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GOP Congressman Calls For Trump To Drop Out After Proposed Muslim Ban

GOP Congressman Calls For Trump To Drop Out After Proposed Muslim Ban

In a very unusual speech on the House floor Tuesday, Rep. David Jolly (R-IL) sternly denounced Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States: “It is time that my side of the aisle has one less [sic] candidate in the race for the White House — it is time for Donald Trump withdraw from the race.”

He began his floor speech by forcefully criticizing President Obama’s speech to the nation on Sunday night, saying that Obama had not promised any new solutions against terrorism, but had instead “lectured” Congress and the American public. But then he moved on to the subject of The Donald.

“But we also face a test of our commitment to religious freedom — one of the basic freedoms upon which our nation was founded. And we are either going to defend that religious freedom, or we are not,” he said. “It should be heartbreaking to every American that we have a frontrunner in the presidential race that suggests there will be a religious test for anybody who wishes to come to our shores. It is an affront for our very principles upon which our nation was founded.”

He also added that Trump’s call to discriminate against one religion would in turn become a threat to people of any religion: “I’m a born-again Christian — I believe in the saving grace of the Jesus Christ that I call my God. And the beautiful thing about this country is that I can stand here on the House floor among my peers, and in front of the nation, and declare that faith without fear of any reprisal. But if Donald Trump has his way, we may not have the liberty to do that anymore.”

Jolly was elected to the House in a special election in March 2014, and then won his first full term that November. He is now running for the United States Senate in a wide-open Republican primary, perhaps due at least in part to a new round of court-ordered changes to Florida’s congressional district lines that made his own seat lean much more Democratic.

Jolly endorsed Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination this past June, though more recently he has speculated that Marco Rubio might ultimately become the nominee.

But one thing’s for sure: If he has to run for Senate with Donald Trump at the top of his ticket, David Jolly definitely won’t be very… um, happy.

Republicans Can’t Win By Attacking Health Care In 2014

Republicans Can’t Win By Attacking Health Care In 2014

For me, the fact that Republicans keep using the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – as a political football is a tragedy. Sure, the law has problems, but it is already saving lives and improving the health of millions of Americans.

Thankfully, it seems that Republicans who are counting on attacking the health reform system to get them into the end zone will be stopped short of the goal line based on numbers coming out of a March special election for a Florida House seat

For me, the Affordable Care Act comes down to people’s lives and health. Consider the story of a young man I met who told me that this new avenue to becoming insured had saved his life.

He had some symptoms that made him worry about his health. But he, like many Americans without insurance, ignored them, as he couldn’t afford to see the doctor. After the Affordable Care Act became law, he got coverage through his parents’ health insurance plan, and on visiting a doctor, found out he had stage 4 — that’s advanced — cancer. Fortunately, he got to the doctor in time to save his life.

That young man is far from alone. As of the end of February, some 11 million Americans have health coverage under the new law. Repealing it, as Republicans continue to insist, would take away coverage from each and every one of them.

In the Florida election, Republican David Jolly said “I’m fighting to repeal Obamacare, right away.” His opponent, Democrat Alex Sink, countered, “We can’t go back to insurance companies doing whatever they want. Instead of repealing the health care law, we need to keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong.”

The key part of Sink’s message was to remind voters why people wanted health care reform in the first place. As one of Sink’s TV ads said, “Jolly would go back to letting insurance companies deny coverage.”

That’s an effective reminder of the huge problems Americans have had for decades, when insurance companies could deny care because of a pre-existing condition, charge people higher rates because they were sick, and even charge women higher rates than men. The ACA ended all that.

The candidates in Florida pushed especially hard for the votes of seniors, which is not surprising given both Florida’s high senior population and the fact that seniors vote more frequently than other age groups.

In its ads for Jolly, The Republican Congressional Campaign repeated the same misleading charge that Republicans used successfully in 2010 to scare seniors against the ACA, that it cut $716 billion from Medicare. But unlike 2010, when Democrats did not respond to attacks on the ACA, Sink pushed back.

She reminded seniors that the ACA actually provides important new Medicare benefits, including closing the infamous prescription drug “donut hole.” Sink’s ads accurately said, “His [Jolly’s] plan would even force seniors to pay thousands more for prescription drugs.”

