Ten Republican senators at this writing support a bipartisan infrastructure outline. So does a like number of Democrats, including the party’s two main centrists, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. That means if recalcitrant liberals can be kept in line, no sure bet, there are potentially enough votes for a resulting bill to overcome a filibuster.

President Joe Biden wants to pay for a new infrastructure plan by taxing corporations, but Republicans would prefer to use gasoline tax revenues — a stance that some say sits uneasily with their pitch as a working-class party.

Biden’s original proposal was to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, but Republicans have said that is a nonstarter. GOP lawmakers have instead floated indexing the federal gas tax to inflation, which would raise it over time.

A preference for consumption taxes over levies on corporations that could potentially hurt competitiveness, job creation, or wage growth reflects mainstream conservative economics. But Republicans have become increasingly reliant on blue-collar and non-college voters in recent election cycles, which has made the party competitive in the Rust Belt at the presidential level for the first time since the 1980s.

“Look, there is a real hunger in this country for ‘actual infrastructure’ (bridges, roads, dams, etc.), so what congressional Republicans should do is take a page out of Harry Reid’s playbook and go behind closed doors, settle on a plan and funding, and hold to it no matter what, because Democrats simply don’t have the numbers in the Senate,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.

Still, many Republicans think gas tax tinkering should be a nonstarter.

“Any talk of a new gas tax or gas-tax indexing needs to be scuttled immediately,” O’Connell said. “The reason is simple: By canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, closing ANWR, and refusing new permits for drilling of fossil fuels on federal lands, the Biden administration has already imposed an onerous gas tax on the working class of this nation, which has resulted in higher prices at the pump. Congressional Republicans would do well to remember who it is they are fighting for.”

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

Former President Donald Trump is increasingly taking aim at his successor, President Joe Biden, with a series of blistering criticisms reminiscent of last year’s campaign as the 45th president teases another run.

Trump has issued a series of statements, his substitute for Twitter, from which he was banished over his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, challenging Biden’s policy decisions and circulating articles that are similarly critical of the White House’s new resident. He also appeared on Sean Hannity’s prime-time Fox News show on Monday night to take his case directly to the voters.

"While former President Trump is maintaining a laser-like focus on helping Republicans take back power in Washington and across the country in 2022, he is also keeping tabs on the follies of the Biden administration,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “And at a time when the country needs to vaccinate as many Americans as possible as quickly as possible, Trump is correct that the Biden administration’s decision to halt distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a self-defeating head-scratcher that will only lead to greater skepticism about COVID jabs among the general population.”

Known for his marketing instincts, Trump also objected to the symbolism of the 9/11 date. “September 11th represents a very sad event and period for our Country and should remain a day of reflection and remembrance honoring those great souls we lost,” he said. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do.” O’Connell called Biden’s choice of date “flat tone-deaf."

“Donald Trump may be out of the White House, but he is the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party and the one person who can lead the GOP back to majorities in Washington next year, despite repeated attempts by Big Tech, the Democrats, and corporate media to silence his every word,” O’Connell said. “And should Trump choose to run for the White House in 2024, he will be the Republican Party presidential nominee."

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

President Biden entered office billed as a consummate Washington deal-maker, but the Democrat's first major piece of legislation is unlikely to score a single Republican vote, calling into question his pledge to work across the aisle.

Democrat Jim Manley, a former top aide to onetime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, suggested Biden cut his losses early.

"He was smart enough to realize quickly that negotiations with Republicans were never going to work out and that he made the right decision to use the so-called reconciliation process," Manley said.

Democrats, “from the get-go, said that they were going to use budget reconciliation,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist.

A veteran of several Republican administrations said he thought Biden had never planned to concede much.

Read more from Katherine Doyle at the Washington Examiner

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is quickly establishing himself as the Republican best positioned to inherit the mantle from former President Donald Trump if the latter exits electoral politics.

DeSantis has taken up the major themes of the Trump presidency — defending national sovereignty, assailing Big Tech, excoriating political correctness, pursuing economic reopening during the pandemic, and getting tough with China — and married it to a relatively popular gubernatorial record in a major state.

