Axios reports on the latest PRRI poll on Christian Nationalism. Surprise! Most Americans aren’t for it:
This once-fringe ideology has become prevalent in some deeply red states at a time when the nation overall is increasingly diverse and less religious.
The new data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas come days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should receive legal protections as “unborn life” — and cited Christianity in its reasoning.
7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said.
In California, New York and Virginia, more than 75% of respondents said they were rejecters or skeptics.
In five deeply red states, at least 45% of respondents said they were adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism: North Dakota (50%), Mississippi (50%), Alabama (47%), West Virginia (47%) and Louisiana (46%).
States with the highest levels of support for Christian nationalism form a horseshoe shape, starting in the upper Midwest, dipping down into the deep South, and then through the Appalachian Mountains.
Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times more likely than Democrats (16%) to hold Christian nationalist views, the survey found.
Majorities of two religious groups hold Christian nationalist beliefs: white evangelicals (66%) and Hispanic evangelicals (55%). Both groups are strong supporters of former President Trump, other polls have indicated.
This ideology is mainstream in the Republican party. This is the crisis of democracy as much as anything.
Christian nationalism is a set of beliefs centered around white American Christianity’s dominance in most aspects of life in the United States.
Many Christian nationalists believe the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation.
Many also believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values and that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.
“It’s really a claim for an ethno-religious state, and so there’s nothing democratic about that worldview,” Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, tells Axios. Jones said some Christian nationalists view political foes as evil or demonic rather than as fellow citizens with different opinions, and see them as needing to be conquered.
We may think this is just another group of fringe wingnuts and GOP opportunists angling for power. But the reality is that our democratic system favors minoritarian government (largely due to the necessity of appeasing the slave holders) and this is not something anyone should dismiss out of hand. There is a lot of money and power pushing this stuff for their own reasons. And these people are very serious.
McConnell on the Senate floor announcing his upcoming retirement as Senate leader: "Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them." pic.twitter.com/gyvZjNoxba
I don’t think anyone who reads this blog needs me to recite chapter and verse of what this man has done to America with his “ends justify the means” tactics. We all know what he’s done. But even he isn’t hardcore enough for the MAGAs.
He says that he knows the politics of his party and he knows that they have become so extreme that they will no longer tolerate him. He’s lost control of them. God help us if Trump wins another term and gets a congressional majority.
They insisted that an embryo’s stem cells represented a human with full human rights. Of course IVF is on the chopping block
This was the reason that those “fetal personhood”laws were all passed originally — to placate the extremists who would rather see actual people suffering and dying than allow embryos or fetal tissue to be used for life-saving research. Every time a Republican has been in the white house it’s been a huge controversy. IVF wasn’t discussed much on the right and when it was they turned to the far right Evangelicals who call the embryos “snowflake babies” and insist they should be adopted and implanted. (Considering how many of them there are it would obviously take a “Handmaids Tale” level of forced pregnancies to make that happen.)
When Donald Trump attacked the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos should be considered children, it was widely seen as a glaring indicator of a new political reality. Trump and Republicans, analysts noted, recognize the dangers of appearing aligned against in vitro fertilization and are bolting from the decision as fast as possible.
But for a largely overlooked reason, this political morass will be harder for Republicans to extricate themselves from than they might think. This issue will continue playing out not just on the federal level but also at the level of the states, where the true implications of GOP positions on reproductive rights will be harder to evade.
Democrats are planning to make a big issue out of IVF in this year’s battle for control of state legislatures, strategists tell me. This will entail highlighting state-level bills and laws that define fetuses as people and could impact access to IVF, especially now that anti-choice activists are emboldened by the Alabama ruling.
[…]
Democrats plan to highlight the GOP push for so-called “fetal personhood bills,” which seek to enshrine full rights for fetuses on the grounds that life begins at fertilization. According to the Guttmacher Institute, proposals have been introduced in at least a dozen states, reflecting the rush of anti-abortion legislation unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 striking down abortion rights.
Many of these bills don’t have protections for IVF, says Candace Gibson, the institute’s director of state policy. Gibson notes that the implications of these proposals for IVF remain murky, as this is largely uncharted legal territory. But she says the Alabama ruling could galvanize some anti-choice activists to push a fetal personhood agenda “even more aggressively.”
