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AbstractIn this article, we study the local political mobilization effects of political protests in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We analyze monthly voter registration data from 2136 US counties across 32 states, leveraging variation in the exposure to BLM protests across counties in a two-way fixed-effects framework with a matched control group. In contrast to previous studies, which reported substantial mobilization effects of local protests in other contexts, we show that voter registrations in the aggregate were insensitive to the presence of local BLM protests. We further disentangle the effects along party lines and the degree to which protests were associated with violent behaviors and find similarly insignificant effects. We present some preliminary evidence that the large scale of the protests and their extensive news coverage might have reduced the importance of experiencing a protest firsthand. IntroductionMany powerful political movements arise from seemingly insignificant events that set in motion a cascade of consequences. In some cases, the process ultimately results in a change of government or the entire dissolution of a nation. Early theoretical studies struggled to explain the emergence of rebellions, since the reward they provide is a public good, whereas the potentially large costs of participation are borne by the individual (Tullock, 1971). Subsequent literature proposed a variety of explanations consistent with rational choice theory that can reconcile this seeming paradox of revolution. These explanations include bloc mobilization (Oberschall, 1994), uncertainty about the repressive capabilities of the regime (Boix & Svolik, 2013), and social preferences (Shadmehr & Bernhardt, 2011).Footnote 1 In a similar spirit, Kuran (1989) described a framework in which privately held and publicly voiced political preferences can diverge. This results in a bandwagon effect, where individuals hold their political views private until a sufficiently large number of individuals voice similar views.A recent example of such a movement is Black Lives Matter (BLM), which, although officially founded in 2013, mushroomed into a global movement of an almost unparalleled scale following the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, 2020. Driven by concerns about perceived racial injustices, protests occurred across the United States, as well as in many cities worldwide.Despite the large scale of the movement and its associated protests, little is known about its political consequences. Although the protests primarily targeted perceived racial injustices, they commonly involved calls to get out the vote and emphasized the importance of registering to vote to achieve political change (New York Times, 2020). Moreover, the protests received a large amount of media coverage across the political spectrum. However, this coverage was marked by a deep ideological divide, as some conservative commentators emphasized the occurrence of violent outbursts at some of these protests, seeking to reinforce their narrative that a Democratic government would threaten public safety (FiveThirtyEight, 2020).These factors suggest that the BLM protests might have contributed in important ways to the record-breaking voter registration levels and turnout observed in the 2020 presidential election by encouraging voters in support of the movement, as well as those opposing it, to cast their vote. In this study, we focus specifically on the impact of local protests on the political mobilization of previously unregistered voters by comparing temporal patterns in voter registration across observationally similar communities with and without large-scale BLM protests.The vast majority of US states require voters to register to vote, a procedure that has long been acknowledged as potentially detrimental to voter turnout, since it compels prospective voters to expend energy at a time when political interest is relatively low (Highton, 1997; Rosenstone & Wolfinger, 1978). Recent years have seen a variety of efforts to increase political participation, including the abolition of voter registration deadlines (Brians & Grofman, 2001), widespread registration drives (Nickerson, 2015), and automatic voter registration when a citizen engages with government entities (McGhee et al., 2021). Despite these advances, there remains a substantial population of eligible yet unregistered voters (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2012), particularly among low-income Americans (Brians & Grofman, 1999). This gap is highly relevant, since interventions aimed at increasing voter registrations have been shown to translate directly into higher voter turnout (Nickerson, 2015).The above-cited research thus suggests that drivers of voter registrations are an important factor to study as we seek to understand political participation in the United States.A distinct advantage of voter registration data over traditional measures of electoral participation is their availability with high frequency. Compared to biennial turnout data, this data availability considerably mitigates potential confounding. One might be concerned about the possibility that protests are endogenous to places where they maximize political mobilization due to unobserved factors, such as the potential for new registrations. As outlined by Azam (2019), such behavior would lead to a biased estimate of the effect of protests in purely cross-sectional regressions. By observing voter registrations in a panel, we can account for such unobserved factors if they are constant during the observed time period (Wooldridge, 2015). We argue that focusing on a short time horizon before and after the protests lends credibility to the assumption that confounding variables did indeed remain constant during our sampling period.However, the use of voter registrations as an outcome also has some limitations that qualify our conclusions in important ways. First, registrations capture only the political engagement of previously unregistered voters. Although studying this population is interesting in its own right, its non-representative nature limits the extent to which findings can be extrapolated to the electorate as a whole (Jackman & Spahn, 2021). Second, the analysis of timing variation in voter registrations requires assumptions about why individuals prefer to register to vote at one point in time rather than another. While time-varying costs of registration are likely important (Cantoni, 2020; Kaplan & Yuan, 2020), we argue that the salience of political events can be a strong motivating factor, especially considering the availability of online voter registration in most states by 2020.Our research contributes to several strands of the literature in economics and political science. Most notably, we analyze the impact of political protests on voter mobilization. This question has previously been studied by Madestam et al. (2013), who found that protests by the Tea Party movement led to a local increase in the vote share for the Republican party. We add to this body of knowledge by providing estimates on the local political mobilization effects of another large-scale political movement, using an alternative outcome and identification strategy. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to estimate the effect of the Black Lives Matter protests on political mobilization.Footnote 2We further contribute to the vast literature on how voters react to dramatic external events. For example, terrorism has been found to affect voting, even though the violence was committed by independent actors without the support of political parties (Geys & Hernæs, 2020; Montalvo, 2011). The lootings and riots that accompanied some of the BLM protests provided conservative commentators with a powerful narrative contending that under a Democratic government, lootings and riots would be the norm.Footnote 3 Alternatively, the BLM movement can be viewed as an expression of dissatisfaction with prior policy. Voters might be motivated by seeing many citizens openly demand more progress on racial equality and policing. The previous literature on retrospective voting has generally confirmed that voters hold policymakers accountable for failure to control crime (Arnold & Carnes, 2012; Bateson, 2012) or failures of the education system (Holbein, 2016). Experimental evidence has shown that the context and framing in the media matter in determining how voters attribute blame (Healy & Malhotra, 2013; Malhotra & Kuo, 2008). Since conservative and liberal leaning voters consume different news sources (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Bakshy et al., 2015; Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2011), we can expect that they would receive different interpretations of the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter protests, which might change the extent to which voters are mobilized.Our results do not support the notion that local political protests affected voter mobilization, either in the aggregate or on either side of the political spectrum. Furthermore, we find similar null effects also for the subset of counties in which protests turned violent, although the considerably reduced sample size does not allow us to confidently rule out meaningful effect sizes.Although our results stand in contrast to earlier findings in the literature on the mobilization effects of political protests, these differences might be attributed to the scale of the BLM movement and its extensive media coverage. Similar to the prior literature, our analysis cannot identify the overall impact of the BLM movement but, rather, focuses on the differential in the mobilization effects induced by local protests. The vast media coverage of the BLM movement might have reduced the importance of local exposure, thus contributing to the null effect we estimate in this study.Footnote 4 The major national cable TV networks spent almost 2.5 hours per day reporting about the protests on the weekend after George Floyd’s death (FiveThirtyEight, 2020). In addition, we show that despite considerable variation in interest across states, even areas with little exposure to local protests exhibited substantial interest in BLM, as measured by Google Trends data.Section 2 of this paper describes our data sources and presents descriptive statistics of the sample; Sect. 3 describes our empirical strategy; Sect. 4 indicates our main results, heterogeneity analyses and robustness checks; and Sect. 5 provides a brief conclusion.DataVoter registration dataWith the exception of North Dakota, all US states require citizens to register to vote before they can cast a ballot in federal, state, and local elections. Even though voter registration is a nearly ubiquitous requirement, the regulations and procedures underlying the registration process differ widely across states. In 2020, about one-third of states permitted same-day voter registration, while other states required voters to register until several weeks before election day. Furthermore, states differed in the availability of online voter registration as well as systems that automatically register eligible individuals to vote when they interact with other government agencies.Similar to the differences in regulations regarding the timing of voter registration across states, there are also considerable differences in how voter registration statistics are released to the public. Some states release regular updates of their statewide voter file, whereas others merely release infrequent reports of aggregated voter registration numbers. In an attempt to overcome these data availability issues, various data aggregators have attempted to compile comprehensive nationwide voter files by combining separate statewide voter files. Although these undertakings have created powerful resources that have recently been used in academic research (Cantoni & Pons, 2021; Hassell et al., 2020), their usage is restricted. Since our estimation strategy relies only on aggregate data, we instead opted to collect publicly available reports released by the offices of secretaries of state and of state election boards.To nonetheless achieve a wide coverage of states, we aimed to collect monthly (or higher-frequency) reports of county-level voter registration statistics released during 2020, leading up to the general election. If no such reports were publicly available, we contacted the relevant agency and requested similar files. This approach resulted in a sample of 17,088 monthly county-level observations from 32 states spanning a period from February to September 2020.Footnote 5 Since not all states record party affiliations, we observed voter registrations by party only for a subset of 1276 counties in 22 states.Footnote 6 While our coverage of US states is incomplete, it is representative of the United States as a whole.Footnote 7 Nonetheless, in an attempt to quantify the importance of this selection, in Sect. 4.1 below we show that the inclusion (or omission) of any one state does not fundamentally alter our main conclusions.We must account for several features of the data in our analyses. First, in some states, the voter registration reports are not compiled at regular intervals, but instead are produced to reflect voter registration totals around the time of specific events. Hence, although the data frequency is roughly monthly, the precise number of days between two monthly observations can vary. Second, though most states compile their voter registration reports at the beginning or end of each month, a small subset of states reports voter registration totals in the middle of the month. Third, since most states report voter registration totals rather than new registrations, the numbers are affected by voter list purges, resulting in occurrences of negative monthly changes. We account for these issues by including state-by-period fixed effects in all our analyses, thereby effectively comparing counties within the same state in a given time period.Figure 1 shows the evolution of voter registrations over our sample period. Since the sample coverage differs toward the end of the sample period, registrations have been standardized by the population in the sample to make the numbers comparable. Following a period of very low registration numbers in April and May, the number of monthly registrations picked up considerably in June, both in the aggregate and for each party. Although this increase roughly coincides with the height of the BLM protests, the aggregate data do not allow us to distinguish whether the increase was caused by the BLM protests or other factors such as primary elections or approaching registration deadlines.Fig. 1Monthly registrations per capita. Notes: The blue shaded area shows new registrations during a specific month across all states and party affiliations in our sample. The lines show the number of new registrations by party affiliation, relative to the population of the states in which party affiliation is available. Since party affiliation is available only for a subset of the states, the lines do not have to add up to the blue shaded area. Reporting dates vary across states; therefore, observations were assigned to the closest end of month (e.g., voter registrations for June might be recorded on June 25 in one state and July 3 in another). (Color figure online)Full size imageProtest dataThe data on protests were compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED; https://acleddata.com/special-projects/us-crisis-monitor/) and retrieved in December 2020. The dataset contains all events of political violence, demonstrations, or strategic developments in the United States between May 1 and December 12.The BLM protests started following the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25 and quickly spread throughout the United States. Figure 2 shows the total number of distinct protests per day in the area shaded in light blue. The number of distinct protests peaked on the first weekend of June and remained high for around a week, with over 400 recorded protests every day. This number then declined sharply and fell to only a few dozen protests per day at the end of June. Since many of these protests involved only a handful of individuals, we restrict our sample to “large-scale” protests, which we define as a protest with at least 100 participants or one classified as non-peaceful.Footnote 8 The solid line in Fig. 2 reflects the same pattern, though the number of such protests was only around 200 per day during the peak.Fig. 2Number of daily BLM protests in the United States. Notes: The blue shaded area shows the raw number of events as recorded in the data. The solid line shows the number of counties treated per day. The dashed line shows the number of counties treated for the first time. The treatment period starts on May 26 and ends on June 15. (Color figure online)Full size imageDue to the concentration of events around the death of George Floyd, we define exposure to BLM protests for each county in terms of having experienced a large-scale BLM protest in that county between May 26 and June 15. These counties are considered treated in all subsequent periods. This design choice is motivated by the dashed line in Fig. 2, which shows the number of counties experiencing their first large-scale protest on a given day. The vast majority of large-scale protests after June 15 occurred in counties that had previously experienced large-scale protests, with only a negligible number of counties experiencing their first large-scale protest after this date. Throughout, we omit these latter counties from our analyses to prevent them from biasing our results.Additional dataWe further supplement our dataset with data on county-level demographics and past election results from the US General Elections 2018—Analysis Dataset, made available through the MIT Elections Lab.Footnote 9 Specifically, from this dataset we collect county-level information on presidential vote shares in the 2016 election, as well as information on total population, percentage of non-white population, and median household income.Empirical strategyOur empirical strategy relies on the comparison of voter registrations over time across counties with and without major BLM protests in a two-way fixed-effects framework. In addition, we match counties one-to-one based on predetermined variables to create a control group that closely resembles the treatment group with regard to demographics, political preferences, and voter registration dynamics. We define counties that experienced at least one large-scale BLM-related protest before June 15 as being exposed while the remaining counties are considered unexposed. We define the first observation following the first recorded large-scale BLM protest in the county as the onset of the treatment period, with these counties remaining in the treatment group in all post-treatment periods. As discussed above, we choose this operationalization over a staggered treatment design because the vast majority of counties that ever experienced BLM-related protests did so before June 15 and were subsequently subject to recurring bouts of protests.The empirical model we employ is as follows:$$Y_{{{\text{c}},{\text{s}},t}} = \alpha_{{\text{c}}} + \beta_{{{\text{s}},t}} + \mathop \sum \limits_{t} D_{{{\text{c}},{\text{s}},t}} \delta_{t} + \varepsilon_{{{\text{c}},{\text{s}},t}}$$ (1) where \(Y_{{{\text{c}},{\text{s}},t}}\) denotes the number of voter registrations scaled by county population. \(\alpha_{{\text{c}}}\) and \(\beta_{{{\text{s}},t}}\) indicate county fixed effects and state-by-period fixed effects, respectively. Further, \(D_{{{\text{c}},{\text{s}},t}}\) denotes a set of indicator variables that take a value of 1 for the observation in period t and county c if the county experienced a large-scale BLM protest between May 26 and June 15. The coefficients \(\delta_{t}\) therefore estimate the difference in per-capita voter registrations between treated and untreated counties in each time period. We omit \(D_{{{\text{c}},{\text{s}},t}}\) for the last pre-treatment period so that the remaining coefficients can be interpreted relative to this base period. Throughout, we cluster standard errors at the county level.The fixed effects alleviate several potential threats to identification. First, county fixed effects account for persistent differences across counties that might be correlated with both the presence of BLM protests and voter registrations, such as size, demographic makeup, and unobserved factors like the costs of mobilizing voters. The state-by-period fixed effects further control for state-specific policies that are common to all counties within the state. Importantly, this method accounts for statewide responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and state-specific idiosyncrasies in the reporting and administration of voter registrations.Footnote 10Despite these detailed controls, applying our estimation strategy to the full sample is unlikely to result in valid inferences, since counties are highly heterogeneous in population and the probability of having a protest increases with the county’s population. We consider it unlikely that highly populous counties are subject to the same trends in voter registration as less populous ones; hence we instead pursue a two-step strategy similar to that of Jäger and Heining (2019) by employing coarsened exact matching (CEM;Ho et al., 2011; Iacus et al., 2012) to create a balanced sample on the basis of predetermined characteristics prior to conducting the two-way fixed-effects analysis.Footnote 11 Importantly, since matching is not performed on prior trends in voter registrations, the forward-looking coefficients ahead of the protests remain informative about the plausibility of the common trends assumption.In our main specification, we match counties based only on population. Specifically, we transform this continuous variable into 100 strata. The matching mechanism omits all counties within strata in which there exist no observations of opposite treatment status. The remaining observations in each stratum are then subjected to Mahalanobis matching so as to achieve a one-to-one match between treated and untreated observations. Throughout the article, we present extensive robustness checks, varying the number of strata, including additional variables, and using weighted regressions instead of one-to-one matching to ensure that the specific operationalization of the matching procedure is not driving our results.Footnote 12Table 1 shows (unweighted) summary statistics of the treated and untreated counties in the full sample and in the matched sample. It shows that in the full sample, treated and untreated counties differ substantially on most predetermined variables, with large-scale BLM protests being more frequent in more populous counties with a more Democratic-leaning population. This result is due to large urban counties, virtually all of which experienced BLM protests during our sample period. The matching procedure retains only those treated counties for which a comparable untreated observation is available. This process removes many of the counties at the tail end of the population size distribution, thereby aligning the two groups more closely with respect to their predetermined characteristics, as displayed in the bottom panel of Table 1. In additional robustness checks, we match counties on a larger set of predetermined variables to achieve an even more balanced sample, but for transparency we rely on the most parsimonious matching strategy for our main results.Table 1 Summary statisticsFull size tableResultsWe begin with a discussion of our main results, before investigating their robustness and further decomposing the findings by party affiliation and characteristics of the protests—in particular, whether they were associated with violent behaviors.Figure 3 presents our main results. The black diamonds represent coefficient estimates obtained from an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression of Eq. (1) with voter registrations per capita as the dependent variable. Counties are matched one-to-one based on population. In an attempt to account for the possible sensitivity of our results to the matching procedure, around each main coefficient we plot the estimated coefficients from possible alternative operationalizations. Specifically, we present coefficients from 83 alternative specifications, varying the set of variables included in the matching procedure, the number of matching strata, and the weighting scheme. To enable some basic inferences, we indicate in red all the estimated coefficients that reached statistical significance at the 5% level.Fig. 3Event-study coefficients: total voter registrations. Notes: Event-time signifies months relative to the first recorded large-scale BLM protest between May 26 and June 15. The black diamonds are the estimated coefficients from an OLS regression of Eq. (1), with counties being matched one-to-one based on 100 population strata. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals with standard errors clustered at the county level. Small diamonds in the background indicate estimated coefficients from alternative specifications with different matching strata, matching on additional variables, and weighted M:1 matching instead of 1:1 matching. Red color indicates statistical significance at the 5% level. (Color figure online)Full size imageIn our main specification, after applying the matching algorithm, we are left with 6368 observations from 796 counties. The coefficients are precisely estimated and give little indication of diverging trends prior to being treated. Moreover, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of no effect immediately following the protests. Although the estimated coefficient becomes positive and statistically significant at the 5% level in the second post-treatment period, we caution against interpreting this finding as evidence of positive mobilization effects, since the estimate is not robust to alternative choices of matching parameters. Further, even if taken at face value, the estimated point coefficient 2 months after the protests corresponds to an increase in per-capita voter registrations of only 0.0005.Footnote 13The corresponding time-invariant estimate is presented in column 1 of Table 2. In line with our interpretation of the time-varying coefficients, the overall effect is estimated to be positive, but small in magnitude and not statistically significant. The point coefficient, if taken at face value, suggests that local BLM protests resulted in a per-period increase in per-capita voter registrations of 0.00015. For the median county in our estimation sample with around 28,500 registered voters in February 2020, this corresponds to a monthly increase of four voters.Table 2 Main resultsFull size tableRobustnessThere are a few potential concerns related to the validity of our findings. First, as described in the data section, states differ widely not only with respect to the rules surrounding voter registration, but also regarding the communication of voter registration statistics to the public. Although we attempt to reduce the influence of such state-specific idiosyncrasies through the inclusion of high-dimensional fixed effects, one might nonetheless be concerned that any single state might exert undue influence on our estimated coefficients. Panel (b) of Fig. 4 presents event-study coefficients, where every gray diamond represents a separate regression in which one state is removed from the data. As a visual aid, we overlay the coefficient and confidence interval from the main specification in black. Overall, there appears to be relatively little variation in the estimated coefficients. This insight is also relevant in view of our incomplete coverage of states, as it suggests that the estimated effects are not driven by any specific state and thus should be generalizable to other states not included in our sample.Fig. 4Robustness. Notes: Event-time is months relative to the first recorded large-scale BLM protest between May 26 and June 15. (a) Equivalent to Fig. 3 but uses as the dependent variable the growth rate of voter registrations. The small diamonds in (b) are estimated coefficients with one state omitted at a time; the main specification is reproduced in black. (c) Versions of Fig. 3, varying the cutoff date before which a protest has to occur for it to be considered as treated. Specifically, it combines four versions of Fig. 3, with the protest date cutoff varying in increments of 5 days from June 10 to June 25. In panel c, the definition of event-time might therefore differ across specificationsFull size imageSecond, we test whether our findings are robust to alternative operationalizations of the outcome variable. Specifically, in panel (a) of Fig. 4, we present event-study results while using as the dependent variable the growth rate of monthly voter registrations (i.e., voter registrations divided by total registrations in the preceding period). While the coefficients are not directly comparable, the results are qualitatively similar.Finally, we analyze the role of two important design choices in our definition of large-scale protests that might influence our estimates. In all analyses presented thus far, we defined a county as treated if it experienced a protest with at least 100 participants before June 15. As discussed in Sect. 3, a small number of counties experienced their first large-scale protest after this date and are coded as untreated in our analysis. Although removing these later-treated counties from the sample prevents them from influencing the estimates, we nonetheless investigate whether the findings are sensitive with respect to the specific date chosen as the cutoff. Specifically, in panel (c), we repeat our analyses for date cutoffs ranging from June 10 to June 25 in increments of 5 days.Footnote 14 Overall, the figure suggests that varying the date does not change our estimated coefficients in a meaningful way.Furthermore, since our definition of a “large-scale” protest is based on participation in absolute terms, it ignores the fact that in a small county, even a protest with a few dozen participants might be meaningful, whereas 100 participants can hardly be considered a large number in a county of several million inhabitants. To address this issue, in Fig. 5 we implement an alternative definition of the size cutoff based on relative size. Specifically, we vary the size cutoff between 0.1% (top panel) and 1% (bottom panel) of the county population. Unlike in the main analysis, where violent protests were considered “large-scale” irrespective of their size, here we base inclusion in the sample exclusively on protest size. We find that the estimates produced from these specifications are similar to those generated by the 100-participant cutoff, although increasing the threshold reduces the effective number of observations and thereby renders the estimates less precise.Fig. 5Robustness: relative protest size. Notes: Event-time is months relative to the first recorded large-scale BLM protest between May 26 and June 15. The panels are equivalent to Fig. 3 but employ different size cutoffs above which protests are considered “large-scale”Full size imageHeterogeneityThus far, we have limited our analysis to aggregate mobilization effects. However, these aggregate effects might mask important heterogeneity, with protests mobilizing only some voters but not others. Specifically, mobilization effects might depend on whether potential voters perceived the protests as legitimate criticisms of social injustices or as violent riots. Based on this rationale, we explore heterogeneity along two dimensions: first, we test for differential mobilization effects across party lines, since the narratives used to describe the protests differed across the political spectrum, with conservative news outlets more frequently relating the BLM protests to riots or looting (FiveThirtyEight, 2020). Second, we test whether mobilization effects depend on the degree of violence associated with the protests.Figure 6 presents event-study estimates using as the dependent variable per-capita voter registrations, with the affiliation listed as Democrat in panel (a) and as Republican in panel (b). Because not all states report party affiliation in their voter registration data, this step cuts our sample by almost half, to 3,632 observations from 454 counties. Although this reduction in sample size reduces the precision of our estimates, this loss of precision appears to be largely comp | Civil Rights Activism |
FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is proposing a legal route to overturn the Pentagon’s abortion policy as Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville continues his blockade on hundreds of military promotions.
Graham tapped conservative attorney Jay Sekulow for legal advice. Sekulow is "confident" a lawsuit could be brought against the Department of Defense.
"This is a use of funds that's prohibited by law," Graham told Fox News Digital in an interview Thursday. "And certainly was never authorized by the Congress, and Jay is a pretty smart guy. He thinks that there's a great chance of success in the courts."
Graham will need the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to bolster momentum in court. The main argument, Graham said, is that the policy violates the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortion services except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.
Additionally, the provision was implemented without Congress’ approval after Roe v. Wade was overturned last year.
Graham is optimistic a court battle could bring a bigger return for the GOP, claiming it "may pay dividends down the road."
"I think the student loan provisions that were struck down, that was court action that reined in the Biden administration," Graham said of the Supreme Court's rejection of President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan in June. "I think the court action here could rein in the Biden administration [again]."
The other avenue, Graham said, may be through the military defense spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress has to agree on by the end of December.
The House’s version, which passed earlier this year, dismantled the abortion policy in its text, along with other hardliner GOP issues like transgender procedures for service members. But it’s unlikely the Democrat-controlled Senate will agree to pass the lower chamber's package.
"I don't agree with the abortion decisions, using taxpayer money to pay for abortion travel, but military officers who are being denied promotions had nothing to do with this," Graham said.
Tuberville’s protest, sparked by the Department of Defense reimbursing service members who receive abortion procedures, has been unwavering for nearly nine months.
The Democrat-led rules committee passed a resolution this week to override his objection and get promotions to the Senate floor. Nine Republicans will have to vote alongside Senate Democrats to get the motion across the finish line.
Despite his opposition, Graham said he wouldn’t vote with the Democrats.
"I am prepared to find off ramps without having to change the structure of the Senate," Graham said.
Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who sits on the Senate Rules Committee, also voted against the resolution Tuesday, even though he has previously voiced his skepticism of Tuberville’s holds.
Whether Tuberville is on board to trade his objection for legal action is yet to be seen. So far, he’s been unrelenting, even after a handful of GOP lawmakers — including Graham; Todd Young, R-Ind.; Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska; and Joni Ernst, R-Iowa — took to the floor after midnight until nearly 4 a.m. Thursday to rail against his blockade.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Tuberville’s office said, "Coach is exploring all feasible options to end the Pentagon’s illegal and immoral policy." | US Federal Policies |
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) accused Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) of openly detailing his sexual experiences to fellow lawmakers in a bonkers interview with CNN on Wednesday. (You can check out his comments in the clip below.)
Mullin, an ally of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), made the wild claims about Gaetz after the Florida Republican ― and seven other members of his party ― joined all House Democrats in supporting the ouster of McCarthy from his post on Tuesday.
The move arrived after Gaetz filed a motion to vacate the California Republican from the speaker’s chair.
Gaetz, in a statement to CNN, dismissed Mullin’s accusations.
“I don’t think Markwayne Mullin and I have said 20 words to each other on the House floor,” Gaetz said.
“This is a lie from someone who doesn’t know me and who is coping with the death of the political career of his friend Kevin. Thoughts and prayers.”
Earlier in the interview, the senator referred to allegations from 2021 that Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl ― adding that the media didn’t pay the Florida Republican any mind because of the accusations.
The Justice Department dropped sex trafficking charges against Gaetz in February after investigating him over the allegations since 2020. Gaetz has denied the allegations.
“There’s a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him ― because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor that all of us had walked away, of the girls he had slept with,” Mullin said.
Mullin’s claims arrive on the same day Marc Short, chief of staff for former Vice President Mike Pence, said Gaetz more likely came to Washington “for the teenage interns on Capitol Hill” than to be a “fiscal crusader.”
The senator claimed that no one in the media gave Gaetz the “time of day” until November last year, when “all of a sudden he found fame” when he opposed the prospects of a McCarthy speakership.
“And he’s always stayed there,” Mullin said. “And he was never gonna leave until he got this last moment of fame by saying ― by going after a motion to vacate.”
H/T: Mediaite | US Congress |
The 26-year-old turned herself into local authorities and was charged with false reporting to law enforcement authorities and falsely reporting an incident in connection to the kidnapping hoax on July 28, according to the Hoover Police Department in Alabama. She was booked and subsequently released from custody after posting bail.
In her mug shot released by police, Russell—clad in black with her hair straightened—was seen smiling for the camera.
During a July 28 press conference with Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, Hoover Police Chief Nicholas C. Derzis said authorities decided to charge Russell with two misdemeanors as her actions "created panic and alarm for the citizens of our city—and even across the nation—as a concerned group that a kidnapper was on the loose using a small child as bait."
Russell was reported as missing on July 13 after she called 911 as well as a family member to report seeing an unaccompanied child on an Alabama highway, sparking nationwide attention. The search for Russell came to an end on July 15, when she reappeared at her parents' Hoover residence alone and on foot.
She initially alleged that she was taken by a man and woman, who forced her into a car when she approached the child and held her captive, according to Hoover police. Authorities said Russell claimed she managed to escape when her purposted kidnappers were taking her through the west Hoover area, and that she ran through the woods until finding her way back home.
However, authorities were "unable to verify" most of what Russell told them during their investigation into her disappearance, Derzis said in a July 19 press conference. But, according to Derzis, they did find internet searches made on Russell's phone that were "very relevant" to her case, including queries about Amber Alerts and the 2008 film Taken, a Liam Neeson movie about an abduction.
"As you can see," Derzis said at the time, "there are many questions left to be answered, but only Carlee can provide those answers."
Russell owned up to faking her kidnapping on July 24, shortly before she was set to meet with detectives for a second interview. In a statement issued through her attorney, Russell confessed that there was "no kidnapping."
"My client did not leave the Hoover area when she was identified as a missing person," her lawyer Emory Anthony said in the statement, which was provided to Hoover police. "My client did not have any help in this incident. This was a single act done by herself. My client was not with anyone or any hotel with anyone from the time she was missing. My client apologizes for her actions to this community, the volunteers who were searching for her, to the Hoover Police department and other agencies as well, as to her friends and family."
Russell also insisted that she did not have "any help" in the ruse.
"This was a single act done by herself," her attorney said in the statement. "My client was not with anyone or any hotel with anyone from the time she was missing. My client apologizes for her actions to this community, the volunteers who were searching for her, to the Hoover Police department and other agencies as well, [and] to her friends and family."
E! News has reached out to Russell's attorney for comment on her arrest but hasn't heard back. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
A county clerk in New Mexico abused the power of her office and broke the law in the run-up to the 2022 elections, a state agency alleged in court this week, claiming that the official deleted and mishandled midterm ballots; sought, obtained and discussed drugs; and even deployed a Taser near a coworker.
The complaint also alleges that Yvonne Otero, a Republican elected as Torrance County clerk in 2020, violated election procedures around certifying election machines, alluded to having sex and doing cocaine during work hours and threatened employees — before she eventually just stopped doing her job in the fall, before the election.
Otero's attorney, Jacob Candelaria, said the complaint included false, “outlandish, and dramatized” allegations, and argued election deniers were trying to punish his client for not accepting false claims about voter fraud.
"My client fully intends to defend herself against these false allegations," he said, adding that she was separately seeking a court order to get her job back.
The extraordinary allegations were made by the New Mexico State Ethics Commission, an independent state agency that enforces governmental conduct and anti-corruption laws, in a court filing on Tuesday.
Torrance County requested the commission investigate the matter, said Jessica Randall, deputy general counsel on the commission.
Torrance is a small, rural county east of Albuquerque that has been a hot bed of false voter fraud claims. The county commissioners faced significant backlash for certifying the June primary election results, and they later authorized an independent recount of the county's paper ballots.
The county, whose commissioners first sought to oust Otero in October, recently hired a new county clerk, after voting to remove Otero for abandoning her post. A January posting says the job pays $69,148 plus benefits.
Tabulators, trust and a Taser
Several of the allegations address Otero’s handling of the 2022 midterm election.
Otero presigned ballot tabulator certification forms in advance, before the equipment was tested and certified, so she could go on vacation, according to the complaint, and she deleted or ignored a handful of emailed ballots from overseas. Military and overseas voters can cast absentee ballots electronically, in accordance with federal law.
Candelaria said the complaint was the first he and his client had heard of deleted ballots, but he said she didn't deny signing the election certification forms in advance.
Alex Curtas, director of communications for New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, said Toulouse Oliver was “unaware, but extremely troubled” by the allegations that overseas ballots were not properly handled and counted and would conduct her own internal review.
He said the county’s deputy clerk, Sylvia Chavez, had worked closely with state officials to oversee the county’s midterm election and that "she did a great job."
The rest of the complaint's allegations range from the misuse of government resources — giving a staff member's computer to her brother, for instance — to the bizarre and inappropriate.
Otero was observed “intimately touching” a member of the public at work, according to the complaint, before going into her private office with the individual. She allegedly alluded to having sex in her office after emerging with remarks like “that’s how you break in the probate judge’s desk,” and “I needed that stress relief."
Candelaria said she was visited at work by a male friend and closed the door for privacy but did not have sex at work.
“Those are perhaps some of the most outlandish and are, in my client’s view, sexist and discriminatory allegations being made against her,” he said.
One incident that both Candelaria and the commission agree on is that Otero discharged a Taser near an employee in the county clerk’s office, in what she claimed was a joke.
Candelaria said she did it to startle a sleeping co-worker and acknowledges now the joke was in “poor taste.”
Otero allegedly sought "unprescribed narcotic drugs" from a subordinate employee — threatening “mutual destruction” if the employee did not do as asked — and spoke about doing cocaine.
In one April 2022 instance, she told her employees she needed a “small bump” to get through the day, the complaint alleges, and said that Otero had acknowledged using cocaine for the past six years.
Candelaria said Otero asked a colleague to obtain a prescription drug for her while she was between primary care doctors — but did not threaten the co-worker — and said she’d used cocaine outside work sometime in the past six years to help with her ADHD. He denied she'd used cocaine at work.
“Having served in the Legislature for 10 years, if the Ethics Commission wanted to punish every single person who used cocaine at any point in the prior six years, a good majority of the Legislature would be subject to discipline,” he added.
The complaint also alleged that Otero stopped coming to work and stopped signing on to her computer at home. Candelaria said she’d been instructed to work from home by the county attorney after an employee complained about the Taser incident. That incident is also why she signed the election certification forms before the certification had taken place.
“There has never been a point in time where she has abandoned her job duties, period,” he said.
Mario Jimenez, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico and a former elections official, applauded the ethics commission for investigating the matter but said he was nonetheless disheartened to learn of the allegations.
"When I read it, I was nothing short of infuriated," he told NBC News. "We're losing public trust." | US Local Elections |
Sen. John Fetterman is being kept overnight in a Washington, DC, hospital “for observation,” after being admitted earlier Wednesday after feeling lightheaded, his office said in a statement.
The Pennsylvania Democrat was elected to the Senate in November while recovering from a stroke he had suffered in May. According to his spokesperson, there was no evidence of a new stroke Wednesday, but he was set to undergo more tests during his hospital stay.
“Towards the end of the Senate Democratic retreat today, Senator John Fetterman began feeling lightheaded. He left and called his staff, who picked him up and drove him to The George Washington University Hospital. Initial tests did not show evidence of a new stroke, but doctors are running more tests and John is remaining overnight for observation,” Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, said in the statement.
Last year, Fetterman checked himself into a hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, several days before the primary. Fetterman won the nomination while in the hospital and underwent a nearly three-hour surgery that same day to implant a defibrillator. He was released from the hospital after a nine-day stay.
Fetterman’s cardiologist later issued a statement, providing more insight into what caused his stroke and outlining that the Democrat suffers from both atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy.
Calvello said Wednesday night that Fetterman was “in good spirits and talking with his staff and family.” | US Congress |
A murder suspect who was accidentally released from an Indiana jail due to a clerical error has been apprehended following a two-week manhunt, authorities said.
Kevin Mason, 28, was initially arrested on Sept. 11 in connection with a 2021 murder in Minneapolis. He was mistakenly released from the Adult Detention Center in Indianapolis two days later due to a "faulty records review by civilian staff," the Marion County Sheriff's Office said.
Investigators determined that he left the Indianapolis area the night of his release, with the search expanding into multiple cities. He was ultimately apprehended by the U.S. Marshals Service in St. Paul, Minnesota around 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, the Marion County Sheriff's Office said. No additional details were released.
"I would like to extend my sincere gratitude and congratulations to the USMS for concluding this manhunt and safely bringing Mason back into custody," Marion County Sheriff Kerry Forestal said in a statement. "Our federal partners have kept us informed throughout the entire process. We are truly thankful for their assistance and wide resources -- most specifically, their task force partnerships with local law enforcement agencies that have allowed them to pursue Kevin Mason throughout the country."
Mason was arrested on Sept. 11 and mistakenly released around 11:05 a.m. ET on Sept. 13, according to Forestal. Authorities became aware of his release several hours later, around 5:30 p.m., he said.
Investigators learned he called for a ride later that night and his girlfriend, Desiree Oliver, picked him up near the jail, Forestal said.
Oliver obtained a new cellphone, "the deceptive type of behavior we'd expect from somebody when they're assisting a criminal," Forestal said during a press briefing Sept. 20. She also purchased men's underwear, a travel kit and men's slippers from a Walmart, he said.
Investigators covertly tracked her actions, instead of going public with the search for the suspect, before arresting her on Sept. 20 on the charge of assisting a criminal, the sheriff said.
Oliver was formally charged with assisting a criminal on Monday. She was released from custody on Wednesday and is scheduled to return to court on Nov. 29 for a pre-trial conference, online court records show.
Mason will not be charged in Indianapolis, the Marion County Sheriff's Office said.
He is accused of fatally shooting Dontevius Catchings, 29, in the parking lot of a Minneapolis church in June 2021 during a funeral service. The Hennepin County Attorney's Office charged him with murder in the second degree and firearms possession following the shooting.
The U.S. Marshals Service was offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to Mason's capture.
Two Marion County Sheriff's Office employees were terminated due to Mason's release, the sheriff's office said. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Democratic strategists are urging a “don’t panic” response to a series of opinion polls that reveal deep worries over Joe Biden’s age and his ability to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election.
A CNN survey conducted by SSRS caused shockwaves this week when it put Biden’s approval rating at just 39% and found two in three Democrats say the party should nominate someone else next year. In a hypothetical contest, registered voters were split between Trump (47%) and Biden (46%).
The findings echoed a Wall Street Journal poll that found 73% of voters say Biden, 80, is “too old to run for president” but just 47% of voters say the same about Trump, who is 77 and the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination. It put the two candidates neck and neck in the race for the White House, as does a polling average compiled by RealClearPolitics.
This stands in contrast to the last electoral cycle when, in 2019, polls showed Biden enjoying a seven to 10 percentage point lead over Trump. He eventually won the national popular vote by 4.4 percentage points.
Even if Biden takes the popular vote again next year, the all-important electoral college may be decided by wafer-thin margins in a handful of states. Third-party candidates, such as the leftwing academic Cornel West or No Labels – a big money group actively working to secure a place on the presidential ballot in at least 20 states – could hurt Biden more than Trump and tip the balance.
Such a prospect alarms activists who describe how Trump’s four-year presidency assailed the rights of women, people of colour and immigrants, culminating in an attempted coup, and dread a return to the White House that could prove even more authoritarian and aggressive.
It also rattles Democrats forced to ask why Biden, with a strong economy and series of major legislative accomplishments under his belt, is failing to pull clear of a predecessor who is twice impeached and charged with 91 criminal counts in Washington, New York, Florida and Georgia.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “Look, Joe Biden should not be their nominee. Joe Biden is unpopular. Joe Biden is too old. That’s no longer a Republican talking point; that’s the sentiment of half of the Democratic party and a supermajority of independents, and rational Democrats know that. But the problem is, how do you get rid of the guy?
“Nobody has the stomach and is willing to take the risk of taking him on in the primary process because failure weakens the Democratic party and kills your career. So you look around and you say, yeah, there’s huge risks, sane Democrats see them and they’re stuck.”
Biden’s age continues to be an obsession, with every stumble or gaffe viewed through that lens, even though aides testify to his energy and he is currently embarked on another overseas trip. Republicans are shaping a campaign message that Biden is unlikely to complete a second term, meaning that Vice-President Kamala Harris would take over.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Biden has to stay healthy. You can’t pretend not to be 80 or 81 or 82, which he’s going to be nearly at the time of the election. You have to be what you are but you can minimise the effects of it and they’ve done a terrible job on that.
“I know they can’t change him fundamentally but there is no excuse for having him shuffle in front of the cameras almost every day. He does shuffle and I’m sympathetic – I’m in my 70s – but there are ways to avoid that. I just don’t understand why, unless he’s insisting – he’s very sensitive about this.”
The latest round of polls have provoked a sharp response by senior Democratic advisers. They argue the party’s strength was underestimated in last year’s midterm elections when a so-called “red wave” failed to materialise for Republicans. They also point to the potency of abortion rights and successes in recent elections and ballot measures in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and other states.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who bucked conventional wisdom on the 2022 midterms and was vindicated by a weaker Republican showing, said: “The reason I’m fine with where everything is and not worried is that the Republican base is very engaged right now. There’s a massive primary going on, ads are being run, the candidates are all over Fox News, Trump is threatened with imprisonment.
“If you’re a Republican voter, the election is happening. The Republicans have what I call asymmetrical engagement. They’re engaged, they are being talked to, there’s things going on. Our voters aren’t. There’s a lot of evidence that the Democratic coalition just isn’t very engaged and they’re having a summer. There’s no reason for them to be thinking about 2024.”
Rosenberg added: “I don’t think anyone’s panicking our side. There’s an awareness that we’ve got work to do. We should win next year if we do the work.”
But longtime Trump critics warn that Democrats are underestimating the dangers. Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and former Republican consultant, said: “I wish they would panic. The greatest danger here is complacency and a sense of misplaced optimism that some externality is going to take Trump out.”
Democrats need to unify strongly behind Biden and close the gap between perception of the economy and the reality, Wilson added. “Telling the economic good news story is their main and only job, and they need to be on that 24 hours a day.
“They have not yet fully internalised how important that is because, while they’re not going to persuade Maga voters, they could persuade moderate Republicans and soft independents. Every time you get a positive economic message, it’s buying a little more safety and security for the guy.” | US Federal Elections |
The following is a transcript of an interview with House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio, that aired on "Face the Nation" on Oct. 15, 2023.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner, who joins us from Dayton. Good morning to you.
REP. MIKE TURNER: Good morning, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We heard the National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan say that the request to Congress will be significantly higher than $2 billion in terms of aid for Ukraine and for Israel. What can you tell us about what is needed?
REP. TURNER: Well, I met with him and members of the National Security Council with my counterpart, Jim Himes, at the end of last week, and they're talking in terms of a quad of really a of a need of a national security package. And that is certainly the border, additional funds there for border control, the border barrier, the wall that the administration has now said needs to go forward in areas. Ukraine. Obviously, now that we're dealing with this- this crisis with Israel, bolstering our support for them, and then also looking in the southeast as to what we might be able to do to support Taiwan. As they're putting those together so that we don't piecemeal this and we look at this as an overall national security package. It'll give us a better understanding of the ability to have a debate as to what's needed for the United States.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Don't piecemeal this, you said, so you support bundling all of those things together? Do you think your fellow Republicans will support that?
REP. TURNER: You know, at this point, Margaret, we're having a hard time keeping the House floor open, I don't want to have to keep trying to bring people in and convince them to vote for, you know, minor pieces of overall security bills that we know are going to have to come to the House floor over the next- this year and next.
MARGARET BRENNAN
Well, to that point, because of course, Congress is paralyzed until a Speaker is chosen. Do you know how long it will take before Republicans can select a speaker so you can do this important business?
REP. TURNER: No, and this really is the tragedy. As you know, Kevin McCarthy was fired because he had sought a bipartisan solution to keep the government open and those who wanted to close down the government instead they closed down the House of Representatives with the aides of Democrats. You know, this was a- this is a very bad deal for America. It certainly was a bad deal for Hakeem Jeffries, as he got all the Democrats to vote with less than- the vote was less than 4% of Republican votes to take down a Speaker who was working for bipartisanship. It's gonna be hard for them in the future to come- if they want to work in bipartisanship when they fired the guy that was sitting there for doing so.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But so in the past, you've supported Jim Jordan. He doesn't have the votes right now to become speaker. Kevin McCarthy acknowledged as much on- on another network this morning.
REP. TURNER: Right, and he's working to do so. Kevin, when he first came out of conference, where you're nominated to be speaker, also did not have enough votes to be like speaker- actually he didn't have enough votes when he first got to the House floor. And then the coalition formed that elected him. Jordan is working right now to put that coalition together to get to 217.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So do the allegations that he turned a blind eye to sexual assault at Ohio University cause any problems for you or the allegations that he had knowledge of Donald Trump's attempts on January 6, then leading up to it to stop the election certification?
REP. TURNER: Well first Margaret, the allegations at Ohio State, there's not one person who's ever said that they have knowledge of Jim Jordan having any knowledge. And what occurred at Ohio State wasn't even under Jim Jordan. He was not like the head coach. This was not something that he had responsibility for. So those that are making accusations are making, you know, just presumptions of what he would have had to have known. But it- there's no one I mean mind you, this was years ago, no one who has come forward at all ever, and ever said that there was actual knowledge of Jim Jordan's part. Of course, he condemns what occurred there. With respect to Donald Trump, I-you know, that's a mess that's going to continue going on- on the issue of January 6, and Americans are gonna be able to have that debate as we go forward in this next election cycle.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So no- no pause on your point- part for Jim Jordan. Do you think that there is an alternate here where Republicans work with Democrats to find a mutually acceptable speaker?
REP. TURNER: Well, you know I- that would not be my preference since Hakeem Jeffries walked away from the opportunity to do that, when- when Kevin McCarthy was on the floor. You know, the vote on the floor was, should the Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, be removed. And every Democrat, 208 of them, voted to remove Kevin McCarthy. So, at this point, I would prefer there to be a Republican solution, because when- when they rejected bipartisanship, it's kind of hard to then go back to it. But we have a lot of people on the bench. I think Jim Jordan will be an excellent speaker. I think he'll be able to get to 217. If not, we have other leaders in the House. And certainly, if there is a need if the radical, you know, almost just handful of people in the Republican side, make it unable- to make it for us unable to be able to return to general work on the House, then I think obviously, there will be a deal we'll have to be done.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Wow. I want to also ask you about a comment you made on this program recently. You were talking about classified documents mishandled by the current president. And you said that when it came to Biden and Trump, they're both "equally egregious" with equal classification issues. This past week, President Biden was interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Herr, will there be legal consequences? Will your committee do anything to act on this? And what exactly do you mean equally egregious?
REP. TURNER: Well, when you look at the documents, both the classification level and the subject matter, both sides, Trump and Biden's documents, if they had been released in the public or gotten into the hands of nefarious parties, would be damaging to the United States national security. When I look at those documents, there are documents on both sides, equally egregious, that would have negative consequences to our means, methods, techniques and- and our allies. Now, in this instance, I think President Biden needs the same consequences that they pursue with- with President Trump. The actions are the same. And in this instance, if you think you're getting leak--
MARGARET BRENNAN: -- Indictment?
REP. TURNER: If you're getting leak after leak after leak on the Trump documents, you're hearing nothing on the Biden documents. So you're continuing to see the inequality that comes out of the Justice Department. As there's silence on the other side with respect to Biden's- and by the way, he was a- he was a serial classified document hoarder. I reviewed documents that were from all the time that he's been in government. This really is a very serious breach by President Biden.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Just to be clear here, though, are you saying that President Biden had top secret and TS/SCI classification level documents in his personal home?
REP. TURNER: That's- that's- that's public already, Margaret. But that is- so I'm not confirming something that- that people don't already know. That is correct.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay. So I think you're saying that he should be indicted, when you say treated the same?
REP. TURNER: I think they need to be treated exactly the same. Now they're continuing their investigation with- with President Biden. I don't think if President Biden, in the end, has been found to violate the law, and I believe from what I've seen that he has, that he should be treated any differently than Donald Trump. Why would- why would he? Just because he's president or because he's a Democrat. And that's how the Department of Justice has been acting. They need to be treated the same.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But have you seen evidence of a crime? It sounds like that's what you are saying.
REP. TURNER: I have seen evidence of the fact that classified documents of some of the highest levels have been mishandled by President Biden. Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mike Turner. We will stay tuned to watch what happens with your party in the coming days and stay in touch. We'll be back in a moment.
for more features. | US Congress |
The seizure happened Monday night. The FBI approached the mayor on the street, asked his security to step aside and confiscated two iPhones and an iPad. They were returned a few days later.
Adams' campaign attorney Boyd Johnson issued the following statement, which appears to raise questions about someone else close to him being involved in some kind of impropriety:
"After learning of the federal investigation, it was discovered that an individual had recently acted improperly. In the spirit of transparency and cooperation, this behavior was immediately and proactively reported to investigators. The Mayor has been and remains committed to cooperating in this matter. On Monday night, the FBI approached the mayor after an event. The Mayor immediately complied with the FBI's request and provided them with electronic devices. The mayor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and continues to cooperate with the investigation."
