Schumer: Abortion ruling and Jan. 6 hearings helped Democrats expand Senate majority

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday morning took a victory lap after Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) won his runoff election, declaring the Supreme Court’s decision striking down abortion rights and the House Jan. 6 hearings were key factors in Democrats expanding their Senate majority.  

“It is a good morning, a great morning!” Schumer exulted at a press conference Wednesday, pointing out that this year was the first time since 1934 that the president’s party did not lose a single Senate incumbent in a midterm election.  

Schumer said it looked in April like Democrats would lose control of the Senate. But the tide turned after a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the House Jan. 6 select committee's public hearings put a spotlight on the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  

He also cited Supreme Court decisions striking down a century-old New York law restricting the carrying of concealed firearms and limiting the Environmental Protection Agency's power to regulate coal plants. 

“In May and June, the public began to realize how far right these MAGA Republicans had gone. The Dobbs decision was the crystallization of that, of course, when people said, ‘Wow these MAGA Republicans are serious about turning the clock all the way back,’” Schumer said, referring to former President Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” 

“But then there were the two other Supreme Court decisions on concealed carry and on limiting what we could do to stop coal plants from poisoning the atmosphere,” he added.  

Schumer also credited the House Jan. 6 hearings, in which two moderate Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), played starring roles, in bringing to light damning details surrounding the attack on the Capitol and what Trump did to encourage the violence that left several people dead.  

“There were the Jan. 6 hearings. I think they had an important effect because people didn’t just read about something that happened once, but every night they saw on TV these hooligans, these insurrections being violent, beating up police officers,” Schumer told reporters.  

“They saw all of that and they said, ‘Wow,’” he added. “And the third thing is they saw the Republican leaders wouldn’t even attack this craziness.” 

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 ranking Senate GOP leader, however, pushed back Wednesday on Schumer’s assertion that Republican leaders were not vocal enough in condemning the Jan. 6 attack or Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. 

“He’s got his own theories on that. I think it was a lot of things,” Thune said of Schumer’s assessment of why Senate Democrats picked up a seat.  

“I think it was pretty vocal. If you look at statements some of our leaders have made, including statements that I have made, and the attacks the president made on some of us throughout the process,” Thune said. “I don’t think it was unclear.”  

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) condemned Trump’s behavior in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack in a fiery floor speech after voting to acquit him on technical grounds of inciting an insurrection in his second impeachment trial.  

“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” he said. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”  

McConnell said the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol “because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.” 

Since that forceful speech, however, McConnell has rarely commented on Trump’s behavior or statements, though he did recently criticize the former president’s dinner with an outspoken white supremacist and antisemite and Trump's suggestion that the Constitution should be suspended to allow him to return to the Oval Office.  

Schumer on Wednesday said voters may have still had doubts about the Democrats’ ability to govern, but that changed after Democrats passed a bipartisan bill to address gun violence in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas. 

He also cited passage of bipartisan legislation to help veterans suffering health problems because of exposure to toxic burn pits, radiation and other hazards and passage of a $280 billion bill to help the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry compete with China.  

And he lauded the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, which established a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, allocated $370 billion to energy programs and to fight climate change and set new rules for prescription drug pricing, as a major win.  

“In June [voters] still held doubts about the Democratic Party,” Schumer noted. “The turning point really occurred this summer where we passed six major bills, five bipartisan, all of which affected people’s lives."

“They were the things people wanted us to talk about. Making the environment better, dealing with the high cost of prescription drugs, helping our veterans … dealing with gun safety, getting American jobs here, not in China,” he said.  

“By Sept. 1, I thought we’d win the Senate, we’d keep the Senate, because the combination of those two things was the powerful one-two punch that made us defy all the odds,” he said.

McConnell condemns Trump dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday condemned former President Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken white supremacist and antisemitic organizer. 

McConnell usually avoids conflict with the former president, whom he last spoke to in December 2020, but on Tuesday he let loose with pointed criticism of Trump’s electability.  

“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, [is] highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States,” he told reporters at the start of his weekly press conference. 

McConnell’s comments came a day after Senate Republicans across the political spectrum criticized Trump’s decision to host Fuentes and Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, at his dinner table at Mar-a-Lago shortly before Thanksgiving. 

Ye has also provoked controversy for making numerous antisemitic statements and lost lucrative partnership with Adidas and other corporate brands because of them.  

McConnell’s comments represented some of his most direct public criticism of Trump since excoriating him on the Senate floor at the end of his second impeachment trial for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. 

Asked if he would support Trump if he wins the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, McConnell emphasized: “There is simply no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy and that would apply to all of the leaders in the party who will be seeking offices.” 

McConnell’s remarks were more direct in taking on Trump than those of his House counterpart.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) earlier on Tuesday had condemned Fuentes but stopped short of going after the former president.

“I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes,” McCarthy said outside the White. “He has no place in this Republican Party.”

He added, “I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn’t know who he was.”

McConnell and Trump have feuded since McConnell told Trump in a phone call on Dec. 15, 2020, that he had recognized Joe Biden as president after the Electoral College voted to elect him the day before.  

The Senate Republican leader was “furious” at the time, according to associates, about Trump’s role inciting the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.  

Though McConnell voted to acquit Trump on technical grounds for inciting the storming of the Capitol, he declared on the floor: “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” 

Since then, McConnell has studiously avoided commenting on Trump’s controversial statements, legal problems or influence on the party.  

But he did make clear after the Nov. 8 midterm election that he did not think Trump’s prominence in the national political spotlight was helpful to Senate Republican candidates, especially in the swing state of Pennsylvania where Trump held a rally with Senate GOP candidate Mehmet Oz a few days before he was defeated on Election Day. 

“Here’s the problem, we underperformed among voters who did not like President Biden’s performance, among independents and among moderate Republicans, who looked at us and concluded [there was] too much chaos, too much negativity and we turned off a lot of these centrist voters,” McConnell told reporters after the election, though being careful not to mention Trump by name.  

He said that trend was a problem in several battleground states and “fatal” in Pennsylvania.  

