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News Story
Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones
Eric Meyer, publisher of the Marion County Record, answers questions in his newspaper office Friday after police seized computers, servers, cellphones and other items. He says he doesn’t know how they will get the newspaper out on Tuesday, but, “We will publish something.” (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)
MARION — In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said the police raid is unprecedented in Kansas.
“An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know,” Bradbury said. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Meyer reported last week that Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with LaTurner, whose staff was apologetic. Newell responded to Meyer’s reporting with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page.
A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said, and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license. The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.
A reporter with the Marion Record used a state website to verify the information provided by the source. But Meyer suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. Meyer decided not to publish a story about the information, and he alerted police to the situation.
“We thought we were being set up,” Meyer said.
Police notified Newell, who then complained at a city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true. Her public comments prompted the newspaper to set the record straight in a story published Thursday.
Sometime before 11 a.m. Friday, officers showed up simultaneously at Meyer’s home and the newspaper office. They presented a search warrant that alleges identity theft and unlawful use of a computer.
The search warrant identifies two pages worth of items that law enforcement officers were allowed to seize, including computer software and hardware, digital communications, cellular networks, servers and hard drives, items with passwords, utility records, and all documents and records pertaining to Newell. The warrant specifically targeted ownership of computers capable of being used to “participate in the identity theft of Kari Newell.”
Officers injured a reporter’s finger by grabbing her cellphone out of her hand, Meyer said. Officers at his home took photos of his bank account information.
He said officers told him the computers, cellphones and other devices would be sent to a lab.
“I don’t know when they’ll get it back to us,” Meyer said. “They won’t tell us.”
The seized computers, server and backup hard drive include advertisements and legal notices that were supposed to appear in the next edition of the newspaper.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said. “We will publish something.”
Newell, writing Friday under a changed name on her personal Facebook account, said she “foolishly” received a DUI in 2008 and “knowingly operated a vehicle without a license out of necessity.”
“Journalists have become the dirty politicians of today, twisting narrative for bias agendas, full of muddied half-truths,” Newell wrote. “We rarely get facts that aren’t baited with misleading insinuations.”
She said the “entire debacle was brought forth in an attempt to smear my name, jeopardize my licensing through ABC (state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division), harm my business, seek retaliation, and for personal leverage in an ongoing domestic court battle.”
At the law enforcement center in Marion, a staff member said only Police Chief Gideon Cody could answer questions for this story, and that Cody had gone home for the day and could not be reached by phone. The office of Attorney General Kris Kobach wasn’t available to comment on the legal controversy in Marion, which is north of Wichita in central Kansas.
Melissa Underwood, communications director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, replied by email to a question about whether the KBI was involved in the case.
“At the request of the Marion Police Department, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, we began an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing in Marion, Kansas. The investigation is ongoing,” Underwood said.
Meyer, whose father worked at the newspaper from 1948 until he retired, bought the Marion County Record in 1998, preventing a sale to a corporate newspaper chain.
As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.
“That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,” Meyer said. “The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.”
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics. | US Police Misconduct |
It’s been just a clutch of days since former President Donald Trump and his allies made clear that if he wins reelection, he plans to gut the existing U.S. government and “install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists” to take over senior legal, judicial, defense, regulatory, and domestic policy jobs in the civil service. It’s been under a week since he announced in an interview on Univision that he’d cheerfully “weaponize” the power of the Justice Department to indict his rivals for no other reason than that they were “beating me very badly.” Also less than a week ago, he delivered his chilling Veterans Day promise to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American dream.” The news of his plans to carry out mass deportations while rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and interning them in sprawling detention camps, as well as his hope to cancel U.S. visas—for lawful green-card and student visa holders—who harbor “anti-American” views is also very recent. All of this is to be achieved by installing armies of lawyers, judges, and functionaries who will not erect roadblocks to such projects, as they did when he was president the first time, because they don’t believe in the rule of law as we understand it. As Trump openly described his rationale for his plans last week in the most spine-chilling language yet, undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And yes, the week is only half done.
We further learned, just a week ago, that Ohio Republicans plan to try to block a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive freedom by stripping state judges of the power to decide such cases. And we have learned in recent days of plans by allies of the new Republican House speaker to reinstate the brutally repressive Comstock Act so as to further limit sexual autonomy. And today we can’t seem to take our eyes off the now-violent physical altercations happening in the very same Capitol building that was stormed by violent extremists trying to overturn the 2020 election. The cogs and the wheels of democratic governance sound janky as hell right now.
The piece suggesting that all of the above represents an objective, verifiable, and historically predictive set of preconditions for authoritarianism, or fascism, or the end of free and fair elections has been said or written, succinctly and brilliantly, in recent days by Jamelle Bouie, Joyce Vance, Ruth Ben Ghiat, Rachel Maddow, John Cassidy, Seth Meyers, Jason Stanley, Zack Beauchamp, Chris Lehmann, Michael Tomasky, Scott Lehigh, and who knows how many others. And, perhaps paradoxically, the piece suggesting that the press has failed utterly to meet this perilous moment has been done, also brilliantly, by Margaret Sullivan, Brian Stelter, and Dan Froomkin, all of them echoing the call of New York University professor Jay Rosen, who continues to demand that the media cover the 2024 campaign by emphasizing “not the odds but the stakes.”
The stakes, we can probably agree, are in no way in doubt. As Bouie and others suggest, the Stephen Millers and Jeffrey Clarks and Steve Bannons are counting the minutes before “Flood the Zone With Shit” becomes the new “E Pluribus Unum.” Indeed, it almost seems as if “not the odds but the stakes” no longer captures a media failure alone; it actually also encapsulates the scope of a bitter political failure. We may actually have moved into the realm of journalism adequately covering the stakes, with the sad reality emerging that nobody seems to care much about the stakes at the present moment.
The horse race we are describing? The odds we are clocking? The contest we are all betting on? It’s now just fascism vs. democracy. These “stakes” we are, all of us, fretting about, this question of whether democracy survives the next 12 months, is the very thing everyone is watching like it’s the NCAA playoffs. I’m no longer completely convinced that voters don’t fully understand the stakes; not when you’re hearing Trump talking of executing his former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, not when you’re hearing of mass deportations without due process, and not when family separations at the border is a future promise, as opposed to a recent lawless tragedy.
What if the media is actually covering the spectacle precisely because the stakes—casual brutality, violence, callousness, lawlessness, and the descent into anarchy—are perfectly visible, legible, and clear? It’s hard to read any other way the current threats by sitting senators who promise to beat up committee witnesses, or former speakers of the House who elbow their political opponents, or congresspeople who say they will impeach everyone who makes them mad while dabbling in the recreational threat to shut down the government. What if the problem isn’t that consumers of media fail to understand the actual stakes of losing democracy? What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good, clean fun? As Bouie puts it in his New York Times piece on the subject this week, “The mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen. And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”
There is going to come a moment—and for many of the writers cited above, that moment has already arrived—in which the media appropriately reports on the enormity of the stakes and nobody flinches.
When you’ve been contending with such enormous stakes for as long as this country has—since at least that golden escalator ride eight years ago—it can be hard to keep flinching at the risks, even as they become ever more undeniable. Here’s hoping that our reflexes start to kick in over the next 12 months, lest we’re once again reminded of what happens when the stakes have been staring us in the face all along and we choose instead to roll the dice on democracy itself. | US Federal Elections |
WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden insisted Friday that “this fight is not over” after the Supreme Court struck down his $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan. Biden blamed Republicans' opposition, aiming to direct the ire of millions of borrowers toward them rather than his own party in next year's elections.
The president planned an afternoon address to lay out a series of actions to provide continued relief to 43 million student loan borrowers, and in the meantime tried to stay on the political offensive against the GOP.
“The hypocrisy of Republican elected officials is stunning,” Biden said in a statement. “They had no problem with billions in pandemic-related loans to businesses – including hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars for their own businesses. And those loans were forgiven. But when it came to providing relief to millions of hard-working Americans, they did everything in their power to stop it.”
Electoral consequences aside, progressive Democrats in Congress and activists clamored for the White House to offer a swift and substantial response to the court's decision. Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center, said the responsibility falls “squarely” on Biden’s shoulders.
“The president possesses the power, and must summon the will, to secure the essential relief that families across the nation desperately need,” Abrams said in a statement.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of her party's leading voices on the left, said, “The president has more tools to cancel student debt — and he must use them."
The GOP has long argued that repaying the student loans is a fairness issue, and they celebrated the ruling. Betsy DeVos, who served as secretary of education under President Donald Trump, called Biden's original plan “deeply unfair to the majority of Americans who don’t have student loans.”
Republicans now seeking their party's 2024 presidential nomination lined up to applaud the ruling, with former Vice President Mike Pence saying he was “pleased that the court struck down the radical left’s effort to use the money of taxpayers who played by the rules and repaid their debts in order to cancel the debt of bankers and lawyers in New York, San Francisco, and Washington.”
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nation's Nikki Haley said the Supreme Court was “right to throw out Joe Biden's power grab.”
Trying to place the onus for ending the plan on the GOP could allow Biden’s reelection campaign to keep the issue of students loans as one of strength in the short term. But that may ultimately offer little solace to 43 million Americans who will now could have to start again repaying their student loans.
“We do not want to go into excruciating debt for our entire lives to enhance our education,” Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-led organization that promotes the power of young Americans, said in a statement.
The White House’s efforts to block payments were an attempt to keep a Biden 2020 campaign promise to wipe out student loan debt that was especially popular with young voters and progressives. Both will be vital to Biden in next year’s presidential race — but may be less energized about supporting him after the high court’s decision.
Wisdom Cole, the national director of the NAACP Youth & College Division, said Black Americans helped put Biden in the White House, so there’s an obligation for him to “finish the job” with his pledges to provide relief for borrowers around the country. He suggested a lack of action could see Biden face a backlash next year with key demographics — specifically young voters and Black voters.
“It’s going to have a huge impact on the next election. This was a key point. This was a key policy priority,” Cole said, adding, “If we don’t do this, we continue the cycle of seeing our elected leaders make promises and not follow through.”
A May poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 43% of U.S. adults approve of how Biden sought to handle student debt, similar to his approval rating overall of 40% in the same poll.
The poll suggested that Biden gets credit for his handling of the issue among young adults in particular. Fifty-three percent of adults under age 30 said they approved of Biden’s handling of student debt, compared with only 36% who approved of his job performance overall.
Cole suggested that the White House employ the Higher Education Act of 1965 as a legal foundation for debt relief.
“Failure is not an option for us,” Cole said, adding, “They have to ensure that they’ll use every legal authority to give borrowers relief from crushing student loan debt.”
The high court’s decision comes as loan payments — which have been on hold since the start of the coronavirus pandemic three years ago — were already set to resume in the fall.
Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham University, said it would be essentially impossible to provide immediate debt relief before payments start again.
“That’s why we call it administrative law rather than fiat,” Shugerman said, noting that the rulemaking process requires “crossing t’s and dotting i’s and giving real reasons for policies.”
The situation has some political overlap with a COVID pandemic-era ban on nationwide evictions, which expired in 2021 with the Biden administration opposing the move but arguing that its hands were tied because the Supreme Court refused to extend it — despite the protests of progressive Democrats and housing activists. But the impact of the student loan program could be far wider.
Friday's decision wasn’t unexpected given the court’s reactions when it heard arguments in the case in February. Since then, the White House has faced pressure from activists and progressive Democrats to formulate a backup plan that would provide relief to borrowers — but spent months publicly refusing to publicly discuss a Plan B.
The pressure was only intensifying now.
“President Biden must keep the promise he made to cancel student debt,” said U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who was among the most vocal defenders of the eviction moratorium. “Inaction is not an option.”