By Election Day, voters had a clear contrast between the positions of the candidates on the ACA. It was a close election, with Jolly winning by a small margin (48.4 percent to 46.5 percent) in a district with an 11-point Republican advantage, one that has been represented by the GOP for nearly 60 years.

But polling found that independent voters in the district supported the “keep and fix” position over the “repeal” position by a margin of 57 percent to 31 percent. Sink actually gained ground over Jolly during the election on the question of which candidate had a better position on the ACA.

I am very much looking forward to the time when Congress can start having real debates on how, as Sink said, “we can keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong” with the Affordable Care Act. However, it looks like it will take at least one more election, in 2014, to get us to that point.

We will turn the corner if progressives do not sit on the sidelines, but instead welcome the debate that Republicans insist on having about repealing the ACA.

That debate is an opportunity for people to be reminded in concrete terms that the new health care program, for all its shortcomings, is about providing every American with the peace of mind that comes with having health coverage.

Richard Kirsch is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States. He’s also a senior advisor to USAction.

Cross-posted from Other Words

Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr

Keep Calm And Carry On: Jolly’s Win Does Not Presage Republican Wave

Keep Calm And Carry On: Jolly’s Win Does Not Presage Republican Wave

David Jolly won an upset victory over Democrat Alex Sink in Tuesday’s special election in Florida’s 13th congressional district, sending another Republican to the House of Representatives, and unleashing a torrent of breathless predictions that Democrats are doomed in 2014.

A National Journal article by Josh Kraushaar, titled “Why a Republican Wave in 2014 is Looking More Likely Now,” and Joe Scarborough’s declaration that “we may have something historic here happening, where you have one act [Obamacare] actually causing grave damage to a political party two midterms in a row” typify this brand of speculative political analysis.

That makes for an easy narrative, but it’s grounded in very few facts. It’s entirely possible — or even probable — that Republicans make major gains in the 2014 midterms. They may even win a Senate majority. But if they do, it will have nothing to do with what happened in Pinellas County on Tuesday night.

For starters, as political scientist Alan Abramowitz pointed out after a 2011 special election in New York — in which Republican Bob Turner upset Democrat David Weprin, prompting excited (and false) reports of an impending Republican wave in 2012 — the results of special elections do not accurately predict the results of subsequent general elections.

“An analysis of the results of all special House elections since World War II shows that while there is a weak relationship between the net party swing in special elections and the net party swing in the subsequent general election (the correlation is .32), special election results have no impact once you control for other factors such as the party of the president in midterm elections, seats held by the parties going into the election and the incumbent president’s approval rating,” Abramowitz wrote.

A quick look at the specifics of Florida’s special election makes it clear that this contest is no exception.

First, turnout was very low. Just 183,634 voters cast ballots in the election, down from 329,347 in the 2012 general election, and 266,934 in the 2010 midterm. To be clear, Republicans — who have a narrow registration advantage in the district — did a much better job getting their voters out to the polls than Democrats did. But Florida Democrats’ failure to convince voters to turn out for Alex Sink in March tells us exceedingly little about, say, Alaska Democrats’ ability to get out the vote for Mark Begich in November.

Second, there’s no evidence that Obamacare — which has been widely labeled as the hinge on which the election swung — actually served as a decisive factor in the election. There is no exit polling available for the race, but polls leading up to election day suggested that voters had other priorities; a Februrary Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll, for example, found that while 39 percent said the Affordable Care Act was “very important” to their voting preference, 33 percent said it was just “somewhat important,” and 26 percent said it is “not at all important” (in fairness, that poll also said that Sink would win).

And while the Affordable Care Act featured prominently in the barrage of television ads that saturated the airwaves throughout the campaign, it was hardly the sole focus of the race. In fact, Jolly didn’t even mention the law in his victory speech, choosing instead to focus on his commitment to local issues.

But even if it turns out that Obamacare did seal the victory for Jolly, there’s no reason to assume that the issue will spark a Republican wave. As Abramowitz reminds us, the way that 180,000 Floridians feel about the law in March tells us very little about how some two million voters in North Carolina or Georgia will feel about it eight months from now. And national polls suggest that the law is not set up to be a clear electoral winner for either party.