“Dr. Oz was trying to run as a moderate, trying to appeal to those voters in Bucks and Chester County surrounding Philadelphia. That message got muddled at the end, which made it very difficult for him to achieve success,” he said, appearing to refer to Oz getting tied to Trump and the MAGA-affiliated gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano at the end of the race.  

Trump announced a run for the White House a few days later.

But his electability appears to have taken a hit since Election Day, when Republican candidates, such as Arizona gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake, who pushed Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 elections, lost key races.  

A Morning Consult/Politico poll of registered voters across the country showed Trump leading a crowded field of Republican challengers if the GOP primary were held today. Trump garnered 45 percent support compared to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 30 percent support.  

A Club for Growth Action poll conducted from Nov. 11 to Nov. 23, however, showed DeSantis leading Trump by 11 percentage points and 15 points in Iowa and New Hampshire, which traditionally hold the first two contests of the presidential primary.  

Updated at 5:29 p.m.

Toomey blames Trump for GOP midterm losses

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Retiring Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) blamed former President Trump for Republicans losing the Pennsylvania Senate race and other close races this week, asserting there was “a high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses.”  

Toomey, who twice won election in Pennsylvania in 2010 and 2016, said Trump created political problems for Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, who tried to distance himself from the former president's claims that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread fraud.  

“President Trump had to insert himself and that changed the nature of the race and that created just too much of an obstacle,” Toomey said on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”  

“And by the way, it’s not just Pennsylvania. You look all over the country, there’s a very high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses, or at least dramatically underperforming,” he added, referring to Trump’s slogan: Make America Great Again.  

Toomey predicted that the poor performance of Trump-backed candidates, especially those who embraced his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, will “accelerate” the former president’s loss of influence in the party.  

"So here's my theory on the case, is that there is not going to be one discrete moment at which the fever breaks and Donald Trump becomes irrelevant. That's not likely to happen. What I think is: his influence wanes,” Toomey said. 

“And a debacle like we had Tuesday night, from a Republican point of view, accelerates the pace at which that influence wanes,” he said.  

Toomey highlighted what he called “interesting data points” showing that Trump’s popularity in the party isn’t what it was even a year ago.  

“A year or two ago, if you ask Republican voters — ‘Do they consider themselves more traditional Republicans or Donald Trump Republicans?’ — he had a huge lead. That has flipped. And that’s telling, I think. I think that’s going to continue.” 

Toomey was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in February of 2021 on the impeachment charge that he incited the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Other prominent Republicans are also blaming Trump for their party’s disappointing performance on Election Day.  

While Republicans are poised to capture control of the House and still have a chance to win the Senate, the red wave that many of them expected failed to form as Republican voters turned out to the polls in lower numbers than projected.  

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the GOP is suffering from a “Trump hangover.”

"I think Trump's kind of a drag on our ticket. I think Donald Trump gives us problems politically," he told a local television reporter in Janesville, Wis.  

"We lost the House, the Senate and the White House in two years when Trump was on the ballot, or in office," he said. "I think we just have some Trump hangover. I think he's a drag on our ... races."

Senate Republican strategists weren’t thrilled that Trump decided to hold a rally with Oz and gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Latrobe, Pa., the Saturday before Election Day.  

One Senate Republican adviser warned before the event that it was “probably not” a good idea to appear on stage with Trump and Mastriano, an outspoken election denier and opponent of abortion rights, whom Democrats tried to tie to Oz.  

But the adviser acknowledged it was almost impossible for Oz to spurn Trump’s invitation to appear at a rally after the former president’s endorsement helped him beat hedge fund CEO David McCormick in the tightly contested Senate GOP primary.

“What are you going to do?” the source lamented, knowing that Trump’s appearance with Oz didn’t present the best optic for swing voters right before going to the polls.  

Mike Lillis contributed.  

Expected Trump indictment looms over midterm election 

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

The expected indictment of Donald Trump is looming over the midterm elections as both parties are preparing for a major battle after Election Day if Attorney General Merrick Garland moves forward with an unprecedented prosecution of a former president. 

Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and the House are warning they will put up a staunch defense of Trump if the Department of Justice announces an indictment, which some GOP aides and strategists expect to come in the first 60 to 90 days after Election Day.  

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is already warning that GOP lawmakers could use their power of the purse to reign in the Justice Department if prosecutors indict Trump, which he says would be using law enforcement authority as a political weapon. 

“If Biden treats the Department of Justice as partisan stormtroopers, then Congress is justified in using whatever tools Congress has to stop that abuse of power,” Cruz told The Hill in an interview, when asked about the possibility of holding up Justice Department funding.  

If an indictment of Trump does come before mid-December, Justice Department funding likely would become a political football as congressional leaders work to pass legislation to fund the government for the next year.

Cruz, who has a new book out, “Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized the Legal System,” says any indictment of Trump would serve as more evidence that the Justice Department has let partisan politics dictate its decision-making.  

He believes the Justice Department will announce an indictment of Trump at around the same time it announces charges against Hunter Biden, the president’s son, in an effort to show that it is acting in an even-handed way.  

“The Biden White House wants to indict Donald Trump and they want to put whatever fig leaf in front of them they can to make it appear slightly less partisan,” Cruz said, pointing to what he called a series of “coordinated” leaks to lay the groundwork for an indictment.   

Sensitive to Republican accusations that the Justice Department is driven by partisan politics, senior Justice Department officials have discussed the possibility of appointing a special prosecutor to handle the investigations and any possible indictment of the former president.  

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who would become chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations if he wins reelection and Republicans win control of the Senate, says one of his top priorities will be to investigate what his spokeswoman called the “corruption and politicization of federal law enforcement and our intelligence agencies.” 

Johnson last month proposed setting up a select congressional committee similar to the Senate’s Church Committee established in 1975 to investigate whether the CIA spied on anti-war protesters.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is expected to take over as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans capture the House, plans to investigate the Justice Department’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents.

House Judiciary Committee Republicans on Friday released a 1,000-page report detailing what they called “a rampant culture of unaccountability, manipulation and abuse at the highest level” at the Department of Justice and FBI.  

