Greene County Democrat

Tag: Sarah Huckabee Sanders

  • Newswire : Britt backlash stokes GOP fears about losing women voters

    Alabama Senator Katie Britt

    By: Julia Manchester, The Hill

    Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) State of the Union response is shining a light on the GOP’s struggle to appeal to women voters ahead of November’s elections.
    The rebuttal was met with an avalanche of backlash for being out of touch, with many critics calling the choice to have Britt sitting at a kitchen table for the address sexist.
    Political strategists and observers say Britt’s performance is largely emblematic of her party’s problem in appealing to women voters, particularly in the suburbs, who have recently turned their back on the party.
    “Republicans have now two years in a row have picked a young woman — last year Sarah Huckabee Sanders, this year Katie Britt — to try to shift the image of the Republican Party away from older white men, which is really quite the reality of the party,” said Debbie Walsh, the executive director of the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University.
    And there is no question that Britt is in the minority within her party in the Capitol. She is one of nine Republican women serving in the U.S. Senate. “It is the image they are trying to strike in an attempt to reach women voters in some way,” Walsh said.
    Republicans praised the choice of Britt to deliver the rebuttal, citing the contrast in age between her and President Biden, as well as her own record in the Senate. Last month, Britt played a leading role in helping Republicans navigate a ruling by her state’s Supreme Court that frozen embryos were considered children. She worked to gather support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) as Democrats were using the issue to attack the GOP.
    The GOP has struggled to reach women in recent years, particularly those in the suburbs, since former President Trump took office in 2016. In the 2022 midterms, they helped deliver significant victories to Democrats in key swing states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. According to the Pew Research Center, Biden won 54 percent of suburban voters in general. And back in 2018, 53 percent of suburban women voters said they voted for Democrats, up from 47 percent in 2014 and 51 percent in 2016, according to CBS News exit polling.
    “Not only do they have a problem appealing to women, but it’s just to suburban voters at large,” said Gunner Ramer, political director the Republican Accountability Project, an anti-Trump right-leaning group.
    Britt’s rebuttal featured her at her kitchen table, a location she and her family discuss issues impacting them, she said. Critics on the left and some on the right criticized the senator for using her kitchen backdrop, arguing that it fed into the outdated stereotypes about gender roles in the home. Britt defended the venue choice on “Fox News Sunday,” saying, “Republicans care about kitchen table issues.”
    “We care about faith, family; we care about freedom. We are the ones talking about the economy and the real effects of that,” Britt said.
    Meanwhile, Britt’s performance was excoriated during both a “Saturday Night Live” opening and comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue at Sunday’s Academy Awards.
    On top of all that, Britt has faced backlash over a story she told during the rebuttal of a woman facing sexual violence from two decades ago in Mexico. The senator defended the anecdote in the same “Fox News Sunday” interview, saying it was representative of Biden’s border policy, even if it significantly predated his administration.
    However, the venue choice, coupled with what many have described as an awkward delivery from Britt, resulted in critics pouncing.
    Ramer highlighted a focus group that the Republican Accountability Project conducted with voters from swing states the day after the State of the Union. They overwhelmingly said that “weird” was the word that summed up their reaction to the address.
    “It misreads the voters they need to win back, because appealing to the traditional woman voter sort of thing — a lot of those voters are already going to support Trump,” Ramer said. “What they needed to do was go after the suburban vote, and Katie Britt’s response didn’t do that, and I think we saw that reflected in the focus group we did.”
    And while Britt’s rebuttal may be in the headlines now, the speech itself likely won’t play a long-term role in the GOP’s appeal to women and suburban voters unless Britt is a leading contender to be Trump’s running mate.

  • Newswire : Federal Judge orders Trump Administration to keep DACA in place

    By Roque Planas, Huffington Post

     

    FILE PHOTO: Supporters of the DACA program recipient during a rally outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles
    DACA protestors

