Latest news with #G.O.P.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
What do SC leaders think about Trump's ‘Big, Beautiful Bill'?
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WSPA) – There was plenty of drama behind-the-scenes in Washington D.C. surrounding President Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill,' including a 'no' vote from one of South Carolina's Republican Representatives. President Trump said his 'Big, Beautiful Bill' includes G.O.P. priorities, such as tax cuts and extra border security. 'We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful. The only thing we're cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse with Medicaid,' said Trump. As expected, democratic Representative Jim Clyburn voted against the bill. Representative Ralph Norman, along with a few other G.O.P. holdouts, initially voted against the bill, saying it didn't go far enough to cut Medicaid benefits for undocumented immigrants. 'You know, to be honest with you, I never thought I would have to fight for getting illegals off the government payroll,' Norman said. After conversations with Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump, Norman said they worked out a deal. 'It was a great bill, but we just didn't cut like I thought we should have, and I held out for the last minute,' Norman said. 'When we got pretty much what I thought we needed, we voted for it. ' Senator Lindsey Graham said people should be responsible with their own vote, but Republicans shouldn't vote 'no.' 'We need to get behind President Trump,' Graham said. 'This is our best chance in 40 years to control spending in Washington, and we need to be working with Trump, not against him.' Graham added that he expects the bill to change in the Senate. 'I intend to change the bill, but I'll do it working with President Trump,' Graham said. 'He has enough enemies in the in the nation and throughout the world. The Republican Party needs to help this man because he's doing things that other presidents couldn't do. ' Governor Henry McMaster also supports the 'Big Beautiful Bill.' The Bill was passed in the House, and is now in the hands of the Senate. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Ya Libnan
6 days ago
- Politics
- Ya Libnan
Republican calls for Russia sanctions intensify but want Trump's blessing be able to do it
Emergency workers in a residential area in Markhalivka, Ukraine, after a Russian rocket strike on Sunday. Last weekend saw Russia's most aggressive wave of attacks since the war began. A group of G.O.P. senators has grown more vocal about urging penalties on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine, offering a counterpoint to President Trump's hands-off stance. By Robert Jimison Updated 3:48 p.m. ET A small but vocal group of Republicans in Congress is pushing to escalate pressure on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine, diverging sharply from President Trump's conciliatory stance after months of staying mostly quiet and deferring to his hands-off approach. The shift intensified over the weekend in the wake of Russia's most aggressive wave of attacks since the war began. But it has been building for weeks as Senate Republicans and Democrats alike have signed on to legislation that would impose sweeping sanctions on Moscow . The bill now has 80 cosponsors, more than enough to override a veto in that chamber. The same measure in the House has garnered little backing in either party, making a showdown with Mr. Trump on the issue unlikely, at least in the short term. But the movement in the Senate suggests an increasingly hawkish mood on Capitol Hill and a growing frustration with Russia's intransigence among Republicans, who are ramping up their calls for decisive action. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally of Mr. Trump's, is leading the bipartisan push on the Russia sanctions bill. Last week, speaking from the Senate floor, Mr. Graham appeared to be aiming his remarks directly at the president in a bid to persuade him that any influence he may imagine he has over President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia does not appear to be having much impact. 'Putin, in my view, is playing us all,' Mr. Graham warned. He laid out missed opportunities for diplomacy that he said proved Russia was not serious about peace. 'President Trump called for a 30-day cease-fire. Ukraine said yes; Russia said no,' he said. 'President Trump urged Zelensky and Putin to go to Istanbul — I was over there — and meet to have direct talks. Zelensky went; Putin didn't.' 'We've given Russia plenty of opportunity to find an honorable and just end to this war,' Mr. Graham continued. 'They're not interested. And they're not going to change until we up the ante. So we need moral clarity here. Putin is dragging this out.' Mr. Trump has in recent days hinted at a change in posture. After Russia's latest assault, he told reporters that he was 'not happy' with Mr. Putin and was 'considering more sanctions.' But it was not clear whether he had changed his broader view that it is time for the United States to wash its hands of involvement in the conflict. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has signaled a desire to move beyond the war, musing about a potential economic partnership with Russia after a peace deal. A White House adviser recently told The New York Times that additional sanctions could hinder business opportunities, adding that the president instead wants to focus on maximizing economic opportunities with the Kremlin. That desire to look past the current state of war stands in stark contrast to the views of many Republicans in Congress, who maintain their party's longstanding view of Russia as a bitter adversary that deserves to be treated as such. In a social media post on Monday, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa declared that he had seen enough of Mr. Putin killing innocent civilians and publicly urged Mr. Trump to 'take action,' urging him to consider 'AT LEAST SANCTIONS.' On Tuesday, Mr. Grassley wrote on social media that he thought Mr. Trump had been sincere in thinking his friendship with Mr. Putin would bring an end to the war, but that 'ITS TIME FOR SANCTIONS STRONG ENUF SO PUTIN KNOWS 'game over.'' And he suggested that Mr. Trump should be at least as harsh in trying to cut off Mr. Putin from the world financial system as he has been in seeking to cut off Harvard University from federal funds. 'Sanctions for Putin like no fed grants for Harvard,' he wrote in his post. Even before the latest assault, other Republicans have called for a tougher stance against Mr. Putin. 