Reports circulated on Friday that Trump could announce a reelection bid as soon as Nov. 14.

He’d be the instant front-runner in the Republican presidential primary field and Senate GOP aides predict the party’s conservative base would quickly rally to his defense against any criminal charges brought by the Justice Department.  

An early Trump bid could also be interpreted as a warning shot at Justice that any indictment of him as he runs for the White House would be political.

Some think their party has a better chance of retaking the White House with a different standard-bearer. But few of these Republicans are likely to back an indictment.

Former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who served as a counselor to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) leadership team during his time in the Senate, said the Republican backlash to an indictment against Trump will be “massive” and “overwhelming.”  

“Even people like myself who have no use for Donald Trump and think he’s been very unfortunate for our party and that his treatment of our electoral process has undermined our democratic process would find it extremely difficult to tolerate an indictment of a former president,” he said. “There would have to be just incredible grounds of knowing violations that created serious national security problems. I just don’t suspect that’s the case.”

Gregg conceded that “no one knows” outside Trump’s inner orbit, the Justice Department and intelligence agencies just what kind of damage Trump may have caused to national security by keeping classified documents at his estate but warned “indicting a former president is a complete breakdown, in my opinion, of the structure of our government which is built on some level of tolerance of political activity.”  

Gregg said Garland should expect a fight over funding for his department if he indicts Trump and Republicans win control of one or both chambers of Congress.  

“You would have a constitutional issue of immense proportions because the Congress would, I assume, assert its right to discipline the administration or the attorney general through the purse and maybe in other ways,” he said. “We don’t need that as a country.”  

A Senate Republican aide said GOP lawmakers are closely following the moves of the Justice Department, and that an indictment could strengthen Trump politically. “Everyone rallied around him again” after the Mar-a-Lago raid, the aide noted.  

Democrats say Garland will face calls for his resignation if federal prosecutors decide to not prosecute Trump for holding sensitive classified documents at his estate at Mar-a-Lago, which they view as a clear violation of the law and a straightforward case to argue in court.  

“If he ultimately determines to not bring charges against Trump, somebody will call for him to step down,” said Ray Zaccaro, a Democratic strategist and former Senate aide.  

Zaccaro argued that Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago broke the law and that the crime happened after he left office. He also noted that while no former U.S. president has been indicted on criminal charges, it has happened in other countries.  

Democratic members of the House Select Jan. 6 committee vented frustration earlier this year over the Department of Justice being slow to pursue contempt charges with members of Trump’s inner circle who refused to cooperate with the panel.  

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) bluntly called on Garland in March to “Do Your Job” after the Justice Department was slow in supporting the subpoenas of the Jan. 6 Committee.  

The backlash will be more intense after Election Day if Garland doesn’t act to enforce the law prohibiting the private possession of highly classified documents, such as a document describing Iran’s missile program, which the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago.  

Republicans and Democrats who expect the Justice Department to indict Trump believe it will bring charges against the former president for holding classified national security-related documents at Mar-a-Lago, instead of trying to prosecute him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Any prosecution of Trump related to Jan. 6 would be complicated by the fact that the Senate already tried and acquitted Trump on similar charges during his impeachment trial last year.  

Republican and Democratic aides acknowledge that any prosecution of Trump will plunge the Department of Justice into a political firestorm and make it more difficult for the Biden administration to work with Republicans, who are likely to control the House if not both chambers of Congress next year.  

“If the Department of Justice does it, it will be a maelstrom. They’re obviously well aware of that but have to balance it with their duty to uphold and administer the law. It’s pretty clear that Merrick Garland is not relishing this,” said a Senate Democratic aide who requested anonymity to discuss Trump’s possible indictment, a sensitive topic on Capitol Hill.  

The aide said it’s clear that Trump violated the law but cautioned that doesn’t necessarily mean Garland will bring an indictment.  

If the attorney general fails to act, “there are going to be some Democrats who are going to complain vociferously,” the source said, but acknowledged “there are a lot of Democrats who recognize that Garland’s got no good options here” because he will come under strong criticism no matter what he decides to do.  

“Whatever happens on Tuesday will inform his decision but not make it easier,” the aide said, making reference to Election Day, which will be a referendum on Biden but also Trump, whom Democrats have tried to tie to Senate and House GOP candidates.   

Emily Brooks contributed to this report. 

Oz takes risk vs. Fetterman with Trump rally

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Former President Trump is seeking to put his imprint on the Pennsylvania Senate race with a rally in Latrobe on Saturday with Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, a risky move given Oz’s efforts to distance himself from Trump’s debunked election fraud claims.

Throughout the 2022 election cycle, Democrats have tried to make the battle for the Senate a referendum on Trump, even though he left office nearly two years ago and won’t be on the ballot.

Oz has distanced himself from Trump’s claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election and has tried to project a moderate image in his race against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), a stark contrast with gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano (R), an election denier who will also share the state with Trump Saturday.

Some Republican strategists are questioning the wisdom of Oz appearing on stage with Trump and Mastriano, who is trailing by double digits in the gubernatorial race, so soon before Election Day.

One Senate Republican adviser said appearing with Trump and Mastriano is “probably not” a good idea given Trump’s penchant for controversy and his negative approval rating in the state, but lamented: “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t think you have much of a choice in the matter because we have an issue with Republican base voters,” the strategist said, noting that “Trump gave Oz a lot of credibility” by endorsing him in the primary and now Oz has to pay him back.

Retiring Sen. Pat Toomey (R), whose seat Oz is running for, refused in 2016 to say whether he would even vote for Trump until about an hour before the polls closed that year.

Toomey was also one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Democrats have also tried hard to tie Oz to Mastriano since last week’s debate when Oz, a celebrity doctor, said that he wanted women, doctors and local political leaders to “put the best ideas forward” on setting rules for abortion.

The Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), immediately unveiled an ad declaring that Oz “thinks abortion decisions belong to politicians like Doug Mastriano,” flashing photos of Oz and Mastriano, a state senator, side by side.