___
Associated Press writers Chris Megerian and Collin Binkley contributed to this report. | SCOTUS |
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been accused of showing "contempt for democracy," after claiming the Trump supporters who stormed Congress on January 6, 2021, would have "won" if they'd been organized by her and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.The Georgia Republican made the incendiary comments, which she later claimed were "sarcasm," on Saturday at a dinner hosted by the New York Young Republican Club.Referring to the January 6 attack Greene said: "I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would've been armed."After her comments were condemned by the White House Greene said in a statement that she was "making fun of Joe Biden and the Democrats, who have continuously made me a target since January 6."
Above, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks after House Republicans met to choose their party leaders at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on November 15, 2022. Greene has been accused of treating democracy with "contempt" after saying the January 6 rioters would have won if she'd organized them. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY
John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute think tank, told Newsweek that Greene's comments were a "depart from every democratic and constitutional norm this country was build on."He said that for "some" Republican officials, "all that matters is winning, and if violently dismantling democracy is their only path, they are willing to take it."Hudak added that Greene is unlikely to face sanction from her remarks from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is hoping to become speaker when the House returns with a Republican majority in the new year."Unfortunately, in an environment in which politics matters more than democracy, Kevin McCarthy—in his pursuit to become and remain as Speaker of the House—does not have the political capacity to punish her or others like her without threatening his own political fortunes," he said."And just as bad as the person speaking those words are the institutional leaders who give her the space to continue to behave that way."Dr Julie Norman, co-director of the Centre on US Politics at University College London (UCL), told Newsweek that Greene's remarks are likely to repel American voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election."Greene's tasteless remarks may have been a joke, but they're a clear reminder of how common the language of political violence has become in some pockets of the GOP," Norman said."But if the recent midterms showed one thing, it's that most Americans want their democracy back. And doubling down on violent rhetoric isn't what most voters want to hear in the run-up to 2024."It's a view shared by Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who said: "Americans are tired of political extremism and violent rhetoric. They are also tired of officials who spread the big lie of stolen elections.""We saw this play out in the November midterm elections, where so-called election deniers lost most statewide position in key battleground states," he told Newsweek. However, Dr. Thomas Gift, who also teaches U.S. politics at UCL, argued that the comments won't cause a reaction against Greene within the Trump supporting Republican base."Greene's comments reflect the extent to which calls for violence have become normalized among the hard right-wing of the GOP," he told Newsweek. "While her remarks will doubtlessly be condemned by more establishment figures in the party, they won't damage her standing in the least among the MAGA base. In fact, eliciting a rise out of centrist Republicans may be the whole point."Greene's remarks were roundly condemned by a number of pro-democracy campaign groups, with one describing them as an "indictment" of the current GOP."Margorie Taylor Greene's statement that J6 protesters—who beat police, wanted to hang Mike Pence, and kill Nancy Pelosi—should have brought weapons shows her contempt for democracy and her willingness to forcefully impose MAGA ideology on the nation," Reed Galen, co-founder of anti-Trump conservative group the Lincoln Project, told Newsweek."It's terrifying that in the new Congress she will drive the GOP agenda and Kevin McCarthy will kowtow to her every whim," he said.Gunner Taylor, the political director of Defending Democracy Together, which was also founded by anti-Trump Republicans, made a similar argument."Marjorie Taylor Greene's recent comments are unsurprising," he told Newsweek. "The continued downplaying of the January 6 insurrection is part of a larger trend within the Republican Party that is completely unacceptable. And, despite all of this, Kevin McCarthy has already signaled he would empower Greene should he become Speaker. All of this should serve as an indictment of today's GOP."On Wednesday, Greene claimed House Republicans will "investigate the origins of Covid" next year claiming Dr Fauci, the president's chief medical officer "belongs in jail."Appearing on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, Greene claimed Republicans hold a weekly strategy meeting in McCarthy's office, which she said is "called the five families" in an apparent mafia reference.Newsweek reached out to Marjorie Taylor Greene for comment. | US Political Corruption |
House conservatives give Speaker Johnson a ‘mulligan’ in funding fight — for now
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is getting a free pass from hard-line Republicans who are upset with his approach on keeping the government open with a “clean” funding extension, but are holding him to a different standard than former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — for now.
“Everybody gets a mulligan,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who voted against the continuing resolution (CR).
Weeks ago, Gaetz led a group of eight Republicans who joined with Democrats to oust McCarthy from the Speakership in part because of how he pushed through a CR with the help of Democrats.
But the same members who rose up against McCarthy were much more forgiving of Johnson’s very similar move — even as they lament that the latest, two-step CR did not include spending cuts or set up the House to extract conservative policy concessions from the Senate and White House.
While they voted against the continuing resolution, no one is calling to snatch away Johnson’s gavel — and few are seriously questioning his leadership.
“He’s had two weeks to pass it. His predecessor had since January, and then he jammed us up against the Sept. 30 deadline,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), another one of the eight GOP members who voted to oust McCarthy.
The change in attitude has frustrated those who supported McCarthy and disagreed with ousting him.
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a McCarthy ally who served as Speaker pro tempore after former Speaker’s ouster, said that it is up to those who voted to take away McCarthy’s gavel to explain “how they can contort themselves into now supporting this Speaker making the same play call.”
“It’s up to their acrobatics, their contortion to justify their position,” McHenry said.
To be sure, not every hard-line conservative member was willing to brush off Johnson’s handling of the continuing resolution.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) was particularly incensed that Johnson opted to push the stopgap through a fast-track suspension process that avoided any possibility of Republicans blocking on a procedural vote while relying on strong Democratic support for passage.
“I gotta tell you, you can’t assume my vote on any bill if the Speaker is going to roll us,” Roy said Tuesday on Fox Business.
The bill passed Tuesday with near-universal support from House Democrats, with two voting against it — while 93 of the 221 House Republicans opposed it.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), another member who voted to oust McCarthy, declined to comment on the stopgap’s passage and Johnson’s leadership on Tuesday evening.
And with House Republican leadership being forced to pull attempts to pass full-year appropriations bills twice last week, Johnson has a steep uphill climb ahead of him without a clear path out of the quagmire.
“He’s got a very difficult management task,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said. “But I do know that his heart is in it.”
Gaetz had yet another sports metaphor to explain the GOP willingness to let Johnson continue in the Speakership despite him moving to pass another stopgap.
“When you change football coaches, like, the new coach that comes in, he still has to coach the last coach’s team for a few games before they really get their system and their offense installed,” Gaetz said. “So this is the last McCarthy play we have to run, and I know Speaker Johnson doesn’t even want to do it.”
Johnson has made a similar argument.
“I can’t turn an aircraft carrier overnight,” the Speaker said in a press conference Tuesday.
And Johnson said Tuesday morning on CNBC that the two-step CR — which has some government funding run out Jan. 19 and the rest Feb. 2 — did more than a single-date extension to try to implement change, arguing that it puts the House in a better position to avoid a massive omnibus funding package.
Asked about criticism of the stopgap from “arch conservatives,” Johnson responded: “I’m one of the arch conservatives, OK?”
“I want to cut spending right now, and I would like to put policy riders on this. But when you have a three-vote majority, as we do right now, we don’t have the votes to be able to advance that,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s conservative credentials are one reason why the hard-liners are more eager to trust him. He is the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House.
On Monday evening, Johnson made an in-person visit to the House Freedom Caucus’s weekly meeting to discuss the stopgap funding bill, members confirmed — a move that is highly unusual for a Speaker, if not unprecedented entirely.
The Freedom Caucus nonetheless came out with a formal position statement opposing the CR on Tuesday. But the position was sure to note that the group is “committed to working with Speaker Johnson,” even though it added it is looking for “bold change.”
“He’s one thing that’s unique. We trust what he says,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a Freedom Caucus member. “He will not meet with a group and come back and tell Freedom Caucus something else, which is a good thing.”
Mychael Schnell contributed.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Congress |
Security researchers say hackers are mass-exploiting a critical-rated vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler systems to launch crippling cyberattacks against big-name organizations worldwide.
These cyberattacks have so far included aerospace giant Boeing; the world’s biggest bank, ICBC; one of the world’s largest port operators, DP World; and international law firm Allen & Overy, according to reports.
Thousands of other organizations remain unpatched against the vulnerability, tracked officially as CVE-2023-4966 and dubbed “CitrixBleed.” The majority of affected systems are located in North America, according to nonprofit threat tracker Shadowserver Foundation. The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA has also sounded the alarm in an advisory urging federal agencies to patch against the actively exploited flaw.
Here’s what we know so far.
What is CitrixBleed?
On October 10, network equipment maker Citrix disclosed the vulnerability affecting on-premise versions of its NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway platforms, which large enterprises and governments use for application delivery and VPN connectivity.
The flaw is described as a sensitive information disclosure vulnerability that allows remote unauthenticated attackers to extract large amounts of data from a vulnerable Citrix device’s memory, including sensitive session tokens (hence the name “CitrixBleed.”) The bug requires little effort or complexity to exploit, allowing hackers to hijack and use legitimate session tokens to compromise a victim’s network without needing a password or using two-factor.
Citrix released patches, but a week later on October 17 updated its advisory to advise that it had observed exploitation in the wild.
Early victims included professional services, technology, and government organizations, according to incident response giant Mandiant, which said it began investigating after discovering “multiple instances of successful exploitation” as early as late-August before Citrix made patches available.
Robert Knapp, head of incident response at cybersecurity firm Rapid7 — which also began investigating the bug after detecting potential exploitation of the bug in a customer’s network — said the company has also observed attackers targeting organizations across healthcare, manufacturing, and retail.
“Rapid7 incident responders have observed both lateral movement and data access in the course of our investigations,” said Knapp, suggesting hackers are able to gain broader access to victims’ network and data after initial compromise.
Big-name victims
Cybersecurity company ReliaQuest said last week it has evidence that at least four threat groups — which it did not name — are leveraging CitrixBleed, with at least one group automating the attack process.
One of the threat actors is believed to be the Russia-linked LockBit ransomware gang, which has already claimed responsibility for several large-scale breaches believed to be associated with CitrixBleed.
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont wrote in a blog post Tuesday that the LockBit gang last week hacked into the U.S. branch of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) — said to be the world’s largest lender by assets — by compromising an unpatched Citrix Netscaler box. The outage disrupted the banking giant’s ability to clear trades. According to Bloomberg on Tuesday, the firm has yet to restore normal operations.
ICBC, which reportedly paid LockBit’s ransom demand, declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions but said in a statement on its website that it “experienced a ransomware attack” that “resulted in disruption to certain systems.”
A LockBit representative told Reuters on Monday that ICBC “paid a ransom — deal closed,” but did not provide evidence of their claim. LockBit also told malware research group vx-underground that ICBC paid a ransom, but declined to say how much.
Beaumont said in a post on Mastodon that Boeing also had an unpatched Citrix Netscaler system at the time of its LockBit breach, citing data from Shodan, a search engine for exposed databases and devices.
Boeing spokesperson Jim Proulx previously told TechCrunch that the company is “aware of a cyber incident impacting elements of our parts and distribution business” but would not comment on LockBit’s alleged publication of stolen data.
Allen & Overy, one of the world’s largest law firms, was also running an affected Citrix system at the time of its compromise, Beaumont noted. LockBit added both Boeing and Allen & Overy to its dark web leak site, which ransomware gangs typically use to extort victims by publishing files unless the victims pay a ransom demand.
Allen & Overy spokesperson Debbie Spitz confirmed the law firm experienced a “data incident” and said it was “assessing exactly what data has been impacted, and we are informing affected clients.”
The Medusa ransomware gang is also exploiting CitrixBleed to compromise targeted organizations, said Beaumont.
“We would expect CVE-2023-4966 to be one of the top routinely exploited vulnerabilities from 2023,” Rapid7’s head of vulnerability research Caitlin Condon told TechCrunch. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Gaetz is urging McCarthy to take a tougher line over a number of issues, including impeachment efforts against President Biden, balancing the budget and issuing subpoenas for Hunter Biden, the president's son.
