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https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-right-wingers-have-gotten-away-ridiculous-lies-decades

This week, in a sudden bout of atypical decency and common sense, a cavalcade of social media companies and content platforms — including YouTube, Spotify, Apple and Facebook — finally banned Alex Jones and his media empire Infowars.

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The move was long overdue, as Jones has spent his whole career peddling not just right-wing disinformation, but the worst kinds of conspiracy theories, demonizing innocent people and running cover for legitimate villains. Jones has used his platform to terrorize the families of shooting victims, even parents of the Sandy Hook children, by suggesting they are "crisis actors" participating in a massive hoax. On the flipside, he's denied violence committed by actual murderers, claiming that Timothy McVeighwas a "patsy" and that arguing that David Koresh, who impregnated 12-and-13-year-olds and almost certainly ordered a mass suicide that killed multiple children, was an innocent victim.

It's a sign of how trollish and amoral conservatives have become that their instinct was to rush forward and claim that it was an assault on free speech for online platforms to refuse to distribute the steady stream of lies and defamation that pours out of Infowars. Most of these folks didn't even pause for breath between trying to get writer Sarah Jeong fired from the New York Times for jokes mocking racists to declaring that "free speech" requires private companies tosignal-boostan amoral monster like Jones. Such bad faith isn't merely a tool of the right. It's the central organizing feature of the troll lifestyle that they've created for themselves.  What's going on here is not a mystery. American conservatives long ago decided that nothing mattered more than winning. They won't hesitate to support harassment, defamation, disinformation or, as we're now learning, possible treason, if they feel the end result will be a few more votes for the Republican party.

But the whole Jones debacle highlights a very real problem that social media and other content platforms have to contend with: Where do you draw the line?Jones may be on the fringe, but his show was linked to the Republican mainstream in the sense that most of the American conservative movement functions by peddling disinformation and, in many cases, conspiracy theories. Banning all disinformation from these sites would mean wiping out the vast majority of right-wing content, which would no doubt result in even more squalling that we're hearing now. But the current situation, where some lies cross the line but others don't, is a muddled mess that allows for all the bad-faith posturing about "free speech" that's going on now.

It's not quite fair to blame Mark Zuckerberg personally for this particular problem, because misinformation isn't just about "fake news" or the blatant fictions of Infowars. It goes straight to the heart of Republican politics, even before the party nominated a conspiracy theorist and con man to be their presidential candidate. Making false claims, intentionally or otherwise, has been a central Republican tactic for decades, and it's just getting worse. [ yes, but DNA is max engagement, leads to addiction, megaphone for rw lies/conspiracy]

Take climate-change denial as the primary example. There's a widespread, tacit acceptance in the mainstream media that it's normal for Republican politicians to "believe" that climate change is a hoax. (Even though that wasn't universally true even 10 years ago.) This is taken as somehow categorically different and less awful than, say, claiming that a mass shooting of children is a hoax.

But is it really all that different? In both cases, the person is apparently claiming that a widespread fiction has been created to trick the public into embracing certain policies, and that the hoaxers are so powerful they are able to hoodwink the media, the government and the public at large into believing them. In both cases, the conspiracy being posited would require literally thousands of people to pull it off and then to be quiet about it for decades. With climate-change denialism, there's even the suggestion that the conspiracy is worldwide, requiring a level of organization and secrecy that is frankly impossible for real-world human beings to pull off.

In both cases, the impact of the conspiracy theory is so horrible it's hard to contemplate. With conspiracy theories about mass shootings, surviving family members are harassed and hounded, even forced to move to escape their tormenters. With Pizzagate, we've already seen an armed vigilante holding a restaurant hostage because he believed lies about pedophiles organizing there.

But with climate change, a more socially acceptable conspiracy theory, the cost of indulging the lie is death. People are dying from heat, people are dying from floods and people will die from resource wars — all because we were too crippled by a conspiracy theory to take action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions when that could have prevented or mitigated this catastrophe.

The reason we have Infowars, and have conservatives defending it, is becausewe — the public, the media, politicians — didn't do enough to stand up to the rising tide of right-wing lies a decade ago. We politely agreed to treat empirically false claims on everything from climate change to economic policy as if these were matters of opinion on which reasonable people could disagree, rather than a question of one side flat-out denying actual reality. So we shouldn't be surprised now that conservatives feel emboldened enough to back up the guy who accuses innocent people of being pedophiles or faking children's deaths.

Kicking Infowars off social media is a good start, but to get our disinformation epidemic under control, more drastic measures need to be taken. Gatekeepers of all sorts, journalists in particular, need to become more active in fighting back and challenging conservatives on their lies, including those that have been falsely categorized as differences of opinion. We gave them an inch and they took a mile. It was a massive mistake that should never be made again.

amanda marcotte

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vanity fair 2914 kurt e

Are  conservatives ever right?

The question isn’t meant to suggest that liberals are never wrong. But reviewing the last few decades of conservative policy initiatives—or their objections over that timespan to policies they hate—shows a consistent pattern of failure: predictions never pan out, and intended results turn to catastrophic flops.

Given the G.O.P.’s midterm victories this week, the question is of particular import. Come January, conservatives will have control of both houses of Congress, and hold a considerable legislative advantage in the last two years of the Obama presidency. Yet not a week ago, conservative politicians and commentators were screaming out batty ideas as they demanded that President Obama close the borders over Ebola, ignoring the advice of infectious disease specialists who know that shutting borders against a disease leads people to make travel by means that aren’t easily tracked, escalates danger, and harms the ability to stop the infection at its source. Conservative know-nothings dismiss the professionals as know-nothings themselves, despite their training and expertise.

And that could be the problem. Too often, it seems, conservatives have scorned experts as incompetent, biased, or otherwise worth ignoring because they came up with answers that didn’t fit their politically desired answer. Often, they proclaim experts have a liberal bias. Of course, plenty of Democrats have voted for conservative ideas, but that is beside the point. The question is whether policies proposed by conservatives failed, not whether they were passed into law. And this question is all the more important now, with the Republicans having re-captured control of the Senate. Will they govern based on a knowledge of history and the analysis of experts? Or will they resort to faith-based, sure-we’re-right policies—like trying to impose a border ban to stop Ebola—that may lead the ignorant to cheer but will leave turn the experts’ hair white with fear.

Before venturing through the rogues’ gallery of past disasters, an exception that proves the rule: the 1983 decision by the Reagan Administration to deploy missiles in Europe to counter Russian SS-20s was a success, ultimately contributing to the Soviet collapse. But otherwise, there is not a lot in the last three decades to give conservatives bragging rights, and with almost every fiasco, they blame someone else. So let’s look at the record of the last 30-some years:

Tax cuts pay for themselves.

The fantasy: In 1981, as he championed massive tax cuts, President Ronald Reagan promised there would be no growth in the federal budget deficit because the economic boom that would follow would lead to higher revenues.

Reality: Budgeted federal revenues dropped, leading to a huge fiscal hole. Deficits rose to 6 percent of G.D.P. by 1983, then the highest in peacetime history. Reagan tacitly admitted failure by reversing directions and raising taxes multiple times, starting in 1982.

Blame: Conservatives claimed Democrats in Congress ran up spending so much that the growth of revenues could not keep up with the growth in outlays.

The excuse is false: According to a 2002 report prepared by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, when all appropriations bills during the Reagan administration are taken into account, the big spender was Reagan himself. All told, the report shows, Reagan requested about $4.7 trillion in his budgets submitted to Congress—including the regular annual budget, the supplementals and deficiency appropriations. In the final action, Congress spent a bit less than that amount. (I know, Republicans’ heads just exploded. Read the official report.)

The Aftermath: History is ignored. Conservatives still insist, on no evidence, that cuts pay for themselves. Trillions of dollars in debt have been run up over 30 years because of tax cuts. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would force the Congressional Budget Office to change how it calculates projected losses from tax cuts to make future results align more closely to conservative predictions.

Deregulating the Thrift Industry Will Save It

The Fantasy: In the early 1980s, Republicans championed the idea that deregulating the savings and loan industry–which historically focused on taking in savings and making mortgage loans–would increase their profits and ability to compete. In 1982, Reagan signed a law throwing off plenty of regulations and expanding the types of investments thrifts could make. On signing the law, Reagan proclaimed, “I think we hit the jackpot,” and dubbed the law the “Emancipation Proclamation for America’s savings institutions.”

Reality: Within seven years, the thrift industry was in ruins, destroyed by hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. The federal government ultimately lost about $125 billion in payouts it made to cover for insured savings. Some economists have said that the collapse contributed to bank failures and helped drive the recession from 1990 to 1991. Two factors wrecked the industry: thrift executives, whose experience was in issuing mortgages, were ill-equipped to handle their sudden reliance on more complex investment choices, and plenty of criminals—seeing the opportunity to loot or abuse the less-regulated thrifts—drained them of cash through self-dealing and speculation.

Blame: Some conservatives attempted to lay responsibility on regulators for shutting down thrifts before they had the chance to recover.

The excuse is false: Regulators acted as required under the law. The idea of allowing the thrifts to double down on investments in hopes of recovery may appeal to gamblers at the casino, but is not appropriate public policy.

Iraq I: The Tilt

The Fantasy: Aiding the government of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s—launched by Hussein—was in the national interest of the United States. At the beginning of this policy in 1982, Reagan issued National Security Study Directive 4-82 to create a strategic opening with Iraq. That same year, the White House decided to remove Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. American military at Fort Bragg trained Iraqi soldiers in guerrilla warfare, skills that were then taught by those troops to forces in Baghdad for decades. According to declassified documents and affidavits, the administration also sent arms and high-tech components to Saddam through third countries and sent spare parts to keep Iraq’s Soviet-made weapons operational (the Soviets cut off Iraq when it invaded Iran). Finally, when Saddam gassed his own people in Halabja in 1988, American officials knew he did it but blamed Iran anyway.

Reality: Saddam was a larger threat than Iran. His invasion signaled his desire for territorial expansion, and by providing his forces with weapons and training, the conservative tilt resulted in United States troops during the Persian Gulf War facing arms procured for the Iraqis by the American government. That war began after Saddam turned his expansion desires to Kuwait and invaded, a bit more than two years after Halabja.

The Aftermath: Reversing the “Iran did it” story, President George W. Bush cited the Halabja attack by Saddam as a reason for America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. After the administration disbanded the Iraqi military following Saddam’s overthrow, the soldiers launched a guerrilla war, incorporating tactics from American training passed down over the years.

Giving Iranian Moderates Weapons Will Help America

The Fantasy: By selling weaponry to Iranian moderates, the Reagan administration thought it would help gain influence in the Tehran government and obtain the release of American hostages held in Lebanon.

Reality: The sales went directly to the government of Iran (and the profits diverted to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua). The purported “moderates” had orchestrated a scam. While Reagan at first denied this scheme was also intended to gain the release of hostages, he later stated the effort devolved into this. Subsequently declassified documents showed that releasing the hostages through the arms sales was one of the driving points all along.

The Aftermath: The dealings with Iran took place at the same time as the policy of tilting with Iraq. According to declassified records, the revelation of the administration’s double-dealing with Tehran and Baghdad created chaos for American-Iraq relations, leading Reagan to step up financial and military support for Saddam.

Raising Taxes Will Cause a Recession

The Fantasy: This is the corollary of the “taxes pay for themselves” canard. When President Bill Clinton championed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, it included significant tax increases on wealthy Americans. For that reason, it was often called the Deficit Reduction Act. No Republicans voted for the measure, with many publicly saying it would cause a recession. For example, Newt Gingrich, then a Republican Congressman from Georgia, stated, “I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is the Democrat machine’s recession.’’ Then-senator Phil Gramm said, “The Clinton Plan is a one-way ticket to recession. This plan does not reduce the deficit.”

Reality: While Clinton subsequently decided the tax increases were too large and pared them back a bit, one of the largest economic booms in history followed the adoption of the law. The deficit shrank to nothing, and policy makers at the Federal Reserve began publicly fretting about how to handle a projected surplus.

The Excuse: While refusing to acknowledge that they were wrong about a recession, conservatives have attributed the economic performance afterwards to an assortment of factors other than taxes. They have denied that it was the tax increases that closed the deficit.

The Lesson: Conservatives were partially right—a lot of factors beyond just tax policy played into the economic boom. Which goes to prove that their belief in taxes as the driving force of all economic performance is wrong however you look at it.

Abolishing Some Bank Regulations Will Help the Economy

The Fantasy: Many Democrats supported this proposal, which had been a conservative idea for years, passed in 1999 by a Republican Congress, and signed by Clinton. Legislators believed that by repealing the Glass–Steagall Act from 1933 and allowing commercial banks to purchase more securities and affiliate with Wall Street firms, the economy would benefit. Plenty of liberal Democrats voted against the idea, including Senators Byron Dorgan, Tom Harkin, Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold and others. In a floor speech, Dorgan warned, “We will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past.” He cautioned that banks would become “too big to fail” and that the impact on government and the economy would be disastrous.

Reality: Dorgan was wrong—it didn’t take ten years for the repeal to bear poison fruit. It took nine. In the economic collapse of 2008, giant banks and insurance companies that launched into securities trading following the trashing of Glass–Steagall, particularly Citigroup and American International Group, ran into huge problems that would not have occurred had the law still been in place. The financial repercussions pushed banks all over the country out of business and led not only to the Great Recession, but also to the government being forced to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to minimize the disaster.

The U.S.–led Bombing of Yugoslavia Would Be a Disaster

The Fantasy: Following years of massacres and state oppression, an attempted negotiation of a peace treaty to end the Kosovo War collapsed. The Clinton administration assembled a NATO bombing campaign to drive the forces of Slobodan Miloševic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, out of Kosovo and impose a peace agreement. A large majority of House Republicans voted against a non-binding resolution supporting the American involvement in the NATO mission, and—engaging in the very behavior they would later say during the Bush Administration was un-American and demoralizing for troops—began to criticize the president and the operation as doomed to failure. “This is President Clinton’s war, and when he falls flat on his face, that’s his problem,’’ said Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana. And that hypocritical blowhard, Sean Hannity, joined in to blow hard: “They haven’t prepared for anything in this. And they’re running out of weapons to do it. And frankly, I don’t think Clinton has the moral authority or ability to fight this war correctly.”

Reality: The two-and-a-half-month bombing campaign of Yugoslavia was an unparalleled success. NATO suffered not a single casualty from the operation, although two Americans died when their AH-64 Apache experienced a technical malfunction. Miloševic accepted an international peace plan and the Yugoslav government withdrew its forces from Kosovo. A NATO-led peacekeeping force came into Kosovo. Albanians greeted American soldiers with delight and threw flowers at their feet. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later charged Miloševic with war crimes, including genocide. He died before he could his trial ended.

Bin Laden Was a Front for Iraq

The Fantasy: Up until 9/11, conservatives tended to dismiss Clinton as having spent too much time worrying about Osama bin Laden. As Robert Oakley, a top counterterrorism official under Reagan, said just before George W. Bush took office, “The only major criticism I have is (Clinton’s) obsession with Osama.” Beginning in the earliest days of Bush 2, counterterrorism officials left over from the Clinton administration pleaded for a planning meeting on dealing with al-Qaeda, but were put off until days before the attack. The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. provided briefings to the White House beginning in the spring of 2001 that they were obtaining intelligence showing al-Qaeda would soon launch a massive attack on the United States. However, still-classified records I have seen reveal that, in June, senior Bush officials dismissed the intelligence agencies’ concerns. Bin Laden, these officials said, was running a “false flag” operation on behalf of Saddam to distract the administration from the threat posed by Iraq. Intelligence officials prepared multiple briefings trying to prove this argument wrong. But members of the Bush administration continued to advance the theory even after the Iraq war began in 2003.

Reality: Bin Laden had no connection to Saddam, whom he considered to be a secular infidel. Some of the intelligence that the Bush administration relied on for its argument was false, but officials continued to advance it despite being warned of its inaccuracy.

Blame: Some conservatives who had once criticized Clinton for spending too much time on bin Laden reversed course and said he didn’t make enough effort. When, years earlier, Clinton launched missiles at an al-Qaeda camp following attacks on two American embassies, conservatives had criticized the action as a “wag the dog” moment. They argued he was trying to create a false crisis to take the public’s mind off of scandal involving his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.

The Aftermath: After 9/11, Bush officials refused to release the documents showing how strongly they had pushed the idea that bin Laden was a stooge for Saddam.

Iraq 2: W.M.D.s and a Short, Inexpensive War

Fantasy: As part of the imaginary connection between bin Laden and Saddam, the Bush administration proclaimed that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be delivered to terrorists. Saddam allowed United Nations’ weapons inspectors into Iraq, who searched fruitlessly for W.M.D.s; Bush officials dismissed those results—the best intelligence available at the time—as the result of the weapons inspectors’ incompetence. Before the invasion, officials promised the war would last months and cost America next to nothing.

Reality: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction other than decayed, unusable scrap leftover from the late 1980s. The war lasted almost a decade and, with the instability still in place after American troops pulled out, led directly to the growth of the terrorist group ISIS. As of 2013, the war cost America two trillion dollars.

Blame: Conservatives hold the American intelligence agencies responsible for the war. They also blame President Barack Obama for the creation of ISIS.

The Excuse is False: Declassified documents and statements by intelligence officials have revealed that the Bush White House disregarded all warnings that much of the classified information they were relying on to justify war was shaky at best. Moreover, even assuming the information was correct, top administration officials were warned that containment through weapons inspections would keep Saddam under control while a war could set off a conflagration of almost unimaginable ferocity. Obama does bear some blame for ISIS because he was unable to persuade Iraq to extend the timetable established by Bush for withdrawal. However, there is no doubt Obama, like Bush, wanted American forces out and did not see it as a high priority to push for keeping them there.

Obamacare

The Fantasy: The government was taking over health care. No one would sign up for the insurance. If they did sign up, no one would pay. If they did pay, premiums would fly sky-high, and beyond the ability of most Americans’ to afford it. It would increase the number of uninsured, not decrease it.

Reality: As a system that operates through private insurance companies, Obamacare does not give the government control of the health care system, although certain policies on coverage and quality of insurance are in place. Eight million people signed up for policies during the first open enrollment period; 7.3 million people paid their premiums, far more than had been anticipated by the insurance companies. In addition, more than 7 million people obtained coverage through expanded Medicaid and millions of others below the age of 26 stayed on their parents’ policies. According to Gallup, the uninsured rate has dropped from 18 percent in the third quarter of 2013 to 13.4 percent in the quarter just ended. The Kaiser Family Foundation has found that the rate of increase in premiums has slowed since Obamacare began to be introduced, and that the average premium for benchmark policies will drop next year.

Response: People whose health insurance did not provide minimum levels of coverage lost their policies, leading conservatives to falsely imply many people were being harmed.

These are just the highlights—the parade of failure goes on and on. What matters here, though, is not that conservatives have been reckless in the past. It is that ignoring expert opinion is a fatal flaw, one that has proven to do immense damage to this country—financial catastrophes, arming enemies, bloody wars, and the like.

This is not the consequence of ignorance. Many conservative leaders are brilliant. There is, however, a confidence that borders on arrogance that has repeatedly led to disaster. Add to that the constant refrain of “liberal bias,” which has proven to be a crutch conservatives use as a substitute for putting fingers in their ears and singing, “La-la-la.” (Watch what happens in the comment section below; I doubt ragers will bother to read this whole thing. If you want to criticize, prove you read it by writing the words “I disagree” in your comment.) Basically, whenever someone says they’re wrong, conservatives too often fall back on claims that those who disagree with them are biased and thus worthy of being ignored, a convenient position that allows them to avoid debating uncomfortable criticisms.

Neither side of a political debate holds a monopoly on the truth. Liberals are often wrong. However, somewhere along the line, conservatives stopped being careful and grew too dismissive of what they do not want to hear. They need to take a step back, question their own ideas—and, when the policies fail, admit it and re-think.

America needs reality-based policy. Bluster and fantasy have cost us too much.

https://www.alternet.org/how-right-wing-convinces-itself-liberals-are-evil

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How the Right Wing Convinces Itself That Liberals Are Evil

Since the 1950s, the conservative movement has justified bad behavior—including supporting Donald Trump—by persuading itself that the left is worse.

By David A. Walsh / Washington Monthly July 21, 2018, 7:02 AM

If you spend any time consuming right-wing media in America, you quickly learn the following: Liberals are responsible for racism, slavery, and the Ku Klux Klan. They admire Mussolini and Hitler, and modern liberalism is little different from fascism or, even worse, communism. The mainstream media and academia cannot be trusted because of the pervasive, totalitarian nature of liberal culture.

This belief in a broad liberal conspiracy is standard in the highest echelons of the conservative establishment and right-wing media.The Russia investigation is dismissed, from the president on down, as a politicized witch hunt. George Soros supposedly paid $300 to each participant in the “March for Our Lives” in March. (Disclosure: I marched that day, and I’m still awaiting my check.) What is less well appreciated by liberals is that the language of conspiracy is often used to justify similar behavior on the right. The Russia investigation is not just a witch hunt, it’s the product of the real scandal, which is Hillary-Russia-Obama-FBI collusion, so we must investigate that. Soros funds paid campus protestors, so Turning Point USA needs millions of dollars from Republican donors to win university elections. The liberal academic establishment prevents conservative voices from getting plum faculty jobs, so the Koch Foundation needs to give millions of dollars to universities with strings very much attached.

This did not begin with Donald Trump. The modern Republican Party may be particularly apt to push conspiracy theories to rationalize its complicity with a staggeringly corrupt administration, but this is an extension of, not a break from, a much longer history.Since its very beginning, in the 1950s, members of the modern conservative movement have justified bad behavior by convincing themselves that the other side is worse. One of the binding agents holding the conservative coalition together over the course of the past half century has been an opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism built on the suspicion, sometimes made explicit, that there’s no real difference among them.

In 1961, the American Medical Association produced an LP in which an actor opened a broadside against the proposed Medicare program by attributing to Norman Thomas, a six-time Socialist Party candidate for president, a made-up quote that “under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.”Because these ideologies were so interchangeable in the imaginations of many conservatives—and were covertly collaborating to enact their nefarious agenda—this meant that it was both important and necessary to fight back through equally underhanded means.

The title of that LP? Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. The American left is used to waiting for liberals to finally get ruthless. Through the eyes of the right, they always have been.

Long before Fox News, conservatives began forming their own explicitly right-wing media landscape. Supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal dominated the “mainstream” press, which meant that conservative dissidents needed a home. The conservative magazine Human Events was launched in 1944 as an alternative to what its cofounder, Felix Morley, believed was a stifling conformity in the American press. The same was true of the American Mercury in 1950, when under the ownership of William Bradford Huie the formerly social-democratic magazine moved to the right. “There is now far too much ‘tolerance’ in America,” Huie declared in the first issue of the new Mercury. “We shall cry a new crusade of intolerance . . . the intolerance of bores, morons, world-savers, and damn fools.”

Both Morley and Huie felt victimized by a liberal press establishment that stifled alternative voices—and, after all, liberals had the New Republic and leftists the Nation as journals of opinion—but their charge of mainstream “bias” was more complicated. One of the largest newspapers in the United States, the Chicago Tribune, owned by conservative businessman Robert McCormick, had militantly opposed the New Deal and American entry into World War II. Fulton Lewis Jr., a Washington, D.C.–based political journalist who was, by 1950, one of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s biggest supporters, had one of the most listened-to radio programs in the country. And both Morley and Huie had had illustrious careers before launching their magazines. Morley won a Pulitzer Prize when he edited the Washington Post in the 1930s; Huie had a solid reputation as a freelance journalist. But they clung to the belief that dissenters from the liberal orthodoxy were being hounded out of media, which more than justified questionable acts, particularly on Huie’s part. Desperate to keep his magazine afloat, Huie sold the American Mercury in 1952 to far-right businessman Russell Maguire, who was closely tied to prominent anti-Semites and was one himself. Huie told a reporter at Time that he knew all about Maguire’s unsavory views, but believed his financial backing was necessary in order to ensure a conservative voice in American letters. “If I suddenly heard Adolf Hitler was alive in South America and wanted to give a million dollars to the American Mercury, I would go down and get it.”

Even more alarming to conservatives than the bias of the mainstream press was the number of liberals, radicals, and communists alleged to be inhigher education. In a 1952 American Mercury article, a twenty-seven-year-old William F. Buckley accused liberal historians of a “conspiracy against giving the American people the facts” about Franklin Roosevelt, and claimed that they thus “betrayed the American people.” In his debut book, God and Man at Yale, published the year before, Buckley had dismissed academic freedom as a cynical shield wielded by left-wing faculty to protect themselves from the political consequences of their views; he advocated using the threat of withholding alumni donations as a weapon against the liberalism and leftism running amok in the academy. Buckley would soon become the gatekeeper of “respectable” conservatism by pushing back against the conspiratorial excesses of the John Birch Society. But he began his career by indulging in some of those rhetorical flourishes himself, along with a plan of action on how to fight back against the stranglehold of leftists on the academy.

Buckley was also one of McCarthy’s most vociferous defenders. Although popularly remembered today as a drunken punch line discredited by crusading journalists like Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s, McCarthy is actually an important figure in the development of American conservatism. Almost every major conservative journalist and politician in the 1950s defended him. Senator Barry Goldwater voted against McCarthy’s censure in 1954. Conservative radio pundit Fulton Lewis defended McCarthyism in his broadcasts even after the senator’s death. William F. Buckley was no exception: he went to the bat for McCarthy in the 1954 book McCarthy and His Enemies. Buckley applauded McCarthy for recognizing that “coercive measures” were necessary to enforce a new anticommunist “conformity.” While Buckley—unlike many of his peers—did distinguish between “the Liberals” and “the Communists,” he suggested that “atheistic, soft-headed, anti-anti-Communist liberals” were ultimately little better than communists, and by far a greater danger to American democracy than any supposed excesses of McCarthyism. And indeed, Buckley never abandoned his defense of McCarthy and repeatedly attempted to rehabilitate the senator in the eyes of the broader public. In 1999 he published a pro-McCarthy novel, The Redhunter, which incorporated large swaths of McCarthy and His Enemies almost verbatim.

Still, Buckley was comparatively moderate next to other conservatives, who suggested that the answer to the communist threat might be to adopt the communists’ own tactics. Fred Schwarz, an Australian-born doctor who founded the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade in 1953, wrote in his book You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) that liberals were effectively “protectors and runners of interference for the Communist conspirators.” Why? Because liberals resisted efforts to purge communists and their sympathizers from schools and universities, and insisted on pesky legal technicalities like the Fifth Amendment. “[O]rganization is the genius of Communism,” Schwarz continued, and so “an anti-Communist program needs organization.” Just as communists “operate through a great number of front organizations, each of which is tuned to some specific motivating dynamic,” so must “every religious, professional, economic, and cultural group” adopt this model to “organize an anti-Communist program.”

