GOP endorsement watch

[Progressive Pessimist]

"I didn't vote for President Trump...but I will vote for his Supreme Court appointee."

[Mr. Morden]

"I didn't vote for President Trump...but I will vote for his Supreme Court appointee."

I mean....quite a few Senators over the years have voted to confirm SCOTUS nominees made by presidents who they didn't support for president.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

He's still mad that he got turned down for Secretary of State.

If he’d thrown his support behind Biden he’d still have a chance...

Do y'all have a Mitt Romney type in UK parliament, Torrain? Someone that is a member of his or her party at his or her core*, but with a maverick streak?

We've had a lot of these over the years, although there seem to be fewer in the current parliament than in the last few where there was more opportunity for wielding more influence whenever one chose to cross an otherwise finely balanced aisle. For some, it's gone smoothly, for others - well, almost no one remembers CHUK and it's been less than a year since their parliamentary demise.

It's theoretically harder to pull that off here because the parties are more centralised and it's easier for the leadership to purge them (see: BoJo deselecting 21 MPs who broke a three-line whip in late September 2019). Still, it happens, the whip was restored to a number who successfully sought reelection and there's probably a future Ken Clarke somewhere within the crowd of hackish first-term MPs.

[Landslide Lyndon]

"I didn't vote for President Trump...but I will vote for his Supreme Court appointee."

I mean....quite a few Senators over the years have voted to confirm SCOTUS nominees made by presidents who they didn't support for president.

It's one thing to not support a president and another to believe he committed crimes and must be removed from office.

[YL]

Do y'all have a Mitt Romney type in UK parliament, Torrain? Someone that is a member of his or her party at his or her core*, but with a maverick streak?

We've had a lot of these over the years, although there seem to be fewer in the current parliament than in the last few where there was more opportunity for wielding more influence whenever one chose to cross an otherwise finely balanced aisle. For some, it's gone smoothly, for others - well, almost no one remembers CHUK and it's been less than a year since their parliamentary demise.

It's theoretically harder to pull that off here because the parties are more centralised and it's easier for the leadership to purge them (see: BoJo deselecting 21 MPs who broke a three-line whip in late September 2019). Still, it happens, the whip was restored to a number who successfully sought reelection and there's probably a future Ken Clarke somewhere within the crowd of hackish first-term MPs.

Well, in the UK openly stating that you are voting against your party's candidate is liable to get you expelled from the party, even if you're a Labour member in a hopeless seat merely advocating a tactical vote for the Lib Dems.  There's no way that the antics of Joe Lieberman in his last Senate term, for example, would have been tolerated by a UK party.  Actually this is part of why I'm not a Labour member even though I want a Labour-led government: I'm not prepared to vote for the party in City Council elections at the moment and in the UK political culture that means I feel I shouldn't join.

In some ways Romney might be comparable to those Labour Right figures who were fairly mainstream until Corbyn got elected leader and they suddenly became sulky backbenchers occasionally rebelling in Commons votes and giving anonymous anti-Corbyn briefings to friendly journalists.  (Romney never struck me as a maverick before the Trump ascendancy.)  But if they'd openly said they weren't voting Labour in an actual election they would have been thrown out, as actually happened to Alastair Campbell (not an MP, but he was expelled from the party membership).

[Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS]

I'm sure this will come as no surprise.

Bill Weld, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, says he voted for Joe Biden

[Mr. Morden]

"I didn't vote for President Trump...but I will vote for his Supreme Court appointee."

I mean....quite a few Senators over the years have voted to confirm SCOTUS nominees made by presidents who they didn't support for president.

It's one thing to not support a president and another to believe he committed crimes and must be removed from office.

Romney may wish that Trump had been removed from office, but it didn't happen, so Trump is still president.  So I'm not sure what you're suggesting.  That Romney stage some kind of boycott of all Trump's actions as president?  Even the Dems aren't doing that, as they worked with Trump to pass stimulus bills into law earlier this year.

In another thread, I think Shua asked about a hypothetical in which a Democratic Senator in the 90s thought that Bill Clinton had committed an impeachable offense, and Clinton had a SCOTUS seat come up in which he nominated someone like RBG.  Should this hypothetical Senator then have been an automatic no vote on this nomination, even if he thought the the nominee would make a good addition to the court?  I don't see what the point of that would be.

[ηєω ƒяσηтιєя]

https://mobile.twitter.com/GovBillWeld/status/1319366380039393285

[Landslide Lyndon]

"I didn't vote for President Trump...but I will vote for his Supreme Court appointee."

I mean....quite a few Senators over the years have voted to confirm SCOTUS nominees made by presidents who they didn't support for president.

It's one thing to not support a president and another to believe he committed crimes and must be removed from office.

Romney may wish that Trump had been removed from office, but it didn't happen, so Trump is still president.  So I'm not sure what you're suggesting.  That Romney stage some kind of boycott of all Trump's actions as president?  Even the Dems aren't doing that, as they worked with Trump to pass stimulus bills into law earlier this year.

In another thread, I think Shua asked about a hypothetical in which a Democratic Senator in the 90s thought that Bill Clinton had committed an impeachable offense, and Clinton had a SCOTUS seat come up in which he nominated someone like RBG.  Should this hypothetical Senator then have been an automatic no vote on this nomination, even if he thought the the nominee would make a good addition to the court?  I don't see what the point of that would be.

