The Midterm Elections

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

23 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Well of course they are! How else does he stand a chance of getting a second term? 

[fraurosena]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course he does

[GreyhoundFan]

I sincerely hope this horrid plan causes a blue tsunami in November; "Trump aides plan fresh immigration crackdowns before midterms"

Spoiler

Top aides to President Donald Trump are planning additional crackdowns on immigration before the November midterms, despite a growing backlash over the administration’s move to separate migrant children from parents at the border.

Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and a team of officials from the departments of Justice, Labor, Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget have been quietly meeting for months to find ways to use executive authority and under-the-radar rule changes to strengthen hard-line U.S. immigration policies, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.

The goal for Miller and his team is to arm Trump with enough data and statistics by early September to show voters that he fulfilled his immigration promises — even without a border wall or any other congressional measure, said one Republican close to the White House.

Among the fresh ideas being circulated: tightening rules on student visas and exchange programs; limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers; making it harder for legal immigrants who have applied for welfare programs to obtain residency; and collecting biometric data from visitors from certain countries.

Details of the ideas are still being worked out, one White House official said.

In one of the most closely watched plans under discussion, DHS has proposed a new rule that former Obama administration officials and immigration advocates worry could be used as an end run around a 1997 court settlement that limits the time migrant children can be kept in government custody. Putting a formal government rule in place, lawyers and advocates say, could in effect supersede the settlement, allowing the administration to get rid of it altogether by dropping the rule a year or two later.

“Once you rescind that regulation, then you go back to being able to do whatever you want and the detention becomes the complete discretion of ICE,” said Leon Fresco, former deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Department of Justice. “That is where people think this is headed.”

The president and his top aides have framed the family separation issue as something Democrats could end by signing on to Republican legislation addressing Trump’s priorities, including funding the border wall — even though the separation moves are solely the outgrowth of a Department of Justice decision and not grounded in a particular law.

Miller, who was instrumental to Trump’s early travel ban — which, like the border separations, triggered widespread public outrage and was put into effect without sufficient logistical planning — is among those who see the border crisis as a winning campaign issue.

“That is the fundamental political contrast and political debate that is unfolding right now,” Miller said in an interview with Breitbart News published on May 24. “The Democratic Party is at grave risk of completely marginalizing itself from the American voters by continuing to lean into its absolutist anti-enforcement positions.”

And some in the Trump administration are not inclined to back down from any of its immigration policies because they’ve been planning them for more than a year, according to one White House official and a Republican close to the administration.

On Jan. 25, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for the arrest and detention of people caught crossing the border illegally — a broad preview of the Department of Justice’s April “zero-tolerance” decision to refer all border-crossers for federal prosecution, which has led to the separation of children from parents being sent into criminal courts.

Many of the ideas for enacting more aggressive immigration enforcement or tweaking old government rules originated with the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, which Miller effectively runs.

Other participants in the effort include John Walk, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ son-in-law; Thomas Homan, the soon-to-retire head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Francis Cissna, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; Gene Hamilton, a former staffer to Sessions and ex-DHS official, who’s now at the Department of Justice; and officials throughout DHS.

In his Breitbart News interview in May, Miller called for closer examination of H1-B visas, which allow U.S. employers to hire foreign workers for certain specialized jobs.

OMB is currently reviewing a proposal to make it harder for immigrants with visas to obtain permanent residency, including a green card, if they or their children have used government benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps or tax credits. Advocates fear this would keep people from seeking necessary help or medical attention.

The list of proposed rules by DHS, released this spring, offers another road map for the coming changes.

In one interim final rule, DHS would expand and make permanent a pilot program that allows the agency to collect biometric data — such as fingerprints, photographs or retina scans — from certain foreigners at land ports and some airports and seaports, a move that alarms privacy advocates.

“At all of the agencies, there is a steady drip, drip of regulatory and policy changes,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors lower levels of immigration. “It is clear that Congress is unlikely to help them in terms of legislative fixes and will probably not even give them much more money, so they are going to use the tools they have and address these problems.”

 

[Cartmann99]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I sincerely hope this horrid plan causes a blue tsunami in November.