A full-blown Leninist approachwas tempting, Schwarz wrote, but he preferred a decentralized organization based on “voluntary choice and free will.” Not all on the anticommunist right were so circumspect. Robert Welch, a wealthy retired candy manufacturer and right-wing activist, organized the John Birch Society in 1958 explicitly along the lines of what he called “international communism.” Welch wrote in the society’s founding document, The Blue Book, that this was simply a savvy political decision: the communist conspiracy was, after all, “incredibly well organized,” and “so well financed that it has billions of dollars annually just to spend on propaganda.” The Birchers would, like the communists, organize themselves into cells (or, as Welch preferred to call them, “chapters”), set up front organizations, and distribute propaganda (by which Welch meant conservative magazines and journals, including National Review, Human Events, and his own American Opinion). The goal was not to become a mere “organization” like the Democratic or Republican Parties, but to become a movement, in the same sense as communism or its close ideological ally, organized labor. And indeed, at its peak in the early 1960s the John Birch Society claimed around 100,000 members, more than the Communist Party USA at its height in the 1940s, easily making it the largest and best-organized group on the right. The Birchers’ on-the-ground presence certainly dwarfed the reach of the National Review, which in 1961 counted only 29,000 weekly subscribers.

One of the Birchers’ most prominent campaigns was a drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had presided over a Court that made dramatic rulings in favor of civil rights, ranging from establishing a right to birth control to abolishing mandatory school prayer to the greatest sin of all, desegregating public schools. In August 1963, Welch accused the civil rights movement of being a communist plot to create a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the South, with Martin Luther King Jr. as president, and blamed Brown v. Board of Education for poisoning race relations in America. “What we want to do,” Welch wrote in the Birch Society’s bulletin, “is to concentrate the whole opposition to what is happening in the South, and resentment of it, into one course of action: The Movement to Impeach Earl Warren.”

The conflation of communism and the NAACP was not accidental. Of all of the supposedly communistic liberal front groups, none drew conservative scorn more fiercely than the civil rights movement. William F. Buckley, who opposed the impeachment as a tactic against the Warren Court, nonetheless infamously wrote in 1957 that the “advanced” white race in the South was justified in taking “such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” in areas where “it does not predominate numerically.”His magazine, National Review, repeatedly suggested that the civil rights movement was communist inspired, riddled by communist infiltration, or composed of communist front organizations. Martin Luther King himself was suspect—National Review called him the “source of violence in others” in 1965.

King was far more radical than his sanitized popular memory today—he spoke out against American imperialism in Vietnam, called for a guaranteed basic income, and was murdered while visiting Memphis to support a strike by public-sector sanitation workers—but he was no doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist. “Communism forgets that life is individual,” he said in a 1967 speech, while also condemning capitalism for forgetting “that life is social.” These distinctions were lost on the civil rights movement’s right-wing opponents. By painting civil rights activists as communists, or at the minimum dupes of an international communist conspiracy, segregationist southerners were making a bid for the support of conservative anticommunists elsewhere in the country.

They got it. Barry Goldwater, whose anti-liberal and anticommunist political bona fides were so secure he could get away with criticizing the John Birch Society without losing the support of its members, voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The vast majority of conservative publications opposed the bill’s passage, on the grounds both that it was an unacceptable expansion of federal power and that the “mobocratic” and “unruly” civil rights agitators were in effect advocating for socialism. George Wallace, the hyper-segregationist governor of Alabama, recognized the potency of this conspiratorial rhetoric during his third-party run for president in 1968. Shunned by Buckley and the conservative establishment on the basis of his sympathy for New Deal–style welfare programs, Wallace was embraced by the Birchers because of his unwavering opposition to the “communists,” “radicals,” and “agitators” in the civil rights movement.

The rise in prominence of thereligious rightin the 1970s and ’80s did little to tamp down paranoid political rhetoric. Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Francis Schaeffer—as well as Catholics like Paul Weyrich and Mormons like W. Cleon Skousen—conflated liberalism, socialism, and communism under the broader umbrella of “secularism” and built alliances with one another to combat this scourge. Often, this merely meant consolidating preexisting activism: Falwell had been an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and Skousen was a key propagandist for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and early ’70s before penning in 1981 The 5,000 Year Leap, a book that codified many of the shibboleths of the religious right to the present day. The evangelicals and their allies in other denominations were united in their opposition to abortion, gay rights, and feminism—the tangible realities of the nefarious left-liberal agenda.

Increasingly, the communist fingerprints to be found on these cultural changes were not to be found in an overarching conspiracy directed from Moscow—after all, the sexual politics of radical American feminists were hardly those of Leonid Brezhnev—but from a more nebulous grouping of student radicals, intellectuals, and activists. Although the term “cultural Marxism” would not be used to describe this new, somewhat murkier conspiracy until the 2000s, the outlines of the charge were already evident by the late 1970s. In 1980, televangelist James Robison declared in a speech that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals, and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists, and the communists coming out of the closet,” and called for “God’s people” to fight back.

The collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated these trends. It was no longer possible to accuse liberals and remnants of the left of being in Moscow’s pocket, but this did not stop conservatives from invoking the specter of left-wing radicalism to rally support and justify extremism. It just took more creativity. Pat Buchanan deftly shifted midsentence in his infamous 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention from the Cold War to the “cultural war,” the “religious war . . . for the soul of America,” suggesting that the fight against liberalism, feminism, and the “gay agenda” was not just the equivalent, but in fact the continuation, of the Cold War itself.

The “culture war” was the basis of the Clinton hatred phenomenon in the 1990s, which—as in 2016—was particularly focused on Hillary Clinton. She was the worst of all possible worlds: an elitist big-government liberal with degrees from Wellesley and Yale Law, a feminist who initially refused to change her name after marrying Bill, declined to embrace the image of a mother and housewife in the White House, and was rumored to be the real powerhouse next to her husband.

Bill Clinton had run in 1992 as a “different kind of Democrat,” and after losing Congress in 1994 tacked even more to the right. Clinton embraced financial deregulation, effectively abolished the existing welfare program, and even signaled his openness to partially privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Yet Clinton’s policy concessions to conservatives won him little goodwill from across the aisle. Congressional Republicans embraced scorched-earth legislative tactics under firebrand House Speaker Newt Gingrich, including the 1995 government shutdown, a preview of the right’s nihilistic resistance to Barack Obama over a decade later.Gingrich was a veteran partisan bruiser—as House minority whip he led the successful effort to oust Texas Democrat Jim Wright as speaker for minor ethics infractions in 1989, suggesting for good measure that Wright and other Democrats harbored socialist sympathies given their willingness to negotiate with the Sandinista government to end the Nicaraguan civil war.

But in another sense, the fervid anti-Clinton paranoia may have been a psychic and political necessity for Republicans who yearned to regain power. With Clinton offering real policy conciliations to conservatives, the easiest way to maintain energetic opposition was to construct a narrative of criminality and anti-American perfidy that must be countered at all costs. Right-wing attacks against the Clintons could and did backfire—the president’s approval ratings actually rose during his impeachment—and accusations against Bill Clinton for affairs, sexual harassment, and even rape were easier to dismiss as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as Hillary Clinton put it, when right-wing magazines were also accusing her of murder. Bill Clinton weathered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but Clinton hatred never went away. It reappeared with a vengeance in 2016.

The bitter partisan battles of the 1990s intensified trends that had existed on the political right since World War II. Indeed, the creation of Fox News in 1996was a supercharged throwback to the days of Human Events and the American Mercury. Fox News was necessary, the argument went, because conservative journalists and conservative perspectives were shut out of mainstream broadcasters. Never mind that even Bill O’Reilly had enjoyed a career at CBS and ABC before joining Fox News in its debut year. But while conservative media in the 1950s and ’60s either had a limited reach—the National Review in 1960 had less than a tenth as many subscribers as Time—or were counterbalanced by the FCC’s fairness doctrine, which was on the books between 1949 and 1987, Fox News presented an unchallenged right-wing worldview to millions of viewers twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

Conservative pundits repackaged Cold War–era attacks equating liberals with communists during the Bush years. In 2003, Ann Coulter, a frequent Fox News talking head, published Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, which was a full-throated defense of Joseph McCarthy that accused liberals of being, well, traitors who hated America. The book sold 500,000 copies in its first three weeks. Even the racially charged birther myth—that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and was a covert Muslim, to boot—was a riff on the old John Birch Society charge that liberals, including moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, were secret members of the international communist conspiracy. The cry that Obama was a Marxist, Maoist, Muslim Kenyan socialist was almost interchangeable with right-wing attacks directed against the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And the idea that a vast left-liberal conspiracy was both undermining the country and using dirty, underhanded tactics to do so rhetorically justified an anything-goes strategy on the part of the right. Shutting down government. Refusing confirmation votes. Supporting Donald Trump for president.

So-called Never Trump conservatives lament that the Republican Party and, indeed, the conservative movement have ceased to be about ideas beyond slavish devotion to Trump’s cult of personality. But this critique ignores the centrality of the idea of liberal nefariousness even in the self-consciously intellectual corners of the conservative movement. Jonah Goldberg,who has been affiliated with National Review for twenty years, has called for a revived conservative intellectual vigor to tackle the policy challenges of the twenty-first century. He was also the author, in 2008, of the bookLiberal Fascism, which—until a last-minute change by Goldberg—bore the subtitle The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.

Even the theory-heavy Chicago School movement that undergirded the post-Reagan shift to laissez-faire economic policy derived its momentum from the perceived need to rescue the “free enterprise system” from the clutches of liberalism, which would otherwise inevitably lead to communism.Robert Bork, the academic, judge, and Nixon administration official who was perhaps the preeminent ideological conduit between academia and government—and whose 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline is exactly what it sounds like—described his antitrust theories as an antidote to the “reckless and primitive egalitarianism” of the Warren Court.

Trump is, in many ways, the ultimate embodiment of this long-standing tendency on the right. His transformation from New York Democrat to Republican Party celebrity began by embracing the birther conspiracy; he even took credit for Obama’s eventual decision to release his long-form birth certificate. As president, he has wondered aloud why Attorney General Jeff Sessions hasn’t personally defended him from the Russia investigation in the same way that, in Trump’s Fox News–fueled fantasies, Eric Holder once shielded Obama from “scandals” like “Fast and Furious.”

The idea that the left is depraved, corrupt, and ruthless has been an important strain of American conservatism since the movement began. But in the Trump era, it has metastasized. Right-wing policy ideas have been so thoroughly discredited—does anyone even argue anymore that trickle-down economics will ensure mass prosperity?—that the only apparent reason for conservatism’s existence is to fight back against evil liberals. This is, of course, not the sign of a healthy political movement. The right’s support for McCarthy has been a long-standing embarrassment for American conservatism. Its embrace of Trump may be history repeating itself.

see 1st main GOP (also tag)  all stands for conservatism in US in general

states w gop control voter ID, planned parenthood, activist suppression

 ==

mma random 7/18

Republican Party has direct links to right-wing media extremism. Just this week:

• A GOP Twitter account promoted the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon. In short, the conspiracy theory alleges that a secret top-level Trump administration member is leaking pro-Trump clues on a message board known for being the origin of hoaxes and harassment campaigns. It's completely absurd, but it has real traction. An alleged terrorist incident in Arizona has already been linked to QAnon.
• Republicans withdrew their endorsement of GOP congressional candidate Seth Grossman after Media Matters' Eric Hananoki reported that Grossman had touted opinion pieces from white nationalist websites that made vile racist allegations. Grossman has made a number of increasingly ridiculous claims regarding his actions.
• A book by Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) was blurbed by a leading anti-Muslim figure who was banned from the United Kingdom for his bigotry.
• The conservative outlet NewsBusters promoted a piece on a white nationalist website that claims Black people “are a threat to all who cross their paths.” They removed the links and the author is no longer associated with the site.

This is all in addition to our previous reporting, including the GOP congressional nominee who keeps going on neo-Nazi podcasts and the Republicans who run a Facebook group that features numerous conspiracy theories, including Seth Rich.

Featured video

Sinclair is forcing local news stations across the country to air pro-Trump "must-runs" featuring a former top Trump aide. (We've also put together the complete background on the Trump-Sinclair relationship)

This Week in Dumb

Ben Stein (who has made some really racist remarks in the past) went on Fox News and said that the Russia investigation is like "some movie about an old Southern town where the law enforcement people are members of the Ku Klux Klan".

==

https://www.alternet.org/americas-patriotic-fervor-epidemic-problem-supported-gop

==

psych shenkman bk, cogn diss

https://www.alternet.org/psychology-behind-trump-cult

==

538 6/18

http://www.alternet.org/culture/deep-roots-left-vs-right

...

The tension is built right into the name of our nation. “United states” is an oxymoron. Which are we, a “union,” a constraining marriage for better or worse, or loose and free individual states? Both, of course, and in tension, at multiple hierarchical scales from individuals to families, neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, the whole country and the whole world.

There’s little hope that we could ever reorganize the parties to represent cleanly this distinction, for example, the left always advocating for freedom and the right always advocating for constraint. If we could, maybe they would recognize how much they depend upon each other, or maybe they would just bicker as they currently do as though their hyperbolic half-answers were the whole answer.

Still, getting back to basics can help us get beyond just such half-truth hyperbole. Lots of political actors these days talk as though they’re arguing from first principles, as though the answer is indeed always freedom or always constraint.

Libertarians pretend that more freedom always solves everything. Social conservatives argue as though constraint solves everything. They don’t mean it. Libertarians don’t seem to care much about other people’s freedom, just their own. They’re like the flailing dancer crowding everyone into the corners of the dance floor with their self-infatuated “dance of personal freedom for all.”

And social conservatives aren’t really all about constraint. They want the freedom to never have to be constrained by the presence of other people’s values. In the end they're both authoritarian. They have the winning formula, whatever it is. Their way trumps all other ways.

Remembering that what we’re all really negotiating—the right balance of constraint and freedom, security and liberty—may make us more receptive to negotiation, and smarter negotiators too, not taken in by hyperbolic half-truths about the one true way. 

==

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/open-warfare-breaks-out-among-conservatives-march-lockstep-behind-trump-or-show

win at all costs Flt 93

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/koch-brothers-paris-agreement-2430226599.html

Paris Exit Was 'Victory Paid and Carried Out' by Republican Party for the Koch Brothers

nolink

The 22 Republican senators who sent a letter to President Donald Trump last week urging the United States' withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement received more than $10 million dollars in campaign funds from fossil fuel interests.

The two-page letter was signed by a number of Republican heavyweights from coal/gas/oil-rich states, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Ted Cruz of Texas.

The Guardian calculated that the 22 senators received a total of $10,694,284 from oil, gas and coal money in just five years. (See the breakdown below.

However, that sum does not even come close to the amount of undisclosed funds coming from the deep pockets of Charles and David Koch's coal, oil and gas conglomerate, Koch Industries, and other outside groups.

As the Guardian explains:

"Visible donations to Republicans from those industries exceeded donations to Democrats in the 2016 election cycle by a ratio of 15-to-1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that does not include so-called dark money passed from oil interests such as Koch industries to general slush funds to re-elect Republicans such as the Senate leadership fund.

"At least $90m in untraceable money has been funneled to Republican candidates from oil, gas and coal interests in the past three election cycles, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics."

Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, shared recently his views on Trump's climate walkout.In an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance, Sachs referenced the senators' letter and specifically cast blame on the billionaire oil barons for pulling the strings of Republican party leaders such as McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who both supported exiting the Paris accord.

"This is the victory paid and carried out for 20 years by two people, David and Charles Koch," Sachs said. "They have bought and purchased the top of the Republican party. Trump is a tool in this."

Notably, most of the Republican signatories of the letter do not support the belief that human activity contributes to climate change.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Democratic Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts explained why he thinks his Republican colleagues do not believe in the science of climate change.

"This Conservative party in the United States is funded by the Koch brothers [and] it's funded by the coal industry," Markey said. "[They] insist that Scott Pruitt—the Attorney General of Oklahoma that actually sued the EPA 19 times on clean air, clean water, soot, mercury issues—becomes the head of the EPA in our country."

The 22 Republican signatories' funding from Big Oil, Gas and Coal in the past three election cycles (2012, 2014 and 2016):

James Inhofe, Oklahoma

Oil & gas: $465,950 + Coal: $63,600 = $529,550

John Barrasso, Wyoming

Oil & gas: $458,466 + Coal: $127,356 = $585,822

Mitch McConnell, Kentucky

Oil & gas: $1,180,384 + Coal: $361,700 = $1,542,084

John Cornyn, Texas

Oil & gas: $1,101,456 + Coal: $33,050 = $1,134,506

Roy Blunt, Missouri

Oil & gas: $353,864 + Coal: $96,000 = $449,864

Roger Wicker, Mississippi

Oil & gas: $198,816 + Coal: $25,376 = $224,192

Michael Enzi, Wyoming

Oil & gas: $211,083 + Coal: $63,300 = $274,383

Mike Crapo, Idaho

Oil & gas: $110,250 + Coal: $26,756 = $137,006

Jim Risch, Idaho

Oil & gas: $123,850 + Coal: $25,680 = $149,530

Thad Cochran, Mississippi

Oil & gas: $276,905 + Coal: $15,000 = $291,905

Mike Rounds, South Dakota

Oil & gas: $201,900 + Coal: none = $201,900

Rand Paul, Kentucky

Oil & gas: $170,215 + Coal: $82,571 = $252,786

John Boozman, Arkansas

Oil & gas: $147,930 + Coal: $2,000 = $149,930

Richard Shelby, Alabama

Oil & gas: $60,150 + $2,500 = $62,650

Luther Strange, Alabama (Appointed in 2017, running in 2017 special election)

Total: NA

Orrin Hatch, Utah

Oil & gas: $446,250 + Coal: $25,000 = $471,250

Mike Lee, Utah

Oil & gas: $231,520 + Coal: $21,895 = $253,415

Ted Cruz, Texas

Oil & gas: $2,465,910 + Coal: $103,900 = $2,569,810

David Perdue, Georgia

Oil & gas: $184,250 + Coal: $0 = $184,250

Thom Tillis, North Carolina

Oil & gas: $263,400 + Coal: $0 = $263,400

Tim Scott, South Carolina

Oil & gas: $490,076 + Coal: $58,200 = $548,276

Pat Roberts, Kansas

Oil & gas: $388,950 + Coal: $28,825 = $417,775

==

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/12/these-3-maps-show-just-how-dominant-republicans-are-in-america-after-tuesday/

Results are still trickling in, but it looks like Republicans will still control an all-time high 69 of 99 state legislative chambers. They'll hold at least 33 governorships, tying a 94-year-old record.

That means that come 2017, they'll have total control of government in at least 25 states, and partial control in 20 states. According to population calculations by the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, that translates to roughly 80 percent of the population living in a state either all or partially controlled by Republicans.

Things are just as good for the GOP at the federal level, where Republicans have reached the trifecta. They just won the White House, they've kept their majorities in Congress and they have a chance to reshape the Supreme Court to a  strong conservative ideological leaning.

Democrats, meanwhile, will go into 2017 without any significant gains in Congress and with total control of just five states. (Republicans managed to tie Connecticut's state Senate, but a tie breaks for Democrats thanks to the state's Democratic lieutenant governor presiding over the chamber. So technically the state stays in Democratic control.)

Election Day was largely a stalemate between the parties at the state level, but Republicans only needed to pick up one or two chambers and governors' mansions to make history.

And they did, despite our predictions otherwise. Republicans flipped at least three new state legislative chambers, including taking control of the last state legislative chamber in the South, the Kentucky statehouse.

[Democrats are now basically extinct in the South]

In Wisconsin, Republicans will have their largest state legislative majority since the 1970s, and in North Carolina, Republicans held onto their super-majority in the legislature.

Democrats had their own successes: They flipped the New Mexico and Alaska statehouses from red to blue and managed to retake both of Nevada's chambers. They expanded their majorities in chambers in California, Washington and New York. And they are on the verge of knocking off a Republican governor in North Carolina -- one of the hardest feats to pull off in politics. In two other states that Donald Trump won big (Montana and West Virginia), they held onto the governorship.

But Democrats' success came in isolated pockets. When you look at the post-2016 map, the story is still one of absolute Republican dominance.

And it means Democrats' surge to power in 2006 and 2008 has been completely decimated. My colleague Philip Bump visualized this another way --trendlines plummeting downward for Democrats at all levels of governance:

Democrats are still soul searching for what went wrong on Tuesday. But there are a few reasons that help explain Republicans' steady march to dominance over the past eight years.

==

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/24/republican-lawmakers-introduce-bills-to-curb-protesting-in-at-least-17-states/

Republican lawmakers introduce bills to curb protesting in at least 17 states

By Christopher Ingraham February 24 at 11:37 AM 

Since the election of President Trump, Republican lawmakers in at least 17 states have introduced or voted on legislation to curb mass protests in what civil liberties experts are calling “an attack on protest rights throughout the states.”

From Virginia to Washington state, legislators have introduced bills that would increase punishments for blocking highways, ban the use of masks during protests, indemnify drivers who strike protesters with their cars and, in at least once case, seize the assets of people involved in protests that later turn violent. The proposals come after a string of mass protest movements in the past few years, covering everything from police shootings of unarmed black men to the Dakota Access Pipeline to the inauguration of Trump.

Some are introducing bills because they say they're necessary to counter the actions of “paid” or “professional” protesters who set out to intimidate or disrupt, a common accusation that experts agree is largely overstated. “You now have a situation where you have full-time, quasi-professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder,” said Republican state senator John Kavanagh of Arizona in support of a measure there that would bring racketeering charges against some protesters.

Others, like the sponsors of a bill in Minnesota, say the measures are necessary to protect public safety on highways. Still other bills, in states like Oklahoma and South Dakota, are intended to discourage protesting related to oil pipelines.

Democrats in many of these states are fighting the legislation. They cite existing laws that already make it a crime to block traffic, the possibility of a chilling effect on protests across the political spectrum, and concerns for protesters’ safety in the face of aggressive motorists.

None of the proposed legislation has yet been passed into law, and several bills have already been shelved in committee.

Critics doubt whether many of the laws would pass Constitutional muster. “The Supreme Court has gone out of its way on multiple occasions to point out that streets, sidewalks and public parks are places where [First Amendment] protections are at their most robust,” said Lee Rowland, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

This is by no means the first time in American history that widespread protests have inspired a legislative backlash, says Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociology professor who studies protest movements. “For instance, southern legislatures — especially in the Deep South — responded to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education) with dozens and dozens of new bills outlawing civil rights groups, limiting the rights of assembly, etc. all in an effort to make civil rights organizing more difficult,” he said via email.

“Similarly,” he added, “laws designed to limit or outlaw labor organizing or limit labor rights were common in the late 19th/early 20th century.”

The ACLU’s Rowland says the new bills are not about “creating new rules that are necessary because of some gap in the law.” She points out, for instance, that “every single city and county in the United States” already has laws on the books against obstructing traffic on busy roads.

Rather, Rowland says the laws’ intent is “increasing the penalties for protest-related activity to the point that it results in self-censorship among protesters who have every intention to obey the law.”

Even the accusations of “paid” or “professional” agitators, which Trump has promoted, have been leveled at protesters before.

“This is standard operating procedure for movement opponents,” Stanford’s McAdam said. “Civil rights workers were said to be ‘outside agitators, and the tea party was dismissed as an ‘AstroTurf’ phenomenon — funded from on high by the Koch brothers and others — rather than a legitimate ‘grass roots’ movement. In all these cases, including the present, the charges are generally bogus, with the vast majority of protesters principled individuals motivated by the force of deeply held values and strong emotion.”

But now, social media has made it possible to organize larger protests more rapidly than ever before. “The older laws are becoming less effectual in dealing with these kind of groups,” said Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan, a political sociologist who studies protest movements. On top of that, “the courts have said, ‘Look, the people have a right to protest in this way.’ ” So on some level the new legislation represents an attempt by lawmakers to catch up with new realities of 21st-century protesting.

Here’s a list of laws that have been introduced or voted on since the election.

Arizona

Arizona’s bill, introduced this week, would open up protests to anti-racketeering legislation, targeting protesters with the same laws used to combat organized crime syndicates. It would also allow police to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that at some point becomes violent. It recently passed the state Senate on a party-line vote and is now before the House.

Colorado

A bill under consideration in Colorado would strengthen penalties for “tampering” with oil and gas equipment. It’s intended to prevent activists from shutting off pipelines, a tactic that’s been used in other states.

Florida

A bill introduced by Republican George Gainer in the Florida Senate this month would provide criminal penalties for protesters obstructing traffic and exempt drivers from liability if they struck a protester under certain conditions. It was filed this week, and if enacted would take force on July 1.

Iowa

A bill supported by nine Republican sponsors would make protesters who intentionally block highways subject to felony charges and up to five years in prison. The bill’s lead sponsor told the Des Moines Register it was introduced in response to a November incident in which a protest Trump shut down part of Interstate 80 in Iowa.

Indiana

An Indiana Senate committee recently toned down a bill that would have allowed police to shut down highway protests using “any means necessary.” The current version allows police to issue fines for such behavior.

Michigan

A Michigan bill voted on late last year would have increased fines for certain “mass picketing” behavior, and made it easier for courts to shut down such demonstrations.

Minnesota

Bills under consideration in Minnesota would increase fines for protesters blocking highways and airports. A separate measure before the legislature would make it possible for jurisdictions to charge protesters for the costs of policing the protests.

Missouri

A Republican lawmaker has introduced legislation that would make it illegal for protesters to wear masks, robes or other disguises during protests deemed to be illegal.

Mississippi

A bill before the Mississippi legislature would make obstruction of traffic a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence.

North Carolina

A North Carolina Republican has pledged to introduce legislation making it a crime to “threaten, intimidate or retaliate against” current or former state officials, in response to an incident involving the heckling of Gov. Pat McCrory. The Senator proposing the legislation, Dan Bishop, confirmed via email that he still intends to introduce the legislation, perhaps as early as next week, after consulting with potential co-sponsors.

North Dakota

A number of North Dakota bills have been introduced in response to the long-standing protests there against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The measure that drew the most attention was a bill that would have removed penalties for motorists who strike protesters with their car in some circumstances. That bill failed to make it out of the House, but a number of other measures increasing penalties for certain types of protest action are advancing through the legislature.