A Democratic senator voting to convict Clinton is a hypothetical. Romney voting to convict Trump is a fact.
And it's not just this vote. Romney has repeatedly condemned Trump's behavior and accused him of debasing his office.

[Mr. Morden]

"I didn't vote for President Trump...but I will vote for his Supreme Court appointee."

I mean....quite a few Senators over the years have voted to confirm SCOTUS nominees made by presidents who they didn't support for president.

It's one thing to not support a president and another to believe he committed crimes and must be removed from office.

Romney may wish that Trump had been removed from office, but it didn't happen, so Trump is still president.  So I'm not sure what you're suggesting.  That Romney stage some kind of boycott of all Trump's actions as president?  Even the Dems aren't doing that, as they worked with Trump to pass stimulus bills into law earlier this year.

In another thread, I think Shua asked about a hypothetical in which a Democratic Senator in the 90s thought that Bill Clinton had committed an impeachable offense, and Clinton had a SCOTUS seat come up in which he nominated someone like RBG.  Should this hypothetical Senator then have been an automatic no vote on this nomination, even if he thought the the nominee would make a good addition to the court?  I don't see what the point of that would be.

A Democratic senator voting to convict Clinton is a hypothetical. Romney voting to convict Trump is a fact.
And it's not just this vote. Romney has repeatedly condemned Trump's behavior and accused him of debasing his office.

It's a hypothetical, but a hypothetical I posed to illustrate how silly I think a "boycott" of Trump or whatever you want to call it would be.  Again, the Dems have also voted to remove Trump from office and have condemned his behavior and accused him of debasing his office.  Yet, because he's still president, they've still worked with him this year on covid relief, and presumably (if there was anything else on the agenda that the two parties might agree on) would work with him on other things that they think would benefit the country, so I similarly don't see the issue with Romney voting to confirm a SCOTUS nominee who he thinks would be good for the country.

But we've gotten off topic, so I'll drop this, and let you have the last word if you have any further comments on this.

[WarmPotato]

Mitt Romney! Carly Fiorina! John Kasich! That's pretty much it. Left wing youtubers will tell you that armageddon is coming, but the reality is that most of these people have no political influence. Anthony Scaramucci for example, nobody on the left or right is loyal enough to him that it would flip a vote. And there are just as many (if not more) democrats flipping to endorse Trump. All these republicans are accomplishing is killing whatever semblance of a legacy they had left over.

But what do YOU think? Will the RINOS make a big difference?

[GeneralMacArthur]

You could have just posted this in the GOP Endorsement Megathread.

Needless to say, there are many Republicans who look to these kinds of folks as leaders.  20-25% of Republicans supported John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary.  When those Republicans see Kasich supporting Biden, they feel like that gives them permission to vote for Biden, without betraying the Republican ideology that they're still loyal to.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Twenty former Republican U.S. Attorneys on Tuesday accused President Donald Trump of threatening the rule of law as they declared their support for Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden.

The former senior federal prosecutors, who collectively served under every Republican president from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, said in a publicly released letter that Trump treated the Department of Justice as his personal law firm by pressuring government lawyers to protect his allies and attack his political foes.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-attorneys/republican-former-u-s-attorneys-endorse-biden-call-trump-threat-to-rule-of-law-idUSKBN27C238

[Duke 🇺🇸]

They're right, of course. It's too bad Trump's behavior has been almost normalized over the last 5 years. 7 more days

[ProudModerate2]

They're right, of course. It's too bad Trump's behavior has been almost normalized over the last 5 years. 7 more days

[brucejoel99]

The tent keeps getting bigger & bigger!

[Ljube]

Swamp creatures.

[ηєω ƒяσηтιєя]

https://twitter.com/RVAT2020/status/1321556242129707010

[Landslide Lyndon]

https://twitter.com/KevinCate/status/1321864407329230851

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/KevinCate/status/1322297481418444800

[GeneralMacArthur]

These Florida GOP endorsements would've been more useful a week or two ago.  Most of Florida has already voted.

[Progressive Pessimist]

These Florida GOP endorsements would've been more useful a week or two ago.  Most of Florida has already voted.

I don't think they matter one way or the other.

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/KevinCate/status/1322297481418444800

Jim Smith has to be the most generic name ever.

[Mr. Morden]

A Republican can pretty much go through this campaign cycle without having to deal with the issue of an endorsement.

Watch Ben Sasse go through the entire campaign not endorsing Trump while appearing to support everything he proposes.

Susan  Collins will be pressured at some point to directly say weather she supports Trump or not and if she will vote for him.

She will, I predict, state that she is voting for him, but not campaigning for him.  She'll say something like, "I'm voting Republican but I'm running my own campaign." and make it just plain enough that she is voting "for the ticket" or something like that.

This is what you were saying in April.  But it's now just a few days before the election, and she still won't say if she's voting for Trump or not:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/collins-defensive-final-debate-ducks-trump-re-election-question-n1245229

“I’m not getting into presidential politics,” Collins said, repeating her position that she can work with a Trump administration or with the administration of former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden if he wins the election.

“What I don’t want to see,” Collins said, “is one party control in Washington, because I think that would lead to a far-left agenda being pushed through the Congress.”

Her fellow GOP Senators Murkowski and Sasse have also not said if they're going to vote for Trump or not, as far as I'm aware.  Romney said he *didn't* vote for Trump, but hasn't said who he *did* vote for.  Maybe they'll tell us who they voted for after the election!

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/jdistaso/status/1323015006137573377