Month: January 2021
Furious Trumpists are already lining up to primary Republicans who voted for impeachment
Following the House's recent move to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection, the 10 Republicans who voted in favor of holding Trump accountable for his actions are now almost all facing intense intra-party anger—including, in many cases, talk of potential primary challenges. Here's the latest on each:
CA-21: Republican leaders in Fresno County are enraged with Rep. David Valadao, with the local party's chair saying his organization wouldn't support the congressman "if the election were held today." But Valadao is at least somewhat insulated thanks to California's top-two primary system, which makes it exceedingly hard for partisans to oust incumbents in a primary since they'd have to finish third to miss out on the November general election—something that's never happened in a congressional race.
IL-16: Politico reports that Gene Koprowski, a former official with a conservative think tank called the Heartland Institute, "is already running" against Rep. Adam Kinzinger, but he doesn't appear to have done anything more than file paperwork with the FEC. Koprowski appears to have no social media presence, and if he did launch a campaign, he managed to earn zero attention from local press. He did, however, gain some notice in 2018 when HuffPost reported that he'd been charged with stalking a female colleague, and that senior Heartland officials sought to protect him.
MI-03: Army National Guard veteran Tom Norton, who unsuccessfully sought the GOP nod in Michigan's 3rd District last year when it was an open seat last year, is running against Rep. Peter Meijer once again. Norton raised very little and finished a distant third with just 16% of the vote. His Twitter feed is filled with remarks like, "If there is no such thing as gender, how can @KamalaHarris be a historic female?" and "If your gay go be gay that is your right. But when you remove a body part your not a woman your still a man. We are normalizing crazy."
MI-06: There hasn't been any reporting yet about backlash directed at veteran Rep. Fred Upton, but that doesn't mean there isn't any. Upton, a relative pragmatist in today's GOP, has often been targeted in primaries for his previous apostasies, and last year, he turned in a relatively soft 63-37 win over businesswoman Elena Oelke, who appears to have raised no money at all.
NY-24: Local Republican and Conservative Party officials are quite pissed at Rep. John Katko, though there's been no real talk of a primary challenge yet. However, Katko was already on thin ice with the Conservative Party, whom he infuriated last cycle when he cosponsored a bill that condemned Trump's ban on transgender Americans serving in the armed forces. Some (but not all) of the damage was later repaired, but loss of Conservative support could prove very dangerous: In 2018, Katko defeated Democrat Dana Balter by 13,694 votes while earning 16,972 votes on the Conservative Party line. New York's 24th is one of just two districts Joe Biden won on this list (along with California's 21st), so defections on Katko’s right flank could cause him serious trouble in the general election as much as in a primary.
OH-16: Former state Rep. Christina Hagan, who sought Ohio's 16th District once before, "is not ruling out" a challenge to Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, says Politico. Hagan lost to Gonzalez 53-41 in the GOP primary in 2018, when the 16th had become open, then ran unsuccessfully in the neighboring 13th District last year, falling 52-45 to Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan.
SC-07: We've previously written about two Republicans who are considering challenges to Rep. Tom Rice, but now a third is threatening to enter the fray. Former NYPD officer John Cummings, who raised $11 million in a futile bid against AOC last year, is reportedly thinking about taking his grift show down South for a potential primary bid. Rice may be the most vulnerable Republican on this list because South Carolina, alone among these nine states, requires runoffs if no candidate secures a majority, meaning Rice can't pin his hopes of survival on winning renomination with a mere plurality.
WA-03, WA-04: Republican leaders in Washington's 3rd and 4th Districts are hopping mad and say they expect both Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse to face primary challenges, though no names have emerged yet. However, like Valadao, both enjoy a measure of protection thanks to Washington's top-two primary system, which works just like California's.
WY-AL: Politico reports that Air Force veteran Bryan Miller is "expected" to run against Rep. Liz Cheney, though in a brief quote, he doesn't say anything about his plans. If he does enter, however, that might paradoxically be good news for Cheney, since she already landed one credible opponent, state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, just the other day. Unlike Tom Rice in South Carolina, Cheney could escape with a plurality because Wyoming has no runoffs.
Rep. Meijer attracts GOP challenge after impeachment vote
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) - A newly elected Michigan Republican congressman who voted to impeach President Donald Trump is already drawing a GOP opponent for the 2022 race.
Tom Norton, a Trump supporter, said he will challenge Rep. Peter Meijer in the Republican primary in the Grand Rapids area. ...
Smerconish: This is how complex the Trump aftermath could be
Democrats agree to delay Donald Trump’s impeachment trial so he can prepare a defence
Jurors want Attorney General Daniel Cameron impeached for shameless lies in Breonna Taylor case
Three grand jurors in the Breonna Taylor case have had enough of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s lies and manipulation, and on Friday they decided to do something about it. They filed a petition with the Kentucky House of Representatives calling for Cameron's impeachment after he failed to even mention a homicide charge in his presentation to the jury last September, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, died on March 13 after officers smashed through her door while she was sleeping and fired 32 times into her apartment, hitting her six times. But Cameron only presented to the jury three wanton endangerment charges, regarding shots fired into a neighboring apartment. Kevin Glogower, the lawyer representing the three grand jurors, said in the petition: “The Grand Jurors did not choose this battle. This battle chose them."