Oklahoma

Inspired by pipeline protests in North Dakota, the Oklahoma legislature is considering a bill that would increase penalties for trespassing on certain pieces of “critical infrastructure” like pipelines and railways.

Oregon

A novel piece of legislation in Oregon would require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.

South Dakota

A Senate panel in South Dakota recently approved a bill that would increase penalties for certain acts of trespassing and blocking highways. It’s a response to pipeline protests in North Dakota, and to the potential for similar protests in South Dakota if the Keystone XL pipeline gets built.

Tennessee

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A Tennessee Republican wants drivers to be protected from liability if they inadvertently strike a protester who is blocking a roadway.

Virginia

A Virginia bill that would have increased penalties for people who refused to leave the scene of a riot or unlawful protest died in the state Senate last month. The bill had been requested by law enforcement.

Washington state

Washington lawmakers are considering a bill to increase penalties for people blocking highways and railways, acts that the bill's sponsor has characterized as “economic terrorism.”

---

==

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/24/republican-lawmakers-introduce-bills-to-curb-protesting-in-at-least-17-states/

Republican lawmakers introduce bills to curb protesting in at least 17 states

By Christopher Ingraham February 24 at 11:37 AM 

Since the election of President Trump, Republican lawmakers in at least 17 states have introduced or voted on legislation to curb mass protests in what civil liberties experts are calling “an attack on protest rights throughout the states.”

From Virginia to Washington state, legislators have introduced bills that would increase punishments for blocking highways, ban the use of masks during protests, indemnify drivers who strike protesters with their cars and, in at least once case, seize the assets of people involved in protests that later turn violent. The proposals come after a string of mass protest movements in the past few years, covering everything from police shootings of unarmed black men to the Dakota Access Pipeline to the inauguration of Trump.

Some are introducing bills because they say they're necessary to counter the actions of “paid” or “professional” protesters who set out to intimidate or disrupt, a common accusation that experts agree is largely overstated. “You now have a situation where you have full-time, quasi-professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder,” said Republican state senator John Kavanagh of Arizona in support of a measure there that would bring racketeering charges against some protesters.

Others, like the sponsors of a bill in Minnesota, say the measures are necessary to protect public safety on highways. Still other bills, in states like Oklahoma and South Dakota, are intended to discourage protesting related to oil pipelines.

Democrats in many of these states are fighting the legislation. They cite existing laws that already make it a crime to block traffic, the possibility of a chilling effect on protests across the political spectrum, and concerns for protesters’ safety in the face of aggressive motorists.

None of the proposed legislation has yet been passed into law, and several bills have already been shelved in committee.

Critics doubt whether many of the laws would pass Constitutional muster. “The Supreme Court has gone out of its way on multiple occasions to point out that streets, sidewalks and public parks are places where [First Amendment] protections are at their most robust,” said Lee Rowland, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

This is by no means the first time in American history that widespread protests have inspired a legislative backlash, says Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociology professor who studies protest movements. “For instance, southern legislatures — especially in the Deep South — responded to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education) with dozens and dozens of new bills outlawing civil rights groups, limiting the rights of assembly, etc. all in an effort to make civil rights organizing more difficult,” he said via email.

“Similarly,” he added, “laws designed to limit or outlaw labor organizing or limit labor rights were common in the late 19th/early 20th century.”

The ACLU’s Rowland says the new bills are not about “creating new rules that are necessary because of some gap in the law.” She points out, for instance, that “every single city and county in the United States” already has laws on the books against obstructing traffic on busy roads.

Rather, Rowland says the laws’ intent is “increasing the penalties for protest-related activity to the point that it results in self-censorship among protesters who have every intention to obey the law.”

Even the accusations of “paid” or “professional” agitators, which Trump has promoted, have been leveled at protesters before.

“This is standard operating procedure for movement opponents,” Stanford’s McAdam said. “Civil rights workers were said to be ‘outside agitators, and the tea party was dismissed as an ‘AstroTurf’ phenomenon — funded from on high by the Koch brothers and others — rather than a legitimate ‘grass roots’ movement. In all these cases, including the present, the charges are generally bogus, with the vast majority of protesters principled individuals motivated by the force of deeply held values and strong emotion.”

But now, social media has made it possible to organize larger protests more rapidly than ever before. “The older laws are becoming less effectual in dealing with these kind of groups,” said Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan, a political sociologist who studies protest movements. On top of that, “the courts have said, ‘Look, the people have a right to protest in this way.’ ” So on some level the new legislation represents an attempt by lawmakers to catch up with new realities of 21st-century protesting.

Here’s a list of laws that have been introduced or voted on since the election.

Arizona

Arizona’s bill, introduced this week, would open up protests to anti-racketeering legislation, targeting protesters with the same laws used to combat organized crime syndicates. It would also allow police to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that at some point becomes violent. It recently passed the state Senate on a party-line vote and is now before the House.

Colorado

A bill under consideration in Colorado would strengthen penalties for “tampering” with oil and gas equipment. It’s intended to prevent activists from shutting off pipelines, a tactic that’s been used in other states.

Florida

A bill introduced by Republican George Gainer in the Florida Senate this month would provide criminal penalties for protesters obstructing traffic and exempt drivers from liability if they struck a protester under certain conditions. It was filed this week, and if enacted would take force on July 1.

Iowa

A bill supported by nine Republican sponsors would make protesters who intentionally block highways subject to felony charges and up to five years in prison. The bill’s lead sponsor told the Des Moines Register it was introduced in response to a November incident in which a protest Trump shut down part of Interstate 80 in Iowa.

Indiana

An Indiana Senate committee recently toned down a bill that would have allowed police to shut down highway protests using “any means necessary.” The current version allows police to issue fines for such behavior.

Michigan

A Michigan bill voted on late last year would have increased fines for certain “mass picketing” behavior, and made it easier for courts to shut down such demonstrations.

Minnesota

Bills under consideration in Minnesota would increase fines for protesters blocking highways and airports. A separate measure before the legislature would make it possible for jurisdictions to charge protesters for the costs of policing the protests.

Missouri

A Republican lawmaker has introduced legislation that would make it illegal for protesters to wear masks, robes or other disguises during protests deemed to be illegal.

Mississippi

A bill before the Mississippi legislature would make obstruction of traffic a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence.

North Carolina

A North Carolina Republican has pledged to introduce legislation making it a crime to “threaten, intimidate or retaliate against” current or former state officials, in response to an incident involving the heckling of Gov. Pat McCrory. The Senator proposing the legislation, Dan Bishop, confirmed via email that he still intends to introduce the legislation, perhaps as early as next week, after consulting with potential co-sponsors.

North Dakota

A number of North Dakota bills have been introduced in response to the long-standing protests there against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The measure that drew the most attention was a bill that would have removed penalties for motorists who strike protesters with their car in some circumstances. That bill failed to make it out of the House, but a number of other measures increasing penalties for certain types of protest action are advancing through the legislature.

Oklahoma

Inspired by pipeline protests in North Dakota, the Oklahoma legislature is considering a bill that would increase penalties for trespassing on certain pieces of “critical infrastructure” like pipelines and railways.

Oregon

A novel piece of legislation in Oregon would require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.

South Dakota

A Senate panel in South Dakota recently approved a bill that would increase penalties for certain acts of trespassing and blocking highways. It’s a response to pipeline protests in North Dakota, and to the potential for similar protests in South Dakota if the Keystone XL pipeline gets built.

Tennessee

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A Tennessee Republican wants drivers to be protected from liability if they inadvertently strike a protester who is blocking a roadway.

Virginia

A Virginia bill that would have increased penalties for people who refused to leave the scene of a riot or unlawful protest died in the state Senate last month. The bill had been requested by law enforcement.

Washington state

Washington lawmakers are considering a bill to increase penalties for people blocking highways and railways, acts that the bill's sponsor has characterized as “economic terrorism.”

---

==

DAVID A. GRAHAM  NOV 6, 2016

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/where-republicans-stand-on-donald-trump-a-cheat-sheet/481449/

Although he is a longtime Republican, Powell’s decision to endorse a Democrat is not shocking. He also backed Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and in each of those cases made his announcement right around this time of year, in mid- to late-October. Nor is it altogether surprising that he would oppose Trump. A large number of generals, especially those in the centrist establishment, have criticized Trump as too friendly to Russia, unpredictable with nuclear weapons, and insufficiently attuned to the importance of America’s strategic allies, among other things

Election Day 2016: Live Coverage

What adds some intrigue to the apparent Clinton endorsement is the revelation, in September, of a large tranche of Powell’s personal emails, in which he offered an unvarnished view on both candidates. (A spokeswoman confirmed the messages were real at the time.) Powell said Donald Trump  “has no sense of shame,” and is “a national disgrace” and “international pariah.” He said that “the whole birther movement was racist” and complained that the media was providing Trump with oxygen to fuel his campaign. He cracked jokes about Trump’s poor standing with women voters.

Yet he was also critical of Clinton. “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris,” he complained. He criticized her handling of the controversy over her use of a private email server, and bristled at what he viewed as her aides’ attempts at clearing her, or at least mitigating the damage, by dragging him into the story.

“I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect,” he wrote in one apparent email from the leak.

When the emails leaked in September, it seemed like a moment of reckoning for someone like Powell. Did he speak out and endorse Clinton, who he thought would be better qualified but with whom he had some real gripes? Or did he keep quiet and hope that she was able to defeat Trump without him? Powell’s statement now comes as the likelihood of a Trump victory seems to be shrinking. It’s not clear why he decided to speak now, but his views seem clear.

How do you solve a problem like The Donald? For Republicans and conservatives, the time for hoping Trump would simply burn himself out, collapse, and go away is over. Now they have to figure out what they’ll do: Sign up with Trump in the name of party unity, and distaste for Hillary Clinton? Or risk alienating the Republican nominee and reject him?

As the chaotic and failed attempts to stop Trump over the last year have shown, there’s no obviously right choice for how conservatives should respond. But which choice are people making? Here’s a list of some major figures and where they stand on Trump—right now. We’ll keep it updated as other important people take stances, or as these ones change their views about Trump.

Party Elders

George W. Bush: ABSTAIN

The former president “does not plan to participate in or comment on the presidential campaign,” an aide told the Texas Tribune. (May 4, 2016)

George H.W. Bush: ABSTAIN

“At age 91, President Bush is retired from politics. He came out of retirement to do a few things for Jeb, but those were the exceptions that proved the rule,” an aide told the Texas Tribune. (May 4, 2016)

Barbara Bush: NAY

Unlike her husband and elder son, the former first lady has publicly disavowed Trump. “I mean, unbelievable. I don't know how women can vote for someone who said what he said about Megyn Kelly, it’s terrible,” she told CBS in February. “And we knew what he meant too.” (February 4, 2016)

Mitt Romney: NAY

The party’s 2012 nominee, one of Trump’s staunchest critics during the primary, told The Wall Street Journal, “I wanted my grandkids to see that I simply couldn’t ignore what Mr. Trump was saying and doing, which revealed a character and temperament unfit for the leader of the free world.” Romney continued: “I know that some people are offended that someone who lost and is the former nominee continues to speak, but that’s how I can sleep at night.” (May 27, 2016)

Romney previously told The Washington Post he would skip the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and said at a D.C. dinner that he won’t be supporting Trump. (May 5, 2016)

Bob Dole: YEA (formerly UNDECIDED)

The former Senate majority leader and 1996 GOP presidential nominee endorsed Trump on May 6. He will also be the only living GOP nominee to attend the RNC. (May 6, 2016.) Dole previously would not commit to voting for Trump but said in January that Trump would be preferable to Cruz. (May 5, 2016)

John Boehner: YEA

The former speaker, who says he and Trump are “texting buddies,” told an audience at Stanford University that he’d back Trump in the general election. (April 28, 2016)

Trent Lott: YEA

The former Senate majority leader told The Clarion-Ledger that he will back Trump, despite some reservations. (May 4, 2016)

Tom DeLay: UNDECIDED

Asked by reporter Jon Ward whether Clinton or Trump was worse, the former House majority leader responded, “I can’t answer that right now.” (June 21, 2016)

DeLay hadn’t spoken out since Trump’s ascension, but was highly critical of him during the primary: “We have got to stop Trump. Whatever it takes without cheating or violating the rules of the Republican primaries,” he told Newsmax.

Dick Cheney: YEA

The former vice president blasted Trump during the primary over his stance on 9/11, and said he “sounds like a liberal Democrat,” but he now says he will back the nominee. (May 6, 2016)

Newt Gingrich: YEA

The former speaker of the House did not formally endorse Trump during the primary, but he has repeatedly praised the mogul and his vision, and is said to be a contender for a position in a Trump administration.

Jeb Bush: NAY

The former Florida governor and presidential candidate came to detest Trump during the campaign. In April, he said he would not attend the Republican National Convention. He now says he will not vote for either Trump or Clinton. (May 6, 2016)

Reince Priebus: YEA

As chair of the Republican National Committee, Priebus doesn't really have a choice, though that doesn’t mean he won’t pour Baileys in his cereal over it. (May 4, 2016)

 Follow

 Reince Priebus ? @Reince

.@realDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton

6:05 PM - 3 May 2016

  12,582 12,582 Retweets   18,226 18,226 likes

Priebus said on May 6 that Trump needs to change his tone.

Rick Perry: YEA

The former Texas governor and presidential candidate—who was one of the first to blast Trump—told CNN that he backs Trump. (5/5/16)

Mike Huckabee: YEA

The former Arkansas governor, who ran for president this year, says Republicans should get in line.  “When we nominated people over the past several election cycles, some of us had heartburn, but we stepped up and supported the nominee,” he said. “You’re either on the team, or you’re not on the team.” (May 5, 2016)

Bobby Jindal: YEA

The former Louisiana governor, who during his own presidential campaign called Trump a “narcissist” and an “egomaniacal madman,” wrote in a Wall Street Journal column that he’s voting for Trump, “warts and all.” “I think electing Donald Trump would be the second-worst thing we could do this November, better only than electing Hillary Clinton to serve as the third term for the Obama administration’s radical policies,” he said. (May 9, 2016)

Eric Cantor: YEA

Cantor, the former U.S. representative from Virginia and House majority leader, says he will back Trump, though he offered a tepid endorsement, saying a Trump-Clinton matchup was “probably not the best choice for anybody,” and adding, “He’s a businessman . . . [but] he’s been on so many sides of every issue that you never know.” (May 9, 2016)

Ben Carson: YEA

Carson, a relative political newcomer who ran for president in 2016, has become one of Trump’s most prominent surrogates, despite repeatedly voicing misgivings about the candidate.

Rick Santorum: YEA

The former Pennsylvania senator and two-time presidential candidate appeared, with Mike Huckabee, at a Trump rally back in January, when they were ostensibly rivals. (Both Santorum and Huckabee already seemed finished by then.) Despite Santorum’s strong social conservatism, he says that after “a long heart-to-heart with Donald Trump” he is “100 percent” endorsing the nominee. (May 25, 2016)

Karl Rove: UNDECIDED

The former George W. Bush strategist and current Wall Street Journal columnist and PAC boss has called Trump  “a complete idiot” who is “graceless and divisive.” (Trump, in turn, has asked, “Is he not the dumbest human being on earth?”) But The New York Times reports the two men met in May. (June 3, 2016)

Larry Pressler: NAY

A moderate and former three-term senator from South Dakota, Pressler has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. (June 14, 2016)

Herman Cain: YEA

Mr. 9-9-9, the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, introduced Trump at a rally in Atlanta, calling him “one of the great conservative voices in America today.” He had previously told Republicans who didn’t back Trump to “get over it” but also insisted it was not an endorsement. (June 15, 2016)

Norm Coleman: NAY

The former Minnesota senator wrote in a March 3 column that he will not support the Republican nominee. “I won't vote for Donald Trump because of who he isn't. He isn't a Republican. He isn't a conservative. He isn't a truth teller…. I also won't vote for Donald Trump because of who he is. A bigot. A misogynist. A fraud. A bully.” (July 7, 2016)

Michael Bloomberg: NAY

Does the former New York mayor count as a Republican? A former Democrat, he ran and was elected Big Apple head honcho as a Republican, though he later became an independent. In any case, Bloomberg is appalled by Trump, and he will speak on behalf of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. (June 24, 2016)

Sally Bradshaw: NAY

Bradshaw, a longtime operative and aid to Jeb Bush, was an author of the GOP’s post-2012 “autopsy” report. Now she says she’s not even a member of the party. “Ultimately, I could not abide the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump and his complete lack of principles and conservative philosophy. I didn’t make this decision lightly,” she told CNN. She said if Florida looks close, she will vote for Hillary Clinton in order to defeat Trump. (August 1, 2016)

Marc Racicot: NAY

Racicot, a confidant of former President George W. Bush who chaired the RNC from 2001 to 2003, tells Bloomberg, “I cannot and will not support Donald Trump for president.” (August 3, 2016)

Vin Weber: NAY

A former Minnesota congressman who helped Newt Gingrich bring the Republican Party to power and is now a lobbyist, Weber has ruled out Trump. “I won't vote for Trump,” he told CNBC. “I can't imagine I'd remain a Republican if he becomes president.” (August 3, 2016)

Gordon Humphrey: NAY

The former U.S. senator from New Hampshire says he cannot vote for Trump, calling him “a sociopath, without a conscience or feelings of guilt, shame or remorse.” Humphrey told NBC he may reluctantly vote for Hillary Clinton, but only if it’s a close contest. (August 4, 2016)

George P. Bush: YEA

The scion of the Bush family, who is currently Texas land commissioner, has broken with other members of the Bush clan, who have either pointedly abstained or said they would not vote for Trump. “From Team Bush, it's a bitter pill to swallow, but you know what? You get back up and you help the man that won, and you make sure that we stop Hillary Clinton,” he said. (August 6, 2016)

Chris Shays: NAY

A longtime moderate Republican U.S. representative from Connecticut who lost his seat in 2008, Shays has endorsed Hillary Clinton. “I think many Republicans know Donald Trump could cause great damage to our country and the world at large, and still plan to vote for him. But not me,” Shays wrote for CNN. He said he backs Clinton not reluctantly but with “strong conviction.” (August 10, 2016)

Richard Viguerie: YEA

The direct-mail pioneer and social-conservative elder statesman was once a Trump critic, saying in February, “I’m just very concerned about his mental stability and his moral background, or lack thereof, which he brags about. He has no grounds that drive him morally.” More recently, however, he has taken to praising Trump. “I haven't seen anything like this since the 1980 Reagan campaign against  Carter,” he said. (September 2, 2016)

Carly Fiorina: YEA (was ABSTAIN)

The former presidential candidate has called on Trump to step down and allow Mike Pence to take up the party’s mantle. She did not clearly state whether she would vote for Trump if he did not withdraw. (October 8, 2016)

Speaking to the Washington State Republican Party Thursday night, Fiorina said, “We must have President Trump—we can't have President Clinton.” She is reportedly considering a run for RNC chair. (September 9, 2016)

Fiorina, who briefly served as Ted Cruz’s running mate before he left the race, feuded with Trump during the primary, particularly over disparaging comments he made about her face. She had not endorsed him publicly, and her spokeswoman told The Washington Examiner in June that she was focusing on down-ballot races.

Mike Murphy: NAY

Murphy, a veteran Republican who ran Jeb Bush’s failed campaign for president, has been an outspoken Trump critic. Following the first presidential debate, Murphy said only Clinton was “ready” to serve:

 Follow

 mike murphy ? @murphymike

I despise her silly lefty domestic policy and the class war tropes, but it's all too clear that of these two only HRC is ready to be POTUS.

8:19 PM - 26 Sep 2016

  562 562 Retweets   1,199 1,199 likes

(September 27, 2016)

John Warner: NAY

Warner, the longtime Virginia senator and former secretary of the Navy, is endorsing Clinton. Warner, a World War II veteran who is still considered popular in Virginia, was always willing to buck his own party, sometimes voting against Republican leaders and endorsing Democrat Mark Warner (no relation) as his successor, but his backing should give Clinton a boost in Virginia. (September 28, 2016)

William Milliken: NAY

Milliken, a Republican who was Michigan’s longest-serving governor, holding office from 1969 to 1983, has crossed party lines to endorse Hillary Clinton over Trump. “Because I feel so strongly about our nation's future, I will be joining the growing list of former and present government officials in casting my vote for Hillary Clinton for president in 2016,” he said. As the Detroit Free Press notes, this isn’t Milliken’s first time endorsing a Democrat, but it could help sway votes in a swing state. (August 8, 2016)

Mickey Edwards: NAY

Edwards, who represented Oklahoma in the U.S. House, chaired the American Conservative Union, and helped found the Heritage Foundation, has been critical of Trump for some time. In August, he signed a letter asking the Republican Party to divert money from the presidential race to down-ballot races to save GOP control of Congress, and he helped circulate a letter from retired members of Congress deeming Trump unacceptable. (October 6, 2016)

Jon Huntsman: NAY (was YEA)

Huntsman, a moderate former governor of Utah who served as ambassador to China under Barack Obama and ran for president in 2012, says Trump should withdraw and allow Mike Pence to run for president. (October 7, 2016)

Huntsman was previously among the first mainstream GOP figures to back Trump. "We've had enough intraparty fighting. Now's the time to stitch together a winning coalition," he said. "And it's been clear almost from the beginning that Donald Trump has the ability to assemble a nontraditional bloc of supporters.” (April 29, 2016)

Christine Todd Whitman: NAY

The former governor of New Jersey and administrator of the EPA under George W. Bush is backing Hillary Clinton. “A Hillary presidency promises more of the Obama failed policies, but she would at least walk into the oval office ready to govern,” she wrote in a column. “She would be a steady hand on the nuclear code and she demonstrated a willingness to work across the aisle when she was in the senate.” (October 7, 2016)

Michael Steele: NAY

The former RNC chair and lieutenant governor of Maryland told an audience at a dinner honoring Mother Jones (seriously), “I was damn near puking during the debates,” adding that Trump had “captured that racist underbelly, that frustration, that angry underbelly of American life and gave voice to that.” He says he will not vote for Trump or Clinton. (October 21, 2016)

Mel Martinez: NAY

The former RNC chair and Florida senator says he won’t vote for Trump. “I would not vote for Trump, clearly,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “If there is any, any, any other choice, a living, breathing person with a pulse, I would be there.” (February 29, 2016)

Ken Mehlman: NAY

The former RNC chair wrote on Facebook that he was #NeverTrump. (May 12, 2016)

Representatives

Paul Ryan: YEA (was UNDECIDED)

The House speaker says he cannot and will not defend Trump any longer, and he said he will instead focus on trying to save Republican control of Congress. He has not, however, withdrawn his endorsement. (October 10, 2016)

Ryan condemned Trump over a tape in which he made lewd comments about women and discussed groping them without consent, disinviting him from a campaign event. But Ryan did not say he had changed his mind about an endorsement. (October 7, 2016)

Ryan once again affirmed his backing for Trump, offering the-less-than-resounding statement, “That’s not my plan. I don’t have a plan to do that.” (June 16, 2016)

has condemned Trump’s attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s as “absolutely unacceptable,” saying, “Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” but adding that he isn’t dropping his support for Trump. (June 7, 2016)

Ryan previously announced that he will vote for Trump:

 Follow

 Paul Ryan ? @PRyan

I'll be voting for @realDonaldTrump this fall. I'm confident he will help turn the House GOP's agenda into laws. http://www.gazettextra.com/20160602/paul_ryan_says_he_will_vote_for_donald_trump …

12:05 PM - 2 Jun 2016

Photo published for Paul Ryan endorses Donald Trump

Paul Ryan endorses Donald Trump

In an opinion piece released Thursday to The Gazette, Paul Ryan says he will vote for Donald Trump, despite their differences.

gazettextra.com

  4,396 4,396 Retweets   6,359 6,359 likes

Ryan said he had become convinced that Trump would help Ryan enact his House agenda. (June 2, 2016)

Ryan initially said he intended to support the Republican nominee, but after Trump clinched the nomination, he said he was not yet prepared to back Trump. “To be perfectly candid with you, I’m just not ready to that at this point,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I’m not there. I hope to, and I want to.” He said the party needs “a standard-bearer that bears our standards.” (May 5, 2016)

Kevin McCarthy: YEA

The House majority leader, a Californian, has broken with Speaker Paul Ryan and will back Trump. McCarthy has signed up as a prospective delegate for Trump in the Golden State. (May 10, 2016)

Steve Scalise: YEA

The House majority whip, a Louisiana representative, offered Trump a tepid endorsement. (The two men share the dubious distinction of being linked politically to David Duke.) “I've always said that I will support the Republican nominee,” Scalise said. “Now is the time for for our party to unite around Donald Trump so that we can focus on defeating Hillary Clinton in November to prevent another four years of job-killing, big government policies so we can get our economy back on track.” (May 5, 2016)

Cathy McMorris Rodgers: YEA (formerly UNDECIDED)

The Washington representative, who is chair of the House Republican Caucus, offered Trump a tepid endorsement, pointing out that he was the choice of primary voters, but adding, “In the months ahead, he will have to earn the presidency by demonstrating that he has the temperament for the job and plans to empower every American to pursue a future of opportunity and freedom.” (May 19, 2016)

McMorris Rodgers previously said she had not made up her mind. “Before I endorse him, I would like to have a conversation with him. I would like to ask him questions about some of the statements he’s made,” she told The Spokesman-Review. (May 5, 2016)

Raul Labrador: YEA

The Idaho congressman, a Tea Party hero, tepidly backs Trump after opposing him in the primary and backing Cruz. “There are some things he doesn’t quite understand,” Labrador told The Huffington Post. “With Trump, I have at least some hope that he’s going to make the right choice.”

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: NAY

The senior member of the Florida congressional delegation says she will write Jeb Bush’s name in on the ballot in November. (August 11, 2016)

Ros-Lehtinen, who was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States, has said she will not vote for Trump. “I will work with whomever is chosen by the American people to serve as president, because I deeply respect the American constitutional system,” she said in a statement. “In this election, I do not support either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.” (May 6, 2016)

Fred Upton: ABSTAIN

The longtime Michigan congressman (and, true fact, uncle of Kate) has called on Trump to withdraw from the race.

