#lankford

[porterdavis]

Give us the name, Senator

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Clay Jones

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 10, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 11, 2024

As predicted, last week was an important one for the Republican Party.

The Republicans’ rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday stayed in the news throughout the weekend. On Friday, independent journalist Jonathan Katz figured out that a key story in it was false. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) described a twelve-year-old child sex trafficked by Mexican cartel members, implying that the young girl was trafficked because of President Joe Biden’s border policies.

Katz tracked down the facts. Britt was describing the life of Karla Jacinto, who was indeed trafficked as a child, but not in the present and not in the U.S. and not by cartels. She was trafficked from 2004 to 2008—during the George W. Bush administration—in Mexico, at the hands of a pimp who entrapped vulnerable girls. Jacinto has become an advocate for child victims and has told her story before Congress, and she met Britt at an event for government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.

Britt’s dramatic delivery of the rebuttal had already invited parody and concern about the religious themes she demonstrated. The news that a central image in it was a lie just made things worse. “Everyone’s f*cking losing it,” a Republican strategist told The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”

On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to replace former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who resigned effective Friday, with Trump loyalist Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. They will co-chair the organization and have made it clear their primary goal is to put Trump back in the White House. 

Friday night, on Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a video announcing that the old Republican Party “no longer exists outside of the D.C. beltway…. The move that happened today…that’s the final blow. People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”

Just what that means was crystal clear on Friday night, when Trump hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the Trump Organization’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. The darling of the radical right, Orbán has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and hosted former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and his policies inspired the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation Florida governor Ron DeSantis has championed.

The right wing’s fondness for Orbán springs from his having rejected democracy and replaced it in Hungary with what he calls an “illiberal state.” Orbán and other far-right leaders working against democracy maintain that the central principle of democracy, equality before the law, undermines society. It permits immigration, which, in their minds, dilutes the “purity” of a people, and it requires that LGBTQ+ individuals and women have the same rights as heterosexual men. Such a world challenges the heteronormative patriarchal world traditionalists crave.

Orbán’s takeover of the press, elimination of rival political parties, partisan gerrymandering, capture of the courts, and control of Hungary’s government are not just ideological, though, but also economic. Corruption and the capture of valuable factories and properties for cronies have allowed Orbán and his allies to amass fortunes. 

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said on Friday. Trump said that Orbán simply says, “‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and…he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

On Saturday, Republicans in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, censured Senator James Lankford (R-OK) over his work negotiating the border security measure. In January, state Republicans claimed they had passed a resolution “strongly” condemning Lankford; others said the vote for the resolution was “not legitimate and definitely does not represent the voice of all Oklahoma Republicans.” 

Lankford is a far-right senator whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to represent the Republicans in the negotiations. House Republicans had demanded the border security measure before they would allow a vote on a national security supplemental bill that funds Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

Because the Democrats are desperate to fund Ukraine, they were willing to give up things they had never laid on the table before, including a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States as children, making the bill that emerged from the negotiations strongly favor the Republican position on immigration. The Border Patrol Officers’ union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal all endorsed it.

But the House Republicans’ demand for a border measure appears to have been an attempt to kill the national security supplemental bill altogether. As soon as it became clear that there would be a deal, Trump came out against it. He demanded that Congress kill the measure, and his loyalists agreed.

Lankford, who had helped to produce the strongest border measure in years at the request of the nominal head of the party, has now been censured because he crossed Trump.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Biden signed into law one of the consolidated appropriations bills that must be finished to fund the government. The other must be finished by March 22. 

Biden has continued to ride the momentum built by Thursday’s State of the Union speech. His campaign has released a number of advertisements, and today he was in Georgia, where the largest political action committees representing communities of color—the AAPI Victory Fund, the Latino Victory Fund, and The Collective PAC—endorsed him and pledged $30 million to mobilize communities of color to vote in 2024.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[roughridingrednecks]

Lankford

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans want open borders. Their own rhetoric, not mine. Just like they did in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 when Trump was in office. It's all performance.

You want to never solve issues? Vote for the asinine fools in the Republican Party.

#VoteBlue

[ms-boogie-man]

Ta-dah!!!!…

This just goes to show you Demonrats and Tessio Republicans (RINOs) really do exist

The uni-party cannot get this trash written in the lower House of Congress, so the Senate is going to do it themselves, and Joe Biden will sign it into law if it passes

This bill is not the will of We the People. Schumer, Lankford and Biden are treasonous

Enjoy the final loss of our republic yo

Angie/Maddie🦇❥✝︎🇺🇸

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton led a group of fellow GOP senators Wednesday in denouncing pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.

WHY IT MATTERS: Republican congressional campaign arms are already cutting footage and are ready to launch ads slamming vulnerable Democrats for not condemning the campus protests that have erupted over Israel's war in Gaza.

