Saturday, February 27, 2021

On Politics: CPAC and the New Republicanism

CPAC has evolved from a family reunion of Republican libertarians, social conservatives and a hawkis
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By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I'm Lisa Lerer, your host.

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The golden statue of the former president being wheeled through the halls of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday may have been a touch on the nose, considering the obvious Old Testament allusion.

But if you were looking for clues about the direction of the Republican Party after the Trump years, an effigy of Donald Trump in an American flag bathing suit may be as symbolic as any golden calf.

In recent years, CPAC has evolved from a family reunion of Republican libertarians, social conservatives and a hawkish foreign policy establishment into Trump-chella.

This year has been no exception, with speaker after speaker focusing on the pet issues of the former president. "Are your votes being distorted?" one ominous video asked, flashing photos of President Biden on the big screen. Mr. Trump plans to address the crowd on Sunday and anything he says about his future political ambitions will inevitably overshadow the entire event.

Yet, the former president may not end up running again — continuing legal issues could kill his bid — but there's little question that he leaves the party reshaped in his image. Even though Mr. Trump often failed to articulate a comprehensive policy doctrine, he has fundamentally remade what being a Republican means.

That shift was made strikingly clear in the remarks of politicians who hope to lead their party into the future — with or without Mr. Trump.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a rock star in conservative circles right now, laid out a pretty concise summary of the new conservatism in his speech on Friday: Anti-"adventurism" abroad, anti-big technology companies, anti-immigration, anti-China and anti-lockdowns.

"We cannot — we will not — go back to the days of the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear," he said, proclaiming Florida to be an "oasis of freedom" in a country suffering from the "the yoke of oppressive lockdowns."

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who opened his remarks with a joke about his much-criticized trip to a Cancún resort, cast conservatives as Jedi "rebels" against the "rigid conformity" of the socialist left — a call to arms at an event steeped in complaints of cultural victimhood. This year's conference is titled "America Uncanceled."

But Mr. Cruz also had a message for members of his own party.

"There's a whole lot of voices in Washington that want to just erase the past four years, want to go back to the world before," he said. "Let me tell ya right now: Donald J. Trump ain't goin' anywhere."

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Josh Hawley, a junior senator from Missouri, after defending his efforts to contest the election results as "taking a stand," proclaimed a "new nationalism" that included breaking up technology companies, standing up to China and tightening borders. The "oligarchs" and "corporate media," he said, want to divide Americans with "lies" like systemic racism. Hours before his speech, Mr. Hawley announced legislation requiring a $15 minimum wage for corporations with revenues over $1 billion.

None of the men, it's worth noting, made any reference to Mr. Biden, a sign that the party continues to lack any cohesive line of attack against the new administration.

But what was equally striking is how far the speeches differed from traditional Republican ideology. A party that has defined itself as defenders of the free market now believes big technology companies wield too much power and the government needs to put more restrictions in place. Concerns about interventionism abroad have replaced hawkish doctrine as the driving foreign policy force. Nativism has gone mainstream and the politics of cultural grievance, focused heavily around race, dominate among conservatives that once delighted in mocking sensitive liberal "snowflakes."

Of course, some of this rhetoric isn't quite accurate. Although pandemic rules vary across the country, stay-at-home orders are lifted in all states and businesses are largely open in most. Even as Republicans fret about being "canceled" by liberals, local parties in recent weeks have censured members of Congress who strayed from overwhelming support of Mr. Trump.

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But Mr. Cruz is correct that there are some Republicans who hope that the party will revert to its pre-Trump policies and rhetoric. After watching the speeches at CPAC, it's hard to imagine how the party could have once rally around a fiscally conservative, hawkish on foreign policy Republican like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, their 2012 nominee.

Back then, Mr. Romney used the conference to burnish his conservative bona fides during the primary, declaring himself "severely conservative." But unlike nine years ago, the Republican Party of today is firmly behind Mr. Trump and his brand of populist politics. In a recent Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll, nearly half of Trump voters even said they would abandon the G.O.P. completely and join a Trump party if the former president decided to create one.

In interviews with Republican voters this week, many showed little interest in returning to the conservative principles of the past — expressing support for policies like stimulus checks, concern about socialism and a desire for less intervention abroad. Many wanted Mr. Trump to run again. But even those who preferred someone new said they wanted to continue pushing his "America first" agenda.

