Political Jason

Vulnerable Republicans have a clear message for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: no deal, no recess. With talks between the White House and Democratic leadership at an impasse, Senate Republicans up in November are pressing for the chamber to stay in session until some agreement is reached. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who faces a potentially competitive re-election challenge, said that it would “look like a dereliction of duty” for the Senate to go home without clinching a deal as millions…

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Rep. Roger Marshall won the GOP primary for an open Senate seat in Kansas on Tuesday, turning aside the controversial Kris Kobach — to the relief of Republicans concerned that Kobach could put not just the state but the party’s Senate majority at risk this fall. Marshall had 37 percent of the vote compared to 26 percent for Kobach when The Associated Press called the race. The result was a more decisive victory for Marshall than expected by many Republicans,…

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A left-leaning group focused on persuading religious Americans to vote out Donald Trump in November has recruited some of the president’s leading Republican agitators to assist them. On Wednesday, Vote Common Good will launch a new partnership with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump GOP group founded by veteran Republican strategists, to mobilize faith voters to reject Trump on Election Day. The initiative will focus on courting white evangelicals and white Catholics — two demographics Trump won by significant margins in…

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President Donald Trump on Tuesday reversed his opposition to mail-in voting and encouraged it — at least in one crucial battleground state — after railing against the practice for months amid the coronavirus pandemic. “Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all…

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The White House is considering a trio of executive orders aimed at shaking up coronavirus relief negotiations with Democrats, a sign of frustration within the Trump administration at the sluggish pace of the talks with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The three actions under consideration would delay the collection of federal payroll taxes, reinstitute an expired eviction moratorium, and in the riskiest gambit of them all, extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits using unspent money already appropriated…

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President Donald Trump on Monday slammed White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx after the public health official said the pandemic was “extraordinarily widespread.” Trump’s attack comes shortly after top White House officials admonished House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for undermining trust in Birx. “So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics,”…

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Senate GOP leaders and the White House have shown no clear plan to break a deadlock with Democrats over a new coronavirus relief package, said Republican senators and Trump administration officials. A week of closed-door talks between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on one side and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on the other have yielded little progress. At the same time, a $600-per-week federal unemployment benefit has…

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President Donald Trump on Monday claimed to have the authority to issue an executive order addressing the expected influx of mail-in voting in the November election and said he hadn’t ruled out doing so, in spite of the Constitution’s expressly giving states the right to run their elections. “I have the right to do it,” Trump insisted, adding: “We haven’t got there yet, but we’ll see what happens.” Trump made the assertion during a coronavirus briefing at the White House…

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Donald Trump’s all-out war on mail voting is backfiring in battleground states. New private polling shared first with POLITICO showed that Republicans have become overwhelmingly concerned about mail balloting, which Trump has claimed without evidence, will lead to widespread voter fraud. A potentially decisive slice of Trump’s battleground-state base — 15 percent of Trump voters in Florida, 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 10 percent in Michigan — said that getting a ballot in the mail would make them less likely…

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President Donald Trump has extended the federal deployment of nearly 25,000 National Guard members detailed to coronavirus relief efforts until the end of 2020, but ordered states to start picking up 25 percent of the tab — millions per month at a time states are struggling financially. Though many states are reporting record cases and hospitalizations amid a resurgence of the virus, the memorandum released Monday night says the decrease in financial support comes “as the United States transitions to…

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