I hurd that here is another vote to impeach.
Hurd has been trying to sound the alarm, but he’s found GOP leaders unreceptive and afraid of crossing Trump.
“If you’re at the age of 40 in most places across this country, you have to whisper that you’re a Republican,” he lamented in a June speech at a Pride Month event sponsored by the Log Cabin Republicans, according to the Washington Blade. “This is a party that is shrinking. The party is not growing in some of the largest growing parts of our country. Why is that? … It’s real simple. … Don’t be a racist. Don’t be a misogynist. Don’t be a homophobe. These are real basic things that we all should learn when we were in kindergarten. But, unfortunately, there’s too many people that don’t follow those things.”
-- In an interview last night with The Post, Hurd warned that Democrats have a chance of carrying Texas in the 2020 presidential election. That would be the first time since Jimmy Carter did so in 1976. A Democratic victory in the Lone Star State would make it virtually impossible for Trump to get reelected. “When you look at trends, the two-largest growing groups of voters are Latinos and young people,” Hurd told our Robert Moore. “And we know what the broader trends are happening there.”
The Daily 202: Will Hurd’s retirement from the House, at 41, is a bow to the Republican realignment under Trump
By James Hohmann
August 2 at 10:44 AM
With Mariana Alfaro
THE BIG IDEA: The lone black Republican in the House announced Thursday night that he will not run for reelection next year, as President Trump escalated his attacks on Baltimore and other urban centers during a rally in Ohio.
This split screen was a coincidence, but the events are not unrelated. Trump’s election has accelerated a realignment between the two parties. Many white voters who historically supported Democrats gravitate toward the GOP across the industrial Midwest, as many millennials and minorities across the Sunbelt increasingly identify with the Democratic Party because of their distaste for the president.
Texas Rep. Will Hurd, who is retiring from Congress at the ripe age of 41, was one of four House Republicans to vote last month for the resolution to condemn Trump’s racist statements about the four liberal women he serves alongside.
There is a realistic chance that none of the four GOP dissidents will remain in Congress come 2021. Another member of the quartet, Susan Brooks of Indiana, previously announced her retirement. There’s speculation that Fred Upton may follow in Michigan. And Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania is one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the country.
Ironically, Brooks also serves as the recruitment chair for the National Republican Congressional Committee. She’s one of only 13 female Republicans in the House. Another, Martha Roby of Alabama, announced her retirement last Friday. GOP officials have struggled to recruit women to run, and when they have succeeded, many female candidates have lost in primaries to more conservative men.
-- Hurd has been trying to sound the alarm, but he’s found GOP leaders unreceptive and afraid of crossing Trump.
“If you’re at the age of 40 in most places across this country, you have to whisper that you’re a Republican,” he lamented in a June speech at a Pride Month event sponsored by the Log Cabin Republicans, according to the Washington Blade. “This is a party that is shrinking. The party is not growing in some of the largest growing parts of our country. Why is that? … It’s real simple. … Don’t be a racist. Don’t be a misogynist. Don’t be a homophobe. These are real basic things that we all should learn when we were in kindergarten. But, unfortunately, there’s too many people that don’t follow those things.”
-- In an interview last night with The Post, Hurd warned that Democrats have a chance of carrying Texas in the 2020 presidential election. That would be the first time since Jimmy Carter did so in 1976. A Democratic victory in the Lone Star State would make it virtually impossible for Trump to get reelected. “When you look at trends, the two-largest growing groups of voters are Latinos and young people,” Hurd told our Robert Moore. “And we know what the broader trends are happening there.”
Speaking to The Post, Hurd reiterated his criticisms of Trump’s tweets that four of his congressional colleagues should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Three of the women are from the United States, and the fourth, Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), is a Somali refugee who became a U.S. citizen as a teenager. “When you imply that because someone doesn’t look like you, in telling them to go back to Africa or wherever, you’re implying that they’re not an American and you’re implying that they have less worth than you,” Hurd explained.
-- In Cincinnati, meanwhile, Trump said Democrats who lead urban centers “deliver poverty for their constituents and privilege for themselves.” In addition to Baltimore, he took aim at Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. “For decades, these communities have been run exclusively by Democrat politicians, and it’s been total one-party control of the inner cities,” the president said. He called federal funding sent to these areas “stolen money and it’s wasted money, and it’s a shame.”
“And he invited members of the crowd to criticize Baltimore, asking them to shout out the names of countries with comparable homicide rates. When one supporter yelled out, ‘Afghanistan,’ Trump repeated him, saying, ‘I believe it’s higher than Afghanistan,’ prompting laughter from some in the crowd,” per Josh Dawsey, Felicia Sonmez and Laura Hughes. “As protesters disrupted his remarks in Cincinnati on Thursday night, Trump sought to blame the city’s Democratic leader, declaring, ‘You must have a Democrat mayor. Come on, law enforcement.’” (Unlike in North Carolina, there were no chants of “Send her back.”)