Glogower told the Courier-Journal that the jurors were “randomly selected” and “terribly misused by the most powerful law enforcement official in Kentucky,” adding that “Mr. Cameron continues to blatantly disregard the truth.”
Officers have said they were responding to a shot fired by Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who has maintained that he thought intruders were breaking into his girlfriend's home instead of police. Officers used a no-knock drug warrant for Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover to justify their presence in Taylor’s home, but Glover didn’t live at Taylor’s house and was already in police custody at the time of the shooting. Det. Joshua Jaynes, who secured the drug warrant, and Det. Myles Cosgrove, who fired the shot the FBI determined killed Taylor, were officially fired this month for their roles in the deadly shooting, the Louisville Metro Police Department confirmed to media on Jan. 6.
Brett Hankison, who is accused of blindly firing 10 shots into Taylor’s home during the raid, was also fired, but Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who shot Taylor five times, was only reassigned to administrative work. Mattingly was injured in the incident when Walker shot the cop, Cameron said during a news conference on Sept. 23.
Cameron used the press event to allege that the grand jury “agreed” that Mattingly and Cosgrove were “justified in their return of deadly fire after having been fired upon by Kenneth Walker.” While dodging a question about whether homicide charges were presented to the jury, the prosecutor instead claimed that his office presented “all the information” and jurors “were walked through all the homicide offenses.”
Jurors maintain that simply is not true. “Neither Cameron nor anyone from his office mentioned any homicide offense to the grand jury,” they said in their petition, obtained by the Courier-Journal. “Not only were no homicide offenses presented as alleged, no charges of any kind were presented to the Grand Jury other than the three wanton endangerment charges against Detective Hankinson."
RELATED: In bombshell interview, grand jurors in Breonna Taylor case call out Kentucky AG’s lies
RELATED: Six months after killing Breonna Taylor, Kentucky grand jury indicts 1 officer for 'endangerment'
McCarthy voices ‘concerns’ with Cheney after impeachment vote
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he has “concerns” with Rep. Liz Cheney after she broke with Republican leadership to vote to impeach former President Donald Trump.
In an interview set to air Sunday, McCarthy suggested he was blindsided by the GOP conference chairwoman’s decision, which drew widespread criticism from rank-and-file Republicans and cast a light on the party’s internal divisions in the post-Trump era.
“Look, I support her, but I also have concerns,” McCarthy said on Gray TV’s “Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren.” “She took a position as a No. 3 member in conference; she never told me ahead of time.”
McCarthy said the Wyoming Republican would have some explaining to do before House Republicans for her decision to join nine House GOP members in voting to impeach Trump for inciting a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month.
“She can have a difference of opinion, but the one thing if we're going to lead within the conference, we should work together on that as a whole conference because we're representative of that conference,” McCarthy said. “I do think she has a lot of questions she has to answer to the conference.”
McCarthy suggested the best forum for that would be in a closed conference setting.
“Let people ask their questions, let her express why she did what she did, where did she come to that conclusion? And let's just have that discussion,” he said.
McCarthy’s comments come as calls have grown within the House Republican caucus to remove Cheney from her leadership post.
Members of the Trump-allied Freedom Caucus began circulating a petition last week among House GOP members that would force a meeting to debate a resolution calling for her resignation.

Cheney, who drew a primary opponent on Wednesday after her vote, has said she has no intentions of stepping down.
"I'm not going anywhere. This is a vote of conscience,” Cheney said last week. “It's one where there are different views in our conference. But our nation is facing an unprecedented, since the civil war, constitutional crisis.”
Some House Republicans have privately chastised McCarthy, who allies say is trying to quell rancor within the party, for not doing more to call out Trump for his role in the failed insurrection that left five people dead.
McCarthy drew criticism on Thursday for saying Trump did not incite the Capitol riot, seemingly contradicting his previous remarks made on the House floor this month that Trump bore some responsibility for the attack.
"I don't believe he provoked it if you listen to what he said at the rally," McCarthy told reporters.
When pressed by Van Susteren, McCarthy insisted that “everyone” — including Trump — bore responsibility for the Capitol riots, a comment which provoked heated reactions on social media.
A spokesman for McCarthy clarified the comment later on Saturday, saying the House GOP leader meant that Americans have a shared responsibility "to lower the political temperature" and didn't intend to assign blame to everyone for the riot.
McCarthy said he was also left out of the loop by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s announcement to file articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden on Thursday.
Greene told “the public before she told me,” McCarthy said of the Georgia Republican’s effort to oust Biden from office, which is certain to fail.
McCarthy backed Greene, a staunch Trump supporter who has embraced parts of the QAnon conspiracy theory, on her right to submit the articles, but disagreed with the decision.
“I think it's best, especially with what we have gone through with the Democrats, let's not stoop to their level, let’s believe in the rule of law,” McCarthy said. “I just don't think the timing and the case is right at this time, in this moment."