The Alabama ruling revolved largely around language in the state constitution. But as The New Republic’s Matt Ford has explained, it demonstrates that the logic of fetal rights leads fairly straightforwardly to prohibitions on IVF, making it a highly significant moment for the fetal personhood movement’s pursuit of state-level legislation.
People have been warning that these “fetal personhood” bills inevitably lead to banning IVF and ultimately surveillance of pregnant women for “suspicious” miscarriages if Roe was overturned. It is the logical consequence of banning abortion.
Think about it. These people have been outlawing stem cell research with embryos successfully going back decades because they say that it’s killing a child That’s the basis for “fetal personhood” bills in the congress and around the country. How on earth can they now say that IVF should be exempt but life-saving research isn’t?
These anti-abortion zealots have always been extremists. They been terrorists, fergwdsakes, blowing up clinics and assassinating doctors! Sure, they can be pragmatic for the sake of their crusade but they aren’t giving it up. They know they need Trump in the White House so they may back off of a national ban until he gets back in but they’ll keep pressuring the state houses. And they’ll keep electing judges like those in Alabama who made their decision for religious not constitutional reasons.
I’m not saying that Alito and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and the rest of the sadistic six can’t dance on the head of a pin to find some illogical reason why IVF is different than stem cell research or miscarriage and therefore should be exempt, but it will obviously be fallacious. The fact is that if an embryo is considered a person with full human rights in one situation it has to be considered a full human being in all situations and there are few people in this country who agree with any of that, even among the fetal crusaders. And that’s because it doesn’t meet any real world test that most of us have to face in one way or another.
As of right now, there are 14 states with pending Fetal Personhood Bills. The proposed federal Life At Conception Act, was co-sponsored by 125 House Republicans. There’s no carve out for IVF in their bill.
BREAKING: Donald Trump is losing his mind because President Biden called him out for having senile moments. Retweet to ensure all Americans know Donald Trump is losing his mind. pic.twitter.com/7Wa3xQFRRa
Here we are again looking right down the barrel of a government shutdown because one half of one of the three branches of government is completely dysfunctional under GOP leadership. We’re talking about the Republican House of Representatives of course. They are simply incapable of passing legislation. In fact, 2023 was the least productive year since the Great Depression with congress passing just 27 bills that became law. (In 1948 President Harry Truman famously called the legislative branch the “do nothing congress” because they only managed to pass 511 bills.)
This is the third time in six months that the country has been on the brink of a shutdown because the hard right in the House is holding their breath until they turn blue. It’s not clear what they want except perhaps to cause more chaos. The last time it cost Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job and the same fate may very await Speaker Mike Johnson as well. There’s nothing in his performance so far that suggests he has the skill or the desire to finesse this situation.
There’s no need to reiterate the saga that continues over the Ukraine and border funding. We know that both parties came to the table and negotiated in good faith to come to an agreement on both of those issues to meet the demands of the right wingers. But Donald Trump directed them to walk away because he believes passage of any bill will help Joe Biden in the election in the fall and they did it. So, at the moment, funding for Ukraine, the border, Israel, Taiwan and Gaza is dead and Republicans are screaming incoherently about how the border must be dealt with even though they just shot down a bill that any hard-line, immigrant hating right winger should have been thrilled to vote for. None of that makes any sense at all.
But there are a whole bunch of other spending bills caught in limbo as well, while the government continues to operate on the 2022 budget that was passed by the Democratic House under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As it stands, unless they pass another continuing resolution or come to some kind of agreement, about 20 percent of the federal budget will shut down on March 2. The rest of the government goes down one week later, at midnight on March 9.
Johnson bought himself some time last fall when he first succeeded McCarthy and managed to pass the continuing resolution that’s coming due this week. The House returned from another extended break this week (they’re very tired) and found that whatever talks had been going on during their vacation had gotten nowhere. It’s hard to know exactly what the hang-up is but according to the NY Times, the far right has an assortment of demands such as reversal of “a rule that aims to broaden access to abortion medication or a policy that could make it harder for some veterans deemed mentally ill to purchase guns” and they insist on limiting food stamps for the poor.