-- Over 70 percent of Hurd’s constituents are Latino. Hurd is one of only three Republicans left in the House who represents a district that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. Going into the midterms, there were about two dozen such Republicans. (She won there by 3.5 points.)
-- This spring, Hurd was one of 14 House Republicans to vote for the resolution of disapproval to overturn Trump’s national emergency declaration. The president issued an order to divert money appropriated for the military toward a border wall, which Hurd says is a bad idea. Hurd subsequently voted for the unsuccessful effort to override the president’s veto.
-- There have been early warning signs that Hurd would be a short-timer. On key votes so far this year, for example, Hurd has sided with Trump only 51 percent of the time. In the previous two years, Hurd took Trump’s side 95 percent of the time on votes that mattered, according to a tabulation by FiveThirtyEight.
In June, Hurd broke with House Republicans to vote for a bill – doomed in the Senate – that would create a pathway to citizenship for the “dreamers,” those undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children.
In May, Hurd split with his party to vote for a disaster-relief bill that included more aid money for Puerto Rico than Trump wanted to provide for the commonwealth.
In March, he backed the resolution opposing Trump’s ban on openly transgender people serving in the military.
In February, Hurd voted with Democrats to require background checks on all firearms sales and to end U.S. military assistance to Saudi-led forces in the Yemen civil war.
In January, he backed the unsuccessful push to stop Trump from relaxing sanctions on Russian companies linked to an oligarch who is pals with Vladimir Putin. Most Senate Republicans sided with the president, and the sanctions were lifted.
-- A former CIA officer, Hurd has also been urging his party to take the threat of Russian election interference more seriously.He focused on the Kremlin’s efforts to mess with the 2020 presidential election as he questioned former special counsel Bob Mueller last week during the House Intelligence Committee hearing. Last summer, he also spoke out after Trump’s buddy-buddy news conference with Putin in Helsinki.
-- Bigger picture, Hurd’s planned departure puts in stark relief the degree to which the GOP’s diversity problems – a serious challenge for decades – have grown worse since Trump took over the party three summers ago and pushed it in a more nativist, exclusionary direction. Of the 250 Republicans in Congress, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott is poised to be the only African American Republican left. Former Republican congresswoman Mia Love, another African American, lost reelection in Utah in the midterms.
Rep. Justin Amash, whose father is Palestinian and whose mother is Syrian, quit the GOP last month after endorsing Trump’s impeachment. The president promised to support a primary challenge to the libertarian-minded congressman.
-- Hurd’s announcement is another blow to the GOP’s hopes of retaking the House in 2020. Nine Republicans have declared that they are retiring. Six of those have come in the past week, including two other Texans. This reflects the widespread expectation among Republicans that their party won’t win back the majority next year and an understandable desire not to toil in the minority of a majoritarian institution.
Last cycle, 34 House Republicans opted not to run for reelection – the most since 1930. At this point in 2017, though, there were fewer announced GOP retirements. “This is almost as big as Paul Ryan retiring announcement last year,” says Paul Kane, one of our congressional reporters. “Hurd wasn’t just any swing-seat Republican. He was supposed to be the 21st century GOP. He is - no, was - the future of GOP.”
History is also against them. If Republicans were to win the House, it would be first time since 1952 that a party flipped control of the chamber during a presidential year. Assuming the GOP prevails in next month’s do-over election in North Carolina, where the results were thrown out because of alleged election fraud by a Republican operative, the party will still need 18 pickups.
-- Democrats said they would have defeated Hurd if he ran again and expressed confidence that they will win his seat. Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones lost to Hurd by only about a thousand votes last year. She’s running again in 2020. “The simple facts are that hypocrite Trump Republican Will Hurd did not stand a chance in the 23rd congressional district,” Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Manny Garcia said in a statement. “Clearly Will Hurd knew his time was up.” National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) called Hurd a “patriot” and pledged that the GOP “will fight tooth and nail” to hold the district.
-- Hurd says he would like to run again for elected office at some point, though he didn’t specify which one. “I think I can help the country in a different way,” the congressman said. “And I think I have an opportunity to help make sure the Republican Party looks like America.”
“He has made or scheduled trips in recent months to New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina, with an eye toward the 2024 Republican presidential calendar,” Moore reports. “Hurd also repeated his earlier pledge to vote for Trump if he’s the Republican nominee in 2020. He said Hispanics, African Americans and other groups would be receptive to conservative themes if they weren’t drowned in racially charged rhetoric.”
