Republicans

Sunday Notebook: Charlie Baker among those seeking the national spotlight

November 20, 2022 by pkzadmin

We now have a clearer sense of what will feature on the to-do list for Gov. Charlie Baker’s remaining seven weeks in office: a final flurry of judicial appointments and clemency recommendations, celebrating the long-delayed and often uncertain completion of the Green Line Extension, and, despite his claimed distaste for national politics, pontification about the Republican Party’s future.

Baker made big news Friday morning when he announced he would move to commute the sentence of Ramadan Shabazz from first-degree murder to second-degree murder and pardon six people, including two convicted in a high-profile 1980s abuse case whose validity has long been disputed.

Gerald “Tooky” Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave were convicted of sexually abusing young children at the Fells Acres Day Care Center they ran, but Baker said he has “grave doubt regarding the evidentiary strength of these convictions,” pointing to other experts and judicial officials who have reached similar conclusions over the years.

Baker’s recommendations — particularly the commutation of Shabazz, which would make the 72-year-old eligible for parole after he was initially sentenced to death and has since spent five decades behind bars — tee up noteworthy business for the Governor’s Council to tackle in the ongoing lame-duck session. His latest announcements also came only a couple of days after Baker tapped Parole Board member Tina Hurley to chair that panel.

Green Line extension launch near

Baker, or at least his team, this week circled another date on the calendar with a major announcement: the second and final leg of the Green Line Extension will launch for riders on Dec. 12.

The opening of the first branch, which featured a rebuilt Lechmere Station and only one new stop at Union Square, drew a day of festivities and victory speeches from Baker, his top deputies and former officials who had a hand in the years-long project.

MBTA and Baker administration higher-ups have not yet indicated the level of fanfare over the start of service on the five-station Medford Branch, but they might see it as a way to draw focus back toward a landmark accomplishment after months of intense scrutiny on the T’s safety failures that spiraled out under their watch.

Baker appears on CNN

And as Baker’s eight years in the corner office draw to a close, the governor has started to turn his attention toward a type of political punditry he has often resisted.

During his two terms, he often found common ground with Democrats and sometimes voiced disagreement with or disapproval for former President Donald Trump, a position that both reflected and accelerated the growing divide between the popular governor and MassGOP Chair Jim Lyons.

But Baker also made a frequent point to stay uninvolved in many political fights. For months leading up to and then in the wake of the election to succeed him, Baker declined to endorse either Republican challenger Geoff Diehl or eventual winner Maura Healey, nor any statewide candidate besides Republican auditor hopeful Anthony Amore. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — an action that prompted a class action lawsuit and an investigation by a Texas sheriff — Baker displayed little interest in publicly criticizing a fellow Republican governor.

Baker apparently decided he had a lot more to say after the dust settled on last week’s elections, when Republicans won back a narrow U.S. House majority but failed to flip the Senate or capitalize on a midterm position that historically favors whichever party does not hold the White House.

The governor sought out the spotlight by inviting CNN to his State House office for an election post-mortem, waxing about how he believes Trump’s influence “probably hurt the (Republican) party and hurt the party’s chances on Election Day.”

“One of the messages from the election is, for Republicans generally, is we need, we need as a party to move past President Trump and to move on to an agenda that represents the voices of all those in the party and the people of the country,” Baker told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

It’s worth noting that Baker chose to deliver his assessment nearly a year after the widely popular governor opted not to seek a third term, during which he might have used his platform to try and push the party in the direction he desired. In his own assessment, what’s next for Baker once he hands over the corner office will be a trip “some place far” and first-time grandparenting, but his comments suggest he’s got more in the tank.

Baker for president

Baker stopped short of ruling out a run for some kind of position down the line, but not in 2024, in an interview with WCVB’s “On The Record” set to air Sunday morning.

“If I was looking at this point in my career to continue to engage in public service, I think (my wife) Lauren and I and Karyn Polito, the lieutenant governor, and her husband, Steve, would have run for another term,” he said. “I certainly plan to be involved in 2024, but I think the likelihood I’d be on the ballot in 2024 is pretty small.”

“I think anybody in public life never slams anything completely (shut), but I’m not going to be a candidate in 2024, period,” Baker replied when hosts Ed Harding and Janet Wu observed that Baker’s name has been floated among some pundits on the national stage this week. After a beat, he added, “If I don’t say that, my wife will be very unhappy with me.”

Wu pressed the governor on whether he would ever be a candidate for public office again.

“I’m not going to rule out ever running for anything,” Baker said.

To which we have to add: “I am not, nor will I ever be — OK? My wife is standing right back there and she will be the first to vouch — a candidate for national office.” That’s a Baker quote from July 2015.

Baker’s not alone on the national stage

Baker was not the only Massachusetts politician to claim a place on the national stage this week. Congresswoman Katherine Clark, who has served as a top deputy to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, announced she would run for the number-two position in the chamber’s Democrat caucus with Pelosi preparing to step back from leadership.

While Clark seeks her own path in the next Congress, the state’s all-Democrat House delegation must prepare for a different dynamic starting in January when they become members of the minority party. That’ll be a shift from the current set-up, which features Congressman Richard Neal as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and Congressman James McGovern as chair of the House Rules Committee.

There’s no guarantee that they reclaim those influential positions if Democrats win back a House majority in 2024 or beyond, especially with new leadership inbound, though a Clark elevation certainly could help the delegation’s chances of controlling some levers of power. If it appears that Republicans will hold on to the House in 2024, that could also factor into the reelection plans of senior Massachusetts U.S. House members.

House Republicans in search of speaker?

GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, face leadership decisions of their own. House Republicans reportedly chose current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as their next top leader, but it’s unclear whether McCarthy has the votes lined up to become speaker. He would need an outright majority in the House, and the narrow majority Republicans are forecast to wield could make any intraparty dissent particularly impactful.

Some high-ranking Republicans signaled Thursday their priorities next term will be investigating President Joe Biden and his family, according to CNN. Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland — a Biden appointee — on Friday named former Justice Department official Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate Trump’s handling of government documents and his involvement in events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The balance of power in Massachusetts remains strongly weighted for Democrats, though party bosses are still waiting more than a week after the election to find out the final Democrat-Republican breakdown in the House and voters in two districts still do not know who their next representative will be.

Recounts still pending

The race between Republican Rep. Leonard Mirra and Democrat challenger Kristin Kassner to represent Georgetown, Hamilton, Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley and part of Topsfield remains undecided, as does the contest between Democrat Margaret Scarsdale and Republican Andrew Shepherd to represent Ashby, Dunstable, Pepperell, Townsend and parts of Groton and Lunenburg.

Both contests appear headed for recounts with only a handful of votes separating the candidates. How those play out will determine whether Democrats pick up three, four or five House seats over the margins they had to begin the 2021-2022 lawmaking session.

LOOSE ENDS: Gov.-elect Maura Healey and Lt. Gov.-elect Kim Driscoll named Danielle Cerny as their transition director and convened policy committees that will focus on housing, transportation, climate and energy, jobs and the economy, youth and young adults, and safe and healthy communities … A new report concluded that telehealth is “here to stay” but warned that its usage remained uneven across different demographic groups … Fare evasion fines are returning to the MBTA after more than a year without enforcement, though arrests and driver’s license impacts will no longer be deployed.

STORY OF THE WEEK: Whether playing out quietly in private committee meetings or broadcast on national news, transitions and a reckoning with what comes next are underway across state government.

SONG OF THE WEEK: A very rough paraphrase of Baker’s message to other Republicans who continued to embrace Trump into last week’s elections: I’m watching you all, I’m seeing you sinking.

Charlie Baker dissects Trump influence, election results

November 15, 2022 by pkzadmin

Stepping onto a stage that he usually shuns, outgoing Gov. Charlie Baker recently invited CNN to his State House office so he could share his thoughts on the midterm elections and the direction of his Republican Party. In the interview that aired Monday on the national network, the two-term governor said his party needs to realize that “voters want collaborative elected officials.”

“I think the biggest issue that played out in the midterms is something that I’ve talked about a lot over the course of the past eight years, which is voters, generally speaking, especially in battleground states aren’t interested in extremism. They just aren’t,” Baker said in the interview with Jake Tapper. “They want people who they believe are going to be reasonable, who are going to be collaborative and who represent sort of the fundamental tenet of democracy that it’s supposed to be a distributed decision-making model and you’re supposed to be OK with that.”

Though they may still end up with control of the U.S. House, Republicans took a drubbing in last week’s midterms. What was forecast to be a “red wave” ended up being the best midterms for a sitting president’s party in decades as Democrats retained control of the U.S. Senate for the rest of President Joe Biden’s term. Baker, a Republican who has at times been the “most popular” governor in America, will be replaced in the corner office by Democrat Maura Healey, and Baker did not campaign for her defeated GOP rival, Geoff Diehl.

As he introduced the pre-taped interview with the outgoing governor, Tapper said that “Baker rarely does national TV interviews but he invited me to his office in the State House for an exclusive one-on-one because he was seemingly so distressed about where the Republican Party is headed.”

Baker said the Republican Party feels “significant influence from the former president,” referring to Donald Trump, and said Trump’s influence “probably hurt the party and hurt the party’s chances on Election Day, not just here in Massachusetts, in Maryland, but in many of those other battleground states.”

“The big message coming out of Tuesday, and I would argue the big message voters are going to send going forward, is you need to demonstrate in word and deed that you believe this is always going to be about more than just your party and your partisans,” Baker, who only endorsed one Republican candidate running statewide here this year, said.