Damn, I hope so! I just read an article about some people whose preferred candidate didn't win their party's primary, and so instead of planning to vote for the candidate who did win the primary, they will maintain their electoral purity by abstaining from voting in that race this November. 

Hell's bells, we've got children in concentration camps and you're actually going to abstain because the candidate who won the primary only hits 80% on your precious little purity scale?!? 

In the real world, you learn to work with the candidates you have. I've lost count over the years as to how many times my preferred candidate lost, and I had to switch allegiance over to his or her opponent for the general election. Look, if you want to sit at home and pout because your candidate lost, there's not much I can do about it, but as for me and my husband, we'll be voting in every single race where a democratic candidate is on the ballot. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump is determined to make Republicans’ challenge in November even more difficult"

Spoiler

If you’re a Republican in a competitive district — or even one that wasn’t really supposed to be competitive — you may be asking when President Trump is going to stop making your life so much more difficult. You loved the tax cut, of course, but while it accomplished the profound moral good of helping large corporations buy back billions of dollars in stock, the voters stubbornly refuse to say they’ve been helped by it. And now things are going off the rails. It’s almost as if the president doesn’t want Republicans to hold on to Congress.

First there’s the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy with regard to people crossing the border, which has now separated thousands of children from their parents. Even apart from the moral outrage, it has become such a political disaster that Republicans are actually standing up to Trump and opposing it, something most of them probably never imagined they’d do.

Meanwhile, Trump is going ahead with his trade war, on Monday threatening, as The Post reported, “to levy tariffs on nearly all of China’s products shipped to the United States unless Beijing agrees to a host of sweeping trade concessions, a dramatic escalation that would enlist American consumers in the brewing U.S.-China commercial conflict.” In case it’s not clear, “enlist American consumers” means “make you pay more for a whole lot of consumer goods.” Naturally, China is threatening retaliation, which would harm U.S. exports.

While Trump may believe that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the thing about a trade war is that it imposes short-term pain not just on the other country but also on your own, for the promise of long-term gain. The hope is that the other side will find the pain intolerable before we do, and give in to Trump’s demands.

I don’t profess to know whether that will or won’t happen with regard to China, or the other countries, such as Canada, that Trump is targeting as other fronts in his trade war. But if Trump actually follows through, we’re going to have to go through the suffering phase before we get to the glorious victory phase. Which makes it unlikely that voters are going to be cheering Trump’s clever and effective economic policies.

One thing we can say for sure: Even if he thinks they will eventually help him and his party politically, Trump is pursuing a trade war and family separation because he believes in them. Immigration and trade are two of the only issues on which he has long-standing, consistent positions. And both could endanger the party’s standing with moderate voters.

Which is what Republicans are afraid of. As I wrote earlier Tuesday, their skittishness around the Trump administration’s family separation policy may be partly a result of sincere moral revulsion, but it is most certainly fed by an evident fear of how voters are going to react. Republicans’ biggest problem, however, is likely not moderate voters but Democratic ones. And Trump seems determined to keep those Democrats as angry as possible and as motivated as possible to get out and vote.

There’s anger on the Republican side, too, but it seems to be manifesting itself in ways destined to undermine them, particularly in the election of GOP nominees who are guaranteed to increase Democratic turnout. For instance, in New Jersey, where Democrats think they have a chance to sweep all five of the districts currently held by Republicans, the state GOP is distancing itself from Seth Grossman, its own nominee in one race, after he said diversity is “a bunch of crap.” In Virginia, the party is in a panic over Corey Stewart, the Confederacy fanboy who won its nomination to challenge Sen. Tim Kaine.

The real problem isn’t so much that candidates such as Grossman or Stewart will lose, which they probably would have anyway. The problem is that their extremism not only garners lots of media attention but also feeds right into the things that are motivating Democratic voters to get to the polls. That’s why, for instance, the person most terrified of Stewart is Barbara Comstock, who represents a Northern Virginia district in the D.C. suburbs.

Comstock was already one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country, and though she has worked hard to make herself look like an independent voice, when her constituents turn on the news and see pictures of Stewart in front of a Confederate flag, it makes her job that much harder. The Cook Political Report just moved its rating of her district from “Toss-up” to “Leans Democratic,” noting not only that Democrats nominated a strong candidate to oppose Comstock but also that “Stewart’s nomination could alienate independents, depress Republican interest in the Senate race and allow Kaine to run up the score in the 10th CD, compounding Comstock’s challenge.”

