Washington Post: “The GOP is still Donald Trump’s party. The clearest proof of that: It is still finding ways to pay Donald Trump money.”

“Since Trump left office, at least six Republican candidates have held fundraisers at the former president’s Florida properties. This weekend, there will be at least six more events put on by GOP-aligned groups.”

“The events show that Trump has maintained his status as the party’s central figure, even after the violent effort by supporters to overthrown the election results on his behalf, and a post-presidency exile in which he has rarely left his own property.”

Ron Brownstein: “With their opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they’ve made for his presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.”

“Last month, every House and Senate Republican opposed Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, even though it delivered significant benefits to working-class white voters, the GOP’s foundational voting bloc, including increased health-care subsidies and expanded tax credits for families with children. That pattern is repeating with the infrastructure plan, even though it directs billions of dollars to rural communities, which are indispensable to Republican political fortunes.”

“John Boehner in a new memoir derides today’s Republican Party as unrecognizable to traditional conservatives like himself, held hostage by both former president Donald Trump and by a conservative media echo chamber that is based on creating ‘chaos’ for its own financial needs,” the Washington Post reports.

On the House: A Washington Memoir

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Boehner, John (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 274 Pages - 04/13/2021 (Publication Date) - St. Martin's Press (Publisher)

Buy on Amazon

Fox News: “The National Republican Congressional Committee on Thursday reported that it brought in $33.7 million in fundraising in the January-March first quarter of this year.”

“The committee highlighted that it had $29.7 million cash on hand as of the end of last month, which it says is a 57 percent increase over the amount of money the NRCC had in the bank at the same point in the last election cycle. The committee also noted that it has no debt and that its average grassroots donation was $32.70.”

Ezra Klein: “Most discussions of the renewed ambitions of the Democratic Party focus on ideological trends on the left. The real starting point, however, is the institutional collapse of the right. Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts. Both as a senator and a vice president, Biden backed this approach. He always thought a bipartisan deal could be made and usually believed he was the guy who could make it.”

“But over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes… The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills.”

I made similar points when arguing Republicans were committing political malpractice.

Jonathan Last: “Does it matter to his future political prospects that Matt Gaetz doesn’t advance legislation? Does it matter that Madison Cawthorn staffed up his office with comms people? Does it matter that Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have committee assignments?”

“Well, these quirks would matter in a system where legislative accomplishments influenced voter behavior. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that Republican voters don’t care about tangible government outcomes.”

“They don’t care whether or not a border wall is built, or who would have (theoretically) paid for it. They don’t care about whether or not the government fails to manage a global pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. They don’t care if unemployment is up—or down. They don’t care about stimulus checks. Or the national debt…”

“Republican voters—a group distinct from Conservatism Inc.—no longer have any concrete outcomes that they want from government. What they have, instead, is a lifestyle brand.”

“As former President Donald Trump prepares to make his first appearance in front of a group of the GOP’s top donors since leaving office, some Republican officials and fundraisers fear that his own political group will cannibalize a significant portion of the party’s financial base heading into a critical midterm election cycle,” McClatchy reports.

“Over the course of two campaigns, Trump built up a loyal army of small-dollar donors, who the former president is now encouraging to contribute to the political action committee he formed shortly after his 2020 election defeat, as he seeks to reestablish himself as the leader of the Republican Party and potentially set himself up for another White House run.”

Max Boot: “We won’t transform our political system anytime soon. In the meantime, centrists have a binary choice: Support either an increasingly extremist and obstructionist Republican Party or a Democratic Party that, under President Biden, is working to solve our most pressing problems.”

“Biden is governing from the ‘new center’ while Republicans are increasingly catering to the far right with shrill, divisive rhetoric and antidemocratic actions such as bills to restrict voting. Under those circumstances, those of us on the center-right can’t afford a third-party flirtation. We need to become Biden Republicans.”

“The Republican National Committee is requiring attendees of the party’s spring donor retreat in Florida to get tested for the coronavirus and submit proof of a negative result as a condition for gaining entry to the event,” the Washington Examiner reports.

What about a vaccine passport?

Adam Serwer: “Republicans cannot imagine labor relations as exploitative except in that someone might have to sit through a tedious video on race or gender sensitivity in the workplace. They do not perceive the concentration of corporate power as perilous unless companies’ desire to retain their customer base interferes with Republican schemes to entrench their own political dominance. They see freedom of speech as vital, unless it prevents them from using the state to sanction forms of political expression they oppose. Their criticisms of ‘woke capital’ go no deeper than this.”

