The Republicans could see Senate primary divisions in 2014

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* Cheney's run renews concerns about party divisions

* In bid to take back Senate, party can afford few missteps

* Tension between party's establishment, Tea Party movement

By John Whitesides

WASHINGTON, July 18 (Reuters) - Liz Cheney's decision to challenge Wyoming U.S. Senator Mike Enzi in a Republican primary next year sets up the type of divisive, intraparty fight that Republican leaders vowed to avoid after the 2012 elections.

The move this week by Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is unlikely to open the door for a Democrat to win the Senate seat in Wyoming, which is heavily Republican.

But it is rekindling Republicans' concerns that party feuds could lead to a reprise of the 2010 and 2012 elections, when bitter Republican primary fights in several states produced weakened, gaffe-prone nominees who went on to lose winnable races to Democrats - and thwart Republicans' hopes of winning a majority in the Senate.

In next year's elections, Republicans will need a net gain of six seats to take control of the 100-member Senate. Most analysts expect the party to gain some seats - possibly enough to reclaim a majority - but say it cannot afford the types of missteps it has made in the past two elections.

The fields of candidates are still shaping up, but already there are signs of brewing Senate primary fights among Republicans in several states, including Iowa, Georgia and Alaska.

"The Republican path to success in the Senate is pretty narrow. If they lose one or two seats because of a difficult primary, that's a huge problem - and it's possible," said Jennifer Duffy, a Senate analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

"They can't afford a lot of unforced errors," she added.

Many Republicans still have painful memories of the last two elections, when contentious primaries produced Senate nominees such as Todd Akin in Missouri, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.

Each rode the momentum of the conservative Tea Party movement to the Republican nomination, then withered amid campaign-trail missteps. Akin and Mourdock stumbled in 2012 by making controversial comments about rape.

During the 2010 campaign, Angle warned that Islamic law was taking hold in some U.S. cities, while O'Donnell - who previously had acknowledged dabbling in witchcraft - made a commercial to try to assure voters she was not a witch.

In the aftermath of the Republican losses last November, party leaders pledged to cut back on internal squabbling and focus on producing disciplined general election candidates.

Republican strategist Karl Rove announced a new political action committee, the Conservative Victory Project, that would back candidates deemed by party leaders to be the most "electable."

That drew criticism from Tea Party and other conservative groups, whose challenge to party leaders' authority is at the root of much of the tension within the Republican Party.

'FISSURES IN THE PARTY'

Cheney's announcement seemed to reinforce the message that some Republicans were not on board with the party's unification drive.

She implicitly criticized Enzi's sometimes accommodating style, saying on Tuesday that "we can no longer afford simply to go along to get along" - an echo of past party clashes between ideologically driven activists and more moderate party pragmatists.

"I think it's going to open a lot of fissures in the party," former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said on MSNBC. "I think this is an insurgent move by Cheney."

Republicans have some clear advantages heading into the 2014 campaign, including a playing field in which Democrats must defend 20 Senate seats to 14 for Republicans.

Democrats also are defending seven seats in states won by Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election - Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, South Dakota, North Carolina, Montana and West Virginia.

But the prospect of ugly Republican nominating battles has given Democrats hope. In conservative Georgia, where Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss is retiring, several Republicans including three members of Congress - Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey and Jack Kingston - already have said they will seek the seat.

In politically divided Iowa, a few little-known Republican contenders are lining up to replace retiring Democratic Senator Tom Harkin. Democrats have rallied around U.S. Representative Bruce Braley as their candidate.

In Alaska, where Republicans are targeting Democratic Senator Mark Begich, Tea Party favorite Joe Miller is facing Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell in a race that could be complicated by the potential entry of another Republican: former Alaska Governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

Palin said this month she was "considering" entering the race. Miller defeated Senator Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 Republican primary, only to lose to her in the general election after she mounted a write-in campaign.

SEEKING 'DISCIPLINED' CONSERVATIVES

Other states where competitive Republican primaries could develop include South Dakota - where former Governor Mike Rounds is running for retiring Democrat Tim Johnson's seat - and West Virginia, where conservatives are exploring a challenge to Republican Representative Shelley Moore Capito's bid for the Senate seat held by retiring Democrat Jay Rockefeller.

Two Republican senators who had been considered vulnerable to primary challenges - Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - do not have strong primary opponents, but could still get them, analysts say.

Both have drawn the ire of conservatives at times. As his party's leader in the Senate, McConnell has been accused of not pushing a strong enough conservative agenda, while Graham has been criticized for straying from the party line - most recently in backing a plan to overhaul the country's immigration system.

"There is definitely a lot of frustration in the (conservative) grassroots and a real hunger for new leadership in Washington and new blood and new energy in the Senate," said Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. The "Super PAC," or political action committee, once was led by former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, an early booster of the Tea Party movement.

Hoskins said the fund was exploring whether to back conservatives in several states, including potential challengers to McConnell and Graham.

"In Kentucky, Republicans would be better off with a different Republican candidate. Mitch McConnell is a very weak general election candidate," Hoskins said.

Polls indicate McConnell is vulnerable in Kentucky, but he has nearly $10 million in campaign funds for his race against Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes, the secretary of state. McConnell also has formed an alliance with fellow Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite.

Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Rove's PAC, said the party's losses in 2012 had reinforced the need for a more disciplined approach to elections.

That new caution was most evident this year in Iowa, where staunchly conservative Representative Steve King chose not to enter the Senate race after some Republicans expressed concern that his views were out of step with most voters in the state.

"There appears to be a broad recognition now that in order to win general elections, we need high-quality candidates who aren't just conservatives but are also good fundraisers and disciplined campaigners," Collegio said.

But Hoskins said his group was still looking for credible conservatives who could win general elections.

"We have primaries for a reason. Republican voters should have choices and there should be a healthy debate," Hoskins said. "Once you are elected, you aren't entitled to be there forever. It's not a lifetime entitlement." (Editing by David Lindsey and Peter Cooney)

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Divisions Over National Security State Scramble Old Alliances, Political Coalitions

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WASHINGTON -- The contours of the debate around security and civil liberties that began the day after the 9/11 attacks have been steadily shifting ever since, but have recently become contorted in the wake of revelations about the depth and breadth of the National Security Agency's secret surveillance. The debate coincides and overlaps with disagreement over indefinite detention, the use of force abroad and, specifically, the employment of drones in a sprawling array of countries in the so-called global war on terror.

The debate has taken on a partisan bent, with grassroots Democrats broadly lining up in surveys to defend the administration, and Republicans charging that presidential authority goes too far. But among the leaders in Washington and the media, alliances are scrambling, with the greatest dissension within conservative ranks.

The battle inside the GOP has left leading tea party figures such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in uncomfortable alignment with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats; Michael Moore; Glenn Greenwald; Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg. They are pitted against establishment figures from both sides, such as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.), and diplomat Richard Haass.

Democrats, owing partly to the simple fact that they control the levers of executive power, are more likely to back the extensive use of that authority. Two recent surveys differed in how respondents reacted to the NSA's surveillance programs, but they found similar patterns of partisanship.

In a HuffPost/YouGov poll, Republicans and independents were most likely to say that collecting Americans' phone records is unnecessarily intrusive, by a 65 percent to 17 percent margin for Republicans and by a 62 percent to 17 percent margin for independents. But Democrats in the poll were more divided, with 39 percent saying collecting phone records is unnecessarily intrusive and 33 percent saying it is justified to combat terrorism.

In a Pew Research Center/Washington Post poll, majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all supported the NSA monitoring, but Democrats were by far the most likely to do so. Sixty-four percent of Democrats called the surveillance acceptable, compared with 53 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.