The governor, who often deflected questions about politics before last week’s elections, opted against seeking a third term and furthering his own politics of bipartisanship. His like-minded Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, also chose not to run for governor, leaving the Trump-backed Diehl to try to hold the office for the GOP.

The governor then touched upon some of what he talked about when he gave a lecture at Harvard’s Institute of Politics earlier this month. Millions of people every year give up on political parties and become independent or unenrolled voters, Baker said.

“That’s a big statement that people are making about what they think about the narrowness of the vision and the attitude of the parties,” he said.

In that speech at Harvard, and again on CNN, Baker recounted how David Bowie in 1999 was already talking about how dramatically — for good and ill — the internet would change society. Baker said the iconic artist was right in many ways.

“There will be certain things the internet will do that will be wonderful and amazing, and that’s absolutely the case. But he also said it would create tremendous disruption and this capacity for a very dark side to find itself and to leverage it and to make it something where truth would be defined by the users and the producers,” Baker said. “And I think in some ways he was right. And he was the only one who was talking about this back then, I give him huge credit.”

Asked why he hasn’t more outspoken against President Trump, despite being billed as an anti-Trump Republican, Baker retorted that he has not “been shy about my point of view on this stuff, I’ve just chosen to make the way I govern and the way we get things done a statement about how I think this should work.”

Baker also mentioned that he did not vote for Trump either time the former president ran for office.

“One of the messages from the election is, for Republicans generally, is we need we need as a party to move past President Trump and to move on to an agenda that represents the voices of all those in the party and the people of the country,” Baker said.

Tapper asked the governor why Republicans weren’t “running to you” for a White House run, given Baker’s “most popular governor” status.

“Well first of all, I’m a northeast Republican, which looks and acts a little different than many of the Republicans around the country,” Baker responded. “It’s a 50-state country and that’s part of what makes it beautiful and gorgeous and also what creates a lot of the noise that goes on at the national level.”

He added that Republicans need to broaden their horizons beyond the party’s core to reach out to independent voters if they want success on the national scale.

Earlier this year, when Baker was participating in a CNN-hosted conference in California, Harvard professor David Liu tweeted that Baker told attendees he would be ‘in the picture’ in the 2024 election.

“I am not, nor will I ever be — OK? My wife is standing right back there and she will be the first to vouch — a candidate for national office,” Baker said in July 2015.

Baker is spending the early part of this week in Florida for meetings of the Republican Governors Association, a group dedicated to electing and reelecting GOP governors.

Sam Drysdale contributed reporting.

Governors races a big win for Republicans, many Senate races far too close to call

November 8, 2022 by pkzadmin

Despite Democrat Maura Healey’s win in the Bay State, it was a great night for Republicans in other key gubernatorial races across the country, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu handily beating back Democratic opposition. But for Senate races, tallies were still too close to call as midnight neared on election night.

Fourteen of the 20 governor’s races called by the Associated Press by 11 Tuesday night saw Republican wins.

In addition to DeSantis and Sununu, the Republican governors of Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Wyoming, Iowa, Ohio, Vermont, Oklahoma, Texas and Idaho all overcame Democratic challengers to retain their seats for another term.

Healey made history in Massachusetts as the first elected female governor and Tuesday night found Sarah Huckabee Sanders as her Republican counterpart when she became the first woman elected governor in Arkansas. Sanders is a former White House Press Secretary in the Donald Trump administration for two years and daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Elsewhere in New England, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, won his first full term on Tuesday night.

Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, of California — who, like DeSantis on the right, has been considered a possible 2024 presidential contender — and Colorado’s Jared Polis sailed to easy new terms. was reelected to another term. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker won another term and Maryland’s Wes Moore became that state’s first Black governor.

While the AP hadn’t called it by 11:30 p.m., New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had minutes earlier declared victory in her hotly contested race with challenger Lee Zeldin.

DeSantis’ win in Florida continues a rightward shift for what was once the nation’s largest swing state, as voters embraced a governor who reveled in culture war politics and framed his candidacy as a battle against the “woke agenda” of liberals.

His was a big win in a fiercely divided country, a divisiveness that may have contributed to Tuesday night’s midterms being the most expensive in the country’s history at an estimated total of $16.7 billion at the state and federal level, according to the nonpartisan campaign contribution and finances tracker OpenSecrets.

Across the United States, people voted on all 435 seats in the House and one-third of the Senate seats and the results could very well flip the one-party, Democratic hold over Washington.

In the Senate, most key races were still too close to call by 11:15 p.m. The Associated Press had called a win for each party in two races: Democrat Michael Bennet bested Republican Joe O’Dea in Colorado by around 30,000-some votes, or 55.7% to 41.9% of the vote with about 62% of precincts reporting; and Sen. Marco Rubio easily winning a third term in Florida over former Rep. Val Demings — Rubio received nearly 58% of the vote to Demings’ 41%.