'Obviously, he's not been serious about the negotiations,' Senator John Cornyn of Texas said last week when discussing the Russian president's reluctance to engage in peace talks. Mr. Cornyn praised Mr. Trump's efforts to bring both countries to the table for negotiations, but said the Russian president would first 'have to get serious.' Both senators, like many Republicans on Capitol Hill, have tried to maintain deference to Mr. Trump's leadership. In an opinion essay published in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday morning, Mr. Graham wrote : 'President Trump has asked Vladimir Putin to provide a term sheet outlining the requirements for a cease-fire, bringing the roadblocks to peace to a head. Depending on how Russia responds, we will know which course to take.' But some in the party believe Russia's weekend assault was the response — just not the one they were hoping for. 'I think we need to put the hurt on Putin,' Senator Todd Young of Indiana said bluntly when asked about the sanctions package. At the same time, many Republicans say it is Mr. Trump's call whether and how to punish Moscow. 'Somehow, some way, somebody has got to put pressure on Putin to come to the table,' Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said last week. But he conceded that Mr. Graham was 'not going to be able to do it until you get to a blessing from the president.' The New York Times
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Has He Got the Votes?
Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump's legislative agenda. But with a tiny margin of control in the House, he can afford to lose only three Republican votes (assuming Democrats uniformly oppose it). The problem is that there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don't agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they're too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them. For every bloc with one demand that must be met before its members will support the measure, there is another demanding the opposite. Here are some of the combatants. Deficit hawks: About three dozen Republicans have been strategizing in a group text and at the Capitol Hill home of one of the members. Most of them signed a letter earlier this year saying they would not vote for a bill that adds to the federal deficit. The bill's current version would add $3.3 trillion over the next decade. Swing-district survivors: The Republican Party owes its House majority partly to victories in politically competitive districts in California and New York, states where many constituents rely on Medicaid. At the behest of vulnerable members from those places, G.O.P. leaders dropped two of the most aggressive options they were considering to cut Medicaid costs. The Congressional Budget Office says that the legislation, as written, would cause 8.6 million more Americans to be uninsured and reduce spending by more than $700 billion over a decade. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Missouri Voters Overturned an Abortion Ban. Lawmakers Will Ask Them to Reconsider.
In November, Missouri became the first state to overturn a near-total abortion ban by a citizen-sponsored ballot measure. On Wednesday, it became the first state to try to reverse that decision through a ballot question, after the Republican-controlled legislature approved a measure that would ask voters to ban abortion again. The question will appear on the ballot in November 2026, although Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican who opposes abortion rights, could choose to put the issue before voters in a special election before that. The measure would amend the state Constitution to ban abortion except in medical emergencies, or in cases of rape or incest if the assault was reported to police within 48 hours and the pregnancy is less than 12 weeks along. The measure would also ban gender-affirming surgery or medications for minors. The legislature approved the measure on the penultimate day of its session after fierce opposition from Democrats and infighting among Republicans, some of whom argued that the new amendment should not include exceptions for rape and incest. The move bucks the trend on abortion-related ballot measures. Voters have sided with abortion rights in 14 out of 17 times that the question has appeared on state ballots in the three years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had for five decades recognized a right to abortion in the Constitution. Opponents of abortion rights have grown wary of putting the question before voters, and in states such as Florida and Arkansas, are instead trying to make it harder for citizens to put questions on the ballot, or pass ballot measures. But Republicans who control the levers of state government in Missouri have long been fiercely anti-abortion; it was the first state to officially ban abortion after the court overturned Roe. They are hoping it will not take much to reverse the amendment approved in November, which passed with support from just under 52 percent of the vote. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, applauded the measure, saying the abortion rights amendment passed in November was 'far too extreme and dangerous.' She argued that anti-abortion questions could win if Republicans campaigned vocally for them. 'When G.O.P. leaders engage, we win on abortion ballot measures,' she said in a statement. The coalition of abortion rights groups behind the ballot question passed in November called the legislature's move 'a direct assault on voters,' and said the language in the measure is deceptive: The title of the resolution the legislature approved says it relates 'to reproductive health care' and does not make reference to a ban or restrictions. 'Abortion rights won in this state six months ago, and mark my words: Missourians will protect reproductive freedom again,' Emily Wales, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, said in a statement. 'We'll knock on doors, speak with voters, and do what the legislature refused. We'll let Missourians be heard.' The ballot measure that passed in November amended the state Constitution to establish a right to reproductive freedom, including a right to abortion until viability, which is the point in pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the uterus, generally around 24 weeks. The legislature can restrict abortion after viability, except in cases where a 'treating health care professional' determines that the abortion is needed to protect the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. Still, it took months for abortion clinics in Missouri to begin offering services, as providers argued that remaining restrictions on abortion made it impossible. While a judge has struck down many of those restrictions, Republicans have also passed a law making it easier to appeal those decisions.