On Wednesday, at his weekly meeting with reporters, Adams faced questions mostly about the stunningBriana Suggs. The mayor did not reveal that he had been approached by FBI agents who confiscated his electronic devices two days earlier.
Sources told CBS New York political reporter Marcia Kramer the information Adams' lawyers turned over to investigators did not involve Suggs, but someone else in the mayor's circle.
Sources refused to characterize the person, but information about them was believed to be on one of the mayor's devices, which were apparently returned to him after a few days.
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment.
Watch Marcia Kramer's report
"What this does is lay the groundwork for the plot to thicken substantially with regard to the mayor's involvement," Kean University Provost David Birdsell told CBS New York.
Birdsell says while there is no implication of guilt, this certainly raises the stakes for the mayor.
"Up until this moment, nobody had made any allegations about the mayor's involvement in the potential alleged fundraising from foreign sources, in this case, Turkish sources, but now they're seizing his devices," he said.
And just what was the FBI looking for?
"Text messages, you will find. Emails, you will find. And just as importantly, you're gonna find evidence of when calls were made or received and who made or received those calls," former U.S. attorney Zachary Carter said.
The mayor issued his own statement saying, "As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation-and I will continue to do exactly that. I have nothing to hide."
for more features. | US Political Corruption |
The Democratic National Committee’s Executive Committee voted Saturday to refer a complaint about the Alabama Democratic Party’s abolition of diversity caucuses to its Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC).
The State Democratic Executive Committee voted on May 6 to eliminate caucuses for youth, LGBTQ+ individuals and people with disabilities and reduced the power of other caucuses. The move brought sharp criticism from the affected caucuses and a complaint from Vice Chair Tabitha Isner and more than 40 Democrats.
Alabama Democratic Party Chair Randy Kelley declined to comment Saturday, referring to earlier comments where he said he believed new bylaws adopted at the May 6 meeting would boost representation.
Democrats at the May 6 meeting also said party leaders charged a previously unannounced $50 fee to enter the meeting. Isner called it a “poll tax;” Kelley said there was precedent for the fee.
Isner wrote in a text message Saturday that she “would be happy to introduce you to the more than 50 duly elected Democrats in Alabama who lost their seat on the committee when Kelley implemented a surprise poll tax and a grandfather clause that applied only to those he hand-selected.”
“He insists that representation was not lost because he intends to appoint their replacements,” Isner wrote. “But representation cannot be appointed. All people deserve the right to choose who represents them. That is how representative democracy works.”
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, who chaired the meeting, said party leaders would work to an “even-handed” investigation of the complaint. But he also mentioned George Orwell’s 1945 novel “Animal Farm,” where a group of pigs who drive a farmer out eventually take the role of the oppressors on their farm.
“One thing that’s very important, particularly to those of us who have lived in the South, who know how Black folks were kept out of the party, one thing we do not want to see is that we do the same thing,” said Harrison, a South Carolina native who is Black.
No timeframe for the investigation has been set.
The RBC investigated complaints about Alabama Democratic Party leadership elections in 2018. The RBC directed the state party to adopt new bylaws that, among other steps, created caucuses for Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, LGBTQ+ individuals, youth, and people with disabilities.
A months-long standoff between the DNC and the state party took place. The DNC eventually deposed Chair Nancy Worley and Kelley, then the vice-chair of the party, and recognized a faction aligned with then-U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, which adopted the bylaws and elected new leadership.
A faction of the party loyal to Vice Chair of Minority Affairs Joe Reed argued that the new diversity caucuses diluted the power of Black voters, who make up a majority of Alabama’s Democratic electorate. Last August, Reed’s faction won control of the party and elected Kelley chair. At the May 6 meeting, the party adopted new bylaws that abolished some of the diversity caucuses and reduced the powers of others.
The complaint from Isner and the other Democrats seeks to have the meeting declared null and void and says the new rules do not comply with the DNC.
Members of the RBC criticized the May 6 meeting at a gathering on Friday. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Allen v. Milligan, Yvette Lewis, an RBC member who helped lead the 2019 investigation of the state party, said Alabama had an opportunity to elect Democrats, but needed to ensure that young people turn out. Harrison echoed that sentiment Saturday.
“Alabama has a unique opportunity now,” he said. “In order to take advantage of that and other opportunities, we’re all going to have to work together.” | US Political Corruption |
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is siding with members of the GOP who voted to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Ramaswamy, who has never held elected office, said he understood McCarthy's critics and supported the desire to inject "chaos" into the legislature.
"The point of removing the House Speaker was to sow chaos. That’s what the critics of Matt Gaetz and everybody else is saying," Ramaswamy said Tuesday in a video posted to social media. "And my advice to the people who voted to remove him is [to] own it."
"Admit it. There was no better plan of action of who’s going to fill that Speaker role. So was the point to sow chaos? Yes, it was," Ramaswamy said. "But the real question to ask, to get to the bottom of it, is whether chaos is really such a bad thing?"
Eight hard-line Republican lawmakers joined every present House Democrat in Tuesday’s historic vote to oust McCarthy from the top job.
"We're concerned about the future of the conservative agenda in the house," said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla, who was the informal leader of McCarthy's critics."I would say that the conservative agenda was being paralyzed by Speaker McCarthy."
McCarthy said Gaetz's move was "personal" and suggested it was done in retaliation for an ongoing Ethics Committee investigation into his conduct.
McCarthy angered hardliners over the weekend when he passed a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open for 45 days in order to avert a government shutdown and give lawmakers more time to cobble together 12 individual spending bills.
Ninety House Republicans voted against the CR on Saturday, arguing that it was a "clean" extension of the previous Democrat-held Congress' policies. But the speaker's previous attempts to put a CR on the table that would cut spending for its short duration were upended by several of those same conservatives who were opposed to any such measure on principle.
Ramaswamy listed a series of issues facing the US that he feels do not yet have a solution in motion — the national debt, border crisis, lawlessness in cities, and more — and said a comprehensive plan was more important than a "babysitter" to "shepherd" votes.
"For everybody out there who's asking the question, 'What's the plan to get a new speaker?' — you're asking the wrong question," Ramaswamy said. "What's the plan to actually revive this country?"
Fox News Digital's Elizabeth Elkind , Brandon Gillespie, and Jamie Joseph contributed to this report. | US Congress |
FILE – The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 14, 2022. The Supreme Court opens its new term on Monday, Oct. 3. The Supreme Court is taking up an Alabama redistricting case that could have far-reaching effects on minority voting power across the United States. The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in the latest high-court showdown over the federal Voting Rights Act, lawsuits seeking to force Alabama to create a second Black majority congressional district. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) Challengers to the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan submitted their written arguments to the Supreme Court on Friday, contending the administration overstepped its authority. In their separate briefs, six Republican-led states and two individual loan borrowers who did not qualify for the relief argued the administration should not be allowed to forgive up to $20,000 for qualifying individuals. The justices will hear oral argument in the cases on Feb. 28, two of the most high-profile challenges to Biden administration policies at the Supreme Court this term. The challenges have put millions of borrowers — and Biden’s campaign promise — in limbo as the program remains on pause until the court’s ruling, expected by the summer. The administration previously argued to the justices that they shouldn’t consider the merits of the two lawsuits because neither group of challengers have standing, meaning the legal capacity to sue. The six states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina — pushed back in Friday’s brief by asserting they will each suffer financially due to the plan for differing reasons. Missouri argued the plan will harm its student loan service, three states cited impacts from how some borrowers are now consolidating their loans and four said their tax revenues will take a hit. Meanwhile, the individual challengers argued they have standing because they were denied a procedural right to express their views through a formal comment period. “Respondents have federal student loans that are not being forgiven under the Program but could be if the Secretary followed the proper procedures,” wrote attorneys for Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor, the two individual challengers. If the court does reach the merits, the administration cites the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act as Cardona’s authority to forgive the loans. Both the six states and the two individuals contended that the law “does not authorize the Program” because the court’s precedents require Congress to give clearer authority for such an important decision. “Canceling hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans—through a decree that extends to nearly all borrowers—is a breathtaking assertion of power and a matter of great economic and political significance,” the states wrote in their brief. The law allows the secretary to modify federal financial aid programs when necessary in connection with a national emergency, and Cardona has tied the plan to the emergency the Trump administration first established for the pandemic that still remains in effect. “While President Biden declares the pandemic over, his Secretary of Education and Department of Education cite COVID-19 to justify the Loan Cancellation Program—an unlawful attempt to eliminate $430 billion of federal student-loan debt,” the states argued. | SCOTUS |
Zelle recently made a huge change to its policy that would give victims of certain scams the chance to get their money back. The payment processor has confirmed to Engadget that it started reimbursing customers for impostor scams, such as those perpetrated by bad actors pretending to be banks, businesses and government agencies, as of June 30 this year. Its parent company Early Warning Services, LLC, said this "goes beyond legal requirements."
As Reuters noted when it reported Zelle's policy change, federal laws can only compel banks to reimburse customers if payments were made without their authorization, but not when they made the transfer themselves. The payment processor, which is run by seven US banks that include Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, explained that it defines scams as instances wherein a customer made payment but didn't get what they were promised. It had anti-fraud policy from the time it was launched in 2017, but it only started returning money to customers who were scammed, possibly due to increasing scrutiny and pressure from authorities.
"As the operator of Zelle, we continuously review and update our operating rules and technology practices to improve the consumer experience and address the dynamic nature of fraud and scams," Early Warning Services, LLC, told Engadget. "As of June 30, 2023, our bank and credit union participants must reimburse consumers for qualifying imposter scams, like when a scammer impersonates a bank to trick a consumer into sending them money with Zelle. The change ensures consistency across our network and goes beyond legal requirements.
Zelle has driven down fraud and scam rates as a result of these prevention and mitigation efforts consistently from 2022 to 2023, with increasingly more than 99.9% of Zelle transactions are without any reported fraud or scams," it added.
A series of stories published by The New York Times in 2022 put a spotlight on the growing number of scams and fraud schemes on Zelle. The publication had interviewed customers who were tricked into sending money to scammers but were denied reimbursement, because they had authorized the transactions. Senator Elizabeth Warren also conducted an investigation last year and found that "fraud and scams [jumped] more than 250 percent from over $90 million in 2020 to a pace exceeding $255 million in 2022." In November 2022, The Times reported that the seven banks that own Zelle were gearing up for a policy change that will reimburse scam victims.
In Zelle's "Report a Scam" information page, users can submit the scammer's details, including what they were claiming to be, their name, website and their phone number. They also have to provide the payment ID for the transfer, the date it was made and a description of what the transaction was supposed to be about. Zelle said it will report the information provided to the recipient’s bank or credit union to help prevent others from falling victim to their schemes, but it's unclear how Zelle determines whether a scam refund claim is legitimate or not.
"Zelle's platform changes are long overdue,” Senator Warren told Reuters. "The CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) is standing with consumers, and I urge the agency to keep the pressure on Zelle to protect consumers from bad actors." | US Federal Policies |
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are set to hold their first hearing next week in the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Joe Biden. But with a very slim majority in the lower chamber of the U.S. Congress, it appears unlikely Republicans will be able to pass the articles of impeachment needed to trigger a trial of the president in the U.S. Senate.
The House Oversight Committee next Thursday will investigate allegations Biden improperly used his position as vice president to help his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Republicans also allege Biden used his official office to coordinate those efforts and was protected from investigations into those claims by his own administration.
“These allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy told reporters last week while announcing the launch of the inquiry.
Multiple Republican-led House committees investigated the allegations for months prior to the launch of the inquiry and did not find any evidence supporting those claims.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said during a hearing Wednesday that Republicans “have wasted countless taxpayer dollars on baseless investigations into President Biden and his family. Desperate to find evidence for an absurd impeachment and desperate to distract from the mounting legal peril facing Donald Trump.”
What are the allegations against President Biden?
Chief among House Republicans’ claims of corruption is an allegation that then-Vice President Biden pushed for the removal of Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2015 because of Shokin’s investigations into Burisma, the Ukrainian company whose board membership included Hunter Biden.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, one of the three members of Congress leading the impeachment inquiry, told conservative news network Newsmax, this week, “We've got a president that's compromised. We've got a president who has violated laws who should be treated as a criminal.”
How has the White House responded?
In a memo to reporters, the White House noted that years of independent reporting and an investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee found that Biden committed no wrongdoing and was carrying out a policy developed by the U.S. State Department and carried out by the International Monetary Fund. Additionally, the White House said evidence shows Biden pushed for Shokin to be harder on corruption and that the Ukrainian prosecutor general was not investigating Burisma.
Do Republicans have the votes to impeach Biden?
The two-step process for removing federal officials from office is laid out in the U.S. Constitution. In the first step of the process, the U.S. House of Representatives must pass articles of impeachment by a majority vote. Republicans only hold a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, with 221 Republicans, 212 Democrats and 2 vacancies. Many Republicans from more moderate districts have expressed concerns about impeaching Biden, particularly heading into a presidential election year.
In an opinion piece published by the Washington Post this week, Rep. Ken Buck, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, wrote, “Republicans in the House who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history.”
House Speaker McCarthy can only afford to lose a handful of Republican votes or risk failure on a vote to impeach Biden.
Will the impeachment inquiry continue if there is a government shutdown?
McCarthy is facing difficulties within his own party passing a spending bill that will fund the U.S. government past a September 30th deadline. If disagreements within the Republican party remain, the U.S. government will shut down. This will stop all but the most essential work throughout government agencies and in the U.S. House of Representatives, meaning lawmakers will not be able to hold an impeachment hearing.
The White House said in a statement this week, the impeachment inquiry was a distraction from Republicans’ inability to govern.
“Extreme House Republicans are already telegraphing their plans to try to distract from their own chaotic inability to govern and the impacts of it on the country. Staging a political stunt hearing in the waning days before they may shut down the government reveals their true priorities: to them, baseless personal attacks on President Biden,” White House Spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement.
What will happen in the Senate?
If the U.S. House of Representatives is able to pass articles of impeachment, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will be in charge of deciding when and if the Senate holds a trial of Biden. Schumer has called the charges “absurd” and could decide not to hold a trial, where the Democratic majority would almost certainly never attain the two-thirds majority required to convict the president and remove him from office. | US Political Corruption |
Biden’s double whammy: Impeachment inquiry, son’s legal woes
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Under routine circumstances, the American presidency is a pressure cooker of a job. Now, for President Joe Biden, there’s the added weight of a congressional impeachment inquiry and his son Hunter’s criminal indictment – all while pursuing reelection amid persistent questions about his age and stamina.
But President Biden is nothing if not determined, having finally reached the Oval Office 32 years after his first bid. Today, a strong desire to block his criminally indicted predecessor from staging a comeback only deepens Mr. Biden’s determination. Devotion to family is another animating force.
Why We Wrote This
An impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Joe Biden and the indictment of his son Hunter on federal gun charges could generate sympathy but also risk for his reelection campaign.
The impeachment gambit by House Republicans could be framed as an effort to deflect attention from former President Donald Trump’s legal troubles. But it’s still a serious matter for Mr. Biden – despite the lack of evidence that he personally profited from his son’s business dealings.
Republicans run the risk of perceived overreach, political analysts say. But that’s likely of little comfort to Mr. Biden and his team.
“Nobody in the White House woke up in the morning and said, ‘You know what would help us? Another scandal involving Hunter Biden,’” says Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University. “The ‘what-about-ism’ hurts, especially when the leading Republican candidate [for president] has been indicted four times.”
Under routine circumstances, the American presidency is a pressure cooker of a job. Now, for President Joe Biden, there’s the added weight of a congressional impeachment inquiry and son Hunter’s criminal indictment – all while pursuing reelection amid persistent questions about his age and stamina.
But President Biden is nothing if not determined, having finally reached the Oval Office 32 years after his first bid. Today, a strong desire to block his criminally indicted predecessor from staging a comeback only deepens Mr. Biden’s determination. Devotion to family is another animating force.
Even if the impeachment gambit by House Republicans can be framed as an effort to deflect attention from former President Donald Trump’s legal troubles, it’s still a serious matter for Mr. Biden – despite the lack of evidence that he personally profited from his son’s business dealings.
Why We Wrote This
An impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Joe Biden and the indictment of his son Hunter on federal gun charges could generate sympathy but also risk for his reelection campaign.
Republicans run the risk of perceived overreach, political analysts say. But that’s likely of little comfort to Mr. Biden and his team.
“Nobody in the White House woke up in the morning and said, ‘You know what would help us? Another scandal involving Hunter Biden,’” says Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University. “The ‘what-about-ism’ hurts, especially when the leading Republican candidate [for president] has been indicted four times.”
The danger for Mr. Biden is that voters who aren’t paying close attention may not see much distinction between former President Trump’s criminal indictments and the Biden inquiry. “What they hear is, something’s not right,” Dr. Engel says.
Hunter Biden woes can cut two ways
Mr. Biden’s close relationship with his only surviving son, Hunter – who has long struggled with addiction, but says he’s now clean and sober – is another element that can cut two ways. To the president’s political opponents, the younger Mr. Biden is a troubled man who profited off the family name in international business dealings during his father’s vice presidency.
To the president’s friends, the Biden family story is one of devotion in the wake of tragedy, including the death of son Beau in 2015 and before that, the car accident that killed Mr. Biden’s first wife and baby daughter in 1972.
Today, Hunter’s struggles are, by many accounts, never far from his father’s thought; the two are known to speak almost daily. And when asked by reporters about his son, the president either responds with a steely glare or a terse expression of support.
“The additional pressure he’s had with his son, Hunter Biden, that’s a tough thing,” says former Sen. Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, a longtime friend of the president from their time together as senators. “The problems Hunter Biden has had, you can’t somehow put that all on hold. That’s with you every day.”
In June, the younger Mr. Biden reached a plea deal with prosecutors over federal tax charges that was expected also to help him avoid jail time over a charge related to purchasing a gun. But in July the plea deal fell apart, and last week, Mr. Biden was charged with lying about his drug use on a gun application. The indictment sets up the potential for a high-profile trial in the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Troublesome family members aren’t unusual in American presidencies, but the example of Hunter Biden – including his role in the business dealings under scrutiny by House investigators – may well represent a greater risk to his father’s political fortunes than in other cases. Republicans have alleged the son received special treatment from federal prosecutors.
McCarthy and the impeachment inquiry
The Biden impeachment inquiry, while not good news for the president, is as much a reflection of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s political travails. After initially promising to hold a formal House vote to launch the inquiry, the speaker skipped that step, and announced the inquiry himself, when he apparently didn’t have the votes. The Republican enjoys only the narrowest of majorities, and is operating under constant threat of a “motion to vacate” that could end his speakership.
Some congressional Republicans oppose the impeachment inquiry. In a Washington Post opinion piece last Friday, Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado – a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus – accused his party’s leadership of diverting attention from an impending government shutdown. “Republicans in the House who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history,” he wrote.
But even if the Biden impeachment inquiry is perceived by some to be political theater, history shows that investigations can go in unexpected directions. In the 1990s, the Whitewater investigation into real estate investments of President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton eventually led to the discovery of President Clinton’s affair with an intern – and his impeachment for lying under oath about that.
Well before the Biden impeachment inquiry was formally launched, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee had already obtained thousands of pages of financial records that the committee chairman claims provide evidence of the “Biden family’s influence peddling schemes,” though it has yet to release that evidence. Now the committee is seeking more documents.
“If I’m Biden, I certainly don’t want anyone digging around,” says Chris Edelson, a political scientist at American University. Still, he adds, “the Republicans to an extent are gambling. What if there’s nothing?”
On Sunday, Speaker McCarthy said on Fox News that House Republicans will eventually subpoena Hunter Biden. That, too, could be risky, as it could engender sympathy for the president’s son, whose personal travails have been tabloid fodder for years.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that many families have experiences with addiction. But in a political context, she asks, “what is the capacity of a given member of the audience to experience empathy about this situation?”
With Hunter Biden, “are we now in a situation where if you’re a Trump-supporting Republican, you won’t experience empathy for someone in that situation?” Dr. Jamieson asks.
In the Biden White House, answers to press questions about Hunter typically echo the president’s six-word expression of support: “I’m very proud of my son.” Though on Friday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered more: She stated for the first time that the president will not pardon his son or commute his sentence if he’s convicted on gun charges.
President Biden’s demeanor and posture on the impeachment inquiry are completely different. While walking across the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday, after landing in Marine One, a reporter shouted a question: “What’s your reaction to the impeachment inquiry?”
Mr. Biden grinned broadly, and responded: “Lots of luck.” | US Political Corruption |
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's hopes of appealing his contempt of Congress conviction have been dealt a major blow after a judge questioned the top Donald Trump ally's key line of defense.
Bannon's legal team argued before a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Thursday that he should have his 2022 conviction for defying a congressional subpoena issued to him by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack thrown out.
Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress in July 2022 and sentenced to four months the following October. He has not spent any time in jail, pending the result of his appeal.
David Schoen, an attorney for the MAGA figurehead, argued that Bannon should have been protected from prosecution because Trump invoked executive privilege in October 2021 preventing Bannon from testifying. This led to Bannon relying on advice from his then-attorney, Robert Costello, that he could not waive the privilege, which keeps information from the executive branch from becoming public.
However, Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard seemed to dismiss the claims from Schoen that the executive privilege defense is "presumptively valid" while noting that Bannon, who left the White House in 2017, was a private citizen during the period covered by the January 6 House select committee's subpoena.
"That's so broad to say it's 'presumptively valid.' Even at its broadest, where [the Office of Legal Counsel] has written, for example, that a former senior official can assert absolute testimonial immunity, it only covers communications within the scope of that former senior official's service in the White House," Pillard said. "And none of the conduct at issue here was during Mr. Bannon's service in the White House was it? None of it."
Schoen replied that the subpoena did cover Trump's presidency, to which Pillard replied that it was "not during Bannon's service."
"Do you have any authority that suggests—any authority at all—that suggest that some kind of executive privilege or immunity would apply to conduct that postdates a person's service?" Pillard asked.
Bannon's legal team has been contacted for comment via email.
Elsewhere, Schoen claimed that Bannon did not willfully ignore the subpoena, but was prevented from complying, and could not make this case to the jury at his trial.
"Mr. Bannon acted in the only way he understood from his lawyer that he was permitted to behave," Schoen told the court.
Justice Department Attorney Elizabeth Danello argued that Bannon was warned multiple times that the executive privilege defense would not stand up as a reason to not comply with the subpoena.
"Mr. Bannon deliberately chose not to comply with a legitimate congressional subpoena," Danello said.
Prior to the hearings, Schoen told Newsweek that "no matter where anyone stands" on Bannon, they should hope his contempt conviction gets reversed on appeal.
"It is a very dangerous proposition to hold someone criminally culpable and send them to prison without a finding that he or she ever acted in any way that he or she believed was against the law or wrong. That is what happened here," Schoen said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit took the case under consideration.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy and the courts. He joined Newsweek in February 2018 after spending several years working at the International Business Times U.K., where he predominantly reported on crime, politics and current affairs. Prior to this, he worked as a freelance copywriter after graduating from the University of Sunderland in 2010. Languages: English.
You can get in touch with Ewan by emailing [email protected].
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here. | US Federal Elections |
House Republicans are once again scrambling with no clear path to elect a new speaker after voting to push Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan out of the race, the latest sign of the chaos and divisions that have engulfed the majority party and left the chamber in a state of paralysis.
In a dramatic turn of events, the House GOP conference voted by secret ballot on Friday to drop Jordan as their speaker designee after he failed to win the gavel for the third time in a floor vote earlier in the day.
The House remains effectively frozen as long as there is no elected speaker. The paralysis has created a perilous situation as Congress faces the threat of a government shutdown next month and conflict unfolds abroad. The battle for the speakership has now dragged on for more than two weeks with no end in sight.
Jordan’s exit from the race now sets the stage for more speaker hopefuls to emerge. Republicans are expected to hold a candidate forum Monday evening. But it appears increasingly uncertain whether any lawmaker can get the 217 votes needed to win the gavel while Republicans control such a narrow majority.
Jordan’s failure to win the gavel also highlighted the limits of former President Donald Trump’s influence in the speaker’s race after he endorsed Jordan.
Speaking to reporters after the vote to push him out, Jordan said, “We need to come together and figure out who our speaker is going to be,” and said he told the conference, “It was an honor to be their speaker designee.”
The move by Republicans against Jordan came after three failed floor votes for his speaker bid and vows from the Ohio Republican to remain in the race despite mounting opposition against him.
In Friday’s floor vote, 25 House Republicans voted against Jordan – a higher number than in the two prior votes and far more than the handful of defectors Jordan could afford to lose and still win the gavel given the GOP’s narrow majority.
A third failed vote
When the vote count against Jordan increased to 25 House Republicans, there were three new GOP votes in opposition – Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Kean of New Jersey and Marc Molinaro of New York.
Kean said in a statement explaining his position, “it has become evident that Chairman Jordan does not and will not have the votes to become Speaker.”
Some Republicans who have oppose Jordan decried what they described as a pressure campaign against them by allies of the Ohio Republican. And several Republicans who opposed Jordan’s speakership bid have said they experienced angry calls, menacing messages and even death threats since casting their votes. Jordan has condemned the threats.
A closed-door House GOP conference meeting on Thursday turned heated, multiple sources told CNN. Some members encouraged Jordan to drop out of the race. There was also an emotional discussion over the threats some Jordan holdouts are facing. Later, members leaving the meeting described it as an airing of grievances with tensions running high.
Some Republicans looking for a way to break the impasse have suggested expanding the powers of interim Speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry – a controversial move that would put the House even further into uncharted territory. But there is widespread opposition within the Republican conference to the idea.
CNN’s Morgan Rimmer, Kristin Wilson, Sam Fossum, Lauren Fox and Manu Raju contributed to this report. | US Congress |
Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign began by forcing the political Left and their media to confront harsh realities about their own policies on vaccines and support for foreign wars when it came to where their own constituents were at. Vehemently anti-war and anti-vax, RFK Jr. gave skeptical Democrats an outlet for their rage at a new pro-war, pro-vaccine mandate Democratic Party.
But poised to break from the Democratic Party today in what is largely expected to be a an announcement of an Independent bid, Kennedy's horseshoe philosophies and campaign have found allies on the political Right—so much so that he may end up hurting former President and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump more than President Biden in the 2024 election.
Kennedy's Democratic populism has found a home in MAGA world media, whose punditry sees him as a useful ally and tool against Joe Biden and in particular, the mainstream media. He has successfully courted some of MAGA world's biggest media stars, who have given him a large platform to stand on, and his popularity with Republican voters eclipses that of Democratic ones.
A case in point: Kennedy will be a featured speaker at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Circus.
Yet MAGA World embraces Kennedy at their own peril. Recent polling has shown that Kennedy would not hurt Biden as an Independent in a general election run—though he would hurt Trump. The prospect of a Kennedy third party run should be putting Donald Trump and his supporters on all kinds of notice. With the narrow margins with which Trump lost the previous election, RFK's popularity could be enough to swing the election to Biden—especially with the coveted normie suburban voters who don't align with some of Kennedy's more extreme positions.
Some of Trump's supporters seem to have figured this out; RFK Jr's possible Independent run has sent alarm bells through MAGA media's biggest stalwarts, with some even suggesting Trump should offer Kennedy a cabinet position just to get him out of the race. Others have suggested Kennedy as a running mate.
It's not quite as far fetched as it sounds. As President Elect, Trump met with Kennedy at Trump Tower in New York City and reportedly offered him a chair position on a panel that would probe vaccine safety—which is somewhat ironic given the fact that Operation Warp Speed fast-tracking COVID-19 vaccines is arguably Trump's greatest accomplishment while in office, and one he still takes credit for to this day.
There is still a sizable anti-COVID vaccine contingent in Trump's own base, and should Trump fail to walk the fine line between taking credit for the COVID vaccine while recognizing some of it's side effects, they could abandon him in a general election. It's a tightrope Trump has yet to figure out.
Kennedy could also act as a legitimate third party libertarian option, and he's also quite popular with people who don't tend to vote. Kennedy could pull from the sidelines of the American electorate, as Nate Silver pointed out.
Whether or not Kennedy would pull a sizable amount of voters is still up for debate, but with an appearance at CPAC, there's enough to suggest that he could impact the election, and not in a way that MAGA world will like. At least, Trump's team seems to think so: They are preparing to attack.
Stephen L. Miller has written for National Review, The Spectator, the New York Post and Fox News, and hosts the independent podcast Versus Media on Substack.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own. | US Federal Elections |
As tensions and divisions within the GOP plunged Capitol Hill into chaos on Tuesday, Republicans were mocked for their less-than-upstanding behavior on social media, with users dismissing lawmakers as "toddlers."
In a series of separate incidents on Tuesday, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who represents California's 20th District, reportedly got into a physical altercation with one of the lawmakers who ousted him last month, while Rep. James Comer of Kentucky called Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida, a Democrat, a "smurf"—a little blue Belgian comic character.
On the same day, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma challenged union leader Sean O'Brien to a physical fight in the middle of a Senate hearing after reading out tweets in which the Teamsters president had called him a "clown" and "fraud."
The chaos unfolded in the Capitol Hill building at a time when Congress is trying to avert a government shutdown before the holidays. That hasn't gone unnoticed by members of the public and Democratic lawmakers, who reacted with mockery to the turbulent behavior of the GOP members.
"These are toddlers," journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X, after recapping the events of the day. "This morning in Republicans: - one House R accused another of sucker punching him; - a senator challenged a witness to a fistfight as people gasped; - the Oversight chair called a Dem member a 'smurf' and repeatedly called his line of questioning 'b******.'"
"If Republicans can't even get it together to impeach Mayorkas over his egregious dereliction of duty re: the criminal illegal invasion at the wide-open border, what CAN they do? Seriously," wrote podcast host Monica Crowley on X.
The dispute between Comer and Moscowitz started during an Oversight Committee hearing when the two sparred over reports that Comer loaned his brother $200,000 despite criticizing President Joe Biden for doing the same thing. Comer denied those reports, but Moskowitz asked the Kentucky Republican why the American people should believe that.
"There's a different rule for the president. There's a different rule for you. Why should they believe what you're saying?" he said. Comer shouted as the two went back and forth, at one point calling Moskowitz "a liar."
A spokesperson for Comer told Newsweek after the hearing: "Representative Moskowitz continues to spew disinformation and is attempting to distract the American people from Biden family corruption. Chairman Comer will not be deterred as he works to uncover the facts about President Biden's involvement in his family's influence peddling schemes."
Newsweek contacted Moscowitz's office for comment by phone on Wednesday but didn't receive an immediate response.
According to reporting by NPR, McCarthy walked past Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee and shoved him, which led to the latter chasing the former House speaker and lunging at him, starting a physical fight.
A possibly more violent scuffle was averted in the Senate by Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, who intervened to stop Mullin, a former mixed martial arts fighter, from starting a brawl with O'Brien. "Sit down!" Sanders shouted at the Republican senator, who had since risen from his seat. "You're a United States senator."
Newsweek contacted McCarthy's and Mullin's offices for comment by phone on Wednesday, but didn't receive an immediate response.
"While Democrats fight (metaphorically) for our right to organize, Republicans LITERALLY try to fight our organizers. Senator Mullin is a multi-millionaire, BTW," journalist Nick Knudsen wrote on X. "Tell me your party hates working people without telling me..."
"Yea, Republicans had a bad day today, spewing dysfunction, getting in fights with each other and even threatening to beat up a witness. But the media is acting like the GOP's behavior today is the end of the republic or something," commented former Republican presidential candidate Joe Walsh.
"You know what the end of the republic is? The end of the republic is when a sitting President refuses to accept an election loss, then tries to overthrow the election, then leads a violent insurrection, and his party STILL worships him to the point where they make him the nominee for president in the next election, an election in which he says, if he wins, he'll become a dictator and throw his political opponents in jail, and his party hears him say all that and STILL bows to him," he continued.
"That right there. That's the end of the republic."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek Reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. and European politics, global affairs and housing. She has covered the ups and downs of the U.S. housing market extensively, as well as given in-depth insights into the unfolding war in Ukraine. Giulia joined Newsweek in 2022 from CGTN Europe and had previously worked at the European Central Bank. She is a graduate of Nottingham Trent University. Languages: English, Italian, French.
You can get in touch with Giulia by emailing [email protected].
Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek Reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. and European politics, global affairs... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here. | US Congress |
Even on a normal day, advancing ethics in government and holding powerful officials to account is no easy task. Add a government shutdown to the mix and things will get a whole lot harder.
Congress has until midnight on November 17th to pass a bill to fund the government and after weeks without a Speaker of the House, it is looking more and more likely that government funding might lapse for the first time since 2019. If it does, Americans across the country would be immediately impacted by a shutdown as over two million civilian federal workers will face delayed paychecks and roughly four million federal contract workers anticipate receiving no paycheck at all, while countless others will face travel delays, slow customer service response for government programs like Social Security and postponed immigration court cases. Less immediately obvious, however, is the way a shutdown will interfere with government ethics.
Here’s how a government shutdown would throw a wrench in advancing government ethics, transparency, and accountability:
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Bringing to light corruption and misconduct in government
As the old saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The public needs access to government records in order to uncover wrongdoing, which is why anyone can file requests for information from any federal agency under the Freedom of Information Act. CREW has used FOIA requests to uncover the Secret Service’s contact with the Oathkeepers and investigate federal officials’ responses to the insurrection on January 6th among other issues. FOIA requests are used by individuals, news organizations and advocates across the political spectrum, and have been used to break huge news stories, from how the government misled the public about the war in Afghanistan, to the release of a secret memo about the use of torture during the Bush administration.
But processing FOIA requests requires thousands of federal employees. Even when the government is fully funded, FOIA requests often take far longer than they should, leading to a backlog of requests. During shutdowns, agencies are delayed even further due to low capacity, and in the past, some agencies have refused to accept requests entirely – a decision we could see replicated in a future shutdown as well.
Without enough employees to process FOIA requests, agencies are unlikely to be able to meet the standards required by law, and it will be harder to access information that may be of public interest.
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Investigating wrongdoing
Our government has systems in place to investigate allegations of misconduct by government officials. While these systems are not perfect, they nonetheless play an important role in bringing wrongdoing to light and cannot function appropriately during a lapse in government funding.
Suppose a federal employee observed a federal official engage in misconduct last week and is concerned that the official may be abusing their office. To address this concern, the witness filed a complaint with their agency’s Inspector General office, a government watchdog body in most federal agencies. But then, the government shuts down and half the IG’s staff are furloughed leading to severely limited capacity. To make matters worse, the remaining staff cannot thoroughly investigate the complaint because they cannot coordinate with other offices and agencies because their staff have also been furloughed. As the Department of Justice IG said in 2019 following the most recent government shutdown, “we cannot conduct effective oversight during a shutdown if OIGs are facing furloughs while agencies are continuing certain operations, and this concern is shared by the IG community as a whole.”
From another perspective, we can consider a member of Congress who was accused of an ethics violation. If a complaint was filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics, such as the one CREW recently filed against Representative Andrew Clyde, that member may be under investigation by OCE. During a shutdown, that investigation may be paused and new complaints may not be reviewed if OCE employees are furloughed.
In these situations, a government shutdown would likely delay such an investigation, whether it results in accountability, or the official’s name being cleared.
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Enforcing the law and seeking accountability
Ethics laws are only powerful if they are enforced, which is why it is a problem when government ethics enforcement bodies are operating at diminished capacity. A government shutdown would mean that only a small number of workers who perform duties vital to national security, public health and safety, or other crucial operations could continue working to keep the lights on and tend to emergencies. But enforcing ethics rules is not usually considered a vital government function, which means that there likely won’t be staff to enforce them.
For example, the Office of Special Counsel is expected to go from 130 employees to just 14 during a shutdown. OSC is responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits executive branch employees from using their official authority to engage in partisan political activity. If an employee violates the Hatch Act during the shutdown, CREW and others could file a Hatch Act complaint, but it is unlikely OSC will be able to issue a ruling on cases during a shutdown. Even if OSC did have enough capacity to investigate and find a Hatch Act violation, they would then need to initiate a disciplinary action via the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, which is expected to furlough its entire 190-person staff.
If the government shuts down, the Federal Election Commission will also be severely limited in its capacity to enforce campaign ethics laws. During the last shutdown in 2019, then FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub told Congress that campaign finance enforcement “ground to a halt” after the agency furloughed 90% of the agency’s 300 employees. With similar staff numbers expected during the next shutdown, the FEC will cease enforcement of the Federal Election Campaign Act, meaning that investigations into dark money complaints will be paused. The FEC will be unable to provide guidance to campaigns about campaign finance laws, just as candidates have begun ramping up their campaigns ahead of the 2024 election.
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Setting up safeguards to prevent corruption and make government more ethical
It’s not enough to hold officials accountable for corruption and ethics violations after the fact; we also need to enact new laws in order to prevent misconduct from occurring in the first place. Members of Congress and most of their staff are working during the shutdown, but it is difficult to hold hearings and move legislation when most of Congress is focusing (or should be focusing) on how to fund the government and deliver vital services to Americans. During a shutdown, it will be more difficult to make progress on important ethics reforms like banning members of Congress from owning individual stocks or bringing transparency and accountability to the Supreme Court.
Rulemakings on critical ethics issues are likely to be held up too. Federal agencies are currently reviewing public comments on implementing the Corporate Transparency Act, regulating the use of artificial intelligence in campaign advertisements, and preserving the merit-based system for civil service workers, to name a few. Despite the significance of these rulemakings, they are all likely to be considered non-essential which means that agencies would be violating the law if they worked on them during a shutdown.
Delays in uncovering, investigating, adjudicating, and preventing ethics violations during shutdowns create opportunities for misconduct to go unchecked and can set a risky precedent. Put simply, government shutdowns weaken mechanisms of enforcement and accountability, and weak accountability measures don’t make for an ethical government. Some of these issues can be addressed by passing legislation to keep ethics offices running during the shutdown. But ultimately, what we really need is for Congress to fund the government and keep the ethics enforcement wheels in motion. | US Federal Policies |
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to endorse Donald Trump's presidential bid on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Sanders will make her announcement at Trump's rally near Miami. Trump is skipping the debate that night — which is being hosted by NBC News — and holding a counterprogramming event, as he did with the first two debates.
The Trump campaign declined to comment. A spokesperson for Sanders did not reply.
Sanders, 41, is seen as a rising star in the Republican Party after getting elected governor in 2022. She is the first woman to serve as governor of Arkansas and the youngest governor in the country. Her father served in the same job from 1996-2007.
By choosing Trump, Sanders is bucking Asa Hutchinson, who preceded her as governor of Arkansas. He has run a campaign that has been deeply critical of Trump and is trailing the rest of the major GOP presidential candidates.
Sanders served as Trump's White House press secretary from 2017 to 2019, and she delivered the GOP response to President Joe Biden's most recent State of the Union speech.
A Trumpworld adviser said the campaign brain trust at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort was frustrated that Sanders had not endorsed earlier.
“MAL has been furious with her for months for going this long without endorsing,” the adviser said. “There’s always a way back in Trump world, but I’m not sure if President Trump will ever view her the same again.”
The high-profile gubernatorial endorsement comes just days after NBC News reported that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds would be endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. | US Federal Elections |
“Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform late Wednesday. “This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
While Trump did not use the word “shutdown” in his post, he did call the coming end of the budget year on Sept. 30 “a very important deadline.”
The House has the power, at any time, to pass a bill that would remove funding for the special counsel investigating Trump, but has failed to even consider such a measure. A failure by Congress to pass an appropriations bill by the end of the month will lead to a partial government shutdown, including the possible furlough of federal workers.
“Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!” Trump wrote.
At least one of his top congressional allies took notice. Within an hour of Trump’s post, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) posted an image of it on the social media site X, still commonly known as Twitter, with the comment: “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution. Hold the line.”
Trump is under two federal criminal indictments. One is related to his attempts to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election, which culminated in the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his followers on Jan. 6, 2021. The other accuses him of illegally retaining top-secret documents at his Florida country club home and then refusing to turn them over despite a grand jury subpoena demanding he do so.
He also faces state charges in Georgia for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss there and in New York for allegedly falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star in the days before the 2016 election.
If convicted on the federal or Georgia charges, Trump could be sentenced to decades in prison. The potential punishment for the New York case is not as severe, and could possibly result in no prison time.
Trump pushed the government into a shutdown at the end of December 2018, after the GOP-led Congress refused to provide him with money for a wall along the southern border. He had promised during the 2016 campaign that he would force Mexico to pay for that project, but as president he never made any attempt to get that country to do so.
That shutdown ended after 34 days, when Trump gave up on forcing Congress to include wall funding in the spending bill and instead raided the Defense Department budget, using billions of dollars meant for such things as service member housing and schools to pay for border fencing instead.
After four years in office, Trump managed to build only 52 miles of new fence where there had not previously been any barrier, although replacement of existing barrier continued as it had under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. | US Federal Policies |
Even as his bid to become the Republican presidential nominee circles the drain, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis can take pride in the fact that he is almost keeping pace with his chief rival in having embarrassing Nazi scandals. Earlier this week, in response to continuing lackluster polling, DeSantis fired 38 staffers. Axios noted that one of those staffers was Nate Hochman, a speechwriter who “secretly created and shared a pro-DeSantis video that featured the candidate at the center of a Sonnenrad, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis and still used by some white supremacists.” Earlier, Hochman and other staffers stirred controversy by sharing a bizarre homophobic and transphobic pro-DeSantis ad (presented as a fan creation, even though evidence points to its being another in-house production). This follows hot on the heels of a June scandal when it turned out that Pedro Gonzalez, a pro-DeSantis influencer whose social media voice was being promoted by the Florida governor’s staff, had a record of anti-Semitic, racist, and fascist private direct messages.
Although he’s trying hard, DeSantis still lags behind front-runner Donald Trump—not just in the polls but also in shameless pandering to white nationalists. Trump of course has the advantage of a head start in this competition. His extensive record (crisply catalogued in a 2017 Slate article) includes his numerous sly uses of alt-right memes, his promotion of extremists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, and his infamous “very fine people” response to the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. More recently, Trump dined last year with Adolf Hitler aficionado and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
But the GOP’s white nationalist problem extends beyond the Trump/DeSantis race. On Wednesday, Media Matters reported that Matteo Cina, a Fox News staffer and former writer for Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, repeatedly posted anti-Semitic messages on TikTok. One Cina post argued that “it is hard to talk about the Holocaust and rising anti semitism [sic] without discussing Jewish presence in banking.” Arizona Representative Paul Gosar has extensive ties to the racist far right. In 2021, he spoke at a white nationalist rally hosted by Fuentes. Earlier this year, Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo reported that Gosar’s digital director, Wade Searle, can be linked to an “extensive digital trail” on white supremacist websites, including those that support Fuentes.
The mounting evidence that many prominent Republican politicians, including a former president, either have Nazi ties or are courting the Nazi vote is unsettling. Frequently, this fact leads to some form of denial or excuse-making—such as the claim that young Republicans are “too online” or just engaging in the familiar puerile prank of adopting rhetoric designed to shock liberals.
There is a smidgen of truth to this argument. Shock Jock mockery and malicious frat boy bigotry are familiar styles of right-wing comedy—a tradition that runs from The American Spectator to Rush Limbaugh to Donald Trump.
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Cornel West: The Christian Socialist Running for President
Cornel West: The Christian Socialist Running for President
But this cruel comedy isn’t just about lolz; it’s also a political strategy. As centrist pundit Jonathan Chait cogently observed, the DeSantis campaign made a conscious decision “to woo the extreme right.” That’s why it hired Hochman, a rising star on the right, “after it was reported he had participated in a Twitter Spaces with Nick Fuentes.” Chait describes a telling incident in 2022 when “a small band of Nazis menaced Jewish students in Orlando.” While Florida Republicans denounced the incident, DeSantis spokesperson Christine Pushaw claimed that the incident was faked by Democrats. DeSantis himself accused the media of trying to smear him. Chait argues, “The point of this political theater was not merely to display dominance against the media. It was to signal tribal solidarity with right-wing allies, by demonstrating DeSantis would not renounce them.” (Although it’s hard to square Chait’s acute analysis here with his earlier claim that DeSantis deserves liberal good wishes as a “lesser evil” than Trump).
Playing footsy with white nationalists has a long history on the American right, one that scholars have been giving more attention to recently. Next year, Yale University Press will be releasing an illuminating book by historian David Austin Walsh titled Taking Back America: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, a far-reaching challenge to conventional accounts of the history of the right, including the role played by figures like William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review.
Walsh, currently a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, is part of a cutting-edge cohort of scholars who reject the traditional view that there is a strong distinction between mainstream conservatism and the far right. Rather, the emerging research on the right documents a long history of porous boundaries, with respectable elected officials and mainstream pundits repeatedly working with figures on fringe, including Nazis.
In his forthcoming book, Walsh notes:
Modern conservatism emerged out of opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, forming a right-wing popular front—a term coined by William F. Buckley, Jr. in his private correspondence—with the openly racist, antisemitic, and pro-fascist far right. This coalition proved to be remarkably durable until the 1960s, when the popular front began to unravel as some conservatives proved to be unwilling to make even modest concessions to the demands of the civil rights movement and jettison explicit racism and antisemitism. These apostate conservatives would form the basis of modern white nationalism—and the boundaries where “responsible” conservatism ended and the far right began were usually blurred. Trump’s statement after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia…was not an outlier. Twentieth-century American conservatism did not equal fascism, but it evolved out of a right-wing popular front that included fascist and quasi-fascist elements.
In the nostalgic memory of some liberals, William F. Buckley is fondly recalled as an avatar of a more cerebral and genteel conservatism, one that rejected extremism. In this misty-eyed view of the past, Buckley was the type of conservative liberals could get along with, open to debate and willing to denounce extremist cranks like Robert Welch, founder of the conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society.
Walsh counters this sentimental myth by noting that
the relationship between the far right and the “respectable” conservatives was far more intertwined than Buckley would later suggest. Not only were Welch and Buckley once friends—Buckley had approached Welch in 1955 for seed funding for the magazine that would become National Review—but many of the men in Buckley’s orbit blurred the boundaries between the respectable and radical right…. The first book review editor for National Review, Revilo Oliver, was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois who believed that communists and Jews were behind the civil rights movement and that the ultimate goal was the genocide of white people. Oliver would eventually become a major figure in the American neo-Nazi movement.
Walsh’s concept of a “right-wing popular front” is extremely clarifying. We can see how this popular front functioned in popularizing Holocaust denial. This subject is described in a superbly researched article, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial,” by University of Colorado communications scholar John P. Jackson Jr., which appeared in American Jewish History in 2021. Jackson documents that “Holocaust denial, far from being the sole province of the extreme antisemitic right, was often embraced by the mainstream right wing of American politics.”
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, there were two distinct groups of Americans interested in minimizing Nazi genocide (the scope of which was not yet fully grasped, with usage of the word “Holocaust” only gaining currency in subsequent decades): Nazi apologists, and Old Right isolationists who hated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. These two groups often worked together to promote books and articles that downplayed Nazi crimes and blamed FDR for World War II. Major conservative publishers like Regnery, Devin-Adair, and Caxton all published books by fascist sympathizers.
Regnery, founded in 1947 by Henry Regnery, is an especially interesting case, because in the 1950s it made a name for itself as publisher of many of the most distinguished works of the burgeoning conservative movement such as Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953). More recently, the press has moved away from highfalutin theory and been a megaphone for more blunt and abrasive voices like Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich.
But in the same period that Regnery was publishing Buckley and Kirk, it was also the publisher of books like Montgomery Belgion’s Victor’s Justice (1949), which argued that denazification was “the equivalent of ‘persecution of Jews’ by German National Socialists.” Belgion also offered extenuating justifications for anti-Semitism by claiming that “from 1918 to 1933 certain Jews—many of them immigrants from the East…waxed rich at the expense of the people in general and obtained in the economic life of the nation a preponderance excessive in respect of their number.”
Regnery also published Charles Tansill’s Back Door to War (1952), which, in Jackson’s summary, claims that “Hitler was a peace-loving leader who had been fooled into invading Poland by the demonically clever Roosevelt.”
Henry Regnery admired F.J.P. Veale’s Advance to Barbarism (published by C.C. Nelson in 1953), which alleged that the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe “was in some ways even more horrible and cruel than…Hitler’s extermination of the Jews.” Veale’s book was praised in National Review in 1955.