On Tuesday morning, McCarthy announced a full impeachment inquiry into Biden and any connections with his son's business dealings. Gaetz dismissed this in a speech on the House floor as a "baby step following weeks of pressure from House conservatives to do more," adding: "We must move faster."
Speaking to CNN later that day, Gaetz warned McCarthy he would push for more concessions from the GOP leader, expressing regret he was unable to block the debt limit deal McCarthy agreed to with Biden in May to avoid the United States defaulting on its debts.
In response to the CNN anchor asking about "leverage" over McCarthy, Gaetz replied: "I'm going to do it over and over again until it works, and today we saw a baby step towards that with more robust efforts towards impeachment, but I'm going to keep doing it...the American people want term limits, they want balanced budgets, they don't want to see government funding wrapped up in like just one up or down vote."
Speaking after McCarthy said he supports an impeachment inquiry into Biden, Gaetz issued him with an ultimatum to go further or risk losing his job.
"I rise today to serve notice: Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role. The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate, total compliance or remove you pursuant to a motion to vacate the chair," Gaetz said on the House floor.
"So we're either going to get compliance, or we're going to start having votes on motions to vacate, and we're gonna have them regularly. I don't anticipate them passing immediately. But I think that, you know, if we have to begin every single day in Congress with the prayer, the pledge and the motion to vacate, so be it."
Newsweek reached out to Speaker McCarthy's office via phone call for comment.
McCarthy was elected speaker in January on the 15th round of voting after several Republican hardliners, including Gaetz, opposed his bid for the office. Before his election, in a bid to appease the hardliners, McCarthy agreed to change House rules so any one member could introduce a "motion to vacate," which could see him forced to stand down as speaker.
Republicans launched investigations into the Biden family's business activities after seizing control of the House in the November 2022 midterms but have struggled to conclusively link the president to alleged efforts at influence peddling by his son.
Responding to McCarthy's impeachment announcement, White House spokesperson Ian Sams commented on X, formerly Twitter: "House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they've turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. His own GOP members have said so.
"He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment, now he flip flopped because he doesn't have support. Extreme politics at its worst." | US Congress |
GLASTONBURY, Conn. -- A former Connecticut police officer is suspected of being a serial burglar and committing 30 or more thefts in three states, including the community he had patrolled until recently.
A newly unsealed warrant says former Glastonbury Police Officer Patrick Hemingway is believed to have targeted safes and cash registers at restaurants and businesses in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The warrant, cited in multiple news reports and released Thursday, says surveillance videos show a suspect possibly resembling the former officer.
Hemingway, 37, was charged last month with computer crimes and making a false statement. A judge at his arraignment said more charges were expected.
In one surveillance video, a tall male wearing a mask, gloves and a hooded sweatshirt is seen holding a flashlight “in a tactical manner.” The suspect is also holding “a coiled, corded object to his left ear” that resembles the portable police radios used by the Glastonbury Police Department, the warrant said.
“Lock-picking tools” were used in some of the burglaries, according to the warrant. Hemingway left behind a bag that included a lock-picking tool kit when he resigned Sept. 1 from the Glastonbury Police Department, the warrant said. Cell phone data and images of a vehicle resembling one owned by Hemingway's wife and spotted at multiple break-ins are also cited in the warrant.
As the burglary part of the investigation continues, Hemmingway is being held on a $1 million bond. His lawyer argued in court that the bond was too high.
“I've seen murder cases where the bond is that high,” James E. Sulick said.
“I want to withhold any comment until I’ve had a chance to review things with my client,” Sulick said Saturday. “And I just haven’t been able to do that yet.”
Hemingway was initially arrested as a fugitive from justice on Sept. 22 at a New Jersey airport where Sulick said he was studying to become a commercial pilot. He was extradited to Connecticut. The warrant for the computer crime, signed when Hemingway was in New Jersey, stems from allegations he misused a police database 80 times. According to the warrant, Sulick made 28 queries about his own vehicle from Feb. 26, 2019, as well as 19 queries about his wife's vehicle from April 11, 2022 to Aug. 23, plus other queries.
"A possible explanation for Patrick running such information so frequently would have been to determine if he was being investigated by police,” the warrant said.
Last month, the Glastonbury Police Department issued a news release saying they had been alerted to the possibility that a former officer was a person of interest in a recent burglary and had contacted the Connecticut State Police Major Crimes unit because the investigation involved multiple jurisdictions. The officer was not named and the department said it would not comment further. | US Police Misconduct |
Politics|Trump Rally Plays Music Resembling QAnon Song, and Crowds Reacthttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/politics/trump-rally-qanon-music.htmlIn Ohio, a dark address by the former president featured music that was all but identical to a theme song for the conspiracy theory movement.VideoCreditCredit...David Maxwell/EPA, via ShutterstockSept. 18, 2022, 2:30 p.m. ETFormer President Donald J. Trump appeared to more fully embrace QAnon on Saturday, playing a song at a political rally in Ohio that prompted attendees to respond with a salute in reference to the cultlike conspiracy theory’s theme song.While speaking in Youngstown in support of J.D. Vance, whom he has endorsed as Ohio’s Republican nominee for the Senate, Mr. Trump delivered a dark address about the decline of America over music that was all but identical to a song called “Wwg1wga” — an abbreviation for the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”As Mr. Trump spoke, scores of people in the crowd raised fingers in the air in an apparent reference to the “1” in what they thought was the song’s title. It was the first time in the memory of some Trump aides that such a display had occurred at one of his rallies.Aides to Mr. Trump said the song played at the rally was called “Mirrors,” and it was selected for use in a video that Mr. Trump played at the conservative meeting CPAC and posted on his social media site, Truth Social. But it sounds strikingly like the QAnon theme song.Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said, “The fake news, in a pathetic attempt to create controversy and divide America, is brewing up another conspiracy about a royalty-free song from a popular audio library platform.”As president, Mr. Trump often had a winking relationship with QAnon, amplifying social media posts related to the conspiracy theory movement, which holds that when he was in the White House he was locked in a war against satanic, child-trafficking liberals and Democrats. A chief tenet of the movement, which has gradually spread from the fringes of the far right closer to the center of the Republican Party, is that Mr. Trump will ultimately be returned to power.But what was once a flirtation with a movement that the F.B.I. has warned could increasingly turn violent now appears to be a full embrace.Last week, for example, Mr. Trump posted an image of himself on Truth Social, wearing a Q pin on his lapel and under a slogan reading “The Storm is Coming.” Adherents to QAnon believe that the “storm” is the moment when Mr. Trump will retake power after vanquishing his enemies, having them arrested and potentially executed on live TV.Mr. Trump’s speech in Ohio had an apocalyptic tone and seemed intended to delegitimize officials in the F.B.I. and Justice Department who are involved in investigations into both his handling of sensitive government documents removed from the White House and the role that he and allies played in trying to overturn the 2020 election.ImageCredit...Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never ever before,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “We’ve got a Federal Bureau of Investigation that won’t allow bad, election-changing facts to be presented to the public.”Addressing the conflict in Ukraine, Mr. Trump also warned that the United States “may end up in World War III.” Assailing reporters, as he often does, he said that there was “no fair press any longer” and repeated his frequent refrain that the news media is “truly the enemy of the people.”Those complaints were followed by series of other false claims.Mr. Trump said that “free speech is no longer allowed” in the United States, a country, he went on to claim, “where crime is rampant like never before, where the economy has been collapsing.” | US Political Corruption |
Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition.
“Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” So declared the Queen of Hearts during the trial of the Knave of Hearts (for allegedly stealing tarts) in Alice in Wonderland. This approach, which Lewis Carroll meant to symbolize the height of absurdism, seems an apt description of how the House Republicans are proceeding with an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.
As of now, there is no evidence that Biden did anything to warrant the political equivalent of a death sentence. Yet rather than merely continue pursuing their multi-committee investigation of Hunter Biden’s admittedly questionable business dealings to determine if President Biden ought to be subjected to an impeachment inquiry, the Republicans have rushed to the presumed sentence before even coming close to reaching a verdict. This is absurd.
In previous impeachments, the basic facts of the alleged wrongdoing were known. The Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon’s efforts to impede the investigation of the burglary and subsequent cover-up were matters of public record when the House of Representatives on October 30, 1973, launched an impeachment inquiry. Previously, the Senate had created a special investigative committee and held the nationally broadcasted Watergate hearings, and federal prosecutors had long been on the case and sending Nixon’s minions to the hoosegow.
In the cases of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the basics of their wrongdoing were confirmed prior to the House kick-starting impeachment. The infamous Starr report, which detailed Clinton’s affair with an intern and his subsequent lies about it, was submitted to Congress in early September 1998. The House GOP voted to launch the impeachment process a few weeks later. With Trump, there was no question that he had leaned on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to produce dirt on Joe Biden. A quasi-transcript of the phone call had been released. And Trump’s incitement of the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol on January 6 was done in full public view.
Whether these impeachments were justified or not, they were predicated on established misdeeds.
Not so now. What is this impeachment about? It’s about Republican speculation that Joe Biden was somehow involved in illicit activity with Hunter. Yet there is no confirmed evidence of that or that Hunter’s business ventures—which do appear to have been sleazy attempts to score big money by trading on the family name—were illegal.
The House Oversight Committee has released a compilation of what it calls “evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling schemes.” But this list mainly offers testimony and documents showing that Hunter Biden vigorously name-dropped his pop to grease business deals and that on a few occasions Biden met or chatted with his son and his son’s overseas business associates. There’s no information indicating Biden took official actions to help Hunter or his colleagues. This “evidence” could lead someone to think that something improper might have occurred; it provides leads that ought to be investigated. But it is not the basis for considering political execution.
House Republicans have repeatedly been forced to acknowledge that evidence linking Biden to corruption has not yet been unearthed. On CNN this week, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) was pressed on whether the Republicans had found direct evidence of Biden malfeasance. He replied, “The point of the [impeachment] inquiry is to give us greater standing to get the full evidence.”
Moreover, Rep. Jim Comer (R-Ky.), the leader of the GOP impeachment inquiry, has distorted and exaggerated the investigation’s findings, repeatedly hurling false allegations about President Biden.
This is sentence first—investigation afterwards. We’re going to have an impeachment inquiry to see if we can find evidence to justify an impeachment inquiry. (I’d certainly welcome any investigation of wheeling-and-dealing conducted by relatives of elected officials, including, say, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.) As you would expect, numerous Republicans have conceded this impeachment effort is about weakening Biden for the 2024 election and seeking revenge for Trump.
Bottom line: This is a bogus and trumped-up impeachment crusade.
We now turn to an important question: How does the media cover and contextualize a sham impeachment? The aim of the Republicans—if they cannot produce true evidence of Biden corruption—is to tarnish the president by linking his name to “impeachment” in as many headlines and news accounts as possible. Can the media report on these shenanigans without being an accomplice, without bolstering a bad-faith effort driven by far-right extremists and conspiracy-mongers, such Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz? Even though news accounts sometimes note that the Republicans have yet to produce evidence to justify impeachment, the overall coverage ends up boosting the Biden-is-corrupt innuendo being slung by the Republicans.
Not to pick on the New York Times—but why not, since everyone does. When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Tuesday that he was initiating an impeachment inquiry of Biden without a House vote, the Times covered his declaration on the front-page. The headline blared, “McCarthy Opens Inquiry of Biden, Appeasing Right.” In the opening paragraphs, the article focused on the internal GOP politics, reporting that McCarthy was doing this to appease far-right lawmakers and “quell a brewing rebellion among ultraconservative critics.”
The paper had a line in the third paragraph stating that after months of digging Republicans have found “no proof” of Biden corruption. But then it reported in detail McCarthy’s charge that Biden had lied about his knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings and that the Biden administration had given the president’s son “special treatment” in a criminal investigation. It quoted McCarthy declaring that the House Republicans have “uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct” and that “these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption.” (Note that McCarthy said “allegations,” not “evidence.”) A greater amount of ink was granted to McCarthy’s accusations than the absence of evidence.