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Josh Hawley and the Republican Populists, at War With Their Party
The lone Republican vote in the Senate last month to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees came from an unlikely Democratic ally: Senator Josh Hawley, the archconservative from Missouri best known for calling out 'wokeness' in all sectors of society, and for raising his fist to offer solidarity with supporters of President Trump hours before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. And yet the overdraft vote was hardly the first time Mr. Hawley had stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2023 he introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, which died in committee for lack of Republican support. He has broken from his party by refusing to vote for cuts to Medicaid as part of the budget reconciliation process. In March he joined a Democrat, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, to offer a bill that would speed up the contracting process for new unions. A G.O.P. senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, signed on as a cosponsor, but otherwise, Mr. Hawley said in a recent phone interview, 'not a single Republican would touch it.' Since his arrival to the Senate in 2019 at the age of 39 as its youngest member, Mr. Hawley has charted two seemingly parallel courses: as a full-throttle champion of socially conservative causes and, somewhat less noisily, as a populist who aligns himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, on many populist issues. 'His ultimate goal is to break the alliance the social conservatives have had with the corporate world since the Reagan era,' said Matt Stoller, a former Senate aide to Mr. Sanders. The term 'populist' conjures two raw-knuckled protagonists of the agrarian South, Andrew Jackson and Huey Long, with whom the whippetlike Mr. Hawley, a Missouri banker's son who attended Stanford and Yale Law School, would seem to have little in common. But prioritizing working-class Americans over elites has been a key rhetorical theme in Mr. Trump's political ascendancy, and Mr. Hawley has embraced it. His powerful compatriots in the movement include not only the president but also Vice President JD Vance and Stephen K. Bannon, one of Mr. Trump's top allies. 'The Senate is the Hate Trump Club,' Mr. Bannon said in an interview. 'Hawley's the only populist we've got there.' Mr. Hawley may be a lonely voice, but he underscores a central question of the second Trump term: What will the president do to improve the lives of the working-class Americans who voted him back into office? Tariffs, Mr. Hawley said in the interview. He called them 'a potentially vital tool' in bringing industry back to the United States, despite the turmoil in the financial markets and the fears of high prices they have ignited, particularly for those with lower incomes. Mr. Hawley said he was particularly pleased about the 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles, 'which are being cheered loudly by workers in my state.' He added that Mr. Trump's 'instincts are absolutely correct' in his call to repeal taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. But he was more skeptical about extending the corporate tax cuts passed by Congress during Mr. Trump's first term. 'The populist-nationalist case for them was that they were meant to encourage companies to pay workers better and to bring back American jobs,' he said. 'The question is, have they done that? Not really.' Skeptics suggest that Mr. Hawley's populism and the current Trump-inflected iteration is, like movements past, motivated more by grievance politics than by a desire for economic progress. 'As seriously as I'd prefer to take their ideas, I tend to put the term in quotes,' said Hannah Gurman, an associate professor of U.S. history and American studies at New York University. 'You look at how Vance said he's for unions, but not for the public sector or teachers. And you look at Hawley, who says he wants more industry in America but voted against all the Biden initiatives because they were too woke. There's always a cultural program to use as an excuse not to advance a serious policy.' An Era Like Roosevelt's Mr. Hawley said his populism began to take shape in his 20s when he was writing a book, 'Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness,' which included a focus on the economic inequities of the Gilded Age and was published by Yale University Press in 2008. 'I came to realize that we're living through a period like Roosevelt's,' he said, 'one where power has become increasingly concentrated among the very wealthy at the expense of normal Americans.' Mr. Hawley planted his first populist markers as Missouri's attorney general. In 2017, he filed legal action against three of the state's largest opioid manufacturers, saying they had violated Missouri's consumer protection laws. That same year, Mr. Hawley became the first state attorney general to investigate Google over potential antitrust violations. Those interests deepened in the Senate where, he said, his experience 'has only confirmed how very real the concentration of economic and political power is.' In his first speech on the Senate floor, in May 2019, Mr. Hawley criticized 'big banks, big tech, big multinational corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media' as aristocratic architects of a society that 'works mainly for themselves.' Mr. Hawley's portfolio was soon overshadowed by his allegiance to Mr. Trump, who after his first impeachment trial ended in February 2020 singled out Mr. Hawley as 'one of the greatest supporters on the impeachment hoax.' Ten months later, Mr. Hawley was the first Republican senator to declare that he would object to the 2020 election results. But Mr. Hawley was also working with Mr. Sanders at the time to steer direct payments of $1,200 to Americans as part of a Covid relief bill. A year later, Mr. Hawley showed deference to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s trustbusting Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Lina Khan, in a committee hearing. He even offered her a chance to respond to the insinuation by a fellow Republican, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, that Ms. Khan had Marxist sympathies. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board later published a column with the arch title 'Josh Hawley Loves Lina Khan.' Still, Mr. Hawley is regarded as a loner who has not built coalitions in the Senate like Mr. Vance did during his two years there. 'I'm not an arm-twister,' he told The New York Times five years ago. His aloofness has extended even to those who find common cause with him, like Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Democrat and fellow Missourian who took to social media to concur with Mr. Hawley's support for improved rural mail delivery and for banning stock trading for members of Congress. But he said he had yet to hear back from Mr. Hawley. 'He's our state's senior senator, but he's not actively involved in our delegation,' Mr. Cleaver said. Mr. Hawley is considerably more public-facing when it comes to hot-button cultural issues. His critiques of major corporations often include the view that, as he put it during an interview with Fox Business in 2023, such businesses possess a 'radical ideological agenda' bent on promoting diversity while censoring conservative perspectives. In a speech last month at the evangelical Liberty University, he asserted that America was the greatest nation in history 'because our spiritual convictions are the convictions of the Bible.' In 2023, he published a book titled 'Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.' And in December he wrote a letter to Mr. Biden's defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, accusing him of prioritizing 'progressive gender experimentation ahead of warfighting' by permitting a transgender military employee to live in women's barracks. His wife, the lawyer Erin Morrow Hawley, successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, and Mr. Hawley is himself an outspoken opponent of abortion. This year, Mr. Hawley introduced a bill that would end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Dipping Toes in Populist Waters Mr. Hawley belongs to a conservative intelligentsia that includes Oren Cass, the influential founder and chief economist of the think tank American Compass. Like Mr. Hawley and Mr. Vance, Mr. Cass, 41, came of age not during the laissez-faire economic policies of the Reagan era but during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. 'A key driver for us,' Mr. Cass said, 'is the fundamental insight that free markets aren't delivering on the things we care about the most.' Some Republican legislators have dipped their toe to test the populist waters, according to Mr. Cass. He included in the group Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has proposed increasing the minimum wage through an e-verify system; Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, who has teamed up with Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, to address how private equity consolidation is affecting fire truck manufacturing and the communities that rely on effective firefighting; and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, who has worked with Senate Democrats to reduce credit card swipe fees. 'I never ran for office thinking I was populist,' Mr. Marshall said in an interview. 'But on the campaign trail, I heard from a lot of farmers, ranchers and union workers who didn't feel like their senators had been fighting for them. I prioritize Main Street over Wall Street.' Not everyone on the right accepts that dichotomy. 'It's the performative rhetoric of people who think in cartoon categories,' said George Will, the Washington Post columnist and veteran conservative commentator. Mr. Will described populism as 'the belief that the public knows what it wants and that public opinion should be translated into policy without being delayed or diluted by intermediate institutions.' 'It's the exact opposite of what Madison talked about in using Congress to filter and refine public opinion,' he added, referring to James Madison's advocacy of checks and balances rather than a government continually roiled by public passions. Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, likens his party's emerging attitudes to a partisan role reversal. 'I feel like we're in a blender of changing political identities,' he said in an interview. 'This populism reminds me of Democratic liberals in the '70s: apologists for the Russians, protectionists, skeptics of law enforcement. And now these populists are saying, 'We're tired of war,' when we're not even in one. The last time Republicans were this isolationist was the 1930s, and we lost Congress for most of the next 60 years.' Mr. Hawley, who is thought to harbor presidential ambitions, has been careful not to get too far out in front of his party, or for that matter Mr. Trump. But, he said: 'Donald Trump's election showed this: If the Republican Party is going to be a true majority party, we have to be pro-worker. The voters are giving us a chance now, but they've not bought in. We have to deliver.'