That wasn't the case when former President George W. Bush was in office. A similar ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in 2006 during the Bush administration -- after similar revelations that the government was collecting Americans' phone and email data -- found that 75 percent of Republicans and just 37 percent of Democrats said it was acceptable for the NSA to "secretly [listen] in on phone calls and [read] emails without court approval."

Republicans who were then on the receiving end of Democratic criticism, particularly that dished out by then-candidate Barack Obama, are piqued to see so many now standing up for the national security state. "This so similar to the Cheney doctrine, it's not even funny, and nobody's talking about that," a former Republican leadership aide said on background. "At least Republicans are consistent. The left should be enraged. He promised something better than this. And it's fucking the same, it's the same arrogance."

The GOP has historically been a coalition that included staunch isolationists, an outgrowth of a don't-tread-on-me philosophy. The purge began in the run up to World War I and was fully complete by the 1980s, as the GOP captured "Reagan Democrats" who wanted tough talk against the Soviet Union and rebelled against the counter-cultural opposition to the Vietnam War that had seeped into the Democratic Party. The neoconservative movement, once led by Sen. Scoop Jackson, a Cold War Democrat from Washington state who had been a favorite to win the 1972 presidential nomination, drifted fully over to the GOP, and by the time the Patriot Act was rushed through Congress, the GOP gave it a full-throated embrace. A handful of Democrats stood up to it, but few wanted to make a political fight out of it.

But the tea party wave in 2010 brought in a new batch of Republicans who had no connections to the post-9/11 legislative flurry and a deep distrust of government. The first time House leaders put an extension of the Patriot Act on the floor, they were shocked when their members blocked it.

Paul has become the base of opposition to the overreach of the national security state, solidifying his place with his 13-hour filibuster on drones. He has extended that critique to include the NSA's surveillance, and has angered plenty of top Republicans in the process. That debate is likely to continue playing out over the next several years, as Paul flirts with a presidential bid, lifting his national profile and that of the civil liberties movement he's leading.

The GOP's division on national security and civil liberties was summed up nicely Monday by Rush Limbaugh, who told listeners he was "conflicted" on whether the source of the NSA revelations, leaker Edward Snowden, should be punished.

"I must tell you, I am conflicted about this in a number of ways," he said. "The regime is saying this guy's gotta be silenced, this guy's gotta be prosecuted. And the media, they're going back and forth on how to deal with this, 'cause this has got a lot of people shaken up, because [President] Obama represented a panacea, if you will. Some of these people really drank that Kool-Aid and believed it.

"We had an idealistic utopia coming that this was stuff exclusive to Bush, all this torture and all this spying and all this warrantless wiretap searching and the Supreme Court deciding who's the president," he continued. "These people were consumed with this rage. It was literally eating them alive. So Obama comes along -- leave the racial aspect out of it -- Obama comes along and promises none of this is gonna go on and he's gonna get to the bottom of it. He's gonna stop it. He's gonna expose it, and the country's gonna get its respect."

Limbaugh, after a digression about Obama's race protecting him from impeachment, made the argument that the NSA overreach is not a conservative or tough-on-terror reaction to 9/11, but is the consequence of liberalism's basic philosophy.

"I think that the opportunity still exists and the focus of attention ought to be: this is what you get with liberals," he suggested. "This is what you get with liberalism -- or Democrats if you want -- but this kind of big government, this kind of overreach, this kind of insecurity, this kind of violation of privacy, this is exactly what you get. This is who liberals are. That, to me, needs to be the message."

Meanwhile David Brooks, the man in charge of explaining conservatism to liberals in the pages of The New York Times, lectured Snowden about trusting the government.

"Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good," Brooks wrote. "This is not a danger Snowden is addressing. In fact, he is making everything worse."

Liberal writers Jeffrey Toobin and Joe Klein, meanwhile, are lined up with Brooks. Toobin slammed Snowden as a criminal narcissist. The liberal shift represents a realignment that has been underway since 9/11, but was hastened by the presidential candidacy of former Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Facing charges of a lack of patriotism, Democrats nominated a war hero, pinned flags to their breasts and began talking in bellicose terms. Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq made sure to be clear that they supported the one in Afghanistan.