Jackson documents that this type of Old Right isolationist pro-Nazi sentiment was withering away by the end of the 1950s, but the cause of minimizing (and sometimes denying) the Holocaust was increasingly taken up by a new cohort of self-styled libertarians. Like the Old Right, the libertarians were motivated by a hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal, which spilled over into a project of discrediting Roosevelt’s foreign policy, even if that meant supporting Nazi apologias.
Curiously, a leader of this trend was Murray Rothbard, who was himself Jewish but had no compunction about befriending anti-Semites like Willis Carto, head of the Liberty League. In private correspondence, Rothbard upbraided “the kikes” and complained about “bellyaching about the 6 million ad nauseam.”
Rothbard was an early reader and admirer of the privately circulated “long memorandum” written by David Leslie Hoggan in 1966—a foundational text in Holocaust denial. Rothbard praised what he called “6mm revisionism” in a letter in a letter to the historian Harry Elmer Barnes, a complex and major figure whose career illustrates both the use and abuse of historical revisionism.
In the 1920s, Barnes won widespread scholarly and popular acclaim for books such as The Genesis of the World War (1926), where he was an incisive and persuasive critic of simplistic wartime propaganda that pinned blame for the First World War solely on Germany and the Central Powers. As such, he served as a model for the salutary and necessary work of scholarly revisionism willing to challenge conventional narratives, serving as a precursor of figures like A.J.P. Taylor and William Appleman Williams, who brought revisionism to subsequent foreign policy debates. Unfortunately, in the last two decades of his life, Barnes (who died in 1968 at age 79) went beyond his admirable skepticism of mainstream and government-approved narratives. He became a conspiracy theorist who pioneered some of the early arguments of Holocaust denial. It was this later crackpot Barnes who was cherished by right-wing partisans like Rothbard.
In the pages of his journal, New Individualist Review, in 1962, Barnes argued that “there is no unique or special case against Nazi barbarism and horrors unless one assumes that it is far more wicked to exterminate Jews than to massacre Gentiles.” In a 1961 letter to a colleague, Barnes was even more explicit, worrying that “the 6mm will never be debamboozled in my lifetime, and probably not yours. The Khazars [i.e., Jews] have licked Revisionism for a long time…. I fear that only a totalitarian world can ‘contain’ the Khazars.”
Rothbard worked diligently to promote figures like Barnes in libertarian circles. Rothbard’s efforts paid many dividends. In 1976, Reason magazine published a special issue on revisionism. Most of it concerned Cold War revisionism questioning foreign policy hawkishness. But the issue also included versions of Holocaust denial, including an article by Gary North that praised an anonymous book titled The Myth of the Six Million, which was in fact a reworking of Hoggan’s “long memorandum.” North claimed that it “presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story.”
Rothbard died in 1995, but his legacy currently looms larger than ever in American politics. As journalist John Ganz has documented, Rothbard was an important precursor of Trump and MAGA. In the last decade of his life, Rothbard revitalized the idea of a right-wing popular front by creating a coalition of paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives that included the white nationalist Samuel T. Francis (who died in 2005) and the Catholic reactionary Pat Buchanan. This group was united by an opposition to what they regarded as a compromised conservative establishment. They took inspiration from the rise of figures like former Klansman David Duke, believing that his career marked a new, more openly race-conscious, reactionary politics.
Prior to his fiasco as a DeSantis speechwriter, Nate Hochman had been an emerging intellectual star on the right. His writing, including a 2022 essay in The New York Times that makes note of the rising influence of Francis’s ideas, shows that Hochman (who is also Jewish) very self-consciously sees himself as an heir to the paleoconservative project.
The right-wing popular front, which frayed in the 1960s, has returned with a vengeance. The urgent task for liberals and leftists is to organize our own alliance in the mold of the original popular front, which the right has merely mimicked and travestied. | US Political Corruption |
- Law Firms
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 (Reuters) - The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday urged a U.S. judge to reconsider a partial gag order she imposed on Donald Trump in the case accusing him of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, arguing it violates his free speech rights.
"Trump retains a First Amendment right to speech, and the rest of us retain a right to hear what he has to say," the ACLU wrote in an amicus brief filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The organization argued that the gag order by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, which she has temporarily lifted, is “unconstitutionally vague” and covers such a broad range of topics that it would “undermine public discussion on matters of public concern.”
The order bars the former U.S. president and others directly involved in the criminal case from making public statements that target prosecutors, court staff and potential witness in the case. It allows Trump to criticize the U.S. Justice Department and to denounce the prosecution as politically motivated.
Chutkan issued the order after finding that Trump’s social media posts and public comments risk influencing witnesses and prompting threats and harassment against public officials. Trump has repeatedly referred to Special Jack Smith, who is prosecuting the case, as a “thug” and “deranged.”
Trump, who has criticized the restrictions as a constraint on his presidential campaign, is appealing the order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It is temporarily on hold while Chutkan considers Trump’s request for a longer pause.
It is unclear whether Chutkan will consider the ACLU’s arguments. The judge has previously denied requests from outside organizations to file briefs in the case.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges in the federal election case, one of four criminal cases he is facing as he runs for president as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.
The ACLU has been a vocal critic of Trump and frequently challenged his administration’s policies while he was in the White House. The group has faced criticism for veering toward uniform liberal advocacy and away from its traditional stance of defending civil liberties across the political spectrum.
“This isn’t the first time that we have said that even Donald Trump’s First Amendment rights have to be protected,” said Ben Wizer, the director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “It’s always been our view that if free speech rights don’t belong to all, then they don’t belong to any.”
Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | US Federal Policies |
In 2019, a manipulated video spread through social media platforms showing Joe Biden on stage telling an audience that he “shouldn’t be president”. Biden’s voice had been slowed down, giving the impression he was slurring his words, while footage from a real speech he gave at an Iowa university was edited to cut out context, splice together clips and make it seem like he was calling himself “Slow Joe Biden”.
It was a full year before Biden formally became the Democratic nominee for president, but already the narrative that he was in serious cognitive decline was beginning to take shape. Over the course of the 2020 presidential race, a procession of far-right meme-makers, Republican party operatives and Trump campaign officials would suggest Biden was losing it. More deceptively edited videos circulated, Fox News hosts claimed Biden was senile, attack ads ran suggesting he was mentally unfit and Donald Trump tweeted that his opponent had “dementia”.
The notion that Biden is suffering from cognitive decline or lacks the mental acuity to be president has been a fixture of conservative media for years, but questions about his abilities appear to have increasingly become a mainstream concern. A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed that only 32% of respondents believed Biden had the “mental sharpness” to be effective in the White House – a significantly lower share than previous polls over the last several years.
As Biden, now 80 years old, prepares for the 2024 presidential race, it’s likely that his age and mental faculties will be a primary target for conservatives during the campaign. AI-generated audio tools have also made it easier for anyone with a basic digital skill set to manipulate Biden’s persona, while his history of real-life gaffes, verbal stumbles connected to a lifelong speech impediment and limited news conferences provide plenty of ammunition for speculative claims he has mentally declined.
Although asking whether the nation’s oldest-ever president is fit for a grueling and mentally demanding job is a reasonable question, much of this narrative has relied on either specious allegations or outright deception.
The altered 2019 clip of Biden, for instance, was made by prolific far-right meme-maker and ardent Trump supporter Logan “Carpe Donktum” Cook. At the time, Cook had partnered with Ali Alexander – later one of the key figures behind the “Stop the Steal” movement – to launch a Maga influencer site. Videos like Cook’s became part of a pipeline that saw Maga supporters or Republican operatives create content that would then move through rightwing media and get amplified by campaign officials or Trump himself.
At times in-office government officials or Republican party organizations directly engaged in promoting this content. In one case from 2020, Trump’s White House social media director, Dan Scavino, tweeted out a manipulated video that made it falsely appear as if Biden had fallen asleep during a media interview with a local news station. The video, which Photoshopped captions and edited together footage, was originally created by a meme-making Maga supporter before being picked up by Scavino.
Trump’s campaign or Republican officials also made their own content. Over the course of just one month in the summer of 2020, Trump’s campaign ran more than a thousand Facebook and Instagram ads with various slogans attacking Biden’s mental abilities.
“Do you think Joe Biden is old & out of it?” one of the social media ads asked.
“Do you think Joe Biden has the mental fortitude to be president?” another read, linking to a poll on the Trump campaign site.
Trump’s campaign created four separate video ads suggesting Biden was mentally diminished, including one titled “What happened to Joe Biden” that took clips of him speaking fluently while vice-president and juxtaposed them with verbal stumbles on the campaign trail. One televised ad that ran in 12 states announced “Joe Biden is slipping.” Trump began repeating the attacks during media interviews, insinuating Democrats were covering something up.
“Biden is shot. I’m telling you he’s shot. There’s something going on,” Trump told Fox News in August 2020.
These attacks kept up during Biden’s presidency and last year a group of 54 Republican lawmakers wrote an open letter to “express concern” with the president’s “current cognitive state” and demand that Biden take a mental fitness test. The letter cited the Alzheimer’s Association’s signs of mental decline before listing a series of Biden gaffes and polling on his mental state. (Biden has a well-documented stutter which creates frequent verbal gaffes and repetitions, making it fairly easy to find videos of him stumbling over his words.)
Biden’s physician released a five-page summary of his current health status in February, detailing some issues such as arthritis and a need to take blood thinners, but describing him as “healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency”. But such internal assessments have not stopped Republican attacks, while incidents like Biden’s onstage fall last week at the Air Force Academy commencement have fueled rightwing news cycles that Democrats are hiding his infirmity and legacy media outlets are acting as apologists.
On social media, the Republican National Committee created an account that served as an attack dog against the Biden administration. The @RNCResearch account has repeatedly promoted the idea that Biden is in mental decline and last year tweeted out a misleading video that took several seconds of out-of-context footage from Biden’s trip to Israel and framed it to make the president look lost and confused.
Fox News and other rightwing media networks have also kept a steady drumbeat of claims. The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a segment last year alleging a Democratic party conspiracy to hide that Biden was “cognitively unable to serve”, while host Sean Hannity told viewers earlier this year that Biden was showing signs of dementia and was “plagued by his own cognitive decline”.
The “dementia” claims have been amplified further by conservative media across platforms like Rumble, while the immensely popular podcast host Joe Rogan – a longtime promoter of baseless conspiracy theories – told his millions of dedicated listeners last year that Biden was “basically a shell” cognitively. Clips of Rogan’s comments were then featured by rightwing outlets such as the Daily Caller, giving them even more reach.
One of the reasons that Republicans and Trump supporters have spent so much time and resources pushing the idea of Biden-in-decline may be that it seems to be a genuine polling liability for Biden, especially when compared with perceptions of Donald Trump. Despite Trump’s history of nonsensical statements and free-associating speeches, and the fact that he is only a few years younger than Biden, he has consistently scored much higher on surveys asking about his mental acuity and energy levels. A Pew Research poll in 2020 found that Trump had a 16-point lead over Biden when it came to being described as “energetic”, and a Washington Post-ABC News poll from May found 76-year-old Trump had a 22-point advantage over Biden when it came to perceptions of “mental sharpness”.
Although Democrats haven’t waged the same level of attacks against Trump, the former president did face similar questions about his cognitive abilities while in office, with pundits like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claiming his generally erratic behavior was the result of dementia. The speculation grew to the point that he took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment – a 10-minute psychological exam of simplistic questions to determine medical issues like signs of neurological impairment – which he repeatedly bragged about performing well on. That Trump felt pressured to take the test is also part of the rightwing grievance against Biden, often framed as evidence that Democrats aren’t being fair or have something to hide.
If either Trump or Biden win the presidency next year they will both be in their 80s by the time their term is up, but there is already a rightwing ecosystem in place attempting to make the age and mental abilities of the candidates solely focused on Biden. The latest polls on Biden’s mental abilities and the onset of the 2024 campaign have already revitalized attacks and given a sense of what the next year and a half might look like.
“President Biden announces his reelection campaign, but Americans say … HE’S ALREADY LOST IT!” the New York Post’s front page blared last month, alongside a Photoshopped image of a deranged-looking Biden peering out from behind window curtains. | US Federal Elections |
The most important selection of text from Tuesday’s indictment against former President Donald Trump isn’t the list of charges against him. It’s not the detailed description of how he and his co-conspirators pressured state lawmakers to overturn the results and compiled lists of fake electors to substitute for lawful ones. Rather, it’s a simple conversation between two Trump administration lawyers three days before January 6.
One of them was Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel. He had a brief glimmer of public prominence when he was part of Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment trial. The other was Jeffrey Clark, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, identified as “Co-Conspirator 4” in the indictment. Clark had embraced Trump’s fraud claims and was, with Trump’s help, poised to become the acting attorney general—the better to further the plot to overturn the election.
Philbin, by contrast, had his feet planted in reality. He knew that the election was over and that Biden had legitimately won it. “The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed [Trump] that ‘there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House on January 20,’” the indictment recounted. “Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade [Clark] from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General.”
But Clark, apparently, would not turn back from the path on which he and his co-conspirators were set. He responded to Philbin by raising the specter of a much darker outcome. “[Philbin] reiterated to [Clark] that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if [Trump] remained in office nonetheless, there would be ‘riots in every major city in the United States,’” the indictment said. “[Clark] responded, ‘Well, [Patrick], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” In short, Trump and his co-conspirators sought to illegally disrupt the transfer of power on January 6 and then use the military to crush what would have been massive nationwide protests while Trump stayed in office.
It is unsurprising that this has not deterred Trump’s most fervent supporters. Indeed, it may even be their preferred outcome. But the indictment should also be the death knell for whatever is left of anti-anti-Trumpism, the bizarre ideological stance held by some establishment conservatives. Yes, it’s bad that Trump keeps doing all these bad things, they often argue, but it would be even worse if he were held accountable for them.
Trumpworld has already rolled out a series of purported defenses against this indictment. You can’t prosecute him because this was all free speech! This is all a distraction from the House GOP’s Hunter Biden investigation! It’s double jeopardy because the Senate acquitted him during his second impeachment trial! None of these are particularly credible, and I won’t waste your time with them.
The anti-anti-Trumpists are at least slightly more sophisticated. Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio host, led the charge on Tuesday night. “Jack Smith, an American Javert, should be obliged to prosecute this case outside of the Beltway,” he wrote on Twitter, referring to the special counsel who brought the charges. “Former President Trump deserves a fair trial on these unprecedented charges, which will strike tens of millions of Americans as a political witch hunt.”
The implication that Trump cannot get a fair trial in Washington is an old one. One of its earliest permutations came from Alan Dershowitz, who argued all the way back in 2017, during the Russia investigation, that a D.C. jury pool would be hostile to Trump because of the city’s large Black population. Most variants of this now refer to the city’s large Democratic population instead. This gives short shrift to the integrity of jurors themselves and to the voir dire process that Trump’s legal team can use to weed out biased jurors. It is also hardly the fault of prosecutors that Trump tried to carry out his coup attempt in D.C. instead of a more favorable jurisdiction.
Other anti-anti-Trumpists homed in on a supposed weakness in proving Trump’s intent. “Good luck proving that Trump knew he lost the election, when he—whether behind closed doors or in public, whether with one person or massive crowds—has consistently maintained that he won with an apparent passionate sincerity,” National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote on Twitter. He then hastily added: “Of course, this isn’t a good thing. It’s just a fact.” Uh huh.
Prosecutors appear to have anticipated that this unique brand of logic would be deployed, which is why they included an exchange between Trump and Pence in the indictment where Pence demurs on throwing out electoral votes and Trump tells him, “You’re too honest.” I also look forward to seeing Trump’s lawyers argue that he is so utterly detached from reality that he can’t be prosecuted for trying to overthrow the republic.
Belief is not fact. If you still believe your election victory was stolen after your running mate, attorney general, director of national intelligence, and campaign manager have told you it wasn’t and after multiple federal agencies and Republican state lawmakers have disproven your allegations, it’s only because you want to believe it. If I steal Rich Lowry’s car because I steadfastly and implacably believe it’s mine despite all evidence to the contrary, I have still committed grand theft auto.
Andrew McCarthy, a National Review columnist and a former federal prosecutor, was also dismissive of the indictment. He complained in a column on Tuesday night that prosecuting Trump on these charges would be deeply wrong. On the obstruction charge, for example, McCarthy argued that “Americans, presidents included, have a right to attempt to influence Congress, even based on dubious or imagined evidence.”
“To establish obstruction, Smith must prove that Trump’s efforts at persuasion were corrupt—again, in the sense that he knew his badgering and lobbying had no factual or legal merit,” he continued. “The concept of corruption is meant to reach clearly criminal conduct, such as evidence manipulation or witness tampering. It has never been understood to reach wrong-headed legal theories.”
For one thing, I find it hard to imagine a more corrupt act than a president illegally seizing power and holding it through force after losing an election. For another, the badgering and lobbying had no “factual or legal merit” whatsoever. The indictment spends no small amount of time pointing out that everyone except the co-conspirators was telling Trump he was wrong and there was no evidence to support his claims. Most importantly, “the vice president can unilaterally decide who wins a presidential election” is also not a “wrong-headed legal theory.” Qualified immunity is a wrongheaded legal theory. The major-questions doctrine is a wrongheaded legal theory. This was a coup attempt, and Eastman’s memo was merely a thin veneer of legalese to justify it.
For what it’s worth, this is also not what McCarthy argued in the immediate aftermath of January 6. In his January 17 column on the impeachment process, he argued that Trump’s “attempt to influence” lawmakers was an impeachable offense. “It was perfectly appropriate for the president to rely on his legal right to seek recounts and contest state election procedures,” McCarthy wrote. “It is inexcusable, however, for the president to have tried to induce the vice president and congressional Republicans to violate their sworn constitutional duties. That in itself is worthy of an impeachment article.”
What was impeachable conduct two years ago is now, in McCarthy’s eyes, a basic right. It’s worth reading that January 17 column to see how far the anti-anti-Trumpism train has traveled in the last two years. At the time, McCarthy broke ranks with his fellow National Review writers and argued that the “best thing for the country” would be a “bicameral, bipartisan resolution of censure” against Trump that would “stand as an emphatic verdict of history.” He lambasted the Democratic impeachment push for various reasons and said he would vote to convict, if he were a senator, only with apparently great reluctance.
His second line of attack in this week’s column—that federal prosecutors are stretching the defrauding-the-United-States statute—is also tenuous at best. “As the Supreme Court reaffirmed just a few weeks ago, fraud in federal criminal law is a scheme to swindle victims out of money or tangible property,” McCarthy continued. “Mendacious rhetoric in seeking to retain political office is damnable—and, again, impeachable—but it’s not criminal fraud, although that is what Smith has charged.”
This is just not true as a matter of law. McCarthy is correct that the Supreme Court has recently tightened federal anti-corruption laws in some respects, most notably in the McDonnell, Percoco, and Ciminelli cases. But as other commentators have noted, those cases involved the federal bribery and wire-fraud statutes, not the conspiracy-to-defraud statute. And the Supreme Court’s precedents are consistent and clear that obstructing a lawful government function by deceit falls within that specific statute.
And McCarthy’s final point is almost laughable. “Finally, Smith is charging Trump with a civil-rights violation, on the theory that he sought to counteract the votes of Americans in contested states and based on a post–Civil War statute designed to punish violent intimidation and forcible attacks against blacks attempting to exercise their right to vote,” he noted. “What Trump did, though reprehensible, bears no relation to what the statute covers.” He is referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a Reconstruction-era statute that was indeed passed to protect Black Southerners from white supremacist terrorism.
That statute makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person ... in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” (In this case, voting rights.) While the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was originally drafted as part of Reconstruction, its language is not limited to those circumstances. That is how laws typically work. McCarthy also surely knows that Reconstruction-era laws can be used in the present day because he is undoubtedly aware of Section 1983, the flagship federal civil rights tort against state and local officials.
That brings us back to the basic irrefutable point: This was a coup attempt. Trump was not merely working out some frustration or trying to gin up some campaign contributions out of his outraged supporters. He was trying to overthrow the republic, to smash two and a half centuries of American self-government because he could not personally stand it that he lost a presidential election and all the privileges that came with it. Naturally, Trump should receive the same due process and legal rights as everyone else in a court of law. But no one is obligated to take his defenders’ claims seriously unless they reckon with that basic fact.
Unfortunately, that reckoning does not seem imminent. “The indictment is a scandal that shows Joe Biden has no business being president,” Dan McLaughlin, another National Review columnist, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night, adding, “The facts recited in the indictment are a scandal that shows Donald Trump has no business being president.” That is a more fitting epitaph for anti-anti-Trumpism than I could ever compose myself. | US Political Corruption |
The Biden-Harris campaign's communications director argued that "a brick wall of MAGA extremism" has contributed to Americans struggling financially and working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
"That's precisely why we need another four years to continue to finish the job, right? I think it's important, too, that the president, of course, wants to get all of this done. But we have to be honest about the brick wall of MAGA extremism that we continue to run into when we're trying to get things done for the American people," Biden campaign official Michael Tyler told CNN's Victor Blackwell on "CNN This Morning Weekend" on Saturday.
Tyler was responding to a question about how President Biden has previously said Americans shouldn't be forced to work two jobs in order to stay afloat and above the poverty line.
"The Labor Department numbers came out for the third quarter; nearly 8.4 million people in this country are working at least two jobs. That's the highest number since 2019. So, when people are looking for that economic shift, they don't feel it," Blackwell said before pointing to a woman who is working three jobs to make ends meet.
Tyler argued that the Biden administration needs four more years in the White House in order to "get the work done" on the economy.
"Are we going to continue the work to build an economy that grows and the middle out and the bottom up? Or do we want to return to the failed trickle down economic policies that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans put into place for generations," he said.
"This is the work that we have to do over the next four years. The president understands the challenges. He understands people's concerns, and he is doing the work to solve them. And so we have to make sure that everybody gets out and votes on November 2024, so we can get the work done," he said. | US Federal Elections |
Donald Trump has released a charity single, recorded with a choir of men held in a Washington DC prison for their parts in the deadly January 6 insurrection he incited.
On Friday, Justice for All by Donald J Trump and the J6 Prison Choir was available on streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.
The move is the latest in a growing trend by Trump and others on the far right of US politics to embrace the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a political cause and portray many of those who carried it out as protesters being persecuted by the state.
Forbes, which first reported the song’s production, said a video would debut on a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, the far-right activist and alleged fraudster who was Trump’s campaign chair and White House strategist.
Over an ambient backing, the song features Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, interspersed with a male voice choir singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The song lasts for about two and a half minutes and ends with a chant of “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” Forbes said it was “produced by a major recording artist who was not identified”.
Robert Maguire, research director for the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said: “I have never been more repulsed by the mere existence of a song than one sung by a president who tried to do a coup and a literal ‘choir’ of insurrectionists who tried to help him.”
Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former US attorney, called the song “a disinformation tactic right out of the authoritarian playbook”.
Trump, she said, was seeking to “wrap lies in patriotism”.
On 6 January 2021, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. A mob then attacked the US Capitol, sending lawmakers including Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, running for their lives.
The riot only delayed the certification process but it is now linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.
Trump was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal.
The House January 6 committee made four criminal referrals regarding Trump to the Department of Justice, which continues to investigate.
That is just one source of legal jeopardy for Trump, who also faces investigations of his financial affairs, a hush money payment to a porn star, his election subversion and his retention of classified records, as well as a defamation suit from a writer who accuses him of rape, an allegation he denies.
Running for president again, Trump dominates polling regarding the Republican field.
Forbes said Trump’s January 6-themed song was intended to raise money for the families of those imprisoned. It also said the project would not “benefit families of people who assaulted a police officer”.
Citing “a person with knowledge of the project”, Forbes said the choir consisted of about 20 inmates at the Washington DC jail who were recorded over a jailhouse phone. Some such inmates reportedly sing the national anthem each night.
Trump did not comment. | US Political Corruption |
A faux-rap song that features the AI-generated voice of Donald Trump defending himself against the criminal indictment out of Georgia has jumped to the No. 2 spot on the iTunes rap chart.
Hi-Rez the Rapper, who describes himself as a radical freedom extremist, released the song on August 25, one day after Trump posted his August 24th mugshot to X (formerly Twitter).
The song has been viewed nearly 3million times on X, and has shot to the top of the Hip-Hop charts since its release.
The digital imitation of the former president's voice is nearly identical to the real-life 2024 candidate's.
In the song, Hi-Rez imagines how Trump responded to being booked and released on bond on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
'Out on bail, out on bail. I won’t see inside a cell,' the AI-produced 'Trump the Don' sings.
'Imma beat them RICO charges. And if I go to prison. You can’t do me like the Clintons. I’ll be laid up, eating steak with Secret Service chillin,' the song continues.
'These DA’s acting silly. My mugshot is worth a billi. Sold some merch and made a milli,' AI Trump raps, making reference to the media frenzy surrounding his mugshot and the inevitable merchandise that will be made out of it.
The roughly 90-second song hits on many of Trump's favorite topics, which he is often heard discussing with crowds at MAGA rallies and during other public speaking appearances.
'Screaming 'orange man bad!' The whole world mad. Thug life, shout out all of my Maga-based Chads,' raps 'Trump the Don.'
'Coming for the deep state. I will stop the New World Order. But before that I’ll finish walls at the border.'
Hi-Rez said he came up with the catchy song after Trump's booking last week, the whole creative process took him just about 30 minutes.
Right-wing pundits and members of the online Trump universe began circulating and praising the song, driving up its viewership in the last several days.
Donald Trump Jr. called the song 'hilarious,' and commentator Candace Owens called it 'absolutely genius,' as she danced along to the video earlier this week on her YouTube show.
On several occasions in the past, Trump has met with famous rappers, including - now infamously - Kanye 'Ye' West at Trump Tower, Snoop Dogg, Lil' John - who did stints on the Celebrity Apprentice in 2011 and 2013 - and Lil' Wayne, who endorsed Trump's criminal justice reform efforts ahead of the 2020 election.
Last week, Trump has made history after becoming the first former president to pose for a mugshot following his arrest for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
The 77-year-old was booked in to jail following his fourth indictment at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta on Thursday - and afterwards shared his mugshot on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He did not have his booking photo taken during his previous arrests in New York City, Miami and Washington, D.C.
Trump's arrival at the Fulton County jail on Rice Street in downtown Atlanta was greeted with loud cheers by his supporters, and some boos from detractors.
He spent around 20 minutes inside the decrepit facility, where seven people have died in custody since the start of this year, and was processed far more quickly than other accused criminals.
Trump's height and weight were recorded, as well as his hair and eye color. His fingerprints and booking photo were taken, and his bond money was paid.
After the booking, Trump declared on the Tarmac that it was 'a very sad day for America'.
He said it was 'a travesty of justice' and added: 'We did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong.'
'This is election interference. So I want to thank you for being here. We did nothing wrong,' Trump said. 'We had every right, every single right, to challenge an election we think was dishonest.'
He then boarded his plane and flew back to New Jersey.
Ahead of his surrender, Trump criticized Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, calling her a 'Radical Left, Lowlife District Attorney'.
His surrender came hours after Willis set a date for the trial.
She requested that Trump's trial begin on October 23 - a date widely viewed as being impossibly soon.
It comes after a handful of other Trump allies and 'co-conspirators' who turned themselves in to the Georgia prison this week had their mugshots released by the Fulton County Sheriff's Office on Thursday.
They are accused of joining a 'conspiracy' led by Trump to unlawfully change the outcome of the election.
Among them was 'America's Mayor', Rudy Giuliani, who also faced the humiliation of having his mugshot taken after getting booked at the Atlanta jail on Wednesday.
In the image, Giuliani can be seen frowning with industrial lighting shining on his forehead and a sheriff's badge on the wall to his right.
The former Trump lawyer is facing 13 felony counts, including RICO charges - the same number as Trump.
It was a stunning and symbolic fall from grace for Giuliani, a former mob boss prosecutor, who famously used the RICO - the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act - to take down the Mafia in the 1980s during his time as a Manhattan prosecutor.
Trump slammed the arrest of Giuliani in a Truth Social post after the release of the 79-year-old's mugshot.
'The greatest Mayor in the history of New York City was just ARRESTED in Atlanta, Georgia, because he fought for Election Integrity. THE ELECTION WAS RIGGED & STOLLEN. HOW SAD FOR OUR COUNTRY. MAGA!' Trump wrote. | US Political Corruption |
- Kevin McCarthy on Saturday forcefully defended House passage of a 45-day stopgap spending bill.
- The bill, if passed by the Senate, will fund the government through November and avert a shutdown.
- McCarthy dared his detractors to force a "motion to vacate" — a vote that could end his speakership.
A defiant Kevin McCarthy on Saturday told House Republican critics calling for his ouster as speaker to "bring it" after the lower chamber passed a 45-day stopgap spending measure with mostly Democratic votes to avoid a government shutdown.
McCarthy, who has been on thin ice with the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus even before he became speaker in January, said that "there has to be an adult in the room" as he spoke after passage of the bill.
The stopgap measure, which will avert a shutdown and fund the government through November should the Senate pass the bill by the end of the day, passed overwhelmingly, in a 335-91 vote. But the bill was backed by 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans, with 90 Republicans voting against the measure (only one Democrat voted against the bill).
Funding for additional Ukraine aid and border security provisions were not included in the stopgap bill — which frustrated many Democrats and Republicans, respectively.
But with Democrats comprising of a majority of support for the "clean" measure in the GOP-led House, conservatives already frustrated with McCarthy appear closer than ever in seeking to challenge his leadership.
Republicans have a razor-thin 221-212 majority, a dynamic which has given outsized power to conservatives in shaping how the House has been run this year. But many of them remain dissatisfied with McCarthy.
For weeks, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has spoken of his desire to push McCarthy on more conservative demands and has dangled the threat of introducing a "motion to vacate" — which would put the speakership of the California Republican up for a vote.
McCarthy on Saturday was undeterred by any threats, though.
"If someone wants to make a motion against me, bring it," the speaker said during an afternoon news conference. | US Congress |
WASHINGTON (AP) — The countdown toward a possible U.S. government default began Thursday with Treasury implementing accounting measures to buy time as frictions between President Joe Biden and House Republicans raise alarms about whether the United States can sidestep a potential economic crisis.The Treasury Department said in a letter to congressional leaders it has started taking “extraordinary measures” as the government has run up against its legal borrowing capacity of $38.381 trillion. An artificially imposed cap, the debt ceiling has been increased roughly 80 times since the 1960s.“I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote in the letter.Markets so far remain relatively calm, given that the government can temporarily rely on accounting tweaks to stay open and any threats to the economy would be several months away. Even many worried analysts assume there will be a deal.But this particular moment seems more fraught than past brushes with the debt limit because of the broad differences between Biden and new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who presides over a restive Republican caucus.Those differences increase the risk that the government could default on its obligations for political reasons. That could rattle financial markets and plunge the world's largest economy into a wholly preventable recession.Biden and McCarthy, R-Calif., have several months to reach agreement as the Treasury Department imposes “extraordinary measures” to keep the government operating until at least June. But years of intensifying partisan hostility have led to a conflicting set of demands that jeopardize the ability of the lawmakers to work together on a basic duty.Biden insists on a “clean” increase to the debt limit so that existing financial commitments can be sustained and is refusing to even start talks with Republicans. McCarthy is calling for negotiations that he believes will lead to spending cuts. It's unclear how much he wants to trim and whether fellow Republicans would support any deal after a testy start to the new Congress that required 15 rounds of voting to elect McCarthy as speaker.Asked twice on Wednesday if there was evidence that House Republicans can ensure that the government would avert a default, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said it's their “constitutional responsibility” to protect the full faith and credit of the United States. She did not say whether the White House saw signs at this stage that a default was off the table.“We're just not going to negotiate that,” Jean-Pierre said. “They should feel the responsibility.”McCarthy said Biden needs to recognize the political realities that come with a divided government. The speaker equates the debt ceiling to a credit card limit and calls for a level of fiscal restraint that did not occur under President Donald Trump, a Republican who in 2019 signed a bipartisan suspension of the debt ceiling.“Why create a crisis over this?" McCarthy said this week. "I mean, we’ve got a Republican House, a Democratic Senate. We’ve got the president there. I think it’s arrogance to say, ‘Oh, we’re not going to negotiate about pretty much anything’ and especially when it comes to funding.”Any deal would need to pass the Democratic-run Senate. Many Democratic lawmakers are skeptical about the ability to work with Republicans aligned with the “Make America Great Again” movement started by Trump. The MAGA movement has claimed that the 2020 election lost by Trump was rigged, a falsehood that contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.“There should be no political brinkmanship with the debt limit,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “It’s reckless for Speaker McCarthy and MAGA Republicans to try and use the full faith and credit of the United States as a political bargaining chip.”In order to keep the government open, the Treasury Department on Thursday was making a series of accounting maneuvers that would put a hold on contributions and investment redemptions for government workers' retirement and health care funds, giving the government enough financial space to handle its day-to-day expenses until roughly June.What happens if these measures are exhausted without a debt limit deal is unknown. A prolonged default could be devastating, with crashing markets and panic-driven layoffs if confidence evaporated in a cornerstone of the global economy, the U.S. Treasury note.Analysts at Bank of America cautioned in a report last week that “there is a high degree of uncertainty about the speed and magnitude of the damage the U.S. economy would incur.”The underlying challenge is that the government would have to balance its books on a daily basis if it lacks the ability to issue debt. If the government cannot issue debt, it would have to impose cuts equal in size on an annual basis to 5% of the total U.S. economy. Analysts say their baseline case is that the U.S. avoids default.Still, if past debt ceiling showdowns such as the one that occurred in 2011 are any guide, Washington may be in a nervous state of suspended animation with little progress until the “X-date,” the deadline when the Treasury's “extraordinary measures” are depleted.Unlike the 2011 showdown, the Federal Reserve is actively raising interest rates to lower inflation and is rolling off its own holdings of U.S. debt, meaning that recession fears are already elevated among consumers, businesses and investors.Biden administration officials have said they will not prioritize payments to bondholders if the country passes the “X-date” without an agreement. Over the years, officials have studied this emergency option, which Treasury officials across administration have said is unworkable because of the government's payments system.“To some extent, the ‘extraordinary measures’ are the backup plan, and once those are exhausted the next step is a major question mark,” economists at Wells Fargo wrote in a Thursday analysis.___AP writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this story. | US Federal Policies |
Sanders calls on Biden to use 14th Amendment to raise debt ceiling
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday called for President Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment in order to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default on the nation’s credit as White House and House GOP negotiators race to strike a deal.
In an Fox News op-ed, Sanders said enacting many of the proposed cuts Republicans passed in their debt limit bill last month — and that are on the table now — would be “a disaster,” just as a default would be.
“In my view, there is only one option. President Joe Biden has the authority and the responsibility under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to avoid a default,” Sanders wrote. “This is not a radical idea. Making sure that the United States continues to pay its bills regardless of whether the statutory increase in the debt ceiling is raised or not is an idea that has been supported by Republicans and Democrats.”
Sanders added that Section 4 of the amendment must be utilized to “continue to pay its bills on-time and without delay, prevent an economic catastrophe, and prevent huge cuts to healthcare, education, childcare, affordable housing, nutrition assistance and the needs of our veterans.”
“It must be exercised,” he added.
According to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, known as the public debt clause, the “validity of the public debt” of the U.S. “authorized by law … shall not be questioned.” The section was ratified to ensure the U.S. paid debts incurred during the Civil War.
The White House on Tuesday appeared to rule out invoking the 14th Amendment, though Biden has said in recent weeks he believes he has the authority to do so. However, it would likely get caught up in legal challenges that would stretch past the June 1st “X-date” laid out by Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen.
“The question is could it be done and invoked in time that it would not be appealed as a consequence past the date in question,” Biden said during his trip to Japan last week.
Talks between the White House and House Republicans continue as the two sides try to reach a deal by the end of the week to give all figures involved enough time to pass it before the government defaults.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Federal Policies |
Although it's been more than a decade since the end of the Great Recession, the world still hasn't let down its guard. Now some believe the rising student loan burden could bring down the economy in much the same way as the 2008 and 2009 mortgage crises, but is that true?
Years after a payment pause of federal student loans due to the COVID-19 Emergency Relief and Federal Student Aid (CARES) Act, borrowers will need to begin repayments in 2023. While this may be a big burden on those households and could impact the economy, it's unlikely it will match the widespread devastation of the Great Recession.
Key Takeaways
- Federal student loan debt has reached $1.76 trillion as of 2022.
- It is possible for student loan debt to be discharged by declaring bankruptcy, but this could be more difficult to accomplish.
- In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration announced debt forgiveness of up to $10,000 for qualified student loan borrower and up to $20,000 for qualified for Pell grant recipients.
Background
For generations, young people have heard that the only path to success is through a college education. College remains the accepted path for 61.8% of high school graduates, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For most students today, student loans are the way to pay the expenses of higher education. Federal student loan debt has reached historic proportions, topping $1.76 trillion in 2022.
Some believe that the problem will continue to get worse. Over the past 50 years, the rate of college tuition inflation has averaged about 8%, sometimes twice the normal rate of inflation. With college becoming a debt-creation endeavor and the economy often failing to compensate college graduates enough for their education investment, experts believe that more and more people will be unable to pay these loans.
Bankruptcy
Contrary to common belief, student loans can be discharged through bankruptcy proceedings, but it can be more difficult, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Federally-issued student loans must prove to be an undue hardship for the borrower and, in some cases, may require an additional lawsuit known as an adversary proceeding to move forward. Some private loans may be discharged directly.
While the knowledge that bankruptcy is an option may provide some comfort, it should be the last resort. For many borrowers, student loans have inhibited them from moving forward in other areas of life—starting businesses, getting married, buying a home, and having children have all been listed as life events that are frequently delayed due to debt load.
2022 Student Debt Relief Measures
The burden of student loan debt hasn't gone unnoticed by the federal government. In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration announced its Student Loan Debt Relief plan, which is intended to forgive up to $10,000 per federal direct student loan borrower under a certain income level and up to $20,000 for those that had qualified for Pell grants.
However, the action has been met with legal challenges and remains in limbo. According to the Department of Education, it stopped taking new applications until further notice and is working to overturn the decision. Any applications that were already submitted were put on hold.
Important
On Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, the Biden administration extended the pause on payments and interest on federal student loans for the eighth time. Borrowers with federal student loans won’t have to make payments, and loans won’t resume accumulating interest, until 60 days after court cases challenging Biden’s student loan forgiveness program are resolved or the Department of Education is allowed to move forward with the program. If the cases aren’t resolved by June 30, 2023, payments will resume two months after that.
If the forgiveness program gets the OK from the court, the White House estimates more than 90% of the relief would go to households making less than $75,000. About 20 million borrowers would see their balances cleared, and lower loan balances for others would make it easier for them to resume repayments, especially those who struggle the most, according to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB).
But a defeat in the courts would mean borrowers will need to resume payments during a time when inflation and rising interest rates have increased their financial burden compared to before the pandemic. As of September, 2022, 7.1% of student loan borrowers were behind on their other debt compared to 6.2% before the pandemic hit, according to CFPB research.
Still, there are a few measures that could help avert disaster. The government removed all negative effects from loans currently in default, meaning those borrowers can resume payments without any past-due balance, just like other borrowers.
The Biden administration has also proposed a new income-driven repayment plan for federal student loan repayment that caps monthly payments at 5% of your monthly income. After 10 years, whatever remaining balance you have would be eliminated if the original loan balance was $12,000 or less.
Earlier Debt Forgiveness Measures
Before the sweeping relief, targeted debt forgiveness had already taken effect for students who attended predatory or fraudulent schools. Students that attended several technical or vocational schools, such as ITT Technical Institute, may be eligible for federal loan forgiveness.
On a broader scale, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program allows those that work in public service positions to receive debt forgiveness after 120 qualifying payments while working in a nonprofit or government job. Income-based repayment programs also aim to lessen the monthly financial burden for low-income borrowers.
Is student loan debt getting worse?
Student loan debt has been consistently outpacing the growth of personal income, with the volume of student loan debt having increased from $750 billion to $1.76 trillion from 2010 to 2022.
Can I ask for my student loans to be forgiven?
For federal student loans, it's entirely possible for some or all of your student loan debt to be forgiven. However, different programs have certain eligibility requirements that must be met in order for you to qualify for student loan forgiveness.
Do student loans affect your credit score?
Student loans do affect your credit score. Because they are considered a type of installment loan, they are part of your credit report. If you make your student loan payments on time, it can help your credit score, while paying late or skipping a payment will have the opposite effect.
The Bottom Line
There's no doubt that the student loan system is in desperate need of reform, but comparing it to the mortgage crisis may be inaccurate. Although the total amount of outstanding student loans now stands at about $1.76 trillion, that number is small compared to the roughly $11.92 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt. Programs aimed at lowering the debt burden may help alleviate the pressure on borrowers, but significant reform is needed to avert future debt rising even more. | US Federal Policies |
But that doesn’t mean the former president and his allies are skipping out on furiously working to make the first GOP presidential debate a Trump victory.
Behind the scenes, Trump’s campaign is putting their confidence in a team of surrogates traveling to the debate site to spin on his behalf.
Above all, they may be betting on Trump himself, and his unique ability to distract, deflect, and distort.
“I WILL BE VERY BUSY TOMORROW NIGHT,” the former president wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday afternoon, seemingly suggesting he could be plucking away at his iPhone keyboard to send out messages during the debate. “ENJOY!!!”
One source close to Trump suggested to The Daily Beast that the post telegraphed his plans to push out rapid-response commentary during the debate or to partake in last-minute interviews. A Trump spokesperson did not return a request for comment about his exact debate night plans.
What seems certain, at this point, is that Trump will not participate in the debate himself. The Republican National Committee set a Monday night cutoff for candidates to confirm their attendance, a deadline Trump missed after months of building anticipation over what he would do.
For the former president, his calculus around the debate has not been a mystery: He wants the primary to be a coronation, not a competition. Looking at the available public polls of the race, his team believes GOP voters largely feel the same.
“He’s so far ahead in the polls, why would you go on the stage with 1 percenters,” a Trump adviser told The Daily Beast, as to Trump’s recent thinking. “It’s a joke.”
Still, the Milwaukee debate is the first real opportunity for Trump’s biggest rivals—namely, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—to pick up the momentum necessary to challenge the former president for the nomination.
It will also be a platform for two vehemently anti-Trump voices in the field, former Govs. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, who will get their biggest platforms yet to argue the GOP should avoid re-nominating him at all costs.
Given that backdrop, Trump’s team has understood they cannot ignore the debate entirely, even if Trump himself is pretending to ignore it.
They seem to have settled on a two-pronged strategy of both drawing attention away from the big event and making their presence known at it—a formula that could persist through the primary debate season, which Trump has indicated he will not participate in whatsoever.
The news of Trump’s decision not to show in Milwaukee broke last week alongside the announcement that he would sit for an interview with Carlson, to be streamed on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
While Carlson’s viewership has likely shrunk significantly since his firing from Fox News, Trump’s inner circle seems to view the host’s platform as a significant draw away from the debate on his former network.
“You can’t buy that type of exposure,” said one of the three Trump advisers who spoke to The Daily Beast. They were not authorized to speak on the record by the campaign.
This source added that there’s an “expectation” inside the Trump orbit that the Carlson interview will draw more eyeballs than the Fox News debate—and perhaps force the network and other media outlets to cover the sideshow, too.
“It’s hard to cover the debate and not point out the counter-programming,” they said.
That logic may also apply to the Trump team’s strategy to ensure he is promoted in Milwaukee, even if he’s not actually there.
The campaign has carefully strategized over the question of which surrogates to send to engage with press, activists, and other figures who will be on hand for the first debate. They ultimately chose four stalwart MAGA figures: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and Matt Gaetz (R-FL); and former Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake.
The Trump campaign selected the four Republicans for their familiarity with tough press questioning and their popularity among the base.
“I think you’re seeing some of the biggest supporters,” a Trump adviser said. “They’re all very vocal, they’re on the front lines, and all of them speak at the rallies, so it’s kind of the same crowd that has gone to those places.”
Citing the possibility for “fireworks” on the debate stage, some of which will be aimed at Trump, this adviser said the Trump campaign didn’t want to send representatives who were “unknown,” but instead loyalists who would be willing to “stick their necks out” on his behalf.
Greene’s selection in particular was seen as particularly important, given what is perhaps the most significant bit of debate counter-programming: Trump’s anticipated arraignment in Atlanta on Thursday on charges he illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia.
The northwest Georgia congresswoman is “authentically and realistically the most logical person” to go to Milwaukee and parry any indictment-related scrutiny, said a Trump operative who is also close to Greene. They argued her job should be to “do as much discrediting as possible” of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ case against the former president.
Given how little appetite Trump’s primary foes have shown to so much as suggest Trump behaved illegally or unethically in the Georgia case—or in any of the three other criminal cases he is facing—such an approach from Greene may be a politically astute one on debate night.
No matter what the surrogates do, however, any positive media that could flow from a breakout performance by any rival candidate is likely to be overshadowed when Trump turns himself over to authorities at the Fulton County jail on Thursday.
“It will take the oxygen out of whatever happens from the debate,” a longtime Trump confidant said. “Right now, I have CNN on, not Fox News, because I want to see what they’re talking about—it’s all day, every day, every program is the Georgia indictment.”
For Trump’s orbit, their beef with Fox News—which is hosting the first debate and the next one on its affiliate Fox Business—may be as intense as any conflict with the candidates who will appear onstage Wednesday night.
In the final days leading up to the debate, the right-wing media giant has seemingly hit back at the former president’s campaign for trying to influence an event their candidate is skipping.
According to Axios, Fox News is prohibiting Trump’s aides from participating in the customary post-debate spin room, a large hall where campaigns’ representatives can immediately face the press and explain why their candidate won the debate.
On a different front, top Trump adviser Chris LaCivita accused Fox News on Tuesday of engaging in “censorship” after the network allegedly prohibited employees from viewing a website created by MAGA Inc., a Trump-aligned Super PAC, which trolled candidates who are partaking in the GOP presidential debate.
“Swamp comes in all flavors and colors,” he said of the cable behemoth.
One of the most outspoken Trump allies—Steve Bannon—has taken it a step further by urging his viewers to boycott the Fox News debate in Trump’s honor.
“Friends don’t let friends watch TV for stupid people,” Bannon said of Fox News earlier this week. “Make sure they do not watch the debate.”
Despite that call to action, Bannon’s own boss couldn’t disagree more.
“Candidates that can’t or won’t stand up to voice their policy and opinions in an open public sphere of a debate have no right to run for public office in a democracy,” Robert J. Sigg, the president of Performance One Media, which owns the far-right network Real America’s Voice, told The Daily Beast. The network broadcasts Bannon’s popular shows.
“We will be spotlighting those candidates that are willing to show up,” Sigg said. “Any candidate not willing to talk to the American people does not deserve air time.”
While Trump won’t be onstage Wednesday evening, two Trump advisers said the push to convince Trump to appear in Milwaukee has not slowed, despite the fact that he has missed the RNC's deadline to confirm participation.
On Tuesday morning, the campaign continued as Fox News host Steve Doocy wondered aloud if Trump could roll up at the last minute to the debate in a “limousine.” A Fox News reporter responded by leaving the door open to the possibility.
“Every single day, they’re out there pitching for him to show up,” a previously mentioned Trump adviser said of Fox News. “And every guest that goes on, they’re asking: ‘Do you think he’ll show up?’”
“They want him there. He’s been the one to make the choice,” this source added. “I don’t think they’re ignoring him; he’s ignoring them.” | US Campaigns & Elections |
WIRED broke the news on Wednesday that SoundThinking, the company behind the gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter, is acquiring some assets—including patents, customers, and employees—from the firm Geolitica, which developed the notorious predictive policing software PredPol. WIRED also exclusively reported this week that the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center is calling on the US Justice Department to investigate potentially biased deployment of ShotSpotter in predominantly Black neighborhoods.As the US federal government inches closer to a possible shutdown, we took a look at the sprawling conservative media apparatus and deep bench of right-wing hardliners in Congress that are exploiting their leverage to block a compromise in the House of Representatives.Satellite imaging from the Conflict Observatory at Yale University is providing harrowing insight and crucial information about the devastation wrought in the city of Khartoum by Sudan’s civil war. Meanwhile, researchers from the cybersecurity firm eQualitie have developed a technique for hiding digital content in satellite TV signals—a method that could be used to circumvent censorship and internet shutdowns around the world. And the productivity data that corporations have increasingly been gathering about their employees using monitoring software could be mined in an additional way to train AI models and eventually automate entire jobs.Plus, there's more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.A China-linked hacking group, dubbed BlackTech, is compromising routers in the US and Japan, secretly modifying their firmware and moving around company networks, according to a warning issued by cybersecurity officials this week. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the NSA, FBI, and Japan's National Police Agency and cybersecurity office issued the joint alert saying the BlackTech group was “hiding in router firmware.”The officials said they had seen the Chinese-linked actors using their access to the routers to move from “global subsidiary companies” to the networks of companies’ headquarters in the US and Japan. BlackTech, which has been operating since around 2010, has targeted multiple router types, the officials said, but they highlighted that it compromised Cisco routers using a customized backdoor. “TTPs against routers enable the actors to conceal configuration changes, hide commands, and disable logging while BlackTech actors conduct operations,” the alert says.Microsoft and US government officials said in July that Chinese government hackers had breached the cloud-based Outlook email systems of about 25 organizations, including the US State Department and Department of Commerce. On Wednesday, an anonymous staffer for Senator Eric Schmitt told Reuters that the State Department incident exposed 60,000 emails from 10 accounts. Nine of the accounts were used by State Department employees focused on East Asia and the Pacific, while one was focused on Europe. The Congressional staffer learned the information in a State Department IT briefing for legislators and shared the details with Reuters via email.The zero-day market, where new vulnerabilities and the code needed to exploit them are traded for cash, is big business. And it is, maybe, getting more lucrative. Russian zero-day seller Operation Zero this week announced it would increase some of its payments from $200,000 to $20 million. “As always, the end user is a non-NATO country,” the group said, indicating it means Russian private and government organizations.Unlike bug bounties, where security researchers find flaws in companies’ code and then disclose them to the firms to fix for payments, the zero-day market encourages the trade in flaws that can potentially be exploited by the purchasers. “Full chain exploits for mobile phones are the most expensive products right now and they’re used mostly by government actors," Operation Zero CEO Sergey Zelenyuk told TechCrunch. "When an actor needs a product, sometimes they’re ready to pay as much as possible to possess it before it gets into the hands of other parties.”The European Union's proposed law to clamp down on child sexual abuse content—by scanning people’s messages and potentially compromising encryption—is one of the continent's most controversial laws of the last decade. This week, a series of revelations from a group of reporters has shown how the law’s main architect was heavily lobbied ahead of proposing the law and that police wanted access to the message data. First, an investigation revealed the close connections between the European Union’s home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, and child protection groups. A second report shows the European police agency Europol pushed to get access to data collected under the proposed law. In response to the investigations, Europe's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs has written to Johansson asking questions about the relationships. | US Federal Policies |
“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting. McCarthy goes down as having served the shortest speakership since the 1870s.
McCarthy’s defeat was the result of a bitter power struggle within the GOP, and especially due to the efforts of Representative Matt Gaetz, a hard-right rebel, who forced the vote. The House is now without a speaker, and more chaos is sure to follow. The GOP still holds the House majority, but it is a deeply riven and dysfunctional party.
I consider Matt Gaetz to be a maliciously cynical lawmaker, but I can’t say I’m sorry to see McCarthy deposed. After all, he has been one of the key figures in transforming the GOP into a monstrous political party, one whose contempt for constitutional and democratic norms poses the greatest threat to the Republic since the Civil War.
McCarthy was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results—a vote that took place just hours after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Privately, McCarthy said he would call for Trump’s resignation—“I’ve had it with this guy,” he told other Republican leaders—but once it became clear the Republican base wouldn’t break with Trump, McCarthy did an about-face. He went on bended knee to Mar-a-Lago less than two weeks after Trump incited the insurrection. McCarthy saw rehabilitating Trump as his job, and to some degree succeeded within the GOP; since that visit, he’s done everything in his power to defend the former president. McCarthy was careful never to get crosswise of Trump, aware of what a dominant figure Trump is within the Republican party. McCarthy has been so obeisant to Trump—a lawless, cruel and uniquely destructive figure—that Trump once referred to him as “my Kevin.”
Among Kevin McCarthy’s legacies will be his role in reckless attacks on key American institutions, including the Department of Justice. Time and time again, he made unsubstantiated claims about the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. The reason was obvious; McCarthy needed to provide cover for a lawless man. McCarthy surely knew his incendiary attacks on the Department of Justice were false, but that didn’t matter to “my Kevin.”
McCarthy also forged close ties with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who aided him in his quest to become speaker. “I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy told a friend, according to The New York Times. “I will always take care of her.” In this case, he was true to his word.
McCarthy also did something unprecedented, campaigning in his role as speaker in a primary against a sitting incumbent in his own party, Liz Cheney, a one-time ally and member of his leadership team. Cheney’s sin? She voted to impeach Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol; she served as vice chairwoman of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack; and she continued to call out Trump’s lies over the election being stolen. Cheney acted honorably, placing country above party. She put her political career at risk in order to defend the Constitution. And that was simply too much for “my Kevin.”
Last month McCarthy announced he was directing the House to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, after a nine-month investigation led by House Republicans failed to turn up any clear evidence of misconduct by the president. The Republican effort, led by Representative James Comer, has been a clown show. But that didn’t matter to McCarthy; he had a MAGA script to follow, a role to play, a puppet master to dance for. Once again, Kevin McCarthy did the bidding of Trump and the anarchists and political arsonists in his party. In the end, though, no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t revolutionary enough. When Gaetz went after McCarthy, Trump stayed neutral.
A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants.
What makes McCarthy a particularly pathetic figure is that everyone knows he wasn’t (and isn’t) a MAGA true believer. He had been, up until the Trump era, a fairly mainstream Republican, not terribly ideological, shallow but well-liked among his colleagues. He excelled at fundraising. And he was ambitious. He wanted to be speaker of the House, having tried and failed in 2015. He tried again, earlier this year, and won in a historic five-day, 15-ballot floor fight, after giving major concessions to right-wing holdouts.
“From day one, he knew and everyone knew that he was living on borrowed time,” Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia told my colleague Russell Berman. He only managed to borrow 269 days.
During that time, he lived out a cautionary tale of what happens when people with soaring ambitions and no principles gain political power; and what they will do to keep that power.
In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More has an exchange with Richard Rich, an ambitious young man who More, early in the play, warns against getting into politics. Rich doesn’t possess the moral fortitude to resist the temptations that accompany life in politics. It isn’t so much that Rich is bad; it’s that he’s weak.
Rich eventually betrays More, and in one of the most famous lines from the play, More tells Rich, “Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales!"
Kevin McCarthy gave up his soul not for Wales but for something worse—Donald Trump. It will be of little comfort to McCarthy to know he’s hardly the only one to have done so. | US Congress |
Biden Wants to ‘Finish The Job’ on Guns, Abortion Rights and Climate in a Second Term
But if Congress is still divided after the 2024 election, Biden may have to go it alone with executive action
Joe Biden has checked several major items off his legislative to-do list as president -- and now he's telling voters he plans to "finish the job" in a second term.
He wants to codify federal abortion rights, ban assault weapons, make prescription drugs more affordable, slash emissions, target junk fees, increase taxes for the wealthy and pass immigration reform.
If Congress is still divided after the 2024 election — and it likely will be — some of Biden’s most controversial and significant legislative goals may be out of reach. But he can also take executive actions, which have the force of law, even if those actions can be reversed by the next president.
“With a second term, the President will continue to break through Washington stasis and deliver on the issues that matter most to the American people, including lowering prescription drug costs for ALL Americans, strengthening and protecting Social Security and Medicare, and codifying Roe,” Biden campaign spokesman Seth Schuster said in a statement to The Messenger.
During his first two years – when Democrats controlled both chambers – Biden signed major legislation to rebuild infrastructure, cut prescription drug costs, combat climate change, promote gun safety, boost research and manufacturing of semiconductors and help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.
He signed hundreds of bipartisan bills throughout his presidency. He also used executive orders to carry out policy goals on controversial issues, such as reproductive health and gun control.
“The president demonstrated that he can get things done, working across party lines when necessary, on our own where we can't,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed told The Messenger.
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At the very least, Biden could focus on implementing major pieces of legislation signed during his first two years in office and lean into his “unity agenda,” focusing on bipartisan concerns like cancer research, veterans, mental health and opioids.
Here’s the outlook for Biden’s major goals:
Codifying Roe v. Wade
Biden has called for restoring federal abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision last year, leading to abortion bans in 14 states. The House, when led by Democrats, twice passed legislation in 2021 and 2022 to establish statutory abortion rights, but the bill could not win 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.
Left with limited options, Biden has introduced several executive orders and a presidential memorandum to protect access to reproductive health care while in office. And he has leaned on state lawmakers to fight abortion bans and support proactive state legislation.
Absent Congressional action, the Biden administration can still promote policies that advance sexual and reproductive health rights, 100 organizations said in a recent policy blueprint. Among them, Biden can focus on rulemaking that protects and expands access to abortion, birth control and gender affirming care, they wrote. He can also work with Congress to fully fund the Title X Family Planning Program and others.
“While the Biden-Harris administration cannot address all the issues we face on its own, it can use their rulemaking and administrative authority to strengthen access to health care, and defend abortion access in the courts,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Banning assault weapons
Biden was the first president in nearly 30 years to enact significant gun legislation, signing a bipartisan bill last year designed to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands while also seeking to boost the nation’s mental health system. He has also signed an executive order that would increase background checks and created a new office of gun violence prevention in September.
But Biden has said he would still like to ban assault weapons, a long-held policy goal of Democrats.
“Who the hell needs an assault weapon that can hold, in some cases, up to 100 rounds?” Biden said at a campaign fundraiser last month, days after a mass shooting in Maine.
The president faces steep opposition from Republicans, including new House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has said that guns are not the issue. “The problem is the human heart.”
Still, Biden has urged Republicans to work with Democrats to pass legislation that would ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines along with universal background checks.
Foreign policy
Throughout his political career, Biden’s bailiwick has been foreign policy. And now, two foreign wars have become a focal point of Biden’s presidency, a dynamic that isn’t set to change anytime soon.
The former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee has sought to make the case to the public that supporting Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion and Israel in its war with Hamas with tens of billions of dollars in aid advances national security interests in the U.S. and democracy around the globe.
Polls show the public still generally sympathizes with Ukraine and Israel, but there are political warning signs for a president who campaigned on ending “forever wars.” Many Republicans are opposed to providing additional aid to Ukraine, while there are deep divisions within the Democratic Party over supporting Israel.
Still, Biden has pledged support for Ukraine for “as long as it takes” and has remained firmly behind Israel as the Jewish state responds to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, saying the U.S. "will not let you ever be alone.”
Climate
Biden sought to appeal to progressives in his first term by making climate change a priority, but some say he hasn’t gone far enough. Some left-leaning Democratic lawmakers have pressed Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” which would allow him to use executive powers to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help eliminate fossil fuels.
Still, the Inflation Reduction Act included a considerable number of the items progressives had been pushing for, including clean energy investments and tax credits and other incentives toward the purchase of electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances. In all, the IRA paved the way for roughly $370 billion in spending on climate initiatives – Biden called it “the most significant investment ever in climate change.”
The president now wants to slash the country’s emissions in half in the next decade and target steel and cement factories with the aim of reducing their carbon footprint.
Republicans have balked at Biden’s proposals saying that the US efforts are moot when other countries are contributing to pollution. But as the extreme weather continues to play out around the country, Democrats say Biden will face intense pressure from his own party to keep making progress on the issue.
Health care
The Inflation Reduction Act includes a provision to cap the cost of a month’s supply of insulin for seniors on Medicare at $35. Biden wants that insulin cost cap to apply to everyone, not just seniors on Medicare, and there’s momentum behind that goal.
Since the IRA passed last year, some drug companies including Eli Lilly, the largest U.S. insulin manufacturer, agreed to cap out-of-pocket costs for the drug at $35. Several states have capped the cost for those with private insurance, as well.
But while the price cap has bipartisan congressional support, enough Republican senators voted against it last year to strip that provision from the IRA – an outcome that was expected after a parliamentarian said the provision didn’t comply with the rule to advance the legislation. Bipartisan lawmakers are still pushing for passage of insulin affordability legislation.
The IRA also expanded subsidies under the Affordable Care Act through 2025, saving those enrollees more than $700 a year on average. Biden wants to make those savings permanent. But Biden, at least with this Congress, is up against some Republicans who have called for repealing the IRA, entirely – a move he says he would veto.
Taxes
One of Biden’s top promises has been to increase taxes for the wealthy, while cutting taxes for the middle class. Biden said he wants to get rid of “ridiculous special interest tax loopholes” for oil companies.
In his 2024 fiscal year budget, Biden proposed eliminating or modifying more than a dozen fossil fuel tax policies, which includes repealing the use of percentage depletion related to oil and gas wells, as well as stopping companies from expensing intangible drilling costs.
Biden also wants to extend the child tax credit, which was initially made available during the Covid-19 pandemic but was cut from the bill that would eventually be the Inflation Reduction Act.
Biden said the initial tax credit “gave tens of millions of parents some breathing room and cut child poverty in half to the lowest level in history.” Child poverty rate in 2021 dropped to 5.2%, but more than doubled in 2022 to 12.4%. Experts have said the child tax credit would bring the poverty rates back down.
Immigration
While the Biden administration has dealt with record levels of migration at the country’s southern border, the president has said issues at the border won’t change unless congress passes comprehensive immigration reform – not just legislation focused on border security.
Biden unveiled his comprehensive immigration reform proposal on his first day of office, which included an eight-year pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. without legal status, more border security technology, and addressing the root cause of migration.
But the president’s proposal would never pass a divided Congress. Biden in his 2023 State of the Union address said that he would at least like to see Congress pass immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farmworkers, essential workers, as well as providing more equipment and officers to secure the border.
Getting any sort of immigration reform passed will be tough, as the issue has become more politicized due to the uptick of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans have focused on trying to pass border security legislation, while Democrats have pushed for legislation that includes border security and immigration reform.
Junk fees
Throughout his first term, Biden’s administration has targeted “junk fees,” which the White House has described as “unnecessary, unavoidable, or surprise charges.”
Biden said during his State of the Union that Congress must pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act. The measure would “eliminate excessive, hidden, and unnecessary fees imposed on consumers.” It would require that full prices for services be provided upfront to ensure transparency, such as when purchasing concert tickets or booking a hotel or resort. And it would prevent airlines from imposing a fee to seat families together.
“Americans are tired of being — we’re tired of being played for suckers,” Biden said.
While Biden’s crackdown on junk fees has gotten some bipartisan support, some key Republicans, including House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., have defended some unexpected fees.
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A federal judge has made it a lot more difficult for Donald Trump to blame his lawyers for his election-interference case, a former prosecutor has said.
Harry Litman is a law professor at the University of California and a former federal prosecutor. He said that the decision by Judge Tanya Chutkan will probably prevent Trump from starting up "a whole lot of mischief and delay."
Last week, Chutkan granted prosecutors' motion to require the former president to reveal whether he will assert an advice-of-counsel defense in the election-interference trial, which is due to begin on March 4. "If Trump intends to blame his lawyers for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he has to put up or shut up by Jan. 15. He is likely to shut up," Litman wrote in a column in the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
The former president was indicted on four counts in Washington D.C. for allegedly working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
It is one of four criminal cases that Trump is facing while he campaigns as frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He has also pleaded not guilty to charges in the other cases and has repeatedly said that they form part of a political witch hunt. Newsweek sought email comment on Tuesday from Donald Trump's attorney.
"Trump has repeatedly suggested that he relied on his attorneys' advice in undertaking his flagrantly unconstitutional conduct after the election," Litman wrote.
"Most expressly, Trump's lawyer John Lauro claimed on 'Meet the Press' in August that what his client was 'indicted for, ultimately, is following legal advice from an esteemed scholar, John Eastman.' Lauro added that Trump was also following Eastman's advice when he 'petitioned Mike Pence' to refuse to certify Joe Biden's election," Litman added.
Litman noted that Chutkan's order prevents Trump from "ambushing the government at trial, a stunt I have seen defendants attempt more than once."
"Without advance notice, nothing would prevent Trump's lawyer from raising the claim in an opening statement or mid-trial," Litman wrote.
"Thanks to the judge's order, Trump won't be able to blame his lawyers for Jan. 6 without producing a wealth of otherwise privileged materials and taking the stand to testify to his own good faith. Rather than mount the defense the way the law requires, look for Trump to give it up entirely," Litman added.
In October, a former federal prosecutor said that Trump would have to release a potentially explosive trove of documents if he wants to assert a lawyer-advice defense.
Barbara McQuade, whom Trump sacked along with over 40 other federal prosecutors, said that Trump will have to release "every document, memo, email, text message" sent between the Republican, Rudy Giuliani and the rest of the Trump legal team.
That, in itself, could open up whole new areas of attack for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, McQuade said.
The legal professor at the University of Michigan was writing her opinion on the MSNBC website about the potential for Trump to assert that all his actions around alleged tampering with the 2020 election were on the advice of counsel.
To assert that defense, Trump would first have to show the judge, and the prosecutors, all of his communication with his lawyer about the election—potentially leading to explosive new revelations in the case, McQuade wrote.
"Disclosure of those materials between Trump and his lawyers could be explosive because they may not only debunk the advice of counsel defense, but could contain other admissions that Smith could use at trial.
"Smith's motion will push Trump to make a decision—use the advice of counsel defense at trial or protect every document, memo, email, text message sent between him and Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and the other lawyers," McQuade wrote.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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About the writer
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. He has covered human rights and extremism extensively. Sean joined Newsweek in 2023 and previously worked for The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, Vice and others from the Middle East. He specialized in human rights issues in the Arabian Gulf and conducted a three-month investigation into labor rights abuses for The New York Times. He was previously based in New York for 10 years. He is a graduate of Dublin City University and is a qualified New York attorney and Irish solicitor.
You can get in touch with Sean by emailing [email protected]. Languages: English and French.
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law.... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here. | US Political Corruption |
Student loan repayments hit a glitch for 305,000 borrowers: Payment amounts are wrong
Many warned early on that student loan borrowers could run into a few hiccups as a massive reboot of monthly payments kicked off in October.
And those experts did not disappoint.
About 305,000 student loan borrowers ran into an issue where their loan servicer gave them the wrong amount for their monthly payment, according to data provided to the Free Press Friday from the U.S. Department of Education.
While it's a large number of people, the Education Department noted that the glitch hit less than 1% of the 28 million borrowers who benefited from a pandemic related payment pause that began in March 2020 but now need to resume making student loan payments.
The COVID-19 payment pause has ended. Interest resumed building in September on federal student loans that were covered under the unique pause that began three-and-a-half years ago and kept, repeatedly, getting extended.
Borrowers didn't have to make any payments on their federal student loans that were covered under the pause, freeing up $300 or $400 a month in some cases. The pause temporarily froze most federal student debt with a 0% interest rate.
For many borrowers, the first payment is due in October. Exact payment dates vary. The Education Department has noted previously that borrowers were to get a bill, detailing their payment amount and due date, at least 21 days before their specific due date.
Some told they owe more than they do
In recent weeks, some people who logged into their individual student loan account, according to experts, spotted a payment amount that was higher than it should have been. And, as might be imagined, borrowers who faced questionably higher figures weren't too happy.
"Servicers are being held accountable and borrowers will not have payments due until these mistakes are fixed," according to the Education Department.
Borrowers are to be notified by loan servicers of any errors that took place — such as indicating a payment due that's much higher than was quoted for a new SAVE plan. Loan servicers are to put the borrowers into "administrative forbearance until their correct payment amount was calculated, so there would be as little impact as possible on borrowers," the Education Department stated.
Borrowers wise to double-check their statements
The department said its stringent oversight efforts contributed to quickly catching these errors.
On Sept. 29, a letter was sent to President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, signed by attorneys general from 19 states, including Michigan, which raised concerns about receiving "consumer complaints from borrowers struggling to get timely and accurate information from servicers."
The letter indicated that one borrower had complained of seeing a monthly bill jump to $444 a month from $293 a month, following the automatic switch from an old REPAYE plan to the SAVE plan. Something was clearly wrong.
Another borrower, according to the letter, reported that their monthly payment skyrocketed to more than $6,800 a month from $759 to $6,843 after seemingly being removed from an extended repayment plan.
Others complained of seeing incorrect loan balances and interest rates.
The letter noted: "Since the system-wide payment pause began in March 2020, several federal student loan servicers have left the market, causing the transfer of over 30 million borrower accounts to another servicer."
"We know from experience that servicing transfers create a high risk of servicing errors. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, borrowers regularly reported issues with servicer transfers, such as lost paperwork, incorrect records and delays in communication."
Given news of some of the bad billing numbers, it does not hurt to review your payment amount to make sure it is correct.
Most issues have been resolved at this point, according to loan servicers, but borrowers are wise to double check their bills against any information they received when they signed up for the SAVE plan or other income-driven repayment plans, too.
If you're having trouble getting a call into a loan servicer, you know what could be causing some of the hold up. The phone lines are clogged — and loan servicers complain that Congress did not provide more money to address the higher administrative costs associated with this massive, unprecedented restart.
The Education Department said it is working closely with student loan servicers to "ensure that they are providing borrowers the information they need and holding servicers accountable when they do not. "
In many cases, the glitches involved incorrect calculations by federal student loan servicers for payment amounts under the SAVE plan — the new Saving on a Valuable Education Plan that promotes itself as an option for lowest payments possible for many people on a federal income-driven repayment.
For some borrowers who have very limited incomes, the SAVE plan can get monthly payments down to $0 a month. The Education Department noted that some who received incorrect information qualify for $0 monthly payments under SAVE.
Nearly 5 million borrowers already are enrolled in the new SAVE plan, which will cut payments in half for many borrowers, according to the Education Department.
SAVE plan switch triggered some mix up
Some bad numbers rolled out, though, as accounts for a sizable number of borrowers were automatically converted into the new SAVE plan.
The new SAVE plan replaces the old Revised Pay As You Earn or the REPAYE Plan, an income-driven repayment plan. Borrowers on the REPAYE Plan automatically are being put on the SAVE Plan and do not need to sign up.
Scott Buchanan, the executive director of Student Loan Servicing Alliance, an industry trade group, said technical issues arose involving data, as servicers tried to convert about 3 million borrowers from an old REPAYE plan into a new one and enroll others in that new payment plan.
When automatically transitioning borrowers from the REPAYE to the SAVE Plan, the Education Department stated, one loan servicer, MOHELA, "inadvertently used the 2022 — instead of 2023 — poverty guidelines tables to calculate payments."
The U.S. Department of Education’s servicer oversight team identified this error and corrected it, according to the Education Department. As of last month, the Department "notified affected borrowers about their correct payment amount, which will be lower than was initially communicated."
Monthly payments under the SAVE plan are based on your discretionary income — the difference between your adjusted gross income and 225% of the poverty line for your family size, up from the 150% guideline used in other repayment plans. The objective is to protect a minimum amount of income to ensure that borrowers can cover basic necessities like food and housing costs.
Using the old poverty guideline would trigger higher monthly payments, even though those payments should be lower under the SAVE plan. As a result, the borrower could have been looking at paying more than they would actually owe.
"There is a lot of finger-pointing going on," said student loan expert Mark Kantrowitz, as to who deserves more of the blame the U.S. Department of Education or loan servicers.
The Education Department is blaming the loan servicers, Kantrowitz said, but perhaps the U.S. Department of Education is also partly to blame as they provided the loan servicers with inaccurate data for borrowers involved in income-driven repayment.
Incorrect payment amounts were given for other income-driven repayment plans, too, not just the SAVE plan, according to Kantrowitz who has heard from upset borrowers.
Some errors can be blamed solely on the loan servicers, he said, "such as using the wrong year's poverty lines and putting some borrowers into a different repayment plan than the one they were signed up for."
Some borrowers deal with a new servicer
About four out of 10 borrowers have a new student loan servicer and won't be dealing with the same servicer they had before the COVID-19 pandemic pause began in March 2020. And that's created some issues, as expected earlier, Kantrowitz said.
The new servicers, he said, received income, family size and tax filing status information from the U.S. Department of Education, but this information was incorrect for some borrowers.
The Education Department stated that its standard monitoring and review process uncovered some discrepancies in the calculations of payment amounts given by some servicers.
"So the department asked servicers to audit their files regarding calculations made to family size, income, or marital status last month," according to the Education Department.
Some borrowers were being hit by calculations that drove up the monthly payment higher than it should have been. And the Education Department stated that "a very small number of borrowers" saw that their calculated payment amount was lower than it should have been.
Restarting student loan payments and launching a new, more affordable payment plan at the same time proved, as frankly one would have expected, to overload the system.
"One of the challenges here was we've been trying to do sort of five things at once," Buchanan said.
Loan servicers needed to restart the payment process after a hiatus of three-and-a-half years — which had never been done before.
Servicers, Buchanan said, also needed to implement some waiver programs involving one-time limited changes in the public student loan forgiveness program, he said.
The new SAVE plan was launched in late August by the Biden administration — dubbed as the "most affordable student loan repayment plan ever." Many borrowers had to sign up at StudentAid.gov/SAVE first to get lower monthly payments.
It was a short window to sign up, if you wanted a lower monthly payment at the restart in October. But there isn't a deadline for signing up for the SAVE plan, so many borrowers can still make the move to the SAVE plan if their payments aren't doable given their family size and income.
"So far, the challenges have been the system implementation of things," Buchanan said.
As of early September, some 143,600 student loan borrowers in Michigan already were set up to reduce their monthly payments through the SAVE plan, according the U.S. Department of Education. The figure reflects both those who signed up on their own and those who were automatically shifted over from an earlier income-driven repayment plan, called REPAYE.
The education department wanted to speed up the introduction of the SAVE plan, Buchanan said, which gave loan servicers a few months to start a program that might normally take eight months.
Congress hasn't provided additional resources to cover the crush of extra demands, he said.
"Not everyone got a billing statement with that incorrect information," Buchanan said. "A lot of people just logged in and looked and 'Said hey, this looks higher.'"
For most people, he said, such issues were corrected before they even got a billing statement.
"For some, they got revised billing statements that said "Here is the issue. It's been corrected. This is your correct payment amount."
In another case, Buchanan said, a data table from the Department of Education had incorrect information for a borrower's adjusted gross income — a key piece of data if an income-driven repayment plan is being used to calculate a monthly bill.
"To put it in context, our estimates are it's less than probably 5% of the total student loan population who may have had an error. Some had their billing amount slightly under, some were over. But I think nearly all of those have been corrected now."
Right now, Buchanan said, student loan borrowers should have accurate billing information.
A few individuals could face issues, he said, but the majority of cases have been fixed.
If people think there is an error, he said, the borrowers can reach out to their servicer to validate if the payment information has been corrected.
Of course, many borrowers are complaining that it's tough to get a servicer on the phone.
Don't get tricked by a scammer
What borrowers shouldn't do, though, is jump at an unsolicited email or text about your student loans from some outfit that promises to cut through the red tape or cut your monthly bill.
Anecdotally, Buchanan said, student loan related scams seem to be picking up dramatically.
"Scammers often target distressed borrowers or people looking for help to manage their loans," according to a warning from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Often, consumers easily trust what they find online, too, not realizing that fraudsters take out ads online or impersonate others with fairly decent looking websites.
Borrowers are encouraged to use self-service options at the websites for their loan servicers, such as updating their contact information, checking their loan balance, and applying for an income-driven repayment plan.
In addition, a previously announced on-ramp program is providing borrowers a transition into repayment where they will not be harmed if they miss a payment during the restart.
As a nod perhaps to the reality that there would be some glitches along the way, a temporary "on-ramp" to repayment was put in place to run from October through Sept. 30, 2024, to protect financially vulnerable borrowers who miss payments. No action will be taken then that could result in declaring a loan in default or otherwise hurt a borrower's credit.
As I reported earlier, some borrowers are seeing due dates in November, December and even January, particularly if they made some payments toward their federal student loans sometime during the pandemic.
As the payment pause ends, the restart date might reflect when your loan servicer last received a payment from you during the pandemic. In some cases, the last payment might be treated as an extra payment that has now pushed back your upcoming restart of payments. | US Federal Policies |
U.S. Department of Education Announces $42 Billion in Approved Public Service Loan Forgiveness for More Than 615,000 Borrowers Since October 2021
U.S. Department of Education Announces $42 Billion in Approved Public Service Loan Forgiveness for More Than 615,000 Borrowers Since October 2021
To mark Public Service Recognition Week, the U.S. Department of Education (Department) today announced that, as of the beginning of May 2023, it has approved a total of $42 billion in Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) for more than 615,000 borrowers since October 2021. This is a result of the temporary PSLF changes made by the Biden-Harris Administration that made it easier for borrowers to reach forgiveness. At the end of the previous Administration, only about 7,000 borrowers had been approved for the PSLF program.
Additionally, the Department is announcing the implementation of improvements to the PSLF Help Tool, which borrowers use to apply for the program. These updates will, for the first time, let borrowers complete the entire PSLF application process online, and borrowers will no longer need to fax or mail in their application with a wet signature. Allowing borrowers to submit e-signatures for themselves and request e-signatures from their employers will significantly decrease processing time. In addition, borrowers can now digitally track the status of their PSLF form in the My Activity section of their StudentAid.gov account, where they can see updates such as whether their employer has digitally signed their PSLF form and when their form has been processed. This upgrade is in addition to the Biden-Harris Administration's long-term improvements to the PSLF program, slated to take effect in July 2023, which will provide lasting benefits for borrowers.
“Since Day One, the Biden-Harris Administration has worked relentlessly to fix a broken student loan system, including by making sure we fulfill the promise of Public Service Loan Forgiveness for those who have spent a decade or more serving our communities and our country,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “To date, the Biden-Harris team has kept that promise for more than 615,000 teachers, nurses, social workers, servicemembers, and other public servants by approving a combined $42 billion in student loan debt forgiveness. The difference that Public Service Loan Forgiveness is making in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans reminds us why we must continue doing everything we can to fight for borrowers and why families cannot afford to have progress derailed by partisan politicians. During Public Service Recognition Week—and every week—we thank all those who serve our communities.”
The targeted debt relief announced today is part of the Department’s ongoing efforts to ensure that the PSLF program fulfills the promise made to Americans who enter public service and that they receive the debt forgiveness they have earned by serving their communities and the country. Public Service Recognition Week celebrates individuals who serve the United States and local communities as an employee of Federal, state, local, or tribal government.
PSLF is one of several student loan forgiveness programs established by law. It supports public employees—such as teachers, firefighters, and members of law enforcement, as well as those who work for a non-profit organization in a variety of fields—by forgiving the remaining federal student loan balance for those who work in public service and make the required 120 qualifying monthly payments.
Borrowers across the country have benefited from the Department’s efforts to ensure that all public servants can more easily access this targeted debt relief. Of the nearly 616,000 borrowers whose loans have been approved for forgiveness, nearly 610,000 borrowers have already seen their loans discharged, and the rest will soon follow.
In addition to the borrowers who have been approved for forgiveness, more than two million borrowers now have an approved PSLF Form and are on the path to forgiveness. More public service employees around the country continue to apply as they become aware of the PSLF Program.
Continuously Improving the PSLF Help Tool
The Department remains committed to making it easier for borrowers to know if they are eligible for PSLF, certify their employment, apply for forgiveness, and track their progress. For the first time since the program began, borrowers can now sign and submit their PSLF form digitally and track its status throughout the process.
“FSA is making the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program as easy as possible so all public servants can finally get the loan forgiveness they have earned,” said Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray. “The improved PSLF Help Tool is another step forward to modernize and simplify the process for people who rely on us to carry out the law effectively.”
In the past, borrowers had to take multiple steps to complete and submit their PSLF Form. In most cases, they had to print and sign their form, obtain signatures on the printed form from one or more employers, then submit the completed form and related documents by mail or fax. Now, borrowers can complete the entire process digitally on StudentAid.gov via the PSLF Help Tool.
The newly updated PSLF Help Tool enables borrowers to sign and submit their PSLF form digitally; identify employers that need to sign the form and request an e-signature; and track the status of their form. These major changes to the PSLF application process are improving the experience both for public servants and for the employers who need to certify their employment.
Long-term Improvements to PSLF Program Through Regulations
In October 2022, the Department announced final regulations for the PSLF Program that will deliver lasting improvements for borrowers. These improvements will go into effect July 1, 2023, and are detailed in this fact sheet. The improvements include:
- helping borrowers earn progress toward PSLF,
- simplifying criteria to help borrowers certify qualifying employment, and<
- providing opportunities for borrowers to get help correcting PSLF account problems.
Borrowers with Direct Loans who work in public service are also likely to benefit from the one-time account adjustment announced by the Department last year. Borrowers with other types of federal loans have until the end of 2023 to consolidate into the Direct Loan program to receive credit for qualifying payments under this adjustment.
In addition to this one-time account adjustment, the Department also announced earlier this year new proposed regulations that would transform income-driven repayment (IDR) plans to better serve borrowers. The regulations would create the most affordable IDR plan that has ever been available to student loan borrowers, allowing those with incomes under $30,500, or under $62,400 in a family of four, to qualify for $0 monthly payments. They will also simplify the program and eliminate common pitfalls that delay borrowers’ progress toward forgiveness.
Historic Progress on Targeted Loan Relief
The PSLF approvals announced today are part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s broad efforts to support students and provide more than $66 billion in targeted loan relief to nearly 2.2 million borrowers so far, with more on the way. Actions include:
- Establishing a fair and accessible bankruptcy discharge process to help struggling borrowers discharge their federal student loans.
- Providing $9.1 billion in relief for 425,000 borrowers who have a total and permanent disability.
- Approving $14.5 billion in borrower defense claims to nearly 1.1 million borrowers whose schools were found to have cheated them out of their promised education, including extending full relief to approved claims and approving new types of claims.
- Providing $1.26 billion in closed school discharges to 107,000 borrowers who attended the now-defunct ITT Technical Institute, which failed to deliver on the promises it made to students.
- Restoring eligibility for federal student aid to almost 7.5 million borrowers to help them get back on track to complete their credential or degree. | US Federal Policies |
Washington state registered 'many' foreign nationals to vote, emails show
The Washington Secretary of State’s Office says state law doesn’t allow it to verify citizenship receiving a voter’s registration.
The Facts Inside Our Reporter’s Notebook
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During recent election cycles, the Washington Department of Licensing, or DOL, received numerous reports of foreign nationals being automatically registered to vote in the state, even in cases where they insisted to DOL they were not legally allowed to vote.
Some county election agencies have described it as a “rare” occurrence, but it is currently unknown to what extent this problem occurred.
In 2018, the state Legislature passed House Bill 2595, which automatically registers people to vote when they are issued a driver’s license or renew an existing license. To be automatically registered, the voter must provide a signature image and be offered an opportunity to decline registration. The bill took effect in July 2018.
Emails obtained by The Center Square through a public records request found instances where foreign citizens were registered to vote, in some cases despite them insisting during the licensing process that they were not U.S. citizens. According to the Washington Secretary of State’s Office, or SOS, state law does not allow it to verify citizenship when they receive a voter’s registration.
As early as November 2018, DOL and SOS was receiving complaints of foreign voter registration. A Nov. 7, 2018 email from Vanessa Mathisen, an immigration attorney with World Relief Spokane, stated that “many of our clients are unwittingly getting registered to vote when they get their IDs, apply or receive any state benefits. Sometimes we find out because they get a summons for jury duty. Others we do not discover have been registered until they decide to apply for citizenship.”
The attorney further wrote that “in my discussion with the Spokane Voter Registration office, they said that they were told that it’s not a problem if a non-citizen registers to vote. That is false. It is a problem. I don’t know what’s going on at the DOL counters exactly, but I do know that nearly all of my clients that have been registered to vote do not recall doing so, do not recall whether they were asked if they are a US citizen, and 100% of the time either did not speak English or they did not speak English well enough to understand the questions being posed to them.”
She added: “There is no reason to put anyone in the position of having to defend that they did not make a claim that they potentially cannot prove they didn’t make that imperils their immigration status.”
Making false claims regarding eligibility to vote is a Class C felony and includes a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison.
In response to her email, DOL Technical Operations Consultant Jace Anderson wrote that the state agency “has policies to provide customers with LEP [limited English proficiency] with options and avenues for communication. Some offices have staff who are certified to provide bilingual services in some languages; the customers can bring family, friends, or assistants to help with interpretation.”
The consultant further wrote that “there is, unfortunately, not much more that can be done about that from the department’s side; if a customer answers the questions confidently and there is no other indication that there is a significant language barrier, it would not be apparent that the customer did not understand the questions they were asked. DOL is continually reviewing and improving its policies and procedures based on compliance with new and existing regulations, business need, and stakeholder consideration. Your concerns are being reviewed to determine if there is anything DOL can do within the bounds of our power to reduce the occurrence of ineligible voter registrations.”
World Relief Spokane did not respond to a request for comment by The Center Square.
That same month, meetings notes for a monthly King County Voter Education Fund, or VEF, check-in with the South Park Information and Resource Center noted that the organization was “concerned that DOL is registering individuals that are not U.S. citizens without explaining to them what the requirements are. How will this be prevented in the future with automatic registration taking effect [?]”
The issue continued into the 2019 election cycle, in which numerous county election agencies raised concerns about foreign voter registration.
Among them was King County Elections Director Julie Wise. In an Oct. 29, 2019 email to VEF recipients, she responded to reports she had heard from them about the problem.
“Let me start by saying that I am also deeply concerned about this,” she wrote. “Every year we hear from a small number of voters who received a ballot because they accidentally got registered while getting a driver’s license or Washington State ID.”
“I have raised this issue with the Department of Licensing in the past and will continue to do so,” she added.
In an email to The Center Square, King County Elections Communications Officer Halei Watkins wrote that “what we’ve seen over the years is a rare occurrence of someone getting accidentally registered through the DOL because of either miscommunication or human error like checking the wrong box. When that happens, the individual who was accidentally registered is typically very concerned as it can impede their ability to move through the residency and citizenship processes and we cancel the registration.”
She added, “We don’t typically make a formal report to the DOL as the action item (cancelling the registration) is on our end. But, we do meet regularly with the DOL and bring it up in discussion when needed, and the DOL regularly shares their training and efforts toward continuously improving service and consistency in the customer experience.”
Also raising the alarm that election cycle was Sue Higginbotham, administrative assistant to the Kittitas County Auditor’s Office. In an Oct. 10, 2019 email to SOS, she wrote that a local resident who was not a U.S. citizen received a voter ballot.
In this instance, he had been registered to vote in 2014, when he renewed his driver’s license.
“His daughter was there with him and she stated that he was not asked about becoming a registered voter, updating his registration or anything else,” Higginbotham wrote in the email. “I know that was a language barrier, but it is very discouraging to know that DOL personnel are assisting in the process of registering NON-Citizens. I can’t not believe that our local Kittitas County office is the only one in the state to have something slip through. There needs to be something in place for those not receiving the enhanced driver’s license to verify Citizenship prior to clicking that little button.”
In an email response, SOS Director of Elections Lori Augino wrote that DOL would be making updates to online licensing process, including translated it “in language they [residents] prefer. This is a huge step in the right direction for our system.”
In an Oct. 11, 2019 email sent to other DOL employees, Interim Deputy Assistant Director Gregory Chaney wrote that they “must ensure that all procedures are followed and customers understand the qualifications to register to vote and be mindful of the need to be clear as possible regarding voter registration when utilizing translation services for our customers.”
Kittitas Auditor Bryan Elliott wrote in an email to The Center Square that since 2019, their office has not experienced similar situations of foreign citizens being automatically registered to vote.
Yet, the problem apparently persisted into the 2020 election. One woman, whose name The Center Square is declining to print because she is a private citizen, wrote in a Sept. 23 2020 email to DOL, SOS, and Pierce County Elections that a Chinese student was registered to vote and received a ballot despite him insisting he was not legally allowed to vote and his host family requesting his name be removed from voter registration. In the same email, she wrote that a similar situation had also occurred with a Ukrainian national.
“The State Auditor's office said that the Department of Licensing assured them that they carefully follow state regulations about ensuring only Americans receive ballots,” she wrote in the email. “This is not happening. These are two instances when foreign nationals are presenting their foreign passports and automatically receiving election ballots. Both were not asked ‘are you an American citizen?’ They proved, through their passports, that they were foreign nationals. I received answer that if a person is asked the question, ‘Are you an American citizen?’ and do not answer or do not understand English, they will be issued a voter registration card.”
She added that “the Pierce County Auditor's department has said this issue is outside their audit authority, and referred me to the Secretary of State Elections Division.” | US Local Elections |
incoming update…
Rep. Jim Jordan has seen even more Republicans vote against him in the third round of voting for the House speaker's gavel.
25 Republicans voted against Jordan, giving him just 194 votes -- far short of the approximately 217 he would need to win the speaker's race. It's his lowest total so far in the three ballots.
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries picked up 210 votes from House Democrats.
Among Republican holdouts, 8 voted for Rep. Steve Scalise, 6 for Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry and two for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy
Jordan is expected to push for votes throughout the weekend and in an early morning press conference said it was time for the House to get back to work.
"Our plan this weekend is to get a speaker elected to the House of Representatives soon as possible, so we can help the American people," Jordan told reporters.
Jordan called on Congress to "get to work" and cited the crisis in the Middle East as well as the looming government funding deadline on Nov. 17.
"We've got important work to do, important work to do. We need to help Israel. We need to get the appropriations process moving so that the key elements of our government are funded and funded in the right way, particularly our military," Jordan said.
Fox News' Liz Elkind, Houston Keene and Kelly Phares contributed to this report.
House Republicans will meet in a private meeting at 1pm, Fox News is told.
They will vote behind closed doors to determine whether the conference still stands behind House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan as their nominee for Speaker.
A senior House Republican source tells Fox it is believed Jordan would lose that vote after his performance on the floor.
The Republican conference would then try to figure out who is the next Speaker candidate or candidates. It is unclear if that could consume the afternoon or take a few days. It’s possible the GOP may just take the weekend to regroup and come back to consider Speaker candidates on Monday, but that is uncertain.
Fox asked specifically about the resolution by Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, to temporarily empower acting Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry as elected Speaker Pro Tempore for a fixed period.
“I think we need to go through at least one more name (of a candidate) before that,” said one senior GOP source to Fox News.
In short, we could know within the next few hours if the GOP stands behind Jordan or not.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who led the charge to ouster former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, says he and his fellow Republican rebels are prepared to accept punishment from the conference if it results in Jim Jordan becoming speaker.
"We are willing to accept censure, sanction, suspension, removal from the Republican conference," Gaetz said.
Gaetz led the push to remove McCarthy from office over two weeks ago. Since then, Republicans have been gridlocked over a replacement.
Gaetz spoke moments after a third vote in which Jordan fell far short of the 217 votes he needs to win the gavel.
"We, of course, will remain Republicans, we will continue to vote with Republicans on Republican principles, but if what these holdouts need is a pound of our flesh, we're willing to give it to them in order to see them elect Jim Jordan for speaker," he said.
Jordan has indicated there will be more votes throughout the weekend.
Fox News' Liz Elkind contributed to this report.
Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is on track to lose a third round vote for the speaker's gavel.
More than 13 Republicans voted against Jordan along with every House Democrat so far. Voting is still ongoing.
Other names nominated by Republicans on the House floor have been interim Speaker Patrick McHenry, Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.
At least one Republican so far who has voted for Jordan in the previous rounds now flipped to vote against him.
With the current absences on both sides of the aisle, Jordan could only afford to lose five GOP votes to still win.
Jordan lost two previous House-wide votes for speaker earlier this week. He fell 17 votes short of a 217-majority threshold on Tuesday and 18 votes short the day after.
It’s not clear now what his path forward to victory is. But Jordan allies have suggested keeping House lawmakers in Washington through the weekend for marathon rounds of votes until Jordan clinches the gavel.
The House convened on Friday for Republican Speaker nominee Jim Jordan’s third ballot attempt at ascending to the top spot in the lower chamber.
The lower chamber met quorum — the minimum number of members to operate on official business — with at least one Republican out.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., flew to Israel amid the war with Hamas on a fact-finding mission as the House continues to search for a new speaker.
His absence leaves Jordan with new numbers to work with ahead of his third push to take the speaker’s gavel.
Several members of the House Republican conference vote for speaker candidates other than the GOP nominee, meaning Jordan has to flip several members of his party if he hopes to grab the gavel.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., spoke with reporters briefly before the expected third round vote to elect Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, as speaker.
“House Democrats have repeatedly made clear we want to find a bipartisan path forward leader to serve at every step of the way. Republicans have rejected bipartisanship and embrace extremism,” Jeffries told reporters.
He said Jordan was “a clear and present danger to our democracy.”
As he has in previous days, Jeffries did not rule out a compromise to choose another Republican speaker who is more palatable to Democrats – but would not name any specific candidates.
“There are still reasonable Republicans over on the other side of the aisle, as I've repeatedly said, good men and women who want the House to reopen, who want the Congress to function,” Jeffries said.
“And what we've said is we just want a House that allows for bipartisan bills that benefit the American people, not Democrats or Republicans.”
Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is forging ahead with his bid to become House speaker and suggested he intends to hold votes this weekend if he does not win on Friday.
Jordan's office announced a Friday morning press conference late on Thursday night.
House lawmakers are expected to hold a third round speaker vote later Friday morning after Jordan failed to clinch a majority of the chamber in two rounds of voting this week.
"Our plan this weekend is to get a speaker elected to the House of Representatives soon as possible, so we can help the American people," Jordan told reporters.
Jordan called on Congress to "get to work" and cited the crisis in the Middle East as well as the looming government funding deadline on Nov. 17.
"We've got important work to do, important work to do. We need to help Israel. We need to get the appropriations process moving so that the key elements of our government are funded and funded in the right way, particularly our military," Jordan said.
The GOP bomb-thrower fell 17 votes short of a 217-threshold majority on Tuesday, and then 18 votes short on Wednesday.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in an early-morning press conference, says he is staying in the speaker race, and told reporters the House needs to get back to work -- with a third speaker vote expected Friday as he forges ahead with his speaker bid.
Jordan spoke after he lost the first two rounds of ballots earlier this week, failing to gain the 217 votes needed to pick up the gavel. He could afford four Republican defections, but had significantly more than that, falling well short of the 217 needed.
On Friday, Jordan said the American people are "looking for House Republicans to lead and make change on these important issues."
"We've got important work to do," he said.
But Jordan said his solution is to get enough votes through the weekend to become House Speaker.
"In short we need to get to work for the American people. We cant do that if the House isn’t open and we can’t open the House until we get a speaker," he said.
It is possible there could be multiple speaker votes today, and event votes tomorrow and Sunday if Jordan decides he wants to try to grind this out, potentially in hopes of wearing out the opposition.
Rep. Warren Davidson, a key Jordan ally, tweeted last night, “We’ve heard from our colleagues and the American people. Additional votes are expected through the weekend."
Asked about the potential of multiple votes today, and votes Saturday and Sunday, a source familiar with planning told Fox News, "everything is on the table."
Fox News' Tyler Olson contributed to this report.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, announced after a turbulent Thursday that he would hold an 8 am ET press conference Friday to discuss the Republican plan to elect a House Speaker.
Jordan has consistently said he is not backing out of the Speaker’s race. But, his opposition is mounting.
Jordan lost 20 votes during Tuesday’s roll call. He then lost 22 votes on Wednesday. Fox is told that Jordan would lose even more votes if the House takes a ballot for Speaker on Friday.
One GOP source characterized this as an “escalatory strategy.”
The House is currently scheduled to convene at 10 am ET. And the plan — for now — is to have a quorum call and then a third vote for Speaker around 11 am ET.
The expected plan could change with Jordan’s early bird press conference.
Consider the wild whiplash of Thursday:
It was thought the House might take a midday vote. Then Jordan said he would remain a candidate for Speaker but hold off on going to the floor again. He would endorse a plan by Rep. David Joyce (R-OH) to temporarily grant Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-NC) more power so the House could return to functionality.
But hours later, Jordan reversed himself, insisting there would be an evening floor vote for Speaker.
However, plans for that were dashed as the House adjourned, teeing up a potential vote for Speaker for Friday. The legislative body could proceed with votes over the weekend, pending Friday's developments.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., urged House Republicans to unite together and elect a new Speaker as the legislative body has spent more than two weeks without a House-elected member holding the gavel.
During an appearance on Fox & Friends, Cotton expressed his “deep regrets” that a “small minority” among House Republicans mounted a successful effort to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.
“I hope the House comes together soon and elects a Speaker so we can get back to doing the people’s business in addressing all these crises overseas and address issues like inflation and crime here at home,” Cotton said.
When asked about a potential third vote to elect a Speaker, Cotton added: “I just hope they work their differences out among themselves and get back as quickly as possible to do the people’s business.”
A third vote to elect a speaker is expected after Rep. Jim Jordan, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee and the Republican nominee for Speaker, holds a press conference Friday morning.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, is expected to hold a news conference at 8 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 20, the House Judiciary Committee announced. It will be held at the Rayburn House Office Building.
Jordan, the Chair of the Committee, has said he is continuing to pursue his bid for speaker.
The address is expected to provide an update on the House speaker race, after GOP leadership canceled a third vote on Thursday. Jordan received the most of any Republican candidates but failed to gain a majority.
Jordan has reportedly expressed support for temporarily granting additional powers to Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., who is currently the speaker pro tempore.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican nominee for speaker, spent much of Thursday talking with Republican holdouts following a second failed vote to win the speakership.
House Republicans huddled behind closed doors for nearly four hours earlier in the day after plans for an afternoon vote. Jordan, R-Ohio, said a third vote would not be held on Thursday and instead expressed support for a plan to remain the nominee for speaker while granting additional powers to Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., who is currently the speaker pro tempore.
The proposal for an interim speaker was not well received among many Republicans, Fox News reported.
Jordan, R-Ohio, also met in private with several colleagues Thursday afternoon, many of whom said they had not changed their minds about his speaker bid.
Rep. John Rutherford, R-Fla., told reporters that the meeting wasn't about changing the minds of the holdouts, but about changing Jordan's mind.
“He failed his moment of leadership when he failed Steve Scalise and that was pretty much everyone’s opinion," Rutherford said.
Following the conversation with holdouts, Jordan said "it was a good discussion."
Fox News' Thomas Phippen contributed reporting.
Live Coverage begins here | US Congress |
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is one of three House GOP committee chairs pressing to impeach President Biden.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is one of three House GOP committee chairs pressing to impeach President Biden.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
House Republicans are teeing up a vote to formally launch an impeachment inquiry as early this week. The move comes as far right lawmakers and the party's hardline base press for action against President Biden.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan briefed reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday on elements of the Republican case against Biden. Jordan said he hoped the House would vote "as soon as possible" and possibly as early as this week. The move comes as key committee chairs continue to negotiate with witnesses they believe can help develop a case for corruption charges against Biden.
"We think it's helpful to have that vote because we do think that someone will take us to court. Constitutionally it's not required," Jordan said. But he added, "if you have a vote of the full House of Representatives and a majority say we are in that official status as part of our overall oversight work, our Constitutional oversight duty that we have, it just helps us in court."
Jordan told reporters that Republicans have not yet made a decision on what the charges against President Biden would be. Jordan said he still wants to talk to roughly ten people over the course of 6 - 7 weeks. These witnesses include the president's son, Hunter Biden, James Biden, the president's brother, some of their business associates, the tax attorneys at the Justice Department involved in reviewing the probe of Hunter's tax filings over time, and other officials who discussed whether or not to charge him, and what the case they were developing against him involved.
Jordan outlined what he believes amounts to a pattern of corruption that started in 2015 when Hunter Biden was approached about working for Burisma, an energy company in Ukraine.
"We don't know that there are going to be articles yet, but I think the case is pretty compelling," Jordan said. He cited possible charges as bribery, abuse of power and obstruction, but said, "but we'll look at all the facts and make a decision." He also acknowledged the case is a mirror of the case against President Trump in 2019 when he was charged with abuse of power and obstruction.
Political pressure for a case against Biden
The decision to hold a vote on an impeachment inquiry comes months after then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally directed three panels in September to probe whether the president and his family engaged in corrupt business practices. At the time GOP leaders didn't have the votes to approve a formal resolution due to pushback from a number of moderate Republicans, who argued the House needed to develop the case first.
Over the weekend in an appearance on Fox News House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that the response from the Biden administration to the three House panels conducting the investigation was insufficient and the GOP chairs were "being stonewalled." Johnson said a House vote has "become a necessary step."
Johnson has just a three vote majority after Friday's expulsion of New York Rep. George Santos. But he predicted he would have the votes to approve an inquiry, telling Fox, "I believe we will." He cited conversations between the president and his son and banking records. Johnson noted that he served as a member of the legal team defending President Trump during his two impeachments.
House Oversight Chairman Jim Comer posted a video on social media on Monday laying out allegations, including reporting that bank records the panel has indicate that Hunter Biden set up an account that sent monthly payments to his father in 2018.
"President Biden and his family must be held accountable for this blatant corruption. The American people expect no less," Comer said.
But press reports indicate that the payments were related to Hunter repaying personal loan from his father.
Looking for leverage against witnesses
GOP leaders argue that witnesses are not cooperating, and they have sent subpoenas to key witnesses. But Hunter Biden's attorney Abbe Lowell sent a letter to House Republicans saying his client would testify, but instead of a closed door deposition Lowell offered for Biden to appear at a public hearing on December 13.
Two whistleblowers told the Ways and Means panel earlier this year that senior officials slow walked an investigation into Hunter Biden's tax returns, and that the statute of limitations expired before any felony tax charges could be brought by prosecutors. In September he was indicted on three felony firearms charges. An earlier deal for Hunter to plead guilty on misdemeanor tax charges fell apart and the Justice Department continues to investigate his records.
Jordan told reporters Monday that Lesley Wolf, a prosecutor in Delaware, was expected to talk to the committee soon.
Ian Sams, White House Spokesperson, maintained that Johnson was "throwing red meat" to "the far right flank" of his conference.
He added, "This baseless smear campaign is solely intended to satisfy their most extreme members and proves once again that these House Republicans are wasting time on the wrong priorities, instead of working with the President on real issues American families care about, like lowering costs, creating jobs, strengthening health care, and protecting our national security."
Republicans concede that if the House approved articles of impeachment the Democratic-led Senate would acquit Biden. | US Political Corruption |
When will you have to start paying your student loans again? Education Department explains
(NEXSTAR) – While federal student loan borrowers are still in a bit of limbo as the Supreme Court continues mulling President Joe Biden’s debt relief plan, the Department of Education has offered a bit of clarification regarding impending payments.
Borrowers haven’t been required to make regular payments on their debt since March 2020 when then-President Trump started the freeze in response to the COVID pandemic. It’s been extended multiple times since, including the most recent extension issued by Biden in November, which he called the final such move.
As part of the debt bill Biden signed earlier this month, the pause can’t be extended again. Since then, it hasn’t been clear when exactly borrowers would be on the hook again for payments.
That changed Monday when the Education Department shared new information.
“Student loan interest will resume starting on Sept. 1, 2023, and payments will be due starting in October,” the department says in a notice online. “We will notify borrowers well before payments restart.”
Borrowers will have different dates in October in which their loans will be due.
“We recognize that the return to repayment would result in significant financial hardship for many borrowers. That is why this Administration also put forward a plan to provide up to $20,000 in debt relief for hard-working Americans recovering from the economic harms of the pandemic, most of whom make less than $75,000 a year, and why we continue to fight for that relief on behalf of the millions of borrowers who need it,” a spokesperson tells Nexstar. “We will also be in direct touch with borrowers and ramping up our communications with servicers well before repayment resumes to ensure borrowers and their families are receiving accurate and timely information about the return to repayment.”
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver a decision on Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan as early as this week.
Under Biden’s plan, roughly 40 million borrowers could receive $10,000 in loan forgiveness if they make less than $125,000 a year or $20,000 in forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients.
While you wait for payments to restart, there are a few things you can do to be prepared.
A new analysis from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns 1 in 5 borrowers could struggle with student loan repayments. More borrowers could also fall behind on other debt obligations when payments resume, according to NerdWallet.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Federal Policies |
Our commentary comes from journalist Mark Chiusano, author of "The Fabulist," the saga of disgraced New York Congressman George Santos:
2023 was a season of chaos in the House of Representatives, a cartoon of what a legislative body is supposed to be. Through it all, we've had a mascot for the messiness, and his name is George Santos.
Santos is the Republican congressman from New York who made up virtually everything on his résumé: fake volleyball championship. He even told tall tales about being Jewish and , and he now stands accused of ., ,
Yet, none of this became widely known until after his election.
How did this con man get a seat in Congress? And what made him lie so promiscuously?
From the time that he was dressing in drag in Brazil, working in a dreary New York call center, or charting his political rise on Long Island, Santos was skillfully angling for more money and celebrity.
But it was the weakness of America's institutions that allowed Santos to go undetected. Most local media outlets were stretched too thin to expose this fabulist in time. Democrats were overconfident of winning. And Republicans shrugged, allowing the newcomer to win – and keep – his seat for cynical political and fundraising reasons.
It was not surprising that the GOP stuck with Santos for so long, given that the party's leader, Donald Trump, paid no price for his own litany of lies. Santos mimicked Trump's brazen behavior, taking advantage of our political moment which rewards bluster and exaggeration.
Santos now says he won't seek reelection and is facing expulsion, after a devastating report from the House Ethics Committee.
But the accountability is only beginning, for him and for Trump. In the meantime, Santos' wild – and wildly entertaining – story is a reminder of what happens when lying becomes a way of life.
For more info:
- "The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos" by Mark Chiusano (Atria/One Signal), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available November 28 via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
- markchiusano.com
Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Lauren Barnello.
for more features. | US Congress |
- The Senate voted to confirm Democrat Anna Gomez to the Federal Communications Commission, breaking the deadlock at the agency that has lasted the entirety of the Biden presidency.
- Gomez's confirmation comes after a protracted battle to confirm Biden's initial pick for the commissioner seat, Gigi Sohn, ended with her withdrawal.
- With the arrival of Gomez, a telecom attorney who's previously worked in several positions at the FCC and in the private sector, the agency has the opportunity to pursue actions that don't have the support of the Republican commissioners.
The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Democrat Anna Gomez to the Federal Communications Commission, breaking the deadlock at the agency that has lasted the entirety of the Biden presidency. The vote in favor was 55-43.
Gomez's confirmation comes after a protracted battle to confirm Biden's initial pick for the commissioner seat, Gigi Sohn. As senators remained split on her confirmation, the FCC was left in a 2-2 deadlock of Republican and Democratic commissioners, limiting its agenda to items that both sides could agree on.
With the arrival of Gomez, a telecom attorney who's previously worked in several positions at the FCC and in the private sector, the agency has the opportunity to pursue actions without the support of the Republican commissioners. That could include a push to return to net neutrality rules, which seek to prevent internet service providers from slowing or blocking service for select websites, for which President Joe Biden has voiced his support for. Still, the late confirmation and fast-approaching 2024 elections could complicate such efforts.
Though Sohn was first nominated in October 2021, she ultimately withdrew herself from consideration in March this year, as Republicans and some Democrats continued to oppose her. Sohn said that during that period, she'd been subject to "unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks" and said in a statement at the time, "It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators."
Disclosure: Comcast, an internet service provider, is also the owner of CNBC parent company NBCUniversal.
WATCH: Proposed policies around internet gatekeepers could increase competition, says ex-White House CTO | US Federal Policies |
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin received backlash from his Republican counterparts for using hardline tactics to stop them speaking about two judicial nominees ahead of roll call votes.
During a Thursday meeting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Durbin chairs, the Democrat repeatedly prevented GOP senators from debating two Joe Biden nominees to the U.S. District Court, Mustafa Kasubhai and Eumi Lee.
While defending the move, Durbin explained that the GOP had two chances to debate their nominations in previous hearings. Durbin also said he was merely using a tactic previously used by the last two Republican chairs of the committee— Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley and South Carolina's Lindsey Graham—who he said violated committee rules by advancing nominees and rules while the GOP controlled the Senate without giving Democrats a chance to voice their views.
"The two preceding chairs of this committee violated the letter and spirit of Committee Rule IV," Durbin said. "In doing so, Republicans established a new precedent that I followed on one occasion last Congress and will follow again today. I've said time and again there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and a different set for Democrats."
California congressman Ted Lieu praised the actions of Durbin while noting that former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had prevented the Senate from voting on Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination, Merrick Garland, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. McConnell said the nomination should be decided by whoever won the 2016 election, which was taking place several months later.
"I'm old enough to remember when Republicans refused to even allow a hearing on a nominee by the name of Merrick Garland," Lieu posted on X, formerly Twitter.
"Thank you to Senator Dick Durbin for standing up to Republican obstruction."
McConnell later faced allegations of hypocrisy when he allowed Donald Trump, who won the 2016 election, to nominate conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the SCOTUS bench following the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and rushed through her confirmation a matter of weeks before the 2020 election.
During the heated exchanges in the meeting, several GOP senators were left astounded and angered by Durbin's refusal to allow them to debate the judges before going to roll call as standard.
Durbin's office has been contacted for comment via email.
Texas Senator John Cornyn was one of the first to ask to speak on the nomination of Kasubhai, which was denied by Durbin. "Oh, I'm sorry, we've already done that at great length," Durbin replied. "Senator, we've debated these nominees twice."
Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn also asked to speak on the nominee, with Arkansas' Tom Cotton asking: "We don't have a right to speak under the rules?" When Durbin responded with "the third time, I'd say no," Cotton replied: "So you're just going to make it up?"
Graham told Durbin that he and his fellow Republican colleagues want to be given the chance "to tell you again why these nominees are awful," with Cotton adding "you just going to sit there and ignore us?"
The GOP senators then refused to take part in the roll call vote, with Cotton replying when his name was read: "Mr. Cotton says the chairman needs to rethink his decision and let Sen. Cornyn and Sen. Blackburn speak. That's what Mr. Cotton says so you can mark that down as my vote," Cotton said. "Everybody over there who's not willing to look at me or look at Dick Durbin needs to think about it as well."
When Blackburn's name was called for her vote, she said: "I'm waiting to be heard on the nominee, I've requested several times to be heard on the nominee."
In reply, Cotton added: "Now I guess Senator Durbin isn't going to allow women to speak. I thought that was sacrosanct in your party."
The heated argument continued for the vote regarding Lee, with Cornyn accusing Durbin's actions of being a "complete disgrace."
"You just destroyed one of the most important committees in the United States Senate," Cornyn said.
"And you set a precedent which will be repeated. Any time one party or the other takes advantage and takes the low road it sets a precedent that will then become a norm."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy and the courts. He joined Newsweek in February 2018 after spending several years working at the International Business Times U.K., where he predominantly reported on crime, politics and current affairs. Prior to this, he worked as a freelance copywriter after graduating from the University of Sunderland in 2010. Languages: English.
You can get in touch with Ewan by emailing [email protected].
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here. | US Congress |
Jessica Burgess, a Nebraska mother accused of helping her teenage daughter use pills to end her pregnancy, was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.
Burgess and her daughter, Celeste Burgess, stand accused of working together to end Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy in April 2022.
According to prosecutors, after the pair bought pills to end the pregnancy, Celeste Burgess gave birth to a stillborn fetus. At the time, Nebraska law banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy was well past that point, according to court records.
Police say that the Burgesses buried the fetal remains. An examination of the remains suggested they may have also been burned, according to court documents.
Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to charges of false reporting, providing an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, and concealing, removing or abandoning a dead human body. She was sentenced to one year in prison each charge, but the sentences for false reporting and tampering with human remains will run concurrently, with the sentence for the illegal abortion to served consecutively with the sentences for the other charges, a spokesperson for the Madison county courthouse said.
Celeste Burgess also took a plea deal and was sentenced to 90 days for concealing or abandoning a dead body earlier this year.
Although the case occurred before the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, it has been seen as a harbinger of how law enforcement may prosecute people for ending their own pregnancies in a post-Roe era – and how giant tech companies could go along with it.
Court documents in the case revealed that Facebook’s parent company Meta supplied police with the private Facebook messages that Celeste and Jessica Burgess had sent one another. In one message, Celeste told Jessica: “Remember we burn the evidence.”
Although most states do not ban people from inducing their own pregnancies – abortion bans typically penalize abortion providers, not patients – abortion rights advocates have long warned that if a prosecutor wants to target someone for a self-managed abortion, they will find a statute that is elastic enough to do so.
Celeste Burgess was released from Madison county jail earlier this month, after serving a little more than half of her 90-day sentence, local Nebraska news outlet KTIV reported. At her sentencing, Celeste Burgess said that her family could not have afforded a funeral for fetal remains, according to Courthouse News. (In a financial affidavit obtained by Vice, Jessica Burgess said she had $400 to her name.) Celeste Burgess also reportedly deals with multiple mental health issues and became pregnant due to an abusive relationship.
Jessica Burgess was set to undergo a court-ordered psychological evaluation ahead of her sentencing. But the evaluation was canceled due to lack of funding, according to KTIV.
Nebraska law now bans almost all abortions past 12 weeks of pregnancy. | US Federal Policies |
Warren, Garamendi Renew Call for TransDigm to End Price Gouging, Provide Pricing and Cost Transparency to Defense Department
New Transdigm Information Shows Company is “Taking Advantage of Loopholes in Federal Contracting Law” to Drive Up Prices for Taxpayers while Earning Exorbitant Profits Price Gouging Creates National Security Vulnerability; Lawmakers Call on DoD to Enforce Pricing Transparency Laws to Prevent Contractor Ripoffs
Washington, D.C. – After new reports that defense contractor TransDigm refused to provide cost and pricing information needed to prevent price gouging of taxpayers and the Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and U.S. Representative John Garamendi (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee Readiness Subcommittee, sent letters to the Department of Defense and TransDigm, pressing them to provide transparency on cost and pricing data to ensure that taxpayers aren’t being overcharged for expensive DoD contracts.
The lawmakers are asking DoD for answers about its practices to prevent price gouging, while also pushing TransDigm to provide cost or pricing data for its contracts after reports that the defense contractor was price gouging and earning record profits. In May 2023, the lawmakers wrote to Boeing and TransDigm, calling out the defense contractors for their refusal to provide cost and pricing data, and called on DoD to take action.
“(T)he Truthful Cost or Pricing Act, requires the government to obtain data to determine whether prices are fair and reasonable,” wrote the lawmakers in their letter to DoD. “This data is necessary for the Department to ensure government contractors are not overcharging taxpayers. DoD has reported, however, that there are ‘chronic issues’ with contractors refusing to provide that data… Contractors who consistently refuse to turn over cost and pricing data continue to rake in DoD contracts. For example, three previous inspector general reports, and a subsequent DoD report, have found TransDigm and its subsidiaries have repeatedly refused to provide requested cost or pricing data.”
The DoD’s latest Annual Report to Congress on Denials of Contracting Officer Uncertified Cost or Pricing Data Requests, provided to Congress earlier this year, contained deeply troubling findings that TransDigm and its subsidiaries continue to refuse to provide pricing data, failing to respond to 401 requests from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). In its response to the lawmakers’ letter, TransDigm “question(ed) an assertion that TransDigm companies refused to provide cost or pricing data supporting the reasonableness of their prices,” and claimed they are “not currently aware of any such instances” where TransDigm companies refused to provide cost or pricing data. TransDigm additionally refused to provide information about how many transactions in the last year fell below and above the TINA reporting requirement threshold.
“The explanation for the discrepancy between TransDigm’s claims and the DoD IG findings is that TransDigm appears to be taking advantage of loopholes in contracting law,” continued the lawmakers.
“Other defense contractors have worked to make it easier for military products to be labeled as ‘commercial,’ and TransDigm has benefited greatly from this loophole. TransDigm informed us that ‘products manufactured for commercial aircraft have near identical military counterparts’ which allows for a loophole to deny producing cost or pricing data by claiming ‘commerciality.’ In the latest report to Congress, TransDigm claimed ‘commerciality’ in about 90 percent of cases.”
Multiple DoD IG reports have also revealed that the overwhelming majority of TransDigm transactions fell below the threshold. And DoD shared with the lawmakers that the “Department is confident that the process is being followed and it shouldn’t be a surprise to any company (TransDigm) that a (contracting officer) requested specific data and it did not provide that data. In fact, in some cases the data is asked for multiple times during the elevation process to the head of the contracting activity.”
In response to the lawmakers’ May 2023 letter, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Dr. William A. LaPlante shared that the Head of the Contracting Activity (HCA) must make the decision to award a contract, including in cases where a contractor refuses to provide cost or pricing data if certain criteria were met. DoD also shared that it would not support an increase to the TINA threshold “due to concerns it would have a significant, negative impact on contracting officers’ ability to determine price reasonableness and negotiate reasonable prices.” DoD also shared that the Department does not track contractor delays in providing certified cost or pricing data, or data other than certified cost or pricing data.
“When TransDigm refuses to act in good faith, there are two options for the DoD: buy from TransDigm at their exorbitant prices, or walk away without the parts they need, putting mission readiness at risk,” wrote the lawmakers in their letter to TransDigm. “This lack of market competition leaves our military and national security vulnerable. In a statement before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the DoD’s Principal Director for Defense Pricing and Contracting, John Tenaglia, stated “the price we pay matters because the more we pay, the less combat capability we can acquire for a ready force.” DoD has also highlighted these concerns, sharing with us that “there could be instances where the Department purchases less due to increases in prices.” TransDigm’s ongoing refusal to provide DoD with pricing data is unacceptable given the company’s record of ripping off the government and taxpayers.”
Given these serious concerns, the lawmakers are asking DoD and TransDigm to answer a set of questions about cost or pricing data by December 13, 2023 to ensure taxpayers aren’t being price gouged.
Senator Warren has led vigilant oversight to hold military contractors accountable for price gouging DoD and consumers:
- In July 2023, chairing a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, Senator Warren called out DoD for wasting billions in taxpayers dollars due to price gouging by defense contractors for services and in health care, and identified opportunities for cost savings when DoD buys personnel-related goods and services.
- In July 2023, Senator Warren sent a letter to Secretary Austin and Director of the Defense Health Agency, Lieutenant General Telita Crosland, regarding a series of DoD Inspector General reports finding that DoD is failing to prevent price gouging and overpayments to contractors in the TRICARE health program.
- In May 2023, Senator Warren and Representative Garamendi sent letters to Boeing and TransDigm, calling out the defense contractors for their refusal to provide cost and pricing data to DoD, and they sent a letter to DoD calling on it to take action to address these contractors’ refusals to provide cost and pricing data.
- In October 2022, Senator Warren obtained a commitment from DoD not to increase contract prices due to inflation.
- In October 2022 Senator Warren sent a letter to DoD urging them to insist on receiving certified cost or pricing data to justify any contract adjustments.
- In June 2022, Senator Warren and Representative Garamendi introduced the bicameral Stop Price Gouging the Military Act, which would enhance DoD’s ability to access certified cost and pricing data. Part of Senator Warren’s legislation was incorporated into the FY 2023 National Defense Authorization Act reported to the Senate.
- In May 2021, Senator Warren introduced the Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would enforce limits to the influence of contractors on the military, restrict foreign influence on retired senior military officers, and assert greater transparency over contractors and their interaction with the DoD.
- In September 2020, Senator Warren and Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) formally requested that the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General (IG) investigate reports that the Pentagon redirected hundreds of millions of dollars of funds meant for COVID-19 response via the Defense Production Act (DPA) to defense contractors for "jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.”
- In May 2020, Senator Warren wrote to the Department requesting clarification on how the Department would prevent profiteering following a recent change to increase payments to contractors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- In May 2017, Senator Warren wrote to the DoD Inspector General, requesting an investigation into TransDigm for potential waste, fraud, and abuse in the military spares market.
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MERRIMACK, N.H. — Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will be visiting Israel on Sunday, making him the first Republican presidential candidate to travel to the country since the outbreak of the war.
During a town hall in Merrimack, New Hampshire, on Thursday, Christie said he plans to talk to families of the people taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, members of the Israel Defense Forces and government officials.
He told reporters he's unable to share more specifics about whom he's talking with until he gets there because of safety concerns.
Christie told the audience he is leaving for his trip Friday. He said he wants to "see it for myself," adding, "I don’t think you can try to be president of the United States and be afraid to go and see what’s happening on the ground."
“If you really want to lead, you need to go over and show the people of Israel, that one person running for president of United States cares enough to get on an airplane and get over there and do what needs to be done to find out how we fix this problem,” Christie later added.
Christie said the goal of his trip is to learn. “I’m just going to, like, ask a lot of questions and then shut up and listen, and hopefully it’ll make me a better candidate. And I’m confident it will make me a better president,” he said.
Christie told reporters Israel’s foreign ministry invited him come to Israel. Asked whether the ministry reached out to every candidate, he said, “I have no idea, but I can just tell you that they said they appreciated the things I was saying and the stance I was taking, if I was interested in coming over, they will be able to welcome me. And I made the decision to come.”
During the debate hosted by NBC News on Wednesday night, Christie said if he were in the Oval Office on the phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he would say, “America is here no matter what it is you need at any time to preserve the state of Israel.”
This is not Christie’s first time visiting a conflict zone while running for president. He made a surprise trip to Ukraine in early August.
CNN, which first broke this story, reports he is also planning to visit a part of southern Israel known as the Gaza envelope, a populated area that is about five miles from the Gaza Strip.
Christie is scheduled to give a foreign policy address at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, on Wednesday. | US Political Corruption |
A federal judge signed off on a settlement giving 200,000 student-loan borrowers $6 billion in debt relief last year.
In January, three companies requested a stay on the relief, citing reputational harm the settlement brought them.
Borrowers in the case recently filed a motion opposing the stay due to the harm postponing the relief would bring.
A group of student-loan borrowers who believe they were defrauded by their schools responded to the companies that want to block them from getting long-awaited debt relief.
In January, two for-profit higher-education companies — Lincoln Educational Services Corp. and American National University — and Everglades College, Inc., a nonprofit, filed notices to appeal federal Judge William Alsup's November decision to give 200,000 student-loan borrowers $6 billion in debt relief and requested that he put a stay on that relief as the appeals process plays out. Some of the borrowers who were set to see debt forgiveness attended colleges run by those companies, which were among many named in the November settlement.
This was a result of a lawsuit, Sweet v. Cardona, first filed in 2019 under former President Donald Trump's Education Department, in which the plaintiffs accused the department of failing to process borrower defense to repayment applications, which are claims borrowers can file if they believe they were defrauded by their school.
Per the terms of the settlement in favor of the students, the Education Department identified 153 schools it found to have engaged in misconduct, and any student who attended one of those schools would receive full relief automatically.
While President Joe Biden's Education Department agreed to the settlement and Alsup signed off on it, the three companies filed an appeal claiming they were not given "due process" after being included in the settlement, saying that they "will immediately suffer the stigma of having all BD claims against them summarily granted—without any administrative process, judicial factfinding, or reasoned decision on the merits."
Last week, the plaintiffs in the case filed an opposition to the request to the stay the relief, writing in the legal filing that the companies would not be harmed if the borrowers get relief, but the borrowers would be "severely harmed" if the process was paused.
"They have already waited years for the resolution of their borrower defense ('BD') applications, some of which have been pending since 2015," the filing said. "The loans that would be discharged under the Settlement continue to shadow them, affecting their credit, their livelihoods, their mental health, and countless other aspects of their lives. One hundred and forty-four borrowers have submitted declarations attesting to the harm a stay would cause them."
The filing went on to push back on the companies' concerns of reputational harm, saying they have failed to provide evidence of such harm, but noted how delaying this relief during the appeals process will significantly hurt borrowers. For example, one borrower said in the filing that the "stay will keep me from being able to take out enough loans to finish my degree, which I need in order to have a career that I can make a meaningful, livable wage with."
Alsup is set to take up the issue of granting a stay on February 15. Eileen Connor, president and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents the borrowers in the case, said in a statement that "each day that justice is delayed means additional harm for borrowers and their families who have already been forced to wait years for a resolution."
"These baseless appeals show just how hard students must fight to protect their rights and get relief they are owed under the law," she said. "The court's decision granting approval of this settlement is clear and unequivocal, and as our filing details, further delay would only compound the significant harm and trauma borrowers have suffered throughout this process." | US Federal Policies |
How did Miami's honcho clear the donation obstacle despite polling around 0.2 percent nationally?
Well, thanks to some unusual fundraising tactics — driven largely by luring donors with various goodies — Suarez was able slide past the threshold, notwithstanding his campaign trail gaffes. (Remember the "weebles"?)
After raffling off front-row seats to Lionel Messi's Inter Miami CF debut in late July, the presidential hopeful resorted to more direct means of enticement. Following in the footsteps of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a wealthy ex-Microsoft executive and fellow presidential candidate, Suarez promised $20 Visa gift cards to each donor who contributes at least $1 to his page on WinRed, the GOP's fundraising platform.
"Everything costs more in Joe Biden's America so, to help you out, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is offering you a free $20 Visa gift card when you donate just one dollar to his campaign," the promotion reads.
The gift-card enticement method has been untested before the Federal Elections Commission, but it raises questions how the resulting donations should be categorized given that campaigns could be construed as recycling their own money by paying for contributions. In Suarez's campaign, for example, a $1 donor receives $19 net in return.
Some experts have voiced concerns about whether the tactic jibes with federal election law that prohibits a political donor from making contributions "in the name of another person," AKA a straw donor. Campaign finance lawyer Paul S. Ryan told The Atlantic it would set a "horrible precedent" if politicians are allowed to offer gift cards in exchange for donations.
Burgum and Suarez's promotions have been criticized for circumventing the spirit of the Republican National Committee debate qualifications, which encourage widespread grassroots support. To qualify for the August 23 debate, the committee requires 40,000 unique donors, with blocks of at least 200 donors each spread across 20 states or U.S. territories.
Suarez's promotion was heavily advertised on social media by SOS America, the political action committee supporting Suarez's campaign. A promotional link, which is now dead, included SOS America PAC in the URL. Suarez also promoted the giveaway on his Twitter account.
When contacted by New Times, PAC spokesperson Chapin Fay said the super PAC has "nothing to do" with the gift card fulfillment.
"The gift card promotion was done by the official campaign," Fay said.
SOS America previously ran a contest to win a year of college tuition, up to $15,000, in exchange for a $1 donation.
Under federal law, super PACs cannot donate directly to candidates or coordinate with them or their campaigns. Federal elections attorney Kenneth Gross tells New Times, however, that it's hard to prove coordinated communications between a candidate and their super PAC, especially in a timely fashion.
While candidates are prohibited from paying people for their votes, there is no law that explicitly bars a candidate from compensating them in exchange for a donation, he says.
"It was a unique scheme when the governor of North Dakota did the same thing with success," Gross adds. "It will be interesting to see how this all plays out."
The timetable for when the Suarez campaign will be sending the gift cards is unclear. New Times has not received a response to questions submitted to the campaign regarding the fulfillment process.
Meanwhile, some folks are claiming they donated to Suarez but have yet to receive their gift cards. And they appear to be getting antsy.
One man tells New Times he donated on July 31 and has not received his gift card despite his account being charged. He adds that he hasn't received any confirmation that the card is processing or when it will arrive. He says he also donated to the Burgum campaign and received the gift card from that promotion ten days later.
Still waiting for my gift card.— MAT (@Mookie1969) August 8, 2023
"All I get is more emails saying I should donate to receive my card, but I guess I’ll wait and see," he says of the Suarez donation.
John Penley, a Las Vegas resident, says he donated to the campaign on August 4 and contacted WinRed to find out when he would receive the card. The donor support service told him the fundraising platform was not running the promotion and he needs to reach out directly to the Suarez campaign. Penley tells New Times he hasn’t heard anything about the fulfillment process since he donated.
Given the novel nature of gift-card promotions to lure donors, super PACs associated with candidates using the strategy are likely to distance themselves from the card purchasing process. A super PAC's involvement in the buying process would run the risk of being classified as a direct campaign contribution, which could violate federal law.
FiveThirtyEight's poll of polls shows that Trump leads the Republican field of presidential candidates by a wide margin. More than 53 percent of surveyed voters favored Trump, followed by DeSantis (14.3 percent), then biotech financier Vivek Ramaswamy (7.5 percent).
The August 23 debate is slated to take place at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with Fox News' Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier as moderators.
In addition to the donor requirements to qualify for the debate, candidates must poll at least one percent in three national polls, or one percent in two national polls and one percent in an early state poll from two separate "carve out" states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina). | US Federal Elections |
WASHINGTON — After three weeks of chaos and paralysis over the speaker fight, House Republicans say there’s no appetite in their conference for lurching into another crisis: a government shutdown.
But with the deadline just nine days away, Congress still hasn’t come up with a plan to keep the lights on in Washington. Though many lawmakers are upbeat about averting a shutdown, the mood runs counter to their lack of progress and the uncertainty of a new House speaker who is still finding his feet.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., hasn’t announced a plan after walking Republicans through several options, and he said the details and next steps of a short-term funding bill remain up in the air.
“I’m not going to comment on it tonight,” he told NBC News on Tuesday. “All the work is still going.”
House Republicans are all over the map when it comes to how a short-term stopgap bill, known as a continuing resolution, or CR, should be structured. Most of them, however, agree that shutting the government down on Nov. 17 would be a bad idea and would cause more internal GOP strife. Further, a shutdown would be a huge distraction as the party tries to pass its remaining funding bills to set up a negotiation with the Senate on longer-term spending.
“There’s no appetite for a shutdown,” said Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., who is close to leadership and serves on both the Appropriations and Budget committees.
On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., declined Tuesday to reveal his preferences on a funding bill, how long it should last or when it might come to a vote.
“We hope we can get bipartisan agreement to move forward as quickly as possible,” he told reporters. “We’d like to get a CR done as quickly as possible. That’s what we think.”
Republicans are trying to coordinate across the chambers. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Senate GOP appropriator, was set to meet Wednesday with Johnson to discuss the path forward on government funding, said two sources with knowledge of the plan.
Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was ousted from power just days after he teamed with Democrats on a “clean” stopgap measure to avert the last shutdown threat on Sept. 30. It sparked a nasty civil war among House Republicans as they struggled for 22 days to elect McCarthy’s successor — a battle that froze the chamber and prevented the party from moving their spending bills.
“I think we have to give ourselves time to pass our appropriations bills. And we have to be realistic because we lost time during the speaker’s race," Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., another appropriator, said. "And in my opinion, we got to back the speaker. Ultimately, he will make the call based on our input."
“I don’t think anyone really wants a shutdown,” he added.
First-term Rep. John James, R-Mich., who represents a competitive district, didn’t express a preference on a stopgap bill, but said: “We have all the tools necessary to avert a shutdown. We’re going to do everything we can to do that.”
There is no shortage of ideas on how to structure the CR.
In a closed-door meeting this week, Johnson laid out three potential options for averting a shutdown, attendees said: A “two-step” process, favored by conservatives, where a handful of the spending bills would go on a CR through Dec. 7, and the others on a second CR through Jan. 19; a relatively “clean” CR through January to give the House more time to finish passing their spending bills; and Option 3, what leaders described as getting “jammed by Senate, negotiate best we can get.”
“I think we can’t get too cute, and you want to make it as simple as possible,” Bilirakis said of the two-step CR idea.
Some conservatives say they won't back a clean funding bill without conservative priorities, while other lawmakers are trying to attach aid for Israel or Ukraine to any CR that moves.
“I’m not interested right now personally in a clean CR. I want to see something attached to it," Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, suggesting that he wants to see provisions related to the border, but that those being floated in the Senate are insufficient.
Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., said he would like to see a short-term bill that lowers spending from current levels to the caps established in a two-year budget deal in May.
“Look, my personal preference is, I guess, less important than what can get 218 votes,” he said. “So I’m flexible in terms of where to get to avoid a shutdown, while at the same time getting us to the place that maximizes our leverage with the Senate.”
Like several of his ultraconservative Freedom Caucus colleagues, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., is backing the two-step approach, which Johnson has referred to as a “laddered CR.”
“I like the ladder approach. I want to do our best to pass as many appropriations bills as we can this fiscal year,” Buck said.
But even some conservatives who support it acknowledge the idea has lost momentum. Talk of a laddered CR "has died down," said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn.
And Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, called the idea "politically DOA," arguing that "Democrats will reject it out of hand."
Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., blasted the multitiered approach as one that would wreak “havoc and uncertainty” on Americans and industries.
“It’s stunning to me because if you think about conservative Republicans of the past, certainty was what they wanted — limited government and certainty,” she said. “A laddered approach makes no sense. We have to be grown-ups and pass a clean CR and then pass a full budget.”
Some lawmakers say the most plausible scenario is that Johnson puts a relatively clean CR on the floor, just before the shutdown deadline, that can pass with both Republican and Democratic votes — just as McCarthy did before his ouster. But even McCarthy's biggest detractors have said they'll give Johnson more breathing room than his predecessor and it’s unlikely any Republican would force a vote to remove him given that he was elected just two weeks ago with support from all 221 Republicans.
"We all learned a lesson from the motion to vacate. It was difficult to find a speaker, a lot of people didn't want to be speaker and we had trouble getting enough people to to support a speaker," Buck said. "So, I don't think you're gonna see a motion to vacate again in this Congress."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the next steps on a stopgap bill will be up to Schumer to decide in the upper chamber, and he'll then need to sort it out with Johnson.
“On the date issue, I assume the majority leader and the speaker will reach some kind of agreement,” McConnell said. | US Congress |
- Sens. Warren and Sanders joined 6 of their colleagues in calling for a strengthened gainful employment rule.
- The rule would cut off federal aid to schools that offer programs that leave students with more debt than their degree can pay off.
- Trump repealed the rule, and Biden has since delayed its timeline to reinstate it.
President Joe Biden has taken steps to crack down on schools that offer degrees to students that won't pay off the debt they took on — but Democratic lawmakers think he can go even further to prevent an endless cycle of repayment after graduation.
Last week, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders joined six of their Democratic colleagues, including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, in urging Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal in a letter to strengthen protections for students that enroll in "low-financial-value programs" — "postsecondary programs that saddle students with unaffordable debt and provide low financial returns."
The lawmakers wrote that with tuition continuing to increase, students are forced to take on more debt, making measures to increase transparency about the value of college degrees all the more important. One way that can happen is through the gainful employment rule, which cuts off federal aid for schools that offer career and certificate programs that leave students with a large of amount of student debt compared to their likely post-graduation earnings.
It was first established by former President Barack Obama in 2014, intended to prevent students from excessively borrowing loans they would not be able to repay given the degrees they earned. However, former President Donald Trump repealed the rule in 2019, and Biden pushed off the rule's reinstatement to July 2024 at the earliest.
"To further ensure institutions are held accountable, we support the reinstatement and strengthening of the forthcoming proposed gainful employment rule to ensure career education programs at for-profit and non-degree institutions lead to a job in a graduate's field and allow a graduate to repay their student loan debt," the Democratic lawmakers wrote.
"We urge the Department to take immediate action to publish and implement the rule as soon as practicable to ensure harmful actors are held accountable for enrolling students into low-quality programs," they added.
While for-profit schools have been accused in the past of misrepresenting their programs to students and engaging in fraudulent behavior, the gainful employment rule applies to almost all programs offered by for-profit schools, along with certificate programs at public and nonprofit schools. Alongside the reinstatement of this rule, the lawmakers also called for the Education Department to prioritize relief through borrower defense to repayment claims, which are claims borrowers can file if they believe they were defrauded by the school they attended.
As Insider previously reported, Kvaal in 2018 called Trump's repeal of the rule "negligent" when he was serving as the president of the Institute for College Access and Success.
"It's one thing to say we're struggling to implement this," Kvaal said at the time. "But to say we're going to ignore this regulation because we've encountered logistical problems, I think it's negligent and failing to carry out their responsibilities."
Advocates have also pushed for the reinstatement of the rule, along with other measures to prevent schools from offering degrees that won't pay off post-grad. The Project on Predatory Student Lending and Student Defense — two borrower advocacy groups — submitted a comment to the Education Department last week, saying that "if programs are of little or no value to students or the public, there is little reason to either encourage student investment of time and money or commit taxpayer funds to support the institution."
A department spokesperson told Insider last year that the "administration is committed to preventing a future student debt crisis by holding colleges and universities accountable if they leave students with mountains of debt or without good jobs." | US Federal Policies |
Joe Biden is having a rough summer. The US supreme court has overturned Roe v Wade, ending federal protections for abortion access. Although gas prices are now falling, they remain high and have driven inflation to its largest annual increase in more than 40 years. West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has finally ended any hopes that the president had of passing a climate bill in Congress. With an evenly divided Senate, Biden’s options for addressing these problems – or enacting any of his other legislative priorities – are bleak.The American people have taken note. Biden’s approval rating has steadily fallen since April and now sits in the high 30s. A recent Monmouth poll found that only 10% of Americans believe the country is heading in the right direction.Amid this pessimism, Democrats are bracing for a potential shellacking in the midterm elections, as Republicans appear poised to regain control of the House of Representatives. Faced with a grim outlook for 2022, some Democrats are already looking ahead to 2024 and asking, is Joe Biden the best person to lead the party and the nation?Questions over whether Biden should seek re-election in 2024 have grown louder in recent weeks. A New York Times/Siena College poll taken this month found that 64% of Democrats say they would prefer a different nominee for 2024. Among Democrats under 30, that figure rises to 94%.Ellen Sciales, a spokesperson for the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said voters of her generation have grown disillusioned with Biden and other Democratic party leaders. After turning out to vote at near-record levels in 2020, young voters are now watching in dismay as the climate crisis accelerates and reproductive rights are stripped away, Sciales said.“Democrats should be treating the loss of my generation as an existential threat,” Sciales said. “We’ve been warning Democrats that unless they pass real meaningful policy immediately, like what was promised in Build Back Better, they are going to lose the engagement of so many voters, threatening their chances in 2022, 2024 and even further.”In addition to his sinking approval rating, Biden is facing increasingly pointed questions about his age. At 79 years old, Biden is already the oldest president in US history, and if re-elected, he would be 86 when his second term ended. The Times/Siena poll found that age and poor job performance ranked as the top two reasons why Democrats said Biden should not run again in 2024.The White House has publicly dismissed concerns about Biden getting older. “That is not a question that we should be even asking,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said last month.But some of Biden’s aides privately tell a different story. According to a recent New York Times report, White House staffers have expressed hesitation about scheduling long international trips for Biden, out of concern that they are too taxing for him. They also worry that Biden’s slower, more shuffling gait could cause him to fall, and they fret over his tendency to jumble words in speeches. David Axelrod, who previously served as Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist, has said that Biden’s age could be a “major issue” if he seeks re-election.A New York Times columnist last week wrote an article titled “Joe Biden is Too Old to be President Again”, but pointed out that this was a wider problem with US politics. “There’s a problem here that goes beyond Biden himself. We are ruled by a gerontocracy. Biden is 79. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 82. The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, is 83. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is 71. Often, it’s not clear if they grasp how broken this country is.”Biden insists he still plans to run again in 2024, assuming his health cooperates. “I’m a great respecter of fate. Fate has intervened in my life many, many times,” Biden said in December. “If I’m in the health I’m in now, if I’m in good health, then in fact, I would run again.”But those comments have not quelled the 2024 conversation, even among fellow Democrats. When progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked whether she would endorse Biden as the Democratic nominee in 2024, she demurred.“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Ocasio-Cortez said last month. Weeks later, she dodged questions from late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert about whether she would consider launching her own presidential campaign in 2024.If Ocasio-Cortez or another progressive leader chose to challenge Biden, it would be a historic candidacy. No sitting Democratic president has faced a primary challenge since 1980, when Ted Kennedy chose to run against Jimmy Carter as the country faced record-high inflation and gas shortages. Carter was able to defeat Kennedy in the primary, but he ultimately lost the general election to a Republican candidate who promised to “make America great again”: Ronald Reagan..Jon Ward, author of Camelot’s End, which chronicles the 1980 Democratic primary, said there are some clear parallels and important distinctions between Carter and Biden. While Carter had a clear-cut opponent in Kennedy, it remains unclear who – if anyone – from the Democratic party’s highest ranks would challenge Biden.But one element working in Biden’s favor is time, Ward said. The 2024 presidential election is still more than two years away, giving the economy some breathing room to return to a place of greater stability.“There’s time for inflation to ease and for the economy to turn around,” Ward said. “However, it’s not clear that’s where we’re headed, since there are a lot of forecasts of recession and even the prospect of the very ‘stagflation’ that crippled Carter.”Biden’s allies insist he has time to improve the economy and the nation’s broader outlook, and they are generally dismissive of polls indicating he should step aside in 2024.“Polls are a snapshot of the time,” said Antjuan Seawright, Democratic strategist and senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Truth be told, what’s hot today could be cold tomorrow, and what’s cold today, it could be very hot tomorrow.”Seawright criticized the recent 2024 chatter as “a manufactured outrage from a few in our party”, suggesting those who are engaging in the speculation should instead rededicate themselves to the midterm elections.Even some of the progressives who did not support Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary echo that point. Rahna Epting, executive director of the progressive group MoveOn, said she has not yet been talking about the 2024 election because of her single-minded concentration on the midterms.Emphasizing the urgency of the upcoming elections, Epting noted that some of the gubernatorial, state legislative and secretary of state races being held this year will have sweeping implications for 2024. A number of Republican candidates who have embraced Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 race are now running for posts that could help them determine election rules in 2024.“We’re going to find out whether our elections in 2024 are going to be free and fair, based on who ends up in office in 2022,” Epting said. “The very terrain of our democracy and our election system is going to be decided this election cycle.” | US Federal Elections |
Johnson leans into conservative demands with two-tiered plan to avert shutdown
It already seems unlikely the spending plan could pass the House, with the new speaker saying they would need Democrats to support it.
Speaker Mike Johnson is leaning into the demands of his right flank, planning to head off a Friday government shutdown deadline with a risky two-tiered spending idea.
The proposal tees up two different funding deadlines for different parts of the government: one on Jan. 19 and the other on Feb. 2. The strategy ramps up the chances of a shutdown, since Senate Democrats are almost certain to reject the idea. Even some House Republicans have been publicly skeptical of the two-deadline system, which lawmakers have referred to as a “laddered” continuing resolution.
Johnson has told members he plans to bring the plan up for a floor vote on Tuesday, but its chances already seem bleak. The speaker told members on the call Saturday that he expected some Republicans to vote against it and that they would need some Democratic backing, but the minority party has already signaled that they would only support a so-called “clean” stopgap bill, not the two-tiered system conservatives had favored.
Johnson told the House GOP that if this package fails to pass the chamber, he plans to bring a full-year stopgap spending bill to the floor. That package would include blanket cuts to non-defense spending, he said, according to two Republicans on the call.
The proposed spending bill would also officially extend the farm bill through September 2024, as well as extend other less controversial health programs.
It doesn’t include any additional money for Israel, Ukraine or the border, with Johnson saying in a statement that those spending measures needed separate consideration.
“This two-step continuing resolution is a necessary bill to place House Republicans in the best position to fight for conservative victories. The bill will stop the absurd holiday-season omnibus tradition of massive, loaded up spending bills introduced right before the Christmas recess. Separating out the CR from the supplemental funding debates places our conference in the best position to fight for fiscal responsibility, oversight over Ukraine aid, and meaningful policy changes at our Southern border,” Johnson said.
Even conservatives don’t seem to be fully on board. House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) immediately announced on X he would oppose the legislation, saying it amounted to a “clean CR.”
“My opposition to the clean CR just announced by the Speaker ... cannot be overstated. Funding Pelosi level spending & policies for 75 days — for future ‘promises,’” he wrote. | US Congress |
MADISON, Wis. -- There should be no effort to impeach a liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice based on what is known now, a former justice advised the Republican legislative leader who asked him to review the issue.
Some Republicans had raised the prospect of impeaching newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz if she did not recuse from a redistricting lawsuit seeking to toss GOP-drawn legislative district boundary maps. On Friday, she declined to recuse herself, and the court voted 4-3 along partisan lines to hear the redistricting challenge.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had asked three former justices to review the possibility of impeachment. One of those three, David Prosser, sent Vos an email on Friday, seemingly just before Protasiewicz declined to recuse, advising against moving forward with impeachment.