“Four years is a political lifetime,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “That said, if Donald Trump chooses not to run for president in 2024, there is no question that DeSantis, assuming he wins reelection in the Sunshine State in 2022, will likely be the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.”

Still, Trump will be 78 in four years. DeSantis is only 42. The two men are political allies. And they now reside in the same state. “Florida under DeSantis has been heralded as a beacon of freedom by conservatives, and with Donald Trump residing at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach and Republicans locked out of power at the federal level, Florida is now seen as the center of the Republican political universe,” O’Connell said.

“Gov. DeSantis’s leadership during the pandemic has earned him plaudits in conservative circles across the country. When other big-state governors were stressing lockdowns and stoking fears, DeSantis was pushing to reopen safely, and it paid off. His goal was to minimize death and suffering while maximizing openness,” O’Connell added. “And it is not just Republican voters who recognize DeSantis’s success and meteoric rise, there is a reason why the Florida governor is being hammered by the dominant liberal media. He is succeeding by following the science and the data and making media-anointed pandemic heroes like Govs. Newsom and Cuomo look like amateurs in terms of doing what is best for their constituents.”

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a message for confronting President Biden’s new administration, with one GOP missive stating: “There’s bipartisan agreement. … Joe Biden’s a partisan.”

The GOP is hammering Biden’s executive orders, his use of a budgetary maneuver to pass a COVID-19 relief package without Senate Republicans (despite their offers to compromise), and even occasional clashes with the dwindling number of centrist and red-state Democrats on Capitol Hill to undercut the new president’s talk of “unity.”

But as was the case during the 2020 presidential campaign, the Republican message is having a difficult time being heard over continued discussion of former President Donald Trump and their own infighting. The headlines over the past week were dominated by an unsuccessful attempt to boot House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney from her leadership position because she voted to impeach Trump and the House stripping Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments for conspiracy theorizing and incendiary comments. Soon attention will turn to Trump’s Senate trial, his second in as many years.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from questioning whether their party leadership is trying to squeeze too much legislative output out of their razor-thin majorities without Republican cooperation.

Republican operatives see a target-rich environment ahead of a midterm election in which they need only a net gain of one seat in the Senate and seven in the House to recapture the majorities.

“President Biden’s ‘return to normalcy’ has been an unmitigated disaster, and while congressional Democrats may not yet realize it, or choose to ignore the harsh realities outside of D.C., as the corporate media does,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “We were assured that Biden had a ready-to-go vaccine distribution plan, but America quickly found out he didn’t. Most voters want their kids back in school yesterday, but Biden is petrified of the teachers unions."

"America was told that Biden would govern from the middle and would work to seek bipartisan consensus," he added. "Instead, Biden is issuing radical executive orders on just about every issue from open borders to canceling the Keystone XL pipeline to nonsensical climate edicts like they were parking tickets accrued after a late night in Foggy Bottom. Fifty percent of America simply did not vote for this hard-left turn.”

Republicans are cognizant of the challenge.

“Yes, Biden’s early approval ratings remain high, but it is only a matter of time before America wakes up to the harsh realities of what Biden and company means for their families,” O’Connell said. “And for those who doubt what I am saying, there is a reason why the top political story in the U.S. for the last week has been about the past utterances of a backbench congresswoman from Georgia who, until recently, 99% of America had never heard of.”

“The reason is simple: If corporate media can’t fraudulently paint the Republican Party as ‘extremists’ before the American public feels the pain of one-party rule," he added, "then the Biden administration will be neutered at the ballot box in 2022."

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

President Trump isn’t the first Republican to allege voter fraud in big Democratic-controlled cities or to face charges that he is seeking to disenfranchise minority voters in those communities.

On election night in 1994, Ellen Sauerbrey looked poised to become the first Republican governor of Maryland since Spiro Agnew. But a late batch of votes, mainly from Baltimore, came through to put the Democrat over the top. Sauerbrey alleged fraud and challenged some 11,000 votes. Her opponent’s winning margin was less than 6,000.

Detroit is the focal point of the Trump campaign’s election challenges in Michigan, where there have long been allegations of irregularities and generalized corruption. In 2013, Democratic Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and racketeering.