On Tuesday the four congressional leaders, Johnson, House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority leader Chuck Shumer and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell met with President Biden and VP Kamala Harris in the White House to assess the lay of the land. They all reported that they were “optimistic” that they can reach an agreement but they were short on details.
They all ganged up on Johnson, including McConnell, on the Ukraine funding, trying to get him to let that bill come to the floor so they can get it done. Johnson used to be in favor of it, but he’s firmly under Trump’s thumb so who knows if he’ll budge on that? He’s now pushing the fatuous notion that he can only do it if Biden uses executive authority to close the border immediately. The NY Times reported:
After the meeting, Mr. Johnson said of the foreign assistance bill that House Republicans were still “actively pursuing and investigating all the various options on that, and we will address that in a timely manner.”
But he reiterated his stance that the effort should take a back seat to immediate action to crack down on migration at the U.S. border with Mexico. “The first priority of the country is our border and making sure it’s secure,” Mr. Johnson said. “I believe the president can take executive authority right now today to change that.”
Biden tried to educate him about how it would cost money to do that, which will only be available if they pass the bill that appropriates it.
Axios reports that one of the negotiators, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Me, thinks they could unveil a compromise as early as today. But after what the Republicans pulled with the Ukraine/border agreement it’s hard to imagine how anyone could trust them to keep their word. Who knows what they’ll pull out of their hat at the last minute? And has anyone consulted Dear Leader Donald Trump? In the past he has been in favor of a government shutdown because he thinks it hurts the Democrats, the same rationale he used when he ordered them to scuttle the border bill. He’s a bit distracted with all his legal problems at the moment, so maybe they can slip something by before he looks up and realizes they’ve actually done something.
It’s all up to Johnson in the end. He knows he can pass these bill in minutes and get everything funded, including Ukraine and the border, immediately if he will bring the bills to the floor and allow it to pass with Democratic votes and a handful of sane Republicans. But he may very well lose his speakership if he does it, just as McCarthy did. There is nothing so far to indicate that he has the character or the guts to sacrifice his ambition to do that even though many lives are at stake here in the US and around the world. But considering that he always says that if you want to know his values all you have to do is read the Bible, if there’s one guy you’d think who would ask himself “what would Jesus do?” it would be Mike Johnson. So far, it appears he’s more likely to ask himself “what would Trump do?” instead.
Last night Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that despite promising that there would be no more continuing resolutions, he has proposed to extend the deadlines from March 1st to March 8th and March 22nd. There is no word as of this writing whether the Senate and the White House will accept it.
T-shirt for sale by Apostle Greg Hood. Image: greghood dot org.
We’ve warned plenty about the New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains people. Long before us, Richard Hofstadter warned about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 in the wake of the McCarthy era. The paranoid style in American religion is closely related.
In the late 1970s, Republican operatives decided on mobilizing useful idiots on the religious right for conservative political purposes. They invited the camel to poke its nose under the tent. And in the fullness of time we got QAnon and Trump and MAGA. ALL ONE, like the pepermint soap.
Of camels’ noses and tents
Axios reports this morning that while Christian nationalism is on the rise, it still remains widely unpopular:
About two-thirds of Americans reject or are skeptical about Christian nationalism despite its rising influence that’s shaping education, immigration and health care policies, a new survey finds.
Why it matters: Some Republicans are openly expressing Christian nationalist views, which have ranged from calls for more religion in public schools to book bans and even suggestions that democracy should die.
This once-fringe ideology has become prevalent in some deeply red states at a time when the nation overall is increasingly diverse and less religious.
The big picture: The new data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas come days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should receive legal protections as “unborn life.”
Zoom in: 7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said.
How fringe are Christian nationalists? In echoes of Steve Bannon’s nihilistic rhetoric about burning the government to the ground, Fred Clarkson reports that these “prophets” want to burn down religion too:
It is more than paradoxical that an ostensibly Christian university leader would say, “We are here to put a knife to the throat of religion.” But that’s what Apostle Greg Hood, the founder of Kingdom University in Franklin, Tennessee believes so heartily he emblazoned it on a KU t-shirt.
