Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough lit into President Donald Trump for “playing the racist card” and lining up with “some of the most abhorrent regimes in the 20th century.”
“This last week, let’s just be really blunt about it, it’s why Republicans are scared of him right now. It’s been race. He’s been playing the racist card. He said, ‘I’m a nationalist.’ David Duke comes out the next day saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much for finally admitting that you’re a white nationalist.’ Then you have even some Republican back-benchers that are linking George Soros and these anti-Semitic threads to the caravan. You’ve got Fox News talking about smallpox and leprosy coming up,” Scarborough stated.
“I’m sorry. I won’t say specifically what regime this is out of, but go back and read your history books and look at some of the most abhorrent regimes in the 20th century,” he continued. “Might as well be certain countries talking about gypsies. It lines up historically exactly with what certain countries were talking about when they were talking about gypsies and Jews. Mika, that doesn’t play well in Peoria. That doesn’t play well in suburban Virginia. That doesn’t even play well in western Iowa. That’s why you have Republicans now distancing themselves from Donald Trump going to Pittsburgh, and the head of the NRCC distancing himself from a Republican who basically has identified with white nationalism in western Iowa, Steve King now, for far too long.”
Scarborough concluded that Trump’s presidency “is like Charlottesville every day,” a reference to the white nationalist rally in 2017 that turned violent.
WASHINGTON (AP) – On Jan. 21, 1997, one of the most memorable days in congressional history, Newt Gingrich became the first House speaker to be reprimanded by his colleagues for ethical misconduct.
The 395-28 vote, to reprimand him for bringing discredit on the House for failing to ensure his use of tax-exempt groups was legal, was historic by itself. But Gingrich’s peers didn’t stop there. They fined him $300,000 for misleading the House ethics committee and causing it to extend a costly investigation.
Fifteen years later, the case has come back into focus as the fight for next year’s Republican presidential nomination has resuscitated a political career once thought to be all but over.
The ethics committee back then made no finding on whether Gingrich’s use of tax-exempt groups to raise money was illegal. It said it would let the Internal Revenue Service determine if any tax laws were broken. In 1999, the IRS said they were not.
In settling the case, Gingrich acknowledged he gave false information to the ethics committee in denying that a Republican political action committee he led – GOPAC – was connected to a college course he taught that was funded by tax-exempt organizations.
GOPAC, in fact, was involved in developing what was supposed to be a nonpartisan college course, the committee said, and Gingrich’s denial was “inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable.”
Gingrich said in recent comments on the campaign trail that more than 1 million pages of documents were turned over to the ethics committee that investigated him, and that 83 charges were repudiated as false. “The one mistake we made was a letter written by a lawyer that I didn’t read carefully,” he said.
But he also accused the ethics committee of being partisan and said, “The way I was dealt with related more to the politics of the Democratic Party than the ethics.” The committee, then and now, has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans.
The ethics findings, unhappiness of many Republicans with his leadership, and his resignation as speaker after 1998 GOP election losses left Gingrich with scars that seemed to doom his political career. It didn’t revive until last month, when the former speaker surged to the top among Republican presidential hopefuls.
Gingrich’s ethics investigation consumed more than two years. Democrats were rabid in their insistence that the speaker broke House rules. And they wanted revenge. Years earlier, Gingrich and others had filed an ethics complaint against a Democratic speaker, Jim Wright – a case that led to Wright’s resignation in 1989.
If Gingrich wins the GOP nomination, Democrats are certain to remind voters of this piece of baggage. The ethics report in 1997 portrayed him as unethical beyond the case at hand. Without details, it said that “over a number of years and in a number of situations, Mr. Gingrich showed a disregard and lack of respect for the standards of conduct that applied to his activities.”
The genesis of Gingrich’s ethics case goes back to 1990, when he was No. 2 in the House GOP hierarchy. Democrats had a stranglehold on the majority dating back to 1955, and Gingrich knew that If Republicans were ever to take back the House, they had to recruit hundreds of thousands of new voters.
He developed a television show in 1990 and a college course in 1993, using tax-exempt organizations to help finance them and spread his message: Replace the “welfare state” with an “opportunity society” centered in part on Republican, free enterprise economic principles.
“Based on the evidence, it was clear that Mr. Gingrich intended that the (television show and college course) have substantial partisan, political purposes,” the ethics committee found.
That was a problem. U.S. tax law provides a way for people to make tax-deductible donations to certain groups as long as those groups stay away from partisan politics. The groups are often called 501c3s because that’s the section of the IRS code that gives them tax-exempt status.