Tim Faulkner, a retired park supervisor from Elgin, Ariz., said he believed that any potential candidate would have to earn the former president's support and be able to carry his movement forward.

"There's a new generation coming up that needs to take the torch, and I think Trump's role would be helping to secure that foundation," he said.

Democrats' $15 minimum wage push hits setback

President Biden and congressional Democrats suffered a major blow this week when the Senate parliamentarian rejected their effort to include a national $15 minimum wage in their stimulus package, undermining part of the new administration's first legislative push. The procedural action may incite significant intraparty battles — between Senate and House Democrats, who intend to pass the bill with the $15 wage included — and the progressive and moderate wings of the party.

I talked to our ace congressional reporter Emily Cochran about what the legislative ruling means for the wage increase, Democratic politics and why anyone even has to listen to a parliamentarian.

Hi Emily! So who is the Senate parliamentarian and why does she have so much power?

Elizabeth MacDonough, the first woman to hold the post, has served as parliamentarian since 2012. In a chamber steeped in tradition and precedent, she is the arbiter of the rules and procedures. Technically, her rulings are not finite and instead serve as guidance — but rarely does the majority disregard the advice of the parliamentarian.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 was a central promise of Democrats on the campaign trail. What happens to that effort now? Can it still happen?

As written, the current provision is all but guaranteed to fail as part of President Biden's stimulus plan, which is being moved through Congress on a fast-track process that imposes strict budgetary rules. Democrats are now scrambling to see if there is a way to reframe or adapt the provision to reach the blessing of the parliamentarian and clear the Senate rules as part of the $1.9 trillion plan. If not, the proposal would require 60 votes to clear the Senate through the regular legislative process — and it doesn't appear to have those votes right now.

Democrats control the White House, Senate and House. What does this tell us about limits on their power?

It's a reminder of the balancing act that is needed with such slim margins in both the House and the Senate, given that Democrats are not united behind either the increase to the $15 minimum wage or removing the procedural and parliamentary impediments in order to pass their agenda without Republican support. For example, there is a precedent for removing the parliamentarian over a ruling congressional leaders did not like — but the White House has already said it will not remove Ms. MacDonough, even as progressives push for her to be overruled or removed.

By the numbers: 10

… That's the percentage increase in personal income last month, according to the Commerce Department. It's the largest jump since April and is almost entirely attributable to the stimulus checks and unemployment insurance payments.

… Seriously

The way we live now: Band practice in Wenatchee, Wash.

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On Politics: In Democrats’ Fight for $15, Unity Proves Elusive

If the Democrats have a problem, it's with the working class.

If the Democrats have a problem, it's with the working class. Their support from voters without college degrees (particularly white voters, but not exclusively) has been slipping in recent years.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, finds its own base more heavily tilted than ever before toward the white working class. These voters remain devoted to former President Donald Trump but don't have much nostalgia for the pro-corporate version of the G.O.P. that predated him and that many Republican leaders are now wishing they could return to.

Many Democrats are now eager to seize upon the opportunity, demonstrating to voters that they haven't become the party of elites and urbanites only.

So when legislators on the party's left flank pushed to make a $15 minimum wage a top priority this year, Democratic leaders got on board, figuring it might signal the party's commitment to working people. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, gave it his firm support, and President Biden included the proposal in his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief proposal — along with the now-standard stimulus checks and unemployment extension.

"There should be a national minimum wage of $15 an hour," Biden said last month as he prepared to enter the Oval Office. "Nobody working 40 hours a week should be living below the poverty line."

Polling suggests that an increase to $15 an hour is popular: Sixty-one percent of Americans, in a Quinnipiac University poll released this month, said they supported it, including 63 percent of independents and a majority of voters across all major income groups.

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But the Democratic Party is still not totally unified — and in an evenly divided Senate, the Democrats need total unity. Two centrist lawmakers, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have indicated that they aren't ready to support an increase to $15 an hour, calling it too steep.

"At the end of the day, we do still struggle with the fact that our 50th vote represents a state that went for Trump by something like 40 points," Sean McElwee, a founder of Data for Progress, a strategy firm that advises top Democrats in Congress, said of Manchin.

So when the Senate's parliamentarian ruled yesterday that a $15 increase did not belong in a bill passed through the budgetary reconciliation process — a decision meaning that it would require at least 60 votes to pass and would therefore be dead on arrival in the Senate — the White House was reported to have breathed a quiet sigh of relief. The Covid-19 relief bill is now set to move ahead without a blanket minimum-wage increase. (Democrats are exploring other partial solutions, including tax incentives for corporations to get them to raise their own wage floors to $15.)