This is not a hoax. In fact, the bloody tee epitomizes the paradoxes of the New Apostolic Reformation—a movement that says it means to bust out of the “demonic prison” of religion, knives out. Religion is, of course, one of the seven mountains of culture that NAR seeks to conquer to achieve Christian dominion (the other six being government, family, education, business, media, and arts & entertainment). The rhetoric they employ when discussing how to do it can be violent, if not always t-shirt worthy. But understanding the paradox of religion killing religion helps us understand this campaign for a paradigmatic change in the direction of American and world Christianity.
There’s a certain tension in the NAR, between the metaphorical and the physical; the hyperbolic and the actual. But most often, these are not mutually exclusive.
Trump played that tension like a violin ahead of Jan. 6. These dudes do the same. Apostle Greg Hood said, “We’re dealing with demonic strongholds that are controlling people, that are using people to keep their agenda.” Spooky much?
He nevertheless claims “we’re not attacking people”—even as he employs military metaphors and scenarios in which people would inevitably be killed in real life, including by nuclear weapons and drone strikes.
“Wicked things… are happening in our nation,” he says, because “wicked people are ruling at the moment.”
You know how this works. Trump did on Jan. 6: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
It’s a heavenly battle and a real one.
Even as top apostles prime the pump for possible real-world violence, and encourage the Ekklesia to envision themselves as an End Times army, they are, paradoxically, also planning for the future governance of society. While it’s not uncommon for churches to sponsor Christian schools, at least one apostolic center, Impact Church International in Concord, North Carolina, not only hosts a KU campus, but also the K4-12 Daniel Christian Academy, which is explicitly devoted to teaching about the seven mountains of dominion.
The press loves a horse race like the kid in the story assumes in a room full of manure there must be a pony. Naturally, the Washington Post reports “warning signs for Biden, Trump and Haley” in the Michigan primary results from Tuesday night. The race is on! And it’s a nail-biter!
President Biden and former president Donald Trump won the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan by huge margins Tuesday night — but there were serious problems for both candidates lurking under the surface.
Trump crushed Nikki Haley by over 40 points.
Biden, meanwhile, won the Democratic primary by an even more overwhelming margin — but 13 percent of voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” following a campaign to persuade voters to not to support Biden in protest of his support for Israel and his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.
The protesters want a cease-fire. They don’t want Biden to call for one. Biden and his team have been pressing Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu unsuccessfully for a cease-fire for weeks.
The press wants to build suspense, though.
While Trump has won every primary so far, Haley’s ability to keep winning so many votes even though she lacks a clear path to the nomination raises questions about how many of her voters will back Trump in November.
There’s trouble for Biden as well.
More than 100,000 Democratic primary voters marked their ballots “uncommitted,” far exceeding the modest goal of 10,000 votes set by Listen to Michigan, the group that organized the campaign.
It wasn’t just protest votes by Palestinian Americans and allies horrified over carnage in Gaza. Protest votes by Armenians muddy the waters further. They mounted their own “uncommitted” effort over Biden’s support for Azerbaijan “which launched a military offensive in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region last year. The region had been under the control of Armenian separatists for decades.”
With no exit polls conducted in Michigan, what the “uncommitted” vote means is unclear (New York Times):
A vote for “uncommitted” was a serious form of protest against Mr. Biden, but it’s just not the same as voting for Donald J. Trump in the general election. That simple fact limits how much we can read into the results for November, especially as there was no exit poll to offer insight into the attitudes of protest voters.
At the same time, it’s also possible that Mr. Biden’s problems go well beyond those who voted uncommitted in a primary. The typical Democratic primary voter is disproportionately old, white and loyal to Democrats. Mr. Biden might be faring even worse among the kinds of Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home.
But despite overwhelming wins by both Trump and Biden, anything could happen!
Simon Rosenberg doesn’t have to sell papers or advertising. His message to Democrats has remained consistent for months: “I would much rather be us than them.”