Gingrich’s TV show and college course originally were a project of his GOPAC political action committee. But after they started consuming a substantial portion of the political committee’s revenues, Gingrich and others transferred the project to the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation. The foundation was a tax-exempt 501(c)3 group that had been dormant but was revived to sponsor the televised workshop.
The foundation operated out of GOPAC’s offices, and virtually all its officers and employers were simultaneously GOPAC officers or employees. The main difference between GOPAC and the foundation was the $260,000 in tax-deductible contributions the foundation raised to fund the TV program and the workshops.
Gingrich tried to protect his donors’ tax deductions by keeping out references to Republicans and partisan politics in the TV show and college course. The course was taught originally at the public Kennesaw State College in Georgia in 1993 and the private Reinhardt College in 1994 and 1995. Gingrich and another professor each taught 20 hours.
The partisanship came in when Gingrich arranged “workshops” across the country for people to see his lectures and the TV show. A purpose of the workshops was to recruit voters who would support Republicans, the ethics committee said.
It cited documents in which Gingrich describes the purpose of the TV show and college course.
“The objective measurable goal is the maximum growth of news coverage of our vision and ideas, the maximum recruitment of new candidates, voters and resources, and the maximum electoral success in winning seats from the most local office to the White House,” Gingrich wrote.
He said in numerous writings that the college course was part of his “Renewing American Civilization” movement to replace the “welfare state.” The course and the movement had the same name.
In a 1993 document Gingrich said the goal of the movement was “replacing the welfare state, recruit, discover, arouse and network together 200,000 activists including candidates for elected office at all levels” leading to “a sweeping victory in 1996.”
He didn’t have to wait that long. In the 1994 election, Gingrich engineered a Republican takeover of the House. The GOP held the House majority for a dozen years until Democrats regained it in 2006. Last year, Republicans took it back.
DES MOINES, Iowa – Republicans in search of their party’s presidential nomination are returning to campaign mode after a brief Christmas respite, with Rick Santorum planning a bird hunting trip with conservatives in Iowa and Mitt Romney phoning supporters.
With just a week until Iowa holds its leadoff caucuses, candidates are stepping up activities in the state ahead of the Jan. 3 contests.
Many voters are undecided. And while former Massachusetts governor Romney appears stronger in Iowa than he had earlier, he’s facing a continuing challenge from Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the U.S. House.
In Iowa, both Romney and Gingrich must contend with Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who seems to have the most sophisticated network of volunteers ready to organize ahead of the caucuses. Paul, who is popular with conservatives, was to return to Iowa this week to meet with supporters he has kept in touch with since his unsuccessful run in 2008.
Romney, who kept this state at arm’s length for most of the year, seemed to increase his efforts in Iowa as polls found him in a stronger position.
He planned to talk with supporters in a series of telephone calls in Iowa and New Hampshire on Monday between working on a speech that aides described as his final pitch to Iowans.
Romney planned to deliver that speech Tuesday evening and then set out on a bus tour of Iowa.
He will share the highways with Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Gingrich. All scheduled bus tours to start then, too.
Gingrich, who last week criticized the negative tone of the campaign, was ready to directly challenge Romney on the economy, an issue Romney has made central to his campaign.
Gingrich’s standing in public and private polls has slipped as he faced unrelenting criticism from the candidates and their allies.
Santorum, meanwhile, planned to announce support from another wave of Iowa conservatives. He scheduled a pheasant hunting trip for Monday afternoon.
While he trails in polls and has not spent significant money on ads, Santorum is hoping his nonstop courtship of Iowans yields a late surge.
He visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties during the summer — an accomplishment Bachmann has feverishly tried to replicate.
Meanwhile, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman kept his focus on New Hampshire, which votes for a Republican presidential candidate on Jan. 10. Early in the campaign, he said he would not compete in Iowa and instead would make his start in New Hampshire, which comes second on the nominating calendar.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Friday afternoon called on his colleagues to support the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill, even though no one — or almost no one — has read it.
“I rise in strong support of this bill, and I urge my colleagues to support this piece of legislation,” he said. “None of them have read it.”
He quickly acknowledged that House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) read the bill, and that ranking member Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) probably read it as well. But he said that despite his support for the bill, he is not a fan of the process that Republicans used to bring the bill forward so quickly, and at the last minute, for passage.
“Had I as majority leader brought that bill that sits on that floor, 1,207 pages, within the last 24 hours to the floor, I think the response from that side of the aisle would have been harsh, accusatory and not helpful,” Hoyer said.
Hoyer said the process should be a “lesson in humility” for all members. The House is expected to approve the bill later this afternoon and send it to the Senate.
Democrats have spoken favorably about the bill in early afternoon debate, and even those who are upset with the process have said they would vote for the bill to avoid a government shutdown.