Upton previously said he would not endorse Trump, though he stopped short of saying he would not vote for him.  “There’s a lot of things that folks are not happy about with either of these two candidates,” he said during a radio interview. “We’re running our own race, and don’t look for me to endorse anyone in this race probably the rest of the year.” (June 16, 2016)

Richard Hanna: NAY

Hanna, a retiring congressman who represents a swing district in central New York, is the first House Republican to say he will vote for Hillary Clinton. “For me, it is not enough to simply denounce [Trump’s] comments: He is unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country,” Hanna wrote in the Syracuse Post-Standard. “Secretary Clinton has issues that depending on where one stands can be viewed as great or small…. While I disagree with her on many issues, I will vote for Mrs. Clinton.” (August 2, 2016)

Charlie Dent: NAY

Dent, a moderate Republican who represents southeastern Pennsylvania, said he doesn’t intend to vote for Trump or Clinton. “I’m not planning to vote for either of the two major-party nominees and I’m not ready to say I’m going to vote for the libertarians either,” he told Jake Tapper. (August 2, 2016)

Adam Kinzinger: NAY

The Illinois representative, a former Air Force pilot hails from a district west and south of Chicago, criticized Ted Cruz when he didn’t endorse Trump at the RNC. But then after Trump suggested not supporting NATO allies, Kinzinger described the idea as “utterly disastrous,” and he now tells CNN, “I don't see how I can get there anymore.” (August 3, 2016)

Mike Coffman: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Colorado representative has issued a statement calling for Trump to leave the ticket, in the wake of the publication of a video in which Trump made lewd comments about women and discussed groping them without consent. “For the good of the country, and to give the Republicans a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump should step aside,” he said. (October 8, 2016)

Coffman was previously vague on his position. In atelevision ad, he said, “People ask me, 'What do you think about Trump?' Honestly, I don't care for him much. And I certainly don't trust Hillary." He promised to “stand up to” Trump. A spokeswoman said he was considering other candidates, but had not ruled out voting for the nominee. (August 4, 2016)

Bob Dold: NAY

The Illinois congressman, who represents the northern suburbs of Chicago, was among the first Republicans to say he would not vote for Trump. “Whether it be Mr. Trump’s comments about women, his comments about Muslims, his comments about Latinos, for me it was very personal his comments about POWs,” Dold told WLS in May, adding, “I want to make that I’m clear about this, I’m not going to support Hillary Clinton either.  I would write someone in.” (May 6, 2016)

Scott Rigell: NAY

The Virginia congressman, who represents the Virginia Beach area, has become the first Republican member of Congress to say that he will vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Rigell says he long ago decided he could not back Trump. “When their own conscience is seared by some statement that Trump has made, I have encouraged them to be direct and also, in a timely manner, repudiate what he said,” he told The New York Times. (August 7, 2016)

Dave Reichert: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Washington congressman, who represents a district just east of Seattle, says that after the release of a video in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women, “Donald Trump has lost my vote.”

Reichert previously said in an interview with KIRO radio that he would “never” endorse Trump. But he also said he wouldn’t vote for Clinton, and when pressed on whether he would vote for Trump, he added, “I never said I wouldn’t vote for him, I just said I wouldn’t endorse him.” (August 11, 2016)

Mark Sanford: YEA

The South Carolina conservative and former governor (as you may recall) is backing Trump—he writes in a New York Times op-ed calling on the nominee to release his tax returns. “I am a conservative Republican who, though I have no stomach for his personal style and his penchant for regularly demeaning others, intends to support my party’s nominee because of the importance of filling the existing vacancy on the Supreme Court, and others that might open in the next four years.” (August 16, 2016)

Reid Ribble: NAY

The Wisconsin congressman has consistently been an outspoken Trump critic. He said in December that he would not back Trump if he became the nominee. In June, he said Trump was “likely to be a racist.” Now, along with Representative Scott Rigell and a slew of operatives, he has signed a letter asking the RNC to withdraw resources from the Trump campaign and concentrate on holding Congress. (August 16, 2016)

Mac Thornberry: UNDECIDED

Thornberry, a Texan who heads the House Armed Services Committee, has not endorsed Trump and skipped the Republican National Convention. Asked repeatedly on MSNBC whether he had confidence in Trump’s qualifications to serve as commander-in-chief, Thornberry deflected, saying he had concerns about both Trump and Hillary Clinton. (September 7, 2016)

Jason Chaffetz: YEA (was NAY and previously YEA)

Chaffetz, a Utahn who chairs the House Oversight Committee, tweeted that while he would not “endorse” Trump, he would still publicly announce his plans to vote for the Republican nominee:

 Follow

 Jason Chaffetz ? @jasoninthehouse

I will not defend or endorse @realDonaldTrump, but I am voting for him. HRC is that bad. HRC is bad for the USA.

6:05 PM - 26 Oct 2016

  6,109 6,109 Retweets   10,568 10,568 likes

(October 26, 2016)

Chaffetz previously announced that he was withdrawing his support from Trump over a tape in which he made lewd comments about women and discussed groping them without consent. “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president. It is some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine,” he said. (October 7, 2016)

Chaffetz previously voiced his support for Trump.

Barbara Comstock: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Virginia representative announced she is withdrawing her support for Trump. “I cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump,” she told The Washington Post. (October 7, 2016)

Comstock previously said she had not yet decided whether to endorse or vote for the GOP nominee.

Martha Roby: NAY (was YEA)

Roby, who represents the Montgomery, Alabama, area says she will no longer support Trump. “Donald Trump's behavior makes him unacceptable as a candidate for president and I won't vote for him,” she said. (October 8, 2016)

Roby previously endorsed Trump after he won the nomination, while expressing reservations. (May 16, 2016)

Joe Heck: NAY (was YEA)

Heck, a Nevadan who is the GOP’s candidate for U.S. Senate, has withdrawn his support for Trump over a video in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women. He called on Trump to step down. (October 8, 2016)

Heck previously endorsed Trump.

Cresent Hardy: NAY (was YEA)

Hardy, who represents Nevada, says he will no longer support Trump. (October 8, 2016)

Hardy previously tried to say that while he supported the GOP nominee, he somehow did not “endorse” him. (August 31, 2016)

Mia Love: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Utah representative has said that after the release of a video in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women, she cannot vote for him. “His behavior and bravado have reached a new low. I cannot vote for him," she said. "For the good of the party, he should step aside." She had not previously decided whether to back him. (October 8, 2016)

Will Hurd: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Texan, who represents a swath of West Texas, told the El Paso Times, “I never endorsed Trump and I cannot in good conscience support or vote for a man who degrades women, insults minorities and has no clear path to keep our country safe.” (October 8, 2016)

Steve Knight: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

Knight, a Californian who represents parts of Los Angeles County, says he will not back Trump: “While I’ve never before endorsed a Presidential candidate, I’ve felt compelled to strongly condemn many of Mr. Trump’s previous outrageous remarks. And after serious consideration, I have decided that I cannot support either candidate for President.” (October 8, 2016)

John Katko: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The upstate New York representative, who had not previously endorsed Trump, now wants him to drop out. “I am certainly not going to vote for him,” he said. (October 8, 2016)

Kay Granger: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Texan, who had not endorsed Trump, has called on him to withdraw in the wake of a video in which he boasts about sexually assaulting women. (October 8, 2016)

Rodney Davis: NAY (was YEA)

The Missouri representative has called on Trump to step down in favor of Mike Pence. “I am rescinding my support for Donald Trump and asking to have my name removed from his agriculture advisory committee,” he said. (October 8, 2016)

Davis endorsed Trump following the Republican primary. “I think what we have is a choice between two candidates for president, and the choice is pretty clear on which one is going to be tougher on national security issues, which one is going to put America's interest first,” he said.

Ann Wagner: NAY (was YEA)

The Missourian has called on Trump to step down and says she will not support for him. “As a strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault, I must be true to those survivors and myself and condemn the predatory and reprehensible comments of Donald Trump,” she said. (October 8, 2016)

Wagner had previously endorsed Trump.

Chris Stewart: YEA

The Utahn called on Trump to withdraw in favor of Mike Pence, but he did not say whether he would vote for the GOP ticket if Trump did not. (October 8, 2016)

Stewart previously endorsed Trump despite having called him “our Mussolini.” (May 9, 2016)

Bradley Byrne: YEA (was UNCLEAR and YEA)

The Alabaman’s spokesman has clarified that Byrne intends to vote for the Trump ticket. (October 11, 2016)

Byrne previously said that Trump should step aside and allow Mike Pence to lead the ticket, but he did not say whether he would vote for Trump if he did not withdraw. (October 8, 2016)

Byrne had previously tepidly endorsed Trump. “It's not a choice between Hillary Clinton and somebody else. If you want to defeat Hillary Clinton, you must vote for Donald Trump,” he said. (July 25, 2016)

Tom Rooney: NAY (was YEA)

The Floridian says he will not vote for Trump in the wake of a video in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women. Rooney will also not vote for Clinton. (October 8, 2016)

Rooney was one of the earliest members of Congress to back Trump. “I’m a Republican and he’s our nominee. All these people who are saying they’re not going to support who the Republican primary electorate has chosen need to re-evaluate why they’re part of this team. The people have spoken and you have to respect that.” (May 4, 2016)

Erik Paulsen: NAY (was UNDECIDED and YEA)

The Minnesotan, who faces a tough reelection race, called a video in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women “disgusting and offensive,” adding, “I will not be voting for him.” (October 9, 2016)

Paulsen had previously promised to vote for the GOP nominee, but in August said that Trump had not yet earned his vote. (August 17, 2016)

Frank LoBiondo: NAY (was YEA)

The New Jersey representative says he will vote for Mike Pence instead of Donald Trump. “I cannot support and will not vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States,” he said. (October 8, 2016)

LoBiondo previously endorsed Trump.

Jamie Herrera Beutler: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Washington representative says that in the wake of a video in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women, she will write in Speaker Paul Ryan for president. (October 8, 2016)

Herrerra Beutler had previously not endorsed Trump but said she hoped he would earn her support.

Senators

Mitch McConnell: YEA

The Senate majority leader issued a statement tepidly backing Trump. “I have committed to supporting the nominee chosen by Republican voters, and Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee is now on the verge of clinching that nomination,” he said. (May 4, 2016)

Ted Cruz: YEA (was APPARENT NAY and UNDECIDED)

The Texas senator, for months one of the highest profile holdouts among Republicans, has decided to endorse Donald Trump, he wrote in a Facebook post: “A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment. And if you don’t want to see a Hillary Clinton presidency, I encourage you to vote for him.” (September 23, 2016)

The Texas senator made his opinion about Trump fairly clear when he was given a prized speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Cruz refused to endorse the nominee, offering some barbed, double-edged comments like this: “Don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.” He was booed off the stage. Trump then said he’d refuse to accept Cruz’s endorsement if offered, which doesn’t seem likely to be an issue.

Cruz had previously floated the idea—likely unrealistic—of reanimating his suspending campaign and refused to endorse Trump. “We’ll see what happens as the months go forward, I think we need to watch and see what the candidates say and do,” he told Glenn Beck. (May 10, 2016)

In dropping out of the Republican race after losing to Trump, Cruz did not make any indication whether he was willing to back his rival. (May 3, 2016)

Jeff Sessions: YEA

The Alabama senator was Trump’s first endorser from the Senate, and he has been a high-profile backer and adviser to Trump’s campaign.

Susan Collins: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The moderate Maine senator writes in a Washington Post column that she has decided she cannot vote for Trump. “I have become increasingly dismayed by his constant stream of cruel comments and his inability to admit error or apologize,” she writes. “But it was his attacks directed at people who could not respond on an equal footing—either because they do not share his power or stature or because professional responsibility precluded them from engaging at such a level—that revealed Mr. Trump as unworthy of being our president.” She has not said for whom she will vote. (August 9, 2016)

Collins previously told Time that she was in wait-and-see mode. “I’ve said from the point that it became obvious that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican candidate that I’d always supported previous presidential nominees of my party but that in this case I was going to wait and see what happened and that is what I am continuing to do.” (June 7, 2016)

Having previously said that her backing from Trump would be contingent upon a shift in his rhetoric, Collins then said she would support the nominee. (May 6, 2016)

Collins said: “I have always supported the Republican nominee for president, and I suspect I would do so this year, but I do want see what Donald Trump does from here on out.” To win her vote, “He’s going to have stop with gratuitous personal insults,” she said, amusingly. (May 4, 2016)

John McCain: NAY (was YEA)

The Arizona senator and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, who is in a tight reelection battle, has announced he no longer supports Trump. “I thought it important I respect the fact that Donald Trump won a majority of the delegates by the rules our party set,” he said in a statement. “But Donald Trump’s behavior this week, concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.” (October 8, 2016)

McCain released a scorching statement criticizing Trump for his comments about Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, but he did not revoke his support. (August 1, 2016)

McCain has said publicly that he’ll back the nominee. In a private recording obtained by Politico, however, he frets that Trump endangers his reelection effort, while his former top aide Mark Salter is backing Clinton. (May 5, 2016)

Kelly Ayotte: NAY (was YEA)

The New Hampshire senator says she will not vote for Trump in the wake of a video in which he boasts of sexually assaulting women. “I wanted to be able to support my party’s nominee,” she said, but “I am a mom and an American first, and I cannot and will not support a candidate who brags about degrading and assaulting women.” (October 8, 2016)

Like her friend John McCain, the New Hampshire senator attacked Trump for his feud with Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, pronouncing herself “appalled” but giving no indication that she will withdraw backing for Trump. (August 1, 2016)

Ayotte, who is also in a tight reelection battle, previously said she plans to “support” but not “endorse” Trump, whatever that means. (May 5, 2016)

Rand Paul: YEA

In a fascinating interview with WDRB (via Reason), the Kentucky senator and former presidential candidate said citizens should vote their conscience, while suggesting that he was only publicly backing Trump because he had pledged during the primary to support the nominee. “I've made my complaints about our nominee quite explicit. I continue to do so, but also don't see it as my job now—the thing is, is: I do think that my word is important. I signed a document, not under duress, but I signed a document saying I wouldn't run as a third party and I will support the nominee.” (August 2, 2016)

Paul has said he will support Trump. (His father, ex-congressman and presidential contender Ron Paul, says he will not.) (May 4, 2016)

Lindsey Graham: NAY

The South Carolina senator and former presidential candidate blasted Trump following the nominee’s attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, saying fellow Republicans should withdraw their endorsements. “This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” he said. “If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it. There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.” (June 7, 2016)

Graham was one of Trump’s most prominent critics during the primary, even endorsing Cruz even though he’d previously likened the choice between him and Trump to a choice between poisoning and being shot. The day Trump won Indiana, Graham tweeted:

 Follow

 Lindsey Graham ? @LindseyGrahamSC

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

2:03 PM - 3 May 2016

  12,219 12,219 Retweets   16,158 16,158 likes

Graham says he will not vote for either Trump or Clinton. (May 6, 2016)

Ben Sasse: NAY

The Nebraska freshman senator was another anti-Trump ringleader, and has been suggested as a third-party candidate. In a long Facebook post, he explained why he’s still not backing Trump. (May 4, 2016)

Marco Rubio: SOFT YEA

The Florida senator and former presidential candidate said he does not plan to attend the Republican National Convention, but he has not made any statement changing his stance on Trump. (July 6, 2016)

In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Rubio said that although he has backed Trump, who he views as preferable to Hillary Clinton, he still believes what he said during the presidential campaign: That Trump is unfit for the presidency and cannot be trusted with the nation’s nuclear arsenal. (June 9, 2016)

Rubio, who previously referred to Trump as a “con artist,” now says he backs Trump, will attend the Republican National Convention, and will release his remaining delegates to Trump. “I want to be helpful. I don't want to be harmful, because I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president,” he told Jake Tapper. (May 26, 2016)

Rubio had previously not spoken about the race since Trump became the presumptive nominee, but in late April he said that he’d support Trump in order to beat Hillary Clinton. (April 21, 2016)

Rob Portman: NAY (was YEA)

The Ohio senator has withdrawn his endorsement of Trump. “While I continue to respect those who still support Donald Trump, I can no longer support him,” he said in a statement. “I continue to believe our country cannot afford a Hillary Clinton presidency. I will be voting for Mike Pence for President.” (October 8, 2016)

Portman, who now seems to have the clear upper-hand in his reelection fight, previously said he’d back the Republican nominee. Most recently, he said that having Trump on the ticket would be positive for his own hopes. (May 5, 2016)

Richard Burr: YEA

The North Carolinian, who also faces a tough reelection, supports Trump. (May 4, 2016)

 Follow

 Richard Burr ? @BurrForSenate

2/3: I look forward to working with Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket and to maintaining a #GOP Senate.

12:44 PM - 4 May 2016

  32 32 Retweets   17 17 likes

Roy Blunt: YEA

The Missourian, who is up for reelection, says he will support the nominee. (May, 5, 2016)

Ron Johnson: YEA

The Wisconsin senator, who is battling predecessor Russ Feingold, is one of the most precarious Republicans this year. He tepidly backed Trump. “As Ron has repeatedly said for months, he intends to support the Republican nominee, but he's focused on the concerns of Wisconsinites—not national political winds,” a spokesman told Roll Call. (May 5, 2016)

Pat Toomey: UNDECIDED

The Pennsylvania senator, another endangered incumbent, has not made up his mind. “As I have said repeatedly, I have not endorsed Donald Trump,” he said at a press conference. “There are things that he has said, a number of things he has said and done that give me great pause and I have significant concerns about, so I remain in a mode of waiting to be persuaded. I’ve not made a final decision on what I’m going to do. Hillary Clinton is completely unacceptable to me.” (August 10, 2016)

Toomey previously said: “It certainly looks like Donald Trump is on his way to the nomination .… Donald Trump was not my first choice. He wasn’t my second choice or third or fourth choice. I have lots have differences with Donald Trump and lots of problems with him but I am absolutely in the ‘never Hillary Clinton’ camp.” (May 4, 2016)

Mark Kirk: NAY (was YEA)

The Illinois senator, one of this year’s most endangered incumbents, says he will write in Colin Powell for president. (August 11, 2016)

Kirk previously announced that he is no longer supporting Donald Trump—the first Republican to rescind his backing. “After much consideration, I have concluded that Donald Trump has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to assume the greatest office in the world,” he said.  (June 7, 2016)

Kirk previously said he’d back Trump if nominated.

Tom Cotton: YEA

The rising-star Arkansas senator weakly endorsed Trump. “I’ve long said that I will support the Republican nominee because we can’t afford a third Obama-Clinton term,” he said. He had previously criticized Trump for mocking John McCain, but also said Trump would be “a more serious leader for our country” that Clinton. (May 5, 2016)

Bob Corker: YEA

The Tennessee senator, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said he is willing to help Trump. Corker praised Trump’s otherwise widely panned foreign-policy address and is reportedly talking to him about overseas matters. He’s been mentioned as VP candidate. (May 10, 2016)

Mike Lee: UNDECIDED

Lee, a conservative Utahan and close associate of Ted Cruz, demanded that Trump step down. “Donald Trump is a distraction. It's time for him to step aside so we can focus on the winning ideas that will carry Republicans through to a victory in November,” he said in a statement. Lee did not make clear whether he would support Trump if he did not step down.

Lee had not made his decision, but lashed out at conservative radio host Steve Malzberg for pressing him to back Trump. “We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” he said. “We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church.” He didn’t, however, rule out backing Trump in the future. (June 30, 2016)

Lee previously expressed reservations. “I have not supported Donald Trump up to this point, I have not endorsed him," Lee said, according to the Washington Examiner. "I have some concerns with him. He scares me to death; so does Hillary Clinton …. I'll make the decision as best I can, but I'm not there yet.” (May 11, 2016)

Orrin Hatch: YEA

The Utah senator, a longtime Washington fixture, backed Marco Rubio in the primary. After meeting with Trump on May 12, he said, “I totally endorse him.” Hatch also offered to help Trump pick Supreme Court nominees—moving to dampen one of the biggest conservative objections to Trump, which is that he can’t be trusted to select justices. (May 12, 2016)

Tim Scott: YEA

The South Carolinian, the GOP’s only black senator, quietly backed Trump after supporting Marco Rubio in the primary. He called Trump’s comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel “racially toxic,” but is not rescinding his endorsement. (June 7, 2016)

Jeff Flake: NAY

The Arizona senator says he cannot at this point back Trump. “It’s uncomfortable not having endorsed the Republican nominee, I have to say,” he said. “But I can’t at this point. I hope to be able to support the nominee. I certainly can't right now.” (June 7, 2016)

John Cornyn: YEA

The Texas senator said in May, “I’m for the nominee of the party; if it’s Donald Trump, I’ll support him wholeheartedly.” He’s gone back and forth, warning in February that Trump could be “an albatross around the down-ballot races.” More recently, he’s announced he simply won’t talk about Trump. “Wish me luck,” he said. (June 15, 2016)

Dean Heller: SOFT NAY

The Nevada senator told Politico he is currently opposed to Trump, though he wouldn’t rule out changing his mind. “Today, I’m opposed to his campaign,” he said. “He did a lot of damage. It’s very difficult for him, as far as I’m concerned, to recover from his previous comments. I’ll give him a chance, but at this point, I have no intentions of voting for him.” (June 30, 2016)

Lisa Murkowski: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The Alaska senator has said she cannot back Trump and asked him to withdraw over a video in which he boasts of sexually assaulting women. “The video that surfaced yesterday further revealed his true character,” she said. “He not only objectified women, he bragged about preying upon them. I cannot and will not support Donald Trump for President—he has forfeited the right to be our party's nominee. He must step aside.” (October 8, 2016)

Murkowski, who has turned particularly moderate since the 2010 election, in which she lost a GOP primary but won reelection as a write-in candidate, tells the AP she has not made up her mind about the election. “I’ve got a few months to listen, as other Americans are, to what is laid down in terms of policy, and we'll figure it out,” she said. (August 10, 2016)

Cory Gardner: NAY (was YEA)

The Colorado senator has changed his mind and will not vote for Trump. ““If Donald Trump wishes to defeat Hillary Clinton, he should do the only thing that will allow us to do so—step aside, and allow Mike Pence to be the Republican party’s nominee,” he said. “If he fails to do so, I will not vote for Hillary Clinton but will instead write-in my vote for Mike Pence.” (October 8, 2016)

At a rally, the Colorado senator gave Trump a backhanded endorsement. “I’m voting Republican up and down the ticket. A Republican president will make a difference, even a Republican president named Donald Trump,” he said. Gardner previously called Trump a “buffoon.” (August 18, 2016)

Mike Crapo: YEA (was NAY and previously YEA)

The Idaho senator now says he will back Donald Trump, despite previously rescinding his endorsement. In a statement, Crapo said he would back Trump to prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency. (October 24, 2016)

Crapo had withdrawn his backing for Trump over a video in which Trump boasts of sexually assaulting women. “I have reached the decision that I can no longer endorse Donald Trump,” he said. “This is not a decision that I have reached lightly, but his pattern of behavior has left me no choice. His repeated actions and comments toward women have been disrespectful, profane and demeaning.” (October 8, 2016)

Crapo previously was slow to endorse Trump but threw him his support after he locked up the nomination, saying, “Congratulations to Donald Trump on his nomination victory. I strongly support his candidacy for president and now we can come together to support his call for less government and more support for veterans, law enforcement and increased safety and security.” (July 19, 2016)

Shelley Moore Capito: YEA

The West Virginian has called on Trump to withdraw over a video in which he boasts about sexually assaulting women. She did not say whether she would refuse to vote for him if he remained. (October 8, 2016)

Capito endorsed Trump following the West Virginia primary.

John Thune: UNCLEAR

The South Dakotan, who is the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, called on the nominee to step down. “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately,” he tweeted. But Thune did not make clear whether he would continue to support Trump if he did not withdraw. (October 8, 2016)

Thune previously endorsed Trump. “We have to get it right in 2016 because the future of our country is hanging in the balance in so many different ways," he said. “And there are three words that ought to scare everyone in this room: President Hillary Clinton.” (May 31, 2016)

Dan Sullivan: NAY (was YEA)

Alaska’s other senator says Trump should withdraw, and said he would vote for Mike Pence. (October 8, 2016)

Sullivan had previously backed the nominee. “While I don’t support some of the rhetoric Donald Trump has used in his campaign, nor some of his policy ideas, I plan on supporting the Republican nominee at this time,” he said. (May 4, 2016)

Deb Fischer: YEA

The Nebraskan, a major Trump backer, confirmed that she will still vote for him. “I plan to vote for Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence on November 8,” she told KLIN. “I put out a statement ... with regard to Mr. Trump's comments. I felt they were disgusting. I felt they were unacceptable and I never said I was not voting for our Republican ticket.” (October 11, 2016)

Fischer harshly criticized Trump after the release of a video in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. “The comments made by Mr. Trump were disgusting and totally unacceptable under any circumstance," she said. "It would be wise for him to step aside and allow Mike Pence to serve as our party's nominee.” But Fischer did not say whether she would vote for Trump if he did not withdraw. (October 8, 2016)

Fischer previously backed Trump. “He has tapped into where people are in this country,” she said. “They’re supporting Donald Trump. Truly.” (May 13, 2016)

Governors

Chris Keane / Reuters

Chris Christie: YEA

The New Jersey governor and former presidential candidate was Trump’s first major establishment endorser, and has been a staunch ally.

Paul LePage: YEA

Maine’s sometimes-racist governor had backed Christie, but he quickly endorsed Trump after Christie did.

