of undocumented immigrants detained in western states of the U.S. With the possibility of federal budget sequestration, ICE released 303 immigration detainees in the last week from detention centers throughout Arizona. More than 2,000 immigration detainees remain in ICE custody in the state. Most detainees typically remain in custody for several weeks before they are deported to their home country, while others remain for longer periods while their immigration cases work through the courts. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Remember back when Motel 6 decided to leave a light on for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and turn over guests “with Latino-sounding names” for deportation? The motel chain’s decision to moonlight as mass deportation agents is set to cost the company millions, following legal action from a group of Latino guests racially profiled by the motel chain in Arizona and Washington state.

“Motel 6 will pay up to $7.6 million to Hispanic guests to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming that it violated their privacy by regularly providing guest lists” to ICE, Reuters reports. “Motel 6 also agreed to a two-year consent decree barring it from sharing guest data with immigration authorities absent warrants, subpoenas, or threats of serious crime or harm.”

That probably should have been the policy all along, except it wasn’t, and it’s going to be an expensive mistake: “up to $5.6 million will go to Motel 6 guests who faced immigration removal proceedings after their personal information was shared,” Reuters continues. Last fall, Motel 6 admitted that motel employees regularly shared guest information with ICE. In two Arizona locations, agents conducted at least 20 arrests between February 2017 and August 2017 without any arrests at surrounding motels during that same period.

In Washington state, Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued due to the same practice, alleging that "Motel 6 staff observed ICE identify guests of interest to ICE, including by circling guests with Latino-sounding names,” resulting in numerous arrests. The New York Times reported that “one of the plaintiffs, who is identified with a pseudonym, was held in detention for over a month after ICE officials arrested him in Phoenix outside the Motel 6 where he was staying. The lawsuit said a Motel 6 employee had photocopied his driver’s license from Mexico.”

“Motel 6 corporate leaders promised to put a stop to such practices throughout their chain of 1,400 hotels,” the Los Angeles Times reported last year, but that won’t do much to assuage the fears of Latinos who called for a boycott of the chain. "Motel 6 fully recognizes the seriousness of the situation and accepts full responsibility,” said the chain and MALDEF, which filed the lawsuit, “for both compensating those who were harmed and taking the necessary steps to ensure that we protect the privacy of our guests.”

Wisconsin Republicans plot to weaken governor's powers now that it will be a Democrat

Laura Clawson

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 5:50 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 17:50

MILWAUKEE, WI - OCTOBER 26: Tony Evers, Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin, speaks at a rally in support of Wisconsin Democrats at North Division High School on October 26, 2018 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former President Barack Obama also spoke at the event. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) — Tony Evers

Republicans in the Wisconsin state legislature have been only too happy to give the governor power, while it was Scott Walker. Now that Tony Evers, a Democrat, will be the state’s governor, Republicans are talking about following in the footsteps of North Carolina Republicans and undermining the will of the voters by stripping the governor of powers:

"If there are areas where we could look and say, 'Geez — have we made mistakes where we granted too much power to the executive,' I'd be open to taking a look to say what can we do to change that to try to re-balance it," [Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos told reporters.

As for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald:

Fitzgerald is willing to consider taking away some of the governor’s powers before Evers is seated, said his chief of staff, Dan Romportl.

“He has said previously that he is open to it, and plans to discuss the topic with Senate Republican caucus members (Thursday),” Romportl said by email.

Republicans have until January 7, when Evers is sworn in, to decide how to weaken the governor and jam it through. It’s almost too cartoonishly evil to be believed, except that we’ve already seen North Carolina Republicans do it. Today’s Republican Party is about power over anything else, and they don’t care what they have to do to get it.

