All posts tagged: Republican lawmakers

Iowa lawmakers address immigration, religious freedom and taxes in 2024 session

Iowa lawmakers address immigration, religious freedom and taxes in 2024 session

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — After a marathon day that stretched into Saturday’s early hours, Iowa lawmakers wrapped up a four-month legislative session that focused on reforming the way special education is managed and speeding up tax cuts. The Republican-led General Assembly also waded into issues like immigration and religious freedom, which have proven core to the party’s 2024 campaign message. Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, pushed many priorities through the Legislature after submitting 18 requests for bill drafts, more than any other year of her tenure and any other governor since 2006, publicly available data shows. Here’s a look at the issues that made headlines: REYNOLDS’ PRIORITIES DOMINATE SESSION Education was a key issue for Reynolds this session, including one proposal to revise the state’s education system for students with disabilities that consumed lawmakers’ attention. Reynolds wanted school districts to be able to choose how to use their special education dollars. For decades, those funds have gone directly to cooperatives known as area education agencies, or AEAs, that provide special education services. A compromise …

How Trump Endorsements Became Banal

How Trump Endorsements Became Banal

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, officially endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection two Saturdays ago. The news landed as an afterthought, which is probably how she intended it. “Today at the @WVGOP Winter Meeting Lunch, I announced my support for President Donald Trump,” Capito wrote on X, as if she were making a dutiful entry in a diary. Republicans have reached the point in their primary season, even earlier than expected, when the party’s putative leaders line up to reaffirm their allegiance to Trump. Several of Capito’s Senate colleagues joined the validation brigade around the same time: the GOP’s second- and third-ranking members, John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming, along with Trump’s long-ago rivals Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. None of their endorsements caused much of a ripple. Perhaps some mischief-maker surfaced the old video of Cruz calling Trump “a sniveling coward” in 2016 or Rubio calling him “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency.” But for the most part, the numbing …

Trump Gets One Step Closer

Trump Gets One Step Closer

January 27, 2024, 12:25 PM ET Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.   The 2024 race is coming into focus this week after Republican front runner Donald Trump’s victory in New Hampshire brought him one step closer to the GOP’s presidential nomination. But his final primary opponent, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, has rejected calls to drop out of the race and continued to campaign in her home state. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have also ramped up their campaign, making reproductive rights a central theme of their reelection efforts. Meanwhile, the fate of a bipartisan border-security deal, which Republican lawmakers had insisted upon before considering additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, has been complicated by Trump’s opposition to the deal. Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more are Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent …

Texas’ Dystopian Horror – The Atlantic

Texas’ Dystopian Horror – The Atlantic

Kate Cox is a mother of two young children, and in that respect, she’s like the majority of women—60 percent—who seek an abortion. She wants to have a third child, but if the state of Texas had its way, it’s possible none of her children would have a mother at all. On Monday, Cox fled Texas to seek an abortion, after the state invoked its authority to force her to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term. Pregnant with what they’d hoped would be their third child, Cox and her husband had learned that the fetus had a fatal abnormality, Trisomy 18, ensuring that even if delivered, the child would live a short, excruciating life and die a painful death. Yet she’d been told that, under Texas law, she could not get an abortion, even though carrying the baby to term would risk not only her own health but the possibility of getting pregnant again. “The safest option to protect Ms. Cox’s health and future fertility was to get a D&E abortion,” a legal complaint filed …

The Republican Party’s culture of violence

The Republican Party’s culture of violence

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The MAGA movement has been infused with violence and threats of violence for years. Those threats—now aimed at Republican lawmakers—are the new normal in the GOP. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Sleeping With a Gun by the Bed The trash fire that is the Republican competition to elect the speaker of the House is entering a new phase now that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio is out of the running. Nine men have put themselves forward; Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the apparent favorite, at least for now. Of the nine, seven voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Emmer and Representative Austin Scott of Georgia voted to certify the results.) Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made against Republican …

The Next Test for the Abortion-Rights Movement

The Next Test for the Abortion-Rights Movement

For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God. “With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval. They had gathered at the Warren AME Church, in Toledo, to voice their opposition to a constitutional amendment that Ohio voters will approve or reject in a statewide referendum on August 8. Many of those in the boisterous crowd were experiencing a feeling unfamiliar to Democrats in the state over the past decade: optimism. If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority. In other years, …

The Trump Indictment Puts the GOP on Trial

The Trump Indictment Puts the GOP on Trial

Earlier today, Donald Trump was indicted for a third time, on the charge that he attempted to subvert the 2020 presidential election. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accuses Trump of a conspiracy to defraud the United States by “using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit”; a conspiracy to “corruptly obstruct and impede” an official proceeding of the U.S. government; and a conspiracy “against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” “Each of these conspiracies—which built on the the widespread mistrust the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud—targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election,” the indictment said. The indictment is the latest entry in a remarkable tally of criminal and civil charges against the former president. In June, Trump was indicted by Smith on 37 felony counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, obstructing justice, and making false statements. (A superseding indictment last month added three additional felony counts …