Fetterman told Pittsburgh’s NPR station in an interview aired Wednesday that he “would never stand on … the stage with someone like Doug Mastriano” and emphasized his support for passing a federal law to codify Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court struck down in June.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) said the weekend rally with Trump and Mastriano encapsulates why Oz is a bad choice to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate.

“Mehmet Oz will be on stage with Doug Mastriano — the type of extreme ‘local political leader’ who has no business making health care decisions for Pennsylvania women,” said Patrick Burgwinkle of the DSCC.

A Washington-based Democratic strategist said “it’s risky” for Oz to get on stage with Trump and Mastriano, given Trump’s penchant for turning off suburban female voters.

“Trump is just a very polarizing figure and sends people to their corners and this is a state that President Biden won, so you’d be hard-pressed to argue that appearing with the candidate that lost your state two years ago … is an effective way to close out” the race, the strategist said. “You can’t have your rally in Pittsburgh and not have the Philadelphia suburbs aware of what’s going on.”

A USA Today-Suffolk University poll of 500 likely Pennsylvania voters conducted from Oct. 27 to Oct. 30 found that Trump has a 37 percent favorable rating and a 55 percent unfavorable rating in the state. Biden’s job approval rating stood at 38 percent and his disapproval rating stood at 51 percent in the poll.

The same poll found Fetterman leading Oz by just 2 points in the Senate race, down from a 6-point spread a few weeks ago.

Biden will attend a rally with Fetterman and former President Obama in Philadelphia Saturday. Obama will campaign for Fetterman earlier in the day in Pittsburgh.

Trump’s unscripted speaking style at campaign rallies poses another risk for Oz, who has tried to distance himself from the former president’s unfounded claims of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania in 2020.

Oz said last month that he would not have objected to the certification of Biden’s victory had he been a senator in January of 2021.

There’s a good chance, however, that Trump on Saturday will reprise his claim that the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania were marred by widespread fraud, an unsubstantiated claim that Toomey, the retiring Republican incumbent, dismissed as “very disturbing” and lacking evidence.

Trump on Tuesday raised fresh doubt about whether this year’s elections in Pennsylvania would be fair.

He posted an article from the site Just the News reporting that the Pennsylvania Department of State had sent out more than 240,000 mail-in ballots without verifying voter identities.

“Here we go again! Rigged election!” he wrote.

That has Republican strategists in Washington worried about a reprise of what happened in the Georgia Senate runoff elections in January of 2021, when Republican voter turnout dropped off after Trump claimed the mail-in balloting process was rife with fraud.

More than 750,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election did not vote in the Senate runoff races two months later, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won both races.

A Senate Republican aide warned that Trump could depress GOP turnout in Pennsylvania by making new claims of brewing election fraud.

“There’s no doubt that he hurt there,” the aide said of Trump’s impact on the failed reelection bids of then-Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) in 2021.

However, Brian Nutt, a Republican strategist based in Harrisburg, Pa., argued that Tuesday’s race will be a referendum on Biden’s record, not Trump’s claim of election fraud.

“I wouldn’t know what the Oz campaign is thinking or looking at in that regard,” he said of Saturday’s rally in Latrobe. “It’s pretty hard for the Democrats or anyone to make it a referendum on Donald Trump when we have inflation at a 40-year high, we have $4 and $5 gasoline."

“It’s very hard to make this a referendum about Donald Trump when the country is in a crisis financially,” he said.

Nutt said Oz may be motivated to hold a rally with Trump “to bring even more [Republican] voters home” to his campaign.

Oz, who narrowly won the GOP primary over hedge fund CEO David McCormick, had trouble consolidating GOP voters behind his campaign over the summer.

But a new poll shows that more Republican voters have rallied to Oz over the last few weeks.

The Muhlenberg College-Morning Call poll of 460 likely voters conducted from Oct. 24 to Oct. 28 showed that 87 percent of Republican voters say they support Oz, up from the 81 percent of GOP voters who said they did in September.

Utah emerges as wild card in battle for the Senate

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

The Utah Senate race between conservative Republican Sen. Mike Lee and Independent Evan McMullin has emerged as a potential wild card in the battle for the Senate.

Recent polls show the race is close, with McMullin trailing Lee by only a few points in a state where Republican victories are usually all but guaranteed.

Lee, a conservative who supported then-President Trump’s effort to challenge the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, is a star among many members of Utah’s Republican base, but his unpopularity among moderates and Democrats has driven his approval rating down to the low 40s.  

“This is within the margin of error,” said Richard Davis, an emeritus professor of political science at Brigham Young University, citing recent polls by Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics. “It could go either way. It’s basically neck and neck.”  

If McMullin manages to pull off an upset, his pledge to not caucus with either Democrats or Republicans could throw the battle for control of the Senate into turmoil.

If Republicans wind up keeping retiring Sen. Pat Toomey’s (R) Pennsylvania seat in GOP hands and defeating the Democratic incumbent in Nevada or Georgia, McMullin could still keep the Senate under Democratic control by voting for Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) as majority leader.

Conversely, he could swing it to Republicans by affiliating with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) or simply not affiliating with either party, which would give Republicans a 50-to-49 seat majority with one unaffiliated senator in the chamber.  

“He’s in the catbird seat because as an Independent both sides are going to want to give him something” to get his vote for determining the Senate majority in an evenly split chamber, Davis said.  

“I can’t imagine that he’s going to caucus with the Republicans, but he had to say that he wasn’t going to caucus with the Democrats to win over the very people he’s trying to win over right now,” Davis said of the moderate Republicans who aren’t thrilled about voting for Lee but wouldn’t consider voting for a Democrat, either. 

“He could be in an extremely powerful situation if he gets to determine which way the Senate is organized, which party gets the majority,” he added. “I think what he’s going to do is negotiate on Utah’s behalf, get things for Utah out of this.”  

The latest Deseret-Hinckley poll shows Lee leading McMullin by four points, 41 percent to 37 percent, with 12 percent of Utah voters undecided.  

The poll found that 40 percent of respondents had a favorable view of Lee, while 47 percent had an unfavorable view.  

Lee’s allies, however, argue that the Deseret poll put too much weight on registered instead of likely voters, skewing the results in favor of McMullin.  