The escalating tension in recent days has put a spotlight on one of the most sensitive and divisive issues within the Democratic Party.

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING: "These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks," Cotton said in a press conference Wednesday.

"Every university and every student has the right to be able to speak their mind to be able to test out new ideas," said Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Lankford, also a Republican.

• "But when you're talking about screaming at Jewish students, and rabbis [are] saying no longer is this university a safe place for you to be, it violates the very principles that all these universities supposedly stand for."

REALITY CHECK: No encampments or sit-ins have been reported at Arkansas or Oklahoma college campuses.

FLASHBACK: Cotton took to X last week, encouraging "people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands."

• The post was later edited, adding "to get them out of the way" to the sentence.

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING: The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, would require the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism in its enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

• "That's a bill we should promptly bring to the floor and pass over here, as well," Cotton said.

[haveyoureadthispoll]

From a former law enforcement park ranger and investigator, this female-driven true crime adventure follows the author’s quest to find missing hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail by pairing up with an eclectic group of unlikely allies.   As a park ranger with the National Park Service's law enforcement team, Andrea Lankford led search and rescue missions in some of the most beautiful (and dangerous) landscapes across America, from Yosemite to the Grand Canyon. But though she had the support of the agency, Andrea grew frustrated with the service's bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, and left the force after twelve years. Two decades later, however, she stumbles across a mystery that pulls her right back where she left - three young men have vanished from the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile trek made famous by Cheryl Strayed's Wild , and no one has been able to find them. It’s bugging the hell out of her.   Andrea’s concern soon leads her to a wild environment unlike any she’s ever ventured into - missing person Facebook groups. Andrea launches an investigation, joining forces with an eclectic team of amateurs who are determined to solve the cases: a mother of the missing, a retired pharmacy manager, and a mapmaker who monitors terrorist activity for the government. Together, they track the activities of kidnappers and murderers, investigate a cult, rescue a psychic in peril, cross paths with an unconventional scientist, and reunite an international fugitive with his family. Searching for the missing is a brutal psychological and physical test with the highest stakes, but eventually their hardships begin to bear strange fruits—ones that lead them to places and people they never saw coming.

[porterdavis]

Yessiree! Family values

[muddypolitics]

(via James Lankford Stunned GOP Doesn't Actually Want Immigration Fixed HA HA HA Oh Mercy)

The key aspect of this, again, is are we, as Republicans, going to have press conferences and complain the border’s bad and then intentionally leave it open after the worst month in American history in December? Now we’ve got to actually determine, are we going to just complain about things? Are we going to actually address in a change as many things as we can if we have the shot?

[lovecidik]

only months after the wedding, ida found out she was pregnant! ♡

[ruindunburnit]

If the HON vampyre world is so matriarchal and woman-foreward... why did Anastasia take Dragon Lankford's last name when she married him, and why is that not considered so majorly unusual for a vampyre woman to do?

[quaranmine]

by the way i was listening to one of my audiobooks yesterday morning while trying to drag some semblance of energy from my body to go into the office yesterday, and i had two observations

i really should have found and listened to this before writing the fic, because it would have been so helpful as research. although i just checked and it was only released in august 2023 so actually i would've already been most of the way to completion by that point lol

it has given me extra ideas for missing scenes to go in my oneshot book (that's the "letters from the lookout" series).

[loveboatinsanity]

[athletic-collection]

Cole Lankford

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 31, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 1, 2024

Stef W. Kight and Zachary Basu of Axios reported tonight that the border measure, on which a bipartisan group of senators have worked for four months, is “on life support” after former president Trump urged his supporters in the House to block it so he can run on the issue. Senators are still holding out hope they can get it through, blaming “misinformation” about the bill, whose text has not yet been released. 

The attacks on the measure are revealing the increasing extremism of the Republican Party. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) appointed Senator James Lankford (R-OK), who is well liked and is known as a calm conservative, to lead negotiations for the party. Suddenly, Lankford finds himself on the side Trump and his followers oppose. Lankford is now under attack from within his own party. 

The Republican about-face is also threatening to take down U.S. aid to Ukraine, which is fighting off a Russian invasion. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) linked aid to Ukraine to the border deal last November with the argument that the U.S. should not be helping other countries until it helped secure its own border. After Trump’s attack on the border measure, congressional reporter Max Cohen of Punchbowl News reported this afternoon that McConnell has suggested moving ahead with aid for Ukraine. 

"It's time to move something,” Cohen reported McConnell saying, “hopefully including a border agreement. But we need to get help to Israel and Ukraine quickly…. There is bipartisan support here in the Senate for both Israel and Ukraine, hopefully at some point we can get them the support they need."