    A federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to keep in place the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children from deportation and allows them to work legally, while a lawsuit proceeds.
    The order, signed by U.S. District Judge Williams Alsup, marks a major triumph for immigrant rights groups who have rallied around the program that benefits nearly 700,000 people.
    The preliminary injunction on Trump’s cancellation of DACA requires the Department of Homeland Security “to maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis on the same terms and conditions as were in effect before the rescission on September 5, 2017” ― including allowing those who already benefit from DACA to apply to renew their status.
    The order does not, however, allow people who have never held DACA protections to apply as new applicants.
    “Dreamers’ lives were thrown into chaos when the Trump administration tried to terminate the DACA program without obeying the law,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) said in a statement. “Today’s ruling is a huge step in the right direction.
    The Trump administration “looks forward to vindicating its position in further litigation,” Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley said in a statement.
    “Tonight’s order doesn’t change the Department of Justice’s position on the facts,” the statement said. “DACA was implemented unilaterally after Congress declined to extend these benefits to this same group of illegal aliens.”
    The White House on Wednesday called the judge’s ruling “outrageous,” and Trump, in a tweet, blasted the “court system” as “broken and unfair.”
    “An issue of this magnitude must go through the normal legislative process,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “President Trump is committed to the rule of law, and will work with members of both parties to reach a permanent solution that corrects the unconstitutional actions taken by the last administration.”
    Before the order, the program was scheduled to begin phasing out on March 5.
    Alsup is presiding over five lawsuits challenging the legality of Trump’s termination of DACA that were consolidated into one in the Northern District of California. The state of California, the Regents of the University of California, the city of San José and several DACA recipients are among those suing in an attempt to preserve the program.
    The lawsuits argue that the White House flouted the process for terminating the program in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and that the cancellation was based on flawed legal logic.
    The Obama administration used executive action to create the DACA program in 2012, allowing undocumented immigrants who arrived as children or young teenagers to apply to work legally in the country and avoid deportation for a renewable two-year period.
    The Trump administration announced in September, however, that it would cancel the program, citing a threat from a coalition of 10 states, led by Texas, to challenge the program’s constitutionality.
    At press time, we learned that the Trump Administration is appealing this decision in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and has asked the Supreme Court for an unusual immediate review the decision.

  • Newswire : John Lewis and Bennie Thompson boycott Trump’s visit to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

    By Monique Judge, The Root


     Congressman John Lewis and Bennie Thompson

    Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) announced last Thursday that they are skipping last Saturday’s opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson because Donald Trump will be in attendance—something they consider to be “an insult” to the black heroes commemorated there.
    Thompson and Lewis issued a joint statement that said, “President Trump’s attendance and his hurtful policies are an insult to the people portrayed in this civil rights museum.” According to its website, the museum “shares the stories of a Mississippi movement that changed the world” and “promotes a greater understanding of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and its impact by highlighting the strength and sacrifices of its people.”
    The website continues, ”Visitors will witness the freedom struggle in eight interactive galleries that show the systematic oppression of black Mississippians and their fight for equality that transformed the state and nation. Seven of the galleries encircle a central space called “This Little Light of Mine.” There, a dramatic sculpture glows brighter and the music of the Movement swells as visitors gather.”
    President Donald Trump was the lead person spreading the lie that President Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, was not born in the U. S. President Trump also equated Ku Klux Klan members and Neo-Nazis to people protesting the evils of racism during the deadly White supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Va. last August.
    Repeatedly, in front of the nation, he has flagrantly displayed racial insensitivities; even with his most recent support of Senate Candidate Roy Moore in Alabama, not only an accused pedophile, but a man who has said America was last great during slavery.
    Since his inauguration, Trump and his appointee Attorney General Jeff Sessions have careful demolished important policies put in place during the Obama administration for the purpose of preventing police brutality and other issues of racial inequality in the criminal justice system.
    In addition, President Trump has claimed massive voter fraud in America, a claim that experts say is patently false.
    These are just a handful of the reasons that civil rights leaders opposed the president’s attendance at the Dec. 10 opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. They argue that the museum is like hallowed ground that celebrates those who risked their lives to fight against everything that Trump appears to embrace – despite his words to the contrary.
    “President Trump’s presence at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is not a show of respect. It’s merely a photo op,” says Derrick Johnson, president/CEO of the NAACP. “I live in Mississippi and its civil rights leaders are my mentors, sheroes, and heroes. I cannot sit silently alongside a man who has used the power of his office to turn back the clock on hard-won rights.”
    In response to the announcement from Lewis and Thompson, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement, “We think it’s unfortunate that these members of Congress wouldn’t join the president in honoring the incredible sacrifice civil rights leaders made to right the injustices in our history.”
    Lewis is an icon of the civil rights movement for his work in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was at the lead of the civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March 1965. He also participated in sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee and in the Freedom Rides that ended in a mass arrest in Jackson, Mississippi. So it is fair to say that John Lewis is one of the civil rights heroes recognized in the museum.