It was not until the middle of the piece that the newspaper reported that some Republicans have not supported impeachment because GOP investigators have yet to produce evidence tying Biden to his son’s business dealings. Mainly, the Times handled the evidence question in the usual he said/she said approach, quoting Democrats insisting that no evidence of corruption has been turned up.
It’s all politics, charge and countercharge. Rs and Ds operating on the same level. Certainly, this adheres to journalistic convention. But it affords impeachment scammers an advantage, amplifying their insinuation that Biden is corrupt. And it allows them to—wait for it!—weaponize impeachment. That is, to use this dramatic course of action, justified or not, to spread the unproven notion that Joe Biden is a criminal dirtbag.
A story that appeared in the Times the next day similarly focused on McCarthy’s political dilemma, as well as his flip-flop on the issue of proceeding with impeachment absent a House vote. (He had previously said there must be such a vote.) But on the question of evidence—or the lack thereof—the newspaper again gave its readers thin gruel, with a half-sentence reporting that some Republicans were uncomfortable about “moving forward in the absence of solid evidence.”
All this downplays a central component of the story: the Republicans are proceeding with an impeachment absent hard-and-fast evidence. That helps the GOP.
How can the media avoid providing platforms to scoundrels whose goal is to spread disinformation and poison the national discourse? There was another example in the Times this week of empowering a liar. In an article about House Republicans who oppose military aid to Ukraine—even though firms in their districts manufacture weaponry being sent to Ukraine—the paper quoted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) saying, “our constituents have great concerns about seemingly unlimited taxpayer money being used to fund the war in Ukraine, especially when Americans are struggling at home with rising inflation and places like East Palestine and Maui continue to be ignored by the Biden administration.”
The Biden administration didn’t ignore the train derailment disaster in East Palestine or the wildfires in Hawaii. It deployed multiple agencies to help the Ohioans, and Biden traveled to Maui. Why would the paper of record print an outright lie from Jordan and help him advance a deceitful agenda?
It may sound hyperbolic to say this, but there is a war going on in the United States over the future of American democracy. Disinformation is perhaps the most potent weapon in that war. And impeachment is now another front in that war.
So how does the media cover a (so far) baseless impeachment day by day without aiding and abetting the weaponizers? This circus cannot be ignored. But with each twist and turn, must reporters again and again lead with the fact that there is no solid predicate for this impeachment? Perhaps, even if that could get boring for reporters and their viewers and readers. Without context, unconfirmed accusations hurled by unprincipled accusers can influence the political debate. Remember how the Republicans spent years bleating “Benghazi” over and over to tarnish Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election? McCarthy boasted then that the GOP’s multiple Benghazi probes—which never proved any of the wild conspiracy theories—caused her poll numbers to drop. The Biden impeachment is the same strategy—on steroids.
McCarthy and his House colleagues are exploiting impeachment to generate headlines and soundbites that create the impression that Biden is a crook—to give Fox and its wannabe competitors plenty of grist for their propaganda-churning mills and to help Trump return to the White House with an authoritarian agenda. That is the crux of the story here. Whether the rest of the media plays it that way will determine if the extremists—those who tried to overturn the last election, who downplayed or excused a violent attack on the Capitol, and who now support a demagogic presidential candidate who subverted the constitutional order—succeed. | US Congress |
America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship
“Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship. People need to be alarmed.
The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy. And most of the folks who get paid big bucks to understand politics could not make any sense of it.
TV pundits compared a near-shutdown of the federal government and Kevin McCarthy’s subsequent ouster as speaker to the iconic sitcom Seinfeld — a show about nothing. In capitals around the globe, world leaders and baffled analysts struggled to make sense of the utter dysfunction paralyzing the nation that just a generation ago held itself out as the lone superpower.
Yet to a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.
The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through the what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.
If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.
The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack. (Yes, the same Hillsdale that GOP-led school boards, including Pennridge in Philadelphia’s northern exurbs, are hiring to whitewash their curriculums.)
In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, the centrist liberal Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.
“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue.”
Things are getting more terrible by the day, whether it’s the mob on Staten Island tormenting residents of a temporary shelter for refugees by bombarding them with noise or flashlights, or the shockingly ugly social-media swarms of right-wingers mocking the murders of liberals like Philadelphia journalist Josh Kruger or New York’s Ryan Carson, or the MAGA gunman in New Mexico who smirked after shooting a Native American during a vigil. But the chaos at the bottom of the political food chain is coming from the same instincts tearing apart the top of the government: A desire to blow it all up.
When these raw instincts are translated by the extreme right’s “intellectuals” into an explicit plea for a dictatorship, you can see that America is poised to cross the Rubicon — a metaphor rooted in the river in northern Italy that Julius Caesar had to cross with his army in 49 B.C. in order to drive out Rome’s democratically elected government and seize power.
America should be having a robust, life-or-death conversation — when TV’s cable talkfest signs on at 6 a.m. until the last words at midnight, on the floors of the House and Senate, in newspaper editorial boards and down at the barber shop and in Starbucks — about whether we really want to end this country’s 247-year uneven experiment in democracy, and whether one man should have the power to override elections, jail his enemies, free his friends, and eviscerate federal agencies.
And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.
It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange. Donald Trump, the 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.
As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Trump has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities. If Julius Caesar were still here, he’d surely be giving a Trump 47 presidency a Roman salute.
But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like Trump — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — Bannon, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster who was pardoned by Trump but faces new charges, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as Trump did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it.”
In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate, Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, wrote that the Trump ally frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”
So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny.”
Dictatorship can happen here, but why, and why now? That would probably take another book to explain, but it feels partly the ultimate outcome of America’s college/non-college divide that I wrote about in 2022′s After The Ivory Tower Falls, which looked at the root causes of mostly white-working-class resentment of educated elites — not just in academia but in the media, the bureaucracy, and elsewhere. But it also reflects the desperation of a conservative movement struggling to win free and fair democratic elections yet determined to impose its cherished hierarchies — including white supremacy and the patriarchy — by any means necessary.
The Guardian’s Wilson noted that Anton, in an essay decrying the power of elite, liberal-minded “experts,” wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965.” What was that year’s landmark event? The passage of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered Black voters and led to the election of thousands of African American office holders.
After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Republicans could win elections through the backlash politics of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or the demagoguery of 1988′s “Willie Horton ad.” They then turned to tactics like voter suppression or extreme gerrymandering as their electorate shrunk. In 2024, the right sees dictatorship as its final “Hail Mary” pass. And it just might work.
But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” But in the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.
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North Carolina’s state elections board on Tuesday removed two local election officials who had refused to certify their county's 2022 results after officials determined they violated state law.
The state board voted unanimously to dismiss Surry County elections secretary Jerry Forestieri and board member Timothy DeHaan in one of the strongest disciplinary actions taken against local officials across the U.S. who have delayed or refused to certify election results. Controversies over election certification have roiled mostly rural counties across the country as conspiracy theories about voting machines have spread widely among conservatives.
Forestieri and DeHaan had questioned the legitimacy of state election law and court decisions disallowing photo ID checks and voter residency challenges. They falsely claimed in a letter that the vote was "illegal" and "very uncertain."
"These rulings have stripped the election process of the trustworthiness they were designed to protect," they wrote. "Since then, the general welfare of the citizens of North Carolina has been damaged by a growing lack of trust in our election process."
The two circulated the letter during a canvas meeting last fall when county election officials convened to certify the accuracy of the vote count. DeHaan ultimately signed on to certify, while Forestieri did not.
State Board Chair Damon Circosta said Tuesday that county elections officials cannot decline to implement state board directives or court orders they disagree with.
"Those who administer elections must follow the law as it is written, not how they want it to be," Circosta said.
The North Carolina Supreme Court, which at the time had a Democratic majority, upheld a trial court ruling late last year that declared a 2018 voter ID law unconstitutional and tainted by racial bias. But the high court's new Republican majority opted to revisit the case earlier this month.
Bob Hall, former executive director of the prominent voting rights group Democracy North Carolina, filed complaints with the state board that prompted the Tuesday hearing. He said the men's refusal to accept the legitimacy of the state's election laws directly conflicts with their oath of office and responsibility to exercise their duties according to those laws.
Election conspiracies in recent years have undermined public confidence, led to threats against election workers in North Carolina and other states, and inspired efforts to ban voting machines altogether. They’ve also been used by a small number of local officials across the country to justify refusing to certify election results, as was the case in Surry County.
The ousted county officials had falsely alleged that court rulings gave "protection to felonious voter fraud" and raised the possibility of "election theft."
Last year, state officials in New Mexico had to obtain a court order to compel officials in Otero County, a conservative community that backed former President Donald Trump with nearly 62% of the vote in 2020, to certify results from their primary election. No commissioners in New Mexico were removed from office for refusing to certify results, according to state election officials.
There is no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting equipment in the 2020 or 2022 elections.
Election experts fear that what happened last year could be a preview of what’s to come after the 2024 presidential election should a candidate once again refuse to concede.
Election officials have spent six years shoring up their cybersecurity defenses and adding equipment and testing to ensure election technology is protected. Much of the country now uses paper ballots, which ensures a record can be used to recalculate results should any manipulation or error occur.
Yet this hasn’t stopped the false claims from being spread by Trump and his allies, who continue to travel the country meeting with local officials and holding community forums highlighting election conspiracies. | US Local Elections |
An Arkansas woman pleaded not guilty to charges she sold stolen body parts from medical school corpses for $11,000 to a Pennsylvania man she met on social media.
Candace Chapman Scott, 36, a former mortuary worker, is accused of selling 20 boxes of body parts to a man she met through a Facebook group about “oddities,” according to the April 5 indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in Little Rock.
Scott pleaded not guilty to 12 counts, including conspiracy to commit mail fraud, mail fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property and interstate transportation of stolen property.
She remains in jail as she awaits a hearing scheduled for Tuesday on whether she will be released on bail.
The man who allegedly purchased the remains was not named in the federal indictment. But he was identified as Jeremy Lee Pauley in separate state charges.
Scott worked at Arkansas Central Mortuary Services, a funeral home, and part of her job included transporting, cremating and embalming remains. According to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, the funeral home is where the medical school sent remains of cadavers that had been donated for medical students to examine.
In October 2021, Scott allegedly approached Pauley and began offering to sell him remains from the medical school that the mortuary needed to cremate and return.
“Just out of curiosity, would you know anyone in the market for a fully in tact, embalmed brain?” Scott wrote to Pauley in her first Facebook message, according to the indictment.
In the next nine months, Scott sold Pauley fetuses, brains, hearts, lungs, genitalia, large pieces of skin and other body parts, the indictment alleges. The indictment claims that, in one incident, Scott sold the remains of a fetus at a discount because “he’s not in great shape.”
In another message from Dec. 2, 2021, the indictment said Scott offered to sell Pauley “2 brains, one with skullcap, 3 hearts one cut, 2 fake boobies, one large belly button piece of skin, [one] arm, one huge piece of skin, and one lung” for $1,600. Scott received a payment from Pauley through PayPal that same day for $1,600.
Scott collected $10,975 in 16 separate PayPal transfers, the indictment says.
Prosecutors argue that Scott should remain behind bars until her trial. Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Jegley told U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Thomas Ray on Friday that Scott may flee over the prospect of a long prison sentence.
“I think that the facts … underlying the indictment and in the indictment are uniquely egregious and objectionable and we believe there is going to be some significant public outcry as a result of this,” Jegley said.
Ray said the accusations against Scott are “shocking and depraved.” But under federal rules, the judge is only supposed to order Scott to remain jailed if she is a flight risk since she is not considered dangerous.