But without a blanket wage increase, observers in and around the Democratic Party say, this issue is not likely to go away. It remains a top priority both for progressives and for Democratic leaders like Schumer and Biden, both of whom objected — at least publicly — to the parliamentarian's announcement.

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"The minimum wage is very popular," McElwee said. "I do think that if I was Joe Biden, I would like to be able to run for re-election on the fact that the average worker is making much more because I was president than they were before."

McElwee pointed to the fact that in various swing states, minimum-wage ballot referendums tend to be popular — far more so, in fact, than Democratic candidates on the same ballots. In Sinema's home state of Arizona, in 2016, voters increased the state minimum wage to $12 an hour by a 58 percent majority, even as the state supported Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Florida voted even more resoundingly to raise its state minimum wage to $15, with 61 percent supporting it.

"What we saw in Florida is that a $15 minimum wage is over 10 points more popular than Democratic electeds," McElwee said. "It's an open-and-shut case."

The strategist Simon Rosenberg — whose moderate-leaning New Democrat Network often finds itself at odds with Data for Progress's vision for the Democratic Party — said that he saw a minimum-wage increase as a winning issue with voters including those toward the center. Rosenberg called Republican lawmakers' seemingly unanimous opposition to it a political "mistake." But he also noted that Republican-led messaging campaigns have been building opposition to the idea of minimum-wage increases for decades.

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"The investment of right-wing business interests in demonizing the minimum wage has been one of the most consistent projects of the right in the last generation," Rosenberg said, referring to major donors such as Charles Koch. "It's a touchstone issue."

The Quinnipiac poll this month found that despite its broad popularity, a $15 minimum wage remained deeply unpopular with Republicans, who opposed it by a 2-to-1 ratio. White people without college degrees, Trump's base, were more evenly split: 47 percent in favor, 51 percent opposed.

Manchin's state is trending away from him politically; it had never voted Republican for president by as wide a margin as it did in 2016 and 2020. So he cannot afford to ignore the effects that the anti-wage-increase messaging campaign has had on core Republican voters.

Rosenberg said that if Democrats were able to burnish their brand by passing other major legislation aimed at workers and families, it could bode well for a minimum-wage increase — even in West Virginia. "I think Joe Manchin wants to be with the Democrats as much as he possibly can, and in order to do that, in his mind, he has to oppose them on certain things," he said. "If in six months the Covid package is popular and the economy is coming back, Manchin's going to have much more running room."

FROM OPINION

Which Covid vaccine should you get?

By Alexandra Sifferlin

A third Covid-19 vaccine is likely to be approved for use in the United States very soon.

Today, a committee of experts for the Food and Drug Administration granted Johnson & Johnson's one-dose Covid-19 vaccine "emergency use authorization" — the green light that allows it to be put into arms across the country.

As the new health and science editor for Opinion, my question when covering the pandemic is always: What does this mean for the average person?

Experts have said for months that people should get any of the F.D.A.-approved vaccines. But it's helpful to understand why.

The effectiveness data for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine looks great compared to any reasonable benchmark for a vaccine against the coronavirus, even if the numbers are not quite as good as those reported by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

It's understandable for people to wonder if they should try to hold out for what they may think is the "better" vaccine. In anticipation of these questions — and, honestly, to address the many DMs and texts I receive from readers and friends about this — I asked Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, the executive director of the public health research group PHICOR, to share the reasons people should get whatever vaccine they can the fastest, based on his published research.

As Lee details in his Op-Ed today, his team developed a computational simulation model of the entire United States and assessed what would happen if people got vaccines of varying levels of efficacy at different rates and times. "As we reported in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, in most cases, getting people vaccinated sooner with a lower efficacy vaccine prevented many more Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths compared to waiting even just a month for a higher efficacy vaccine," Lee writes.

He also argues that there are other factors beyond effectiveness rates that make a vaccine worthwhile. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one dose and can be stored at regular refrigerator temperatures. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines need to be stored in freezing temperatures and require people to receive two shots, separated by a few weeks.

I always hesitate to use the words "game changer," so let's just say the approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has the potential to greatly improve vaccine rollout in the United States and the rest of the world.

And as Lee writes, getting any of the approved vaccines as soon as you are eligible is important — "not just for protecting yourself, but for helping get life back to normal for everyone."

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