“There are a lot of clearly angry people who want to march on the Capitol,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican. “I haven’t talked to a single Republican up here in the Senate that has encouraged or enabled anything like that.”

Nevertheless, the “Justice for J6” rally, to be held at noon on Saturday at the foot of Capitol Hill, has created a predicament for Republicans, who are caught between a hard-right base including many voters who consider the rioters righteous and a desire to distance themselves from the attack and its political fallout.

“Anytime the attention is on Joe Biden it’s good for Republicans, and anytime the attention is on Jan. 6 it’s bad for Republicans,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and veteran of Capitol Hill. “The only hope Democrats have of keeping the House is to make Jan. 6 the issue of the campaign. They know that, and we know that. The only people who don’t seem to know that are the activists.”

That has left top Republicans in an uncomfortable spot, toiling to distance themselves from an event that is certain to dredge up the subject of the Capitol riot — and that could potentially spiral out of control — but wary of offending voters who sympathize with the cause.

Reps. John Katko and Claudia Tenney could see their districts merged next year, forcing a Republican primary, under a draft plan proposed today by the New York Independent Redistricting Commission.

The merged districts are one of two competing plans the bipartisan commission floated for the Central New York congressional seats after it failed to reach a consensus.

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The public will have a chance to comment on the draft maps, starting next month. The commission plans to hold 12 public hearings across the state to ask for feedback on the proposals.

After the comment period, the commission is required to send final maps to the state Legislature by January. The Legislature has the final say of whether to approve or reject the maps.

There are hardly any signs that California Republicans have gotten the message that the key to returning to power is to develop positions and policies that address the genuine issues voters have with their state — policies that subject Democratic governance to serious criticism.

The Larry Elder campaign’s reaction to its impending defeat in the recall was to preemptively claim fraud, with a website belonging to the campaign even alluding to the “ammo box” as a means to “ameliorate the twisted results” of the election. (The reference to the ammo box apparently was removed from the website by Tuesday.)

Former President Trump weighed in with a statement calling the election “rigged,” an assertion for which there are absolutely no grounds whatsoever. Unless the GOP is prepared to say that its long drought in statewide office-seeking is the result of 15 years of rigged elections, it must acknowledge that voting fraud isn’t its problem. Blindness to voters’ interests is its problem.

That self-evident truth was on vivid display throughout the recall. We can examine the party’s deep illness by examining the platforms of the leading Republican candidates: radio host Elder, businessman John Cox, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and state Assemblyman Kevin Kiley.

The general approach of all of them was to list the problems faced by the state and suggest that only they had the answers.

As my colleague Steve Lopez eloquently observed a few days before the election, many of the fixes they were selling — “tax cuts, restoring the death penalty, releasing fewer prisoners, school choice, harsher policies on immigrants, loosening coronavirus protocols, relaxing environmental protections, police enforcement of homeless encampments — are red-meat talking points rather than viable solutions to the state’s most vexing problems.”

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-09-15/recall-loss-california-gop-death-spiral

President Joe Biden is set to meet with Democrats’ two most prominent holdouts on their massive social spending package: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

The president will host Sinema on Wednesday morning and then Manchin on Wednesday evening, according to people familiar with the meeting. Both centrist senators are resisting other Democrats’ goal of spending as much as $3.5 trillion on social programs, climate action and safety net expansion.

The move by Biden shows he is moving directly to arbitrate what’s become a messy fight in the Democratic caucus. During a lunch on Tuesday, Manchin reiterated his hopes to pause the spending package, according to an attendee, a statement that met with crickets.

Democrats had hoped to write their bill by today, an impossibility given the internal handwringing. And they have no margin for error: They need all 50 Democratic senators to sign onto any legislation via budget reconciliation, which skirts a GOP filibuster but demands lockstep unity in an evenly split Senate.

Seven years ago, New Yorkers voted decisively to empower a new bipartisan commission to do what self-interested politicians could not: draw new congressional district lines that were not gerrymandered to favor a particular party.

But as the panel prepares to unveil its proposed maps for the first time on Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers in New York and Washington are already laying the groundwork to cast them aside — plotting to use their supermajorities in Albany to draw new district boundaries for the next decade that might eliminate as many as five Republican-held seats.

The end result could drive one of the most consequential shifts in power in the country this redistricting cycle, the first since New York voters approved a 2014 ballot measure to curb gerrymandering.

Under the most aggressive scenarios, Democrats could emerge from 2022’s midterm elections with control of as many as 23 of New York’s 26 House seats in an all-out effort to prop up their chances of retaining control of Congress. For the first redistricting cycle in decades, Democrats control the Legislature and governor’s office, giving them the freedom to reshape districts without having to compromise with Republicans, who long held a lock on the State Senate.