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House Republicans declare war – but Senate Republicans don’t want to talk about Trump’s indictment
House Republicans declare war – but Senate Republicans don’t want to talk about Trump’s indictment, Eric Garcia, The Independent
Even Trump critics in the party don’t want to discuss it

Few Republicans have criticised former president Donald Trump more than Senator Mitt Romney. The 2012 Republican nominee for president and current Utah Senator voted to convict Mr Trump in his impeachment trial in 2020 and his impeachment after the January 6 riot in 2021. But when your dispatcher caught him in the Senate basement on Tuesday evening ahead of votes, he had little to say about the potential indictment of Mr Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

“You know, I’ll have something for you if and when that occurs, but it hasn’t and so I got nothing,” he told The Independent.
The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory
The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory, Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times
The authors [Sides, Tesler and Vavreck] combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”

“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level.

Now, this earlier scholarship notwithstanding, three political scientists are presenting an alternative interpretation of the 2016 election.
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More Acceptance but Growing Polarization on LGBTQ Rights: Findings From the 2022 American Values Atlas
More Acceptance but Growing Polarization on LGBTQ Rights: Findings From the 2022 American Values Atlas, PRRI
Eight in ten Americans (80%) favor laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing. This includes 48% who strongly support such laws. About one in five Americans (18%) oppose these laws, including 7% who strongly oppose them. Support for these protections has increased over the past few years: around seven in ten Americans favored nondiscrimination provisions in 2015 (71%), 2017 (70%), 2018 (69%), and 2019 (72%), before rising to 76% in 2020 and 79% in 2021.[5]

Overwhelming shares of Democrats (90%) and independents (82%), as well as two-thirds of Republicans (66%), favor nondiscrimination provisions for LGBTQ people. Since 2015, support has increased by 12 percentage points among Democrats (78% to 90%) and nine percentage points among independents (73% to 82%). Support among Republicans has increased by five percentage points (61% to 66%).
Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban.
Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban., Ian Millhiser, Vox
Republicans just got a painful reminder that political stunts can backfire.

These attacks did not succeed. The [Affordable care Act] bill became law, and Obamacare is popular now that it has been in full effect for nearly a decade without anyone being forced to stand before a death panel. But there is at least one lasting legacy of these attempts to characterize the Affordable Care Act as an attack on patients’ right to decide whether and when to seek health treatments.

In many states, opponents of Obamacare effectively took the GOP’s talking points and turned them into state constitutional amendments protecting patients’ ability to obtain health care that the government might not want them to have. Wyoming’s amendment, for example, provides that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”

According to Quinn Yeargain, a law professor at Widener University, similar amendments are on the books in several other states.
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Jim Jordan’s sordid attack on possible Trump charges demands an answer
Jim Jordan’s sordid attack on possible Trump charges demands an answer, Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
If and when Donald Trump faces criminal charges, it will thrust the country into a new type of political war over an unprecedented situation, and Republicans are already rising to the occasion. They’re signaling a willingness to deploy the full levers of their power in sordid but novel ways, to paint any prosecution as the stuff of banana republics.

Democrats will have to marshal some serious creativity in response. The extraordinary move by House Republicans to insert themselves into Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation of Trump provides Democrats with an opening to do just that.
Don’t assume that DeSantis is a safe alternative to Trump
Don’t assume that DeSantis is a safe alternative to Trump, Janan Ganesh, Financial Times
Precisely because the Florida governor is not a natural fit with Maga voters, he tries dangerously hard to please them

Some Conservatives have a theory about this. Having voted Remain, and scolded “nasty” Tories in the past, [Theresa] May was always straining to show the right that she was one of them. The result was textbook overcompensation. A fervent Leaver, with nothing to prove, might have been milder on the status of UK-resident EU citizens, for instance. And slower to invoke Article 50, the formal process of Brexit, when there was no plan.

An ocean away, US Republicans won’t remember her from among the rabble of recent UK premiers. But, as Ron DeSantis courts them, the parable of May is something to keep in mind as a warning. The idea has taken hold that Florida’s governor is a much safer alternative to Donald Trump: a populist, no doubt, but a house-trained one. This is wrong, or at least rash, on two counts.

First, DeSantis is abler and more disciplined than Trump. Even if he believes in just three-quarters of the Maga creed, he can get a greater share of it enacted. Trump’s efforts to subvert the US system always hit against the limits of his own attention span and executive grip. That fail-safe won’t exist with DeSantis.

Second, there is something of May about DeSantis: something of the try-hard.

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