Trump's making migrant minors appear in court via video, and it's hurting their cases

Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 5:20 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 17:20

JUCHITAN DE ZARAGOZA, MEXICO - OCTOBER 30: A child, one of thousands of Central American migrants in the caravan, eats while in a camp for the evening on October 30, 2018 in Juchitan de Zaragoza, Mexico. Following a break on Sunday, the migrants, many of them fleeing violence in their home countries, resumed their march towards the United States border. As fatigue from the heat, distance and poor sanitary conditions has set in, the numbers of people participating in the march has slowly dwindled but a significant group are still determined to get to the United States. It has been widely reported that the Pentagon will deploy 5,200 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to prevent members of the migrant caravan from illegally entering the country. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) — A child, one of thousands of Central American migrants in the caravan, eats while in a camp for the evening on October 30, 2018, in Juchitan de Zaragoza, Mexico.

Trump’s Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) wants to livestream migrant children’s testimony into courtrooms rather than allow them to appear in court. The administration’s claim is that it will speed up proceedings. Whether that’s true or not, the costs to justice outweigh any such benefit.

There’s no way to quantify the extent to which video-streaming harms minors’ cases. At least, not yet. Only 30 minors have been streamed into court so far, though the administration has queued up an additional 75 for inclusion in its “pilot.” Once there’s a larger sample size, we may be able to compare outcomes to those of similarly situated minors who appeared in person in the same jurisdictions. (NB: It’s “may” because obfuscation is a given.)

Video-streaming will disadvantage minors. It’s not favorable to witnesses generally, but it’s especially problematic for minors giving emotional testimony. See below an excerpt from a dissertation on the effects of videoconferencing on courtroom credibility, presented as written, cites and all, to illustrate how well-founded its conclusions are.

[R]esearch into perceptions of videotaped individuals indicates that viewing a person on screen versus live, affects how they are perceived by observers. Landström and Granhag (2010) found that children giving courtroom testimony via CCTV were judged more negatively than children appearing live when adults were asked to answer questions regarding the child’s appearance credibility, and likability. The reason for this difference in perception is attributed to the vividness effect (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Testimonies that are emotionally interesting, image provoking, and proximate in a sensory and temporal-spatial context are considered to be vivid. This type of testimony is perceived as more credible, is paid more attention, and is better remembered than nonvivid testimony (Bell & Loftus, 1985). Live testimonies are perceived more vividly than CCTV testimonies due to the spatial proximity of the live witness.

Live witnesses are perceived more positively than remote. Testifying by videoconference also limits minors’ ability to communicate in full—via demeanor, body language, etc.—and introduces additional factors that could affect their testimony, e.g., how translation works for each side, their feelings about being on film, their inability to see what’s going on in the rest of the courtroom, their reactions to who’s capturing them on video, and so on. The AP reports that some become so frustrated they simply “give up.”

Texas state Republican who called ICE on pro-immigrant demonstrators gets the boot

Gabe Ortiz

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 4:50 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 16:50

Screen_Shot_2018-11-08_at_11.43.16_AM.png — Matt Rinaldi, soon-to-be former Texas state representative

Texas Republican state Rep. Matt Rinaldi, the noted pendejo who responded to pro-immigrant demonstrators outraged about the state’s discriminatory “show me your papers” law by siccing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on them, was given the boot by voters this week, the Texas Observer reports. “With all of the early vote in plus more than half of precincts reporting, Rinaldi’s opponent Julie Johnson is up by 12 points. The odds of Rinaldi coming back from that are virtually nil, so the Observer is calling it for Johnson.”

Good riddance to trash people, because that’s what Rinaldi has been. Outraged over the state’s racist measure, communities and activists of all ethnicities and citizenship statuses responded by flooding the statehouse with chants of “shame!” Rinaldi responded by calling ICE “on several illegal immigrants who held signs in the gallery which said ‘I am illegal and here to stay,'” he alleged in a Facebook post at the time.

State Rep. Ramon Romero said at the time that Rinaldi “saw a bunch of people who look Latino, and he assumed they were undocumented. So how can he say SB4 won’t lead to racial profiling?” Rinaldi’s actions let to another Latino member of the statehouse, Rep. Cesar Blanco, receiving a racist message from a man railing on “illegal alien spics” and saying he “stands with” Rinaldi. “White power,” the man said before ending the conversation.