“The indictment alleges horribly egregious conduct, shocking conduct,” Ray said. “But under the Bail Reform Act, those aren’t factors that I consider for dangerousness that goes to danger to the community or risk of the community. As shocking and depraved as the alleged conduct is, none of that would go toward dangerousness so the only thing I see here that would support a request for detention is obviously flight risk.”‘
Pennsylvania officials learned of the transactions after they received complaints last year about Pauley.
Pauley is charged in Pennsylvania with a misdemeanor count of abuse of a corpse, a felony count of receiving stolen property, a misdemeanor count of receiving stolen property and a felony count of dealing in proceeds of unlawful activities. He is free on bail and his preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 7.
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences spokeswoman Leslie Taylor told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the FBI has not revealed to school officials whether any of the remains have been identified. She said embalming damages DNA, which makes identification extremely difficult.
Taylor said the medical school still contracts with Arkansas Central Mortuary Services.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Medicaid has become a key component in negotiations over the debt ceiling
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
About 1 out of every 4 Americans gets their health care coverage through Medicaid. The federal program that mainly serves people with lower incomes or disabilities has become pivotal to negotiations over the debt ceiling. Republicans want to make more people work to qualify. Many Democrats say that's a nonstarter. Let's ask Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state about this. Congresswoman, President Biden says making it harder for anyone to get Medicaid is off the table. Is that something you agree with?
PRAMILA JAYAPAL: We agree that work requirements do not have any good effect. We've actually found that when they've been instituted, particularly after the drastic social safety net cuts of 1996, five years later, there was no difference in employment rates among those recipients. And they tend to hurt the very people they're intended to serve.
MARTÍNEZ: States - some states try to make their own rules when it comes to Medicaid. Arkansas has attempted to tie benefits to work requirements. A recent referendum in Wisconsin supported that idea. Should states be able to make their own rules on Medicaid?
JAYAPAL: You know, I really don't think that they should. I think we should try to control this from the federal level, because what we see is that the cuts to Medicaid - the states that don't choose to take on Medicaid recipients or choose to institute these kinds of heavy burdens are the ones that are suffering the most for the people that need it the most. So I think we should have consistent Medicaid requirements across the country. They should be dictated by the federal government. And, you know, I think ultimately we want to make sure we're helping people, not hurting the very people that need it the most.
MARTÍNEZ: Even if states pick up a part of the cost. It's a jointly funded program.
JAYAPAL: Well, that's the problem. I think, because we've made it a jointly funded program, unlike Medicare, states do feel like they have the ability to put in their own rules. I think over time - and obviously this isn't something we can accomplish right away, but I think that is one of the flaws of this very important Medicaid program, is we give states too much control over helping the neediest people in their states.
MARTÍNEZ: If Republicans are successful and more requirements for work are tied to benefits such as Medicaid or SNAP - that's the program that provides aid for groceries - how would it affect states like yours, Washington?
JAYAPAL: Well, Washington state - you know, we are a Democratically controlled state, and so we have much fewer burdens in place. But I have to say, this cannot be a negotiating point on the table. I do not think that Republicans can win on this. And some Republicans themselves have said that this doesn't actually do anything to cut the deficit. So let's be clear that, you know, the amount of money that would be saved is extremely little, if anything. These work requirements require huge administrative burden. I've talked to the people who administer these programs, and they say they have to spend a lot of money just to have people go through and determine whether or not somebody is eligible, whether or not the work requirement actually fits the condition. A lot of people who are on these programs are cycling in and out of different jobs. They're often low-wage workers. They often don't have the stability that a lot of others may have. And so work requirements are just an administrative burden that costs a lot of money and, again, do not help in terms of getting more people back into employment.
MARTÍNEZ: Congresswoman, you used to be on the House Budget Committee. Do any arguments at all from the GOP about lowering spending hold water for you, any at all?
JAYAPAL: Well, I think the key thing here is we have to think about the difference between debt and deficit. If Republicans want to talk about the deficit, we have shown through the last two years of the Biden administration and the bills that we've passed that we can reduce the deficit by raising revenue. And that is the thing that is consistently very hypocritical about the Republican position on this, because they don't want to raise revenue. In fact, they often ensure that their tax cuts go to the wealthiest and don't actually bring in money, whereas Democrats are willing to talk about the fact that the deficit can be reduced by increasing revenues. And I think that's a very important thing at the end of the day.
MARTÍNEZ: Just a few seconds left, Congresswoman - what's going to have to happen to make this deal happen?
JAYAPAL: We've got to have a clean debt ceiling. That is the first thing. We've got to raise the debt ceiling in a clean way. Democrats have a discharge petition to do this. I think we are going to have to put everything on the table, including potentially using the 14th Amendment, because Republicans cannot be rewarded for hostage-taking, trying to get extreme ideas in that they couldn't get in even in the budget negotiations that happen every year.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal. Thank you very much.
JAYAPAL: Thank you.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. | US Federal Policies |
Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones
MARION — In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said the police raid is unprecedented in Kansas.
“An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know,” Bradbury said. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Meyer reported last week that Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with LaTurner, whose staff was apologetic. Newell responded to Meyer’s reporting with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page.
A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said, and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license. The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.
A reporter with the Marion Record used a state website to verify the information provided by the source. But Meyer suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. Meyer decided not to publish a story about the information, and he alerted police to the situation.
“We thought we were being set up,” Meyer said.
Police notified Newell, who then complained at a city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true. Her public comments prompted the newspaper to set the record straight in a story published Thursday.
Sometime before 11 a.m. Friday, officers showed up simultaneously at Meyer’s home and the newspaper office. They presented a search warrant that alleges identity theft and unlawful use of a computer.
The search warrant identifies two pages worth of items that law enforcement officers were allowed to seize, including computer software and hardware, digital communications, cellular networks, servers and hard drives, items with passwords, utility records, and all documents and records pertaining to Newell.
Officers injured a reporter’s finger by grabbing her cellphone out of her hand, Meyer said. Officers at his home took photos of his bank account information.
He said officers told him the computers, cellphones and other devices would be sent to a lab.
“I don’t know when they’ll get it back to us,” Meyer said. “They won’t tell us.”
The seized computers, server and backup hard drive include advertisements and legal notices that were supposed to appear in the next edition of the newspaper.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said. “We will publish something.”
Newell, writing Friday under a changed name on her personal Facebook account, said she “foolishly” received a DUI in 2008 and “knowingly operated a vehicle without a license out of necessity.”
“Journalists have become the dirty politicians of today, twisting narrative for bias agendas, full of muddied half-truths,” Newell wrote. “We rarely get facts that aren’t baited with misleading insinuations.”
She said the “entire debacle was brought forth in an attempt to smear my name, jeopardize my licensing through ABC (state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division), harm my business, seek retaliation, and for personal leverage in an ongoing domestic court battle.”
At the law enforcement center in Marion, a staff member said only Police Chief Gideon Cody could answer questions for this story, and that Cody had gone home for the day and could not be reached by phone.
Meyer, whose father worked at the newspaper from 1948 until he retired, bought the Marion County Record in 1998, preventing a sale to a corporate newspaper chain.
As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.
“That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,” Meyer said. “The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.” | US Police Misconduct |
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republican lawmakers who have spread election conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential outcome was rigged are overseeing legislative committees charged with setting election policy in two major political battleground states.
Divided government in Pennsylvania and Arizona means that any voting restrictions those GOP legislators propose is likely to fail. Even so, the high-profile appointments give the lawmakers a platform to cast further doubt on the integrity of elections in states that will be pivotal in selecting the next president in 2024.
Awarding such plum positions to lawmakers who have repeated conspiracies and spread misinformation cuts against more than two years of evidence showing there were no widespread problems or fraud in the last presidential election. It also would appear to run counter to the message delivered in the November midterm elections, when voters rejected election-denying candidates running for top offices in presidential battleground states.
WATCH: How election deniers fared in their midterm races
At the same time, many mainstream Republicans are trying to move past the lies told by former President Donald Trump and his allies about his loss to President Joe Biden.
“It is an issue that many Americans and many Pennsylvanians are tired of seeing litigated and relitigated over and over,” said Pennsylvania state Sen. Amanda Cappalletti, the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that handles election legislation. “I think we’re all ready to move on, and we see from audit after audit that our elections are secure, they are fair and that people’s votes are being counted.”
Multiple reviews and audits in the six battleground states where Trump disputed his loss, as well as dozens of court rejections and repeated admonishments from officials in his own administration, have underscored that the 2020 presidential results were accurate. There was no widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines that would have altered the result.
The legislative appointments in Pennsylvania and Arizona highlight the divide between the two major parties over election law. Already this year, Democratic-controlled legislatures are moving to expand access to voting and heighten penalties for intimidating voters and election workers, while many Republican-led states are aiming to pass further restrictions, a trend that accelerated after Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.
Democratic governors and legislative victories last fall will blunt the influence of Republicans who took steps or pushed rhetoric seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
But in Arizona and Pennsylvania, two lawmakers who dismiss the validity of that election — not to mention other elections since then — will have key positions of influence as the majority chairs of legislative committees that oversee election legislation.
In Arizona, Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers takes over the Senate Elections Committee after being appointed by an ally, Senate President Warren Petersen. He was one of two lawmakers who signed subpoenas that led to Senate Republicans’ widely derided audit of the 2020 election.
READ MORE: Debunking false claims a difficult battle for election offices nationwide
Rogers, who has gained a national following for spreading conspiracy theories and questioning elections, has faced repeated ethics charges for her inflammatory rhetoric, support for white supremacists and conspiracy-filled social media posts.
She now will be a main gatekeeper for election and voting bills in Arizona, where election changes are a top priority for some Republican lawmakers. Some want to eliminate voting by mail and early voting options that are used by more than 80% of the state’s voters.
She has scheduled a committee meeting for Monday to consider bills that would ban unmonitored drop boxes, prohibit drive-through voting or ballot pickup and impose what voting-rights advocates say are additional burdens on early voting.
In Pennsylvania, Republican Sen. Cris Dush takes over as chair of the Senate State Government Committee after pushing to block the state’s electoral votes from going to Biden in 2020. Dush also mounted an election investigation that he hoped would use the Arizona-style audit as a model.
He was appointed by the Senate’s ranking Republican, President Pro Tem Kim Ward, whose office explained Dush’s appointment only by saying that seniority plays a role and that members have priority requests.
In the first weeks of this year’s session, Dush has moved along measures to expand voter identification requirements and add a layer of post-election audits. Both are proposed constitutional amendments designed to bypass a governor’s veto by going to voters for approval.
Dush said he also plans to develop legislation to require more security measures for drop boxes and ballots.
“I’m going to make a promise to the people of Pennsylvania: The things that I’m doing here as chair of State Government, it’s going to be things that will be conducted in a fair, impartial manner,” Dush said in an interview. “You know, we’ve just got to make sure that we can ensure the integrity of the vote and people aren’t disenfranchised.”
Arizona and Pennsylvania have newly elected Democratic governors who presumably would veto hard-line GOP bills opposed by Democrats.
Still, Democrats, county election officials and voting-rights advocates in both states want changes to election laws that, with Dush and Rogers in place, may never see the light of day.
READ MORE: Rural Arizona county certifies election after judge’s order
Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director for the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said he anticipates the Legislature there will pass a lot of “bad elections bills.” He said moderate Republican lawmakers who might have voted down problematic measures under a Republican governor now might let them pass because they know Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs will likely veto them.
“This is performative,” Gulotta said. “This isn’t substantive.”
The question, he said, is whether Rogers and other Arizona lawmakers can cooperate on “small fixes” where there is consensus. That, he said, will take “real statesmanship.”
Liz Avore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said the organization expects another busy period of lawmaking related to voting and elections ahead of the 2024 presidential vote, even as candidates who repeated Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election lost bids for governor, secretary of state and attorney general in key battleground states.
Democratic and Republican-led states are often moving in opposite directions, but some bipartisan consensus has emerged around certain aspects of election law, such as restoring voting rights to felons and expanding early in-person voting, Avore said.
Republican proposals, such as expanding voter identification requirements, are popular and have majority support, as do some Democratic proposals to broaden access, said Christopher Borick, a political science professor and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
But to be successful with voters, Republicans need to mind the lessons from 2022. Denying the outcomes of fair elections, he said, “is a loser for the Republican Party. Straight up.”
Cooper reported from Phoenix. | US Federal Elections |
In a break with President Joe Biden and Senate Democratic leadership, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced Monday evening that he would vote against a supplemental spending bill to provide emergency military aid to Israel and Ukraine.
Sanders, who drew left-wing ire in recent weeks for stopping short of endorsing a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, cited his concerns about the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and displacement.
Sanders repeatedly invoked what he sees as illegal actions taken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the most right-wing Israeli government in history.
“What the Netanyahu government is doing is immoral,” Sanders said in remarks on the Senate floor. “It is in violation of international law ― and the United States should not be complicit in those actions.”
Sander also clarified that he still supports funding for Israeli defensive technologies ― presumably including the Iron Dome missile defense system that Israel has used to stop rockets fired by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that governs Gaza.
“I believe it is appropriate for us to support defense systems that will protect Israeli citizens from incoming missile and rocket attacks,” he said. “But I believe that it would be irresponsible for us to provide an additional $10.1 billion in unconditional military aid that will allow the Netanyahu government to continue its current offensive military approach.”
This story is developing. Please return for updates. | US Federal Policies |
INDEPENDENCE TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- A New Jersey man deliberately drove his SUV into a home and the offices of a municipal police department earlier this month, authorities announced Friday.
No one was injured in either crash, which both occurred Sept. 20, the Warren County Prosecutor's Office said in a news release. However, at least one officer narrowly escaped being struck when John Hargreaves, 34, of Belvidere, drove into the Independence Township police headquarters, causing significant damage.
Hargreaves' vehicle came to rest in the department's squad room. As he got out of the vehicle, prosecutors said Hargreaves put his hands in the air and appeared to be celebrating while loudly playing the Guns N' Roses song “Welcome to the Jungle” on his car stereo as officers took him into custody.
That crash happened just minutes after Hargreaves had driven into the garage door of a home in Liberty Township, an act prosecutors said was intended to harass the homeowner, who is known to Hargreaves. He then drove to the Independence police station because it was closest to the home, prosecutors said.
Hargreaves was charged with burglary, criminal mischief and a weapons count in both crashes. He also faces counts of terrorism, aggravated assault and causing widespread injury or damage stemming from the police station crash.
Authorities have not disclosed a possible motive for the crashes. They said Hargreaves remained jailed Friday and county prosecutors said they did not know if he has retained an attorney. A telephone number for Hargreaves could not be located. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Carlos Sanchez of McAllen, Texas, took out an enormous amount of federal student loan debt to make sure his children could attend college.
"As my third child makes her way through her senior year in college, I now have what amounts to about $160,000 in parent PLUS loans," Sanchez, 63, told NPR. He likely won't have them paid off (or qualify for debt forgiveness) until he's in his 80s, "which is an extraordinary journey for me," he said, given that he's approaching retirement.
"I'm just hoping to see if there is some relief."
For Sanchez and millions of other parents and caregivers, that relief could come through a loophole in federal law — a loophole that could help them access a more forgiving payment plan and ultimately shed debts that might otherwise follow them for the rest of their lives.
That is, if they know about it. Few do.
The U.S. Department of Education won't discuss this loophole. And if a borrower calls their loan servicer and asks about it, the call center worker will likely greet the question with a confused silence. It's called the double-consolidation loophole.
The parent PLUS debt trap
According to federal data, 3.7 million Americans hold $111 billion in debt from parent PLUS loans. Though they're federal loans, if you close one eye and squint at them sideways, parent PLUS loans look an awful lot like a bear trap. The interest rate is far higher than the rate on a standard undergraduate loan — 8.05% versus 5.50% — and parents don't have easy access to the low monthly payments of income-based repayment plans. There's also virtually no limit on how much families can borrow. Which can be good. Or calamitous.
In the ideal, parent PLUS loans can be engines of equity, helping low-income families and families of color send their children to schools that, because of cost and generational wealth gaps, might otherwise be out of reach. But research suggests that these loans often become the opposite: drivers of inequity.
"Because low-income families, and especially Black and Latino/a parents, are disproportionately taking out Parent PLUS loans, their heavy use and unfavorable terms and conditions exacerbate the racial wealth gap," said a 2022 report from the Century Foundation titled "Parent PLUS Borrowers: The Hidden Casualties of the Student Debt Crisis."
At a recent forum on student loan debt, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., opined on this parent PLUS crisis, saying she'd "spoken to Black parents who say, 'I'm of age to retire, but I cannot retire — because I'm still paying on loans that I took out so my baby could have a better life.'"
"I'm really worried about parent PLUS borrowers," said Wisdom Cole, national director of the NAACP's Youth & College Division.
Making matters worse, Cole said: These parent borrowers have been unfairly excluded from the newest, most flexible repayment plan, SAVE. Cole said the NAACP had expressed its concern over this exclusion to both the Biden administration and the Education Department.
In fact, in a letter sent Tuesday, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson warned Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that "Parent PLUS borrowers face a grim reality as loan repayments restart."
Parent PLUS borrowers can't officially access the most forgiving payment plan
Parents' official exclusion from SAVE is a big deal. (Unofficially, this is where the loophole comes in — more on that below.)
Technically, parent PLUS loan borrowers qualify for only the Standard, Graduated and Extended repayment plans, none of which take a borrower's income into account or promise loan forgiveness after a given period of time.
Parent PLUS borrowers can qualify for the least flexible income-based repayment plan, known as Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR), if they consolidate their loans into a Direct Consolidation loan. But monthly payments on ICR can be high compared with those on the SAVE plan.
ICR calculates payments based on 20% of a borrower's discretionary income, while SAVE uses half that: just 10%. Also, ICR defines discretionary income as any money you earn above 100% of the federal poverty level. Translation: Any income an individual borrower earns over $14,580 is factored into the monthly payment math. The SAVE plan, on the other hand, protects more than twice as much of a borrower's income, allowing anyone who earns less than roughly $33,000 to qualify for a $0 monthly payment.
In short, if there were a way for parent PLUS borrowers to access SAVE, their monthly payments would be vastly lower than they are on ICR.
That's why, in Johnson's letter, the NAACP president urges Cardona to use his authority to expand SAVE access to parent PLUS borrowers. Otherwise, he writes, "millions of families will see the resumption of crippling payments as student loan payments resume this month."
It's unclear whether the Education Department believes it can — or will try to — do as Johnson asks. In the meantime, though, there is a way for parents to access SAVE, through an unofficial backdoor.
How the double-consolidation loophole works
The federal student loan system — as well as this loophole — depend on layers, like the floors of a home. Consolidating a parent PLUS loan, for example, is like laying a rug over a hardwood floor. The Education Department and its loan servicers can see the rug — the newly consolidated loan — but they can also still see the hardwood — a parent PLUS loan — beneath.
But when you consolidate a loan twice, it's like laying wall-to-wall carpet over it all: Servicers can no longer tell what's beneath. And the system can prevent parent PLUS loans from qualifying for the SAVE plan only if it knows they're parent PLUS loans.
The Education Department knows this is a problem.
"In the past, limitations in Department data may have enabled a parent PLUS loan that was consolidated and then re-consolidated to enroll in any [income-driven repayment] plan, despite the Department's position that such loans are only eligible for the ICR plan," the department acknowledged in the Federal Register in July. Still, it's not immediately closing the loophole.
So, how does a borrower fit through this narrow opening?
It is complicated, and, as we said earlier, the Education Department and its servicers won't help you with it. So if you choose to proceed, you're on your own. Sort of.
You'll find explainers here, from Student Loan Planner, and here, from the College Investor. Below, we've reprinted detailed instructions from Massachusetts' Office of the Attorney General, recommended for borrowers with at least two parent PLUS loans:
Step 1: Fill out a consolidation application online on studentaid.gov for just one Parent PLUS Loan. Pick Nelnet for the servicer. Download a copy of your application to help you with Step 2. It will contain account numbers, balance information, loan type codes, and servicer names needed for your next application.
Step 2: Fill out a paper consolidation application for the second Parent PLUS Loan.
-On page two of the application, identify the loans that you want to include in the consolidation. Fill in information about the Parent PLUS Loan that you excluded from the consolidation application you completed on studentaid.gov.
-On page three of the paper application, identify the loans you want to exclude from the consolidation. Fill in information about the Parent PLUS Loan that you included in the application you completed on studentaid.gov.
-Send the completed paper application to Aidvantage.
Step 3: After you have received notice from both Nelnet and Aidvantage that your two new Direct Consolidation Loans have been funded, fill out a final paper consolidation application.
-On page two, list both Direct Consolidation Loans to include them in the consolidation. You will not have any loans to exclude from this application. You can choose any servicer and send the application to that servicer.
-You can send the application to the servicer of your choice, but if you're pursuing PSLF, send it to MOHELA.
Step 4: After receiving notice that your final Direct Consolidation Loan is funded, visit studentaid.gov/idr, log in using your FSA ID and password, and fill out an Income-Driven Repayment plan application, choosing the SAVE plan.
We know. It sounds complicated and tedious. Because it is. And to be clear, NPR is not advising parent PLUS borrowers to do this; we're simply making clear it's an option. At least, it's an option until July 2025, when the Education Department says it will officially close the loophole. | US Federal Policies |
Judge orders anonymous jury for E. Jean Carroll case against Trump
The judge cited the former president's public statements against the court.
For the third time Friday, former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric is factoring into a court case against him.
A federal judge in New York said the upcoming civil defamation trial involving Trump and E. Jean Carroll will be heard by an anonymous jury, citing Trump's "repeated public statements" about the case and the court.
As part of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's order, the names of the jurors will not be revealed, they will be kept together during recesses and assigned a member from the U.S. Marshal Service who "shall take the petit jurors to, or provide them with, lunch as a group throughout the pendency of the trial," and be transported together or in groups to an undisclosed location before they can return home.
The defamation trial is slated to begin in January.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, sued Trump in November 2019 over comments he made shortly after Carroll publicly accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.
The former president said Carroll was "not my type" and suggested she fabricated her accusation for ulterior and improper purposes, including to increase sales of her then-forthcoming book, in statements following the allegations.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
The judge in the case has already determined that Trump's statements were defamatory, so the January trial will only determine damages. Carroll is seeking $10 million.
Carroll prevailed in a second lawsuit in May that alleged defamation and battery, and she was awarded $5 million in damages. Trump is also appealing that case.
Kaplan's order came the same day that the judge in the New York civil fraud trial expanded the gag order and the judge in the federal election tampering case paused hers pending appeal. | US Federal Policies |
It’s simple math: when the score reads 210 to 8, the side with the much tinier number should lose.
Yet that’s not how it works in the US House of Representatives.
On Tuesday, a mutiny led by eight hardline conservatives toppled speaker Kevin McCarthy and plunged the House into chaos. Rattled financial markets declined steeply and the prospects for a government shutdown six weeks from now rose dramatically. The 15-round, days-long speaker battle that McCarthy finally won in January might seem like a short dash compared to the marathon to come.
The unforgivable sin that led Representative Matt Gaetz and a small band of Republican insurgents to move on McCarthy now? The six-week, bipartisan compromise that the speaker brokered this weekend to prevent a government shutdown that would have further shaken markets, made air travel more dangerous, and halted paychecks for millions of workers, including in the military.
Eight members shouldn’t have this outsized power. Leaders who recognize the reality of compromise under divided government shouldn’t be ousted for working toward an accord. Yet our system incentivizes extremism and anti-majoritarianism. It will only get worse until we change the rules and stop punishing what a functional democracy would reward.
