The polls are all going in the wrong direction for DeSantis: Nearly half (45%) of Republican voters – including those who lean toward the GOP – say Trump is definitely the strongest candidate to beat President Joe Biden in 2024, and another 18% think he is probably the strongest candidate. Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13%) or probably (19%) be a stronger candidate than Trump. Among voters who name Trump as their top-of-mind preference for the GOP presidential nomination, 74% say he is definitely the strongest candidate the party can put up against Biden and 21% say he probably is. Among those who express support for another candidate or have no choice at this stage, nearly 4 in 10 still feel Trump is either definitely (23%) or probably (16%) the strongest nominee the GOP can field. Only 22% of this group says the strongest Republican contender would definitely be someone other than Trump and 33% say it would probably be another candidate.
Uncategorized
Buckle up From what I’ve read, the Rules Committee is considered the Speaker’s Committee. It is stacked with members of the speaker’s party and is considered to be a rubber stamp for anything he or she wants to bring to the floor. This is the case regardless of party. So this little mess is unusual: Rep. Chip Roy accused House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday of cutting a deal that could complicate negotiators’ efforts to pass a bill to raise the US debt ceiling this week. But McCarthy’s allies quickly refuted the Texas Republican, underscoring the tension ahead of a key meeting of the House Rules Committee on Tuesday – and putting new pressure on a conservative holdout, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has yet to take a position on the plan. Roy contended that McCarthy cut a hand-shake deal in January that all nine Republicans on the powerful panel must agree to move any legislation forward, otherwise bills could not be considered by the full House for majority approval.
Enjoy Steve Benen fills in the background: If this subject sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In October 2019, while campaigning in Iowa, Biden was asked whether he might follow Gerald Ford’s example in pardoning Richard Nixon after Watergate, at a time when the Republican still faced possible prosecution. Biden said he would choose a different course. “It wouldn’t unite the country,” Biden said, adding, “I think President Ford, God love him, he’s a good guy, I knew him pretty well. I think if he had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have done it.” The topic returned to the fore in May 2020, when Biden joined Stacey Abrams for a virtual town hall-style event on MSNBC, and a voter, referencing the Ford/Nixon example, asked Biden whether he’d publicly commit to a more hands-off approach and leave such matters in the hands of prosecutors. “Absolutely, yes,” the future president replied. “I commit.” Of course, in 2019 and 2020, the prospect of Trump being indicted was entirely hypothetical.
There are a lot of legal cases against Trump pending right now and you would think that a billionaire front runner for the Republican nomination would have the very best legal talent that money can buy. But, as we know, he is the worst client in the world because he doesn’t pay and won’t shut his pie hole so his legal bench is D-list at best. Here’s a rundown: [Y]ou would think a client facing that amount of legal peril would have a top-notch team of lawyers in place to defend him. But when you have a client like Trump, normal expectations don’t apply. Just recently attorney Tim Parlatore announced — very publicly, via voluntarily testifying for the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation — that he was resigning from the Trump legal team, allegedly because of his inability to provide the right kind of counsel to Trump due to obstacles created by fellow Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn. Parlatore claims that Epshteyn was keeping him and other lawyers from being able to speak to Trump and that Epshteyn was not being honest with their client.
The front lines are not inside the Beltway, says David Pepper “The battle for democracy is a long battle,” says David Pepper, former Ohio Democratic chair. It is harder for Democrats to win with election-cycle thinking, I’d argue, and because they always seem to be fighting the last war with the wrong weapons. More on that later. Paul Rosenberg provides a Salon interview with David Pepper following the release of “Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American.” (It’s on my to-do list.) Pepper wrote it as a follow-up to “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines” because so many readers (as I did) skipped to the end to look for answers to Pepper’s all-too-familiar diagnosis of where the reactionary right is taking the country. “Team D” and “Team A” are fighting different battles, Pepper argues. Small-d democrats still believe the answer to pushing back on the autocrats is about electoral victories at the federal level. Then they win them they discover “that they weren’t really victories.” Why not?
And Mankind’s folly Ahead of the Memorial Day holiday, a book arrived unexpectedly from an old friend. John Nation writes about his exploration of WWI battlefields in France in “A Nomad in No Man’s Land.” It began with a simple road sign, Ligne du Front–“Front Line.” The Somme battlefield. Brian Klaas reflects today on his recent visit to Normandy cemeteries. “From the beginning, then, there was a tension” in memorials to the Confederate war dead, Klaas writes, “between paying respects to those who had died—the sons and fathers and brothers—and a debate over whether you could ever separate out the injustice of a war’s cause from those who fought in it. For some, the answer was absolutely not. After all, Confederate soldiers fought to keep others enslaved, one of the great stains on human history.” Above the WWII beaches in Normandy stand memorials to the “sheer scale of that human tragedy” that occurred there marked by row upon row of white marble headstones: 9,387 in the Allied cemetery. The Nazi cemetary, Klaas expplains, “is dark and black.
All you need to know about 2024 A president: A sociopath: A robot:
… about truth and democracy anyway Liz Cheney says they told her to lie if she wanted to keep her seat. Of course they did: Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told Colorado College graduates in a commencement speech Sunday the U.S. “cannot remain a free nation if we abandon the truth,” as she took aim at fellow Republicans and former President Trump. “My fellow Republicans wanted me to lie. They wanted me to say the 2020 election was stolen, the attack of Jan. 6th wasn’t a big deal, and Donald Trump wasn’t dangerous,” said the former vice chair of the Jan. 6 panel that investigated the Capitol riot, who hasn’t ruled out running for president in the 2024. “I had to choose between lying and losing my position in House leadership,” continued Cheney, who was ousted as the No. 3 House Republican after she called out Trump’s false election claims.
The news media is always pounding on the fact that polls say that people think Biden is too old and mentally decrepit to run for another term. (His apparent ability to close a deal with the batshit House GOP without giving away the store argues otherwise but …) I have always wondered why they don’t ask the same question about Trump. He’ll be 77 in a couple of months and there’s plenty of evidence that he’s the one not playing with a full deck: As it turns out people are just as concerned about Trump’s brain function as Biden’s — and they have much greater concerns about Trump’s character: A Fox News poll found that 56% of Americans do not believe former President Donald Trump has the “mental soundness” to be president. A survey conducted by the conservative outlet gave Trump a 33-point lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). The survey also compared President Joe Biden’s character to Trump. Biden had a 9-point advantage over Trump regarding honesty and an 8-point lead for empathy. 11% fewer people also believe that Biden is corrupt.