Protesters later demonstrated outside Rinaldi’s office, some with “bags of ice,” The Dallas Morning News reported. “Dallas political activist Carlos Quintanilla, who used social media to organize Wednesday's protest, said he wanted to let Rinaldi know protesters will work to remove him from his seat in 2018.” Well done Carlos, congrats to Johnson, and adiós Matt.

Affordable Care Act enrollments sluggish in first week, let's help pick up the pace

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 4:20 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 16:20

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 04: Supporters of the Affordable Care Act gather in front of the U.S Supreme Court during a rally March 4, 2015 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case of King v. Burwell that could determine the fate of health care subsidies for as many as eight million people. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) — We've been fighting for this for a long time. Let's keep it up.

Enrollments in the Affordable Care Act are lagging substantially behind last year’s sign-up period.

By the numbers: A little over 370,000 people selected plans through HealthCare.gov in the first 3 days of open enrollment, according to figures the Health and Human Services Department released yesterday.

By contrast, more than 600,000 people selected plans in the first 4 days of the last enrollment period.

Roughly 1 million fewer people have visited HealthCare.gov.

That’s not good, but there’s certainly time for it to turn around. Now that Democrats will be in control of the House, people who might have been waiting to make sure it was still going to be around can sign up. "Overall, it’s just too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions from this data aside from the fact that demand remains strong," said Get America Covered, the grassroots organization that’s stepped in to do the job of recruitment, public education, and assistance that the Trump administration has refused to do.

The grassroots is going to have to step up to make this year a success. You have until December 15 (in a handful of states that deadline is extended into January) to sign up or help get your friends, family, coworkers, tradespeople, whoever enrolled.

There are some great tools to help you or people you are helping figure out what options are available all across the country. Now that all the voting is done, get out there and get people signed up for Obamacare. It’s your second chance to give Trump and the Republicans the finger.

You know where to go, right? Healthcare.gov, because even Trump hasn’t been able to blow it up.

This Week in Statehouse Action: November Reign edition

Carolyn Fiddler

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 3:50 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 15:50

INDIO, CA - APRIL 23: Musicians Axl Rose, Slash and Melissa Reese of Guns N' Roses perform onstage during day 2 of the 2016 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival Weekend 2 at the Empire Polo Club on April 23, 2016 in Indio, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella) — Can't reign without a throne amirite

It was a good night.

Tuesday, mean.

I mean, it was long (note to self: don’t get in front of a camera at 1 AM after being up for 20 hours without at least checking my hair), and it was by no means perfect.

But it was tasty as heck, especially down-ballot.

And you’ve shown great Patience hanging in here over the course of the cycle for campaign updates and statehouse news and election predictions.

(By the by, I did pretty well in terms of prognostication—all of the Lean and Likely D chambers on this list were won or flipped by Democrats, as well as two of the four Tossup chambers and one Lean R chamber.)

So here’s what happened while you were sad about the U.S. Senate.

Campaign Action

Paradise Capital City: The bottom line: Democrats came out of Election Day 2018 with a lot more power in statehouses—and in states generally.

By flipping key state legislatures and governorships, passing game-changing ballot measures, and stripping Republicans of total government control in key swing states, Democrats made significant progress towards building real power at all levels of the ballot this weekend.

Democrats flipped over 350 statehouse seats on Tuesday, but as I’ve pointed out (with some ire) before, that number doesn't actually matter. Here are the numbers that do:

Democrats flipped six legislative chambers:
- Colorado Senate
- Maine Senate
- Minnesota House
- New Hampshire House
- New Hampshire Senate
- New York Senate
Republicans, on the other hand, might not have flipped a single chamber.
- Democrats entered the election with a majority coalition in the Alaska House, and we won’t know if that holds or not until the parties have their leadership elections in a few days.
On top of flipping chambers, Democrats won four new supermajorities by picking up seats in the Connecticut Senate, Nevada Assembly, the Oregon House, and the Oregon Senate.
More importantly (since all those states have Democratic governors, so how many vetoes do we really expect them to need to override, anyway?), Democrats stripped Republicans of supermajorities in four chambers:
- Michigan Senate
- North Carolina House
- North Carolina Senate
- Pennsylvania Senate
Of these, North Carolina is the real game-changer.
- With Republican supermajorities broken, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper will be able to veto the GOP-controlled legislature's terrible bills without Republicans basically saying "Oh, how adorable" and just overriding him.
It’s super weedy (you’ve met me, right?), but the Pennsylvania Senate Republicans’ loss of their supermajority is significant, too.
- Early this year, you may recall that the House had threatened to impeach the state Supreme Court justices who had overturned their congressional gerrymander.
- Articles of impeachment need only a majority to pass the lower chamber, but actually impeaching and removing justices requires a supermajority in the Senate—which Republicans most definitely were in possession of at the time this drama unfolded.
- Republicans ultimately backed off their attempt to usurp the court, but the existential threat to Democratic justices remained.
- Now, though, with the GOP’s loss of at least five Senate seats, the independence of the state’s highest court is quite a bit more secure.
While some results are still outstanding as of this writing, and other races are expected to go to recounts, we know that Democrats also picked up seats in a number of heavily Republican states, including some of the most heinously gerrymandered chambers.
- In Texas, Democrats flipped at least 12 House seats and two Senate seats.
- In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped at least 16 House seats and five Senate seats.
- In Florida, Democrats flipped seven House seats and one Senate seat.
- In Michigan, Democrats flipped five House seats and five Senate seats.
- In Iowa, Democrats flipped five House seats.
- In West Virginia, Democrats flipped five House seats and two Senate seats.

Voters oust Republican sheriffs who collaborated with ICE to deport immigrants

Gabe Ortiz

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 3:20 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 15:20

Screen_Shot_2018-11-08_at_1.16.22_PM.png

A number of Republican sheriffs who for years worked hand-in-hand with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were ousted from office by Democrats this week. “The victories were emblematic of a greater shift among the electorate,” Think Progress reported, “a backlash to Republicans’ overall racist, anti-immigrant midterm messaging.”

Among the Democratic victories was the defeat of Republican Donnie Harrison, who had served as Wake County, North Carolina’s sheriff since 2002. Harrison had partnered with ICE under the 287(g) program, through which “ICE deputizes local or state law-enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.” In reality, it’s a program rife with racial profiling, costs counties millions, and tears families apart.

Democrat Gerald Baker pledged to stop that, saying that “you’ve got a guy who may get stopped out there for expired tags or no driver’s license and he gets in there and they put that detainer on him and he may have a wife and whole house full of children, babies and everything else.” On Tuesday, the voters agreed with him and elected him the new sheriff. “I’m a little in shock,” said Felicia Arriaga, a professor of sociology at Appalachian State University.

While Hennepin County, Minnesota, Sheriff Richard Stanek was not officially a part of 287(g), he said last summer that he would go “above and beyond” to help target undocumented immigrants. This week, he lost to Democrat Dave “Hutch” Hutchinson. “We’re not going to deal with ICE,” he said, “because we have an obligation to our tax-paying people, and our people who live, visit and work in Hennepin County, to make sure they’re safe.”

It wasn’t just anti-immigrant figures that got stopped in their tracks. In Oregon, an effort by sheriffs and anti-immigrant hate group FAIR to end the state’s longstanding sanctuary policies and force police to collaborate with Trump’s deportation force lost by a massive 63-37 percent margin, immigration rights advocacy group America’s Voice said. Nationally, other anti-immigrant candidates running for federal office were also defeated by voters.