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told reporters: “It would be nice to change the status quo on the border, but if there is not the political support to do that, then I think we should proceed with the rest of the supplemental,” referring to the measure that provides funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and humanitarian aid to Gaza.  

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a Trump loyalist, has said she would move to overthrow Johnson as speaker if he puts Ukraine funding up for a vote. 

Meanwhile, Ukraine is running short of weapons and ammunition.

Tonight, Senator Angus King (I-ME) spoke on the Senate floor about what U.S. refusal to aid Ukraine would mean. 

King harked back to the failure of European allies to stop Hitler when it would have been relatively easy. “Whenever people write to my office” asking why we are supporting Ukraine, he said, “I answer, Google Sudetenland, 1938.” “We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.”

The upcoming vote on whether to support “the people of Ukraine as they fight for our values,” King said, “will echo throughout the history of this country and the history of the world for generations…. If we back away, walk away, pull out and leave the Ukrainians without the resources to defend themselves, it will compromise the interests of this country for 50 years. It will be viewed as one of the greatest geopolitical mistakes of the 21st century.”

Abandoning Ukraine would embolden Russian president Vladimir Putin, King said. Putin “told us in 2005 that he felt that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He has…pursued the remedy to that catastrophe in his eyes ever since…. In 2008 he gobbled up part of what had been an independent country of Georgia. In 2014…Crimea and eastern Ukraine. [In] 2022, he tried for the rest of Ukraine.”

People say Putin will stop with Ukraine, King said, but “the Finns don't think so. The Swedes don't think so. The Baltic countries don't think so, and the Finns and the Swedes know Russia.”

“Maya Angelou once said if someone tells you who they are, you should believe them,” King said. “Putin has told us who he is. He’s an autocrat. He’s an authoritarian. And he wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. And I believe he wouldn't stop there….  We have to take him at his word…. He despises the west. He thinks NATO is an aggressive alliance, somehow designed to invade or otherwise threaten Russia. NATO doesn't want to invade Russia. NATO wants to keep the lines where they are.” King noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the first crossing of a border of this nature since World War II.”

“[W]hat we're looking at here,” King said, “is…the struggle between the idea of democracy and the rule of law and authoritarianism and totalitarianism…. Ukraine is the opening wedge in that…conflict.” Turning away from Ukraine would embolden Putin, King said, but not only Putin. “[I]f we cut and run in Ukraine, that will change Xi Jinping's calculus about Taiwan. He's going to say well, the Americans aren't going to stick. We don't have to worry too much about them helping the Taiwanese defend themselves.” 

King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, identified the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy and warned what is at stake if the U.S. abandons Ukraine. “Our asymmetric advantage in the world right now is allies,” King said. “China has customers. We have allies…. But our allies are going to say well, wait a minute. You’re with us now but when the going gets tough and you have to maybe have a budget supplemental to stick with us, you're going to walk away. It's going to undermine the confidence of our allies, and in places like Japan and South Korea, they may say we can't count on the Americans to defend us.”

If we abandon Ukraine, he said, we will have destroyed “our ability to negotiate and make deals in the future. Who the heck is going to deal with us if they know we can't be trusted?.... What an…incredible…self-inflicted wound on this country.” King recalled that in the 1780s, France had stood with the fledgling U.S. even as the Revolutionary War dragged on, and noted that “[t]here’s a reasonable chance we wouldn't be the United States of America today, if our ally had walked away…. The whole idea of an alliance is that you can count on somebody when the times are tough. We're sending ammunition. They're sending lives.” 

Addressing right-wing talking points about aid to Ukraine, King said that U.S. aid to Ukraine is “one of the best and strongest and most closely accounted for provisions of aid ever” and that “the idea that nobody else is contributing and Europe isn't doing its part is just bunk.” Europe has given far more to Ukraine than the U.S. as a percentage of the wealth each country produces, he said, and other countries have also taken in millions of refugees.

“[D]emocracy matters,” King said. “Values matter. Freedom of expression, the rule of law matter, and that’s what’s at stake…. This is a historic struggle between authoritarianism, arbitrariness, surveillance, and the radical idea that people can govern themselves. That's what this is all about. This is a battle for the soul of our democracy in the world…. It's worth fighting for. And in this case we don't even have to do the fighting. We just have to supply the arms and ammunition.”

“I have a question for my colleagues,” King said. “When the history of this day is written, as it surely will be, do you really want to be recorded as being on the side of Vladimir Putin?... Or on the side of China, as they contemplate the invasion of Taiwan…. [H]istory's going to record this vote as one of the most important votes that any of us have ever made.”

For his part, King said, “I want to stand on the side of resisting authoritarianism, on the side of democracy, on the side of the values that the country has stood for and that people have been fighting for 250 years.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON