Trump vs. DeVos in Michigan, and a key week for the Senate

It’s Trump vs. DeVos and Kinzinger in Michigan

Former president Donald Trump is facing one of the biggest tests of the power of his endorsement to date in Tuesday’s primaries, with Trump-backed candidates facing off against Republican rivals across the country.

Three of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year — Reps. Peter Meijer (Mich.), Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.) and Dan Newhouse (Wash.) — are running against Trump-endorsed challengers.

Blake Masters, Trump’s pick in the Arizona Senate race, will take on the other Republicans vying to challenge Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). And Trump-backed candidates for governor, state attorney general and state secretary of state — a crucial role in swing states due to the responsibility of these officeholders for running elections — are competing in Republicans primaries in several states. 

• But some of the fiercest battles are being fought in the Michigan state legislative primaries, where one of Trump’s former cabinet members, Betsy DeVos, and one of the Republicans who voted to impeach him, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), are trying to defeat several of the former president’s chosen candidates.

Trump has endorsed 11 state legislative candidates in Michigan ahead of Tuesday’s primary — more than he’s backed in any other state.

Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election results in Michigan despite losing the state to Joe Biden by more than 150,000 votes, and many of Trump’s chosen candidates have embraced his falsehoods about the election and his efforts to audit the results despite no evidence of widespread fraud.

Jacky Eubanks, a Trump-backed candidate who’s running for an open state House seat northeast of Detroit, has promised to “Initiate a full forensic audit for the 2020 election” and “Pass election integrity legislation” if she wins.

And Mike Detmer, who’s challenging Republican state Sen. Lana Theis with Trump’s endorsement, has criticized Theis for participating in a state Senate investigation that found there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“There are still those that I argue with on this,” Detmer said in an interview on Friday. “And they say, ‘Well, we just need to move on.’ There’s a lot of people in this district that aren’t willing to move on. They want the truth, and they want justice.” 

On the other side of Trump is Betsy DeVos, his former education secretary, and other members of her wealthy family, which has exerted enormous influence on Republican politics in Michigan for decades.

The DeVoses have contributed more than $750,000 this year to two groups backing Republican legislative candidates running against Trump-endorsed candidates, according to Michigan campaign finance filings, sparking outrage among Trump’s candidates.

• “There is a war going on for the soul of the GOP in Michigan with Trump-endorsed candidates on one side and the establishment DeVos family on the other,” Detmer, Eubanks and six other state legislative candidates whom Trump has endorsed wrote in a letter to Trump on Thursday.

John Gibbs, who’s running against Meijer in the Republican congressional primary, also signed the letter, which was previously reported by the Detroit News.

Detmer and other Trump loyalists became disenchanted with Betsy DeVos after she discussed trying to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office after Jan. 6, 2021. She resigned the next day, writing in her resignation letter to Trump that “there is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had” in instigating the attack on the Capitol.

“That was a nonstarter,” Detmer said of using the 25th Amendment. “In my opinion President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong.”

Still, the conflict between Trump and the DeVoses is more complicated than Betsy DeVos’ break with Trump. The DeVoses have backed a couple of legislative candidates Trump supports, and Trump on Friday endorsed the DeVoses’ candidate for governor, Tudor Dixon.

“The DeVos process of vetting candidates and getting behind them is a commitment to the things that they care about,” said Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who resigned last year after blaming Trump for losing the state. “And the Trump endorsement basically is if you 100 percent walk in lockstep with everything he says. It’s naturally not gonna fall the same way.”

The DeVoses aren’t the only ones working to undermine Trump’s candidates in Michigan.

Kinzinger, one of only two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, is leading an effort to encourage Democrats and independents to vote in the Republican primary on Tuesday to help defeat candidates who insist the 2020 election was stolen.

• Kinzinger’s PAC, Country First Michigan, has spent more than $120,000 in nine Michigan state legislative primaries, including Detmer’s — money that goes much further in a state legislative race than it would in an expensive congressional primary.

“Stop Pro Insurrection Republicans from representing you in the State Senate,” one mailer from Kinzinger’s PAC reads. “Do not wait to stop them in the General Election. Vote in the Republican Primary and save our democracy.”

It’s the opposite of the strategy that Democrats have employed in several races, including Meijer’s, in which they’ve spent millions of dollars to help Republicans who’ve questioned the results of the 2020 election because they believe they’ll be easier to beat in November.

Kinzinger decried Democrats’ tactics in an interview last week with a Michigan TV station.

“I have a hard time with a straight face hearing my Democratic friends say, ‘Where have all the good Republicans gone?’ or saying ‘We’re here to defend democracy,’ and then pulling this kind of thing,” he said.

Can Senate Democrats pull it off?

July turned out to be a very good month for Democrats in Congress. They achieved rare legislative successes so close to an election on the microchips manufacturing bill, struck an agreement on a climate-change-and-health-care bill, and the House passed legislation protecting same-sex marriage and an assault weapons ban (although the latter won’t go anywhere in the Senate). 

August could be even better — but everything has to go right. This is the last week the Senate is scheduled to be in session until September, creating a major time crunch for Democrats.

Climate, health care and tax deal

Senate Democrats hope to bring their climate-change-and-health-care bill — which Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) unexpectedly agreed to support last week in a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — to the floor late in the week. But that’s an ambitious schedule. (Our colleagues Tony Romm and Jeff Stein have a behind-the-scenes look at how the deal came to be.)

Why? The bill is being moved through the budget reconciliation process, which means it can be passed with a simple majority, but the parliamentarian can rule any part of the bill is out of order and should be stripped if it doesn’t have a direct impact on government spending or taxation. Democrats and Republicans will spend the first half of the week, at least, making their arguments to the Senate’s referee about what should or should not stay in the bill.

But the biggest potential challenge facing the bill could be Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who has not yet indicated if she supports the measure while she reviews the text and waits for the process with the parliamentarian to wrap.

Sinema was a key negotiator with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a provision that allows Medicare to negotiate some prescription drug prices, and climate change has been a big priority for her. But she was not directly involved in the negotiations between Manchin and Schumer, and it’s unclear if she will object to some of the tax increases included in the bill. 

Time and covid are the challenges confronting Democrats’ vote on the same-sex marriage bill passed by the House. Sinema and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have been working to get Republican support but covid absences have prevented them from holding a vote that could win the support of 60 senators. 

Democrats could run out of time to bring up the bill and might have to wait until September.

After Senate Republicans last week blocked legislation to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Schumer said on Sunday that…