John Kasich: NAY (was SOFT NAY)

In the wake of a video in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women, the Ohio governor and final Republican challenger to leave the race formally said he did not support Trump. “The actions of the last day are disgusting, but that’s not why I reached this decision, it has been an accumulation of his words and actions that many have been warning about,” he said in a statement. “I will not vote for a nominee who has behaved in a manner that reflects so poorly on our country.” (October 8, 2016)

Kasich previously had not entirely slammed the door on backing Trump, but he said he cannot do so now. “We’ll see where it ends up. I’m not making any final decision yet, but at this point, I just can’t do it,” he said. (June 16, 2016)

Kasich previously had not said whether he’ll back Trump. In his comments leaving the race, Kasich pointedly did not mention Trump or indicate his leaning. (May 4, 2016)

Nikki Haley: YEA

The governor of South Carolina tangled with Trump ahead of that state’s primary, and was elegantly withering toward him at the time. But she says she will back him. “I have great respect for the will of the people, and as I have always said, I will support the Republican nominee for president,” she said. (May 4, 2016)

Brian Sandoval: NAY (was UNDECIDED and previously YEA)

The Nevada governor, a moderate conservative, has withdrawn his backing over a video in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women. “This video exposed not just words, but now an established pattern which I find to be repulsive and unacceptable for a candidate for President of the United States,” Sandoval said in a statement. “I cannot support him as my party’s nominee.” (October 8, 2016)

Sandoval once said he would back the GOP nominee, but now says he is “not sure.” “I will only say that you can't defend the indefensible," he said after Trump attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel. (June 7, 2016)

Sandoval previously said he was no fan of Trump but will back him. “I plan to vote for the presumptive nominee although it is no secret that we do not agree on every issue. Elections are about making choices and the Democratic nominee is simply not an option,” he wrote on Facebook. He does not plan to attend the convention. (May 5, 2016)

Pete Ricketts: YEA

The Nebraska governor will back Trump. That’s a bit of a surprise because Ricketts’ father, mother, and brother were among the leading bankrollers of anti-Trump initiatives. Trump threatened them in February, tweeting, “They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” (May 5, 2016)

Mike Pence: YEA

The Indiana governor and social conservative is now Donald Trump’s running mate and the Republican vice-presidential candidate. (July 15, 2016)

Pence previously cautiously endorsed Cruz ahead of the Hoosier State primary, but he’s now on the Trump train. “I’m fully supportive of our presumptive nominee, and I do think Donald Trump will do well in the State of Indiana,” he said. (May 6, 2016)

Charlie Baker: NAY

The moderate Massachusetts governor told reporters he would not vote for Trump and doubted he’d vote for Clinton. Later the same day, a spokeswoman clarified to The Boston Globe: “Governor Baker will not be voting for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.” (May 4, 2016)

Rick Snyder: ABSTAIN

Michigan’s governor—a rising GOP star until the Flint water scandal derailed his career—will not endorse Trump, nor will he weigh in otherwise, he said. “I’ve stayed out of the whole thing, and I’m going to continue to,” he told the editorial board of The Detroit News. “I’ve got important things I want to work on in Michigan.” (June 2, 2016)

Pat McCrory: YEA

The North Carolina governor, facing a tough reelection fight in November, offered a pro-forma endorsement for Trump when pressed by a News and Observer reporter: “I’ve stated that I would support the Republican nominee. Anything else?” (June 7, 2016)

Scott Walker: YEA (was UNDECIDED)

The Wisconsin governor, a former presidential rival of Trump’s, stayed out of the race for some time. In an energetic speech at the Republican National Convention, he made the case for Trump by assailing Hillary Clinton. “America deserves better,” he said. (July 20, 2016)

Walker previously said he’d back Trump—though don’t ask him to be happy about it, or even use the candidate’s name:

 Follow

 Scott Walker ? @ScottWalker

Last August, I said I'd support the GOP nominee. It's now clear who the RNC delegates will vote to nominate. And he is better than she is.

8:49 AM - 6 Jul 2016

  709 709 Retweets   1,202 1,202 likes

Walker also told WKOW that he will be speaking at the Republican National Convention. (July 6, 2016)

Walker had been fairly quiet about the race. Although he initially said he intended to back the nominee, whoever that was, he later hedged, lamenting the “poor choices” Americans face. He declined to endorse Trump, citing his comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel. “He’s not yet the nominee. Officially that won’t happen until the middle of July, and so for me that’s kind of the timeframe,” Walker said. “In particular I want to make sure that he renounces what he says, at least in regards to this judge.” (June 8, 2016)

Larry Hogan: NAY (was ABSTAIN)

The governor of Maryland told The Washington Post he does not intend to vote for Trump. “No, I don’t plan to,” he said. “I guess when I get behind the curtain I’ll have to figure it out. Maybe write someone in. I’m not sure.” (June 15, 2016)

Hogan has repeatedly expressed his disgust with Trump and tried to deflect conversations about national politics. “My thoughts are pretty clear. I’ve talked about it ad nauseam for four or five months,” he said. “My thoughts haven’t changed. I have nothing more to add. I’m not involved in it. I don’t care to be involved in it. I’m not going to endorse anyone and would rather focus on things here in Maryland.” Hogan said he didn’t know who he’d vote for. (June 9, 2016)

Susana Martinez: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The New Mexico governor has responded to the video of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women with disgust. “That’s why I have withheld my support from the very beginning, and will not support him now,” she said. (October 8, 2016)

Martinez was initially mentioned as a VP candidate—not the first time, since as a woman and Hispanic she’d add a lot of diversity to a GOP ticket. But she and Trump have since waged a war of words, with Trump first applauding her, then blasting her, then saying he’d like her endorsement. Martinez has not endorsed Trump, but says she will not be backing Hillary Clinton. (June 16, 2016)

Gary Herbert: NAY (was YEA)

The Utah governor says he no longer backs Trump after the release of a tape in which he made lewd comments about women and discussed groping them without consent. Herbert tweeted that the comments were “beyond offensive & despicable. While I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, I will not vote for Trump.” (October 8, 2016)

Although Trump’s backing in Utah has been unusually weak for a Republican, Herbert previously said he would support Trump. (August 11, 2016)

Bill Haslam: NAY (was UNDECIDED)

The governor of Tennessee issued a statement saying he would not vote for Trump and calling him to withdraw: “It is time for the good of the nation and the Republican Party for Donald Trump to step aside and let Gov. Mike Pence assume the role as the party’s nominee. If he does not step aside, I will write in a Republican for the office of President.” Haslam had not previously endorsed Trump. (October 9, 2016)

Robert Bentley: NAY (was YEA)

The Alabama governor, who has been struggling with his own sex scandal, announced he would no longer back Trump. “I endorsed Gov. John Kasich for president, because I felt like he was the most qualified and the best person to lead our nation,” he said in a statement. “I certainly won’t vote for Hillary Clinton, but I cannot and will not vote for Donald Trump.” (October 9, 2016)

Bentley previously endorsed Trump, though he had not backed him during the GOP primary. “He will be the one that I support, and I will do whatever I can to help,” he said. (May 9, 2016)

Dennis Daugaard: UNCLEAR

The South Dakota governor called on Trump to step down. “Enough is enough. Donald Trump should withdraw in favor of Governor Mike Pence. This election is too important,” he tweeted, but did not indicate whether he would vote for Trump if he did not. (October 8, 2016)

Daugaard previously joined Trump’s agricultural advisory committee.

Cabinet Members and Political Appointees

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

Richard Armitage: NAY

Armitage, a former Navy officer who served as deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush and deputy secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. “If Donald Trump is the nominee, I would vote for Hillary Clinton,” he told Politico. “He doesn't appear to be a Republican, he doesn't appear to want to learn about issues. So, I’m going to vote for Mrs. Clinton.” (June 16, 2016)

Condoleezza Rice: NAY (was ABSTAIN)

George W. Bush’s secretary of state blasted Trump in a Facebook statement and called on him to step down: “Enough! Donald Trump should not be President. He should withdraw. As a Republican, I hope to support someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth.” (October 8, 2016)

Rice previously said she had no plans to get involved in the race or attend the GOP convention, a spokesman told Yahoo News. She also ruled out serving as Trump’s running mate. (June 17, 2016)

Brent Scowcroft: NAY

The retired lieutenant general and national security adviser, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, has announced that he is endorsing Hillary Clinton. Scowcroft did not mention Trump in his statement. (June 22, 2016)

Donald Rumsfeld: YEA

It’s now a known known: The former secretary of defense under George W. Bush is voting Trump. “I'm a Republican, and there's not any doubt in my mind how I'll vote,” he told the Daily Mail, adding that it was “not a close call” and “I don't believe Hillary Clinton is qualified to be President of the United States.” (June 23, 2016)

Hank Paulson: NAY

Paulson, who served as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush and was previously CEO of Goldman Sachs, assailed Trump’s judgment and business acumen in a Washington Post column. “I will not vote for Donald Trump. I will not cast a write-in vote,” Paulson wrote. “I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world. To my Republican friends: I know I’m not alone.” (June 24, 2016)

Michael Chertoff: NAY

The former secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush signed a letter from GOP national-security figures saying they could not support Trump. (August 8, 2016)

Michael Hayden: NAY

A retired four-star general who led the CIA and NSA, Hayden signed a letter from GOP national-security figures saying they could not support Trump. (On August 5, former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, who has identified as an independent, wrote in The New York Times that he backed Clinton over Trump.) (August 8, 2016)

John Negroponte: NAY

The retired diplomat, who served as director of national intelligence, ambassador to Iraq, and UN ambassador under George W. Bush, has announced that he will vote for Hillary Clinton. (August 10, 2016)

Negroponte had already signed a letter from GOP national-security figures saying they could not support Trump. (August 8, 2016)

Tom Ridge: NAY

The former Pennsylvania governor and first-ever secretary of homeland security, who served under George W. Bush, signed a letter from GOP national-security figures saying they could not support Trump. (August 8, 2016)

Ridge had previously ruled out voting for Trump. There’s “not a chance” Ridge would support Trump if he was the nominee, he told Chuck Todd. (December 8, 2015)

William Ruckelshaus: NAY

The first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who served under Richard Nixon and is center-left on environmental issues by today’s standards, issued a statement endorsing Hillary Clinton. (August 9, 2016)

William Reilly: NAY

Reilly, who was EPA administrator during the George H.W. Bush administration, also endorsed Clinton in a statement. (August 9, 2016)

Carlos Gutierrez: NAY

A businessman who served as commerce secretary of George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009, Gutierrez has joined a group of Republicans endorsing Hillary Clinton. (August 10, 2016)

George P. Shultz: NAY

Shultz, who served as secretary of state under Ronald Reagan and as secretary of both labor and the Treasury under Richard Nixon, indicated at a media roundtable at Sanford’s conservative Hoover Institution that he does not back Trump. “God help us,” he said of a Trump presidency. (August 16, 2016)

Paul Wolfowitz: NAY

Wolfowitz, the neoconservative leading light who served as deputy secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration and later as president of the World Bank, tells Der Spiegel he will not vote for Trump and will likely vote for Hillary Clinton. He called Trump a security risk to the United States and said, “The only way you can be comfortable about Trump's foreign policy, is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says.” (August 26, 2016)

Charles Fried: NAY

Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who served as solicitor general under Ronald Reagan, writes in a column for CNN that Trump must be stopped, contrasting him with the Gipper. “You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. And these fleas carry the disease of virulent hatred and discord,” Fried argues. (Several recent policy stands have distanced Fried from conservatives.) (August 30, 2016)

Louis Wade Sullivan: NAY

Sullivan, who served as secretary of health and human services under President George H.W. Bush, is backing Clinton. “Though my enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is somewhat tempered, I certainly believe she is an infinitely better choice for president than Donald Trump,” he told The Huffington Post. (September 8, 2016)

Robert Zoellick: NAY

Zoellick, who served both Presidents Bush, including as U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush, and is a former president of the World Bank, is not backing Trump. “I’ve seen the presidency up close. Trump is a dangerous man. I would not want that man with his finger on the triggers,” he told former Jeb Bush strategist Mike Murphy. (September 12, 2016)

Robert Gates: NAY

Gates, who served as secretary of defense and director of the CIA under President George W. Bush, and continued to lead the Pentagon under President Obama, writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Trump is “beyond repair … unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.” (September 16, 2016)

Donald Gregg: NAY

Gregg, who was Vice President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser and then served as ambassador to South Korea once Bush ascended to the presidency, has endorsed Hillary Clinton. “We now have a person at the top of the Republican ticket who I believe is dangerous, doesn't understand the complex world we live in, doesn't care to, and is without any moral or international philosophy,” he Gregg said in a statement. (September 25, 2016)

Ed Meese: YEA

Meese, who served as attorney general during the Ronald Reagan administration, is the co-chair of a group of the Reagan Alumni Advisory Council for Trump-Pence, the campaign announced. (October 29, 2016)

Meese was critical of Trump during the primary, but Politico reports he has now joined the Trump transition team. Meese declined to comment. (September 27, 2016)

Michael Chertoff: NAY

The former secretary of homeland security, under George W. Bush, and federal judge, has announced he is endorsing Hillary Clinton. Although Clinton has courted GOP national-security figures, it’s a remarkable alliance: He was lead counsel on the original Whitewater investigation, while she in turn cast the lone no vote against his judicial nomination. Chertoff said Trump has been “making enemies of your friends and cozying up to your adversaries.” (October 3, 2016)

Colin Powell: NAY

The former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was once mentioned as a GOP candidate for president, will reportedly back Hillary Clinton in 2016. Speaking to the Long Island Association, Powell said that Trump is “selling people a bill of goods.” (October 25, 2016)

Frank Keating: YEA

Keating, who served two terms as governor of Oklahoma and was associate attorney general before that, has been named a co-chair of the Reagan Alumni Advisory Council for Trump-Pence, the campaign announced. (October 29, 2016)

Pundits and Opinionmakers

Micah Walter / Reuters

Bill Kristol: SOFT NAY

The editor of The Weekly Standard threw his lot in with the #NeverTrump crowd with gusto, and he’s been a leading advocate for a third-party alternative. But these days, he seems a bit confused about what exactly the word “never” means: “I mean, I guess never say never. On the one hand, I’ll say #NeverTrump, and on the other hand, I’ll say never say never. I'll leave it ambiguous.” (May 2, 2016)

Ross Douthat: NAY

After spending the primary alternately criticizing Trump and forecasting his doom, the New York Times columnist seems especially dyspeptic and despairing. (May 5, 2016)

Erick Erickson: NAY

The radio host, editor of The Resurgent, and former RedState editor writes: “Hillary Clinton is unfit for the Presidency, but so is Donald Trump. Some Republicans may decide it is time to be a team player, but I will put my country before my party and decline to help the voters in this country commit national suicide.” (May 4, 2016)

Leon Wolf: NAY

Wolf, the editor of RedState, has been a prominent Trump critic. He says he’s leaning toward voting for a Libertarian candidate. “I genuinely believe that Hillary Clinton would be a better President than Trump, and it’s not close,” he wrote. “That said, Hillary would also be a terrible President, there’s no doubt about that.” He also called on Senate Republicans to confirm Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, lest Trump do the choosing instead. (May 4, 2016)

Ann Coulter: YEA

Coulter has been a fanatical backer of Trump for months.

George Will: NAY

The dean of conservative columnists has left the Republican Party over Trump’s nomination, saying, “This is not my party.” (June 26, 2016)

Will detests Trump, and had previously called for Republicans to defeat him if he is their nominee: “Were he to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states—condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life.” (April 29, 2016)

Charles Krauthammer: SOFT NAY

The leading writer has been very critical of Trump, but in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, he left the door ajar to change his mind. “Let me just say from what I’ve seen up until now, heard from Trump and watched him, I don’t think I’d be capable of voting for Donald Trump,” he said. “Question is, what do I do? I don’t know yet.” (May 3, 2016)

Bill O’Reilly: APPARENT YEA

Without officially stating his support, the Fox News personality has repeatedly defended Trump. (May 5, 2016)

Sean Hannity: YEA

Hannity has been one of Trump’s two most reliable cheerleaders in the media. “I’ll be voting for Donald Trump in November,” he said. (May 31, 2016)

Matt Drudge: YEA

The publisher of the Drudge Report has been, along with Hannity, Trump’s best friend in the press.

Sarah Palin: YEA

The former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate endorsed Trump with a Dadaist address to Iowans in January, and she’s stumped for him since.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: SOFT YEA

The editors of the nation’s most powerful conservative editorial board are not fans of Trump’s, but they are resigned. “Mr. Trump wasn’t our first choice, or even the 15th, but the reality is that more GOP voters preferred him to the alternatives,” they wrote. “Yet GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy.” The board also criticized the move for a thirty-party candidate, irking Bill Kristol.

Joe Scarborough: UNDECIDED (was SOFT YEA)

The MSNBC host and token network conservative was among the friendliest voices in the media toward Trump during the Republican primary. He has been more critical since then. Referring to Trump’s attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, he announced to Republicans, “You have to start calling him out and saying you'll retract your endorsement of him today or else the United States Senate is in danger.” A day before, he compared Trump’s remarks to the Nazi Nuremberg race laws. (June 7, 2016)

Scarborough previously announced was not sure whether he can vote for Trump, citing Trump sticking to outlandish promises like a ban on Muslim immigration that he made during the primary. (May 5, 2016)

Rush Limbaugh: SOFT YEA

The leading right-wing talk-show host has been a booster of Trump all along—to the agitation of Trump-opposing conservatives—despite occasionally criticizing him. After Trump’s Indiana win, Limbaugh predicted: “My instinctive feeling right now is that Trump is gonna win, beat Hillary badly, that it could be landslide proportions.” He has declined to formally endorse Trump, though. (May 23, 2016)

Glenn Beck: NAY

Beck, the talker who was a Cruz backer, has remained steadfastly opposed to Trump since he became the presumptive nominee. In a recent Facebook post, he said, “If the consequence of standing against Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice.” But he added that he was neither endorsing nor voting for the Democrat. (October 11, 2016)

Beck previously said Trump cannot win. “I don’t want my children to look at that man and say, ‘Yeah, he’s my President.’ I won’t have that. I will not endorse it, I will not tolerate it,” he said. (May 4, 2016)

Rupert Murdoch: YEA

The hugely influential conservative mogul—owner of The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the New York Post—suggested in March that the Republican Party coalesce around Trump:

 Follow

 Rupert Murdoch ? @rupertmurdoch

As predicted, Trump reaching out to make peace with Republican "establishment". If he becomes inevitable party would be mad not to unify.

12:57 PM - 2 Mar 2016

  3,729 3,729 Retweets   8,537 8,537 likes

The coverage of Trump late in the primary led Ted Cruz to lash out and accuse Murdoch & Co. of aiding Trump.

Max Boot: NAY

Boot, a leading neoconservative and military historian, says that although he’s a lifelong Republican, the party is dead and he won’t vote for Trump: “The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.” While “Clinton would be far preferable to Trump,” Boot says that right now “I only know one thing for sure: I won't vote for Trump.” (June 3, 2016)

Michael Reagan: Apparent NAY (was YEA and previously NAY)

The son of former President Ronald Reagan, an influential talk-radio host and writer, angrily denounced Trump for implying without evidence that Hillary Clinton had been unfaithful to Bill Clinton. “No way do I or would my father support this garbage,” he tweeted. “If this is where he is going I cannot follow him.” (October 3, 2016)

Reagan previously said he would back Trump in order to stop Hillary Clinton. (July 28, 2016)

Reagan previously said he would not vote for Trump in the California primary and added, “This most likely would be the 1st time if my father was alive that he would not support the nominee of the GOP.” (June 6, 2016)

Hugh Hewitt: YEA (was SOFT YEA and previously NAY)

In the wake of a video in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women, Hewitt has called on the nominee to step down. “For the benefit of the country, the party, his family, and himself, I think that he should withdraw,” Hewitt said. “I don’t think Donald Trump can win.” Hewitt, who has gone back and forth on Trump, did not say whether he would continue to back the nominee if he did not withdraw. (October 8, 2016)

Having appeared to waver earlier, the talk-radio host, who helped moderate several of the Republican primary debates and was critical of Trump, writes, “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump. You should be too if you are a conservative.” (July 31, 2016)

Hewitt softened on Trump in the aftermath of the Orlando attack, writing in a Washington Post column that his focus on security shows that he’s potentially preferable to Hillary Clinton. (June 15, 2016)

Hewitt had taken an unusually hard line against Trump, not only declining to support him but, in the wake of Trump’s comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, actually calling for the Republican National Convention to jettison Trump as nominee. (June 8, 2016)

Robert Kagan: NAY

Kagan, a leading neoconservative historian and writer, was among the first conservatives to back Clinton, writing way back in February, “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.” He later wrote of Trump, “This is how fascism comes to America.” (February 25, 2016)

Bret Stephens: NAY

The deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, says he will not vote for Trump, but will probably not vote for Clinton. “Probably none of the above,” he told Hugh Hewitt. “I will never vote for Donald Trump. I have a very, very hard time voting for Mrs. Clinton.” But Stephens added: “I think that for the United States, Hillary Clinton, as awful as I find her, is a survivable event. I’m not so sure about Donald Trump.” (June 17, 2016)

Greg Mankiw: NAY

Mankiw, an economist at Harvard who chaired George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and Mitt Romney and other Republicans, tells John Harwood he cannot support Trump.

 Follow

 John Harwood ? @JohnJHarwood

GOP economist Mankiw on Trump: "He won't be getting my vote. I have R friends who think couldn't be worse than Obama/Clinton. They're wrong"

5:58 AM - 5 Aug 2016

  410 410 Retweets   522 522 likes

(August 4, 2016)

Lanhee Chen: NAY

The conservative policy wonk, who served as Mitt Romney’s policy director in 2012 and worked with Marco Rubio in 2016, does not back Trump. “I would rather not see him win,” he said at a media roundtable at Sanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. (August 16, 2016)

Stephen Moore: YEA

Moore, a former Wall Street Journal editorial columnist and current chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, is one of Trump’s economic advisers. (August 5, 2016)

Ed Feulner: YEA

Feulner, who as longtime head of the Heritage Foundation turned it into a conservative powerhouse, has joined Trump’s transition team, Yahoo reports. “Feulner, 75, is the first major figure with deep credibility in the conservative movement to join the Trump transition effort,” writes Jon Ward. (August 24, 2016)

Mark Levin: YEA (was NAY)

The talk-radio host has changed his mind, saying he will support the GOP nominee. “I’m gonna vote for Donald Trump. I’m gonna wind up voting for Donald Trump on Election Day,” he said. “I take no responsibility for the dumb things he says or the dumb things his surrogates say.” (September 7, 2016)

Levin had unequivocally ruled out supporting Trump. “As a result of what the Trump supporters have attempted here, particularly Roger Stone, I am not voting for Donald Trump. Period,” he said in April. “So, count me as never Trump.”

Dennis Prager: YEA (was NAY)

The conservative writer and radio host says he backs Trump because Hillary Clinton in worse. “We have the same principles as the Never Trumpers — especially those of us who strongly opposed nominating Trump; that’s why we opposed him, after all,” he writes. “So where do we differ? We differ on this: We hold that defeating Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the Left is also a principle. And that it is the greater principle.” (September 6, 2016)

As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf points out, Prager has previously been highly critical of Trump and his behavior, and in 2011 deemed him “disqualified” from the presidency due to his profanity.

Norman Podhoretz: YEA

Podhoretz, the eminent neo-conservative and longtime editor of Commentary, is among the few neocons to throw his weight behind Trump. “Many of the younger—they’re not so young anymore—neoconservatives have gone over to the Never Trump movement,” he told The Times of Israel. “But I describe myself as anti-anti-Trump. While I have no great admiration for him, to put it mildly, I think she’s worse. Between the two, he’s the lesser evil.” (September 8, 2016)

John Podhoretz: NAY

Among those younger neocons with whom Norman Podhoretz has parted on Trump? His son John, the current editor of Commentary. In May, he wrote in that magazine that he couldn’t support either nominee: “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both devils we know. And because the GOP has become unfit, we will not be able to avoid the choice between them, except by literal avoidance—by staying home. Many, many millions of us will surely do so.”

Michael Medved: NAY

The conservative radio host was an early never-Trump supporter, and continues to criticize him. “Since I never supported #Trump in any way, I'm proud to be one nationally syndicated radio host who WON"T need to reconsider or apologize.,” he tweeted. (October 8, 2016)

John Yoo: NAY

Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who infamously wrote the Bush-era “Torture Memos,” says that Trump “reminds me a lot of early Mussolini .… very disturbingly similar.” (October 12, 2016)

Yoo previously argued that the prospect of Supreme Court appointments does not justify supporting Trump. “No one should rely on his vague promises. He has already flip-flopped on numerous core issues, such as the minimum wage, tax rates and entitlement reform,” he wrote. (August 16, 2016)

Ari Fleischer: NAY (was YEA)

The former White House press secretary under George W. Bush says he will note vote for Trump. “If my ballot contained a box for whom I was voting against, my choice would be easy,” he writes in a Washington Post column. “Never Clinton. But voting means deciding whom to vote for.I will vote for Republicans up and down the ballot. But when it comes to the presidency, I’m going to leave my ballot blank.” (November 6, 2016)

Fleischer previously said he would hold his nose and vote for Trump, and joined a coalition of Bush administration veterans backing the Republican nominee. (September 27, 2016)

Donors

Tyrone Siu / Reuters

Sheldon Adelson: YEA

Although he has not withdrawn his support for Donald Trump, the Vegas-based megadonor and major advocate for Israel appears to have decided to concentrate his donations in congressional races rather than using them to sway the presidential race, The New York Times reports. (September 20, 2016)

Adelson may have been perturbed by Trump’s statements about the Jewish state during the campaign, but he told The New York Times he’s supporting him. “Yes, I’m a Republican, he’s a Republican,” he said. “He’s our nominee. Whoever the nominee would turn out to be, any one of the 17—he was one of the 17. He won fair and square.” (May 5, 2016)

Paul Singer: NAY

The major Republican donor, who backed Marco Rubio and contributed to anti-Trump efforts, will not back Trump but also won’t vote for Clinton. Singer joked he might write himself in. (June 29, 2016)

NBC News previously reported that Singer would not back Trump. Bloomberg reported he’ll stay out of the presidential race. (May 5, 2016)

Joe and Marlene Ricketts: YEA (was UNDECIDED)

The billionaire couple will give at least $1 million to a super PAC working to elect Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post report. (September 20, 2016)

The Ricketts spent at least $5.5 million on anti-Trump efforts during the primary, and Trump at one point threatened them, tweeting, “They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” They have not made their stance public, though their son Pete, the governor of Nebraska, has endorsed Trump.