Prosser turned the email over to the liberal watchdog group American Oversight as part of an open records request. The group has filed a lawsuit alleging that the panel Vos created is breaking the state open meetings law.
“To sum up my views, there should be no effort to impeach Justice Protasiewicz on anything we know now,” Prosser wrote to Vos. “Impeachment is so serious, severe, and rare that it should not be considered unless the subject has committed a crime, or the subject has committed indisputable ‘corrupt conduct’ while ‘in office.’"
Vos on Monday made his first comments about Protasiewicz since she declined to recuse from the case and Vos got the email from Prosser. In his statement, Vos did not mention impeachment. He did not return text messages Monday or early Tuesday seeking further comment.
Vos raised the threat of impeachment because he argued that Protasiewicz had prejudged the redistricting case when during her campaign she called the current maps “rigged” and “unfair.” Vos also said that her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party would unduly influence her ruling.
Protasiewicz on Friday rejected those arguments, noting that other justices have accepted campaign cash and not recused from cases. She also noted that she never promised or pledged to rule on the redistricting lawsuit in any way. | SCOTUS |
As early as George Washington’s presidency, Americans have wanted not only to be vocal, but also visual about their support for different political movements. Emblazoned with faces, slogans, and poignant artwork, political buttons have been a steadfast touchpoint for our national discourse.The popularity of pins as a campaign strategy rose to prominence in 1896 during the heated presidential race between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. This was the first instance of a mass-produced button in US politics, which kicked off a golden age of political buttons. From there, the production of political buttons boomed into the millions, becoming a staple for every candidate, issue, manifesto, movement, and inauguration. Sourced mainly from the Rothstein Political Button Collection at Harvard Kennedy School Collection, a survey of the history of campaign pins reveals that we are still fighting about the same things today.In advance of the 2022 midterm elections, BuzzFeed News took a pointed look into the history of campaign pins, from the weird to the terrifying. | US Campaigns & Elections |
Key events:29m agoDemocrats bargain over climate with a familiar obstacle: Joe ManchinShow key events onlyWhen they were negotiating Build Back Better last year, president Joe Biden and Democratic leaders made proposals, and then tried to get all their lawmakers in Congress on board. The effort ended up failing, and now it appears they are trying a different strategy as they work on a new spending bill that could be announced in the weeks after Congress returns from recess.Negotiators appear to be focusing on writing legislation that will contain proposals all of its lawmakers will support - particularly in the Senate, where every Democrat’s vote will be needed to overcome a filibuster and pass the bill through the reconciliation procedure.Yesterday, Politico reported that lawmakers had reached an agreement on provisions to lower prescription drug costs, and The Washington Post’s report today signals that they’re trying to find consensus around measures to fight climate change - particularly those that would pass muster from Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator whose resistance doomed Build Back Better last year.Republicans are looking for ways to stop the effort. The Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has threatened to torpedo a bipartisan bill meant to fund American technological competitiveness if Democrats move forward with their unilateral proposal.Democrats bargain over climate with a familiar obstacle: Joe ManchinGood morning, US politics blog readers. Democrats are using what may be their limited time left controlling Congress to build a new spending package that will pay for many of the party’s priorities – such as fighting climate change. The Washington Post reported today that Joe Manchin, the West Virginia centrist who scuttled a previous spending effort last year, remains a sticking point in reaching a climate agreement, though talks are continuing.Here’s what else is going on today: President Joe Biden will present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 people in a ceremony at 2pm, including the gymnast Simone Biles, the actor Denzel Washington and, posthumously, Apple founder Steve Jobs and senator John McCain. American airports will get $1bn for upgrades from the federal government, paid for by the infrastructure bill enacted last year. The fallout from the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade continues, with Colorado’s governor moving to protect people seeking abortions, and a Louisiana court stopping the state from outlawing the procedure, for now. | US Federal Policies |
Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s.
She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world.
“From the moment you leave your house, you ask: what does the regime want?,” a Syrian explained to her. “The struggle becomes who can praise the government more.” The bigger the lie you uttered, the more loyal you were.
“The regime’s power resides in its ability to impose national fictions and to make people say and do what they otherwise would not,” Wedeen concluded. “
This obedience makes people complicit; it entangles them in self-enforcing relations of domination, thereby making it hard for participants to see themselves simply as victims of the state’s caprices.”
I was reminded of Wedeen’s research when the US Congress finally selected a speaker after weeks of chaos. Their choice, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is best known for ardently supporting ex-president Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Jo Biden, was rigged. Johnson was the head of the committee to question the integrity of the election. He constructed spurious legal arguments that tried to discredit the vote, though his proposals were thrown out by the US supreme court. He raised the unfounded theory that the voting machines used in the election were tampered with.
This claim is so groundless that Fox, the network that supported the allegation, had to pay nearly a billion dollars in a settlement with Dominion, the company that makes the machines.
Many of the Republican representatives who supported Johnson’s candidacy have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified. Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here.
And in a sense, they are. Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit. For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight.
Along with Wedeen’s Syrian example, I’m reminded of the Czech dissident and playwright Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, where he tells the story of a greengrocer in communist-era Prague who puts up pro-regime posters in his shop window. The greengrocer doesn’t believe the communist slogans; the people who make the slogans don’t believe in them; and the people who read them don’t believe in them.
But as long as everyone plays along, the system continues. It’s the act of not believing and yet pretending, rather than of fervently believing, which is the power of such systems. Your will is corroded: you are made into moral mincemeat that can be shaped any which way by the leader.
Havel nobly suggested that in order to fight such a system, what was needed was to “live in truth”, start being honest. Republican politicians face none of the danger communist-era Czechoslovaks or Syrians under the Assads have, but living in truth seems beyond them.Contradicting Trump’s absurdities risks falling out of favour with the leader and his supporters.
Altogether, about 40% of Americans think the 2020 vote was illegitimate, and about 60% of Republicans (the figures fluctuate). A democracy will struggle to survive, let alone flourish, when such huge swathes of its population see it as their badge of loyalty not to trust its most fundamental processes.
But if the “rigged” election claim is more about identity than evidence, it also means it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation. The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie.
Pledging loyalty to the “big lie” is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfils. Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency.
Self-styled “populists” can flourish in what sociologists call “civic deserts”: frequently rural areas where the old institutions that bonded communities, the local clubs and town halls have disappeared and where civic engagement is particularly low.
But such communities can start to be regenerated for a digital age with, for example, online as well as offline town halls; reinvigorated local news that responds to people’s priorities; and online municipal budget making and other innovations that help people feel part of a community and have ownership over local politics.
Historical lessons from understanding and fighting propaganda can be useful here too. When he investigated the psychology of German soldiers in the second world war, the British psychiatrist Henry Dicks thought that counterpropaganda needed to stress the bonds people had that went beyond belonging to the Nazi Volk: the emotional bonds they felt with loved ones and relatives, for example.
The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It’s a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists? | US Congress |
Donald Trump’s new indictment by a grand jury in Washington, D.C., for crimes related to his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, counts as another blow to his reputation.
He might be convicted. But even if he’s not, a set of deeper issues has clearly emerged already: Many leaders and politicians today just cling to power. Heedless of the common good, they seem to forget that the judgment of posterity will come, inescapably.
One clear diagnosis of this problem came almost 40 years ago from Robert Bellah, the renowned American sociologist, when he spotted a momentous transformation. It was 1986, and President Ronald Reagan had entered his second term.
Bellah felt that public officials lived too much in the moment. He feared that politicians had become too ambitious and egotistical, and had come to disregard not only their own reputation, but also, to some extent, the future itself – since “reputation” is a relation among people and among generations.
If politicians think that “private ambition, material aggrandizement, and looking out for number one are the most important things,” Bellah wrote, then they are implicitly suggesting that you should change into “a bad person.”
The transformation lamented by Bellah may not be irreversible, but many public figures have come dangerously close to the tenet once attributed to Louis XV, king of France in the 18th century: “Après moi le déluge,” “After me the flood” – which means that they are largely insensitive to what will remain after they are gone.
People, especially public figures, were highly concerned about their reputation, or “character,” as it was usually called.
Honeymoon turns to hatred
How a person looked through other people’s eyes was an obsession in the 18th century.
An individual in society, Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith wrote in 1759, is “immediately provided with the mirror.” Everyone is “placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with.”
The American founders were particularly concerned about their reputations. Moreover, the judgment of posterity terrified them.
When Washington was about to enter the presidency, he realized his moral stature would suffer. “The eyes of Argus are upon me,” he wrote to his nephew Bushrod Washington in July 1789. Argus Panoptes, the many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, was watching Washington, “and no slip will pass unnoticed.”
When his turn for the highest office came, Thomas Jefferson also shivered with ominous presentiments.
“I know well that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it,” he wrote.
Public officials will unavoidably fall from grace, Jefferson concluded: “The honey moon would be as short in that case as in any other, and its moments of ecstasy would be ransomed by years of torment and hatred.”
The founders had good reasons to tremble for their reputation – many of these men enslaved other human beings. At the same time, none of them tried to cling to the role of leader when their time had passed. That was because they dreaded the idea that public opinion would censor them as self-serving and cunning operators.
And, more important, it was because they didn’t want to become an embarrassment, a hindrance, a chunk of gravel in the very machinery of the nation.
Stepping down
Washington, famously, set the example. In June 1799, Jonathan Trumbull Jr., the governor of Connecticut who had also served as Washington’s military secretary during the American Revolution, urged him to run for a third term. Many others had previously prodded him.
But Washington demurred. He was determined not to appear egotistical and be “charged” in the public eye “with concealed ambition.”
Perhaps even stronger, given the country’s heated political climate in the 1790s, there was also Washington’s awareness that he had become a problem himself.
“The line between Parties,” Washington wrote to Trumbull, had become “so clearly drawn” that politicians would “regard neither truth nor decency; attacking every character, without respect to persons – Public or Private – who happen to differ from themselves in Politics.”
Washington was aware that he was no longer the leader in the position to unify the nation in the way he did in the 1780s, at the end of the revolution. Even if he were willing to run for president again, “I am thoroughly convinced I should not draw a single vote” from the opposite side, he wrote Trumbull.
Retiring from public life
The founders were able to create a network of admirers who would serve as stewards of their reputation, while downplaying the missteps they made.
“Take care of me when dead,” old Jefferson begged James Madison, his friend of over 50 years, just a few months before he passed away.
For their part, flawed though these leaders were, they helped their friends and admirers by trying not to make them too uncomfortable. They stayed away from public controversy as much as they could. And when they believed they were done, they retired from the public scene – a political act in its own terms.
Even before entering the presidency, Washington wasn’t at all afraid to “tread the paths of private life.” He would do that eventually, right after his second term, in 1797, and “with heartfelt satisfaction.”
Washington had always accepted the unavoidable fact that, like every other mortal, he also would “move gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.”
Washington would be remembered as the American Cincinnatus. Just like Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the mythic Roman statesman and military leader, Washington himself relinquished power – and he did so voluntarily.
Relinquishing power and retiring were the best way to ensure Washington’s glory and reputation.
Apparently, passing the scepter to the next generation and worrying over one’s reputation don’t come as naturally today – at least to some. | US Political Corruption |
I’m as amused as the next person by the antics of George Santos, though it’s nice to see that when the House returns from its Thanksgiving break, his colleagues will vote to toss him out. Don’t confuse his possible ouster as an act of bravery on the part of Republicans—Santos is a severe liability in a key swing district that they’d love to hold onto next November, and that is the only reason they might vote to expel him. He will leave behind an entertaining legacy, I’ll give him that. Now I know what OnlyFans is, so that’s something.
But lets’ face it: The Santos ethics report, while scathing in an eye-popping way, is at best the fourth most important thing that happened in the world of Capitol Hill Republicans this week. Let’s pay attention to what matters.
Republicans seem bent on normalizing political violence, an agenda they advanced this week with Kevin McCarthy’s shoulder-check of his colleague Tim Burchett, and Senator Markwayne Mullin’s macho posturing during a Senate hearing. McCarthy denied that he meant anything by his shove, but Burchett, a serious right-winger in his own right who voted to oust McCarthy, said that it was definitely a “clean shot to the kidneys.”
Mullin’s preening was just an embarrassment for the United States Senate. How did a former MMA fighter become a United States senator anyway? Thank you, Oklahoma. And by the way, let’s not get carried away with the Mullin-as-Rambo theme. The guy is 5’8” and appears to have fought in just three MMA fights, which I ungrudgingly admit is three more than I have (and he did win them). But it doesn’t make him Mike Tyson.
Far worse than what Mullin did was the way he handled it afterward. You might have thought that he’d say, a bit sheepishly, that maybe things got a little out of hand there. You’re living in another time if you thought that. What he did was that he went on Newsmax—I guess there are now cases when Fox is for squishes—and bragged about it.
“You know, some people are real strong behind a keypad, but when they get called out, it’s completely different,” Mullin said. “People’s asked me, too, ‘Is this becoming of a U.S. senator.’ And I’m like, man, I’m a guy from Oklahoma first. In Oklahoma, you don’t run your mouth like that, and if you do run your mouth like that, you’re expected to be called out on it.”
His Newsmax interlocutor then asked him if anything in Senate rules allowed for the settling of disputes frontier-style. “Well, we looked into the rules, and you know, you used to be able to cane,” came Mullin’s reply.
He was referring of course to one of the most notorious incidents in the history of the Senate, the caning on the Senate floor of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks after Sumner had attacked Brooks’s cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, over his pro-slavery views. It’s not true that anybody “used to be able to cane.” Obviously, that was against Senate rules then as now.
The way things are headed, is it really crazy to imagine that we’re maybe weeks or months away from an incident of real violence by some right-wing Trumpist against a liberal Democrat on the House or Senate floor? Violence is celebrated in MAGA land. A poll came out last month showing that exactly one third of Republicans think violence may be necessary to prevail in politics. Only 13 percent of Democrats think so.
We’re at the point where it seems more likely than not that we’ll see violence—not random, and more orchestrated than isolated—before or certainly on Election Day. That’s a little more important than what Santos bought at Hermes.
But that’s not the only matter from which Santos is drawing attention. Rolling Stone’s scoop on new Speaker Mike Johnson’s remarks on a Christian radio show—where he characterized America as “depraved” and “dark” and almost irredeemable—was one of the more disturbing highlights of the week. What brought him to this low estimation of America? Is it perhaps because of greed, or the way we treat poor people—you know, the kind of admonition the actual Jesus might levy? No, Johnson is trashing the country because one-quarter of high-schoolers (an estimate that is undoubtedly a preposterous exaggeration, but so what if it isn’t?) aren’t straight.
He’s entitled to hold whatever bigoted and kooky views he wants personally. But does he understand as an elected public servant that his duty is to uphold and defend the Constitution and our laws, and that Americans have equal protection under the law whatever their sexuality? This man may prove to be a danger in ways the feckless McCarthy could not have begun to imagine being.
Finally, we have this week’s refreshing admission from Texas Republican Chip Roy, who in a rant on the House floor told the actual truth about his do-nothing party. “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy said. “One!”
He’s so close to figuring it out! As Roy well knows, the GOP is not in Washington to do anything. Certainly they’re not that interested in legislating. They are there to disrupt, troll, raise money, go on Fox and Newsmax, rinse and repeat. It’s really no wonder that George Santos thought he’d fit in well with these people. Don’t get me wrong—we’re all better off with Republicans not trying to do things, because on those rare occasions where they do, it’s uniformly horrible for the country.
These are the four faces of modern Republicanism: the contempt for truth and easy embrace of the facile lie (as practiced by Santos); the disdain for doing the job of legislating for the people (as noted by Roy); the articulation of the bigoted theocratic world view (as expressed by Johnson); and the veneration of violence (as described by Mullin). Lies, hatred of government, bigotry, and violence. The Four Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse. | US Congress |
Earlier today, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that Republicans will move forward with an official impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, despite the embarrassing fact that, as House Freedom Caucus member Ken Buck told MSNBC on Sunday, they haven’t uncovered a single piece of evidence “linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor.” Also deeply embarrassing? The tantrum Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is now having over not getting the credit she thinks she deserves for calling to impeach Biden first.
Greene—who commemorated 9/11 one day earlier by calling the president’s policies “traitorous” and suggesting states should secede—was apparently triggered by a post from Congressman Matt Gaetz, who wrote, “When @SpeakerMcCarthy makes his announcement in moments, remember that as I pushed him for weeks, [Fox News host Brian Kilmeade] said I was: ‘Speaking into the wind’ on impeachment. Turns out, the wind may be listening!”
That didn’t sit right with Greene, who has been absurdly calling for Biden’s impeachment since he took office in 2021—and she needed to make sure everyone knew that. Taking to the platform formerly known as Twitter, she responded: “Correction my friend. I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was Vice President on his very first day in office. You wouldn’t cosponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to cosponsor my articles on the border. Who’s really been making the push?”
Earlier in the day, Greene claimed that “launching an Impeachment Inquiry into Joe Biden isn’t a tall order” and that the GOP Oversight Committee has supposedly “uncovered mountains of evidence of crimes and corruption committed by the Biden family.” (To date, the committee has not shared said evidence with the public, which may be because, in the words of Greene’s colleague Buck, it “doesn’t exist right now.”) Shortly before McCarthy’s announcement, Ian Sams, the White House spokesman for oversight and investigations, wrote on X: “McCarthy is being told by Marjorie Taylor Greene to do impeachment, or else she’ll shut down the government. Opening impeachment despite zero evidence of wrongdoing by POTUS is simply red meat for the extreme rightwing so they can keep baselessly attacking him. They admit it.”
In other impeachment news, Politico reports that, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump is working behind the scenes with Republicans to impeach his likely 2024 competition. According to the outlet, the ex-president “has been speaking weekly with House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik, who was the first member of Republican leadership to come out in support of impeachment,” and the two reportedly chatted shortly after McCarthy announced the inquiry today. The former guy also had dinner with Greene on Sunday night at his Bedminster golf club, where “the topic of impeachment was discussed,” per the outlet. Last month on Truth Social, in a post all but admitting the impeachment push was solely about retribution, Trump wrote: “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US.”
If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe. | US Political Corruption |
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan warned Donald Trump in August that she would not tolerate any actions that could be perceived as witness intimidation by the former president in his 2020 election meddling case. She’s now considering a motion for a partial gag-order on Trump’s public statements.
According to a Friday filing, Justice Department prosecutors are seeking “a narrow, well-defined restriction that is targeted at extrajudicial statements that present a serious and substantial danger of materially prejudicing this case.”
The proposed order would include “(a) statements regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses; and (b) statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.”
In other words, the DOJ wants a court order preventing Trump from making public statements that could intimidate witnesses or jeopardize the integrity of the case.
According to another court filing released Friday, Chutkan granted a request from the Justice Department to have a redacted version of the motion against Trump filed to the case’s public docket. In the judge’s initial decision, she wrote that prosecutors allege Trump “targeted with inflammatory public statements” individuals “who were subsequently subjected to threats and harassment,” and that their identities would be removed from the public filing.
Trending
Last month, Chutkan partially granted a protective order that restricted Trump and his legal team’s ability to share potentially sensitive evidence made available to them in the course of the trial. During the hearing announcing her ruling, Chutkan warned the former president’s attorneys that she would take “whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”
“Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel, if they can be reasonably interpreted to intimidate witnesses or to prejudice potential jurors, can threaten the process,” she said. | US Political Corruption |
Secret Service opens fire on people attempting to break into car outside Naomi Biden's home: Sources
Naomi Biden, 29, is the president's granddaughter.
The Metropolitan Police Department and Secret Service are investigating an agent-involved shooting after possibly three individuals attempted to break into a government car outside the Georgetown home of President Joe Biden’s granddaughter, Naomi Biden, according to sources familiar with the situation.
While a Secret Service spokesperson didn’t identify the protectee, he said did say Sunday night just before midnight in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Secret Service agents encountered possibly three individuals breaking a window on a parked and unoccupied government vehicle.
"During this encounter, a federal agent discharged a service weapon and it is believed no one was struck," the spokesperson said. "The offenders immediately fled the scene in a red vehicle and a regional lookout was issued to supporting units. There was no threat to any protectees and the incident is being investigated by the DC Metropolitan Police Department and the Secret Service."
It is unclear if Naomi Biden heard the commotion but she was made aware of the incident afterward, according to sources.
The Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.
Naomi Biden, 29, is the daughter of Hunter Biden and his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, and work as a lawyer at the firm of Arnold & Porter. She married Peter Neal in a ceremony at the White House in November 2022.
ABC News' Mark Osborne contributed to this report. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Michigan to join state-level effort to regulate AI political ads as federal legislation pends
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is expected to sign legislation in the coming days aimed at curbing deceptive uses of artificial intelligence and manipulated media
LANSING, Mich. -- Michigan is joining an effort to curb deceptive uses of artificial intelligence and manipulated media through state-level policies as Congress and the Federal Elections Commission continue to debate more sweeping regulations ahead of the 2024 elections.
Campaigns on the state and federal level will be required to clearly say which political advertisements airing in Michigan were created using artificial intelligence under legislation expected to be signed in the coming days by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. It also would prohibit use of AI-generated deepfakes within 90 days of an election without a separate disclosure identifying the media as manipulated.
Deepfakes are fake media that misrepresent someone as doing or saying something they didn't. They're created using generative artificial intelligence, a type of AI that can create convincing images, videos or audio clips in seconds.
There are increasing concerns that generative AI will be used in the 2024 presidential race to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.
Candidates and committees in the race already are experimenting with the rapidly advancing technology, which can create convincing fake images, video and audio clips in seconds and in recent years has become cheaper, faster and easier for the public to use.
The Republican National Committee in April released an entirely AI-generated ad meant to show the future of the United States if President Joe Biden is reelected. Disclosing in small print that it was made with AI, it featured fake but realistic photos showing boarded-up storefronts, armored military patrols in the streets, and huge increases in immigration creating panic.
In July, Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, used an AI voice cloning tool to imitate former President Donald Trump’s voice, making it seem like he narrated a social media post he made despite never saying the statement aloud.
Experts say these are just glimpses of what could ensue if campaigns or outside actors decide to use AI deepfakes in more malicious ways.
So far, states including California, Minnesota, Texas and Washington have passed laws regulating deepfakes in political advertising. Similar legislation has been introduced in Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey and New York, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen.
Under Michigan's legislation, any person, committee or other entity that distributes an advertisement for a candidate would be required to clearly state if it uses generative AI. The disclosure would need to be in the same font size as the majority of the text in print ads, and would need to appear “for at least four seconds in letters that are as large as the majority of any text" in television ads, according to a legislative analysis from the state House Fiscal Agency.
Deepfakes used within 90 days of the election would require a separate disclaimer informing the viewer that the content is manipulated to depict speech or conduct that did not occur. If the media is a video, the disclaimer would need to be clearly visible and appear throughout the video's entirety.
Campaigns could face a misdemeanor punishable by up to 93 days in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both for the first violation of the proposed laws. The attorney general or the candidate harmed by the deceptive media could apply to the appropriate circuit court for relief.
Federal lawmakers on both sides have stressed the importance of legislating deepfakes in political advertising, and held meetings to discuss it, but Congress has not yet passed anything.
A recent bipartisan Senate bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and others, would ban “materially deceptive” deepfakes relating to federal candidates, with exceptions for parody and satire.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson flew to Washington, D.C. in early November to participate in a bipartisan discussion on AI and elections and called on senators to pass Klobuchar and Hawley's federal Deceptive AI Act. Benson said she also encouraged senators to return home and lobby their state lawmakers to pass similar legislation that makes sense for their states.
Federal law is limited in its ability to regulate AI at the state and local levels, Benson said in an interview, adding that states also need federal funds to tackle the challenges posed by AI.
“All of this is made real if the federal government gave us money to hire someone to just handle AI in our states, and similarly educate voters about how to spot deepfakes and what to do when you find them,” Benson said. “That solves a lot of the problems. We can’t do it on our own.”
In August, the Federal Election Commission took a procedural step toward potentially regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political ads under its existing rules against “fraudulent misrepresentation.” Though the commission held a public comment period on the petition, brought by Public Citizen, it hasn’t yet made any ruling.
Social media companies also have announced some guidelines meant to mitigate the spread of harmful deepfakes. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced earlier this month that it will require political ads running on the platforms to disclose if they were created using AI. Google unveiled a similar AI labeling policy in September for political ads that play on YouTube or other Google platforms.
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Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed from Washington.
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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content. | US Local Policies |
Trump and his allies and acolytes are publicly planning to make him America’s first de facto dictator, which will mean the end of the country’s democracy. Their plans are detailed in such documents and organizations as Agenda 47, Project 2025, and the Red Caesar scenario.
Journalists, pundits, the mainstream political class, other experts, and everyday Americans who follow politics and current events closely assume that the average member of the public does so as well. There are decades of research by political scientists and other experts, however, that shows this to not be true. In reality, most Americans are politically disengaged, lack a sophisticated understanding of political matters, are imagistic and emotional, have a difficult time retaining and understanding complex information, do not pay close attention to elections until they decide to vote, and more generally are civically illiterate. More than half of the American public reads below a sixth-grade level.
In all, the average voter also makes political decisions based on “calculations” and concerns that mainstream professional politics watchers — especially liberals and progressives — would find “irrational." The 2024 election is less than one year away and, at this early point, Trump is tied with or leading President Biden in the polls. Trump is also ahead of Biden in key “battleground” states as well. Given the Electoral College, voter nullification and voter suppression, gerrymandering and other structural failings in American “democracy” there is a very real and growing probability that Donald Trump will return to power in 2025.
The sum effect is that these discussions and warnings about America’s “democracy crisis” and “fascism” are often ignored or filtered out by large portions of the public as being just more “partisan bickering” and “politics as usual." Intervening against that dangerous tendency requires making the stakes and implications of Trump’s return to power and the end of American democracy very clear, very direct, and very real for the average person. The mainstream news media and political class have largely failed in that task.
To that point, this may be the last Thanksgiving where the American people will live in a democracy, however flawed and ailing it may be, where their basic Constitutional and other civil rights are relatively secure.
In an attempt to reflect on the meaning of this Thanksgiving in a time of such great troubles, and what this holiday will mean (and what they will be doing) when and if Dictator Trump takes power next year in 2024 and beyond, I reached out to a range of experts who I have spoken with previously for my conversation series here at Salon:
We need your help to stay independent
Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of "American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy."
I'm thankful for my loving little family. Our world may be on the verge of burning down, but at least we have each other — that and my wife's Canadian citizenship.
How will I spend Thanksgiving in the years following a Trump is re-election? In Canada, on the second Monday of October. I suppose we'll be thankful we got out, because Republicans at both the state and federal level are making it clear that their goal is a future with every trans person either in the closet or detransitioned.
How will I spend Thanksgiving in the years following a Trump is re-election? In Canada, on the second Monday of October.
If Trump goes down, the status quo holds for another 4 years. We'll see if the GOP continues to be just as dedicated to "eradicating transgenderism" in 2028. Based on the core characteristics of fascism, my guess is yes. For the foreseeable future, every general election will be a referendum on whether we should have meaningful elections ever again.
Rick Wilson is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a former leading Republican strategist, and author of two books, "Everything Trump Touches Dies" and "Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump - and Democrats from Themselves".
This Thanksgiving, I'm deeply thankful to see both of my children happy, successful, and married to loving, smart, supportive spouses. (We Wilson's can be a handful.) I'm grateful for my beautiful, brilliant fiancée Renee and the energy and joy she brings to my life every day.
If Trump wins in 2024, it'll be a dark Thanksgiving indeed. Like millions of Americans, I'll be contemplating how to protect my family from the coming authoritarianism Trump and his people have promised. As someone Trump ordered Bill Barr to investigate back in 2020, I'm likely on their list. It almost seems absurd to type those words, but it's important to plan for the worst.
If Trump loses in 2024, I'll raise a glass (or several) that Thanksgiving Day to every damn American who stayed in the fight until the end. Once he's gone, I'll keep giving groups and parties advice on keeping the lights of democracy and liberty on in a world where even if Trump is off the stage, authoritarianism and extremism still has a foothold. Aside from that, I hope I'll be watching my kids have their kids, traveling, writing more books, and flying and restoring antique airplanes.
I feel fortunate that Joe Biden is our president and a fierce advocate for democracy. In another time, that would be the most obvious expectation. But Donald Trump and his fascistic enablers have made it necessary to be clear who’s committed to American values like equality, diversity and justice—and who’s ready to toss it all away. Over the next year leading up to the 2024 elections, I expect Biden will further ramp up the pro-democracy agenda and messaging. That includes continuing to push back against the GOP role in stripping away women’s reproductive freedom and ignoring the will of the people, what we’ve learned is a powerful motivator to get people to the polls. Biden won in 2020 by over 7 million votes with the largest turnout (66.3 percent) in half a century.
I anticipate—and surely hope—2024 will generate the same passionate engagement, if not surpass it. That bodes well for Democrats, even though the various third-party candidates are a reason to worry they could tip the outcome in Trump’s favor.
The idea that a majority or sufficient plurality would choose to usher in an autocratic government with no mission beyond enabling Trump to seek vengeance against his enemies remains improbable. If I’m right, next Thanksgiving will be cause for great celebration. But if I’m wrong? Thanksgiving 2024 will look more like a funeral—the demise of the American democratic project—than a time to give thanks.
Nate Powell is a graphic novelist and the first cartoonist to win the National Book Award. Powell has also won four Eisner Awards. His forthcoming graphic novel, Fall Through, will be released in February 2024, followed by a comic adaptation of James Loewen’s influential "Lies My Teacher Told Me" in June.
The stakes of everything at ongoing risk always illuminate my relative safety, health, comfort, choice, voice, and the people with whom I share this life. I’m deeply thankful for the ability to safely be with friends and members of my creative communities again after three and a half years working our way out of the deepest depths of social isolation. I have so much gratitude for the continuing privilege of making ends meet by doing what I have wanted to do since I was 11 years old—and for people’s faith and support in my strange and emotional work in an often-undervalued medium. I’m thankful for the strangers throughout much of my local community who show basic humanity and decency, calling out my own tendency for judgment and dismissal and helping to reinstill much-needed faith in people. I’m thankful for having a chance to see one of my all-time favorite bands, The Hated, at a one-off reunion show deep in Maryland back in January—and how that experience helped galvanize much of the above gratitude throughout this foreboding year.
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If Trump wins in 2024? I spend a lot of time focused on just how eagerly people have memory-holed much of the last nine years (in fact, I made an entire book built on counteracting that urge in real time). Fragmented senses of continuity and context have been powerful conditions to allow the multiple, ongoing crises and inhumanities we witness and experience every day. I will be doing what I was doing for Thanksgiving every year since 2016: acknowledging the ongoing horror and radically deepened stakes, weeping, swearing, remembering, and then turning my phone off to focus on gratitude and love for the day, surrounded by a handful of people whose very right to exist in peace has (hypothetically) been destroyed. But Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday, and I find it very moving to observe the day with all the mess cut out, on my own terms. I will not let fascists take away that observance of humanity, that interconnectedness.
If Trump loses? In this best-case scenario (which I still, in fact, feel is more likely), I will do exactly the same thing as if the fascists won—there will be mass violence, fear, paranoia, and resentment to different degrees in either outcome. We are a decade into a massive, collective human struggle for the survival of multiracial democracy itself—and this era is only a chapter of the last century’s fight against white supremacy and fascism. This will be the rest of our lifetimes, and everyone needs to understand that fact. At the same time, allow yourself time and space for quiet, for sacredness, for love and human connection—do not relinquish these under any conditions.
Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor for The Atlantic.
It is hard to come up with a bundle of things to be thankful for given the state of the country and its politics. I am grateful that Glenn Youngkin and Virginia Republicans were rejected by voters in that state, that Pennsylvania chose a good justice for its Supreme Court, that Ohio rejected the disgraceful and dishonest Republican effort to impose draconian restrictions on abortion, that Kentucky chose to reelect its superb governor. I am grateful we do not have a government shutdown over the holidays. But our situation otherwise is pretty dire.
If Trump wins, I will likely spend my Thanksgiving talking to family about whether we should leave the country, and where we should go. That, sadly, is not an exaggeration. He has made clear what he will do, turning American into a fascist hellscape. If we decided to stay, I would have to think through how to fight back to keep some fragments of our decency and democracy.
If Trump loses, I will be very thankful. But if Republicans gain back the Senate, I will not be very hopeful that the next four years will provide the opportunities we need to tackle the big problems we face.
Rich Logis is a former right-wing pundit and high-ranking Trump supporter. He describes himself as "a remorseful ex-Trump, DeSantis and GOP voter."
Palpable dread, despair and hopelessness are pervasive throughout our communities on this Thanksgiving; I understand why so many feel politically paralyzed. However, our history shows that we are a resilient people, and I believe it’s because the vast majority of us are, despite our flaws, good and decent people—even, yes, most MAGA voters, who have been exploited by Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party. As a former devout MAGA activist, I left MAGA in 2022, after a year of struggling with the reality that I erred in supporting Trump and MAGA, and playing some role in getting him elected. I give thanks, on a daily basis (sometimes multiple times!), for my personal and political epiphany; because the scales fell from my eyes in my Road to Damascus transformation, I know it can happen for others. My own story is one of hope and redemption, and I see this as possible for our nation. To paraphrase the late, venerable American poetess, Maya Angelou: our nation is a multi-colored ocean, leaping and wide, welling and swelling, we bear the tide. We rise. We rise. We rise.
If Trump wins in 2024? I believe a second Trump presidency will irreparably damage our democracy. What would such an America look, and feel, like? I don’t know; no one does. In the most accurate definition of the word, the U.S. is exceptional, in that we are the only exception in world history: there is no other multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious (including freedom from religion), diverse, tolerant republic/democracy hybrid, in which the people directly participate in government representation and commerce; and is also both the most powerful military, and largest economy by GDP, in world history. We are, for the most part, on our own, in figuring out how to make this American experiment work with the least amount of combustibility, as possible.
Our progress over the last 247 years, since our founding, has never moved linearly; while we are a more equitable society today, much more work is needed, and it will be accompanied by struggle. We have it in our power to ensure that we never have to answer the question of, “what if Trump is re-elected”? Remember: there is a will of the people, and it is one of the tenets that renders us exceptional, albeit imperfect.
Yes, I believe our alliance will be victorious; electorally repudiating MAGA, however, will not cure all our civic ills. Apologies for tempering good news, but a defeat is the start—not the end—of helping others leave MAGA (which my work focuses on) and equipping our nation to go on the non-violent offensive against whatever follows MAGA. MAGA is the latest—but not the last—embodiment of politically traumatic mythologies designed to make millions panicked and desperate over an increasingly diversifying America, and an increasingly engaged youth. Let’s work together to ensure the highest voter turnout in our history; all of us doing a little will make good trouble and history.
Mark Jacob, former Chicago Tribune metro editor and current author of the Stop the Presses newsletter at stopthepresses.news.
I am thankful this Thanksgiving for pro-democracy advocates in MAGA-dominated states. People who work against the odds, standing up for their principles even though their chances of success are not great. The prospects seemed dim in Georgia a few years ago, but they’re not dim anymore. The state has two Democratic senators and voted for Biden in 2020. Perseverance is so important. So, I’m thankful for blue dots in red states.
If Trump wins in 2024? I would be preparing next Thanksgiving for the biggest crisis in American history since the Civil War. I would be protesting and speaking out. Resisting the rise of authoritarianism. I desperately hope I never have to find out the answer to this question.
If Trump loses, he won’t accept the loss. He and his extremist followers may well make a second coup attempt. This is a long-term struggle for the survival of our democracy. Whether he wins or loses, I’ll keep speaking out and fighting fascism. I invite all people of good will to join us.
Cheri Jacobus is a former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee and founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR.
I don't know if "thankful" is the accurate descriptive word for how I feel about the election next year, or the state of the world. I will, however, admit to, despite the past 8 years of Trump thuggery, bigotry, treason, (and taking several direct hits from him and his flying monkeys, myself), still maintaining a glimmer of hope that Justice will prevail. I maintain a degree of faith that the American people's love of Democracy will save us, despite the daily reminders that our institutions have largely failed us so far, when it comes to Trump.
Why this hope and faith with media still relying so heavily on Trump ratings, after Merrick Garland sat on his hands and let us down for so long, and after social media oligarchs increasingly control the flow and access to accurate information? I have hope and some faith because of Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky. Because of Fani Willis, Tish James, Jack Smith. Voters in an off-year election this month turned out to defeat Trumpism and MAGA fascism, giving me hope they will do so again next year. Some in our justice system appear to have the competency, backbone, and commitment to holding criminals accountable, despite a long history of Trump and some of his team skating on obvious crimes.
The collective of non-MAGA cult Americans understand in our bones that failure next November means the effective end of our democracy. That is not hyperbole. We also know an election win will not be the end of the war on democracy, but it is a battle that must be won in order to prevail long term. If successful, we will celebrate at Thanksgiving 2024, but will re-arm for battle, knowing the wind is at our backs. Failure is not something I am willing to contemplate, consider, or plan for at this time. | US Federal Elections |
RALEIGH, N.C. -- North Carolina Republicans closed in Tuesday on enacting new boundaries for the state’s congressional and legislative districts that aim to fortify GOP prospects both in the narrowly divided Congress and in the state General Assembly, where conservatives hope to solidify control there for the rest of the decade.
The full Senate voted along party lines for maps for the state's congressional delegation and for the Senate's own districts. The state House voted later Tuesday for districts in their own chamber. House and Senate leaders aimed for their chambers to give final approval to all three maps Wednesday.
They were all drawn by Republicans in time for the 2024 elections after recent state Supreme Court rulings reversed decisions of the court last year that had thrown out proposed district lines it had deemed were illegal partisan gerrymanders.
The state's highest court flipped from a Democratic to a Republican majority with the 2022 elections, and the GOP justices ruled in April that the state constitution placed no limits on shifting lines for partisan gain. The U.S. Supreme Court had already declared in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims weren't subject to federal court review, either.
Those rulings now diminish legal options for Democrats and their allies opposed to the new maps to challenge the lines in court. They also opened the door for the proposed U.S. House map that could help the GOP pick up at least three seats on Capitol Hill at the expense of first- and second-term Democrats. The 2022 elections, which were run under a temporary map created by trial judges, resulted in a 7-7 seat between the two parties.
The congressional map that passed the state Senate creates 10 districts that appear to favor a Republican, three that favor a Democrat and one that could be considered competitive, according to statewide election data and political experts. Republicans currently hold a 221-212 seat advantage over Democrats in the U.S. House.
Democrats whose seats are threatened by the plan are Reps. Jeff Jackson of Charlotte, Wiley Nickel of Cary and Kathy Manning of Greensboro. And first-term Rep. Don Davis, one of the three Black Democrats in the state's delegation, would run in a competitive district in northeastern North Carolina. Republicans have defended their maps, particularly with their political leanings, as lawful.
“Partisan consideration is a valid criterion in which we balance with other legitimate traditional redistricting criteria,” Sen. Ralph Hise, a Mitchell County Republican and co-sponsor of the congressional map proposal, said during floor debate. Demonstrators in the Senate gallery chanted “fair maps now” as the debate began before authorities quickly ushered them out.
Republicans also redrew boundary lines for their respective chambers that also appear to keep the GOP in a good position to retain their current veto-proof majorities of 72 seats in the House and 30 in the Senate. Statewide election data and a Duke University professor's analysis indicate keeping such a supermajority may be more challenging in the House, where Republicans reached 72 in April when then-Democratic Rep. Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County switched parties.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and his allies have criticized the new maps as a power play by the GOP that discriminates against minority voters and fails to align with the political balance of the nation’s ninth-largest state. North Carolina statewide elections are usually close affairs. Redistricting maps approved by the General Assembly, however, aren’t subject to Cooper’s vetoes.
While partisan gerrymandering claims have been short-circuited by the courts, critics have alleged racial gerrymandering in the maps that likely will result in federal Voting Rights Act litigation soon.
The congressional lines “unnecessarily pack and crack the state’s most urban and diverse communities, diminishing their voting power even though these are the very same areas where population has grown,” said Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, a Wake County Democrat. Republicans said they didn’t use voter population data based on race to form the boundaries.
“We have complied with the law in every way on these maps,” Rep. Destin Hall, a Caldwell County Republican, said during debate on the state House districts.
GOP lawmakers used parliamentary maneuvers to block or vote against Democratic amendments. That included one that would have altered districts in and north of Charlotte so that Democratic Sen. Natasha Marcus would be moved out of a proposed strong Republican district where GOP Sen. Vickie Sawyer also lives. Marcus said Republicans are trying to push her out of the Senate because she's spoken strongly against GOP policies.
Redistricting, meanwhile, seems to have worked in favor of Cotham, whom Democrats have castigated as a traitor for switching parties. Last November, Cotham won a state House seat in a Democratic district and was facing an extremely tough path for reelection if her district had stayed untouched. The new maps appear to offer her two options if she wants to run for office in 2024.
The state House map proposal places Cotham's residence in a new district where Republicans would have a slight advantage, according to statewide election data. And the Senate’s congressional redistricting proposal also would place her in a district along the state’s southern border. The district's current representative, GOP Rep. Dan Bishop, is running for attorney general in 2024. | US Federal Elections |
Not until President Biden and our nation’s parents can agree on what’s really driving up the cost of college will be impossible to solve the tuition crisis millions of American families are confronting. The President appears to believe it is the nefarious for-profit colleges that are robbing students of their education. But many parents say it is the traditional non-profits colleges and their high prices that are sending them in to debt. Washington thinks for-profit colleges make it look bad. They do. Too many for for-profits push students to sign up for the maximum federal financial aid to apparently fatten their college profit margins. When they fail, the government must pick up the tab by forgiving the student loans. Detractors call them “Pell Factories;” churning out dropouts and the future unemployed. In reaction, Washington imposes restrictions taking away their access to the student loan program if loan defaults climb too high. But for the overwhelming number of parents, the for-profit colleges are not an issue. Only a small percentage of students go to these colleges. What concerns most families is the ever-increasing tuition charged at non-profit schools. Tuitions that are reportedly cresting about $60,000 at schools like Georgetown or Lehigh and reaching as high as $80,000 at others. The prices at state universities have risen faster than at private colleges over the past decade. Survey after survey finds students going to these colleges bewildered and angry at the relentless increase in tuition and the debt it requires them to take on. Washington appears sympathetic and more than ever willing to forgive their debt as witnessed by President Biden’s recent (and now blocked) debt forgiveness order. But the order said nothing about curbing tuition, instead there is a mention of providing more Pell Grants and a promise of a strong crackdown on colleges with a high percentage of students in default. That is code for for-profit colleges. Why does the government focus on such a small percentage of colleges? Why does it avoid calling out traditional colleges for their pricing practices? Why doesn’t the government at least challenge traditional colleges that their price increases should be a matter of financial necessity? There are likely a bunch of reasons including ideology, politics and loyalty. Washington seems to believe that colleges are a critical public good both in underpinning our national dream of upward mobility and in contributing to our national defense. Politically, it produces students and faculty who form the backbone of the liberal Democratic Party. And for the Republicans there is always Liberty University and other evangelical colleges. And, finally, loyalty, because members of Congress are proud graduates of traditional and state colleges, in many cases the elite ones. They see it as a private good benefiting their careers. For both Democrats and Republicans there are no votes in causing a college to close. But enough is enough. It’s time to take off the blindfolds and recognize the crisis at hand. The pricing of all colleges is too high and going higher. If we keep feeding student loans to the beast it will explode. The government doesn’t have the luxury of only going after for profits. Rather it must focus its efforts on reducing the cost of college. That means replacing the student loan system that props up all colleges whether for profit or nonprofit. Robert Hildreth is a former International Monetary Fund economist whose professional work involved restructuring South American debt and marketing sovereign debt loans. He founded the Hildreth Institute, dedicated to restoring the promise of higher education. | US Federal Policies |
And the loser is … Donald J Trump. The identity of the winners of America’s midterm elections was not clear the morning after the night before – even at lunchtime on Wednesday the TV anchors could not tell their audiences whether Democrats or Republicans would be in control of the House of Representatives or Senate – but there was no such ambiguity over the fate of the man who continues to loom over US politics, even two years after his removal from the White House. Trump took a beating.True to form, the former president had wanted this election to be all about him. His rallies, nominally staged to boost support for Republican candidates in whichever state he had landed in, were instead intensely focused on himself. At an outdoor event in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Saturday night, for example, he spoke only fleetingly of the men running for governor or senator, devoting most of his two-hour speech either to relitigating the past – insisting, against all evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him – or hinting at a glorious future, talking up his prospects for retaking the presidency in 2024.When he projected charts on to the giant screens, the graphics did not make a case for why Democrats deserved to lose their majorities in Congress, still less offer policy remedies for how the Republicans would combat inflation or crime. No, they showed a series of opinion polls, each one confirming how Trump remained the Republican faithful’s favourite, miles in front of any would-be rival.As things turned out, the ex-president’s trademark narcissism was not so wide of the mark. In a way, the 2022 midterms were indeed all about him – just not in the way he had hoped.Trump, like so many others, had assumed Tuesday would see a red wave rolling across America, sweeping Democrats out of both houses of Congress, toppling blue citadels in the most unexpected places: in the final weekend, there was sufficient panic in the highest reaches of the Democratic party that both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were dispatched to New York, one of the bluest states in the union, to shore up a governor who was suddenly thought to be in a tight race. (In fact, she won easily.)Trump was poised to claim credit for a famous victory and to enjoy the fruits of it. He looked forward to a decisive Republican takeover of the House, one that would see the Democrat-led investigation into the attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021 abandoned, its place taken instead by multiple probes into the affairs of the Biden family. As one seasoned Democrat put it to me this week, “He’ll expect the House to operate as his law firm.” But even if his party does eke out an eventual congressional win, there was no Republican tsunami. “Definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure,” admitted senator and tireless Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham.That’s a surprise, and not only because it upended the Washington conventional wisdom. Heavy midterm defeat for the party of a first-term, incumbent president is seen as the norm, a pendulum effect all but governed by the laws of nature. Barack Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010, just as Bill Clinton lost 52 in 1994. Trump himself lost 40 in 2018. Yet Democratic losses this time will be much fewer, even at a time of great economic hardship and low poll ratings for the Democratic president. How was Biden able to buck that historical trend? The answer lies, in part, with Trump.The former president inserted himself into multiple contests, endorsing candidates at the primaries stage when parties choose their standard-bearers. The Trump seal of approval proved decisive in several, but just look at how those Trump favourites fared. True, the memoirist and venture capitalist JD Vance won in now solidly red Ohio, but in swing states Trumpers performed badly. An election denier who had been present at the 6 January Capitol Hill riot was trounced in the race to be Pennsylvania governor, while TV doctor Mehmet Oz, another Trump pick, was defeated in the Senate race by Democrat John Fetterman – even though the latter faced persistent questions about his ability to serve following a severe stroke in the summer.Perhaps most revealing of the Trump effect was Georgia. Two Republican officials who became nationally known when they resisted Trump pressure to overturn the 2020 presidential count in their state were comfortably re-elected. But Herschel Walker, handpicked by Trump to run for the senate in Georgia, was in a photo finish for that all-important seat, one set to be decided by a run-off next month. Meanwhile, a Trumper in New Hampshire was soundly beaten, while another, Kari Lake, seemed to be trailing in what should have been a winnable contest in Arizona.As Wednesday morning came, a pattern seemed to be emerging. Even Fox News reporters were quoting Republican sources telling them: “If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now. We have a Trump problem.”It wasn’t just Trump’s talent for picking duff candidates in states Republicans had to win (and will need to win again in 2024). It was the transformation he has wrought in the Republican party itself. A majority of GOP candidates had cast doubt on or outright denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That enabled Democrats, starting with Biden himself, to argue that, whatever grievances voters had with the party’s handling of the economy, they had to vote Democrat to save democracy.Bad poll numbers had some wondering if that was a mistaken message, given voters’ preoccupation with rising prices, but it seems to have paid dividends. Along with reproductive rights, imperilled by the supreme court’s summer ruling ending constitutional protection for abortion, the threat to democracy galvanised blue turnout, seemingly turning a red wave into a red ripple. Blame, or credit, for that comes entirely down to Trump, who made election denial a Republican article of faith.All this affects Trump’s prospects for 2024, not least because his most obvious rival for the Republican nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, had such a good night. DeSantis was re-elected in his own state by a landslide, racking up big numbers in historically Democratic counties. At that Saturday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump had mocked the governor, calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” (not one of his better hostile nicknames). The contrast between the two is no longer flattering to Trump, a point made robustly by one senior Republican: “The one guy [Trump] attacked before election day was DeSantis – the clear winner. Meanwhile, all his guys are shitting the bed.” In Ohio, strikingly, JD Vance did not even mention the former president in his victory speech.Cold, hard logic suggests Republicans should step away from Trump, a man who has now presided over three consecutive defeats in 2018, 2020 and 2022 (four if you include the two Georgia senate runoffs in January 2021). But it won’t be simple. For one thing, Trump’s defenders can argue that they do better when his name is on the ballot than when it is not – and it is true that Republicans did gain congressional seats in 2016 and 2020. But in some ways that underlines the problem. Because in a year when Trump himself is not a candidate, like 2022, his absence weakens hardcore Trump devotees’ desire to turn out, while his looming presence on the scene repels the floating voters who decide elections. Put another way, the Republicans’ problem is not simply Trump the man. It is that they have become Trump’s party.All of this is sweet balm for Democrats, who can now crack open the popcorn and enjoy the spectacle of Republicans fighting each other. But that too has implications for 2024. One clear winner from these midterms is Joe Biden, who presided over a better than expected performance for his party. That will reduce the pressure on him to make way for a fresher candidate for next time. Some Democrats anticipated that the thundercloud of defeat they expected on Tuesday would have one silver lining: Biden, who is showing his 80 years, would feel compelled to announce that he would not seek re-election. Those voices have now been stilled, at least for now.In part, Biden can thank his 2020 antagonist for that. The flaws of the 45th president helped put the 46th in the White House – and now the predecessor may have done his successor another favour. For this election night, like the previous three in America, was all about Donald Trump. | US Federal Elections |
WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office said Thursday that she is suffering from Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a complication from the shingles virus that can paralyze part of the face, and that she contracted encephalitis while recovering from the virus earlier this year.
Feinstein, 89, had not previously disclosed those medical details, though she said in a statement last week that she had suffered complications from the virus. The longtime California senator returned from a more than two-month absence on May 10 after weeks of questions about her declining health and whether she would be back in the Senate at all.
Adam Russell, a spokesman for Feinstein, said that the encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, “resolved itself shortly after she was released from the hospital in March.” Feinstein continues to have complications from the Ramsay Hunt syndrome, Russell said.
Russell confirmed the two complications after the New York Times first reported them, raising questions about whether she had been hiding the extent of her illnesses. Upon her return last week, Feinstein was using a wheelchair and noticeably thinner, and has appeared confused at times when speaking to reporters or being wheeled through the halls.
“The senator previously disclosed that she had several complications related to her shingles diagnosis,” Russell said in the statement. “As discussed in the New York Times article, those complications included Ramsay Hunt syndrome and encephalitis.”
Feinstein’s face has appeared partially paralyzed since she returned to the Senate, stirring some speculation about whether she had had a stroke. Ramsay Hunt syndrome is a complication that occurs when the shingles virus reaches a facial nerve near the ears. It can also cause hearing loss.
Encephalitis can also be caused by shingles. The swelling of the brain can have a number of different symptoms, including personality changes, seizures, stiffness, confusion and problems with sight or hearing, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Aides to Feinstein said last week that she is still recovering from her illness and would operate on a reduced schedule. Since she has returned, she has missed some votes where she was not needed. On Wednesday, for example, she missed the first three Senate votes of the day but appeared for the last two, in which the margin was much closer.
Feinstein has faced questions for several years about her clearly declining health and her mental acuity. In February Feinstein said she would not run for re-election in 2024.
But some Democrats have pushed for her to leave sooner. A member of the California congressional delegation, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, called on her to resign as she stayed away from Washington for more than ten weeks, and several other House progressives have echoed his call. And Senate Democrats were increasingly anxious during Feinstein's absence as they were unable to confirm some of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees with a narrow 51-49 majority.
As Democrats worried, Feinstein made an unusual request to be temporarily replaced on the Judiciary panel while she remained out of the Senate. But Republicans last month blocked a vote, saying there was little precedent for a temporary committee replacement and that they didn’t want to help Democrats confirm the most partisan judges. Others said they thought Democrats were unfairly trying to push her out of office.
Two weeks later, Democrats said that Feinstein would return to Washington.
A senator for more than three decades, Feinstein has had a groundbreaking political career and shattered gender barriers. She was the first woman to serve as president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and the first female mayor of San Francisco. She ascended to that post after the November 1978 assassinations of then-Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk by a former supervisor, Dan White. Feinstein found Milk’s body.
In the Senate, she was the first woman to head the Senate Intelligence Committee and the first woman to serve as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. | US Congress |
Department of Education Building. A former Department of Education official is concerned that a new regulatory agenda released by the Biden administration could have adverse effects on religious colleges and universities that participate in the federal student loan program. The Biden administration announced last week it intends to revisit Department of Education regulations on a host of issues in 2023, including accreditation, student loan deferments, distance education, and other issues, according to Inside Higher Ed. YEAR IN REVIEW: THE FOUR BIGGEST EDUCATION CONTROVERSIES OF 2022 Bob Eitel, the co-founder and president of the Defense of Freedom Institute and a former senior counselor to the secretary of Education, said the decision to revisit the accreditation rule is notable because the rule implemented in July 2020 by the Trump administration was the product of a lengthy rule-making process that achieved consensus from stakeholders. "That the Biden Education Department would take it upon themselves to undo that consensus doesn't make any sense," Eitel told the Washington Examiner in an interview. "[And] given some of the anti-faith postures taken by the department in the Biden administration on issues of religion and faith and culture, anybody who attends a faith-based institution should be very concerned about what the department might do." Secretary of Educaton Miguel Cardona. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) The former education official explained that the regulations implemented in 2020 by the Trump administration and then-Secretary Betsy DeVos contained a number of "important changes" that were aimed at protecting religious colleges and universities from accrediting agencies that sought to force such schools to adopt curriculum requirements that violated their religious beliefs. Eitel expects the Biden administration to roll back those protections "because these issues bleed into their priorities regarding gender identity and the rights of transgender students and individuals." Without those protections, religious colleges and universities that object to certain requirements from their accrediting agency on religious grounds could be disqualified from Title IV funding, the federal financial aid program, which requires participating institutions to be accredited in order for their students to receive federal student loans. "The issue here historically has been that accreditation agencies — whether they are agencies that accredit institutions or whether they're agencies that accredit certain programs — often will require faith-based schools to adhere to accreditation requirements that are based in diversity, equity and inclusion or affirmative action, or directly implicate issues of LGBTQ rights in a way that contradicts the faith or the teachings of that faith-based institution," Eitel said. Department of Education Building. Evgenia Parajanian/Getty Images Potentially problematic requirements pushed by accrediting agencies had previously ranged from curriculum standards to student and residential life policies, Eitel said. The DeVos-era regulation prohibited such requirements, thus protecting religious schools from accrediting agencies that would have otherwise refused to accredit them and thus disqualifying the institution from Title IV funding. A disqualification from Title IV could be disastrous, Eitel explained, describing the federal student loan program as the "lifeblood" of institutions. "The current rule reads that a creditor must respect the institutional religious mission of a faith-based institution," he said. "My concern is that the Biden Education Department will work to undo that protection for schools controlled by religious organizations." But while he's concerned about the content of the administration's regulatory agenda, Eitel said he has doubts as to whether or not the department will have time to implement it before the presidential term ends. The administration expects to make a notice of official rule-making in April, according to the official government regulatory website. Eitel said he doesn’t expect a proposed rule to enter public comment for some time, possibly not until 2024. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER "I don't look for any of these higher ed rules that they just announced in this recent publication of the regulatory agenda to be effective before July 1, 2025," he said. "It is an ambitious agenda, and I have questions whether they'll be able to do [it] at all."
The Washington Examiner has contacted the Department of Education for comment. | US Federal Policies |
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- A federal grand jury has indicted a New Mexico man on assault and carjacking charges in connection with the 2021 disappearance of a Native American woman whose case has helped to raise awareness about missing people and unsolved slayings in Indian Country.
The indictment naming Preston Henry Tolth, 23, was unsealed Tuesday. He is scheduled to appear before a federal magistrate Friday in northern Arizona for a detention hearing and formal arraignment.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Tolth assaulted Ella Mae Begay, a Navajo woman who was 62 at the time, took her pickup truck and drove it across state lines. Begay has not been found.
“This indictment is an important first step in determining the truth about what happened to an elderly victim on the Navajo Nation,” U.S. Attorney Gary Restaino of Arizona said in a statement, stressing that the investigation was ongoing.
Begay's truck was seen the morning of June 15, 2021, leaving her home in the remote community of Sweetwater on the Navajo Nation, not far from where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet.
A year after Begay disappeared, her niece began walking from the Navajo Nation to Washington D.C. to bring attention to a decades-long epidemic of violence that has disproportionately affected Indigenous people.
Attorney Darlene Gomez, who is representing Begay's family, said in a social media post that the indictment marked a bittersweet development for family members. Gomez said the family appreciates the prayers and support from those who have followed Begay's case and shared her story in hopes of bringing her home.
The investigation into Begay's disappearance is part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to address cases involving missing and slain Native Americans. Navajo Nation authorities had previously identified Tolth as a person of interest in the case.
Luke Mulligan, a federal public defender for Tolth, declined to comment on the case Tuesday.
New Mexico court records show Tolth has a criminal history that includes charges of aggravated battery, resisting arrest, residential burglary and drug possession that date back to 2019. He already was in custody pending the outcome of a 2022 case in which he was accused of stealing a man's wallet while armed with some kind of sharp weapon, court records show.
Begay's family members have met with U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who recently joined Justice Department officials in hosting the first in-person session of the Not Invisible Act Commission in Washington. The commission will be holding field hearings across the U.S. this year as it develops recommendations for preventing and responding to violence affecting tribal communities. | US Federal Policies |
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, won’t face another round of voting for speaker today. He was expected to lose additional votes.
So Jordan is now getting behind an interim plan to empower House Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., as acting speaker on a temporary basis. Jordan would remain the GOP "nominee" for speaker and try to round up the votes by January. However, it is unclear that Jordan could EVER get the votes to become speaker considering how upset members are at him for purported strong-arm tactics.
Here’s the problem: Empowering a speaker pro tempore is historic, and the situation is mostly unprecedented. There are major legal, constitutional and parliamentary questions about this gambit. And it is far from clear thar House Republicans are even remotely close to backing this plan.
The House has never had an "acting speaker." Any legislation approved by Congress during this interregnum could potentially face a court challenge.
Some Republicans walked out of the GOP meeting, bewildered at the plan. Many do not know if this maneuver to empower McHenry would even work. It’s not even clear whether most Republicans would support this plan. In fact, one Republican said to Fox this was the plan "for now" and fully expected it to implode shortly.
However, other Republicans feel a note of desperation. They know that the House will continue to be paralyzed unless they have a speaker and can advance legislation. That’s why they want to install McHenry. Opponents of this effort are accusing Republicans of "working with Democrats" to make this happen in an effort to dissuade them.
This reflects the intense backstabbing and internecine warfare which is now playing out inside the House Republican Conference. There is deep distrust and division right now. And they are watching House power disintegrate in front of them if they can’t vote.
Regardless, it is unclear if McHenry could just assume power now. The post 9/11 law that created the position of the speaker pro tempore was to maintain continuity of government in case a major terrorism attack killed the speaker and many members of the body. There is one argument that it is IMPLIED that the speaker pro tempore can act no matter what to keep the House functioning and pass legislation. That’s because the post 9/11 law didn’t want the House to be paralyzed. However, that legislation was drafted for a different set of circumstances.
Some lawmakers believe the House must adopt a resolution to empower McHenry on a temporary basis. That would involve a debate and vote. However, a senior House source doubted there would be any debate or vote on such a measure any time soon.
Regardless, there may be some constitutional validity to the House being able to empower McHenry as interim speaker. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution says that the House "shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers." Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says that the House "may determine the Rules of its proceedings."
It is thought that the Supreme Court would point to these clauses as justifying House action to grant McHenry leeway. But this is uncharted parliamentary and legal water. They’ve never just appointed an acting speaker.
That said, there is a question about what constitutes "other Officers." The House clearly selects a "Clerk of the House," a "Parliamentarian" and a "Sergeant at Arms." But tapping a "Speaker Pro Tempore" could be extra-constitutional.
Members are really up in arms about the McHenry plan – despite Jordan’s backing. So, it’s hard to see if this in fact becomes the plan the House goes with.
Over the past several months, House Republicans have quickly crafted a plan on the debt ceiling, spending bills, an interim spending package and even two euthanized candidacies for speaker – and abandoned that very scheme hours later.
It is too early to tell if this is the route for the "McHenry Plan." But there is stark opposition from many Republicans. | US Congress |
The Republican chairmen of the House Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees outlined their view of the factual and legal basis for an impeachment inquiry into President Biden in a 30-page memo, which was obtained by CBS News. It was sent to all committee members late Wednesday.
According to the memo, the committees will look into whether Mr. Biden "abused his federal office to enrich his family and conceal his and/or his family's misconduct."
The alleged misconduct centers around the president's son, Hunter Biden, and his overseas business dealings.
"The purpose of this inquiry — and at this stage, it is just that, an inquiry — is to determine whether sufficient grounds exist for the Committees to draft articles of impeachment against President Biden for consideration by the full House," the chairmen wrote.
The memo says the impeachment inquiry "will span the time of Joe Biden's Vice Presidency to the present, including his time out of office."
GOP-led House committees have been investigating the president and his son for months. So far, no evidence has been produced to show the president broke the law, benefited financially or used his office to help his son.
A president can be impeached for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, according to the Constitution. "The decision to begin this inquiry does not mean that the Committees have reached a conclusion on this question," the memo says.
"It's hard to grasp the complete derangement of this moment," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. "Three days before they're set to shut down the United States government, Republicans launch a baseless impeachment drive against President Biden."
The full House traditionally votes to launch an impeachment inquiry, but it has not done so yet. It voted to initiate an inquiry in President Trump's 2019 impeachment, but not initially in 2021, when he was impeached a second time in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
On Thursday, the House Oversight Committee will hold its first impeachment inquiry hearing featuring three conservative legal analysts. Witnesses for Thursday's hearing are Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant; Eileen O'Connor, former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Tax Division; and Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School. They will be testifying in general terms about impeachments, business dealings and financial crimes.
The minority has called Michael J. Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina.
This hearing comes as House Republicans appear.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthyto launch an impeachment inquiry into the president earlier this month, as a result of mounting pressure from the most conservative members of his conference.
The White House has said Thursday's hearing is a baseless stunt.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Comer has claimed communications records, financial records, and interviews show Mr. Biden "allowed his family to sell him as 'the brand' around the world to enrich the Biden family."
The White House issued a 15-page memo Tuesday aiming to debunk Republicans' specific claims.
Last month, Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, was asked on CBS News' "Face the Nation" if it's his position that the president was completely walled off from Hunter Biden's business affairs.
"I understand and my opinion doesn't matter,""Face the Nation" moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan. "What matters is the facts and the evidence. And the facts and the evidence that have been pursued by however many members of Congress and their staffs and media, looking for any possible connection has shown time and time again, it doesn't exist."
How to watch Republicans' impeachment inquiry hearing
- What: House Republicans hold impeachment inquiry hearing
- Date: Thursday, Sept. 28
- Time: 10 a.m. ET
- Location: Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.
- Online stream: Live on CBS News in the player above and on your mobile or streaming device.
for more features. | US Political Corruption |
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, upset Jared Kushner’s mother by telling her friends her son would go to jail over his ties to Russia, Kushner said on Wednesday.
“My poor mom, I told her to stop, you know, reading whatever. I said, ‘I promise you, we didn’t do anything wrong, it’s good,’” Kushner told the Lex Fridman Podcast. “But you know, she’d call me [to] say … ‘Our friends on the Upper East Side were talking with Chuck Schumer, who says Jared’s going to jail.’”
Schumer, the senior senator from New York, was Democratic minority leader in the US Senate during the presidency of Donald Trump, Kushner’s father-in-law and White House boss. Since 2021, Schumer has been majority leader.
Married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Kushner became his father-in-law’s chief adviser on the campaign trail and then in the White House.
Trump’s first two years in power were dogged by investigations and speculation over his links to Russia and interference by Moscow in the 2016 US election.
Kushner’s interactions with high-placed Russians were placed under the national spotlight. The former Washington Post editor Marty Baron recently said, in a memoir, that Kushner tried to have him fired over the paper’s reporting.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department, secured multiple indictments and issued a detailed report. Though he did not establish collusion between the Trump camp and Moscow, Mueller said he did not exonerate Trump, while also laying out extensive evidence of possible obstruction of justice. Aided by his second attorney general, William Barr, Trump claimed vindication regardless.
Since Trump’s defeat in 2020, Kushner has distanced himself from his father-in-law’s political operation, even as Trump dominates the Republican primary for 2024, despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.
But Kushner, a real-estate and investment magnate in his own right, has continued to draw attention, not least over lucrative links to Saudi investors which critics say are linked to his time as a White House aide.
Fridman is a computer scientist and podcaster. His conversation with Kushner was released on Wednesday.
Of the Russia investigations by Mueller and congressional committees, Kushner said: “I felt like this is one of those things where they’re going to try and catch you and then if you step on the line, they catch with one misrepresentation, they’re gonna try to put you in jail or worse … and so, for me, that was a big concern.”
Of the comments by Schumer which upset Kushner’s mother, Kushner added: “This is, like, a leading senator saying these things.
“And so it was just interesting for me to see how the whole world could believe something and be talking about it that I knew with 1,000% certainty was just not true. And so seeing that play out was very, very hard.” | US Congress |
BROOKHAVEN, Miss. -- Federal and state law enforcement agencies are investigating a shooting near the Mississippi home of U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, state investigators announced Monday.
No one was injured in the shooting Sunday afternoon near Hyde-Smith’s Lincoln County home in south Mississippi, investigators said in a news release. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is working with federal and local law enforcement agencies to investigate the shooting.
Investigators did not reveal whether the home was struck by bullets, what type of firearm was used, or whether they have identified a suspect, citing the ongoing investigation.
Hyde-Smith has represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate since 2018.
“The Senator and her family were not harmed," Hyde-Smith’s office said in a statement Monday. "Senator Hyde-Smith is grateful for the concern shown by many and the good work of federal, state, and local law enforcement.” | US Political Corruption |
Anyone who lived through Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election—a scheme that was capped off by an insurrection that left multiple people dead—knows there is nothing funny about the crimes that the ex-president was indicted on last week. They are, in fact, deeply serious and, as a result, could lead to Trump being sentenced to many years in prison. A subplot to all of the aforementioned that is pretty funny, though? Trump’s very own defense attorney going on TV and making his client look guilty as fuck—on multiple occasions!
On Sunday, Trump lawyer John Lauro appeared on Meet the Press and told Chuck Todd that if Trump committed a “technical violation of the Constitution”—which is to say, a violation of the Constitution—it doesn’t mean he necessarily broke any criminal laws. That claim occurred in the midst of an argument re: whether Mike Pence has ever said Trump asked him to break the law by demanding the then VP block the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. “He said the president asked him to violate the Constitution, which is another way of saying he asked him to break the law,” Todd told Lauro, to which the presumably highly-paid defense attorney responded, “No, that’s wrong. A technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law.” (It is, and more on that soon.)
Elsewhere in the interview, Lauro also told Todd, “The defense is quite simple. President Trump believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that election, and as any American citizen, he had a right to speak out under the First Amendment.” To be clear, Jack Smith has said said the same thing, almost verbatim! The indictment literally reads: “The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” Trump has not been charged with falsely stating he won the election; he’s been charged with—among other things—a conspiracy to defraud the United States. (As for whether or not he truly believed “in his heart of hearts” that he won, many people who spoke to him at the time say he fully knew he lost.)
But back to the whole “technical violations of the Constitution are fine, everyone can go home” business. If you’re finding yourself wondering if this is as absurd an argument as it sounds, (1) you are not alone, and (2) yes, it is deeply absurd! In a subsequent interview with Meet the Press on Sunday, Representative Jamie Raskin—a member of the January 6 committee who has the distinction of being an actual constitutional law expert—told Chuck Todd: “First of all, a technical violation of the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution in six different places opposes insurrection.” Trump, Raskin continued, “conspired to defraud the American people out of our right to an honest election by substituting the real legal process we have under federal and state law with counterfeit electors. There are people in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote, if they try to vote illegally once. He tried to steal the entire election.”
In an email following his Meet the Press appearance, Lauro told NBC News that he “never said that President Trump committed a technical violation.” (He must have been talking about some other theoretical ex-president who tried to overturn the election??) Lauro’s Sunday remarks came days after a pair of incredible TV interviews in which he repeatedly admitted that Trump had tried to stop the certification of Biden’s win, insisted that this was fine, and suggested his client receive credit for not sending in “the tanks.”
In related news, Mike Pence has not ruled out appearing as a witness for the prosecution, saying on Face the Nation that “people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of law, if it comes, and we’ll just tell the truth.” (This is not as comforting as it sounds, given that the former VP refused to testify before the January 6 committee, and had to be forced by a judge to appear before the grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.)
Also on Sunday, Trump demanded the judge randomly assigned to his trial, Tanya Chutkan, be removed from the case, claiming he can’t get a fair trial in her courtroom or any DC courtroom for that matter. Instead, he’d like to be tried in the “politically unbiased nearby State of West Virginia,” which surely has nothing to do with him winning nearly 70% of the state in 2020. | US Political Corruption |
The GOP Debate Was a Sorry Spectacle
When Ron DeSantis is trying to keep things dignified, you know the show has gone off the rails.
Let’s start at the end instead of the beginning.
After two hours of screaming, two hours of puerility, two hours of talking over each other and coming up with one canned line after the other, the seven GOP candidates on the debate stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., were asked a game-show question by co-moderator Dana Perino. Take a piece of paper, Perino instructed them, and write down which of the seven of you that you think should be voted off this island after the debate. The Fox News audience, primed to regard all of politics as an entertainment spectacle, and having been subjected to a two-hour food fight, whooped their approval.
To his credit, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rose in fury at this indignity, telling off Perino in no uncertain terms. It was the highlight of what for DeSantis must have been another exercise in prolonged frustration. He looked ill at ease, his stretched smile more akin to that of a gargoyle hanging off a medieval French cathedral than that of a flesh-and-blood human. The only one on that stage who looked more like he didn’t want to be there was the hapless Mike Pence, situated at the far end of the line of speakers by virtue of his dismal poll numbers; most of the night Pence looked like he was being force-fed caterpillars.
DeSantis, given centerstage because with roughly 12 percent support, he’s still just barely in second place in the GOP nominating contest, struggled to make himself heard over the tumult. He did finally try to take the gloves off against the absentee Trump, but, alas for him, the few times he worked to land punches on the 45th president, he was outperformed by the bombastic Chris Christie, who gleefully labeled his erstwhile friend “Donald Duck” for ducking his obligations to debate his opponents in front of a GOP crowd. One could practically feel the energy seeping out DeSantis’s campaign as each minute ticked by. It must be disheartening to have such an inflated sense of self and then to confront the reality that most people, even in your own party, think you’re a wanker.
Everything about the evening seemed designed to make the candidates look small—from the vast Air Force One jet suspended above their heads, to the extraordinarily short answer times permitted each debater, to the three moderators’ inability, or perhaps simply lack of desire, to stop the outbursts of elementary school–type squabbling. By default, the only one who came out of the debate looking big was the absent one, Donald Trump.
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It wasn’t that the Seven Dwarfs didn’t have anything to say. They did: They were full of opinions about what they all labeled Biden’s “open border policy” and what they agreed were the calamitous flaws of his pivot to electric vehicles. To one degree or another, they all signed on to Vivek Ramaswamy’s poke-a-finger-in-the-eye-of-Mother-Earth pledge to “drill, frack, burn coal.” They all argued that the rule of law, especially in America’s cities had broken down at the hands of radical “Soros prosecutors,” that the fentanyl epidemic represented a national security emergency—hard, really, to argue otherwise given the number of deaths the drug is now causing—that the escalating competition and confrontation with China is an existential threat that America is currently ill-prepared to navigate.
To be fair, among all of this, there were a lot of genuine policy disagreements. To take one example, that of military aid to Ukraine: Ramaswamy essentially pledged to shut off the spigot of guns and money to the invaded country; DeSantis hemmed and hawed; and several of the others, in particular Nikki Haley, Pence, and Christie, were all in on continued assistance. That’s a serious policy issue, and, had the debaters each been given more than a handful of seconds to talk about their views on the topic, it might have revealed genuine ideas about how to handle one of the most serious geopolitical crises since World War II. Alas, that wasn’t the format Fox Business, which has clearly found from its focus groups that its audience members have the attention spans of goldfish, had in mind. Every time the debaters got on a roll, the buzzer went off, the moderators pivoted to a different topic, and they began anew the unseemly process of screaming over each other like ill-mannered children.
Amid the noise, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum again came across as an eminently reasonable adult in the room, successfully conveying his viewpoints without getting trapped in the sort of screaming matches that ensnared both Haley and Tim Scott. In a more sober political moment, a man like Burgum might well emerge as a credible wild-card candidate; in this moment, however, he seemed hopelessly quaint in his efforts to maintain a dignified and calm dialogue. Haley, by contrast, lost the measured cool that served her well in the first debate, getting into repeated verbal tussles with Scott and with Rawaswamy—a man she couldn’t hide her disdain for. In her only stand-out moment of the night, she turned to the wealthy young candidate and, her voice dripping with contempt, announced, “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber because of what you say.” That might well be the only few seconds in the evening worth pressing the repeat button on.
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Most of the time, GIF-like zingers aside, the debate was really just an exercise in click-bait extremism. Why were college students burdened by so much debt? Well, DeSantis opined, partly because so many colleges were teaching gender studies to their captive students. Why were Americans feeling so much economic pain? Well, said Ramaswamy, in addition to Bidenomics, there was the problem that “the Federal Reserve is an agency that has gone rogue.” Did the candidates agree with Florida’s new education guidelines, championed by DeSantis, for how to teach about slavery? No, said Scott, it was wrong to minimize the atrocities of slavery. But, he continued, perhaps suddenly aware that he had come off as too moderate for the GOP crowd, Black families did indeed survive slavery only to be destroyed a century later by LBJ’s Great Society and its expansion of family-destroying welfare programs. Ramaswamy came up with a novel interpretation of constitutional law that would allow him to instantly end birthright citizenship. Pence advocated a massive increase in use of the federal death penalty.
The candidates were quick to spout nonsense on one issue after the next. Yet on the elephant in the room, most of them had nothing to say: There was a deafening silence on Trump’s myriad malfeasances, such a silence that it was hard to take anything they said about the importance of the rule of law seriously.
Yes, the presence of transnational drug cartels on the border is a security and public safety and criminal justice issue. Yes, one can make a policy argument about the need to enforce immigration law or about the need to clamp down on street crime in America’s cities. Those are legitimate points of political debate. But when GOP candidates make their law-and-order pitch, and say that undocumented asylum seekers should be summarily returned over the border to show that everyone is subject to the rule of law in the US, it’s hard not to think back to this week’s court case in New York, in which a judge ruled that Trump and his sons had engaged in systematic fraud by massively inflating the value of their properties. Or to Trump musing on Truth Social that in the good old days a man such as Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would have been put to death for his actions (the actions in question being contacting the Chinese, in the chaotic days after January 6, to assure them that Trump wasn’t about to launch a nuclear attack in order to create a military emergency that would give him a pretext for not ceding the presidency). Or to the nearly 100 federal and state indictments Trump is now facing—charges that could land him in prison for the rest of his life. Or to Trump’s visit to a gun store last week to muse on camera about purchasing a Glock—a purchase that would be illegal given the indictments he faces, and one somewhat akin to, if not more serious than, Hunter Biden’s 2019 gun purchase that has so riled up the right. Or to Trump’s ongoing efforts to intimidate and threaten witnesses, judges, and prosecutors around the country. It’s hard to forget the free pass that the vast majority of Republican voters are willing to give criminals, so long as their name is Donald Trump.
Six of the seven candidates on the stage in Simi Valley are pledged to support Trump if he becomes the party’s nominee, even if he has been convicted in one or more of his trials. Christie, to his credit, is holding out.
So much for their respect for the rule of law. So much for their manufactured outrage at impoverished asylum seekers who cross the border in search of better futures for their families.
If I hadn’t been writing about this, I would have pulled the plug on the whole sorry spectacle about 30 seconds in. There was nothing educational or honest about the evening’s show; it was lowest-common-denominator talk-show entertainment. | US Federal Elections |
Cops use all sorts of tech to track individuals — facial recognition comes to mind, as does mimicking cell phone towers to get pings or mobile data tracking. But some people are finding ways to use technology to listen back. Bluetooth signals might reveal where police are and when they are and when devices like body cams or Tasers are activated.
“It’s be really weird if you had your volume turned all the way up and all of your devices are just screaming, right?,” Alan “Nullagent” Meekins, cofounder of Bluetooth tracking platform RFParty, said. “But that’s really what you’re doing in these wireless spectrums, they’re just constantly shouting.”
All Bluetooth devices have a unique 64 bit identifier called a MAC address. Often a chunk of that address is composed of an Organizational Unique Identifier (OUI), essentially a way for a device to say who it's made by. A look at the IoT devices that are used by many police forces led Meekins and his cofounder Roger “RekcahDam” Hicks to Axon, a company best known for Tasers. Modern police kits are overflowing with Bluetooth-enabled tech (often also made by Axon), from the aforementioned Tasers and body cams, to in-vehicle laptops. Even the gun holsters supplied to some cops send a Bluetooth ping when a sidearm is unholstered. By just reading company documentation, they were able to find the OUI.
A Bluetooth identifier seems trivial, but it could reveal a lot of information about where cops are and what they’re up to, like when their body cams are recording or they turn on the sirens to respond to a call. “There's the signal that is sent when a police officer basically thinks something's recording worthy, if that's the case, people can document that, detect that and there won't be any question whether or not hey, there's a body cam or there wasn't body cam,” Meekins told Engadget. It’s a way to potentially determine whether certain evidence exists so that it can be produced more quickly in a records request — something police often "slow walk" Meekins said. As people run RFParty, the app will collect historical data. In the case of body cams, if the device begins recording, it typically sends a Bluetooth signal out to other devices. If a cop turns on a camera (or Taser or other IoT device), someone running the app could collect this data to record details about the incident.
It's similar to radio waves: if you have the equipment to get past the music and news stations into the bands used by emergency response personnel (and once you know the language and codes to make sense of whats being broadcast there) you can listen in on cop radios to hear about arrests and where police might be patrolling.
An Axon spokesperson confirmed that the company uses Bluetooth capabilities for pairing in-car systems with mobile apps, and for its camera recording devices. Using Bluetooth connectivity helps with "ensuring that incidents are captured and that devices are connected to maximize visibility," the spokesperson said. "Axon is working on additional measures and improvements to address concerns of tracking our devices over time. Specifically, rotation of unique BLE device addresses (known as MAC addresses) that can specifically identify our devices, and removing the need for including serial numbers in Bluetooth broadcasts to reduce the ability to track a specific device over time."
No features in RFParty are designed specifically to track police, it’s a general Bluetooth scanning service, similar to existing services like Wigle.net or nRF Connect. But some of what's displayed on its maps includes common Internet of Things devices used by police, including body cams. Anecdotally, users are already using RFParty for police tracking purposes.
“We have all this technology that there's certain people who understand it, and can exploit it. But you know, most people can't and I think there needs to be more knowledge given out,” Hicks told Engadget. In a talk at DefCon 31 this past August, Meekins showed what the Axon OUI is and privately provided a live demo to me of how a knowledgeable RFParty user could leverage that information.
Of course, having that historical data handy for accountability purposes requires people to be running RFParty in the vicinity of potential abuses of police power, and it's unlikely the app will become popular on a scale where that data will be available for almost any such incident. Still, when cops have the power to use technology against nearly anyone, it's interesting to see the tables turned. | US Police Misconduct |
Ahead of 2024, we must protect election workers nationwide. Our democracy depends on it.
Every week, we continue to see news about the 2020 election and the shocking, seditious efforts to tear down our democracy that followed. Federal and state criminal indictments for conspiracies to overturn the election. Sentencing of extremist leaders of the Jan. 6 riots. Rudy Giuliani’s liability for defamation and infliction of emotional distress against two Georgia election workers.
Accountability for these past actions is critically important. But as these stories dominate the news cycle again and again, it is important not to lose sight of one of the unconscionable continuing consequences — the increase in hostility toward our nation’s election officials, and the impact it has on our democracy.
Since 2020, a shocking number of election officials nationwide, many beaten down by harassment, threats, interference in their jobs and lack of support, have left and continue to leave the field at an alarming rate. Rather than gradually declining in the years since 2020, the hostility, threats and intimidation of election workers has continued, and it impacts election officials — and voters — in every state, and in every party.
Election workers don’t leave these jobs lightly — they are some of the most fiercely committed and staunch public servants there are. But they are also understaffed and underpaid, and when you add in threats, intimidation and hostility, it begins to take its toll.
Election administrator Heider Garcia of Tarrant County, Texas, experienced years of threats and racist messages following 2020, but it wasn’t until April 2023 that he resigned. In 2023, in Buckingham County, Va., threats and harassment caused the entire election office to quit, and not even a month later, the county fired the new registrar. Election directors in 10 of Nevada’s 17 counties have resigned or retired since 2020 — many of them due to intimidation and hostility.
As Pennsylvania secretary of State in 2020, I, along with my husband, stayed in undisclosed locations for some time as a result of threats following the November election, and I was very grateful for law enforcement and others who provided protection. Many of us in similar positions were hoping against hope as we looked to each ensuing official action — final court decisions, the meeting of the Electoral College, audits, recounts and, of course, Jan. 6 and then Inauguration Day — that as facts were proven and the rule of law was upheld, the threats and efforts to tear down our democracy would end.
Unfortunately, none of this has stopped the flood of political violence.
Newer candidates continue to spew hostile and baseless allegations, and the flood of intimidation and threats continue to track these false narratives. As recently as 2022, my family received threats based on flagrant lies being repeated about the 2020 election.
This must stop. In addition to being an affront to humanity, these threats are an injury to our ability to vote. Every election worker that leaves means our voters and electoral system must rely on inexperienced workers who lack institutional knowledge to carry out complex election processes. The mass exodus of election staff leaves gaps in cybersecurity, chain of custody, auditing and many other advanced skills that strengthen election security and integrity, not to mention mentorship for new staff. And all of this leads to a never-ending cycle of prophecy fulfillment for the conspiracy theorists — in creating chaos and fear for election workers and voters, election denialism is its own poison.
We need to strengthen protections for election workers now, and this must be done at the federal, state and local levels. Congress should pass the Election Worker Protection Act of 2023 to provide more resources to recruit and train election workers and increase protections against threats and intimidation of election workers and interference in the electoral process.
We should also strengthen these protections at the state level; states can look to many statutory models, including those enacted this year in Minnesota. And we also must provide support directly to local officials by providing better training, education, incident response and continuity of operations planning to help deter and respond to threats.
We also must provide adequate and continuing funding for election offices. Any hope for secure elections for our dedicated election workers and voters alike — not to mention the survival of our democracy and our fundamental right to vote — depends on it.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Federal Elections |
DAVIS, Calif. -- Northern California prosecutors on Friday charged a 21-year-old former university student with two counts of murder and one of attempted murder in connection with a series of stabbings in the college community of Davis.
Carlos Dominguez is scheduled to be arraigned Friday afternoon in the Superior Court of California, County of Yolo. He was picked up for questioning Wednesday near the city park where he was alleged to have killed his second victim and has been in jail since early Thursday.
Yolo County prosecutors said Dominguez is eligible for a life prison term without the possibility of parole or the death penalty, given the multiple murders. He is accused of fatally stabbing two people, including a fellow student, and stabbing a third victim who is now recovering.
It was not immediately clear if Dominguez had retained an attorney who could speak on his behalf. He could be appointed a public defender at his arraignment.
News of his arrest Thursday was a relief to students and residents shocked by the vicious stabbings, which Davis Police Chief Darren Pytel described as particularly brutal and brazen.
Dominguez was a student at UC Davis until April 25 — two days before the first victim was found — when he was let go for academic reasons, the university said. He was a third-year student majoring in biological sciences. Previously, he attended Laney College in Oakland, the university said.
On Friday, students headed to class, in contrast to earlier in the week when the campus was practically deserted, some said.
Talia Mickelsen, a third-year student studying animal sciences, said she lives in a building across the street from the one in which Dominguez lived. She noticed him a few times, but never interacted with him, she said.
Mickelsen said the last week has been scary, and she feels more secure now that he is arrested.
“It is very eye-opening, but I guess these things can happen anywhere,” she said. "Now, I just make sure I’m vigilant and cautious wherever I go.”
Coco Yan, a student also majoring in animal sciences, said she and a friend did not leave the house unless they went out together.
“I have no sympathy for the stabber," said Yan. “A lot of people were stressed and scared because of it."
Davis police and multiple law enforcement agencies fanned out to investigate after the body of David Breaux, 50, was discovered at a downtown park near the University of California, Davis campus April 27. The second victim, UC Davis senior Karim Abou Najm, 20, was found Saturday night at another city park.
On Monday, Kimberlee Guillory was attacked while inside her tent but survived. Both Breaux and Guillory were homeless.
Davis police have not provided a motive and it is unclear if he knew the victims.
Pytel, the police chief, said 15 people called into the department Wednesday afternoon when they spotted someone matching the stabbing suspect's description at Sycamore Park, where Najm was found.
Dominguez went voluntarily with police for more questioning, Pytel said. They found a large knife in his backpack.
Davis is a city of 67,000, with an additional 13,000 students living on campus. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
New York City police said they are conducting an “internal review” following the spread of a video on social media that appears to show an officer using a homophobic slur on a police car announcement system.
A video shared on Instagram last week, which had more than 2 million views Thursday, appears to show an officer in the passenger’s seat of a marked police car making a comment about oral sex and then saying “f----t.”
The Instagram user who shared the video did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In an email Thursday, an NYPD spokesperson said: “The Department does not tolerate discrimination in any form and is committed to respectful work environments for our diverse workforce. The incident is under internal review.”
The Gay Officers Action League, or GOAL, a nonprofit advocacy group serving LGBTQ NYPD officers, said in a statement Wednesday: “We condemn such behavior because it is reprehensible and a severe violation of the trust and expectations we have for our fellow law enforcement professionals.
“This incident reminds us of the ongoing prejudices that persist within our society, and the ease with which some resort to hate speech. We refuse to remain silent. We are committed to ensuring that all LGBTQIA+ individuals, both within or outside the law enforcement community, are treated with respect and dignity.”
GOAL added that it is aware an NYPD investigation is underway and said it “will continue to monitor the situation closely.”
It said, “We expect the results of that investigation to lead to appropriate disciplinary action in line with the NYPD’s professional standards.”
GOAL President Brian Downey, an NYPD detective, said in an interview Thursday afternoon that the police department was already investigating before he had even seen the video. He said that he has since spoken with Police Commissioner Edward Cuban, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey and leadership from the NYPD’s office of equity and that “they understand how we feel.”
“They didn’t waste any time, which is good. I understand there’s certain things in a disciplinary process or an investigation that you can’t comment on, and that’s for good reason, but we’re watching,” he said. | US Police Misconduct |
A new battery of battleground state polls from New York Times-Siena College reinforces what has been evident for a while now: A year out from the 2024 elections, Joe Biden is in real danger of losing the presidency to Donald Trump. He trails the 45th president in five of the six states that are almost certain to decide the 2024 election; Biden carried all of them in 2020. The surveys echo what Emerson College and Bloomberg-Morning Consult found last month in their own state surveys. The prospect of a successful Trump comeback can no longer be explained away as a media overreaction or a bad dream. It’s now at least even money that this terrifying man full of vengeful plans to ravage the federal government and every institution that has defied his will to power will return to the nation’s top office.
Ironically, the source of this looming potential defeat is that the elements of the electorate whose values are most distant from Trump’s are the least alarmed by what a second Trump administration might unleash. It’s the Democratic base of young and nonwhite voters that is Biden’s big problem, as Nate Cohn explains:
On question after question, the public’s view of the president has plummeted over the course of his time in office. The deterioration in Mr. Biden’s standing is broad, spanning virtually every demographic group, yet it yields an especially deep blow to his electoral support among young, Black and Hispanic voters, with Mr. Trump obtaining previously unimaginable levels of support with them.
Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters under the age of 45 in the battleground states is down to six points; he won them by 39 points in 2020. That’s calamitous. And beyond candidate preferences, these voters seem systemically alienated not just from Biden and the Democratic Party but from a host of civic institutions and the people who run them. Harvard Institute of Politics polling director John Della Volpe argues that millennials and Gen-Z Americans distrust older generations so deeply that engagement with contemporary politics is extremely difficult:
Today many young people see wars, problems and mistakes originating from the older generations in top positions of power and trickling down to harm those most vulnerable and least equipped to protect themselves. This is the fabric that connects so many young people today, regardless of ideology. This new generation of empowered voters is therefore asking across a host of issues: If not now, then when is the time for a new approach?
It’s not an ideal time for Democrats to be led by the oldest president in American history. And as Della Volpe notes, younger voters are showing robust interest in “new approaches” like those offered by crackpot conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It’s a bit too late in Biden’s career for him to reinvent himself and his party in the kind of adventurous plunge to the populist left that might dislodge negative impressions of him, particularly among voters who aren’t paying much attention to political messaging or various indices of national well being. Indeed, it’s increasingly clear that Biden’s long, careful effort to convince unhappy Americans that they’ve never had it so good is failing; another year of boasts about “Bidenomics” will not overcome deeply entrenched perceptions that living standards are declining and economic insecurity is rising. Again, these perceptions are particularly evident among Democratic base voters, as Axios observes in its take on recent presidential polling:
Biden’s lead among Hispanics is in single digits in the six swing states polled (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). Democrats typically win among Hispanics by 30+ points.
A CBS News/YouGov poll out Sunday had a similarly worrisome finding for Democrats: “Hispanic voters are much likelier to say their finances would improve under Trump than Mr. Biden. And most Black voters do not expect their finances to change if Mr. Biden wins again.”
What’s happening: Hispanic ranchers, Mexican American oil workers and non-college-educated Latino voters are shifting measurably from Democrats, with potentially devastating electoral repercussions, reports Axios’ Russell Contreras, who has studied the Latino vote back to JFK’s victory in 1960.
Reasons include rural issues like opposition to protections for endangered species, plus efforts to move away from fossil fuels with no immediate alternative for well-paying jobs.
Among Black voters, stress from inflation and interest rates — and especially the cost of cars and housing — is hurting Biden.
It’s possible that conditions in the country (and the world) will improve enough over the next year that a second Biden term will seem a safer choice than more MAGA; that’s more or less how Biden won in 2020. But it’s not a great bet, and the stakes for getting 2024 wrong will be terrible and long-lasting.
What needs to happen is that the horror of left-of-center (and some right-of-center) elites toward a second Trump presidency be communicated regularly and loudly to voters who should but do not share that horror. Since no one opposing Trump has a more visible perch than Biden or the the kind of political machinery he commands, it’s time to go very negative on the former president and paint a lurid yet entirely accurate picture of what life may be like under his renewed and (in his mind) vindicated rule. His xenophobia, racism, sexism, and megalomania; his disdain for facts, science, and any sort of expertise; his extreme vulnerability to flattering manipulation; and most of all, his refusal to accept adverse decisions by voters, judges, juries, and law-enforcement officials. All these familiar features of the 45th president’s character need to be brought back up, documented, and hammered in, lest his relentless misconduct become normalized.
Some Trump opponents assume the legal peril he’s now in will bring him down without any particular effort on the part of Biden or Democrats (or indeed, Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals). Why gratify his desire to politicize his criminal activity? Why not just watch and wait for the inevitable fall? Short of actual incarceration prior to the 2025 inauguration, it’s unclear Trump’s exposure to criminal prosecution is going to cost him politically without an extraordinary effort to explain what he’s done and what it means for the country’s future if he returns to the White House. Keep in mind that these recent battleground polls with their terrible numbers have taken place against the background of 91 felony charges and constant maneuverings by Trump and prosecutors in federal and state courts. When will his misconduct begin to matter?
I am not, to be clear, proposing a pro-Biden counterpart of the famous 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, rationalizing support for an extremist presidential candidate as a civic emergency. Biden need not violate the constitution nor even cut corners to win reelection. But he does need to abandon the bland reassurance that has been his political signature as president and begin making the 2024 election a choice voters cannot avoid.
Louisiana faced a similar crisis in 1991 when former Ku Klux Klan leader and unrepentant white supremacist David Duke made it into a jungle primary runoff with scandal-plagued former governor Edwin Edwards. Duke led Edwards in some early polls; it appeared his Klan background was absorbed by many white voters as an irrelevant biographical detail. Only when Edwards drew attention to incidents of Duke dressing up in Nazi regalia and giving the Hitler salute while a grad student at LSU (“David, I was working on welfare reform when you were still goose-stepping around Baton Rouge,” Edwards said in a debate) did the election turn into a landslide win for Edwards. The popular bumper sticker of the day read, “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”
Perhaps Biden supporters do not have to print signs and bumper stickers reading, “Vote for the Geezer. It’s Important.” But the sentiment does need to be expressed early and often to those whose unhappiness with this or that aspect of the Biden presidency might lead them to help usher in an authoritarian regime they would like a whole lot less.
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- Ivanka Runs Out of Excuses, Plans to Testify in Fraud Case | US Federal Elections |
- House Republicans just narrowly nominated Rep. Steve Scalise to be their candidate for speaker.
- But Marjorie Taylor Greene is withholding her support, citing his cancer diagnosis.
- She says he shouldn't "sacrifice his health" and needs to put his "full efforts" into the job.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is vowing to oppose her party's nominee for speaker of the House when it comes to a vote on the floor — because he has cancer.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise narrowly clinched the nomination for speaker during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, defeating Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio in a narrow 113-99 vote.
"I like Steve Scalise, and I like him so much that I want to see him defeat cancer more than sacrifice his health in the most difficult position in Congress," Greene wrote on Twitter. "We need a Speaker who is able to put their full efforts into defeating the communist democrats and save America."
—Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) October 11, 2023
Scalise, whose office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, has insisted that he's still capable of doing the job as he seeks treatment.
After his diagnosis in August, he said in a statement that he would be "continuing my work as Majority Leader" and that he would "tackle this with the same strength and energy as I have tackled past challenges." Scalise survived an assassination attempt in 2017.
Greene is not the only holdout. Several hardline House Republicans have said that they will continue to vote for Jordan on the House floor, presumably in a bid to extract concessions from Scalise.
But she is the only lawmaker so far that has publicly made an issue out of Scalise's cancer diagnosis. | US Congress |
Appeals court temporarily lifts Trump gag order in D.C. case
The appeals court’s action makes it likely that the gag order will be sidelined for more than two weeks and perhaps longer.
A federal appeals court on Friday lifted a gag order reining in Donald Trump’s comments about the criminal election-subversion case pending against him in Washington.
At the former president’s request, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily lifted U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan’s order prohibiting Trump from using his public statements to target special counsel Jack Smith and his team, court officials and potential witnesses in the case.
The appeals court’s action makes it likely that the gag order, which Trump contends violates his First Amendment rights and those of his supporters, will be sidelined for more than two weeks and perhaps longer. Trump has also complained that the order interferes with his rights as a presidential candidate to argue to voters that he is being politically persecuted by the Biden administration.
The D.C. Circuit set oral arguments on the gag order issue for Nov. 20. The panel issuing the order consisted of two Obama appointees — Patricia Millett and Cornelia Pillard — as well as the court’s newest member, Biden appointee Bradley Garcia.
The panel’s two-page order did not offer a detailed explanation for the court’s action. However, the judges included boiler-plate language indicating that the “administrative stay” was not a judgment on the merits of Chutkan’s order and was simply to give the panel time to review the case.
A spokesperson for Smith’s office declined to comment on the appeals court’s move.
Chutkan issued the gag order in writing on Oct. 17 at the request of Smith’s team, which contended Trump’s repeated inflammatory attacks on witnesses, prosecutors, the judge and Washington, D.C., itself threatened to damage the integrity of his upcoming trial, slated to begin March 4.
