This remarkable thing happened in the House yesterday and last night, led by John Lewis. A sit-in, parallel to the Chris Murphy filibuster, to force a vote on gun violence. More from the pundits in days to come.
NY Times:
The turmoil on Wednesday and Thursday in the House illustrated the differences in partisan relations in the House and Senate.
Typical of the more restrained and decorous Senate, Mr. Murphy’s speeches last week were derided by Republicans as a pointless “talkathon,” but there were no confrontations and no shouting. Under Senate rules, any one senator who is recognized to speak can hold the floor until relinquishing it.
The House gives the minority no such rights, and the Democrats resorted to an insurrection. Shortly after the sit-in began on Wednesday, Republicans quickly declared a recess, cutting off regular business — as well as the live television feed of floor proceedings, which operates only when the House is in session.
So Donald Trump gives a speech riddled with lies, conspiracy theory and Benghazi, and I have to say, I’ve changed my mind. I had thought he’d pick Newt Gingrich for VP, but after yesterday’s speech I think it’s Alex Jones.
And it was all pushed to the back burner by the House protest. Who cares about something Trump lied about yesterday? He’ll just do it again tomorrow.
Don’t tell me the pendulum hasn’t shifted on gun legislation. This week has been extraordinary.
P.S. Parties matter. No, they are not both the same.
Christopher Hooks:
Trump's rallies and fundraisers in [TX] were chock-a-block with the color we've come to expect. He didn't make a lot of sense. He said some provocative things. He swore, and acted out. At a fundraiser in San Antonio, he was cornered by some donors who wanted him to walk back his trash-talking of NAFTA, and he told them, in essence, to shove it.
But the comical theatricality of Trump's visit obscured something more sinister. Texas used to be a slightly more welcoming place for immigrants, even undocumented ones. But anti-immigrant rhetoric, weaponized over the course of successive elections, has been ratcheting up. Nativism is a drug, and Trump and his greasy surrogates are offering right-wing Texas voters something closer to the uncut kind than anything they've had before. Now that the state's Republicans are embracing Trump, the risk is that even after he flops in November, they'll have to peddle it too.
Take Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's speech introducing Trump in The Woodlands. Patrick is one of the strangest politicians in the state's modern history — a local TV sportscaster from Baltimore who became a right-wing radio shock jock after a devastating midlife crisis and ended up controlling the Texas Senate.
He's a leader of a new wave of Texas conservatism: It's Patrick, not Gov. Greg Abbott, who you want to watch if you're looking for clues about where Texas Republicans are headed. In 2014, Patrick ran one of the most anti-immigrant campaigns in the state's history. He's out to dismantle Texas' public education system. Those outside the state might know him for his anti-trans bathroom activism.
A terrific Storify tweet storm here about how Trump is Running His Campaign Like a Real Estate Deal:
Dear Rep. Ellison: I love your mom.
A must read tweet storm from Al Giordano on nonviolence training, John Lewis and yesterday’s House sit-in:
Francis Wilkerson:
More Abramowitz:
“So the bottom line here is that the Inter-party divide is much larger than the intra-party divide on all policy issues. And this is without screening for voters vs. nonvoters. (Voters are more partisan than nonvoters.) Inter-party differences will undoubtedly be larger when we can focus on voters.
This suggests that in the end, the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans will fall in line and vote for their party’s nominee. Indeed, that is what we are seeing in the polls. For example, in the new Monmouth University poll, only 6 percent of Democrats support Trump and only 8 percent of Republicans support Clinton. “
If you believe Trump's candidacy poses a grave threat to the republic, this is a dispiriting conclusion. But it's not a surprising one. Recent history has repeatedly confirmed that partisan warfare is more important to many Capitol Hill legislators than any notion of the public interest.
Meanwhile, voters who claim to be fed up with partisanship are actually inclined to emulate it. If Trump is the Republican nominee, tens of millions of Republicans will vote for him.
YouGov:
As of this week’s poll, just 57% of those Sanders voters say they will support Clinton in November. One in ten now say they will vote for Trump (meanwhile, 16% of GOP primary voters who did not support Trump now say they will vote for Clinton). The Sanders voters have not increased their support for Clinton since the last Economist/YouGov Poll conducted two weeks ago. Nearly half wish he would run as an independent instead of supporting Clinton. But many have changed their emotional response to the former Secretary of State’s victory. Two weeks ago, nearly four in ten Sanders supporters said they would be “upset” if Clinton were the nominee. That percentage has been cut nearly in half in this week’s poll.
Among Republican voters, there appears to be more distress from those who opposed Trump in the primaries and caucuses. Nearly half (46%) of Republican voters who favored candidates other than Trump continue to say they are “upset” with the prospect of a Trump nomination.
While both Clinton and Trump are viewed negatively by majorities of Americans (with slightly more rating Trump negatively than rating Clinton that way), Clinton’s November voters express more positive support for her. Two in three of them say their vote will befor Clinton, and not against Trump. Trump’s voters are more closely split on whether they are voting for the New York businessman or voting against Clinton.
Vanity Fair:
[Paul] Ryan, of course, has practical reasons to spend his time fundraising for Congress instead of Trump, whose toxicity is already starting to poison the prospects of the G.O.P.’s many down-ticket races, and will likely imperil the party’s majority in both houses. (John McCain, for example, who was the party’s presidential nominee in 2008, might lose his Senate seat in Arizona to a Democrat who’s polling neck-and-neck with him as of May—and Trump’s comments about Latinos aren’t helping.) Ryan has said that, as House Speaker, it is not his place to go to war with his own party’s nominee. But he has done just about everything short of un-endorsing Trump, repeatedly disavowing whatever awful thing The Donald has said latelywithout walking back his support.
Strategically, Ryan can’t lose with this gambit. If Ryan can fulfill his agenda of stacking Congress with his personal favorites, he’ll have a strong base of his chosen Republicans in Congress to fight against Trump (if need be), and if Trump loses, he’ll be remembered for his loyalty to the party (which would be great, say, for 2020). But Ryan’s move still highlights the disunity wracking the G.O.P., even if he’s officially on board the Trump train. Nothing symbolizes a broken marriage like refusing to spend time helping the person whom you’ve agreed to support.
Vox:
Donald Trump gave his first major speech of the election attacking Hillary Clinton on Wednesday morning. It mostly focused on labeling Clinton as corrupt, his stock "Crooked Hillary" line expanded to an hour.
But it also tried to label Clinton as incompetent, blaming her personally for a series of events ranging from the decline of manufacturing jobs in the US to the rise of ISIS in Iraq.
These policy arguments are pretty revealing — largely for what they say about Trump. In the speech, he takes a ridiculously narrow view of how the world works, assuming that if something in America or the world has gone wrong recently, it’s because of American policy — specifically, an American policy created by Hillary Clinton. His basic argument is that if a bad thing happened in the world and Hillary Clinton was alive during it, she’s the one who caused it.
LA Times:
Immoral, lazy, closed-minded: How Democrats and Republicans feel about each other
Norm Ornstein:
The Show Trial of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen
The congressional resolution condemning the longtime public servant breaks with both precedent and decency.