Finally, in Florida’s election, one must consider Libertartian candidate Lucas Overby, who won about 5 percent of the vote. As Nick Gillespie points out in Reason, Overby’s platform makes it very plausible that he pulled more votes away from Sink than he did from Jolly (in the same manner that Libertarian Robert Sarvis pulled more votes from Democrat Terry McAuliffe than he did from Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial election). Again, with no exit polls, it’s impossible to know for sure. But there’s a chance that were Overby not in the race, Sink would have won. If that were the case, would the media be running with overheated reports that Democrats will be in the catbird seat come November?

There’s no question that Sink’s loss should be a major disappointment for Democrats, who squandered a real shot at winning a seat that Republicans have held for decades. And there’s also no question that Democrats, saddled by an unfriendly electoral map and an unpopular president, are in danger of suffering big losses in the midterms. But there is simply no reason to believe that last night’s result provides a roadmap for future elections across the nation. If Republicans do make big gains in November, it will have nothing to do with David Jolly or Alex Sink.

Photo: Cherie Diez/Tampa Bay Times/MCT

GOP Emphasis On Obamacare Helps David Jolly Win House Seat In Florida

GOP Emphasis On Obamacare Helps David Jolly Win House Seat In Florida

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Republicans scored a significant victory in a special congressional election Tuesday, holding on to a seat in a swing district in Florida that Democrats had high hopes of capturing after a campaign that focused heavily on President Barack Obama’s health care law.

With all precincts reporting, Republican David Jolly held a 3,400-vote margin over Democrat Alex Sink in the district, which stretches along the Gulf Coast north of St. Petersburg. The returns remain unofficial until final mail-in and provisional ballots can be counted, but Sink conceded defeat in a statement to supporters shortly after the polls closed.

The Republican and Democratic parties and allied groups spent more than $12 million on the brief campaign, according to disclosure reports compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s about six times the average full-year House campaign in 2012, and an apparent record for a special election.

The money financed a deluge of television ads, robo-calls and mailers, mostly centered on national issues, which largely seemed to drown out local concerns in the contest.

Both parties saw the special election as a good opportunity to try out campaign themes they hope to emphasize this fall.

Special elections “give a test bed of issues and how they play out,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) told reporters Tuesday before the votes were reported. “You can test messages, and you can test strategies, and you can test your theories on voter turnout and ID.”

The Republican theory in this case was that a heavy emphasis on Obamacare would motivate conservative voters to head to the polls, making up for Jolly’s drawbacks as a candidate, which included his current profession, Washington lobbyist, and his relative lack of money.

Although both sides cautioned in advance against over-interpreting the results of special elections, that Republican bet paid off. That’s bad news for Democrats and probably will set off a new round of nervousness among party strategists and office holders as they look ahead to the fall.

The country has relatively few congressional districts that remain truly competitive between the parties. Most Democrats already have pretty much given up on winning back control of the House this year, but if they have any hope of keeping the GOP from widening its lead, they need to be able to win districts such as the St. Petersburg-area one.

Moreover, although voters in the district are significantly whiter and older than the national average, so are the swing voters in many of the states that will hold elections this year that could determine control of the Senate.

In the aftermath of the defeat, Democrats pointed to the district’s longtime Republican leanings and the heavy spending by outside groups on Jolly’s behalf.

“Republican special interest groups poured in millions to hold on to a Republican congressional district that they’ve comfortably held for nearly 60 years,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

But as Republicans cheerfully noted, Democrats and their allies from unions, environmental groups and liberal political action committees outspent the GOP side by almost $1 million in the race.

Jolly’s “victory shows that voters are looking for representatives who will fight to end the disaster of Obamacare” and restrain government spending, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “In November, voters all across the country will have the chance to send the same message.”

Moreover, although Republicans did have the district’s history on their side, Obama carried the district in 2008 and 2012. In those years, voter turnout was significantly higher than in this off-cycle election, underscoring the advantage Democrats have in presidential years and the corresponding problem they face in getting their voters to the polls in midterm contests.

Sink led Jolly in mail-in ballots and other early votes, but she was swamped in the election-day turnout.

The special election stemmed from the death last fall of Republican C.W. “Bill” Young, who had represented the area for nearly 42 years. Before he became a lobbyist, Jolly had served as an aide to Young.

The winner gets just 10 months in office, the remainder of Young’s term. Jolly will have to immediately begin preparing for another fight in November, although Democrats, who will be hotly contesting the state’s governorship, are unlikely to be able to field as well-funded a challenger.

Screenshot/Youtube