If you step back to see the broad national picture, the two parties look about where they’ve been for months, with Democrats holding a lead of seven or eight points in the generic ballot. But as the last couple of weeks have shown, we can’t know what kind of new controversies will emerge in the days ahead, and how they might affect people’s eagerness to turn out. What we do know is that in our polarized age, mobilization is more important than persuasion, and the side whose voters are angrier tends to be the one that wins, especially in midterms.

And I’m pretty sure that between now and November,  Trump is going to do some more things that make Republicans uncomfortable and Democrats enraged.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a disturbing, but important read that applies to the midterms, 2020, and beyond: "The Christian Right Adopts a 50-State Strategy"

Spoiler

If you want to understand American politics today, starting with the prospects for the 2018 midterm elections, you need to know Jim Domen. By the time he was in middle school, Mr. Domen knew he was different. His attraction to boys confused him. He knew it would shock his parents, born-again Christians.

“I tried to read the Bible, and I prayed to change the sinful desires,” Mr. Domen told a radio interviewer in 2013. He tried dating girls, but that didn’t work either.

When he eventually told his parents, they were “devastated,” he has said. They ordered him to seek treatment from a Christian counselor, but his attractions persisted.

For several years in his 20s, Mr. Domen has said, he had a relationship with a man. After the couple split up, Mr. Domen enrolled as a seminary student at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian university in Azusa, Calif., and it was there that his life changed at last. He met his future wife; took a job at the California Family Council, an affiliate of Focus on the Family, an organization that promotes “biblical” answers to America’s social problems; and worked toward the passage of Proposition 8, California’s 2008 statewide ballot initiative stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

From 2011 to 2014, Mr. Domen was a leader of Multisport Ministries, a national men’s athletic ministry that encourages men “to win as God’s men, competing in the character of Christ.” His transformation, he has said, was helped along by “hanging around healthy heterosexual men really teaching me on what it is to be a true man, the true masculinity.” Mr. Domen’s Twitter bio reads: “Pastor, Ironman, Husband, Daddy, Triathlete and Deplorable. I want the world to know I live for the glory of Jesus Christ.”

Since 2014, Mr. Domen has been leading Church United, a group he founded with the aim of “helping pastors transform California at the government and church level.” If the Republican Party holds on to its congressional majority in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, it will be thanks in part to the efforts of Mr. Domen and others like him.

This month in Washington, at the Road to Majority conference, an annual gathering of conservative religious activists, I heard Marsha Blackburn, a Republican representative from Tennessee who is running to replace Senator Bob Corker, sum up the national picture.

“You all have heard that the democrats say they’re going to have a big blue wave,” she said, as the audience tittered. “We have to make certain that blue wave goes crashing into the great red wall.” With a nod to the west, she added, “It looks like they had a little red-wall building going on in California this week.”

California may look to the world like a blue state. But, as Ms. Blackburn knows, it has large swaths of red. Much of this is concentrated inland, where agribusiness millionaires share the roads with a multiethnic working population.

Mr. Domen’s contribution to the red wall turns on an evergreen insight: Pastors can drive votes. The goal of Church United is therefore to politicize pastors in the right direction. Church United started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. The group now counts approximately 500 member pastors.

Mr. Domen’s other crucial insight is that Christian nationalism is no longer an all-white affair. Church United has actively and successfully cultivated a multiethnic group of pastors from a variety of traditions — including Pentecostal and Catholic clergy members — that many white evangelical leaders of the Christian nationalist movement once regarded with contempt.

On May 29, when Mr. Domen assembled several dozen pastors and “former homosexuals” on the steps of the state Capitol to oppose California assembly bill 2943, which could expand California’s existing prohibition on “sexual orientation change efforts,” he made a point of showcasing that diversity. “There are pastors of every color and creed on the steps with us today,” Mr. Domen said. “Members of the press, I ask that you use this word for us, as ‘formers.’”

Church United hosts regional briefings, facilitates partnerships with local officials and takes its members on what it calls “awakening tours” of the state Capitol in Sacramento to learn about the legislative process and “strategically target committee members” to defeat “the enormous evil facing California from the legislature,” according to text on the Church United website promoting the 2018 Sacramento tour.