Charles and David Koch: SOFT NAY

Prior to Trump’s becoming the presumptive GOP nominee, Charles Koch said he thought Hillary Clinton might be a better president than Trump, though he made no indication that the famed pair of brothers would back her. They now say they are not backing Trump, though a spokesman did not rule it out entirely. (May 5, 2016)

Peter Thiel: YEA

Thiel, the PayPal founder and well-known venture capitalist, is known as a libertarian—though Rand Paul tried and failed to court him as a major backer. (Thiel ended up donating to former Silicon Valley denizen Carly Fiorina.) Thiel has signed up as a prospective Trump delegate from California. (May 10, 2016)

Stanley Hubbard: YEA

Hubbard, a longtime Republican donor, gave thousands to the Stop Trump effort earlier this spring. Now he says he’ll back Trump. “All of my favorite candidates dropped out one by one,” he told Politico. “We’re down to my least favorite candidate. And my least favorite candidate is better than Hillary Clinton in terms of what’s best for the country.” (May 10, 2016)

T. Boone Pickens: YEA

The Oklahoma oil billionaire—and recent renewable-energy fanatic—is a former Jeb Bush backer, but Pickens now supports Trump, citing his support for Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration. “Yes, I’m for Donald Trump … I’m tired of having politicians as president of the U.S.,” he told The Wall Street Journal. He will host a fundraiser for a pro-Trump super PAC. (May 12, 2016)

Foster Friess: YEA

The former Rick Santorum bankroller has decided to back Trump, telling The Hill that Trump can’t be judged either by his past stances and behaviors or by what he does and says now. “My success came from harnessing people’s strengths and ignoring their weaknesses,” he said. “And also, from assessing people not according to their pasts or where they are today, but rather based on what they can become.” (May 23, 2016)

Woody Johnson: YEA

The New York Jets owner was a major donor to Mitt Romney in 2012 and to Jeb Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC—as well as for John McCain and George W. Bush. He met with Trump on May 23 and will reportedly donate and help bundle donations for Trump. (May 24, 2016)

Mel Sembler: YEA

Sembler is a major fundraiser and a longtime political ally of the Bush family, having served as an ambassador under both Presidents Bush. Naturally, he supported Jeb Bush’s presidential run. After Jeb Bush dropped out of the race, he said, “Times have changed, the country has changed, the electorate has changed. I don't understand our country any more.” Understand it or not, he’s decided to go along, and has signed on as a vice chairman of the Trump fundraising effort. (May 24, 2016)

Meg Whitman: NAY

The CEO of HP, who ran for California governor in 2010, says she will vote for Hillary Clinton, calling Trump a “dishonest demagogue” who has “undermined the character of the nation.” “I will vote for Hillary, I will talk to my Republican friends about helping her, and I will donate to her campaign and try to raise money for her,” she told The New York Times. Whitman’s announcement isn’t a total surprise—she suggested at a Romney-hosted confab in June she might back Clinton—but is striking, since she was finance chair for a Republican presidential candidate, Chris Christie, this year. (August 3, 2016)

Seth Klarman: NAY

A billionaire financier and hedge-fund honcho, Klarman is an independent who has mostly given to Republicans, including Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush. He’s now working to elect Clinton, calling a Trump presidency “unthinkable.” (August 4, 2016)

Mike Fernandez: NAY

Fernandez, a Cuban emigre and health-care executive, is a major Republican donor in Florida, having given heavily to efforts to elect Mitt Romney in 2012 and Governor Rick Scott in 2014. He also backed Jeb Bush in 2016, but he strongly opposes Trump, who he compared to Hitler, Perón, and Mussolini. “My fellow Republicans, swallow hard, look into your heart — and your gut. Vote for Hillary Clinton and then every single Republican on the ticket,” he wrote in a Miami Herald column. “Do that, and rest assured that you will have served your country well.” (September 1, 2016)

Faith Leaders

Jerry Falwell Jr.: YEA

Falwell, president of Liberty University and son of the iconic Moral Majority leader, has been one of Trump’s staunchest backers.

Russell Moore: NAY

Moore, who is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, says he will not vote for either Trump or Clinton but will write in Ben Sasse. (May 5, 2016)

Ralph Reed: YEA

The conservative activist and former executive director of the Christian Coalition has joined Trump’s evangelical advisory board. “I believe that, should Donald Trump be elected, he will disrupt the broken system in Washington, D.C., in a way that Hillary Clinton won't,” he told NPR. “And I think that message is likely to resonate … very powerfully in the faith community.” (June 21, 2016)

James Dobson: YEA

The former president of Focus on the Family is a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, although he previously said he was “very wary of Donald Trump.” (June 21, 2016)

Richard Land: YEA

Land, who preceded Russell Moore as president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, has taken a different tack from his successor on Trump, joining Trump’s evangelical advisory board. (June 21, 2016)

Robert P. George: NAY

George, a conservative Catholic thinker and professor of law at Princeton who is highly influential in social conservative circles, has written that “Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. George is not supporting Clinton.

Wayne Grudem: NAY (was YEA)

The evangelical theologian has withdrawn his support for Trump after the publication of a video in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. “There is no morally good presidential candidate in this election,” he writes. “I previously called Donald Trump a ‘good candidate with flaws’ and a ‘flawed candidate’ but I now regret that I did not more strongly condemn his moral character. I cannot commend Trump’s moral character, and I strongly urge him to withdraw from the election.” (October 9, 2016)

Grudem previously argued that voting for Trump was “a morally good choice.” (July 28, 2016)

==

Cognition:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/biology-ideology-john-hibbing-negativity-bias

Scientists are using eye-tracking devices to detect automatic response differences between liberals and conservatives. University of Nebraska-Lincoln

You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Click here to read more about the science of why we don't believe in science.

Click here to read more from Mooney on the science of why people don't believe in science.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

It is a "virtually inescapable conclusion" that the "cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different."

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding?That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, and he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what's truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, "22 or 23 accept the general idea" of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of "modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work," and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. [Italics added]

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what's clear is that today, they've more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

"One possibility," note the authors, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but not-paradigm-shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that "successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience."

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-secret-to-making-conservatives-care-about-climate-change/

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3/16

http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/14/climate-change-deniers-congress/

According to a new report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, 59 percent of the House Republican caucus and 70 percent of Senate Republicans refuse to accept the reality of climate change. This means there are a total of 182 climate change deniers in the House and Senate who collectively represent more than 200 million American citizens (based on their district/state size that they represent in Congress).

So how is it possible that the majority of Americans are willing to accept science yet their own representatives ignore it? The answer, as usual, comes down to money.

The Center for American Progress report shows that the fossil fuel industry has given more $73 million to these science-denying politicians; $10 million of which came in just the last 12 months, perhaps spurred on by recent reports showing that 2015 once again broke temperature records or maybe concerned about the falling demand for fossil fuels. But whatever the reason, that $73 million is apparently all it takes to ignore the desires of 200 million concerned American citizens.

The challenge is presenting the issue in terms that might get people more active than just “understanding” the problem. This is what I discussed on a recent episode of The Big Picturewith Thom Hartmann on RT America and you can catch the discussion in the video below:

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https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2015/04/15/111169/release-cap-analysis-shows-anti-environmental-priorities-dominate-first-100-days-of-new-congress-but-no-results-to-show/

april 2015

 D.C. — According to a Center for American Progress analysis of roll call votes, the 114th Congress has cast more roll call votes on energy and environmental issues in its first 100 days than on any other legislative issue, with none of the energy and environmental proposals voted on becoming law.

Thirty percent of the votes cast in the 114th Congress were on energy- and environment-related topics, more than any other legislative area. The Senate alone cast more than 44 percent of its votes on fossil-fuel and anti-environmental priorities, including approving the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, blocking action to address climate change, and selling America’s public lands.

“With close to three-quarters of a billion dollars from coal, oil, and gas companies behind them, the new Congress spent its first 100 days pushing divisive and unpopular proposals that have gone nowhere,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, Senior Fellow and the Director of Public Lands at CAP. “Congressional leaders must now choose whether to drive their anti-environment agenda deeper into a ditch or whether to align their priorities with American families who want more renewable energy and better protections for public lands, public health, and clean drinking water.”

CAP’s analysis found that on 74 percent of the energy and environmental votes, a majority of senators supported the anti-environment position. Public opinion research commissioned by CAP shows that the majority of Americans widely oppose many of the proposals that Senate leaders have chosen to prioritize, including efforts to remove key protections for land, water, and wildlife and to block the creation of new national parks.

An earlier CAP analysis found that fossil-fuel interests spent more than $721 million to help elect and influence the agenda of the 114th Congress.

Click here to read the column.​

For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Tom Caiazza at tcaiazza@americanprogress.org or 202.481.7141.

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Fasison plus Former governor of New York George Pataki and senators Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among a few notable GOP leaders who have broken from the status quo of Republican climate denial.

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http://ecowatch.com/2015/12/18/omnibus-spending-bill

Congressional Republicans Deliver Early Christmas Gift to Big Oil, Exxon and Koch Brothers

This early Christmas gift to Big Oil, ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers from Congressional Republicans will send American jobs overseas, rip up more iconic American landscapes to pump oil that nobody needs, and increase the carbon pollution that’s driving the climate crisis.

Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans have yet to recognize that the entire world, including even the biggest oil producing states like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Russia just agreed to set an expiration date on fossil fuels and power the world with clean energy.

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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/where-the-2016-republican-candidates-stand-on-climate-change/

outlier

More than Markets: A Comparative Study of Nine Conservative Parties on Climate Change

Sondre Båtstrand

Article first published online: 12 AUG 2015

DOI: 10.1111/polp.12122

© 2015 Policy Studies Organization

Issue Politics & Policy

Politics & Policy

Volume 43, Issue 4, pages 538–561, August 2015

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House Speaker Paul Ryan, and other congressional Republicans, are signalling a lack of support for the climate talks. 

Don’t trust the United States: as the international climate summit in Parisgrinds along, this is the message Republicans in Congress are trying to send the delegates. The logic, such as it is, of the claim is that merely by making it the House G.O.P. goes a long way toward proving its validity.

On Tuesday, at a news conference in Paris, President Barack Obama exhorted negotiators to keep in mind what is at stake at the summit. “This one trend—climate change—affects all trends,” Obama said. “This is an economic and security imperative that we have to tackle now.”

Even as he spoke, congressional Republicans were doing their best to undermine him. That same day, the House approved two resolutions aimed at blocking regulations to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. The first would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing rules aimed at cutting emissions from new power plants; the second would prevent the agency from enforcing rules targeted at existing power plants. Together, these rules are known as the Clean Power Plan, and they are crucial to the Americans’ negotiating position in Paris. (The Clean Power Plan is central to the United States’ pledge, made in advance of the summit, to cut its emissions by twenty-six per cent.) The House votes, which followed Senate approval of similar resolutions back in November, were, at least according to some members, explicitly aimed at subverting the talks. Lawmakers want to “send a message to the climate conference in Paris that in America, there’s serious disagreement with the policies of this president,” Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, explained.

As a practical matter, the importance of the votes is probably minimal. Obama has already threatened to veto the resolutions if they reach his desk, and there isn’t enough support for them for an override. But the resolutions are not the only trick congressional Republicans have up their collective sleeves. President Obama has pledged three billion dollars to what’s known as the Green Climate Fund. The fund is intended to help developing countries cope with climate change and also to adopt clean-energy systems. In a just world, three billion dollars is far less than the U.S. should be contributing; Republicans are threatening to block even that contribution. Leaving the fund under-financed increases the chance that poorer countries will walk away from any proposed accord.

Meanwhile, the impossibility of getting an agreement ratified by the U.S. Senate puts yet another constraint on negotiations. While many countries are pushing for a legally binding treaty, the Obama Administration is insisting on a sort of legal chimera—partly binding, partly not—so that, if there is a pact, it won’t require Senate approval. (The Washington Post has a good rundown on this particular problem.)

That Republicans would try to undercut the Administration’s efforts to do something—anything—to reduce carbon emissions is no surprise. Willful ignorance about climate change has become a point of pride among elected officials in the G.O.P. Recently, the Associated Press asked a panel of eight scientists to assess the accuracy of Presidential candidates’ tweets on climate change using a scale of zero to a hundred. (The tweets were shown to the scientists without the candidates’ names, to guard against bias.) All nine of the Republican candidates graded got failing scores. Donald Trump, for instance, received a fifteen, while Ben Carson got a thirteen and Ted Cruz a six. “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, who served as one of the judges, wrote of Cruz’s statements. “That sort of ignorance would be dangerous in a doorman, let alone a president.”

But if the recent votes aren’t surprising, they’re still discouraging. They demonstrate, once again, the power of defeatist thinking. Congressional Republicans rail against the federal government; then, with their own antics, confirm their worst criticisms. (Who, nowadays, would make the case that Americans should have faith in Washington?) The G.O.P. says that America can’t be depended on to live up to its commitments, and, by saying so, achieves its objective, which is sowing mistrust. The best that can be hoped for during the next week in Paris is that the rest of the world ignores the U.S.’s Republican leaders. Would that we had that luxury here at home.

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/congress-moves-to-sabotage-the-paris-climate-summit/

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...

ver wonder why all those folks in rural, “red” America still vote in droves for the same Republicans who brag about gutting the very social programs keeping them alive?  How someone like Matt Bevin can run a winning campaign in Kentucky based on cutting people’s access to affordable health care? How Republican governors can get away with refusing free Medicaid for their own citizens?  Every election it seems that Democrats end up shaking their heads in dismay as yet another mean-spirited red-state Republican manages to defeat the Democrat by essentially promising to make his own constituents’ lives more miserable.  Afterwards we all intone the familiar refrain which boils down to “these people don’t know any better.”If only the Democrats had a more effective “message” on the issues, we couldsurely reachthose people who by all strands of logic ought to vote blue, and convince them that Republicans don’t have their interests at heart.

In one of themore insightful articles ever writtenabout what motivates the rural poor to vote Republican, Alec MacGillis, who covers politics forProPublica,took a tour through deep red America, asking the same questions. In an Op-Ed for today’s New York Times, MacGillis explains that it’s not all about guns and abortion that drives people in economically-depressed areas to vote Republican. In fact it’s something very basic to human nature, which the GOP exploits at every turn. And Democrats ignore it at their peril. 

MacGillis’ first observation is that many people living in the nations’ more downtrodden areas—and specifically, the ones who benefit the most from programs such as Medicaid and Social Security Disability— are completely disconnected from the political process. They simply choose not to vote. Visiting a free medical clinic in Tennessee, MacGillis asked the people lined up how they felt about Obama. Contrary to his expectations he didn’t encounter hostility, Many people expressed support for the President. But practically none of them had bothered to vote:

[T]he people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period.They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

West Virginia, for example, ranked 50th out of all the states in voter turnout in 2012. Other states near the bottom in terms of turnout include Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee, largely rural states that have significant populations of poor people, including large percentages of working-class whites.

Of course, the resulting vacuum left by huge swaths of Americans who don’t vote at all ensures that elections in these downtrodden areas will be won by those who do. Why, then, are the folks who choose to vote in these locales so overwhelmingly predisposed to vote Republican?  MacGillis finds that theoperative motivation is a strong sense of resentment among those who are just getting by towards those who have completely fallen off the economic grid:

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is,in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net,the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

In his article MacGillis cites many specific examples of how this resentment operates in practice:

[T]hese voters are consciously opting against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good for other people — specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients who live nearby.

I’ve heard variations on this theme all over the country: people railing against the guy across the street who is collecting disability payments but is well enough to go fishing, the families using their food assistance to indulge in steaks. In Pineville, W.Va., in the state’s deeply depressed southern end, I watched in 2013 as a discussion with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, quickly turned from gun control to the area’s reliance on government benefits, its high rate of opiate addiction, and whether people on assistance should be tested for drugs. Playing to the room, Senator Manchin declared, “If you’re on a public check, you should be subjected to a random check.”

The belief that those who receive government assistance are somehow “undeserving” and “getting a free ride” is not only a phenomenon of rural areas, but is borne out in surveys nationwide.

Tha pattern is right in line with surveys, which show adecades-long decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens.There has been a particularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans, who perhaps see it as a threat to their own Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University, found a tendency by many Americans in the second lowest quintile of the income ladder — the working or lower-middle class —to dissociate themselves from those at the bottom, where many once resided. “There’s this virulent social distancing — suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person,” said Professor Edin. “They’re playing to the middle fifth and saying, ‘I’m not those people.’ ”

The unfortunate human tendency to think yourself as better than your ”undeserving”  neighbor is what drives these people, even as their own lives are diminished by the very policies they vote to impose on others. To call this a vicious circle would be an understatement. Republican politicians thrive on and exploit these very real resentments, which are not by any means limited to “red” states.  That’s how people like Paul Le Page can be elected governor on an anti-welfare platform in relatively “liberal” states like Maine, where reliance on social programs, particular in rural areas, has increased. Meanwhile, those at the top of the economic ladder become more and more aggressive in securing all of the wealth for themselves, while the poor are played off against one another.  Democrats can call it out for the ugliness that it surely is, but it is a reality seized upon in every Republican pronouncement from immigration to taxes.  If you can get people to think they’re somehow being taken advantage of by an undeserving “other” (especially if that “other” is a different color than they are), you can motivate them to vote any way you want. 

 There are no easy answers for Democrats to deal with and change these attitudes. The most obvious solution—getting people to actually vote-- has become more difficult, particularly with the decline of unions, Democrats’ traditional mechanism for mobilizing voters.  There is also an obvious and intractable racial component driving this “politics of envy” that MacGillis, somewhat surprisingly, never addresses.  He might also have mentioned that the tendency of the national party apparatus to discount and effectively cede these rural voters doesn’t help matters, but instead exacerbates the problem. People aren’t going to respond enthusiastically to a party that apparently doesn’t even want to acknowledge their existence.  

MacGillis also suggests that the resentment people feel towards others they consider “dependent” can be addressed head-on if the Democratic Party decides to make the effort:

...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/21/1452751/-The-Most-Important-Article-You-ll-Read-Today-About-The-Democratic-Party?

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/paul-krugman-how-gop-got-taken-over-scam-artists

http://grist.org/climate-energy/getting-warmer-more-republicans-are-starting-to-take-climate-change-seriously/

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) is angling to turn herself into a Republican leader on climate change — at least in part to fight a 2016 reelection challenge from a climate-hawk Democrat.

On Sunday, Ayotte became the first GOP senator to express support for President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which will rein in CO2 emissions from electric utilities. On Wednesday, she released touting that position and her other efforts to protect the environment. And on Thursday, she announced the formation of a new Senate Energy and Environment Working Group, which a spokesperson said will “talk about ways to build support for protecting the environment and climate and promoting cleaner energy production while also helping the economy.”

The new working group will include three other Republican senators who’ve acknowledged that climate change is a real problem: Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), and Mark Kirk (Ill.). Kirk, like Ayotte, is facing a tough reelection race in a moderate state. He appeared to waffle on climate science earlier this year, but has apparently settled on saying it’s a real, human-caused problem and trying to do something about it.

Politico’s Andrew Restuccia writes, “The establishment of the working group shows the shifting political dynamics at play over environmental policy, with some in the GOP worried that Republicans’ skepticism of mainstream climate science and opposition to air and water regulations isn’t sustainable in the long-term.”

We see a similar dynamic at play in the House, where Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.) is rounding up a handful of Republicans who want to shift the party’s approach on climate change (and inoculate themselves against election-season charges of obstructing climate action). Last month, as noted by Grist’s Ben Adler, Gibson and 10 other House Republicans introduced a resolution affirming their acceptance of climate science and their support for (as-yet-undefined) action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

And these more climate-friendly congressional Republicans have some big-money backers. Jay Faison, a wealthy North Carolina businessman, has donated to Graham and other GOP candidates, and he plans to spend $175 million to push the GOP to address climate change. Andy Sabin is another wealthy businessman supporting Republicans who want to cut carbon emissions. In an interview with Grist earlier this month, Sabin named Ayotte, Kirk, Graham, and Gibson as Republicans he’s excited about.

Some of those same names cropped up last week at the Conservative Clean Energy Summit in Washington, D.C., a first-of-its-kind gathering of Republicans pushing for “energy reform.” Amanda Little, who’s been interviewing conservative climate leaders for a Grist special series, attended the conference and reported on it for The New Yorker. From her piece:

The summit was organized and hosted by Michele Combs, who heads up the group Young Conservatives for Energy Reform (Y.C.E.R.), and her mother, Roberta Combs, the president and C.E.O. of the Christian Coalition of America. … “Clean energy is not a Democrat issue, it’s a family issue,” [Michele] told me. … The summit was part of an ongoing effort to move the issues of climate change and clean energy from the margins of the Republican Party to its mainstream. Although the Combses scarcely spoke at the event, they chose others to make their case — the executive of a solar-power company, a three-star and a four-star general, two congressman, and six U.S. senators. …

The long-term goal of Y.C.E.R., Michele Combs told me, is to help get “a comprehensive energy-reform bill” passed in the Senate soon after the next administration takes office — a bill that could also, in effect, break the congressional climate-legislation stalemate. … “We’re building grassroots to provide cover — to keep senators politically safe when they support energy reform,” Combs said. “First, we’re establishing common ground and a new terminology. Terms like ‘energy reform’ will bring a lot more conservatives to the table than ‘climate change.’”

No matter what they call it, changing most Republican politicians’ hearts and minds will be a tough slog. The majority of GOP members of Congress still don’t accept the well-established science of climate change, and even those who do are more likely to criticize Democrats’ proposed solutions than to propose their own.

It’s a good sign that Ayotte feels she needs to support climate protections if she wants to be reelected. We might see more of that from her GOP colleagues in the Senate, all of whom need to be elected by statewide constituencies. But in the House, Gibson and his fellow resolution signers are anomalies — they’re in moderate districts, while most of their Republican colleagues are in dark-red districts and risk being primaried out of office if they call for cutting CO2 emissions.

If Combs and her allies could change that dynamic, it would be huge. It’s highly unlikely to happen anytime soon, but you won’t find anyone better positioned to lead the charge. As Little wrote in the intro to a Grist interview with Combs, she’s “possibly the most impassioned and unexpected messenger on clean energy and climate change the GOP has ever seen.” And with a mom who’s president of the Christian Coalition, she’s certainly got conservative cred.

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10/15 carl pope:

...It’s easy to blame the ideology, or the temperament, of the Freedom Caucus, for the melt-down, or even the overall competence of the Republican party, as conservative columnist David Brooks has done. “This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence. Running a government is a craft, like carpentry. But the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.”

But there are also deep structural sources of the malady. Consider the primary election that gives the Freedom Caucus its leverage over the more mainstream majority of the House Republicans; the defeat of Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014. Cantor’s successful Tea Party opponent, Eric Brat, received only 36,000 votes, just 8 percent of the registered electorate in Virginia’s 7th district. That’s less than a quarter of the registered Republicans. Indeed, in that fall’s general election, the Democratic candidate for Congress who Brat faced, Jack Trammel, received 91,000 votes, almost three times as many as Brat received in unseating Cantor, even though in the General Election Brat crushed Trammel.

So it’s almost certain that if Virginia, like California and Louisiana, let the two biggest vote getters in the primary contest the general even if they are of the same party, that in Round 2 Cantor would have gotten more than enough votes to keep his seat.

And Cantor’s defeat is no anomaly. Consider South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, in which Trey Gowdy, the Chair of the Banghazi Frenzy Committee, defeated four term conservative Republican Bob Inglis. Gowdy charged that Inglis, by conceding the existence ofglobal warming, had forfeited his conservative credentials in spite of a 93.5 percent American Conservative Union rating. Gowdy stomped Inglis in the primary—but again, look at the numbers. Gowdy got only 54,000 votes, a tiny fraction of the registered voters. Once again in the general election the Democratic congressional candidate, in an overwhelmingly Republican district, received more votes than Gowdy in the primary. There are enough other examples that most House Republicans now live in fear of such a primary defeat—which is why mainstream Republicans couldn’t stand up Boehner against the Tea Party.

Applying this 40,000 votes needed to win a contested Republican primary, and considering that the average Congressional district has 330,000 registered voters, a determined and disciplined “faction” (as Madison would have put it) of far fewer than 5 percent of the American public could dominate the nominating process of the Republican party and capture it. (The same math holds true for the Democrats—it’s just harder to imagine such a disciplined faction of Democrats).

Effectively, an even tinier group now exercises dominating power of intimidation over the Republican caucus in the House.

How did this happen? Low turn-out primaries are nothing new—they are standard fare, and over the decades hundreds of primary victors have been chosen by even smaller segments of the electorate than Brat. It didn’t threaten to shut-down the government. Nor is the presence within one or both parties of small caucuses of members of Congress with view strikingly out of step with the American majority. During the Civil Rights era, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was opposed by 65 House Democrats, a much larger number than the Freedom Caucus.

But three basic changes in American politics, blended with low turn-outs created this toxic brew.

First, American political parties were traditionally ideological grab-bags of regional factions. The Democrats lumped Northern urban liberals with rural Southern conservatives, and rural Protestant Conservatives caucused with up-scale suburban moderates among Republicans. After Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 conservatives decided that they needed a “pure” conservative party, one with a clear and conservative ideology. They chose the Republican party. Aided by the civil rights induced migration of southern whites out of the Democratic party, this project proved fabulously successful. With the 2010 defeat of most of the Blue Dog Democrats in the House, and the loss of most of the remaining conservative Democratic Senators in 2014, both parties now stand solidly on either the right or the left.

Second, having created European style ideological parties, Congressional Republicans then embraced European style parliamentary politics, imposing discipline on individual Senators and Congressman with strong sanctions if they voted their districts or their consciences on key legislation. This trend culminated in the 1995 promulgation of the Hastert rule, that the Speaker would schedule only legislation which enjoyed majority support in the Republican caucus, and its corollary, that Republicans would uniformly provide such legislation with enough votes to pass.

The Supreme Court provided the third kicker. One of the main barriers to a broadly unpopular ideology successfully plucking off 30-40 Congressional seats was that fringe factions lack an obvious mass funding base. But by repealing all of the legal limits on how much money the super-rich and corporations could pump into campaigns, the Court allowed a single patron to turbocharge policy objective held by a tiny minority of Americans and enable them to black-mail the entire national political system by shutting down Congress.

And how does the U.S. political system get out of this hostage taking dynamic? A few years ago many main-stream Republicans (David Brooks among them) argued that the nomination of a genuinely extremist Presidential nominee followed by a decisive drubbing in the general election would “break the fever” which had taken hold of the party. But that strategy assumed that business elites and the Republican establishment still held the loyalty of hierarchical Republican voters. Donald Trump and Ben Carson’s domination of the Presidential polls seems to have illustrated that this loyalty can no longer be counted on, and that the Tea Party, until it enacts its widely unpopular agenda, may well refuse to bow to the pragmatic counsels of “we need to win the Presidency.”

There is another pathway—it’s what Madison would have wanted—and if I had to bet, it’s the likely outcome. Mainstream Republicans will realize that if a relatively small number of them form cross-aisle alliances with the Democrats on those issues on which everyone except the Tea Party agrees (highway funding for example), they can govern, even if minimally because President Obama will eagerly sign such legislation. The business community will have to provide those who cross the aisle with protection in their primaries—which means that only bills with strong conservative and business credentials will be viable. But if Speaker Ryan is forced into such a strategy, and his consent would be essential, the fury of the hard core of the extreme right will make Catherine de Medici look like a pussycat.