Lee’s allies think it’s more likely that the incumbent wins by a healthy margin of 10 or more points.  

The poll, however, found the numbers stay largely the same among likely voters and the race tightens among those who say they will definitely vote, with Lee leading McMullin 42-40 percent.  

“Mike Lee is leading this race. Every reliable poll shows Sen. Lee with a significant lead and our internal polling gives us even greater confidence in the strong support he has across the state,” said Matt Lusty, an adviser to the Lee campaign.  

Utah Democrats helped McMullin significantly by declining to endorse one of their own members and instead backing McMullin at their state convention in April. The Deseret poll found 68 percent of Democrats backing McMullin, and he leads with unaffiliated voters as well.

Davis said if McMullin can win over more Republican moderates who see themselves more in the same camp as Utah’s centrist Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who voted twice to convict Trump on impeachment charges, he could wind up winning.  

McMullin ran as an Independent for president in 2016 and turned in his best performance in Utah, where he won 21 percent of the vote in the general election — trailing the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by only 6 points. Trump carried the state with 45 percent of the vote. 

Boyd Matheson, a prominent Utah radio host who formerly served as Lee’s chief of staff, said McMullin would find himself under tremendous pressure to pick a side if he manages to defy the odds and win election to an evenly divided Senate.  

The Senate’s two current Independents — Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Angus King (Maine) — both caucus with Democrats. Neither, however, had to defeat a sitting senator to win their seats.

“He would be under immense pressure from both Democrats and Republicans and picking a side at this point matters because if you look at someone like a [Sen.] Joe Manchin [D-W.Va.], the reason Manchin has power because he’s in the room,” Matheson said.  

He said if McMullin refuses to caucus with either party, he won’t have any way to sit on a committee without getting a special deal from one of the party leaders.  

“That’s going to be the challenge for McMullin. If he wins, can he have any influence without any committee assignment without being in the Republican lunch or the Democratic caucus lunch?” he said.  

The race was largely overlooked until Lee went on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday to plead for Romney’s endorsement, a surprising move since Romney made clear early in the race that he would stay neutral.  

“As soon as Mitt Romney is ready to, I will eagerly accept his endorsement,” Lee pleaded on Carlson’s show. “Evan McMullin is raising millions of dollars off Act Blue, the Democratic donor database based on this idea that he’s going to defeat me and help perpetuate the Democratic majority.”  

“I’ve asked him, I’m asking him right here again tonight right now,” Lee said. “Please get on board. Help me win reelection.”  

Senate aides say Lee’s pleas for help from Romney were especially surprising given that they have clashed repeatedly this Congress, starting with Lee’s strong support for Trump’s effort to challenge the 2020 election results through the courts.  

Romney, by contrast, was the only Senate Republican to vote to convict Trump after both of his impeachment trials.  

The two Utah senators have also clashed over major policy differences. Lee voted against the three major bipartisan initiatives that Romney supported during President Biden’s term: a $1 trillion infrastructure bill; legislation addressing gun violence after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas; and a $280 billion bill to support the domestic semiconductor industry.  

But Lee and Romney have also worked together on bills to help constituents in Utah, such as the bill they introduced in April to address housing supply and affordability by allowing parcels of federal land to be purchased at a reduced price.  

And they pool their staff to work jointly on constituents’ special cases.  

Even so, Romney and Lee are hardly considered friends.  

Davis, the emeritus political scientist, said Romney is “unlikely” to change his mind and endorse Lee “because I don’t think these two get along well.”  

“He can’t endorse McMullin because that would probably be a step too far to do that but by not endorsing [Lee] he’s certainly sending a message,” he added of Romney.  

Adding to the surreal moment on Carlson’s show, Trump waded into the race by releasing a statement praising Lee as an “outstanding senator” and criticizing Romney harshly for not endorsing his home-state colleague — bringing fresh attention to the possibility that Lee, who won reelection in a landslide six years ago, might be in trouble.  

Trump declared that Romney’s decision to stay neutral in the race “has abused” Lee “in an unprecedented way.”  

Lusty, Lee’s campaign adviser, said: “Sen. Lee sees it as important for all members of the party to stand together and he welcomes the public endorsement of all of his Senate GOP colleagues, including Sen. Romney.”  

But Romney’s defenders are quick to note that Lee refused to endorse late Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) when he ran for reelection in 2012 and Lee’s chief of staff at the time, Spencer Stokes, predicted that Hatch would lose because he had already spent far too much time in Washington.

Fundraising data collected by the Federal Election Commission as of Oct. 14 showed that Lee had raised $7.9 million for his reelection while McMullin had raised $3.2 million. 

Outside interest groups are also pouring money into the race.  

The conservative Club for Growth, a group long allied with Lee, has already spent $2.2 million on the Utah Senate race and has vowed to pour more money into the race, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.  

On the other side, the Put Utah First PAC has spent more than $2.5 million to help McMullin. 

Sasse’s expected exit shrinks Senate’s anti-Trump wing

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Sen. Ben Sasse’s (R-Neb.) expected retirement from the Senate is the latest sign that is it harder to be a Republican critic of former President Trump in Congress than a loyal ally.

Sasse is one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict former President Trump last year during his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He’s the third to retire.

The Nebraskan senator not that long ago was also seen as a rising star in his party and a possible presidential candidate. But that possibility seemed more and more faint as Sasse’s opposition to various Trump actions grew.

Republicans who closely follow Congress say Sasse’s retirement reflects growing polarization in Washington, which has only accelerated since Trump won election to the White House in 2016. And they say there’s less of a political future for GOP lawmakers who won’t embrace Trump.  

“Trump has undermined our party. He’s running a cult and he’s a cultist figure and he’s only concerned about himself, and he’s done fundamental damage to our constitutional electoral process, and so when people who are willing to stand up to him leave the Senate, that hurts because senators should be able to stand up to someone like Trump. That’s why you get a six-year term,” said former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who was a respected fiscal conservative and a member of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) leadership team during his Senate career.   