-- Washington’s new Catholic leader — the country’s lone black archbishop — issued his first public statement since his installation yesterday, accusing Trump of “diminishing our national life” with his “tweets on some members of Congress, deploring Baltimore and related matters.”
“Wilton Gregory, who came to Washington in May, is known through his long, prominent career for being nonconfrontational on hot-button issues in public while working quietly behind the scenes,” religion beat reporter Michelle Boorstein notes. “But on Thursday, Gregory signaled that he wants to use his higher-profile perch in the nation’s capital to challenge the use of identity — by race, national origin or otherwise — as a tool of attack. He said … that he has been meeting privately with major Catholic lay groups, including the massive Knights of Columbus, to press them to ‘promote respect’ and to work to ‘reject racism, disrespect or brutality in speech and action.’"
“I have stressed that I am a pastor and fellow disciple of Jesus, not a political leader,” Gregory says in the statement. “There are, however, sometimes, when a pastor and a disciple of Jesus is called to speak out to defend the dignity of all God’s children.” ( Read the whole thing here.)
-- Leaders of Washington National Cathedral — the national cathedral of the Episcopal Church denomination — also issued a stinging critique of the president this week: “As faith leaders who serve at Washington National Cathedral … we feel compelled to ask: After two years of President Trump’s words and actions, when will Americans have enough?” they wrote in an impassioned statement titled “Have We No Decency? A response to President Trump.” ( Read it here.)
-- Meanwhile, prominent pastors associated with the religious right are balking at any suggestion that Trump’s recent comments were racist. From the AP: “‘He does not judge people by the color of their skin,’ said the Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the Southern Baptist megachurch First Baptist Dallas and a frequent guest at the White House. ‘He judges people on whether they support him,’ Jeffress said. ‘If you embrace him, he’ll embrace you. If you attack him, he’ll attack you. That’s the definition of colorblind.’ … [The Rev. Franklin] Graham, the son of renowned evangelist Billy Graham and president of the charity Samaritan’s Purse, said the president’s critics had devalued the word ‘racism.’ ‘The left has weaponized it and uses it against their opponents,’ he said in a telephone interview Thursday. ‘The president is not afraid to go after anyone — their color has nothing to do with it. It’s the person’s ideology and politics.’”
-- Separately, Republicans are reckoning this week with the emergence of a 1971 audiotape in which Ronald Reagan referred to African delegates at the United Nations as “monkeys.” The then-governor of California told then-President Richard Nixon: “Damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Historian Tim Naftali unearthed the tape, record by Nixon, and wrote a piece about it for the Atlantic.
In an op-ed for today’s Post, Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis says that these words are an “aberration” and don’t reflect how she was raised. “There is no defense, no rationalization, no suitable explanation for what my father said on that taped phone conversation,” Davis writes. “I believe, if my father had, years after the fact, heard that tape, he would have asked for forgiveness. He would have said, ‘I deeply regret what I said — that’s not who I am.’ He would have sought to make amends for the pain his words caused. … Forgiveness is always hard — it’s a wrestling match deep in the soul. … In reaching for forgiveness in myself, my hope is that others will forgive my father for words that should never have been uttered in any conversation.”
-- An alarming trend: Political rallies are becoming more dangerous.
A Kentucky man has been charged with assault after punching an anti-Trump protester outside the president’s rally in Cincy. Tim Elfrink reports: “Protesters were waving signs outside Trump’s rally in Cincinnati last night when a red pickup truck pulled up to the crowd. Someone in the passenger seat started yelling, and a few protesters shouted back, according to the local TV affiliate WCPO. Suddenly, the door flew open and a man in a green polo hopped out, fists cocked. As the crowd gasped and screamed, the man, later identified by local media as 29-year-old Dallas Frazier, landed a quick volley of punches to the face of Mike Alter, 61. Within a few seconds, a police officer rushed in to handcuff Frazier. … He’s due in court at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, WXIX reported. As police led Frazier away from the scene, his arms secured behind his back, the crowd of protesters modified a favorite chant from Trump’s rallies. ‘Lock him up!’ they yelled.”
In Arizona a few hours later, a man was arrested at an Elizabeth Warren rally that drew 3,500 people after tussling with pro-Trump protesters. Annie Linskey reports: “The man was handcuffed after he resisted when security at the Marquee Theater asked him to leave. He was forcibly dragged out as reporters filmed. Jennifer Harrison, a member of the AZ Patriots, said the man tried to grab the cell phone of a group member recording the event. She also said he threatened to hit her. … Members of the group wore red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats at the Warren event and unfurled a Trump flag. Harrison said the group came to record Warren’s event and protest ‘the socialism that she’s peddling.’ … Detective Greg Bacon, a spokesman for the Tempe Police Department, confirmed the man would be charged with ‘assault and disorderly conduct.’”
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