United States Senate

[GreyhoundFan]

She's a repug, so she doesn't actually know anything about the Constitution or anything related to our democracy:

 

[Cartmann99]

What do you do when the polling data for your reelection looks bad? You attempt to bribe the voters of your state!

Mark Kelly (Gabby Gifford's husband) is the challenger. If he wins, Arizona will have two democratic senators.

[fraurosena]

Safe to say Lindsey's back in line.

 

[WiseGirl]

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I don't know if anyone here heard the douchery that was Tom Cotton's speech about why DC shouldn't become a state. Basically he said that Wyoming should be a state, despite having fewer residents than DC, because they have manufacturing jobs in WY. Not kidding. He also whined that it would give Dems two guaranteed senate seats, since DC usually votes 85%+ Dem. This is a great response:

[fraurosena]

Whoah, dude! You realise that'll mean an end to Trump's MAGA hats. Not to mention that breathy Ivanka's many trademarks will become useless. 

 

[WiseGirl]

Sure, what are you afraid of treason turtle?

 

[fraurosena]

Go Tammy!

 

[fraurosena]

It's so important to get this news out to the public ahead of the elections. All R-senators up for re-election need to be voted out.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Rafael is such a jerk:

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Dana Milbank: "What 11 Republican senators had to say about Trump’s racism"

Spoiler

The silence is deafening.

President Trump has gone in the past several weeks from racist dog whistles to an all-out Confederate bugle call with a rebel yell — and yet his Republican enablers in Congress continue determinedly to cover their ears.

He retweets a video in which a man shouts “white power” and later deletes but never disavows it. He talks of the pandemic as “kung flu,” calls for violence against “thugs” in the streets of Minneapolis and labels a sign proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” a “symbol of hate.” He threatens to veto a defense bill if it removes the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military bases.

In the past few days, he has declared that those marching under “the banner of social justice” are part of a “radical ideology attacking our country” and are “bad, evil people” seeking “to end America” in favor of “far-left fascism.” And he has attacked NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag and said its only black full-time driver should “apologize” for a “hoax” after a noose found in his garage was determined not to have been directed at him.

Yet from Republican officeholders, nothing.

“President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination,” The Post’s Robert Costa and Philip Rucker wrote on Independence Day, “has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.”

Unnerved, but inaudible. “On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his wrath — that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change,” Costa and Rucker wrote.

So Trump’s enablers are unnerved by his overt racism — not because it’s despicable on its face but because they fear losing power. And the enablers fret, but in private.

The silence, often attributed to cowardice, is really complicity. As I’ve noted, racial resentment has become the primary driver and predictor of support for the Republican Party, a trend that has accelerated under Trump. If Republican lawmakers continue to “fret privately” as Trump bases his reelection on clumsy racist demagoguery, they must be held to account for condoning the redefinition of the GOP as the new home of the white power movement. Their silence isn’t just enabling Trump; it’s also enabling white supremacy to hijack a major American political party.

So let’s hold them to account.

On Monday, I emailed the campaigns of the 11 Republican senators who face potentially competitive reelections this year: Susan Collins (Maine), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Kelly Loeffler (Ga.), David Perdue (Ga.), John Cornyn (Texas), Joni Ernst (Iowa), Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Martha McSally (Ariz.) and Steve Daines (Mont.). (Disclosure: My wife, a Democratic pollster, has clients in the Colorado and Arizona races.)

Noting that Republican members of Congress have been privately fretting about Trump’s racism, I invited each of the senators to comment on statements Trump has made in recent weeks:

· Decrying schools, newsrooms and corporate boardrooms for a “new far-left fascism … designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

· Saying: “The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments, tear down our statues, and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform. … They want to demolish our heritage.”

· Proclaiming: “The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society. We will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”

· Warning about the menace of “a very tough hombre” breaking into homes and the police not responding.

· And his remarks on “kung flu,” NASCAR, military bases named for Confederates and the “white power” video.

A few hours after my first inquiry, I emailed a reminder.

In response, Loeffler’s campaign said that both she and Trump stand “strongly against racism” and that “this is just another one of the media’s silly games.”

Graham’s campaign directed me to his radio interview Monday with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, in which Graham disagreed with Trump’s NASCAR tweet but said Trump isn’t racist. “You can be dark as coal or an albino. … He’s an equal-opportunity basher and praiser.”

McConnell’s campaign said he “abhors racism” but his responsibilities “don’t include acting as a deputy press secretary for the White House.”

Collins’s campaign said she “has challenged President Trump on many occasions," including “when he failed to immediately condemn the anti-Semitism and racism that led to the violent clashes in Charlottesville.”

The others — Tillis, Perdue, Cornyn, Ernst, Gardner, McSally and Daines — responded as Republicans generally do when asked about Trump’s racism: with crickets.

They think their silence protects them. But it does something else: It turns them into the handmaidens of white supremacy.

 

[Cartmann99]

Sometimes I wonder what it's like to look at your senators and not feel embarrassed.

Edited July 8, 2020 by Cartmann99

[WiseGirl]

 

Edited July 11, 2020 by WiseGirl
Add another link

[GreyhoundFan]

More stupidity from Rafael:

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Not a fan of Hawley:

 

[Cartmann99]

My senator's getting a wee bit cranky:

 

[Xan]

21 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

My senator's getting a wee bit cranky:

 

That's rich.  He loved the cabal of political consultants when they work for his side -- you know, the side that is working to advance the nationalist, immigrant-hating, gun-loving agenda of the radical right.  Pathetic.

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

My senator's getting a wee bit cranky:

 

Methinks he sounds cranky because he's more than a wee bit scared. He knows how effective they are...

[Cartmann99]

13 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Methinks he sounds cranky because he's more than a wee bit scared. He knows how effective they are...

Texas is deciding today which of these two will face Cornyn in November:

 

 

[onekidanddone]

Jeff Sessions is a miserable sniveling ball of barf. All that being said, I hope he wins tonight solely because Trump is backing Sessions’s opposition 

[Cartmann99]

My junior senator is such a jackass.

 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Joni is all-in for hypocrisy:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Cotton is such an ass:

 

[47of74]

I'd call Tom Cotton a fuck stick but that would be insulting to other fuck sticks

Quote

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas described slavery as a "necessary evil" in his ongoing effort to prevent US schools from teaching the 1619 Project, an initiative from The New York Times that reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America's shores.

"We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can't understand our country. As the founding fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction," Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in an article that was published on Sunday.

Cotton's remarks to the newspaper drew a swift backlash on social media, prompting the senator to attempt to distance himself from them in a series of tweets in which he claimed he was citing the views of America's founding fathers, rather than his own.

Cotton's comments came after he introduced legislation that would prevent federal funds and professional development grants from being given to schools that teach the 1619 Project, which was released last year and has since been developed into educational resources and curricula for use by teachers. The bill appears unlikely to gain any significant traction in the Senate.

 

On 7/22/2020 at 5:03 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Joni is all-in for hypocrisy:

 

And the day after Breadbags McCutyernutzoff won Tom Harkin's seat if I could have I would have packed up and moved out of Iowa.