Criminal justice reform just swept America

Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 2:50 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 14:50

Yraida Guanipa, an activist released from prison more than 10 years ago who currently defends other ex-convicts' human rights with her organization YGInstitute, talks to AFP in her office in Miami, Florida, on October 23, 2018. - Florida voters will decide in the November 6th midterm elections if they want to restore the right to vote to 1.5 million disenfranchised ex-convicts who already completed their sentences and hadn't committed murder or sex crimes. The law that permanently disenfranchises felons in Florida goes back to the Reconstruction era. According its critics, it was designed to keep the black population from voting. (Photo by Leila MACOR / AFP) (Photo credit should read LEILA MACOR/AFP/Getty Images) — Yraida Guanipa, an activist released from prison more than 10 years ago who currently defends other ex-convicts' human rights with her organization YGInstitute, in her office in Miami, Florida, on October 23, 2018.

November 6, 2018, brought major criminal justice reform victories across the country, from what’s criminalized to what sentences can be applied. Perhaps the two biggest wins were in Louisiana and Florida: Tuesday marked the demise of Louisiana’s non-unanimous juries, which made wrongful convictions far too easy, and the re-enfranchisement of 1.5 million Floridians.

As of January 1, thanks to Amendment 2, all 12 members of 12-member juries in Louisiana will have to believe in a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to convict. It should always have been that way, of course, but for the moment it’s still true that it only takes 10 jurors to convict, even in serious felony trials—even in murder cases.

This non-unanimous jury rule was implemented out of concern that black jurors would make it more difficult for otherwise white juries to convict black defendants. In 1898, lawmakers argued exactly that and characterized this as a solution “to establish the supremacy of the white race … to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done.”

In addition to being racist, the non-unanimous jury rule’s also just a bad rule. Studies prove unanimity is critical to justice. Louisiana could use more of that—currently the state boasts the second-highest rate of exoneration in the country. What makes it all the more troubling is that though the public, both state parties, and organizations from all over the political spectrum supported Amendment 2, it passed the house by just one vote over the two-thirds requirement.

Paul Ryan deserves as much credit for the GOP's midterm trouncing as Trump

Kerry Eleveld

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday November 08, 2018 · 2:20 PM PST

2018/11/08 · 14:20

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 06: (AFP OUT) US President Donald Trump checks hands with House Speaker Paul Ryan before a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, on June 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images)

One of the more enjoyable reads in the election post-mortem was the New York Times's "How the House fell." The article lays out the striking contrast between how the GOP's divided caucus helped seal their own defeat while a hyper-disciplined Democratic caucus worked in unison to triumph.

But let's focus on the Republican side of the equation in this post, and come back to the Democrats in another. What's clear from the Times' reporting is that while Donald Trump drove the GOP messaging into the ground, the House Speaker Paul Ryan’s abysmal management skills spurred an exodus of members that set Republicans up for near-certain failure.

It all began with Ryan's choice to go after the purely partisan goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act as the GOP’s first experiment in unilateral control. Not only was the legislation not a sure thing, it immediately split the caucus between the hardliners and the "moderates" on an issue that is notoriously complicated and not even remotely in the GOP's wheelhouse. The moderate-conservative fissures deepened with the tax bill, even though Republicans actually succeeded in getting that to Trump's desk. Ryan also stepped all over the toes of the GOP lawmakers chairing House committees. The combination of not building consensus amid his caucus along with micromanaging his committee chairs had disastrous results.

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. [Ed] Royce held a quickly diversifying Orange County seat that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 even as it re-elected him. But he told colleagues that he bitterly resented the fruitless, politically damaging health care debate, and announced his retirement in a statement that took the N.R.C.C. by surprise.

Within weeks, Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, followed suit. Though he had pledged to seek re-election, Mr. Frelinghuysen was incensed over the way Mr. Ryan treated him during the tax overhaul debate — the speaker, Mr. Frelinghuysen told associates, had threatened to eject him from his chairmanship.

On Tuesday, Frelinghuysen’s seat, NJ-11, turned blue. Meanwhile, ballots are still being counted for Royce’s seat, CA-39.

Newer
Older

RSS

Check out our slate of Daily Kos-endorsed candidates