Rosenberg: Trump is underperforming now in 4 states, he’s spending more money than he’s taking in, his party is broke, they’re replacing leadership, dozens of party leaders indicted, House Republicans are abandoning ship, he’s getting crushed in court.. I would much rather be us pic.twitter.com/glfJgTO7zS
Worries about political extremism or threats to democracy have emerged as a top concern for U.S. voters and an issue where President Joe Biden has a slight advantage over Donald Trump ahead of the November election, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
Overall, 34% of respondents said Biden had a better approach for handling extremism, compared to 31% who said Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. I get why 31% think Trump can better handle extremism — they want a tyrannical authoritarian to put his enemies in camps and he’s promising to do that. But why in the hell does only 34% back Biden on this issue since he’s what’s standing in the way of an extremist wannabe dictator becoming president again? They think he’s old so Trump would be better? What?
Here’s more detail:
Some 21% of respondents in the three-day poll, which closed on Sunday, said “political extremism or threats to democracy” was the biggest problem facing the U.S., a share that was marginally higher than those who picked the economy – 19% – and immigration – 18%.
Biden’s Democrats considered extremism by far the No. 1 issue while Trump’s Republicans overwhelmingly chose immigration.
Extremism was independents’ top concern, cited by almost a third of independent respondents, followed by immigration, cited by about one in five. The economy ranked third.
Trump’s “I know you are but what am I” accusations that Biden is the one assaulting democracy notwithstanding, I certainly hope that the man who continues to perpetrate The Big Lie is not seen by a majority of swing state voters as the one to stop extremism. If that and the economy are the top two issues, with abortion rights thrown into the mix, Biden should eke out a victory.
US president Joe Biden says he hopes a Gaza ceasefire deal can be agreed between Israel and Hamas by Monday, as he took questions from reporters while on a visit to an ice cream shop in New York. pic.twitter.com/nbiGmtpBy2
Last night as I was scrolling through Xitter I came across a dozen or so posts excoriating Joe Biden for discussing a possible Gaza ceasefire while he was eating ice cream. He was asked about by a reporter and he answered it. And it was possibly good news too. (He said he was optimistic that there would be a ceasefire by the end of the coming weekend.) But he was bad for doing it while he had an ice cream cone in his hand which I guess means he should not have been eating any ice cream when there is a crisis in Gaza or he should have told the reporter to fuck off, in which case he would have been accused of avoiding the subject. This criticism came from both left and right, which was bizarre.
As for the right wingers — whatever. They have to reach for anything they can and this was on the level of “Obama wore a tan suit at the podium” level sophistry from them. From the left, it’s a little bit more serious.
I understand that people are very agitated about this war, and they are right to be so. They’re trying to influence Joe Biden to do something to stop the massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza and are using whatever means they have. I am optimistic that they understand that everything will be worse for Palestinians and everyone else on this world, including themselves, if Donald Trump is president, and aren’t going to cut off their noses to spite their faces in November. (They should probably consult with some Cambodians to see how well that works out in the real world.)
Josh Marshall had some smart thoughts about the Michigan race tonight where this is a huge topic on cable news today and consequently, where the results will be seen through the lens of the Gaza war:
Here are a few thoughts on the Michigan primary tonight, in which both parties’ returns will be closely watched but especially the Democrats’. It will be the first clear electoral test of the degree of dissatisfaction with President Biden over the Israel/Hamas war, especially in the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are a couple movements trying to participate in the backlash against the President. There’s an “Abandon Biden” group which wants to do what it says, which is get as many people as possible to refuse to vote for President Biden in the November election. The consequences of that decision be damned.
The main focus tonight will be on those pushing for an “uncommitted” vote. The key thing to know is that this group very specifically does not have the same professed goal. “Uncommitted” in this case is best understood as providing a safe harbor of sorts for Democrats who want to signal outrage or opposition without refusing Biden support in the November election.
For those of us who think the November election is a binary choice between Biden and Trump with existential stakes on the line, this is an important and valid distinction. Just because you have to be there to vote for Biden in November doesn’t mean you have to squelch all criticism in the meantime. Or at least that’s the idea. For most.
There are also clearly very different forces operating under the “uncommitted” banner. On the one hand they include people like former Rep. Andy Levin, a liberal zionist and one time synagogue President who is a supporter of Biden’s reelection but also an opponent of his Gaza policy and appears to see the “uncommitted” banner as a way to express opposition and outrage while keeping people within the Democratic and Biden tent. For others like Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud and Michigan House Majority Leader Abraham Aiyash, it is more a show of strength, to put up numbers that show Biden the risk of not changing his policy well in advance of November. But many in this latter group are setting the threshold for what Biden has to do so high that they seem to be all but foreclosing the chance to support him.