“As such, the Republican anti-corporate turn is entirely superficial.”

Dan Pfieffer highlights polling data showing that more GOP voters reported hearing about Dr. Seuss’s estate pulling six of its books from publication than passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan.

“This finding is a testament to the power of the issue and massive indictment of America’s information ecosystem. Dr. Seuss’s books weren’t banned. It’s a completely fake issue driven by blow-dried blowhards on cable and MAGA grifters on Facebook. Yet, it received as much attention as the passage of a historic piece of legislation that will put checks in people’s bank accounts and shots in their arms.”

“They just completely reinvented a coalition and their messaging overnight has gone from an Episcopalian, Presbyterian, white party to rural and non-college. They don’t want to talk about free trade or anything like that. And Biden is not this polarizing figure. I mean, you can’t gin it up. I mean Obama, for obvious reasons, he could get them all ginned up. They try to get a charge out of Biden, but it just doesn’t work that well.”

— James Carville, quoted by the Daily Beast, on why Republicans have had a difficult time opposing President Biden’s agenda.

Perry Bacon Jr.: “Despite Republicans losing the White House and Senate in 2020, and thus being totally swept out of power in Washington, there’s been no official ‘autopsy’ or widespread consideration of appointing new leaders or anything else. In the period after the 1988 presidential election, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential race (2004). It has lost three of the last four presidential elections and allowed itself to be dominated by former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached for breaking with democratic values. But it is moving forward like none of that really happened.”

“The collective decision of conservative activists and Republican elected officials to stay on the anti-democratic, racist trajectory that the GOP had been on before Trump — but that he accelerated — is perhaps the most important story in American politics right now.”

“Republicans are attacking corporations over their decision to condemn the controversial Georgia voting law, part of the party’s embrace of the populism espoused by President Donald Trump even as it creates tensions with traditional allies in the business community,” the Washington Post reports.

“The acrimony between Republicans and large companies over Georgia underscores the party’s increasingly fraying relationship with corporate America over social and cultural issues as GOP leaders grapple with the direction of the party after the 2020 election. The future of that relationship is complicated by the fact that Republicans continue to support economic policies advocated by the private sector on taxes and regulations, making it unclear what form of retribution leaders could pursue.”

FiveThirtyEight: “In the past two decades, trust in traditional media has plummeted — especially among Republicans. According to polling from Gallup, since at least the late 1990s, Republicans have been less likely than Democrats (and independents) to say they trust the media. But starting in 2015, trust among Republicans took a nosedive, falling from 32 percent to 10 percent in 2020. (Meanwhile, among Democrats, trust in the media has actually climbed back up, and by quite a bit.)”

“Part of this is because Republicans are often more vocal in their criticism of the media and have long perceived it as having a liberal bias. But now they are also more likely to say that being ‘anti-media’ is part of their political identity, and this is likely driving the staggering gap in media trust that we are seeing.”

NBC News: “The shift is the product of a Republican Party increasingly driven by ‘culture war’ issues that animate a base invigorated by Trump and corporate powerhouses that are under more pressure than ever to align themselves with the left on voting rights, LGBTQ rights and anti-racist efforts.”

“The result is a fraying in relations between a GOP that has for years advocated for the kinds of libertarian economic policies that have widely benefited these businesses and companies that are using their might to help advance racial and social justice causes.”

“Rep. Liz Cheney took on the Trump wing of her party and survived its attempt to politically kneecap her. But it’s only the beginning of what looks like a years-long fight for her place in the GOP,” Politico reports.

“Cheney has racked up a string of wins that put her on more solid footing in the party — starting with her easy victory over a conservative-led effort to oust her as House GOP conference chair.”

“She still has to lock down her party’s endorsement in the deep red state of Wyoming next August, leaving plenty of time for pro-Trump forces to mobilize against her — though she’s likely to benefit from multiple pro-Trump candidates competing for the same lane. If Cheney can hang on to her House seat, however, her ability to climb the Republican leadership ranks may still be hamstrung by her vote against a former president who’s said to be obsessed with taking down the Republicans who helped impeach him.”