the Republican-led Senate passed a critical tax reform bill that will help make America an economic powerhouse again. We did that by putting more money into the pockets of hardworking families and small businesses
.. Since Republicans in Congress began working on tax reform with the Trump administration, everyone has agreed that middle-class families must be at the heart of our plan.
.. Our bill doubles the child tax credit, preserves the adoption tax credit for families that open their homes to children in need, and roughly doubles the standard deduction. Under the plan we passed, a median-income family of four could see a tax cut of nearly $2,200—money it could use for anything from helping a child through college to saving for retirement.
How the Republicans Broke Congress
Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to deliver on their promises to wealthy donors, and down the road, to use the leverage of huge deficits to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.
.. the unexpected and rapid nature of the decline in American national politics, and how one-sided its cause.
.. the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.
Even today, many people like to imagine that the damage has all been President Trump’s doing — that he took the Republican Party hostage. But the problem goes much deeper.
.. we can’t help seeing the Republican Party as the root cause of today’s political instability. Three major developments in the party required us to change our view.
.. First, beginning in the 1990s, the Republicans strategically demonized Congress and government more broadly and flouted the norms of lawmaking, fueling a significant decline of trust in government
.. House Republicans showed their colors when they first blocked passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, despite the urgent pleas of their own president, George W. Bush, and the speaker of the House, John Boehner. The seeds of a (largely phony) populist reaction were planted.
.. Second, there was the “Obama effect.”
.. we saw a deliberate Republican strategy to oppose all of his initiatives and frame his attempts to compromise as weak or inauthentic. The Senate under the majority leader Mitch McConnell weaponized the filibuster to obstruct legislation, block judges and upend the policy process. The Obama effect had an ominous twist, an undercurrent of racism that was itself embodied in the “birther” movement led by Donald Trump.
.. repeatedly promised the impossible under divided party government: that if they won, Mr. Obama would be forced to his knees, his policies obliterated and government as we knew it demolished. Their subsequent failures to do so spurred even more rage
.. Third, we have seen the impact of significant changes in the news media, which had a far greater importance on the right than on the left. The development of the modern conservative media echo chamber began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio in the late 1980s and ramped up with the birth of Fox News. Matt Drudge, his protégé Andrew Breitbart and Breitbart’s successor Steve Bannon leveraged the power of the internet to espouse their far-right views. And with the advent of social media, we saw the emergence of a radical “alt-right” media ecosystem able to create its own “facts” and build an audience around hostility to the establishment, anti-immigration sentiment and racial resentment. Nothing even close to comparable exists on the left.
Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics.
.. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in
.. hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.
.. The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy
.. Only conservative intellectuals have acknowledged the bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
The Roy Moore Mess
Without a new candidate, the GOP would be better off losing the Senate seat.
Several women have made detailed accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Moore, and multiple people now say he was known for trolling shopping malls for young girls while in his 30s. Mr. Moore’s public defenses have also been less than convincing, not least that he doesn’t know his latest accuser, though he signed her yearbook.
.. Mr. Moore to step away from the campaign and allow Alabama’s Republicans to put forth a more credible candidate to run as a write-in against Democrat Doug Jones. Most likely, Mr. Moore won’t do that. He made his reputation as an Alabama state judge by openly defying valid court orders
.. Democrats and the media will make Mr. Moore the running mate of every Republican in 2018.
.. For 25 years Democrats and feminists euphemized and apologized for Bill Clinton, starting with Gennifer Flowers before he was President. Republicans can show their standards are better.
.. Some have argued that the Bannon insurgency against the Republican “establishment” is in the mode of earlier party challenges led by Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich. This one isn’t close. The populism of Reagan and Mr. Gingrich was always about building the conservative movement into a majority that could govern and change the country.
.. The Bannonites have given no evidence or argument that they are aiming that high. They want to defeat the existing majority—a conservative majority by any historical standard—mainly to show that they can depose Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
They have no discernible governing agenda beyond trade protectionism and slashing immigration, and those often appear to be convictions of convenience. It is hardly a surprise therefore that instead of recruiting talented candidates, Mr. Bannon is collecting cranks and outliers like Roy Moore who, demonstrably, will take the GOP into the minority.
.. Raging against the establishment for the sake of raging is an agenda for losers, and it will cost conservatives the votes in Congress they need to achieve conservative goals.
Bannon pledges not to go to war vs. House Republicans
The Breitbart chief tells top House GOP campaign strategists that his focus is on Mitch McConnell.
.. Top House GOP campaign strategists met with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Friday morning — an indication party leaders are attempting to avert the divisive primaries that Bannon is organizing against Senate Republicans.
.. Bannon pledged to Stivers and Rogers that his focus is not on toppling establishment-oriented House incumbents in the 2018 midterm elections, according to two people familiar with the meeting, but rather on waging an all-out war against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
.. Behind the scenes, Bannon has been telling conservative leaders to focus on primaries in the Senate and not the House. He has framed Senate primaries — beginning with this fall’s Alabama GOP runoff — as headline-grabbing, climactic battles that will determine the direction of the Republican Party during the Trump era... Senate Republican strategists have responded with fury, casting Bannon as an out-of-the-mainstream figure who is threatening to imperil the party’s midterm prospects... Bannon’s best opportunity to shape House primaries, however, comes in open seats.