Some of the hottest senate races were miles out from being called by 11:20. In Georgia, Republican challenger Herschel Walker ahead of Democrat Raphael Warnock, fighting for his first full term, by only 25,000 votes — less than 1% — with 85% of the votes counted. It was the same story in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman stood at about 40,000 points over Republican Mehmet Oz, or 1%.

Back in New England, incumbent Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan led Republican challenger Don Bolduc by around 40,000 votes, which is a much larger percentage in this much smaller state: 55.5% of the vote compared to Bolduc’s 42.5%, with more than half of the total votes counted — which had the New York Times reading the race as “Very Likely” Hassan’s.

With those wins counted toward the total senate seats not up for grabs, Republicans had a slight edge of 45 to 43 seats by 11:30 p.m. in the U.S. Senate, where they only needed to flip one seat to gain control of the chamber.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Immigrant license law takes center stage in WBZ debate

October 3, 2022 by pkzadmin

Is Massachusetts’ new law to allow immigrants living here without legal status in the country to apply for state driver’s licenses a matter of public safety or a statement of lax immigration policy? It depends who you ask.

The lines were pretty clearly drawn this weekend in a WBZ-TV debate between Democratic state Sen. Lydia Edwards and Republican nominee for attorney general Jay McMahon.

Edwards, advocating for a “yes” vote when the question of whether to keep the law in place appears on the November statewide ballot, repeatedly argued that the measure is nothing more than making sure that more people driving on Massachusetts roads are “licensed, tested and insured.”

McMahon, urging voters to say “no” to the law and repeal it, said it unduly rewards people who did not enter the United States “the right way” and makes Massachusetts a “magnet” for illegal immigration.

The Legislature passed the law over Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto and opponents easily gathered more than enough signatures to give voters the opportunity to repeal the policy on the November ballot. The Republican Party and some of its statewide candidates like McMahon expect that the repeal effort will gin up enthusiasm for their campaigns.

Under the new law effective July 1, 2023, all Massachusetts residents who are old enough will be eligible to apply for standard driver’s licenses, regardless of their immigration status. Immigrants who do not have legal status in the U.S. will need to submit other documents — including either a valid, unexpired foreign passport or a valid, unexpired consular identification document — to prove their identity, date of birth and current residency.

“This is not doing anything besides assuring that a person is able and has the permission to drive. And that just makes sense. That’s the safest possible thing we can do. At the end of the day, I don’t think we should be enacting policy that is about legitimizing or not legitimizing individuals and their decisions and how they got here; I genuinely don’t care,” Edwards said in the debate moderated by Jon Keller. “I need to know that someone is driving and knows how to drive, that they’ve been tested, that they have insurance. That’s the safest thing for me and my family. And that, at the end of the day, is all I think most people care about: their families and making sure that they’re safe.”

McMahon responded to that, “To be honest, I do care how they got here.”

“I care because it’s a public safety concern. We want to know who’s crossing our borders, and why they’re coming here. And when they come here illegally, we want to know why are they coming here illegally? Why don’t they go through the proper points of entry? Why would they sneak into the country? Now somebody would say, ‘Well, they’re just looking for a job.’ Well, if they come in the right way, if they fill out the correct paperwork and go to the proper ports of entry, they can get that,” McMahon, a Bourne attorney and former law enforcement officer, said. “Millions of people do it the right way. So I’m always suspect when someone, in their first act of coming into this country, and it’s an illegal act.”

Between the license law repeal effort that’s underway and Martha’s Vineyard’s role in what has become an ongoing national news story about the immigration policies and practices of some Republican governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida, immigration policy has been thrust into the Bay State conversation weeks out from the Nov. 8 statewide elections. A couple of times during the 25-minute debate, Edwards said she would be happy to debate immigration policy with McMahon another time but that Question 4 is not about immigration policy.

“It’s about whether people should be vetted, whether they should be tested and whether they should be able to prove and earn a driver’s license in this state,” she said.

Though the notion that the new law would be a threat to public safety was a central theme to McMahon’s argument, he also acknowledged that there is support for the law from major police organizations, like the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police Association, and offered an explanation for law enforcement’s support.

“When you arrest someone, especially if they’re illegal aliens and they have no documentation, you cannot do a background check on them. So what the police departments are looking at is maybe there’s some identification so that they don’t have to arrest the person. … the departments don’t want to keep arresting these people and have them walk out the door of the courthouse paying a $100 fine,” McMahon said. He later added, “They’re gonna have to arrest otherwise, and they’d rather write a citation.”

Supporters of the law have repeatedly noted that more than a dozen other states already have similar policies in place.