When Obama ran on that platform he stunned his base by following through on his promise to ramp up the war in Afghanistan while winding down the one in Iraq. Meanwhile, he broadened the drone war, launched strikes across the globe and instead of closing Guantanamo, closed the State Department office in charge of closing Guantanamo. He recently vowed to reopen it, in a speech aimed to spell out what limits he saw to his power to wage war.

Klein put the centrist position most succinctly, slamming the "civil liberties freakout."

"Unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with Marc Thiessen, hell has frozen over and he’s on the right track about the National Security Agency–leaks nonscandal," Klein wrote at Time.com. "Those who see the federal government as a vast corporate conspiracy or a criminal enterprise -- in other words, paranoids of the left and right -- are concerned about this. More moderate sorts should also have cause for concern -- especially if a rogue government, like Nixon’s, were in power."

Senate Immigration Debate Shows Party Divisions Ahead Of Vote

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POR DAVID ESPO, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Memo a partidarios de la legislación bipartidista hacia el piso del Senado: Asegúrese de que insistir en que los inmigrantes que están ilegalmente en los Estados Unidos tendría que trabajar, aprender inglés, pasar una verificación de antecedentes y, sobre todo, pagar impuestos antes de que podría obtener la ciudadanía.

Destacar que el 100 por ciento de la frontera México-Estados Unidos se pondrá bajo vigilancia, que los inmigrantes que obtener estatus legal no será elegibles para el bienestar "para más de una década" y que quienes ingresen a los Estados Unidos ilegalmente en el futuro se bloquearán de situación jurídica.

No se olvide a los críticos de la etiqueta de la cuenta como defensores de un status quo que es impopular con el público.

Este es el Consejo probado encuesta distribuido a los demócratas del Senado recientemente en una medida que ofrece la mejor oportunidad en años para reformar el sistema de inmigración de la nación, al mismo tiempo le da al Presidente Barack Obama una oportunidad para un triunfo nacional del segundo término hito.

Puede sonar simple, dado que un grupo bipartidista de ocho senadores redactó el proyecto de ley y luego la guiado por el Comité Judicial del Senado; que la casa blanca, el trabajo organizado y la cámara de comercio apoyan la medida; y que muchos estrategas políticos republicanos quieren el GOP para mostrar una bienvenida más cara a los votantes hispanos.

No pasará.

Ambiciones presidenciales sólo contribuirán a ello, como el senador Marco Rubio, por ejemplo, intentos un straddle político mientras otros posibles candidatos presidenciales GOP se oponen firmemente a la medida.

El republicano de Florida ayudó a negociar el proyecto de ley bipartidista encabezada actualmente para el pleno del Senado y recientemente ha pedido cambios mientras intenta mantener la fe con los partidarios del tea party y otros conservadores que votarán en las primarias y caucuses 2016.

Divisiones internas en el partido republicano, profundamente sostenido diferencias sobre la política, las preocupaciones sobre los costos y más añadir a la complejidad de la legislación que ha dicho el líder de la mayoría en el Senado Harry Reid, D -Nevada, proceder a una votación final el 4 de julio.

"En verdad, el proyecto de ley es Amnistía primero y una promesa de cumplimiento más adelante," el Senador Jeff Sessions, R -Alabama, dijo el viernes, previsualizar puntos junto a otros opositores conservadores pretenden hacer durante las próximas tres semanas.

Requisito de la ley para el pago de impuestos atrasados "es ineficaz", las medidas prometidas para asegurar la frontera "no funcionará" y millones de inmigrantes actualmente en el país ilegalmente calificaría para bienestar en cinco años, dijo de sesiones. La medida "realmente debilita la ley actual en varias áreas significativas" cuando se trata de casos de inmigración juzgados en los tribunales, añadió.

Sesiones había ridiculizado la coalición bipartidista detrás de la medida como una colección de grupos externos que no representan los intereses nacionales.

En un reflejo de la división del partido republicano, él discrepó con Karl Rove, el ex estratega superior para el Presidente George Bush para W., cuyo intento de revisión de inmigración flameado hacia fuera en 2007.

Escribiendo recientemente en The Wall Street Journal, Rove advirtió republicanos para ser consciente de sólido apoyo público para fronteras seguras y para un camino a la ciudadanía para aquellos en el país ilegalmente.

Instó a los legisladores del partido republicano para evitar el uso del término "Amnistía", que dijo es "perdón de delito sin pena".

La legislación impone costos financieros a los inmigrantes en el país ilegalmente que buscan la ciudadanía.

En su núcleo polémico, la legislación crea una ruta de 13 años a la ciudadanía para un estimado los 11,5 millones de inmigrantes actualmente en los Estados Unidos ilegalmente. También establece objetivos de seguridad de la frontera que el gobierno debe cumplir antes de cualquier cambio en el estatus legal a los inmigrantes.

Tal como estaba redactado, la legislación también crea un programa de trabajadores invitados poco calificado, amplía el número de visas disponibles para los trabajadores de alta tecnología y quita énfasis lazos familiares en el sistema de inmigración legal que ha tenido lugar durante décadas.

En el fondo son preguntas sobre el impacto económico de la legislación a la vez son altos déficit federales y la economía está montando una lenta recuperación de la recesión.

La oficina de presupuesto del Congreso tiene todavía estimar el impacto de la legislación sobre el déficit, aunque los fanáticos reconocen que los cambios serán necesarios si la Agencia predice en última instancia la medida tendría como resultado tinta adicional roja.

Sesiones y otros dicen que lo hará.

"Puesto que un número abrumador de los trabajadores aquí hoy es calificado de bajo que son ilegales... se puede esperar de sus ingresos a ser baja, clasificará para el crédito tributario por ingresos devengados, para Medicaid y el programa tras programa, estampillas y otros," sesiones dijo el viernes.

Citó un estudio realizado por la conservadora Heritage Foundation, estimando que los costos del gobierno para las personas cuyo estado de residencia se hará legal agregará $6,3 trillones al déficit en más de 50 años.

Sesiones no dicen así, pero el estudio ha sido ampliamente criticado desde la izquierda y derecha. Parcialmente fue escrito por un economista cuyas tesis 2009 afirmaron que los inmigrantes tienen IQs inferiores que la "población indígena blanca" en los Estados Unidos.

También se perfila como el debate se mueve en un escenario más nacional apenas está sumergido las tensiones raciales.

Sesiones y el senador Mike Lee, R-Utah, se refirieron a los viernes. Algunos en el otro lado de la cuestión se refirió a la carrera cuando la casa de control republicano votó el jueves para reanudar la deportación de los inmigrantes que trajo a los Estados Unidos ilegalmente como niños, muchos de ellos procedentes de países de América del sur o Central o México.

Los partidarios de la legislación a veces afirman que sus opositores son "de alguna manera anti-inmigrante, o es una persona infructuosa, que tu corazón está hecho de piedra, que las costillas están hechas de concreto y que no tienes corazón", dijo Lee. Llamó a este tipo de comentarios "debajo de la dignidad" del Senado.

Sesiones dijo: "hay mucho poder detrás de esta legislación. Lo puedo sentir. Cuando plantean cuestiones, viene el retroceso. "Eres cruel. No te gustan los inmigrantes,'"dijo, parafraseando a la crítica.

"Eso es ofensivo para mí."

Los partidarios del enfoque general adoptadas por la legislación hace clara la crítica no va a parar.

"Casa GOP da el proverbial dedo medio a la comunidad Latina con voto" para deportar a los inmigrantes más jóvenes, ex asesor de Obama David Plouffe escribió poco después de que la casa actuado.

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