Gregg said the departure of so many senior Republicans who were known for both their close relationships with McConnell and their willingness to be pragmatic to get important bills passed for the good of the country is a troubling sign for both the Senate and the nation.  

“It’s not surprising. The Congress has been taken over by a lot of folks who are dominated by the extremes of their party, both the Democratic and Republican, and getting things done if you’re a thoughtful centrist is very difficult,” he said of Sasse’s retirement. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some frustration there.”  

Gregg predicted the departure of so many seasoned legislators will make it tougher for McConnell — or any leader in Congress — to get things done next year.  

“Complex issues … requires people who are willing to cross the aisle and compromise and are substantive, and when you lose like folks like that and you lose the center of the Senate — and the center of the Senate has always been rational, thoughtful doers, versus shouters — it makes it very hard to legislate on complex and difficult issues,” he said.  

Sasse is a finalist to become the University of Florida’s next president — a position he is expected to take. It would end what had been a noteworthy Senate career.

Sasse often decried knee-jerk partisan polarization within the Senate and earlier this year unveiled an ethics reform package to restore public faith in Washington.  

It included a ban on lawmakers trading stocks and making huge salaries in lobbying jobs after leaving Congress as well as requiring presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns and prohibiting foreign nationals from funding state and local ballot initiatives.  

Trump famously refused to make his tax returns public during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and during his time in the White House.  

“Ben Sasse was one of the people who made the Senate work,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “And there’s a pattern of a lot people who made the Senate work who are leaving the institution, and that’s not good for the country and not good for our democracy.”

Ayres suspects that Sasse and other retiring Senate Republicans are fed up with what he called “the toxic polarization” that’s made it “difficult to do the things that led them to run for the Senate in the first place.”  

Besides Sasse, Sens. Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Richard Burr (N.C.), who also voted to convict Trump in 2021, are retiring. The other four GOP senators who voted to convict Trump are Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Bill Cassidy (La.).

Lawmakers in both parties are bracing themselves for standoffs over government funding measures and legislation to raise the debt limit if House Republicans, who are generally more allied with Trump, win control of the lower chamber.  

It’s not yet clear who Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts will appoint to replace Sasse, who was reelected to a second term in 2020, but other retiring Republicans may be replaced by Republicans Trump endorsed in the primaries.  

Those Trump-backed candidates, who are either favored to win or have a good chance of being elected, include Rep. Ted Budd (R) in North Carolina, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Eric Schmitt in Missouri. 

Budd has embraced Trump’s claims of election fraud and introduced his Combat Voter Fraud Act, while Vance said in January the election was stolen and Schmitt joined a lawsuit with 17 other state attorneys general to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  

Sasse was an outspoken critic of Trump throughout his Senate career, though he toned down his criticisms in time to win Trump’s endorsement during his 2020 Republican primary.  

But after clinching the Senate GOP nomination for Nebraska, he ripped Trump apart at a telephone town hall a few weeks before the 2020 general election, calling the president’s values “deficient” because of “the way he kisses dictators’ butts” and “mocks evangelicals” and “flirted with white supremacists.”  

When he voted to impeach Trump, he declared the former president had “lied about widespread voter fraud,” spread “conspiracy theories” and fanned those lies when he summoned his supporters to Capitol Hill to “intimidate Vice President Pence” into halting the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.  

Burr and Toomey joined Sasse in voting to convict Trump on the charge of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection during his second impeachment trial. But several retiring senators who have often been loyal to McConnell were willing to stand up to Trump in significant ways.   

Retiring Sen. Ron Portman (R-Ohio) played a lead role in negotiating last year’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which 18 other Republicans voted for, including retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Burr and McConnell. Trump fiercely opposed the bill, and later said Republicans who voted for it should “be ashamed of themselves” for “helping the Democrats.”   

In October of last year, Blunt, Portman and retiring Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)  joined McConnell in voting for a procedural motion to circumvent a filibuster on legislation to raise the federal debt ceiling and avoid a national default, again despite Trump’s opposition. Trump at the time accused these Republicans of “folding to the Democrats again.”   

James Wallner, a former Senate Republican aide, predicted that McConnell may have to undergo a tough transition next year when many of his loyal allies will be replaced by pro-Trump Republicans unfamiliar with the arcane procedures of the Senate and the nuances and challenges of getting bills passed.  

“Just look at what happened after the 2010 election; it took Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to get a handle on the” conservatives who were elected in the Tea Party revolution, Wallner said. “There was a lot of turmoil and institutional uncertainty after that election.  

“If you have a large number of members on either side of the aisle come in, the potential for disrupting business as usual in the Senate is a lot greater,” he said.  

Inside McConnell and Murkowski’s battle over Trump’s impeachment

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Tensions flared between Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and swing Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) during then-President Trump’s first impeachment trial in the Winter of 2020, according to an exclusively obtained excerpt from a new book.

New revelations about what McConnell did behind the scenes to help Trump during his first impeachment trial shows the minority leader was one of Trump’s most effective Senate allies before their dramatic falling out after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.  

They also show that while McConnell is now supporting Murkowski's re-election bid against a Trump-backed challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, just two years ago the two senators were at loggerheads over how to respond to questions about Trump's conduct and fitness for office.

The forthcoming book, “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump,” reveals that McConnell leaned hard on Murkowski to vote against calling more witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  

Murkowski at the time said publicly she “was disturbed” by McConnell’s pledge to work in “total coordination” with Trump’s legal team and “take my cues from the president’s lawyers.” 

Murkowski saw senators more as members of an impartial jury, not an extension of the defense team, and told a reporter in Alaska shortly before Christmas 2019 that McConnell had “further confused the process.”  

Murkowski’s criticism of McConnell started trending on Twitter. When she woke up the next morning after a late night of wrapping Christmas presents at her cabin outside of Anchorage, she found a “snarky” message from McConnell in her email inbox. 

It was “a missive that would zap all the holiday cheer out of her for two days. The leader was not happy with her comments. And he wanted to talk to her,” longtime Washington reporters Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian write in “Unchecked,” which will go on sale Oct. 18.  

McConnell later tried to mend fences with Murkowski, whom he knew would be a key Republican vote. If she defected, the charges against Trump would have posed a huge political liability for the president and his party heading into the 2020 election.  

