GOP Senators Under Scrutiny “For Posing As China Hawks After Cozying Up To The Country”

Endangered Republican Senators Adopt GOP Talking Points “Despite Their Previous Stances and Links”

Vulnerable Republican Senators are once again being exposed as hypocrites––this time for “posing” as China hawks despite having histories of “cozying up to the country.” A new HuffPost report calls out Senators Steve Daines, Thom Tillis, and Cory Gardner for trying to sell themselves as tough on China in a desperate attempt to save their struggling re-election campaigns. The reality is despite their recent positions, all three vulnerable incumbent Senators had “careers spent encouraging, and sometimes profiting from, investments by U.S. corporations in the country.” 

This is just the latest example of “politically endangered” Republican Senators using the NRSC playbook to “attack China” in an attempt to try and shift blame from Trump’s bungled coronavirus response. The reality is they have failed to hold either China or the president accountable.     

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

HuffPost: Democrats Blast GOP Senators For Posing As China Hawks After Cozying Up To The Country
By Daniel Marans
July 20, 2020

Key Points:

• A number of Republican senators seeking reelection in November are posing as China hawks after careers spent encouraging, and sometimes profiting from, investments by U.S. corporations in the country. 

• Despite their previous stances and links, these Republicans enthusiastically have adopted the poll-tested GOP talking point of blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and casting themselves, alongside President Donald Trump, as the group uniquely capable of confronting the U.S. rival.

• In Montana, for instance, where GOP Sen. Steve Daines faces a tough challenge from Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, Democrats are already spending money to cast doubt on Daines’ commitment to take a tougher line with China.

• Before entering Congress, Daines spent years as an executive at Procter & Gamble at a time when the industrial giant was shutting down production facilities across the U.S. and expanding production in China. Daines, who lived in China for much of the 1990s, oversaw the company’s efforts to infiltrate the nascent Chinese consumer market with the active collaboration of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

• Daines went on to become a champion of U.S.-China relations in Congress, supporting trade agreements that increased U.S. companies’ presence in the country. 

• Daines has made “holding China accountable” a central theme of his reelection campaign since early April. In a Facebook ad capable of reaching hundreds of thousands of people, Daines has promised to “EXPOSE China’s deadly cover-up of the China virus.” The language closely mirrors the recommendations of the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, which advised candidates in an April memo to “attack China” for its alleged role in allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, and to also run on re-shoring domestic manufacturing.

• But as The Daily Beast reported in May, Daines stands out on Capitol Hill as a cheerleader for U.S.-China relations prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. He has been such an outspoken advocate of opening Chinese markets to Montana cattle exports that he made his fifth official trip to China last August.

• He also has used those trips to reassure the Chinese government that the U.S. has no plans to stop recognizing Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan. China’s ambassador to the U.S. has called Daines China’s “ambassador to Congress.”

• Two other Republican senators facing contentious re-election battles also have histories of support for U.S. trade with China that they are now rushing to offset with hawkish positions.

• In 2015, GOP Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Cory Gardner of Colorado voted against both a bipartisan amendment that would have made cracking down on currency manipulation a higher priority in U.S. trade policy and a bipartisan bill vesting the Customs and Border Protection agency with greater authority to enforce trade agreement compliance. (Many economists blame China’s policy of boosting the value of the U.S. dollar and suppressing the value of its own currency for artificially increasing the attractiveness of Chinese exports, thus contributing to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S.)

• That same year, both senators also voted against a Democratic-backed bill that would have enacted tax benefits for companies that create jobs in the U.S. and levied tax penalties on companies that move U.S.-based jobs overseas. (Daines likewise did not vote for these three measures.)

• Matt Corridoni, a spokesman for the Democratic Senate Majority PAC, said, “Republicans are so desperate to claw their way out of their leadership failures on COVID-19 that they’re latching onto the GOP anti-China playbook as a life raft. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds, and if voters don’t reject them for that, they’ll certainly reject them for playing politics while Americans suffer.” 

Read the full story here.

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