Republicans have complained about urban Democratic political machines adversely affecting election integrity for decades. Democrats have increasingly argued that the real fraud is Republican attempts at voter suppression, especially in minority communities. In Georgia, where Trump is contesting the presidential election results, Democratic leader Stacey Abrams has accused GOP Gov. Brian Kemp of effectively stealing the 2018 gubernatorial election from her by the means.

“Urban blue centers have an incentive to cheat and/or skirt the rules set down by the various state legislatures because of machine politics and the need to deliver for the Democrat Party nationally, but also because the chances of being prosecuted are so rare since the courts at all levels have shown themselves so hesitant to weigh in on election matters,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

President Trump’s reelection prospects looked increasingly grim on Friday, as Democratic challenger Joe Biden took the lead in key states that would deliver a majority of the Electoral College, but some prominent conservatives are urging him to look to the contested states’ Republican-controlled legislatures for salvation.

Trump has vowed to fight on, as his legal team fanned out across the handful of battleground states where the campaign is contesting various aspects of the counting process. “We believe the American people deserve to have full transparency into all vote counting and election certification, and that this is no longer about any single election,” the president said in a statement released by his reelection campaign. “From the beginning, we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn."

“For months, the American people were told ad nauseum that President Trump was going to get shellacked in the Electoral College, McConnell and Republicans were out in the Senate, Pelosi was going to get a slew of reinforcements in the House, and Texas could possibly go blue for Biden,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “And why? Because the pollsters said so, and anyone who argued with these “experts” was a Trump-loving sycophant. In short, the Americans were sold a disgusting pack of lies about a ‘blue wave’ that never materialized.”

“Can Trump still win a second term? You bet,” O’Connell added. “It will be without question a heavy lift, but nothing is impossible in the era of Trump.”

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

President Trump is campaigning across the country in the final week of the race for the White House with all the trappings of incumbency and all the urgency of an underdog.

Democrats are confident that they have already banked enough of an early vote lead to withstand a late surge of in-person Trump voters on Election Day and that their nominee, Joe Biden, will finish the job Hillary Clinton couldn’t. The former vice president is ahead by 7.8 points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average and by 3.9 points in top battleground states.

But looking at the numbers in some of those individual states, Republicans see shades of Trump’s poll-defying, come-from-behind victory four years ago.

“The final week of 2020 is eerily similar to 2016. Roughly 2 points in six states is the difference between President Trump being reelected and a Biden Electoral College blowout,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “It is all about turnout now.”

Trump's frenetic pace is a whole different strategy than that of Biden, who has had a limited public schedule dominated by sparsely attended events. “While Biden largely sits on his keister in Delaware, Trump is wisely barnstorming the states and counties that will decide this election," O'Connell said. "You couldn’t have a more stark contrast in how the two candidates are spending their time in the homestretch.”

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence took very different debate approaches but had one strategy in common: seeing how far to the left the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was willing to go.

Pence regularly hammered Harris, a California Democrat who was rated the most liberal senator, on the Green New Deal. Trump tried to draw Biden out on defunding the police and other “law and order” themes. Both Republicans sought to get their opponents to admit they would “pack” the Supreme Court, a proposal with little support in a recent Washington Examiner/YouGov poll.

The strategy was to present the Democrats as far more radical, and much less centrist, than advertised. Failing that, Pence, and especially Trump, hoped to drive a wedge between Biden and his most left-wing supporters. In 2016, some Bernie Sanders voters stayed home, voted for third-party candidates like Green Party nominee Jill Stein, or even cast ballots for Trump.

“When the queen of the Green New Deal, AOC, thumps you on Twitter just after Vice President Pence calls you out for being all over the map on the issue of fracking, it was just not a good night for Harris,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “It was the type of moment that sows distrust with the voters who will decide this election.”

Others hope the Democrats are being too clever by half. “It is just not logically compatible for someone to say they like the Green New Deal as much as Harris does and be so strongly in favor of green energy in every sector of America’s economy, and yet still also be in favor of fracking,” O’Connell said. “These two positions are flat-out incompatible, and that was clear to anyone watching or listening.”

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner