Senate Republicans Lay Low on the Fourth, or Face Single-Minded Pressure
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, DAVE PHILIPPS, JESS BIDGOOD and EMILY COCHRANE
ALDERSON, W.Va. — In normal times, the Fourth of July parade is a fat pitch down the middle for the grinning politician. For instance, here was Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat facing re-election next year in a state that President Trump won by 42 points, waving unheckled among the firefighters, beauty queens and county commissioners who streamed up Maple Avenue.
Political disputes have never impinged on the festivities here, said Karen Lobban, 70, who has been involved with Alderson’s parade in one way or another for all of its 56 years.
But, she added, “Things are different now.”
Mr. Manchin’s Republican colleague in West Virginia, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, was not here on Tuesday as she had been two years earlier. She released a YouTube message but had no public events for the day. The Republican senator next door in Ohio, Rob Portman, had none either. Nor did the two Republican senators in Iowa. The parades in Colorado proceeded without Senator Cory Gardner.
It is a tough summer for Senate Republicans, who are trying to combine a long-promised repeal of the Affordable Care Act with a replacement that has, in legislation drafted so far, been as popular as sunburn. Protesters have held sit-ins at Senate offices, phone lines have been jammed and editorial writers have blasted their states’ congressional delegations. Planes have even flown admonitory, if occasionally poorly conceived, banners over state capitals.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/us/politics/senate-republicans-lay-low-on-the-fourth-or-face-single-minded-pressure.html?emc=edit_th_20170705&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284&_r=0