Chutkan agreed that Trump’s incendiary comments threatened the proceedings. Her order barred all parties in the case from “targeting” witnesses, prosecutors and court staff. She also emphasized that Trump would be permitted to criticize her, the Biden administration and the Justice Department, assert his innocence and generally allege that his prosecution is politically motivated.
But Trump has called the restrictions an unprecedented attack on his free speech, particularly amid the 2024 presidential campaign cycle. Chutkan has repeatedly emphasized that she would not allow presidential politics or the campaign schedule to influence her decision-making.
After Trump sought a stay from Chutkan, she suspended her order for about a week, but reinstated it on Sunday after declaring herself to be unpersuaded by his legal team’s arguments that the directive is unduly vague and overbroad.
Trump is also under a gag order issued in connection with a civil suit the New York Attorney General Tish James filed targeting alleged pervasive fraud in his real estate empire. Trump has been twice fined by the judge there, for a total of $15,000, for violating a directive to cease public statements about the judge’s clerk and other court staff.
Sparring over the scope of the gag order in that case continued on Friday, with the judge issuing a written order declaring that lawyers in the case were also now covered by the directive. | US Circuit and Appeals Courts |
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LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — Five months before the deadliest mass shooting in Maine’s history, the gunman’s family alerted the local sheriff that they were becoming concerned about his deteriorating mental health while he had access to firearms, authorities said Monday.
READ MORE: Lewiston mass shooter had numerous run-ins with authorities, showed warning signs long before shooting
After the alert, the Sagadohoc County Sheriff’s Office reached out to officials of Robert Card’s Army Reserve unit, which assured deputies that they would speak to Card and make sure he got medical attention, Sheriff Joel Merry said.
The family’s concern about Card’s mental health dated back to early this year before the sheriff’s office was contacted in May, marking the earliest in a string of interactions that police had with the 40-year-old firearms instructor before he marched into a Lewiston bowling alley and a bar last Wednesday, killing 18 people and wounding 13 others.
After an intensive two-day search that put residents on edge, he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.
Card underwent a mental health evaluation last summer after accusing soldiers of calling him a pedophile, shoving one and locking himself in his room during training in New York, officials said. A bulletin sent to police shortly after last week’s attack said Card had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks after “hearing voices and threats to shoot up” a military base.
Documents released from the sheriff on Monday gave the most detailed timeline yet of other warning signs and failed efforts to stop the gunman months before he killed.
On Sept. 15, a sheriff’s deputy was sent to visit Card’s home for a wellness check at the request of the reserve unit after a soldier said he was afraid Card was “going to snap and commit a mass shooting” because he was hearing voices again. The deputy went to Card’s trailer but could not find him — nor the next day on a return visit. The sheriff’s department then sent out a statewide alert for help locating Card with a warning that he was known to be “armed and dangerous” and that officers should use extreme caution.
By this time, Card’s reserve unit had grown sufficiently concerned that it had decided to take away his military-issued firearms, the sheriff’s office was told. Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Ruth Castro confirmed that account, adding that Card was also declared “non-deployable” and that multiple attempts were made to contact him.
According to the deputy’s report after visiting Card’s home, he reached out to the reserves’ unit commander who assured him the Army was trying to get treatment for Card. The commander also said he thought “it best to let Card have time to himself for a bit.”
READ MORE: After Maine’s worst mass shooting, more than 1,000 pay tribute on day of prayer, reflection and hope
The deputy then reached out to Card’s brother. The brother said he had put Card’s firearms in a gun safe in the family farm and would work with their father to move the guns somewhere else and make sure Card couldn’t get other firearms.
Authorities recovered a multitude of weapons while searching for Card after the shooting and believe he had legally purchased them, including a Ruger SFAR rifle found in his car, officials said Monday. A Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifle and Smith & Wesson M&P .40-caliber handgun were with his body.
Authorities have not said whether they believe Card planned the Oct. 25 rampage in advance. Nearly three months ago, he tried and failed to acquire a device used to quiet gunshots, a gun shop owner in Auburn said.
Rick LaChapelle, owner of Coastal Defense Firearms, said Card purchased a suppressor, also called a silencer, online and arranged to pick it up at his shop.
Card already had submitted information to the federal government to purchase it, and federal authorities had approved the sale to that point, he said.
When Card filled out the form at LaChapelle’s gun shop to pick up the silencer Aug. 5, he answered “yes” to the question: “Have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?”
“As soon as he answered that ‘yes’ we know automatically that this is disqualifying, he’s not getting a silencer today,” LaChapelle said.
Silencers are more heavily regulated under federal law than most firearms. Federal law requires buyers to apply with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and be approved. The dealer must do a background check ,too
He said Card was polite when notified of the denial, mentioned something about the military and said he would “come right back” after consulting his lawyer.
Investigators are facing increasing public scrutiny and still searching for a motive for the massacre but have increasingly focused on Card’s mental health history.
READ MORE: Maine’s governor says at least 18 people were killed and 13 were injured in shootings in Lewiston
On Monday, Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, held a news conference to provide an update on the response to the shooting. The conference turned contentious quickly when Mills declined to provide information about what the investigation has turned up so far.
Mills said state lawmakers would revisit Maine gun control laws. Proposals for tighter laws have stalled or failed in recent legislative sessions.
“I’m not going to stand here today and tell you I’m proposing X, Y and Z,” she said. “I’m here to listen, work with others and get people around the table as promptly as possible.”
Card’s body was found late Friday in a trailer at a recycling center in Lisbon Falls, but it was unclear when he died.
Residents of Lewiston returned to work Monday, the morning after coming together to mourn those lost in the shootings. More than 1,000 people attended Basilica of Saints Peter & Paul for a vigil in Lewiston.
The deadliest shooting in Maine’s history stunned a state of 1.3 million people that has relatively little violent crime and only 29 killings in all of 2022.
The Lewiston shootings were the 36th mass killing in the U.S. this year, according to a database maintained by the AP and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. The database includes every mass killing since 2006 from all weapons in which four or more people, excluding the offender, were killed within a 24-hour time frame.
Associated Press journalists Patrick Whittle in Portland, David R. Martin and Matt Rourke in Lewiston, Maine, Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington, D.C., Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Bernard Condon in New York and Michael Casey in Boston contributed.
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Oct 28 | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
- The Supreme Court's decision on student loan forgiveness will be especially meaningful for borrowers who started college but never finished.
- For them, managing education loans without the benefit of having higher earning potential is especially difficult.
Increasingly, borrowers are struggling under the weight of a growing tab. As of the latest tally, borrowers owe a combined $1.7 trillion.
For those who start college but never finish, managing such a hefty amount of debt is especially difficult.
Although college enrollment declines have leveled off overall, the number of students who started college but then withdrew rose 3.6% in the 2020-21 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. There are now over 40 million students who are currently unenrolled.
"Growing numbers of stop-outs and fewer returning students have contributed to the broader enrollment declines in recent years," said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Among students who put their education on hold, most said it was due to a loss of motivation or a life change, according to a report by education lender Sallie Mae. Others cite financial concerns, followed by mental health challenges.
"There's a variety of issues students face in college, many unexpected," said Rick Castellano, a spokesperson for Sallie Mae. "In some cases, it could be an unpaid bill."
But the borrowers most in jeopardy of defaulting are those who start college but never finish.
"If you are a student who has some college but no degree you didn't realize the benefit of that education and it's even more difficult to repay the loan," Castellano said.
The default rate among borrowers who leave with student debt but no degree is three times higher than the rate for borrowers who have a diploma.
If a student defaults, it's not only a loss for them, but also for the institution of higher education and the federal government, Castellano added. "It's a key moment for all of those stakeholders."
Meanwhile, college is only getting more expensive. Tuition and fees plus room and board, books and other expenses for a four-year private college averaged $57,570 in the 2022-23 academic year; at four-year, in-state public colleges, it was more than $27,940, according to the College Board, which tracks trends in college pricing and student aid.
Still, many would-be students believe that getting a degree is worth it and continue to borrow to make college possible.
"Regardless of where the Supreme Court lands, forgiveness as a solution is really focused on the back end," Castellano said. "It could absolutely help but how do we ensure we're not back in the same place five years from now?" | SCOTUS |
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass a short-term spending measure Friday, increasing the chances of a government shutdown when funding runs out on October 1.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Friday that passing a short-term funding deal was critical to maintaining security at the U.S.- Mexico border and would buy lawmakers crucial time to negotiate spending priorities, but the measure was defeated by the most conservative members of his Republican Party.
“President Biden and congressional Democrats continue to ignore the border and ignore their own leaders. That is why I'm putting on the floor a stopgap measure that will fund the government and secure the border. No longer can the president ignore a problem he created,” McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill earlier in the day.
But the short-term continuing resolution was defeated 232-198, with 20 Republicans joining a united Democratic opposition.
Even if a measure passed the Republican-majority House, it would face little chance of passage in the Democratic-majority Senate. Lawmakers remain at odds over the size of the U.S. budget for the next 12 months, continued aid for Ukraine to fight Russia, immigration controls at the U.S.-Mexico border, and social welfare programs to help impoverished Americans.
"They tried a partisan continuing resolution and they failed,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters after Friday’s vote. “And there was no way out of their Republican civil war. The only path forward is to partner with House Democrats in a bipartisan way. And we're prepared to do just that.”
The Democratic-controlled Senate is working on a seven-week funding plan that would keep the government fully open through mid-November to give lawmakers more time to set spending levels through September 2024. The bipartisan legislation allocates $6 billion in supplemental aid for the war in Ukraine and for disaster relief in the United States, two sticking points for conservatives in the U.S. House.
Government agencies Thursday morning began notifying workers a shutdown could be in the offing.
'Manufactured shutdown'
Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told White House reporters Friday that a government shutdown could cost the U.S. economy $26 billion.
“The hope is though during a shutdown, if that happens, the economy would be able to pick that GDP loss up in the next quarter. So, it may not be a permanent loss, but why risk our economy for a manufactured shutdown? All a problem within one conference in Congress.” she said.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned lawmakers earlier this week about the dire effects of shutting down part of the government, especially difficulties in controlling the influx of migrants at the country’s southern border with Mexico.
“Shutting down the government is not like pressing pause,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday. “It’s not an interlude that lets us pick up where we left off. It’s an actively harmful proposition. And instead of producing any meaningful policy outcomes, it would actually take the important progress being made on a number of key issues and drag it backward.”
If a short-term funding deal cannot be reached, more than 4 million U.S. military service personnel and government workers would not be paid, although essential services such as air traffic control and official border entry points would still be staffed. Pensioners might not get their monthly government payments in time to pay bills and buy groceries, and national parks could be closed.
Such shutdowns have occurred four times in the last decade in the U.S., but often have lasted just a day or two until lawmakers reached a compromise to fully restart government operations. However, one shutdown that occurred during the administration of former President Donald Trump lasted 35 days, as he unsuccessfully sought funding to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
“This does look very chaotic, but this is not the first time it's happened,” Todd Belt, director of the school of political management at George Washington University, told VOA. “There is a price that has to be paid here. But that is the price of democracy. It does seem very messy sometimes. But eventually, usually you get some compromise.”
McCarthy reached a deal in May with Democratic President Joe Biden on spending levels for fiscal 2024, but a small faction of far-right House Republicans rejected the deal and now is demanding further spending cuts.
The McCarthy-Biden deal called for $1.59 trillion in discretionary spending in fiscal 2024, but some members of the House Freedom Caucus are demanding another $120 billion in cuts and further border controls.
The cuts would be a relatively small portion of the overall $6.4 trillion U.S. budget and would not affect pension payments or government-provided health insurance for older Americans.
Democratic votes needed
The Senate’s short-term spending plan through mid-November could win passage in the House, but only with a mix of Republican and Democratic votes, jeopardizing McCarthy’s speakership.
“Many of these hard-right Republicans who are opposed to any sort of deal or bipartisanship are likely not going to get what they want, because they keep asking for more,” Belt told VOA.
“Ultimately, I think that McCarthy is going to have to make a deal with House Democrats in order to pass these deals. And if he does that — and he did that once to get the spending limit set — when he did these initial negotiations, those Republicans were very angry with him. They'd be angry with him again.”
Biden told a group of donors at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Wednesday, “I think that the speaker is making a choice between [retaining] the speakership and American interests." | US Congress |
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The criminal indictment of ex-President Donald Trump for his alleged attempts to subvert democracy and incite the Jan. 6, 2021, melee in Washington has been a long time coming. Now that it’s here, two-and-a-half years after a mob listened to Trump, marched about a mile eastward, and ransacked the U.S. Capitol in service of his lies about a stolen 2020 election, it hits a little different than the charges previously brought against Trump.
A federal grand jury on Tuesday charged Trump with an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States, a conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and a conspiracy against voting rights. The charges are a remarkable escalation of the legal troubles chasing Trump during what he hopes is a brief return to civilian life. Trump, who is running for President again in 2024 and is the runaway front-runner in the Republican field, could face years in prison if convicted. Now Trump has made history once again, becoming a thrice-indicted ex-Commander in Chief. Well, at least if the normal rules of political gravity still matter. History is being made, but not all history is good.
It was a day a lot of the folks who experienced the attack in Washington on Jan. 6 had been seeking for a long time. The wall-to-wall coverage on cable, the constant refreshes of social-media sites, and even the text chains around Capitol Hill all reflected an anxiety that this may be a false start. It will be similar when Trump is due in court on Thursday in D.C.
Politicos of both parties in D.C. watched in horror more than two years ago as a riot descended on Capitol Hill, the mob raiding offices, menacing lawmakers, and fighting hand-to-hand combat with police. The top leadership of both chambers followed evacuation protocols to make sure their branch of government wouldn’t be decapitated. Vice President Mike Pence was pinned down and forced to hide at a loading dock while White House aides unsuccessfully lobbied Trump to direct his legion of followers to stop terrorizing democracy. Partisanship fades when Hill staffers talk about that day, even if many of their bosses have publicly retreated from prior criticism of Trump and sought to shade the painful facts.
The Trump years numbed the country to the word “unprecedented,” amid the constant reverberations of history being made. From the day Trump took office as the only person ever elected to the presidency with zero government or military experience, around every corner came norm-breaking and precedent-smashing. His tweets broke the fourth wall, he was the only President impeached twice, became the first in 150 years to refuse to attend his successor’s inauguration, and his Administration paid so little heed to laws prohibiting politicking on the government dime that he held the Republican convention on the South Lawn of the White House.
Trump’s team has already started telling allies on the Hill that these latest indictments will not matter at all for his reelection hopes. Republicans cite “indictment fatigue,” hoping to plant the idea that voters don’t much care about it and have already accepted that Trump is a bad dude who doesn’t play by the rules. It’s going to be “Old News!” on the socials and “Witch Hunt!” in the hallways. The messaging leaves responsible conservatives squeamish, but they’ll still carry it for fear of being branded insufficiently MAGA, and thus vulnerable in a primary from someone who wears the red hat proudly.
Trump’s past two indictments suggest this one may, perversely, benefit him as well. The aftermath of those charges—totaling at least 78 felony allegations and counting—brought a fundraising boon and a polling surge. That’s right: the self-described billionaire will collect millions in donations from his fans who see the real estate mogul as a victim of a weaponized Justice Department. His best days of fundraising have been his worst ones legally.
It’s worth taking a beat to appreciate how casually we all blew through the phrase “past two indictments” in the previous paragraph. And the fact that a former President now accused of a “conspiracy to defraud the United States” remains the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s re-nomination next year. A thrice-indicted, convicted sexual abuser, alleged election interferer and wealth fabulist is on course to coast to the general election, past capable governors, investors, ambassadors, and even his own former Vice President. Trump could still return to power facing federal charges and, in turn, dodge accountability for any of his alleged misdeeds. (This is why the state-based cases, where Trump will lack pardon powers, may be the real places to watch.)
But that doesn’t mean the next year-plus will be easy for Trump. His troubles are as epic as they are history-making—and, maybe, incompatible with his campaign schedule. Trump is due in court in October to answer a $250 million civil lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General on allegations the Trumps falsified business records. He is scheduled to begin a New York County criminal trial in March of next year on 34 charges that he falsified Trump Organization business records to pay off a porn star. A federal judge ruled on July 19 the case in Manhattan should continue there, and not be moved into the federal track. Trump was arraigned last month on charges he had classified documents at his Florida vacation club and defied subpoenas to return them, a case also brought by special counsel Smith. He pleaded not guilty to 37 charges. Another three were added last week. A trial date could start in May in Florida.
And, as of Tuesday, he could be facing criminal charges in a D.C. federal court on charges linked to Jan. 6.
On top of all of this, Trump faces potential criminal charges of election tampering in Georgia for a call asking the state’s balloting chief to change the winner; an indictment has been considered imminent in a county-based case since February, and a new grand jury was seated last week. A decision, it seems, is imminent.
Yet, somehow, there remains a better-than-even-odds chance he squirms out of any consequences, which would leave a lot of the witnesses to the chaos of Jan. 6 deeply skeptical about the evenhandedness of the criminal justice system if not dejected and cynical. After all, a high-wattage series of congressional hearings last year into Trump’s conduct surrounding the riot resulted in a collective shrug, and two impeachment trials—one of which was also about Jan. 6—failed to deliver convictions.
Those earlier indictments cut some parts of Trump’s clout down to size. But those haven’t yet been enough to take him down, because Presidents stand like giants. That may be changing, as instead of standing with Sequoia-like titans like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, the Trump sapling is being cut into a stump. With this latest indictment, which is a federal criminal probe that goes beyond fibbing on tax forms and mishandling spycraft files and includes a bodycount, Trump has few chances to rise to his predecessor’s heights, at least beyond a shady corner of his partisan bonfire. It’s why Tuesday’s indictment is not like the earlier ones: it may be the one cited in the first line of future history books. He may well dodge jail time, but even the one-time most-powerful person on the planet cannot escape the accountability of historians.
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THETFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WJRT) - An investigation is underway after 289 absentee ballots from the 2020 election were found in Thetford Township.
The ballots were found inside a storage unit at Storage One in Clio last August.
"My biggest concern is why were they in a storage unit?" Township Supervisor Rachel Stanke said. "Why were they never mailed out to the voters for one? There's got to be a reason why. I don't think you can forget to mail out 289 ballots to voters."
None of the ballots in the storage unit made it into the hands of voters in the 2020 election. That said, of the 289 ballots, 77.5% were marked spoiled, meaning most voters were issued a new ballot in order to perform their civic duty.
"I'm thankful that those people did get to vote, but there is a good amount of people that never got to vote," Stanke said. "And I believe during that time we were in a pandemic. People didn't want to come out of their houses. We have disabled people. There's a reason that they vote absentee."
According to a Michigan State Police report, the ballots were found last August when the former Deputy Township Clerk was cleaning out her storage unit. She says she was given the box by current Township Clerk Nicole Moore shortly after the election and asked to store them.
It was only after the Deputy Clerk tried to return the boxes to Stanke that she discovered they were ballots.
"I just had an inkling to contact the state police and I did that and the state police went over there and recovered the ballots," Stanke said.
The investigation now rests in the hands of the Attorney General's office, who is still looking into exactly what happened.
ABC 12 has tried to speak with Township Clerk Nicole Moore, but she could not be reached for comment at this time. | US Local Elections |
Democrats in Wisconsin, as well as many political observers in the state, are decrying a plan by Republicans to create a purportedly nonpartisan redistricting process that on its face sounds good, but upon further examination doesn’t actually change the likelihood that political maps will continue to be gerrymandered.
Republicans have, since 2011, won the state legislature in a disproportionate measure in statewide elections in large part because they have been able to draw clearly gerrymandered districts in the state in their own favor. In 2020, for example, while the presidential race in Wisconsin was a dead heat (with Democratic candidate Joe Biden winning by just over 20,000 votes over Republican Donald Trump), the GOP won 61 seats in the 99-seat state Assembly. In 2022, while Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, won the state with over 51 percent of the vote, Republicans improved representation in the state Assembly, attaining 64 seats in total that year.
Now, since the election of state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz earlier this year, which flipped the court to liberal control, Republicans have threatened to impeach her over her comments about what most Wisconsinites are well-aware of – that the electoral maps are “rigged” to favor the GOP. Preventing Protasiewicz from being able to serve would also disallow her from taking part in a case on the redistricting process in the state, where it’s expected that the liberal bloc of justices will find the process in violation of the state constitution.
State Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos (R) appeared ready to push forward with the impeachment plan. However, after it appeared unlikely that he had the votes from his own party to go through with it, he pulled back from the idea. Instead, at a press conference attended by him and other Republican lawmakers on Tuesday, he announced he was ready to embrace redistricting reform, which Democrats had been pushing for years.
Vos said the legislation his party would offer would be the same in scope to what a bipartisan bill, proposed in 2019, looks like. “We are going to get this bill passed, we are going to get it signed by Gov. Evers, we’re going to have maps that look different,” he said.
Vos announced the bill would be put up for a vote on Thursday. Democrats, including Evers, indicated deep skepticism over the idea before the bill was made public, expressing doubts that Vos was acting in good faith.
“A Legislature that has repeatedly demonstrated they will not uphold basic tenets of our democracy — and will bully, threaten, or fire on a whim anyone who happens to disagree with them — cannot be trusted to appoint or oversee someone charged with drawing fair maps,” Evers said in a statement.
The skepticism appears to have been warranted, as the new bill has a glaring difference from the 2019 bipartisan version.
The two versions of the bill both mirror the “Iowa model” for redistricting, which has a nonpartisan state agency produce maps that are overseen and guided by a commission consisting of individuals selected by the majority and minority leaders from both houses of the state legislature, with an additional person for that commission selected by the original four. However, the 2019 version included a failsafe to prevent gerrymandering from still happening, whereas, in the 2023 version, that failsafe has been omitted.
When the commission submits the maps to the legislature to vote on, lawmakers can vote them up or down. If they don’t approve a set of maps, the commission reconvenes and produces a new set, addressing the concerns stated by the lawmakers. If that second set doesn’t work, the process is repeated for a third time.
In the 2019 bill, the state legislature is allowed to amend the maps in the third round but only if three-fourths of the commission agrees to the changes they make. In the new 2023 version of the bill, the commission doesn’t play a role in approving amendments to the maps, and the state legislature is allowed to change them on their own — a key difference between the two bills which allows lawmakers to still pass gerrymandered maps, simply by rejecting the commission’s proposals after two votes.
“Say it’s voted down twice, the Legislature can do what they normally do, which is just amend the legislation and pass whatever version they want,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, said to The Wisconsin Examiner. “And so that would allow the Republicans in Wisconsin to just vote down the nonpartisan maps twice and then put forward their own plan.”
A nonpartisan assessment of the bill also notes that the redistricting process, while laid out in great detail, “is not enforceable by the courts” under the terms of the legislation.
Philip Rocco, a political science professor at Marquette University, suggested the “nonpartisan” proposal by Vos was another example of Wisconsin Republicans finding a way to change the election system in the state to favor themselves.
“A better way of thinking of this bill is an ‘Iowa style’ redistricting plan with several ‘Wisconsin style’ escape hatches that nullify the whole thing,” Rocco tweeted.
“Vos’s proposal is a system where staff draws maps, but then if the legislature — meaning Vos, as Speaker — rejects them, he can change them however he wants. Nope,” wrote Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Vos has said he’s open to amendments on the bill, but nonpartisan voting rights groups in the state said he shouldn’t be taken at his word.
“This proposal is being pushed by the same legislators who have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to undermine democratic principles, failed to advance education and health care policies that the majority of Wisconsinites support and a history of rejecting similar nonpartisan redistricting proposals,” read a statement from The Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition. “Trusting these lawmakers to uphold the principles of fair and nonpartisan redistricting is difficult, given their track record of prioritizing partisan interests over the integrity of the electoral process.”
“Today’s events prove what we’ve always known: Vos is untrustworthy & not interested in democracy,” read a tweet from the Wisconsin-based Fair Elections Project. “The voters statewide have rejected his viewpoint. The legal case must move forward and is the best path to resolve the constitutional issue at stake.”
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Trump’s Georgia trial should be kicked to 2029 if he wins the election, his lawyer says
Georgia prosecutors contended that holding the trial next summer wouldn’t hinder Trump’s campaign “in any way.”
If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, he can’t face a criminal trial in Georgia until at least 2029 — after he leaves the presidency — his Atlanta-based defense attorney argued Friday.
“I believe that the [Constitution’s] supremacy clause and his duties as president of the United States — this trial would not take place at all until after his term in office,” said Steve Sadow, Trump’s defense lawyer in the racketeering case in which the former president and many of his allies are charged with conspiring to subvert Georgia’s certification of the presidential election in 2020.
Sadow’s comment came as the judge queried lawyers for Trump and his co-defendants about the timing of a potential trial. By alluding to the supremacy clause, Sadow was invoking the principle that state interests must generally yield to federal duties. How that principle would apply to a state’s attempt to prosecute a sitting president is an untested constitutional question.
On the other hand, Sadow sharply protested a proposal by Fulton County prosecutors to begin the trial in August 2024, saying that would amount to “election interference” by keeping Trump off the campaign trail for the final months of the election.
“Can you imagine the notion of the Republican nominee for president not being able to campaign for the presidency because he is, in some form or fashion, in a courtroom defending himself?” Sadow said during a court hearing in Atlanta. “That would be the most effective election interference in the history of the United States, and I don’t think anyone would want to be in that position.”
“Everyone recognizes that he’s far ahead in the polls to be the Republican nominee,” Sadow added.
Trump is facing three other criminal cases, all of which are slated to go to trial next year — though Trump hopes to delay all of them. His federal trial for election interference and his New York trial for hush money payments are both scheduled for March, and his federal trial for hoarding classified records is scheduled for May.
Friday’s hearing was the first time Trump’s legal team had weighed in on the timing of the Georgia case in front of the judge, Scott McAfee. It underscored the delicate calculus McAfee will have to undertake to balance the need to advance the criminal process with the likelihood that Trump will be his party’s nominee in 2024.
McAfee gave no hints as to how he might rule on that question, but acknowledged the thorniness of the issue, at one point asking prosecutors if the trial would constitute “election interference” if it was in session on Election Day.
Fulton County prosecutor Nathan Wade disputed Sadow’s contention, arguing that trying Trump in August “does not constitute election interference” but rather would be “moving forward with the business of Fulton County.”
“I don’t think that it in any way impedes defendant Trump’s ability to campaign or do whatever he needs to do in order to seek office,” Wade said.
Sadow said other factors could also lead to delays. He indicated that Trump plans to file a motion in January asking to throw the case against him out on grounds that he’s immune from prosecution because he was president at the time of the events in question. If that motion is denied, Trump’s defense will seek to appeal and could seek review by the Georgia Supreme Court, Sadow said.
McAfee said he did not plan to make any decision on a trial date Friday and he signaled he would likely not do so until sometime next year. | US Political Corruption |
Biden will deliver a rare primetime address on threats to American democracyGood evening, and welcome to the Guardian’s US politics liveblog, primetime edition.We’ll be bringing you live updates and analysis tonight, as Joe Biden addresses the country. The president is expected to speak about threats to American democracy, and “the power we have in our own hands to meet those threats”, according to excerpts of his speech that the White House has shared with the media.In recent weeks, Biden has unleashed an uncharacteristically energetic, aggressive line of attack against Republicans allied with Donald Trump, and the party’s willingness to erode democratic rights and personal freedoms.As my colleague Lauren Gambino reports, Biden is expected to evoke a battle for the “soul of the nation”, reviving a theme from his presidential campaign, and build on public backlash against the supreme court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.Here’s our main report on the night ahead:Key events18m agoBiden will deliver a rare primetime address on threats to American democracyShow key events onlyPlease turn on JavaScript to use this featureLauren GambinoBiden will be delivering his speech from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – where American democracy was born.Thursday’s primetime speech is the second of three visits by the president in less than a week to battleground Pennsylvania, home to several consequential races this election season.In the US Senate race, Mehmet Oz, the Trump-backed heart surgeon turned celebrity doctor, is squaring off against the state’s lieutenant governor, Democrat John Fetterman, in a contest that could determine which party controls the chamber, evenly divided at present.Meanwhile, Democrats have warned about the risks of Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican nominee for governor, a leading figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania who helped shuttle people on 6 January to Trump’s Washington DC rally that preceded the attack on the US capitol.In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state, giving the next governor enormous sway over how the 2024 presidential election is conducted in the state. Mastriano faces Democrat Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general.In a speech not far from Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, the US president lashed out at “Maga Republicans in Congress” over their attacks on the FBI after agents seized boxes of classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month. The remarks were designed to counter Republican attacks on Democrats as “soft on crime”, with Biden casting his opponents’ rhetoric as a threat to law enforcement and the rule of law.“The idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, ‘If such and such happens there’ll be blood on the street’?” he said in Wilkes-Barre. “Where the hell are we?”Biden will deliver a rare primetime address on threats to American democracyGood evening, and welcome to the Guardian’s US politics liveblog, primetime edition.We’ll be bringing you live updates and analysis tonight, as Joe Biden addresses the country. The president is expected to speak about threats to American democracy, and “the power we have in our own hands to meet those threats”, according to excerpts of his speech that the White House has shared with the media.In recent weeks, Biden has unleashed an uncharacteristically energetic, aggressive line of attack against Republicans allied with Donald Trump, and the party’s willingness to erode democratic rights and personal freedoms.As my colleague Lauren Gambino reports, Biden is expected to evoke a battle for the “soul of the nation”, reviving a theme from his presidential campaign, and build on public backlash against the supreme court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.Here’s our main report on the night ahead: | US Federal Elections |
New York University law professor Stephen Gillers told Newsweek that the Supreme Court would likely delay Trump's Georgia trial, in which he is accused of illegal interference in the 2020 presidential election, until he was out of office.
Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis said on Tuesday that she anticipated the trial to conclude by early 2025, with proceedings probably underway during the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election.
In an interview at The Washington Post Live's Global Women's Summit on Tuesday, Willis said the anticipated trial over alleged election interference by Trump and his allies could be ongoing on Election Day 2024 and possibly still underway on Inauguration Day.
"I believe the trial will take many months. And I don't expect that we will conclude until the winter or the very early part of 2025," Willis said. "I don't, when making decisions about cases to bring, consider any election cycle or an election season," she added.
That means that the trial verdict could come right down to the wire—if Trump is elected president, he may be able to halt the trial until he is out of office, by which time he will be 82 years old.
If a Georgia jury reaches a verdict before inauguration day, Trump could be sentenced to prison, setting off a major constitutional crisis.
"Of course, as with many things Trump, we lack a precedent," Gillers said. "But I believe that the Supreme Court would order a delay of any state criminal prosecution of a sitting president until the end of his term, regardless of when the alleged crime occurred."
Gillers added that the Supreme Court would rely on "the structure of the constitution, federalism, and the supremacy clause."
Article VI, Paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution, commonly referred to as the Supremacy Clause, "prohibits states from interfering with the federal government's exercise of its constitutional powers," according to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University in New York.
In August, an Atlanta grand jury voted to indict Trump and 18 others over alleged attempts to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election results, charging the former president and every other co-defendant with at least one count of violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all 13 counts he faces. He has also alleged the investigation against him was an attempt to disrupt his 2024 presidential campaign.
Newsweek sought email comment from Trump's lawyer on Thursday.
New York University constitutional law professor, Peter Shane, told Newsweek that, if Trump was inaugurated in January, 2025 while the Georgia trial was continuing, he would "no doubt argue that he cannot be subject to state criminal proceedings while in his office because the need to attend to those proceedings would diminish his capacity to serve as president."
However, Shane said that, while presidents are not immune while in office from state civil proceedings, "a criminal trial of a sitting president would be unprecedented."
If the trial was halted for four years, it would likely have to restart from the beginning once Trump was out of office—something Shane believes the courts would be keen to avoid.
" I have a hard time imagining that the courts would force Georgia to wait four years to redo a trial already commenced, but these are uncharted waters," he said.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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About the writer
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. He has covered human rights and extremism extensively. Sean joined Newsweek in 2023 and previously worked for The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, Vice and others from the Middle East. He specialized in human rights issues in the Arabian Gulf and conducted a three-month investigation into labor rights abuses for The New York Times. He was previously based in New York for 10 years. He is a graduate of Dublin City University and is a qualified New York attorney and Irish solicitor.
You can get in touch with Sean by emailing [email protected]. Languages: English and French.
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law.... Read more
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here. | US Political Corruption |
NEW YORK - New York lawmakers are making it clear they want Rep. George Santos to immediately resign.
Their reactions came after the, which found there was "substantial evidence" of wrongdoing by him.
Santos responded to the report on social media, . Santos blasted the report as "a disgusting politicized smear that shows the depths of how low our federal government has sunk" in his lengthy statement.
"As the governor of the state who actually needs members of Congress who are focused on doing their jobs and delivering for New York, I'm calling on him to resign," Gov. Kathy Hochul said.
"George Santos should end this farce and resign immediately. If he refuses, he must be removed from Congress," Rep. Mike Lawler said. "His conduct is not only unbecoming and embarrassing, it is criminal. He is unfit to serve and should resign today."
"The bipartisan Ethics Committee confirmed what most New Yorkers knew months ago: George Santos is a total fraud who stole an election to get to Congress. The House must use our Constitutional expulsion powers. This will let the Third District participate in a valid election," Rep. Nick LaLota wrote on X.
"As expected, this report confirms what we knew: George Santos is a fraud, committed fraud & should not serve in the House of Representatives. This is why I called for his resignation, voted for his expulsion & believe he needs to be removed from Congress," Rep. Marc Molinaro wrote on X.
"I believe this is long overdue. Santos should resign, or they should remove him from Congress. Also, if he was smart, I think he would enter a plea of guilty and work out the best deal he can with the Justice Department. He does not belong in Congress. I've never seen anyone with such a disgraceful record, both before, during and after he was in Congress. So no, to me, it's important that, based on the findings of the Ethics Committee report, that to me is sufficient basis to expel him from the Congress," former Rep. Peter King said.
King said he thinks that Santos either resigned or was expelled now, he feels it would not have a major issue by the 2024 election.
"The average voter will see the Republicans did what they had to do, Congress did what it had to do, and we can have a real, honest election," King said. "I think, again, for his own good, he should resign and work out an agreement with the Justice Department, and be gone. Because right now, he is dead man walking."
for more features. | US Congress |
Hannah Schoenbaum/AP
toggle caption
Stickers reading "I Voted By Mail" are displayed as the Wayne County Board of Elections prepares absentee ballots in Goldsboro, N.C., on Sept. 22, 2022. A Republican-backed bill would eliminate a grace period for mail ballots to arrive.
Hannah Schoenbaum/AP
Stickers reading "I Voted By Mail" are displayed as the Wayne County Board of Elections prepares absentee ballots in Goldsboro, N.C., on Sept. 22, 2022. A Republican-backed bill would eliminate a grace period for mail ballots to arrive.
Hannah Schoenbaum/AP
DURHAM, N.C. — Major changes are likely coming to North Carolina's voting rules.
The General Assembly's narrow Republican supermajority is poised to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of an elections bill.
GOP lawmakers say the measure will strengthen election integrity in the state, but in his veto message last week, Cooper said the legislation "has nothing to do with election security and everything to do with Republicans keeping and gaining power." The governor warned the bill would "erect new barriers for younger and non-white voters" and "encourages voter intimidation at the polls by election deniers and conspiracy believers."
Perhaps the most significant change in the proposal is the elimination of a three-day grace period for counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day. The bill would also expand access for partisan poll watchers.
Public confidence was "greatly undermined" in 2020, a GOP lawmaker says
The mail ballot grace period has been in place since it gained unanimous bipartisan approval from state legislators back in 2009. But Republican lawmakers set their sights on its elimination amid partisan rancor in 2020.
That year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, voting rights advocates, led by prominent Democratic-aligned election attorney Marc Elias, had sued the state elections board to extend the grace period for mail ballots and to ease rules around the absentee-by-mail witness requirement. The State Board of Elections and Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat and now a 2024 gubernatorial candidate, settled the lawsuit. Consequently, the grace period for mail-in ballots was extended by six days.
The settlement infuriated GOP lawmakers, who accused Stein and the elections board of colluding with Elias and the national Democratic Party to circumvent the legislature's authority. Their lingering anger was clear in statements made during floor debates over this year's elections bill, which Republicans say will boost public confidence in Election Day results.
"This confidence was greatly undermined during the 2020 election when our attorney general and director of the Board of Elections, Ms. [Karen] Brinson Bell, entered into a collusive settlement that subverted state law to extend the absentee ballot deadline from three days after the election to nine days after Election Day," state Sen. Warren Daniel, one of the three Republican co-chairs of the Redistricting and Elections Committee, claimed in June.
Gary D. Robertson/AP
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North Carolina Republican state Sen. Warren Daniel speaks at a news conference on June 12 in Raleigh, N.C.
Gary D. Robertson/AP
Daniel and fellow Republicans have pushed this legislation as a way of restoring public faith in the integrity of elections without acknowledging that much of that mistrust is rooted in baseless claims of widespread voter fraud drummed up by GOP candidates and their supporters.
"Everybody knows what Election Day is: It's when the votes are in, when the counting begins," Daniel said in June, just before a party-line vote that advanced the GOP-backed bill. "And every day that passes after Election Day with votes still coming in creates the possibility of distrust in the process."
However, election results in North Carolina are never final or certified until 10 days later, after the statutorily required county canvass. Also, under state law, mail ballots from military personnel and other citizens overseas get counted as long as they are postmarked by — and arrive within nine days of — Election Day.
The GOP bill would give partisan poll observers greater latitude
Among the legislation's other notable provisions, it would more clearly define — and give greater latitude to — the way partisan poll observers conduct themselves at voting sites. Recognized parties may provide lists of poll observers for sites wherever they have candidates on the ballot.
The parties may appoint two observers for each site and then a smaller number of at-large observers. Under the new bill, the observers may move about the voting area, listen to conversations between voters and precinct officials as long as the discussion pertains solely to elections administration, and go in and out of the site to communicate by telephone with party officers.
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People vote at a polling place on Nov. 8, 2022. in Fuquay Varina, N.C.
Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Democrats in North Carolina have voiced concerns about voter intimidation and interference by partisan poll observers.
"This is an invitation to remake the role of poll observers into partisan operatives who are intent on intimidating voters and causing trouble," Democratic Sen. Natasha Marcus said.
After the 2022 primaries, the State Board of Elections surveyed county elections directors about issues at polling sites. Officials in 15 counties reported witnessing poll observers who violated rules of conduct in place at the time by talking to and intimidating voters, frequently exiting and re-entering the voting area to call their party headquarters, and trying to enter restricted areas where ballot data were being uploaded.
But Jim Womack — president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, which is a branch of the Election Integrity Network, founded by conservative lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell — is a proponent of greater freedom for poll observers and said the new legislation "builds confidence across the country and that's why it's so important to have poll observers there representing all the parties that can assure themselves that no one party has controlled or manipulated the election."
Democrats had a hand in shaping the final legislation
Despite their opposition to the changes, Democrats in the state legislature worked with Republican bill sponsors to soften the legislation's impact.
Democratic state Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed negotiated an amendment to several aspects of the bill, including the scaling back of a provision to require signature verification of absentee-by-mail ballots. North Carolina law already requires two witnesses or a notary for mail-in ballots, one of only a dozen states with witness requirements.
When the new bill originated in the Senate it would have required every county elections office to use signature verification software to validate mail-in ballots. Mohammed persuaded his GOP colleagues to agree to launching a limited, 10-county pilot, starting next year. Furthermore, the bill provides that during the pilot no ballots would be thrown out solely on the basis of failed signature verification.
Mohammed said he is grateful Republicans were open to discussion, even though he still thinks the overall legislation is not necessary because GOP-stoked fears of voter fraud — and the need for more restrictive voting laws — are unfounded. "It's a bill that's out there searching for a problem," he said.
But with a veto override virtually guaranteed, Mohammed and his fellow Democrats will have to take some solace in the limited ways they helped shape the final legislation.
Republicans are flexing new political power in North Carolina
The GOP voting bill comes as Republicans in North Carolina are flexing stronger political power on issues they've long sought to address.
GOP legislators have been trying to reshape the political landscape through redistricting and voting laws since they seized a majority in the 2010 elections. But state and federal courts often thwarted their efforts, tossing gerrymandered maps on racial and excessive partisan grounds. An earlier photo ID voting requirement was thrown out as part of an omnibus elections bill that a federal judge said targeted African American voters "with almost surgical precision."
However, along with reclaiming a veto-proof legislative supermajority after last year's midterms, Republicans have cemented a 5-2 majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court. One of the new GOP-affiliated justices is Phil Berger Jr., son of the state Senate's president pro tempore.
Justice Berger and his conservative colleagues have made it clear they are more sympathetic to Republican lawmakers' positions on court battles over key elections laws than the previous high court's Democratic majority.
In early 2022, the court, with a 4-3 Democratic-leaning majority, had declared Republican-drawn legislative and congressional district maps to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered with excessive partisan bias. The court-ordered redrawn congressional map turned a heavy GOP tilt into an even 7-7 split between Republican and Democratic U.S. representatives from North Carolina.
It was a landmark decision that only stood until conservatives took a majority on the court after the 2022 midterms. After that shift, Republican lawmakers immediately sought rehearings on the redistricting case as well as a case in which a more recent photo ID law, drafted in 2018, had been thrown out because of its potentially discriminatory impact on Black voters.
The new court granted those rehearings and promptly reversed the earlier decisions. The five conservative justices held that courts had no business policing partisanship in redistricting and that the standards for doing so are too vague. Furthermore, the court reinstated the photo ID law, which goes into effect for this year's municipal elections.
Republican lawmakers in the North Carolina General Assembly are now poised to redraw more favorable maps once again with a sympathetic state Supreme Court majority unlikely to get in their way. | US Federal Elections |
Washington CNN — Big headaches for student loan borrowers could be on the horizon. Their monthly payments could restart as early as this summer after a three-year pause. And the federal office that oversees the student loan system is operating under the same budget as last year – which could complicate any efforts to make sure the repayment process goes smoothly, as well as the office’s plans to overhaul the system. When Congress passed the government’s annual budget in December, the Federal Student Aid office got about $800 million less than what the Biden administration had asked for. After granting steady increases in previous years, lawmakers left funding for the office’s operations flat at about $2 billion. Republican lawmakers touted how Congress provided no new funding to help implement President Joe Biden’s controversial student loan forgiveness plan – which is currently tied up in the courts. If the Supreme Court allows the forgiveness program to move forward, it would also be a huge lift for the Federal Student Aid office. “I think it’s particularly unfortunate for borrowers that the political fight over loan forgiveness has resulted in flat funding this year,” said Jonathan Fansmith, assistant vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, an advocacy group for colleges and universities. “Wherever the cracks start to show, borrowers are going to be impacted,” Fansmith added. The Federal Student Aid office, which has about 1,400 employees and provides about $112 billion in grant, work-study and loan funds annually, has a lot on its plate. The office oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio but has also taken on additional work to revamp the federal student aid application form, known as the FAFSA, and to overhaul some federal student loan programs. Last week, it announced a plan to start making significant changes to its income-driven repayment program this year. “I think certainly a number of their priorities will either not get done on the timeline that they had originally hoped for, or not get done at all,” said Michele Shepard, senior director of college affordability at The Institute for College Access and Success, an advocacy group. But the Department of Education says it can still meet the timelines it has set. “The several hundred-million-dollar shortfall will of course have an impact on these important bipartisan priorities, but we will continue to do everything we can with the available resources to better serve students and protect taxpayer dollars,” the department said in a statement sent to CNN. Still, that means the Federal Student Aid office would be doing more work with less money. Here are some of the tasks it is expected to tackle this year: Federal student loan borrowers have not had to make any payments since March 2020, thanks to a pandemic-related pause that has been extended by both the Trump and Biden administrations several times. Most recently, Biden extended the pause after his student loan forgiveness program was halted by federal courts. The administration had told borrowers debt relief would be granted before payments restarted. The payment pause will now last until 60 days after litigation over Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is resolved. If the program has not been implemented and the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that. Bringing roughly 44 million borrowers back into repayment at one time is an unprecedented task. Many people may be confused about how much they owe, when to pay and how. Missing payments can result in monetary fees. The government contracts with several outside organizations, such as MOHELA and Nelnet, to handle servicing the federal student loans. But it’s up to the Federal Student Aid office to communicate with the servicers about when payments restart and how. “To be kind, the quality of student loan servicing has not been stellar,” Fansmith said. “If you multiply all of these issues, even if small, by 44 million borrowers, it’s a massive national problem,” he added. In late February, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases concerning Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which could deliver up to $20,000 of debt relief for millions of low- and middle-income borrowers. A decision on whether the program is legal and can move forward is expected by June. Until then, it is on hold and no debt will be discharged under the program. Biden’s student loan forgiveness program has faced several legal challenges since the president announced it in August. The Department of Education had received about 26 million applications for debt relief by the time a federal district court judge struck down the program on November 10. The legal back-and-forth has created confusion for borrowers around the status of the program. Adding to the uncertainty, about 9 million people received an email from the Department of Education in the fall that mistakenly said their application for student loan forgiveness had been approved. The Biden administration has plans to overhaul some of its student loan repayment programs and the Federal Student Aid office is charged with rolling those out. In July, the Department of Education plans to implement permanent changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to make it easier for government and nonprofit workers to qualify for debt relief after making 10 years of payments. The program has long been plagued with loan servicing problems. Big changes to the department’s income-driven repayment plans are also in the works, aimed at reducing monthly debt burdens as well as the total amount borrowers pay over the lifetime of their loans. The new regulations are expected to cap payments at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from 10% that is offered under most current income-driven plans. As a result, single borrowers making less than $30,600 per year would not need to make any payments under the proposal, up from the current $24,000 threshold. The changes would also forgive remaining balances after 10 years of repayment, instead of 20 or 25 years, as well as cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest. The Department of Education said last week that it expects to start implementing some of these provisions later this year. Each year, as part of its normal work, the Federal Student Aid office processes millions of FAFSA applications from students. Generally, the form is released in October for the following academic year. Every college student needs to fill out the FAFSA in order to qualify for federal student loans, grants and work-study aid. But it has long been criticized as too long and complicated. Congress passed a law in 2021 that simplifies the FAFSA form, and the Federal Student Aid office has been working on implementing the changes – which financial aid experts hope will be done before October this year. The office was supposed to have had the changes already done, but the effective date was pushed back by a year. | US Federal Policies |
Donald Trump refused to take down a post attacking the law clerk of the judge overseeing his bank fraud trial in New York—blatantly violating the court’s gag order—and lawyers on both sides have just been notified that hell is nigh.
The New York Attorney General’s Office and the former president’s defense lawyers were told late Thursday that the issue will come up Friday morning in court, according to a source with knowledge of those discussions.
At issue is the way that Trump, who’s been visibly seething in court for weeks now over the prospect of losing his real estate empire, keeps ramping up his aggression toward Justice Arthur F. Engoron and his clerk, attorney Allison Greenfield.
On just his second day of trial, Trump took an unprecedented move that would get any other defendant thrown into a cell: He targeted the judge’s own staff by spreading a lie—and directing his MAGA battalion to her personal Instagram page.
He posted the same note on his political website and his Truth Social network, sharing a MAGA-aligned Twitter user’s post asking, “Why is Judge Engoron’s Principal Law Clerk, Allison R. Greenfield, palling around with Chuck Schumer?” But Trump went further, linking to Greenfield’s social media photos and drawing the attention of his huge fan base against her.
That very same day, the judge—clearly disturbed by the maneuver—spoke in a solemn tone as he warned Trump to never do it again. He also ordered the real estate tycoon to take down the spiteful attack.
While Trump’s team immediately deleted the Truth Social post, they never bothered to take down the one on the former president’s website, DonaldJTrump.com. The court apparently didn’t notice that until Ron Filipkowski at the liberal website MeidasTouch wrote about it on Thursday, sparking a notification to attorneys on both sides.
A spokeswoman for the AG’s office declined to provide a comment. Trump’s lead attorney, Alina Habba, did not respond to a request for comment. The post was taken down late Thursday night. The webpage is now blank with a 404 error on display that reads, “The page you were looking for does not exist.”
Engoron has already warned Trump’s lawyers that “failure to abide” by his gag order “will result in serious sanctions.” Friday morning could be that showdown. | US Political Corruption |
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