Church United also invites pastors to annual gatherings in Washington that have included a rooftop luncheon at the Heritage Foundation, a private screening of the anti-abortion movie “Gosnell,” a visit to the Museum of the Bible and meetings with sympathetic legislators.

Mr. Domen’s efforts seem to be bearing fruit. “We’ve believed a lie for so long that the church and the state should be separated,” said Pastor Elias Loera of Fresno’s Christian Temple Assemblies of God in a Church United promotional video. “In my awakening tour experience,” he noted, “We had a different perspective of, ‘Hey, guys, we’re supposed to be involved in this process.’”

Another Church United-affiliated pastor, Bob Branch, who leads the Community Springs Church in Temecula, drew similar conclusions. “I was challenged and convicted that I was conceding the public square to the devil,” he wrote after attending a 2017 awakening tour in Washington. He implemented in his church a Culture Impact Team, an initiative designed to mobilize congregations to vote according to what they see as their biblical values.

“Every single person in this room has a sphere,” Mr. Branch told his congregation. “And if we actually became God’s change agents within those spheres, then we’re talking about 150 people impacting perhaps 10,000 thousand people. And that infection spreads.”

If Mr. Branch is able to spread this “infection,” it will mint right-wing voters. “The only commodity or currency in politics is winning elections,” Pastor Robb McCoy of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks said in a Church United video. “We have got to get folks in the congregations to step into this political mountain of influence.”

Mr. Domen and his pastors may use vague language about “getting involved in issues,” but there isn’t the slightest doubt whom and what they are ultimately supporting. President Trump, Mr. Domen wrote, has “done more for the Church than many Christian presidents have.”

Moderates and progressives tend to overlook the impact of the Christian nationalist movement on our nation’s politics. But the parade of Republican Party dignitaries at the Road to Majority conference had little doubt about the power of the underlying alliance. “It’s a lot of fun when you have as much good news to report as we do,” an uncharacteristically ebullient Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, told the crowd. “In my view the last 16 months have been the single best period for conservative values since I came to Washington.”

Playing to the audience, Mr. McConnell asserted, “The single most consequential decision I have made in my entire political career was to not let Barack Obama fill that Scalia vacancy on the way out the door.”

Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, was equally ecstatic. “One-eighth of the U.S. Circuit Court judiciary right now is a Donald Trump appointee nominee,” she said, “and we’ve only been here for 16 months.”

At an evening conference event at the Museum of the Bible, Barry Loudermilk, a Republican representative from Georgia, emphasized the biblical character of the Trump administration. “How many of you know that we have a church service every Wednesday night right over here in the Capitol building?” he said. “We have dozens of Bible studies that happen throughout the week. We have ministers that do nothing but walk the halls of the office buildings and drop in and pray with members.”

Mr. Domen’s operation in California is just one among many efforts to mobilize pastors across the country into what is effectively an extension of the Republican Party. Watchmen on the Wall, a group organized by the Family Research Council, brings pastors together in Washington and other places. These briefings happen to be concentrated in contested states like North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri.

Also working to mobilize pastors for Republican advantage is Bill Dallas, founder of the data operation United in Purpose, which was a sponsor of this year’s Road to Majority conference. One United in Purpose division, Churches Impacting Culture, “connects churches across the nation that are intentional about impacting American culture using the Bible as their standard of truth.”

“We’ll help the pastor determine who is registered or not registered in their congregation,” Mr. Dallas said in a 2016 interview with Joni and Marcus Lamb of Daystar Television, in advance of the presidential election. If the red wall holds in November, Mr. Domen, Mr. Dallas and their allies will take a lot of credit, and they’ll deserve it.

For now, Mr. Domen exudes the joy of a man who has suddenly found himself on the right side of history. “It is the people of God who will change California and its cities, one city at a time,” he wrote in a blog post titled “Goliath MUST Fall.” But perhaps his ambitions have always extended past California’s borders. “Imagine,” he wrote in another post, “if we grew and replicated these efforts in each of the 50 states!”

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Sweet, deer Rufus, please make this the democratic credo for the Midterm Elections.  

