Elected officials traditionally engage with constituents during their seven days off, but unhappiness with the healthcare bill has the GOP avoiding voters

The Resistance Now: it's recess week, but Republicans are hiding from constituents

Hide and seek ...

It’s Republicans’ least-favourite time of the year: recess week. GOP senators have marked their seven days off – traditionally a time for elected officials to engage with constituents – by almost universally hiding from their constituents.

It’s because of that Senate healthcare bill, you see. Not many people like it.

As of Wednesday, only four Republicans had either held or planned to hold public town hall events. And two of those events – step forward Texas’s Ted Cruz and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey – were hardly public.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People protest as Pat Toomey holds an invite-only town hall. Photograph: Marc Levy/AP

Toomey appeared in a Harrisburg television studio with an audience that had been invited by ABC 27. The number of audience members? Eight. Cruz held an event in his safe space of a Koch brothers-backed Q&A. Still, protesters outside Toomey’s gig – and hecklers inside Cruz’s – served to let the pair know what they thought of the Better Care Reconciliation Act.

... but you can’t hide forever

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 activists staged sit-ins at senators’ offices in 21 different states on Thursday – demanding that they vote no on the Senate bill.

The demonstrations were organized by Our Revolution, Democracy Spring, Ultraviolet and more, and targeted senators including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell – the brains behind the healthcare bill – as well as Rob Portman in Ohio and Bill Cassidy in Louisiana.

Just as a reminder: that Senate bill would see 22m additional people lose healthcare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Healthcare activists in New York City. Photograph: Erik McGregor/Pacific/Barcroft

WTF?

Two Silicon Valley billionaires – specifically Mark Pincus of Zynga and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn – launched a new online platform called Win the Future (hence WTF) this week. It’s intended to form as a platform for crowdsourcing ideas to move the Democratic party in a different direction.

So far, so good. Except the direction they appear to want to move the Democratic party – hardly a bastion of liberalism now – is further to the right.

Pincus told Recode the party was “already moving too far to the left” and that he would like to make it more “pro-business”. According to the Huffington Post, the tech moguls have “sunk $500,000” into Win the Future. The idea is not picking up much traction with progressives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest To the right, to the right: Mark Pincus of Zynga. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

No dogs allowed

A group of animal rights activists “were taken into police custody” at the infamous Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest this week, according to the Washington Post. Five people had attempted to unveil an anti-meat banner. They were released without charge. Joey Chestnut won the contest by eating 72 hot dogs and buns. It was his 10th victory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hot dog-eating champ Joey Chestnut is on the right. Photograph: ACE Pictures/REX/Shutterstock

What we’re reading

“Rural progressives” is not an oxymoron, writes Anthony Flaccovento at Blue Virginia. Flaccovento ran for Congress in 2012, and says his message that “attacked inequality and trickle-down economics” appealed to people in the rural areas of his state. So why isn’t the left doing better in the red parts of states like Virginia? Because “the Democratic party and the progressive movement both have, for the most part, written off rural America”.

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