After returning to Washington after the recess, McConnell summoned Murkowski to walk over to him on the Senate floor and told her: “You and I are on the same page.” 

He signaled he didn’t have lingering hard feelings by recalling how in the same interview in which Murkowski criticized him, she also criticized Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for rushing the impeachment investigation.  

And he tried to defend his statement that he would coordinate closely with the White House legal team by arguing that Democrats had done the same thing during Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial. 

But it still was a sore subject for Murkowski.  

“Well don’t advertise it!” she had snapped back. 

Bade, the co-author of Politico Playbook, and Demirjian, a member of The Washington Post’s national security team, write that Murkowski also struggled with herself over how to handle the trial, and how to vote on the crucial question of allowing House Democratic prosecutors to call additional witnesses, which would have extended the trial for weeks or even months.

McConnell worked behind the scenes to persuade her not to defect and vote with Democrats.  

He knew he couldn’t bully her so he had to use the tactic he had deployed so effectively over his years as leader to convince wayward Republican colleagues to toe the party line.  

“McConnell never threatened. He never bullied. And though he often left her space to follow her own intuition, he was an expert at laying the guilt on thick and backing her into a corner,” the authors write.  

Murkowski was a critical player in the 2020 impeachment trial because she turned out to be the deciding swing vote on the question of calling more witnesses.

Unlike the vote on convicting the president and removing him from office, which requires two-thirds of the Senate — which was never a real possibility in January of 2020 — the procedural vote on calling more witnesses only needed a simple majority.  

Republicans controlled 53 seats, but moderate Sens. Susan Collins (R), who was up for re-election in Maine, a Democratic-leaning state, and Mitt Romney (R-Utah), an outspoken Trump critic, were expected to vote for additional witnesses. If Murkowski joined them, there would be a 50-50 tie on the question and it would have fallen to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to decide or punt on the crucial question.  

McConnell knew that Murkowski respected Roberts, who was presiding over the Senate trial, and exploited that to his full advantage. He warned that if she voted with Democrats to call witnesses, Roberts would be thrown into a political maelstrom along with other judges who would be forced to rule on Trump’s legal appeals. 

“The most consequential vote during this impeachment is not about whether to convict or acquit,” McConnell told Murkowski carefully, according to the book. “It’s about how to vote on witnesses—and what position that will put the courts in.” 

He told Murkowski that it would be up to her to protect the integrity of the judicial branch and stop what he viewed as a politically motivated impeachment trial from damaging the federal judiciary’s reputation as standing above politics.  

“If you don’t want to do this for the presidency, if you don’t want to do it for the Senate, if you don’t want to do this for 2020 colleagues, do it to save the courts,” he said.  

This and other anecdotes in “Unchecked” are gathered from interviews the authors conducted with the key players in Trump’s impeachment trial. The sources were granted anonymity to protect them from political and personal recriminations.  

Though Murkowski was torn over the question of witnesses, she felt sure that Trump had acted improperly by using his power as president to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter on a July phone call.

Yet the Alaska senator thought House Democrats had rushed the impeachment investigation and had dumped an incomplete case in senators’ laps, asking them to finish their work by taking on the burden of fact finding.  

Murkowski wondered why the House had not handled the case with more care and concern. She thought that Democrats were just as guilty of playing politics as her Senate Republican colleagues who reflexively circled around Trump to defend him, even though his conduct raised serious ethical and legal questions.  

“Republican leaders, much to her frustration, were constantly telling their rank and file: ‘You gotta circle. You gotta circle together and protect one another here’ — which meant, of course, circling to protect Trump. Just like musk ox, Murkowski thought,” imagining the hulking creatures, who circle around their young with their horns turned out and their rears tucked in during times of danger, according to “Unchecked.” 

She ultimately decided the House impeachment investigation and Senate trial were flawed, but she felt there wasn’t anything she could do to rectify the situation or alter the outcome that Trump would be acquitted on the final vote.  

She and then-Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the other Republican swing vote, ultimately decided they would not support calling new witnesses, putting the trial on the path for a speedy conclusion and giving McConnell the political win he wanted.  

As Murkowski deliberated over what to do, she concluded: “Republicans were too afraid to actually check this president, and Democrats didn’t really care about putting him away—just about getting impeachment over with and using it to do maximum damage to the GOP in the 2020 election.”

“Because of that, she thought sourly, Trump would get away with everything. And she had no choice but to be complicit,” the authors write.

Democrats brace for life with a House GOP majority

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Senate Democrats are bracing for the possibility for life under a divided government, with President Biden in office and a strong possibility of a Republican-controlled House.

Democrats hope they can retain their majority in the Senate, where a number of political handicappers say the party is favored. That would give Democrats more leverage and congressional support for Biden over the next two years.

But if the House does fall as expected, lawmakers expect partisan gridlock.

Some Democrats are predicting government shutdowns and standoffs over raising the federal debt limit will take center stage.  

“If Republicans win control of the House, they will not be able to govern. It’ll be a cascading nightmare of dysfunction and horrible for the country and horrible news for anybody who relies on federal funding,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. 

Murphy predicted that if Republicans are in charge of one or both chambers, “it’s probably a series of shutdowns and funding crises.” 

“This new breed of Republicans are anarchists. They don’t really believe government should be funding anything,” he added.  

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House minority leader who is in line to become Speaker if Republicans win the lower chamber, is more allied with former President Trump than his Senate GOP counterpart, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).  

McCarthy sided with Trump last year when the former president called on Republicans to block legislation to raise the debt limit, which would have put the nation at risk of default.

Not a single House Republican voted to raise the debt ceiling in October and it fell to McConnell and his leadership team and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to provide the votes to keep the United States fulfilling its debt obligations.  

Trump, who retains a strong grip on the Republican base, slammed McConnell for compromising with Democrats, arguing that GOP lawmakers should have sought to paralyze Biden’s agenda.  

Trump presided over a 35-day government shutdown at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 — the longest in U.S. history — which was triggered by his demand to spend nearly $6 billion to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.  

FiveThirtyEight.com, a political forecasting website, gives Republicans a 7 in 10 chance of winning the House majority and Democrats a 7 in 10 chance of keeping control of the Senate.  

Another Democratic senator who requested anonymity to comment frankly on the likely result of the November election, said if Republicans capture the House, it will yield “a series of investigations” of the Biden administration.  

“Many want to impeach Joe Biden. It would be a recipe for chaos and for gridlock,” the lawmaker said.

Several House conservatives have already introduced articles of impeachment against Biden, alleging “high crimes” related to his handling of border security and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan last year to has management of the coronavirus pandemic.  

Conservatives are signaling they will attempt to block funding for the Internal Revenue Service to hire an estimated 87,000 new employees, which was provided for in the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in August under the budget reconciliation process.  

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a prominent Trump ally, penned an op-ed for Fox News with Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) urging fellow Republicans to “stop caving to Democrats” and warned “under no circumstances should any Republican in the new majorities next year vote to fund the Democrats’ newly passed army of 87,000 new IRS officials to audit and harass Americans.”  

Some Trump allies still haven’t given up hope of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which was one of Trump’s top domestic priorities after taking office in 2017.  

“If we’re going to repeal and replace ObamaCare — I still think we need to fix our health care system — we need to have the plan ahead of time so that once we get in office, we can implement it immediately, not knock around like we did last time and fail,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who is running for reelection, told Breitbart News Radio earlier this year.  

When Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 midterms, then-Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose influence in the party has grown significantly over the last decade, proposed $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years. His proposed Spending Reduction Act would have cut nondefense discretionary spending dramatically.  

In April of that year, then-President Obama and then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) flirted with a government shutdown before Democrats finally agreed to $39 billion spending cuts in a late-night deal.

The Congress also came perilously close to defaulting on the federal debt in August of 2011, a few months after House Republicans captured the House. Fiscal disaster was averted by a compromise that McConnell and Biden, who was then vice president, helped craft.   

Senate Democrats say they hope such standoffs will be avoided.

“I think we’ve learned that shutdowns really are a lose-lose [proposition,]” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who came to Congress in 2011. “Certainly some House Republicans have learned. Whether all of them or the newly elected ones remains to be seen.” 

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said he’s optimistic about working with House Republicans in the next Congress to pass the annual defense authorization bill. But he expressed concerns that Trump allies in the House will try to undermine the professionalism and political neutrality of the military.  

Trump tried to shake up the Pentagon’s senior ranks and install loyalists into key positions after he lost the 2020 election to Biden, and Reed fears that Trump allies in the House may still have that on their agenda.  

“One of my concerns is less the NDAA, it’s the growing attack on the military as an institution. I just saw where the Arizona candidate for the Senate called for firing all the generals and putting in conservatives. That’s not how we [run] our army. It’s based on competence and experience and the judgment of others, their superior military officers,” Reed said.   

Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, has repeatedly called for the across-the-board firing of generals between August of 2021 and March of this year, according to a recent report by Vice.com.  

Despite the growing Democratic concerns of having to interact with a House Republican majority in 2023, some Democratic senators think they’ll be able to find narrow areas of common ground.  

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) cited bipartisan support for the chips and science bill that passed both chambers this year with bipartisan majorities.  

“Of course there will be areas where we can work together,” he said.  

“They’ll be doing a lot of stuff for show,” he added, anticipating new investigations of the Biden administration. 

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) noted he is working with Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) to restore the pensions of salaried retirees in Delphi who were terminated when General Motors declared bankruptcy in 2009.  

“There will be ways. They’re not all crazy. Some of them are,” he said of House Republicans.  

Brown, however, insisted the political winds are shifting in Democrats’ favor, even in the battle for the House.  

“I think things are changing and these are close races,” he said. “The only thing that would cost us the House is redistricting,” referring to the changes to congressional maps made after the 2020 census.  

Trump slams McConnell as ‘disloyal’ amid Jan. 6 hearings

Posted on (Updated by Alexander Bolton

Former President Trump on Thursday vented his anger with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) during the House select Jan. 6 committee’s hearing, slamming him as a “disloyal sleazebag” despite the recent victories McConnell helped secure for Trump’s legacy.

Trump appeared to lose his temper after the Jan. 6 committee played a clip of McConnell's speech on the Senate floor during Trump’s second impeachment trial in which he blamed the former president for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

“Is this the same Mitch McConnell who was losing big in Kentucky, and came to the White House to BEG me for an Endorsement and help? Without me he would have lost in a landslide. A disloyal sleaze bag!” Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform.  

Trump appeared to be referring to the 2020 election, but McConnell never faced any serious danger from his Democratic challenger Amy McGrath. He wound up winning a seventh Senate term by a margin of nearly 20 points.

Trump’s vitriolic attack on the GOP leader came only a week after Democrats formally abandoned their plans to reverse the 2017 tax cuts, one of Trump’s biggest domestic accomplishments.  

McConnell mentioned the importance of preserving Trump’s tax cuts at a press conference on Tuesday.  

“One day we think they’re going to leave taxes alone, which of course would preserve the 2017 tax bill, the next day they’re not so sure,” McConnell said of Democrats’ plans to move a budget reconciliation package.  

McConnell also played a key role in helping Trump add three conservative justices to the Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who joined a 6-3 conservative majority in overturning Roe v. Wade last month. 

Yet, Trump remains fixated on McConnell’s refusal to acknowledge his unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen as well as on the GOP leader’s fiery denunciation of Trump’s actions leading to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.  

McConnell excoriated Trump at the end of his second impeachment trial for what he called a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.”  

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday played a clip of McConnell speaking on the Senate floor in which he said “there’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” 

“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of the president,” he said. “Having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”  

McConnell has since declined to speak about Trump or even mention him by name in public. 

On Tuesday when asked whether he would oppose Trump's candidacy for president in 2024 if he runs again, McConnell only predicted that the former president would face a lot of competition for the nomination. 

“I think we’re going to have a crowded field for president. I assume most of that will unfold later and people will be picking their candidates in a crowded primary field,” he told reporters.