All that said, “never” supporting Biden — as the “Abandon Biden” movement, and many others in the broader, left-wing protest community, promise to do — is a strong word and one that is, in its nature, hard to climb down from. So as much as I have very strong disagreements and, at the moment, quite negative feelings about the people who are mounting the “uncommitted” campaign, we should not lose sight of the fact that they are very intentionally and conspicuously keeping at least one foot in the Democratic tent. That is the sine qua non thing that everyone who abhors Trump can and should demand from everyone who is not eager to see another Trump presidency.
With that said, let me note a slightly different point.
It comes from this Politico profile of Michigan House Majority Leader Abraham Aiyash, a key supporter of the “uncommitted” push. But it could have come from countless other similar pieces over recent months. Down toward the end of the article the author includes quotes from top Michigan Democrats Debbie Dingell and Gretchen Whitmer essentially saying that at the end of the day not voting for Biden means electing Donald Trump and those who don’t will own that outcome. Aiyash responds by saying: “I think it is very insulting when folks come to Arab and Muslim communities and say, ‘if you don’t support Biden, you are effectively supporting Trump.’ It’s disrespectful to communities that were impacted.”
As I said, Aiyash is not alone in this rejoinder. It’s standard. But it’s also a bridge too far. Every individual and every community has to judge for themselves what their limits are, whether a point of principle or pain is so grave that they are willing to be part of placing Donald Trump back in the White House. Indeed, Aiyash is on his solidest ground in saying that it is a measure of the intensity of his feelings about the situation that he is considering not supporting Biden in November. But it cannot be a disrespect or a further offense to say squarely and directly what the outcome of the decision he and others are themselves considering may well be. It cannot be a disrespect simply to state the reality of the situation.
As is the case in virtually every U.S. presidential election, the choice becomes a binary one. There are two possible outcomes: a Trump presidency or a Biden presidency. There’s no running away from that choice. For members or erstwhile members of the Democratic coalition, sitting it out is a vote for Trump. No getting away from that. The power of this kind of high octane protest politics is precisely that the stakes are so high. It simply doesn’t wash to brandish those stakes and then cry foul when anyone else invokes them back at you.
The argument that it is disrespectful might be stronger if Biden’s team were to say, “Tough luck, you don’t have any other options.” But that’s hardly the case. The Biden administration has been practically falling over itself in an effort to mend fences, and has also been shifting its actual policy — both for domestic political reasons and because the situation on the ground as well as internationally has changed.
During an appearance yesterday on the Talking Feds podcast, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, caused a bit of a stir when she floated a rumor that Rep. Matt Rosendale may have a three-alarm scandal on his hands.
Just a little rumor: I think their caucus may lose a member in the next couple of days.
It might be the congressman from Montana. Just to gossip a little bit, there’s a reason why Rosendale backed out of that Senate race. The rumor is that he impregnated a 20-year-old staff person.
Immediately after I heard these words, I reached out to Rosendale’s spokesman Ron Kovach, who replied in an email, “This is 100% false and defamatory and former Senator Heitkamp will be hearing from our lawyers soon.”
Heitkamp didn’t outright claim that Rosendale is guilty of what she alleged she heard: She mentioned only that the story has been going around. That is a big difference as far as lawyers are concerned, if they do end up getting involved.
But Rosendale suddenly leaving Congress would throw the House into an even greater state of chaos, hard as that might be to imagine. Losing another member of the House Republican Conference would leave the GOP majority so thin that if you held it up you’d be able to see the sun shining through it.
Rosendale announced that he was running for the Senate against Jon Tester but dropped out almost immediately a couple of weeks ago. The Party poohbahs were unhappy that he was running because they think they have a chance to pick up the seat so everyone assumed they’d talked him out of it. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. He’s also one of the Crazy Eight who ousted McCarthy who has knives out for all of them so this might be part of it too.
Still, I think they will move heaven and earth to keep him in his seat for now. If he is forced to resign… oh, it’s just too delicious to think about.
Anyway, you just hate to hear it, don’t you? (And, by the way, what 20 year old would want to be with that guy???)