So I don’t think it ends well for Speaker Ryan. But perhaps I am misreading the Tea Party. I hope so.

http://ecowatch.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=214ab5fbb3f6015d74ffab4ec&id=a4f66a063c&e=c2e8fdabfa

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TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

Secrets of the GOP Science War: How Spin-Masters and Pundits Confuse Conservatives About Facts

Conservatives have become much less trusting of science. A cynical right-wing campaign is behind that

By Paul Rosenberg / Salon

October 3, 2015

hen scientists announced the discovery of water on Mars recently, Rush Limbaugh drew the obvious conclusion: It was all part of a conspiratorial plot:

LIMBAUGH: If there was once all that water on Mars, and there is a lot of water here on earth, what’s going to happen to our ocean? How did the water vanish?

My point is, they’re presenting all this stuff to you as fact just like they’re presenting everything involving global warming as scientific fact. It`s nothing but wild guesses. It’s nothing but based on computer models which is the result of data input that who knows if it’s legit or not.

That’s to be expected from Limbaugh, I suppose. If you’re a huckster by trade, the truth is your enemy—and not just the truth, but the very possibility of truth. The veryexistence of science is a threat to you. So naturally, if you’ve got as much time to fill as Limbaugh does, you engage in war on science. But the real problem isn’t Rush Limbaugh, it’s the way that the entirety of the GOP adapts to him in various different ways—especially those who are deemed “sensible” in the world of bipartisan consensus, whose job it is to make plausible excuses for their sorry party.

Case in point: GOP strategist Liz Mair, who back in March was abruptly fired after just one day as a Scott Walker online strategist, in response to outrage over an earlier set of tweets critical of Iowa during a January forum. After her firing, Mair fired off a long tweet storm clarifying her views, which she did again—with a more critical edge—just after Walker left the race a few weeks ago. In short, if there’s anyone working inside the GOP likely to be honestly critical of its problems, it’s Mair. Which presumably is why MSNBC likes having her on. But Limbaugh’s anti-science conspiracism clearly illuminates the limits of such critical honesty.

Thus, when Chris Matthews played that clip of Limbaugh and opened up a discussion on “Hardball” on Sept. 29 [transcript], Mair didn’t come to Limbaugh’s defense, but she did find a way to confuse matters further, taking the heat off the science-fearing, science-hating GOP base and blame-shifting to society at large. Before she spoke up, Jonathan Chait made a sensible point:

CHAIT: So, conservatives, in general, have grown more and more distrustful in polls of science over the course of the last four decades. They used to be more trusting of science than liberals now, they’re much less. And specifically with global warming, what they have is a conspiracy theory. They don’t have an alternative scientific theory.

So it fell to Mair to obfuscate, to undo that degree of clarity. “Science has worked for mankind across the board,” Matthews said. “When did it become the enemy of the hard right?” And Mair responded:

MAIR: I don’t think it’s just the enemy of the hard right. I actually think that we’re in a period in society where there are a lot of people who are very skeptical of discovery and science in general. I mean, when we had the debate about vaccines, right, and we were looking at the resurgence of awful illnesses because people weren’t having their kids vaccinated, a lot of that was center centered in very, very liberal enclaves of California. I think unfortunate —

MATTHEWS: They were afraid to get their kids vaccinated —

MAIR: They believe it’s going to give them autism, right?

I think we’ve reached a place in society, and maybe Rush Limbaugh’s comments are manifestation of this, where a lot of people just don’t prioritize discovery or science anymore. I mean, remember in the 2012 election how much Newt Gingrich was derided for all of his talk about moon bases and space exploration, right?

So as Mair is framing things, “a lot of people just don’t prioritize discovery or science anymore,” and they’re all over the map ideologically. She says that “maybe Rush Limbaugh’s comments are manifestation of this” [my emphasis], and maybe they’re not, I guess. “Who knows?” as Rush himself would say.

But there are a two major flaws in her argument. First, there’s actual data supporting Chait’s claim that conservatives alone have become much less trusting of science, and it’s not very scientific of Mair to just ignore that data, because she doesn’t like it, and try to counter it with anecdotes.

A 2012 paper by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review, using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey—the gold standard for public opinion research—found that “group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest.”

There’s also much broader evidence that liberalism is correlated with one of the “big five” personality traits, “openness to experience,” as discussed by Chris Mooney in his 2012 book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality” and in my review of it. Thus, to the extent that science involves prioritizing discovery, Mair is arguing against an impressive range of data.

Second, both of Mair’s anecdotes misrepresent the actual stories of what was going. In California, elected Democrats didn’t indulge the anti-vaxxers, they pushed back, and passed a law requiring all schoolchildren to be vaccinated—over GOP opposition, by the way. As for Gingrich’s space-talk in 2012, folks weren’t laughing at the idea of space exploration, they were laughing at Gingrich’s snake oil routine and his pretense of being a serious thoughtful leader.

The real stories surrounding both anecdotes are illuminating, so let’s take a closer look at each in turn. First off, while it’s true that a lot of anti-vaccine sentiment was seen in liberal enclaves around Hollywood, as the Hollywood Reporter explained in detail last year, the reasons cited weren’t that those not vaccinating their children “just don’t prioritize discovery or science.” It was much more complicated than that:

Today, on the Westside, those who abstain from vaccinating their kids see refusal through their own socio-anthropological lens. “They’re well intended — the people that only want to do the best for their child. They want only natural products, organic foods, attachment parenting, family beds,” says Dr. Lisa Stern, a Santa Monica pediatrician. Observes Dr. Neal Baer, a trained pediatrician and veteran TV writer-producer (ER) who wrote an episode of Law & Order: SVUabout the public health consequences of vaccine refusal, “It’s about not wanting to have anything that isn’t ‘natural’ in your child — this whole notion of the natural and holistic versus the scientific.”

Baer’s framing of “the natural and holistic versus the scientific” reflects a broader cultural construct, but it’s inaccurate. Using products of scientific discovery without adequate risk-assessment is more properly described as “the technocratic” approach, rather than “the scientific,” or even as “the techno-corporate.” Determining where “the scientific” leaves off and “the technocratic” or “the techno-corporate” begins may not be so easy to discern. The story continued:

According to those on both sides of the issue, this demographic is unafraid to take on the medical establishment. “They are not intimidated by the authority of the doctor,” says Brendan Nyhan, Ph.D, a political scientist at Dartmouth who has studied parents who are vaccine skeptics. “Educated, high-income people are more likely to feel confident in standing up to doctors or seeking out ones who are more favorable to alternative schedules and selective vaccination.”

So, the irony here is that some of what’s motivating anti-vaxxers is actually a personalwillingness to discover,however flawed their execution might be, which may then be taken advantage of by people with various different agendas. In short, it’s nothing like the clear-cut, simplistic picture casually tossed out by Mair.

But what wasremarkably clear-cut was what happened once the issue entered the public policy realm: Democratic politicians overwhelmingly looked to the science, while Republicans ignored and fought against it. A bill that would ban personal, religious exemptions for vaccinations, co-written by a pediatrician in the state Senate, Richard Pan, was passed by the state Legislature with strong Democratic support, and was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown. In the California Senate, Legiscan–which tracks legislation in all 50 states—identified the bill on the political spectrum as “Strong Partisan Bill (Democrat 27-2).” The overall vote on its third reading was 46-31, so a substantial majority of Republicans opposed it. In the California Assembly, just a handful of Democrats abstained (3) or voted no (5), while just two Republicans voted for the bill. An effort to overturn the law through the referendum process, just filed in late September, was led by former Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Republican, and former member of the anti-immigration Minuteman organization, who placed third in California’s open primary governor’s race in 2014.

Collectively, what all this shows is how differently organized liberals and conservatives respond when questions are raised involving science. Liberal Democrats could haveplayed to the anti-vaxxer fears of parents, the same way that conservative Republicans have played to the anti-science fears of their base, but overwhelminglythey chose not to.

Mair’s second anecdotal example is even more misleading. Again, here’s what she said:

I think we’ve reached a place in society, and maybe Rush Limbaugh’s comments are manifestation of this, where a lot of people just don’t prioritize discovery or science anymore. I mean, remember in the 2012 election how much Newt Gingrich was derided for all of his talk about moon bases and space exploration, right?

But what did those with actual knowledge of space technology have to say back then, when Gingrich promised a permanent lunar base by 2020, along with “the first continuous propulsion system in space capable of getting to Mars”? Were they all gung-ho in support of Newt? Well, not exactly. The problem was a lack of realism on Newt’s part, both about what it would take technologically and financially. Not to mention what it would take legally and constitutionally: Gingrich also promised that the American colony could eventually become a state—a direct violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, as was noted at the time.

Although space exploration was anything but a new concern of Newt’s, he had never delivered much of anything in the past, so his pronouncements in advance of the Florida primary drew a lot of skepticism from industry experts, as the Daily News reported (“Newt Gingrich’s moon base plan a ‘cheap trick’ to get votes, space experts say”):

“It’s a gimmick,” said Howard Chipman, CEO of Aurora Aerospace, a facility near Tampa that offers astronaut training. “It’s a cheap trick to get some Florida voters because of all of the space jobs here.”

Chipman said that while the idea of a lunar colony is laudable, the project would cost billions upon billions more than American taxpayers are willing to pay.

“Bush promised for us to go to the moon. The politicians promise to make goals but they don’t back it up with funding and resources to back the task,” he added….

Frank DiBello, CEO of Space Florida, the state’s economic development agency for the aerospace industry, said Gingrich’s timeline is “a little implausible,” noting the technology to support long duration space flights to Mars does not exist.

As the Guardian’s science correspondent Alok Jha noted, the problem wasn’t science, it was money. “In 2004, President George Bush called for a return to the moon, followed by Mars expeditions. NASA duly came up with the Constellation programmme,” but neither Bush nor the Congress ever came close to funding it. Its timeline was instructive, though, for placing Gingrich’s grandiose handwaving in perspective:

Two years later [2006], the space agency unveiled plans to build a permanent moon base within 20 years [2026], which could be used as a launch site for future missions to Mars….

NASA’s plan was that, by 2020, four-person crews would make week-long trips while power supplies, rovers and living quarters were being built on the lunar surface. In the mid-2020s, when the base was fully-built, people would stay for up to six months at a time to prepare for longer journeys to Mars. By the end of the decade pressurized roving vehicles could take people on long exploratory trips across the lunar surface.

So, six years later, Gingrich was proposing to get a full-time moon colony up and running six years earlier than NASA had projected in 2006? A delivery schedule cut by 60 percent? Paid for… how, exactly? Sorry, Liz, but folks weren’t laughing at the idea of exploration. They were laughing at Newt’s P.T. Barnum-style of pandering about it.

Newt, of course, had a long history of proposing grandiose techno-schemes to make himself seem like a “visionary.” At the time, Mother Jones dredged up some examples, mostly from his first book, “Window of Opportunity,” published in 1984. These included ideas like cutting the food stamp budget to buy space shuttles (“Food stamps crowded out space shuttles”); cutting farm subsidies and sending farmers to space (“If we’d spent as much on space as we’ve spent on farm programs, we could have taken all the extra farmers and put them on space stations working for a living in orbiting factories”); and mining the moon (“The moon is an enormous natural resource, possessed of more than enough minerals and materials to provide everything a self-replicating system needs”); not to mention using mirrors to create man-made climate change…and fight crime!

The problem with Newt’s schemes is that almost all of them were harebrained. So, when he became speaker of the House, one of his top agenda items was getting rid of folks knowledgeable enough to see through his BS. I’ve told this story several times before (here and here, for example), so I’ll cut to the chase. When Gingrich was riding high in late 2011, Bruce Bartlett, a top economic adviser to presidents Reagan and Bush I, wrote a piece titled “Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise,” where he explained:

Because Mr Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress’ professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.

To remove this obstacle, Mr Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it.

On becoming speaker, Gingrich slashed the professional staffs of the House committees, and completely abolished two congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The OTA is what concerns us here, because it was the worldwide model agency for in-depth evaluation of scientific and technological questions: the best BS-detecting government agency on the planet. Naturally Gingrich wanted it dead, because invention alone is only one part of science. It’s not nearly enough to just brainstorm ideas, you’ve got to winnow out the ones with the best chance of standing the test of time.

That’s the thing about science. It really does depend on imagination. As Einstein said,it is more important than knowledge. Yet, at the same time, imagination has to pass the test of nature: It has to prove itself in the real world. The very rigor of this test helps to invigorate the scientific imagination. And so, the truly imaginative, truly daring thinkers welcome the testing of their ideas.

That is what liberals have done. They created the OTA in the first place, in 1972, after 40 years of almost uninterrupted control of the House. Conservatives destroyed it in 1995, within a year of taking it over for the first time since 1954. And our country has been much poorer for it ever since—much poorer, and more filled with foolishness. There’s the massive, flamboyant foolishness of figures like Limbaugh and Gingrich (and more recently, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina), which shapes the grand outlines of one mass delusion after another. And then there’s the infill foolishness of operatives like Liz Mair, working overtime to obfuscate the most basic of fundamental facts.

Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area. He runs the site Merge Left, a community of progressive thinkers free to submit their own content.

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http://www.alternet.org/culture/words-matter-what-language-we-use-tells-us-about-our-current-political-landscape

liberal, entitlement etc welfare

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https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/09/09/could-coup-happen-in-united-states/

nice overview:

It Is Time To Get Very Afraid: Extremists, Authoritarians Now Run the GOP and No One Can Stop Them

By Heather Cox Richardson [1] / Salon [2]

September 27, 2015

http://www.alternet.org/print/tea-party-and-right/it-time-get-very-afraid-extremists-authoritarians-now-run-gop-and-no-one-can

Movement Conservatives just claimed the head of House Speaker John Boehner. His political death was the price of preventing a catastrophic government shutdown [3] after Movement Conservatives in Congress tied the very survival of the United States government to their determination to defund Planned Parenthood. Movement Conservatives are gunning for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell next [4]. We should be very afraid. Boehner and McConnell are not wild-eyed lefties. They are on the very far right of the American political spectrum: fervently pro-business, antiabortion, opposed to social welfare legislation. But they are old-school politicians who still have faith in the idea of American democracy.

Movement Conservatives do not. They want to blow up the government and remake America according to their own radical ideology.

Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have set out to destroy the form of federal government that came out of the New Deal. After the Great Crash and the ensuing Depression, most Americans believed that the government must regulate business and protect labor in order to create a stable, prosperous society. But businessmen hated the very same New Deal regulations most Americans liked. The captains of industry believed that government meddling in their affairs would disrupt economic laws. This would cripple their enterprises and, in turn, cripple the American economy. But the New Deal consensus was enormously popular, and actually made for a stable economy in which most Americans enjoyed security. Business interests could not fight this consensus on the merits, or they would continue to lose.

In 1951, a young William F. Buckley, Jr., came up with a blueprint for destroying the American consensus. Rational argument was a losing strategy, Buckley wrote in “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom.’” If voters were presented with facts, said Buckley, they would choose government regulation. So a new breed of Movement Conservative leaders must start from the premise that what Buckley called “individualism”—that is, an economy in which individual action was untouched by the state—was as sacrosanct as the Ten Commandments. Buckley gave this same untouchable status to Christianity, another fundamental that could not be questioned. People could quibble about the details of society based on an unregulated economy and Christianity, he allowed, but those bedrock principles could not be compromised. Individualism and Christianity were under attack, he insisted, from New Deal apologists and secular thinkers who had wormed their way into all levels of government and education. The secular New Dealers, Buckley claimed, threatened America’s very survival.

In the same year Buckley wrote “God and Man at Yale,” Eric Hoffer, a former San Francisco dockworker-turned-philosopher, examined the nature of authoritarian government. Having watched the rise of both fascism and communism, the former San Francisco dockworker thought those who wrung their hands over the ascent of a charismatic leader like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin were missing the point. There could be no leader without a mass movement, Hoffer argued.

His observations about how revolutionary leaders created followers were so compelling that when Dwight Eisenhower became president, he urged everyone to read Hoffer’s book, “The True Believer.” Eisenhower worried deeply about the rise of authoritarian governments. He worried about fascism, communism and religious extremism overseas, but he was also deeply concerned at the rise of Movement Conservatism in America. That movement looked dangerously like the ones Hoffer described. In the years since, Movement Conservatives have continued to follow Hoffer’s script.

Mass movements ultimately need a disaffected population, Hoffer said, people who are either economically or culturally dispossessed. Those isolated individuals need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They need to believe they can regain their previous relevance. Properly primed, such followers will throw themselves behind a leader who promises to return them to power.

In the early stages of a mass movement, “men of words,” as Hoffer called them, primed the pump for revolution by discrediting the current order of society. They encouraged followers to despise the present as a terrible declension from a glorious past. Then came the men of action—political leaders. As society destabilized, these new leaders created an artificial reality that made their discontented followers feel like they were part of something bigger than them, a movement to save society, a movement so important it was worth sacrificing themselves for it. The easiest way to unify followers was with hate. Leaders of such a movement identified a villain. These villains were usually the weakest members of society, making them easy to attack. And each attack on these new “enemies” fed contempt for them. Followers of a movement made more and more outrageous claims about those they demonized. Eventually those villains became so dehumanized that movement members would kill them, believing such atrocities were vital to reclaiming a glorious future for their nation. At this stage, followers were immune to facts or logic. Indeed, arguing with them only entrenched them in their beliefs, because the sign of a true believer’s faith was that it stood firm in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Eisenhower noted that early Movement Conservatives seemed to fit the pattern Hoffer’s work identified. In Eisenhower’s day, Movement Conservative leaders from William F. Buckley Jr. to Robert Welsh, who began the John Birch Society from his position at the Education Committee of the National Association of Manufacturers, harped on the idea that Communists had taken over the American government and were selling it out to an international cabal. Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy took that war into popular media. He claimed the need to defend individualism and Christianity from the secret plots of godless Communists in the government.

McCarthy began the process of creating an enemy that Movement Conservative followers could hate. His outrageous accusations divided American citizens into good and evil. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, expanded this theme, dividing Americans into “Conservatives” like McCarthy and themselves, who were trying to save the nation, and “Liberals” who wanted to destroy it. Their Liberals were all those who endorsed the New Deal consensus. Although New Deal supporters made up the vast majority of Americans, Buckley and Bozell announced that these traitors must be purged from the country. Instead, the nation must return to its glory days with a new “orthodoxy” of strict individualism and Christianity. Bipartisanship, progressivism and national unity were all a dangerous assault on what they claimed were America’s traditional values.

In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower’s use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans. Black people threatened America by forcing the government to redistribute wealth, thus inserting communism into the very fabric of the country. In 1968, Nixon made this Movement Conservative argument part of the established Republican Party when he resorted to the Southern Strategy. He expanded the villains’ list, too: he added to it grasping women, all minorities, and anti-war activists in the streets. They were all trying to destroy America.

Nixon’s people were purposely vague in their accusations—the administration’s favorite straw man was the murky “they” of “they say.” That unspecified “they” allowed Nixon’s people to preserve the illusion that they were describing facts. But President Ronald Reagan unhinged the rhetoric of Movement Conservatism even further from reality. He told folksy stories about Welfare Queens who stole tax dollars and hardworking individuals threatened by “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant Capitol.” When journalists fact-checked Reagan, he accused them of bias and rallied supporters against the “Liberal media.” And it played. In 1987, his administration ended the Fairness Doctrine that had required media to present facts and a wide range of opinions. This enabled Movement Conservatives to spew their worldview on talk radio and later television, railing against lazy blacks, women, minorities, workers and “Liberals,” all of whom were destroying America and holding the country back from regaining its former glory. And the more Movement Conservatives attacked, the more they weakened their enemies, and the more they despised them. Just as Hoffer had predicted.

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives controlled the Republican Party, and they abandoned reality in favor of their simple story line. A member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind that “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior adviser to the president told Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”

That is exactly what today’s Movement Conservatives are doing. After the last Republican debate, astonished observers noted that many of the candidates’ assertions were flat-out lies. The New York Times editorial board mused [5]: “It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world.” But the lies are not random. They tell followers that America has fallen apart because enemies— minorities, women and liberals– have poisoned the government. Only a Movement Conservative leader can purge the nation of that poison and return America to its former greatness. Donald Trump, who currently commands a significant lead, is the salesman who puts it most clearly. He tells his followers that “the world is a mess.” He promises to work outside the old order and replace it with something new and wonderful. He tells them a story in which Christianity is under siege, President Obama is a foreigner, and that immigrants—who actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans– are criminals. He refused to contradict a follower who announced that Muslims are a problem that we must “get rid of.” And he promises to “Make America Great Again.”

But Trump is not an outlier. Jeb! says that black people vote for Democrats to get “free stuff.” [6] Mike Huckabeeinsists that the United States is criminalizing Christianity [7]. Bobby Jindal promises to “fire” [8] Congress. Ted Cruz hints that President Obama is a Muslim [9] and warns that no Muslim should be president. All of the candidates demonize undocumented immigrants.

And Carly Fiorina makes the outrageous claim, on national television, that political opponents murder babies to harvest and sell their brains. Think about that.

The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism. Last week, 43 percent of Republicans polled said they could imagine a scenario in which they would back a military coup [10]. This week, Movement Conservatives in Congress knocked off a conservative speaker because he refused to sacrifice the American government to their demands.

We should be very frightened indeed. If we are not careful, John Boehner’s will not be the only head on the block.

Heather Cox Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at Boston College.

7/15

Since they were first proposed nearly a year ago, Republican lawmakers have relentlessly attacked the EPA’s new power plant emissions standards.

Even this week, Senate Republicans introduced legislation that would not only roll back the new standards but,according to The Hill, would make it nearly impossible for the EPA to rewrite the rules for power plants. Though they claim the new legislation is “bipartisan,” only one Democrat signed onto it: Senator Joe Manchin from the coal state of West Virginia.

To put the EPA’s rules succinctly, these health and safety measures require existing power plants to reduce emissions with carbon capture technology, or by reducing total output. New power plants will be required to be built with technology that reduces emissions.

The Republicans object to these standards because they claim that they will destroy the coal industry and put thousands of Americans out of work, causing a devastating ripple effect throughout the national economy. It's an age-old industry argument that never comes true, from the days when we abandoned whale oil, removed lead from gasoline or required seat belts in cars.

And a new report turns the Republicans' “job killing EPA regulations” argument on its head. Think Progress explains:

Researchers at private consulting firm Industrial Economics and the University of Maryland-based Interindustry Economic Research Fund credit efficiency improvements and lower electricity bills with adding about 273,000 jobs over the next 26 years. The analysts project that the plan will add 74,000 jobs by 2020. The findings support the EPA’s contention that the Clean Power Plan will not hurt the economy.

The real reason for the objection from the GOP is that it will cost the coal industry a little bit of money. And if the industry has to spend money making their power plants less lethal, it might not be able to match the $5.6 million in campaign contributions that they gave to Republicans in 2014, or even the $7.7 million that they gave to Republicans in 2012.

Those campaign contributions come to a little more than $13.3 million in the last four years, and apparently that amount of money is worth more to the Republican Party than the collective lives of more than 3,500 American citizens. That’s how many lives a new study claims can be saved by implementing the new standards.

The New York Times has more on the new study, which was a joint effort between Harvard University and Syracuse University:

The health benefits of the rule would be indirect. While carbon emissions trap heat in the atmosphere, which contributes to a warming planet, they are not directly linked to health threats. Emissions from coal-fired power plants, however, also include a number of other pollutants, such as soot and ozone, that are directly linked to illnesses like asthma and lung disease.

Researchers calculated that the changes in the EPA rule could prevent 3,500 premature deaths a year and more than 1,000 heart attacks and hospitalizations from air-pollution-related illness.

The Republican Party has put the value of an American life at less than $3,800. That’s the total amount of their recent campaign contributions from the coal industry divided by the number of lives that could be saved by these new rules. If you happen to live near a power plant, you should know how much your life is worth to your elected officials.

 http://www.alternet.org/environment/fighting-epa-rules-congress-thinks-your-life-worth-less-3800

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3/14

The League of Conservation Voters may be, effectively, a political adjunct of the DCCC when it comes to backing House candidates, but their annual scorecard on how incumbents vote, is a very accurate reflection of which Members of Congress are working to save the planet and which are working to allow predatory profiteers like the Koch brothers to destroy it. The average score in the House this year was a dismal 43%, one of the lowest scores ever. Anyone aiming to do well on the Koch brothers' Americans For Prosperity scorecard that we looked at this morning. Ron Johnson's 100% rating for the Koch's translated to an 8% rating for LCV, same as Marco Rubio's, who also got 100% for the Kochs.

Over in the House, there were 46 congressmembers with a score of zero. All 46 of them voted against the environment on every single opportunity. All of them were Republicans of the most reactionary variety:

• Jo Bonner (R-AL)

• Martha Roby (R-AL)

• Mike Rogers (R-AL)

• Spencer Bachus (R-AL)

• Tim Griffin (R-AR)

• Steve Womack (R-AR)

• Doug LaMalfa (R-CA)

• David Valadao (R-CA)

• Devin Nunes (R-CA)

• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

• Buck McKeon (R-CA)

• Gary Miller (R-CA)

• Ken Calvert (R-CA)

• John Campbell (R-CA)

• Darrell Issa (R-CA)

• Steve Southerland (R-FL)

• Ander Crenshaw (R-FL)

• John Mica (R-FL)

• Vern Buchanan (R-FL)

• Tom Rooney (R-FL)

• Mike Simpson (R-ID)

• Aaron Schock (R-IL)

• Jackie Walorski (R-IN)

• Susan Brooks (R-IN)

• Todd Young (R-IN)

• Steve King (R-IA)

• Andy Harris (R-MD)

• John Kline (R-MN)

• Alan Nunnelee (R-MS)

• Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO)

• Renee Ellmers (R-NC)

• Patrick McHenry (R-NC)

• Bob Latta (R-OH)

• Bill Johnson (R-OH)

• Markwayne Mullin (R-OK)

• Greg Walden (R-OR)

• Tim Murphy (R-PA)

• Tom Rice (R-SC)

• Phil Roe (R-TN)

• Diane Black (R-TN)

• Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

• Ralph Hall (R-TX)

• Joe Barton (R-TX)

• Michael Conaway (R-TX)

• Pete Olson (R-TX)

• Blake Farenthold (R-TX)

- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/03/calling-out-worst-members-of-congress.html#sthash.9xUbNPKQ.dpuf

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ECONOMY

Paul Krugman on the Real Reason Reality Doesn't Make the Slightest Dent in the Right-wing Brain

What's behind this rabid denial of facts and evidence?

By Janet Allon / AlterNet January 19, 2015

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It's really terrible when reality intrudes on your extremist world view.  And yet that's what keeps happening to right-wingers and Republicans. The latest reality to intrude on their ideological parade is that 2014 was the warmest year on record. It's official, Paul Krugman writes in his column Monday. And yet, it will not make the slightest difference to the climate-change deniers in Congress and elsewhere, who have proven themselves time and time again to be impervious to facts.

Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

There is other news that will not matter, Krugman points out before getting to the deeper question of why. There is the irrefutable evidence that Kansas' right-wing governor Sam Brownback's experiment with supply-side economics is a dismal failure. But this and other supply-side catastrophes has not eradicated that scourge. "If evidence mattered, supply-side economics would have faded into obscurity decades ago," Krugman writes. "Instead, it has only strengthened its grip on the Republican Party."

The unexpected success of health reform—unexpected even to its supporters—is another example. Not only has it resulted in a huge increase in the number of people who have health insurance, "Now we have evidence that the number of Americans experiencing financial distress due to medical expenses is also dropping fast," Krugman points out.

Good news! Government is helping people. Now there is a goal we can all agree with.

Therein lies the rub. Why do even clear government successes (like containing Ebola) only result in more rage?

The reason is that conservatives, who should really be renamed reactionaries, do not want government to succeed. Krugman:

Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest. If you don’t want the government to impose controls or fees on polluters, you want to deny that there is any reason to limit emissions. If you don’t want the combination of regulation, mandates and subsidies that is needed to extend coverage to the uninsured, you want to deny that expanding coverage is even possible. And claims about the magical powers of tax cuts are often little more than a mask for the real agenda of crippling government by starving it of revenue.

And why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed conservatives are actually reactionaries. That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary citizens better and more secure. I’m partial to that story, partly because it helps explain why climate science and health economics inspire so much rage.

Sadly for all of us, we are living in an era when facts, evidence and morality don't seem to matter at all. Which is not to say that we should not keep fighting.

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Global Climate Fund on GOP's Budget Hit List

The yearly battle over the U.S. budget officially begins on Feb. 2, when the president plans to send his fiscal 2016 funding proposal to Congress, where it will be torn to shreds or ignored entirely.

Read more.

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Paul Krugman Reveals the Culprit Behind the GOP's Rabid Anti-Environment Stance

November 28, 2014 |

Since when did breathing clean air become so politicized? It predates President Obama's recent attempts to install regulations to curb ozone emissions, but not by that much. Paul Krugman takes up the truly bizarre Republican opposition to even the most tepid attempts to protect the environment in Friday's column [3] and digs deeper to find the root cause. Of course, polluters will defend their right to pollute, he points out, but why can they always depend on Republican support?

Some background from Krugman:

It wasn’t always thus. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the legal basis for the Obama administration’s environmental actions [4], passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 73 to 0, and was signed into law by Richard Nixon. (I’ve heard veterans of the E.P.A. describe the Nixon years as a golden age.) A major amendment of the law, which among other things made possible the cap-and-trade system that limits acid rain, was signed in 1990 by former President George H.W. Bush.

But that was then. Today’s Republican Party is putting a conspiracy theorist who views climate science as a “gigantic hoax” in charge of the Senate’s environment committee. And this isn’t an isolated case. Pollution has become a deeply divisive partisan issue.

The Republicans have moved to the right of Nixon and Bush. That's part of it, but, again, why?

Money in politics is part of the answer, no doubt. Mega polluters like the Koch brothers pour mega doses of cash into politics, and while it used to flow to both parties, it goes "overwhelmingly in one direction" today. What changed? Rabid anti-government, pro-market ideology is part of the answer. Krugman peels the onion further to conclude that this pernicious ideology is just "a symptom of the underlying cause of the divide: rising inequality [5]."

The basic story of political polarization over the past few decades is that, as a wealthy minority has pulled away economically from the rest of the country, it has pulled one major party along with it. True, Democrats often cater to the interests of the 1 percent, but Republicans always do. Any policy that benefits lower- and middle-income Americans at the expense of the elite — like health reform, which guarantees insurance to all and pays for that guarantee in part with taxes on higher incomes — will face bitter Republican opposition.

Protecting the environment has become a class issue, in part. Everyone breathes, but only the super-wealthy own huge amount of stock in coal companies. Krugman concludes:

In the case of the new ozone plan, the E.P.A.’s analysis suggests [6] that, for the average American, the benefits would be more than twice the costs. But that doesn’t necessarily matter to the nonaverage American driving one party’s priorities. On ozone, as with almost everything these days, it’s all about inequality.

http://www.alternet.org/media/why-conservatives-opt-propaganda-over-realityhttps://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45;jsessionid=CFF4F8F3928260F440E5BD626B1FCED3#-3317

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45;jsessionid=CFF4F8F3928260F440E5BD626B1FCED3#-3317

AlterNet [1] / By Chris Mooney [2]

The Science of Fox News: Why Its Viewers Are the Most Misinformed

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/science-fox-news-why-its-viewers-are-most-misinformed

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BOOKS:

Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet

 By Kerryn Higgs

http://books.google.com/books?id=Iy9BBAAAQBAJ&dq=think+tank+coors+four+sisters&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Green Backlash: The History and Politics of the Environmental Opposition in ...

 By Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer, 

Colbert Pokes Fun at ‘Rolling Coal,’ the Insecure Trucker Driver’s Response to Environmentalists

Watch the ‘Colbert Report' hilariously explain a new phenomenon..

.http://ecowatch.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=214ab5fbb3f6015d74ffab4ec&id=a0081d6261&e=c2e8fdabfa

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 ...nd in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can reallychange (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology....

http://www.alternet.org/scientists-discover-fascinating-psychological-reason-why-conservatives-areconservative

A large number of Louisiana Republicans think President Barack Obama is to blame for the federal government's poor response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday -- despite the fact that the storm occurred three years before he took office.

The Democratic-leaning polling firm, which provided its results to Talking Points Memo, found that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response. Twenty-eight percent put the blame on President George W. Bush, whose administration did in fact oversee the federal response to Katrina. Nearly half (44 percent) of the Louisiana Republicans polled didn't know who to blame.

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The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change

Science, storms, and demographics are starting to change minds among the rank and file.

By Coral Davenport

May 9, 2013 | 8:20 p.m.

Clarion call? New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tours the devastation in the wake of superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Inside This Week's Cover Story

Kerry Emanuel registered as a Republican as soon he turned 18, in 1973. The aspiring scientist was turned off by what he saw as the Left’s blind ideology. “I had friends who denied Pol Pot was killing people in Cambodia,” he says. “I reacted very badly to the triumph of ideology over reason.”

Back then, Emanuel saw the Republican Party as the political fit for a data-driven scientist. Today, the professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered one of the United States’ foremost authorities on climate change—particularly on how rising carbon pollution will increase the intensity of hurricanes.

In January 2012, just before South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary, the Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America, one of the most influential advocacy groups in conservative politics, flew Emanuel down to meet with the GOP presidential candidates. Perhaps an unlikely prophet of doom where global warming is concerned, the coalition has begun to push Republicans to take action on climate change, out of worry that coming catastrophes could hit the next generation hard, especially the world’s poor.

The meetings didn’t take. “[Newt] Gingrich and [Mitt] Romney understood, … and I think they even believed the evidence and understood the risk,” Emanuel says. “But they were so terrified by the extremists in their party that in the primaries they felt compelled to deny it.Which is not good leadership, good integrity. I got a low impression of them as leaders.” Throughout the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate but one—former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was knocked out of the race at the start—questioned, denied, or outright mocked the science of climate change.

Soon after his experience in South Carolina, Emanuel changed his lifelong Republican Party registration to independent. “The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” he says.

Emanuel predicts that many more voters like him, people who think of themselves as conservative or independent but are turned off by what they see as a willful denial of science and facts, will also abandon the GOP, unless the party comes to an honest reckoning about global warming.

And a quiet, but growing, number of other Republicans fear the same thing. Already, deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant.

“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”

A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.

Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to winprimary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.

Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.

The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not. And that day will come sooner than they think.

Already, the numbers tell the story. Polls show that a majority of Americans, and a plurality of Republicans, believe global warming is a problem. Concern about the issue is higher among younger voters and independents, who Republicans will need to attract if they want to win elections.

According to a pair of Gallup Polls in April, 58 percent of all Americans are worried about global warming, and 57 percent believe it is caused by human activities. Not surprisingly, responses reflect a partisan divide on the issue, but among Republicans, concern about global warming is rising. Gallup found that 75 percent of Democrats worry about climate change, compared with 59 percent of independent voters (up from 51 percent in 2010) and 40 percent of Republicans (up from 32 percent from that year).

A January poll of Republicans and Republican-leading independents conducted by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication said that a majority (52 percent) think climate change is happening; 62 percent favor taking action to combat climate change, such as taxing carbon pollution. Only 35 percent of the Republican respondents said they agree with the Republican Party’s position on climate change. (The party’s 2012 platform opposed any limits on greenhouse-gas emissions and suggested the science underlying projections of a warming climate is “uncertain.”)

Meanwhile, a March poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 69 percent of Americans believe the climate is already changing. On the more contentious question of whether fossil-fuel pollution is causing that change, the poll uncovered a generation gap: Only 28 percent of voters over age 65 accept the scientific consensus that such emissions are warming the Earth, while close to 50 percent of those under 50 accept it.

“These polls show that there are a lot of people who are inclined to vote Republican—and believe America should respond to climate change,” says Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason program. “Republicans aren’t inclined to respond to it right now, but in the future, if they don’t take these issues seriously, they’re inclined to alienate a lot of Republican voters.”

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Mother and daughter Roberta and Michele Combs are pillars of the Religious Right.Roberta, president and CEO of the Christian Coalition America, got her start in Republican politics working with celebrated strategist Lee Atwater. Michele, who was named Young Republican of the Year in 1989 and worked as a planner for events such as George W. Bush’s inauguration, is the coalition’s communications director. With their white-blond bouffant hair, penchant for fuchsia lipstick, soft South Carolina accents, and sterling conservative bona fides, the Combses are familiar presences in the ruby-red heart of the GOP establishment.

That’s why it’s so surprising to many that they are tackling climate change. But both women see global warming, and clean air and environmental protection more broadly, as issues that tie into their core conservative mission of protecting family values.

“This is an important issue for the Republican Party,” Roberta Combs says. “At one point in time, this was a Republican issue, but Democrats took it over.”

In 2010, Roberta led a Christian Coalition push for her friend Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to sign on to a Senate climate-change bill, as the measure’s sole GOP sponsor. Graham eventually pulled his support, but thanks in part to Roberta’s pressure, he’s remained one of the few Republicans to openly acknowledge climate change and to call on his party to look for a solution. He is sticking with his position even as he prepares to face South Carolina voters for reelection next year.

“I think the Republican Party needs to embrace an environmental agenda,” Graham says. “When you ask a Republican candidate for president, what’s your environmental platform, what do they say? We need to be able to speak to this just as quickly as to do to reforming the tax code. Younger people, people under 30, this is a huge issue for them.”

Roberta was the Christian Coalition official who persuaded Emanuel, the MIT scientist, to speak with the GOP presidential candidates in January 2012. And she continues to employ her group’s grassroots muscle to muster conservative support for Republicans like Graham who support action to combat climate change, with the hope that eventually one will sponsor a bill that can pass.

“I think the Republican Party has got to move to the center. We should never leave our base, but we’ve got to be more open-minded and look at issues more American families care about,” Roberta says. “As the electorate changes, we’re not going to win as much. It’s a different generation, and the Republican Party has got to look at all of this and broaden its agenda if they want to continue to win elections.”

Last summer, Michele launched a new group,Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, aimed at amassing grassroots support for lawmakers and legislation addressing clean energy and climate change. She is channeling her network of connections among the Christian Coalition and the Young Republicans.

She works closely with Brian Smith, a 32-year-old Air Force veteran and the chairman of the Midwest chapter, who is also a former cochairman of the Young Republicans National Federation, a training ground for party leaders founded in 1931. The energy group is structured like the Young Republicans, with volunteers staffing city, state, and regional chapters. So far, the group has state chairs in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas—all of which have Republican governors.

Over the past year, the group has held a dozen events in those and other states. In October 2012, it sponsored a get-together in Washington for GOP congressional staff. The gatherings—mostly of young professionals in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—feature hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and a talk from retired Marine Gen. Richard Zilmer, who makes the case that both climate change and U.S. oil dependence are matters of national security, and that policies to cut fossil-fuel use are consistent with conservative values. Emanuel has also spoken at some of the events.

The goal, Michele says, is to build a database of voters who will, at some point, come forward to back Republican candidates who support cutting carbon pollution. “We are building a grassroots army of young conservatives around the country,” she says. “When the time comes, we’ll have the grassroots to organize around candidates or legislation, and we can activate them.”

PAYING THE PRICE

What Michele and Roberta want to do, in other words, is protect lawmakers such as Bob Inglis.Today, Republicans point to the former House member from South Carolina as the textbook tale of what happens when a red-state conservative dares to acknowledge climate change.

Inglis, who left Congress in 2011, recalls the challenge his son, Rob, threw down to him a decade ago before he was to vote in his first election. He said, “I’ll vote for you, Dad, but you’ve got to clean up your act on the environment.’ ”

Inglis had never given much thought to the issue of climate change. As a by-the-books conservative, he says,“I accepted that if Al Gore was for it, I was against it, until my son challenged my ignorance on the subject.”Inglis spent the next few years educating himself on climate issues. He joined the House Science Committee and accompanied climate scientists on research trips to Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef, where he saw firsthand the damages wrought by rising carbon pollution and warming temperatures. “I got convinced of the science,” he says, and, in2009, Inglis cosponsored climate-change legislation with Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. The bill proposed an idea that had strong backing from environmentalists, including Gore, as well as prominent conservative economists. It would create a tax on carbon pollution but use the revenue to cut payroll or income taxes.

Inglis would pay dearly for his support of the so-called carbon-tax swap. The following year, he lost his primary election to a tea-party candidate, Trey Gowdy. And Inglis knows his position on the climate was the reason. “The most enduring heresy was saying, ‘Climate change is real and we should do something about it.’ That was seen as a statement against the tribal orthodoxy.”

“But,” he says, “these heresies and orthodoxies change so quickly. Back in 2010, I was voting for immigration reform; look how that’s changed. It’s going to be like that with climate change.”

Along with the evolving politics of immigration reform, Bob and Rob Inglis also see in their situation a kinship with Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who jolted the party earlier this year when he came out in support of gay marriage. Portman changed his stance after conversations with his 21-year-old son, Will, who is gay.

“I hope there’s a parallel,” Bob Inglis says. “Rob [Portman] is a hero of mine. He loves his son. He’s willing to take risks for his son.” Unlike Inglis, Portman hasn’t yet had to face voters in a primary—and won’t until 2016. Given the rapid shift in public attitudes toward gay marriage, he may in fact suffer no repercussions. It wasn’t long ago that gay marriage served as a valuable wedge issue for the party (think George W. Bush in 2004)—much like placing limits on carbon is today.

For the moment, however, Inglis has taken on the arduous task of bringing his party back to him. Last summer, he founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit organization based at George Mason University, focused on convincing conservatives, particularly young ones, that climate change, caused by carbon pollution, is a serious threat—and on pushing for the carbon-tax swap as a fundamentally conservative economic solution. Since last fall, Inglis and a cohort of conservative economists have made their case at a dozen events, including talks at colleges and universities in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi.

Last month, 21-year-old Republican Kevin Croswhite, a senior at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., who grew up in nearby Salem (both towns lie within in the district of Rep. Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate) attended one of Inglis’s events—and was sold.

Croswhite has considered himself a conservative Republican since high school. As an economics major, he is a big believer in data: scientific, economic, and demographic. He is persuaded that his party’s rejection of the data on climate change will damage it politically.

“The country’s going to become more educated, and that’s not going to break our way, as a party, if we are denying what 90 out of 100 scientists say,” Croswhite argues. “If the scientific community is generally accepting of something, you need to trust that.”

While Combs’s and Inglis’s groups try to appeal to conservative Christians and young Republicans, another organization—the National Audubon Society—is reaching out to red-state conservatives in the West, linking the threat of climate change to the ideal of Theodore Roosevelt’s Republican conservatism, in a bid to appeal to hunters, fishers, ranchers, and other lovers of the outdoors. The venerable nonpartisan group has teamed with the Washington organization ConservAmerica to ask red-state voters to sign an “American Eagle Compact” calling for lawmakers to act on conservation policies, including climate change. The effort, which Audubon says is funded by a Texas Republican who has asked to remain anonymous, has so far garnered 55,000 signatures.

“We’re trying to figure out how to partner with those people, so they can turn out in communities across the country, to activate them for support,” says Audubon President and CEO David Yarnold. “We want to make sure that when Republican legislators who support conservation and climate policy go home, they’re not just getting hollered at. We want to make sure they’re hearing from reasonable conservationists who say this is not a partisan issue.”

LIGHTING THE WAY

While those groups work from the bottom up to help push Washington to move on climate issues, a constellation of prominent conservative economists is bolstering the cause. These conservatives include such intellectuals as Art Laffer, the former senior adviser to President Reagan; George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of State; Gregory Mankiw, who was an economic adviser to the Romney campaign and the former chief economist for George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the influential conservative think tank American Action Forum, a former head of Bush’s Council on Economic Advisers, and an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; and a host of other well-respected conservative economic thinkers.

Laffer spoke to National Journal by phone from his home inTennessee, where he lives next door to Gore. The Reagan economist and the liberal global-warming crusader disagree on many issues but are united on the wisdom of a carbon-tax swap as good environmental and economic policy. “Al is a dear friend, and I think he’s a damned good public servant,” Laffer says. “I am ignorant-squared on climate change, but what I do believe is that the risks of reducing carbon in the environment are less than the risks of putting more carbon into the environment.”

Last year, Laffer wrote a detailed paper on how best to structure a carbon-tax swap, presumably as part of the broader tax-reform effort Congress appears to be moving toward. “What I believe in, and Al Gore believes in, is if you’re going to do a carbon tax, you need to offset it dollar-for-dollar with marginal tax reduction on income or employment,” he says. “Anyone who goes through what I just went through, they’ll agree with me. I’ve had more experience than anyone in the financial thinking on this.”

At the beginning of this Congress, a group of Republican lawmakers, along with a few coal-state Democrats, sponsored a measure that vowed they would never back a carbon tax, and given the antitax mood in Washington, prospects for such a tax appear dim. Still, both opponents and proponents concede that the idea will certainly be on the table if Congress makes a serious attempt at tax reform in the coming years.

Laffer said that as with so many of the policies he’s proposed before, the time will ripen for a carbon tax as it moves from impossible to inevitable. “My policies are always the North Star,” he says. “Right now, this is viewed as a third-order problem. But if we take over in 2016, this will have huge traction.”

Laffer spent last year promoting the idea on college campuses. The climate-change advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet flew Holtz-Eakin to New Hampshire to participate in living-room chats with voters about the economic costs of climate change and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

In March, Schultz went to Capitol Hill to talk about climate change and push the carbon tax to congressional aides. In a standing-room-only gathering in the Rayburn House Office Building, he argued, “Good work on conservation and the environment is in the Republican genes; we’ve been the guys who did it.… My proposal is to have a revenue-neutral carbon tax.” Schultz got a standing ovation. Among the audience were staffers from the offices of Republican Reps. Phil Roe of Tennessee, Billy Long of Missouri, and Randy Neugebauer of Texas—ranked as the most conservative member of the House in a 2011 NJ survey.

A SLEEPING GIANT

It’s long been taken as a truism that the powerful oil lobby is the reason nothing happens on climate change in Washington. For many years, that was indeed true. In particular, Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company and a major contributor to Republican candidates, was associated with a campaign to fuel skepticism about climate science. From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil contributed more than $600,000 to the Heartland Institute, a well-known nonprofit group that holds conferences and publishes books aimed at debunking the science of climate change. Exxon Mobil’s support of Heartland made sense. The oil company stood to take a financial hit from “cap-and-trade” climate-change proposals that would have priced carbon pollution from oil.

For a number of reasons, that equation is changing. Exxon Mobil has ended its support of Heartland’s agenda. It’s not that the oil giant has had a green awakening; it’s just that a series of internal changes have positioned the company to profit from at least some policies that price carbon emissions.

In 2010, Exxon Mobil bought the natural-gas company XTO Energy, which transformed the venerable oil producer into the world’s largest natural-gas producer. Around the same time, the company began making a noticeable shift in its climate policy. The reason: Natural gas, which is used to generate electricity, is the lowest-polluting fossil fuel, emitting just half of the greenhouse gases as coal, the world’s top electricity source. In the event of a tax on carbon pollution, demand for coal-fired electricity would freeze, while markets for natural gas would explode.

Every year, Exxon Mobil puts out a widely read report with projections on the global state of energy development. The most recent one included the assumption of a future price on carbon and a corresponding surge in natural-gas consumption. “We assume there’s going to be a price on carbon in the future, and that assumption drives our investment strategy,” says company spokesman Alan Jeffers.

And the position on climate change at Exxon Mobil that once helped fund the Heartland conferences? “We have the same concerns about climate change as everyone. The risk of climate change exists; it’s caused by more carbon in the atmosphere; the risk is growing; and there’s broad scientific and policy consensus on this,” Jeffers says.

In 2010, during Senate negotiations on the cap-and-trade bill, Exxon Mobil told the White House that it wouldn’t back that bill, but it would support legislation with a straight carbon tax, ideally, a carbon-tax swap along the lines of what Inglis and Laffer propose. Ultimately, of course, all of those attempts failed. And, today, Exxon Mobil is not actively lobbying for the tax. The company’s position remains the same, though, Jeffers says. “Our approach has been, if public policymakers have decided they want to put a price on carbon, we see a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most efficient way to do that.”

In the 2012 campaign, Exxon Mobil gave $2.7 million in political contributions, with 88 percent going to Republicans. One of the world’s biggest and most profitable oil companies—a lobbying powerhouse and major influence in GOP politics, particularly in deep-red oil states—has accepted the science of climate change and figured out how to profit from a carbon-price policy. While Exxon Mobil won’t be leading the green revolution, its shift could make a difference in the way many Republicans approach the issue.

HEADING FOR THE HILLS

For now, however, no prominent Republican running for office in the next few years will want to get anywhere near a carbon-tax proposal, or even talk about climate change. While the rift in the party over global warming is becoming increasingly evident, most Republicans feel much more secure on the side that denies the problem.

That was made abundantly plain during the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, the annual Washington gathering that the GOP base uses to anoint its future leaders. Two leading speakers this year were Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush, both of Florida, the state that scientists such as Kerry Emanuel warn is the most vulnerable to devastation from intensified hurricanes in the coming years.

Rubio was the undisputed star attraction, and his keynote speech sparked some of the loudest cheers when he denounced climate science in the context of condemning abortion.

“The people who are actually closed-minded in American politics are the people who love to preach about the certainty of science with regards to our climate but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception,” Rubio said. A month earlier, in his response to President Obama’s State of the Union, Rubio had said, “When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather, [Obama] accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.”

Bush’s CPAC speech had a decidedly different tone. He castigated his party for espousing hard-right views. “Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, antiwoman, antiscience, antigay, anti-worker … and the list goes on,” he said. “Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted, and unwelcome in our party.”

Bush did not specifically mention climate change, although many on both sides of the aisle interpreted his remark about science as a signal that he’d be open to addressing the issue. Pundits praised the speech, but it was not a hit with his party. Bush spoke to a quiet room with a fair number of empty seats. Many in the audience members were checking their mobile devices. When he finished, Bush was met with a polite, modest smattering of applause. (Another Republican who has signaled support for climate-change legislation, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, wasn’t even invited to CPAC.)

At 41, Rubio personifies the next generation of Republican leadership, while Bush represents an older, perhaps out-of-date moderate mind-set—which means the party may very well be heading in the wrong direction when it comes to embracing climate science. Rubio’s view is likely to remain the mainstream one in the party in the short term, thanks to tea-party groups such as Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate.

Over the last several years, Americans for Prosperityhas spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the fossil-fuel industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations. The group spent $36 million to influence the 2012 elections.

“We’ve been having this debate with the Left for 10 years, and we welcome having the debate with these new groups. If there are groups who want to do a niche effort with the Republican electorate, we’ll win that debate,” says the group’s president, Tim Phillips. He’s not worried that organizations such as Combs’s Christian Coalition or economists such as Laffer will influence lawmakers—because AFP would hit any such candidate with an all-out negative campaign. “Let them bring a carbon tax on. They know it’s political death for them to bring this forward on their own.”

There’s no denying the political power of groups like Americans for Prosperity. Still, despite its massive wealth, the super PAC failed to achieve either of its two chief political goals of 2012—unseating President Obama and claiming the Senate majority for Republicans.

The goal of grassroots efforts is to persuade Republicans that they’ll be rewarded if they take a stand in support of climate action—and that they could doom their party to minority status if they don’t. Advocates in the GOP realize that it’s too early and too fraught for Republicans seeking reelection to sound the alarm over the changing climate.

But out of sight on Capitol Hill, staffers say, conversations are taking place about how to go about doing that—eventually. “Most Republicans say the same thing behind closed doors: ‘Of course, I get that the climate is changing, of course I get that we need to do something—but I need to get reelected.’ Somehow they’re going to have to find a safe place on this,” says the Audubon Society’s Yarnold.

“We’re trying to get them to come out of the climate closet,” he says. “There’s no question they’re leaving votes on the table because of this. And they know it.”

This article appears in the May 11, 2013, edition of National Journal as Getting Warmer.

What do Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush have in common?

Yes, OK, obviously they were all Republican presidents. But as of Friday, there is something else that ties them all together.

EPA administrators who worked for all of those presidents came out in support of stronger actions on climate change, co-signing a powerful op-ed in *The New York Times* supporting Barack Obama’s climate actions and arguing that “the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change.”

Here are some highlights from the op-ed, which was written by William D. Ruckelshaus, Lee M. Thomas, William K. Reilly, and Christine Todd Whitman:

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current political gridlock in Washington. Dealing with this political reality, President Obama’s June climate action plan lays out achievable actions that would deliver real progress. He will use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants and spur increased investment in clean energy technology, which is inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a strong economy along with a livable climate. …

Rather than argue against his proposals, our leaders in Congress should endorse them and start the overdue debate about what bigger steps are needed and how to achieve them — domestically and internationally. …

We can have both a strong economy and a livable climate. All parties know that we need both. The rest of the discussion is either detail, which we can resolve, or purposeful delay, which we should not tolerate.

Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

The op-ed also states that there “is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts” of global warming. But, then, nobody should need a bunch of former EPA chiefs to tell them that.Source

• A Republican Case for Climate Action, The New York Times

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Right_(United_States)