It’s true that McCarthy all but sealed his fate when he agreed to allow just one member of his caucus – in this case, Gaetz – to call a vote to vacate the chair. This condition of earning the Gaetz faction’s support back in January contained the seeds of his demise; as the principle of Chekhov’s Gun holds, a weapon introduced in the first act always returns before the end of the play.
It’s also true that Democrats – every one of whom voted against the speaker – provided the bulk of the votes that deposed McCarthy, as more reasonable voices within both parties failed to chart a path together that did not empower extremists.
“Now what?” cried one frustrated Republican after the vote. It’s a great question. There’s obviously no bipartisan consensus candidate. But which Republican could gain the trust and support of the majority of the caucus, and also the victorious far right? Who would take the job under the conditions forced on McCarthy? Why would Gaetz and his allies now settle for anything less? The entire incentive structure has gone berserk.
There’s more than enough blame to go around. Yet none of the partisan finger-pointing will solve the problem. Anti-majoritarian rules brought us to this ungovernable place. Fixing them is the only way out.
The good news is that’s actually not so hard. If the House elected leaders with ranked-choice voting (RCV), this debacle could have been avoided from the beginning. Imagine how different this would have been. The Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries would have led after the first round. McCarthy would have been second. And the Republican Freedom Caucus protest candidate would have finished a distant third. No one would have earned a majority, so an instant runoff would have kicked in.
The Republican rebels would have been forced to make up their minds. When the options came down to McCarthy or Jeffries, they’d have to make a choice. Rather than being obstructionist kingmakers and winning concessions disproportionate to their numbers, Gaetz and his crew would have been heard – and that’s it. Under RCV, a gaggle of Gaetzes don’t get to run the show. They have a voice in line with their actual numbers. And then majorities prevail.
If the House used ranked-choice voting, McCarthy would not have been forced into a deal that allowed any one member to call for a vote to vacate the chair. Gaetz and his allies might have been furious that the Republican speaker went around them to win overwhelming bipartisan majorities to keep the government open. But they would not have had the power to destabilize the entire institution. Eight renegades could have criticized the deal all they wanted. They wouldn’t get to win.
Now what, indeed. By early November, the House will need to pass a funding package that keeps the government open. The deal this past weekend reflected the reality of a divided government. Cooler heads found a way toward an imperfect deal that reflected the best winnable compromise. That’s how divided government works.
The cost of compromise cannot be that the furthest extreme gets to manipulate the game to bring down those who dare make a deal. That’s a recipe for permanent dysfunction – and deepening minority rule.
After all, Matt Gaetz didn’t even win office with a majority. Gaetz won his seat in Congress in 2016 with just 36% of the vote – and merely 35,689 votes – in a crowded Republican primary. He has won re-election since then thanks to the power of incumbency and a district wildly gerrymandered to ensure a Republican victor.
Gaetz, in other words, represents the fringe of the fringe – a plurality winner in a district rigged to be uncompetitive from the get-go. This is yet another problem that a ranked-choice election would solve. The Gaetz Caucus wouldn’t be able to win election simply by appealing to a far fringe that values confrontation and chaos without any concern for the consequences. We have a Congress filled with members responsive only to a radical minority. If we want a different Congress, one responsive to majorities, one where the people rule and not the far fringe, we need to remake the rules.
In that Congress, the fairer one America deserves, forging consensus that Americans desire would be rewarded, not repudiated. Matt Gaetz might be one of 435 members, but his caucus of eight wouldn’t hold power over the rest of us. And those 36,000 primary voters who cast a ballot for Gaetz seven years ago wouldn’t get to call the shots for all 300 million of us.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote | US Congress |
- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen panned a GOP idea to pay off certain debts to avoid a government debt default.
- Such a plan would ensure China and Wall Street are paid off first, said Democratic lawmakers.
- Yellen said the suggestion is "exceptionally risky" and "untested."
WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said China would be among the first in line to get paid under a Republican proposal to prioritize some U.S. debt obligations over others, calling it a "dangerous idea" that would technically cause the U.S. to default on its bonds.
House Republicans are holding up a bill to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, which hit its $31.4 trillion borrowing limit in January. They want any agreement on the debt limit to pair with cut spending cuts on social program.
Their latest debt ceiling proposal, which passed 21-17 out of the House Ways & Means Committee last week, would prioritize which payments the U.S. Treasury makes first when the U.S. hits the ceiling at which it cannot issue more bonds. The GOP plan places a higher priority on making public debt obligations and Social Security payments than other types of government obligations.
"The government on average makes millions of payments each day and our systems are built to pay all of our bills on time and not to pick and choose which bills to pay," Yellen said during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the federal budget Thursday. "There is a reason that Treasury secretaries of both parties have rejected this incredibly risky and dangerous idea and it's never been tried before."
Democrats have pointed out that the Republican plan to prioritize payments would benefit Wall Street and China, since they hold most government bonds. China holds about $1 trillion of U.S. debt, about 3% of all U.S. debt outstanding.
"If Treasury follows this Republican plan, bearing in mind that China holds about $1 trillion in U.S. debt, who would get paid first?" asked Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
Yellen answered: "Well, if that were prioritized, China would get paid ahead of them," adding that debt prioritization is "default by another name."
Economists have called the suggestion to pay some debts incurred by the government over others, "badly misguided."
"I cannot give any assurances about the technical feasibility of such a plan," Yellen told lawmakers. "It would be an exceptionally risky, untested and radical departure from normal payment practices of agencies across the federal government."
She said lawmakers needed to recognize that "raising the debt ceiling is their responsibility to protect the full faith and credit in the United States."
The Treasury Department has initiated temporary measures in recent months to escape default, including suspending new investments in certain federal retirement programs and a health benefit fund. The measures are set to expire in June.
"We need to pay our bills. We need to pay all of our bills. That willingness and commitment to be responsible in paying bills that have already been incurred is what underlies the United States' strong credit rating," Yellen said.
"If we were to fail to pay any of our bills, that would call into question whether or not we deserve our current credit rating. And it's simply a recipe for economic and financial catastrophe to think we can pay some of our bills and not all of them," she added. | US Federal Policies |
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is back in the race for speaker after Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., who the conference selected earlier this week, ended his bid for the job Thursday night.
Republican lawmakers are meeting behind closed doors Friday morning trying to hash out a way forward.
Jordan is now the only declared candidate in the race — but it is not a done deal for him yet.
Reps. Austin Scott, R-Ga., and Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., are committed to voting against Jordan on the House floor for now.
"Look, if you listen to Kevin McCarthy’s words, he said he doesn’t want to be nominated, but he’s also said he was willing to abide by the will of the conference. It’s time for the conference to draft Kevin McCarthy," Gimenez said on Fox Business on Friday morning. "We need our speaker back, and we need to move forward with the business of America."
However, Jordan reportedly spoke with holdouts against him between Thursday night and Friday morning’s meeting.
Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., who told reporters she was opposing Jordan on Thursday night, suggested on Friday she was just leaning against him. "I'm gonna listen to the rules change part, and I'll make my decision," she said.
Jordan scored another valuable endorsement on Friday morning in Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm.
"We must unite behind one leader with the integrity, the ability and the vision to lead us. I believe Jim Jordan is that leader," Hudson said.
Before discussing new speaker candidates, House GOP lawmakers huddled to decide whether to change Republican conference rules to raise the threshold needed to elect a candidate for speaker.
Scalise had won by a simply majority on Wednesday before dropping out on Thursday night.
Most of Jordan’s allies were for the rules change as of earlier this week, and many of them continued to support him despite Scalise being chosen.
However, all four amendments were tabled on Friday, giving Jordan an easier path to victory in the conference.
Moderate Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., suggested on Thursday night that choosing Jordan would be "rewarding" people who further pushed the House GOP into chaos. He did not commit to voting for Jordan at the time.
"We had a lot of members today said they'd only vote for Jim. That bothers a lot of us. It's not really Jim's fault. But it bothers because you reward bad behavior. And so we pretty much have to grapple with that," he said.
Jordan spokesman Russell Dye told Fox News Digital that the Judiciary chairman was confident.
"Jim Jordan is the only person who can unite the conference and get 217 votes to become speaker," he said.
Fox News Digital's Brooke Singman contributed to this report | US Congress |
Washington — Congress is veering toward another shutdown, having made little progress in advancing bills to keep the government open since lawmakersa lapse in funding almost six weeks ago.
The government is funded through Nov. 17, but the Democratic-led Senate and Republican-controlled House have yet to come to an agreement on how to keep agencies operating past that date.
"We certainly want to avoid a government shutdown," House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Tuesday.
But House Republicans have yet to unveil their plan for how to fund the government, having spent three weeks trying to elect a new House speaker after California Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ousted over the short-term bipartisan deal that averted a shutdown at the end of September.
Johnson admitted last week that there was a "growing recognition" that another short-term measure, known as a continuing resolution, is needed.
He laid out multiple options, including a "laddered" approach that would set different lengths of funding for individual appropriations bills.
"You would do one part of a subset of the bills by a December date and the rest of it by a January date," Johnson said Tuesday.
There were also discussions about a stopgap measure that would expire in January "with certain stipulations," he said.
As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear how House Republicans would proceed. For the second time in a week, the House also canceled votes on two funding bills that lacked the support to pass, adding to the dysfunction.
House Democrats have said they want a "clean" continuing resolution, which would extend government funding at the previous year's levels, and say the "laddered" approach is a nonstarter.
"We'll see next week what we actually do," Republican Rep. John Duarte of California said Thursday. "A lot of it will have to do with, can we pass some clean appropriations bills and get the monkey business out of them."
Hard-right members who ousted McCarthy over the last stopgap measure when it didn't meet their demands might cut Johnson some slack given the quick turnaround since his election as speaker, but the lack of any spending cuts also risks upsetting them.
The Senate is expected to vote next week on a stopgap measure, though it's unclear how long its version would extend government funding. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the upper chamber would not pass any partisan legislation from the House.
Ellis Kim and Alejandro Alvarez contributed reporting.
for more features. | US Congress |
This week has not been the US Senate’s finest moment. And we’re not talking about the chamber’s much-debated new dress code, which allows members (though not their staff) to wear casual clothes.
Instead, two events cast an unflattering spotlight on the rules that give individual senators too much power over government appointments, far exceeding the authority that the Constitution envisioned and creating open invitations for misuse.
The way the system for appointing senior officials should work — and the way you might be forgiven for assuming it does if you took civics class at face value — is that the president makes nominations, and then senators vote to accept or reject them.
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But the Senate — by tradition, not because the Constitution says so — lets individual senators hold up nominations for any reason, or for no reason. That odd practice has been on display all summer, as Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, held up nominations for senior military ranks. His fellow senators finally circumvented his blockade this week to approve the promotion of three generals. But hundreds more military promotions remain in limbo; Tuberville said he won’t release his hold until the military ends an unrelated policy on abortions for service members.
In a far more serious development, Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was charged Friday with taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and other misdeeds. One of the most alarming allegations in the indictment is that Menendez recommended that President Biden nominate as the US attorney in New Jersey a lawyer Menendez believed he could influence to disrupt a prosecution of one of the senator’s fund-raisers.
Now, why, you might ask, would the senator — any senator — be making recommendations to the president about their own state’s US attorney? Isn’t that an inherent conflict of interest, since the US attorney is one of the officials most likely to investigate any potential wrongdoing by the senator? Shouldn’t a main criteria for any US attorney be scrupulous independence from the jurisdiction’s political figures?
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But the Senate’s practice has been exactly the opposite. Senators are informally allowed to pick the US attorney in their state. Again, the Constitution makes no mention of any such authority for home-state senators; it calls on the Senate as a body to give “advice and consent” to appointments.