 

[Cartmann99]

Meet MJ Hegar, the Democratic candidate for TX-31.

I bet her Republican congressman is kicking himself right now for refusing to take the time to meet with Ms. Hegar. 

[fraurosena]

If you know any one of these 4 million, show them this tweet.

 

[Howl]

On 6/23/2018 at 2:56 PM, Cartmann99 said:

Meet MJ Hegar, the Democratic candidate for TX-31.

I bet her Republican congressman is kicking himself right now for refusing to take the time to meet with Ms. Hegar. 

I just saw this a few minutes ago and lamented on fb that even though Round Rock is less than a15 minute drive up the Interstate, she's not running in my district.  (Thanks, gerrymandering!) One of my more grounded friends responded, "Just donate to her campaign."  Duh!  

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[LeftCoastLurker]

On 6/24/2018 at 1:30 AM, fraurosena said:

If you know any one of these 4 million, show them this tweet.

 

That's my daughter, and yes she will be registered to vote. We dropped her off at college yesterday (cue the waterworks!) in a purplish state where she hoped to register, but state rules are preventing that. She instead will register where "home" is....super blue but still every vote counts.

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course he did

[GreyhoundFan]

20 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Because of course he did

My mom, who also lives in Virginia, called me this afternoon and said, "please assure me that Stewart won't get elected". I reminded her that every vote counts.

[JMarie]

https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/primaries/new-york

Mr. "I'll break you in half like a boy" Grimm lost in the primary.  

[milkteeth]

 

 

A 28 year old progressive Latina just won the Democratic primary in New York's 14th district. She is well on her way to becoming the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives!  

[onekidanddone]

On 6/25/2018 at 1:35 PM, LeftCoastLurker said:

That's my daughter, and yes she will be registered to vote. We dropped her off at college yesterday (cue the waterworks!) in a purplish state where she hoped to register, but state rules are preventing that. She instead will register where "home" is....super blue but still every vote counts.

My niece turns 18 less than a week before the election 

[AmazonGrace]

From Kayleigh McInane's Twitter

I'm screenshotting because I think she may yet end up deleting this utterly moronic tweet.

 

Some choice responses:

The Hoarse Whisperer‏ @HoarseWisperer

Moron, it was a Dem primary. A Dem won the Dem primary. Because it's a primary. With only Dems. Which means a Dem is going to win. Because it's a primary. For Dems. My lord, you are dumb.

 

Allan Brauer‏ @allanbrauer

Does someone assist you with daily activities like tying your shoes?

 

I mean, I first heard of this lady this morning but it really wasn't that difficult to work out that she probably didn't win because she loves to MAGA.

[JMarie]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

From Kayleigh McInane's Twitter

I'm screenshotting because I think she may yet end up deleting this utterly moronic tweet.

 

Some choice responses:

The Hoarse Whisperer‏ @HoarseWisperer

Moron, it was a Dem primary. A Dem won the Dem primary. Because it's a primary. With only Dems. Which means a Dem is going to win. Because it's a primary. For Dems. My lord, you are dumb.

 

Allan Brauer‏ @allanbrauer

Does someone assist you with daily activities like tying your shoes?

 

I mean, I first heard of this lady this morning but it really wasn't that difficult to work out that she probably didn't win because she loves to MAGA.

She mentions one election and calls it a tsunami?  Really?  She's that one person who will try to start a wave at a football game, but nobody's biting, so she's standing by herself and trying not to look awkward.

[AmazonGrace]

15 minutes ago, JMarie said:

She mentions one election and calls it a tsunami?  Really?  She's that one person who will try to start a wave at a football game, but nobody's biting, so she's standing by herself and trying not to look awkward.

She's now trying to spin Crowley's loss as Democrats in panic because people will vote for Republicans rather than socialists.

 

[Cartmann99]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

She's now trying to spin Crowley's loss as Democrats in panic because people will vote for Republicans rather than socialists.

Kayleigh, if you are going to try to be a political commentator, the first thing you need to learn is how to analyze a district. I wouldn't bet the farm on the Republican candidate winning the general election in NY-14. Trump is the Republican party in many people's eyes, and in a district with a lot of minority voters, a Republican candidate is at a severe disadvantage.