Delegating that collective responsibility to individual senators gives them too much power. And while prosecutors still have to prove their case against Menendez, it’s all too easy to imagine how a senator could abuse the customs that have given them so much sway over individual appointments.
So what to do? There are ways to circumvent holds; Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer used one this week to get the three generals confirmed. And over the past few decades, some other quirky senatorial prerogatives have started to fade. That’s because, when they’re under a public spotlight, so few of those traditions are justifiable. The so-called nuclear option, for instance, ended the ability of a minority of senators to filibuster judicial nominees.
The defense of the filibuster and other senatorial perks is that they encourage consensus. In the case of local nominees, senators may protest that they know their home state best.
Nobody would dispute senators know their home states. But it doesn’t follow from that fact that senators should have powers the Constitution doesn’t grant them as individuals. There’s no good reason individual senators should be allowed to hold up military promotions or to pick US attorneys, and lots of ways both practices could lead to trouble. Hopefully, it won’t take one of their colleagues wearing stripes to convince senators that, like dress codes, some traditions have to change with the times.
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Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion. | US Congress |
Washington — The House of Representatives is poised to convene Tuesday toto elect its new speaker, with Republicans putting forth as their candidate to fill the post two weeks after the roiled the conference.
Jordan appeared to be on his way to 217 votes on Monday night, having won public endorsements of seven Republicans who had opposed him. Many of them said in statements that they had "productive conversations" with Jordan and would vote for him on the House floor. Asked if he thought he'd reach 217 votes in the first round of voting, Jordan told reporters, "I think so," but if not, "we'll keep voting."
The vote on the Republican and Democratic candidates for speaker — Jordan of Ohio and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, respectively — will be a crucial test of support for Jordan, who was nominated byin a secret ballot vote Friday. Fifty-five Republicans opposed him in the party's final ballot, and he spent the days leading up to the floor vote meeting with and calling holdouts to convince them to support his bid. By the end of the weekend, there were still , CBS News' Robert Costa reported.
With all Democrats expected to vote for Jeffries, it's unclear whether Jordan, a conservative firebrand and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, can secure the 217 votes needed to claim the gavel. He stillfrom a number of moderate Republicans heading into the formal vote and can only afford four defections to take the helm of the House.
The House is set to return at 12 p.m. ET, after which members will deliver opening statements, and Jordan and Jeffries will be nominated for speaker.
Alejandro Alvarez contributed to this report.
Speaker race state of play, Tuesday morning
Jordan appeared unexpectedly to be on his way Monday afternoon toward the magic number of 217, which would enable him to win the speakership with Republican votes alone on the House floor. He won over seven who had opposed him on Monday alone, and several Republicans were confident he'd win the election Tuesday.
He hit a bit of a skid during the acrimonious all House GOP meeting Monday night — these meetings continue to devolve into acrimony.
He appears to be just short but plans to barrel ahead with an afternoon vote to twist the arms of remaining holdouts with the public scrutiny of a roll call vote. The conventional wisdom or Vegas over-under seems to be 2.5 ballots.
Opening statements, nominations and procedures could eat up an hour or so — Jordan and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will be nominated, and then the voting begins. Each round of voting takes approximately 45 minutes.
Based on what GOP lawmakers were saying Monday night, Jordan will plow forward on the floor beginning at 12 p.m. to expose the remaining holdouts to conservative MAGA pressure through phone calls and social media. It's a tough tactic, but Jordan surrogates say it's effective and necessary.
The range of "no" Jordan votes could range from 5 or 6 to approximately 20. Some of the California Republicans have been quiet on their voting plans.
One key House GOP member who declines repeatedly to say how he'll vote is Rep. David Valadeo, of California, whose district is close to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's and is one of only two remaining House GOP members who voted to impeach Trump.
Democratic campaign operatives are ramping up pressure on the moderate New York and Arizona Republicans.
It's a warning sign of trouble ahead if the GOP decides to hold another conference meeting before the vote. Once again Monday night, that meeting became acrimonious as members shared their grievances.
Allies of Jordan mount pressure campaign to sway holdouts
Right-wing outside organizations and allies close to former President Donald Trump haveto increase the pressure on Republicans who have withheld their support for his candidacy.
One activist, Amy Kremer, the chair of the pro-Trump group Women for America First, urged her social media followers to call the offices of GOP lawmakers opposed to Jordan, while conservative media figures like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have weighed in.
Beck told his followers that "If you're living in a district with a weenie, wishy-washy Republican, call them and politely warn that if they don't elect a truly conservative House Speaker, we will campaign against you. And we will find your replacement. Call your member and tell them to vote for Jim Jordan.
On his Fox News show Monday night, Hannity called the Republican holdouts "sensitive little snowflakes."
Jordan wins over key opponents in hours before House vote
Several Republicans who opposed Jordan's bid for speaker announced Monday that they had switched their positions after discussions with the Ohio Republican.
Reps. Ann Wagner of Missouri, Vern Buchanan of Florida, Mike Rogers of Alabama, Austin Scott of Georgia, who challenged Jordan in the closed-door election, Ken Calvert of California and Drew Ferguson of Georgia all announced their plan to support Jordan in the floor vote after speaking out against his candidacy.
Wagner called Jordan a "nonstarter" last week, but said in a statement that he eased her concerns about government funding, border security and "consistent international support in times of war" during a conversation Monday morning.
"Too much is at stake to hand control of the House over to radical liberal Democrats, which is why we must elect a conservative as the next speaker," she said in a statement. "Throughout my time in Congress, I have always been a team player and supported our Republican nominees out of conference."
Buchanan, meanwhile, had backed Scalise and told reporters Friday that he disliked "how this process played out." But in a statement on social media, the Florida Republican said he had a "very productive conversation" with Jordan and would be supporting him on the House floor.
"I believe the future and immediate well-being and security of our country is too important and the need for Republicans to move forward united is greater than ever," Buchanan said.
Support from Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was a significant boon to his candidacy. Rogers said on social media that he decided to back Jordan after two discussions that took place over the weekend.
"We agreed on the need for Congress to pass a strong NDAA, appropriations to fund our government's vital functions, and other important legislation like the Farm Bill," Rogers wrote.
Jordan pitches himself as a unifier in letter to colleagues
In a Dear Colleague letter on Monday to House Republicans, Jordan, pitched himself as a unifier and told his GOP colleagues that he intends to bring them together.
"America is a nation of explorers and risk-takers. There is nothing that the United States can't achieve and no limit to our nation's success," he wrote. "As Republicans, we innately believe these things. When Republicans come together, there is no measure to what we can achieve for the American people."
The Ohio Republican acknowledged "frustrations" from his fellow GOP lawmakers about the treatment of McCarthy and Scalise, as well as the events that took place over the past month, and said that conference "must move forward."
"The role of a speaker is to bring all Republicans together. That's what I intend to do. We will make sure there are more Republican voices involved in our major decisions beyond the Five Families," Jordan wrote, referring to the five groups that hold the most sway in the conference, including the far-right House Freedom Caucus and the conservative Republican Study Group. He later added that if elected speaker, he would "tirelessly work to defend and expand our majority and help every Republican member back at home."
Jordan co-founded the right-wing House Freedom Caucus and served as its first chairman.
House has been without elected speaker for two weeks
The vote by the full House follows a chaotic two weeks during which the lower chamber has been growing opposition that effectively closed his path to winning 217 votes.after a group of eight far-right conservative lawmakers and all Democrats McCarthy of the gavel. House Republicans to fill the vacant speaker position in a closed-door vote last week, but he shortly after due to
Jordan quickly emerged as the favorite among conservatives for the GOP's nomination for speaker, and the conference convened Friday morning to select a new candidate. The Ohio Republican faced a late challenge from Georgia Rep. Austin Scott, though ultimately won the backing of a majority of the 221-member conference.
The search for McCarthy's successor has laid bare the deep divisions among the Republican conference, as some GOP lawmakers cast doubt on whether any member of their party can win the requisite support to become speaker.
The new speaker will take over as Congress faces numerous crises both domestically and abroad. Funding for federal agencies, and lawmakers will have to act to avert a government shutdown. The White House has also indicated it will ask Congress to for Ukraine in its war against Russia, and President Biden said he will for Israel in the with the Gaza-based Hamas militant group. | US Congress |
The third flying object in as many days was shot down by US jets not far from military sites in Michigan, and was “octagonal” in shape, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports. Here’s a recap of the very busy weekend had by American military aviators:
The US military has shot down a third flying object over North American airspace in three days, as the air force general overseeing the airspace said he would not rule out any explanation for the objects yet.
The high-altitude unidentified object, described as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it, was shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan on Sunday.
It is understood to have been the same item that was picked up by radar over Montana on Saturday. At the point it was struck by an air-to-air missile launched by F-16 fighter jets, it had been flying across the Great Lakes region at 20,000ft, a height that could have posed a risk to civilian aircraft.
US denies China claim that American balloons violated its airspace
The United States has denied an allegation made by China’s foreign ministry that high-altitude balloons sent by Washington have violated its airspace 10 times over the past year.
“Since last year, U.S. high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than 10 times without the approval of Chinese authorities,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, according to the Associated Press, adding, “It is also common for U.S. balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries.”
He didn’t offer details about the balloons, but the comments drew a response from national security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson:
The US air force earlier in February shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon that had traversed its airspace and heightened tensions with Beijing. That has led many to suspect that China has something to do with the three unidentified flying objects US jets downed over North America since Friday, though Washington hasn’t yet said where those may have come from.
The military still hasn’t said publicly where the flying objects came from, but in Washington, Republicans know who to blame for them: Joe Biden.
Here’s the attack line from congressman John James:
Punchbowl News reports that senators will receive a classified briefing on Wednesday about the shootdowns. In a Sunday appearance on ABC News, the chamber’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer agreed that lawmakers needed to know more about the objects, but also pointed the finger at the Trump administration for not doing more about them:
That’s something I support, Congress should look at that. That’s the question we have to answer. I think our military, our intelligence is doing a great job, present and future. I feel a lot of confidence in what they are doing. But why as far back as the Trump administration did no one know about this?
The third flying object in as many days was shot down by US jets not far from military sites in Michigan, and was “octagonal” in shape, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports. Here’s a recap of the very busy weekend had by American military aviators:
The US military has shot down a third flying object over North American airspace in three days, as the air force general overseeing the airspace said he would not rule out any explanation for the objects yet.
The high-altitude unidentified object, described as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it, was shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan on Sunday.
It is understood to have been the same item that was picked up by radar over Montana on Saturday. At the point it was struck by an air-to-air missile launched by F-16 fighter jets, it had been flying across the Great Lakes region at 20,000ft, a height that could have posed a risk to civilian aircraft.
Balloons or aliens? America rattled by weekend of mysterious shootdowns
Good morning, US politics blog readers. It was a busy weekend for the air force, and a bad one for unknown bodies in North American skies. Since Friday, American jets have shot down three objects flying over the US and Canada, but the Pentagon hasn’t yet said what they are (though the New York Times reports that there’s no reason to believe they are extraterrestrial in nature). The shootdowns came days after a US plane downed a Chinese spy balloon that had drifted across American airspace, enraging Washington at Beijing’s audacity. Are these latest objects more of those, or something else? Perhaps we’ll find out today.
Here’s what else we can expect:
TheWhite House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, briefs reporters at 1pm eastern time.
The Senate will convene at 3pm to consider more judicial nominees from Joe Biden.
Top Biden administration officials including transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and White House adviser Susan Rice speak at the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference starting from 9.30am. | US Federal Policies |
Under fire from House Republicans, the Biden administration has announced it will end the public health emergency over COVID-19 on May 11. But that raises a whole host of questions about the administration's other policies.
With more than three months to go before that date, the White House will need to hash out what ending the emergency means for student loan cancellation, mask and vaccine mandates, testing requirements, and thousands of federal employees who are still working from home .
“There have been mixed messages coming out of the White House,” said Bob Moffit, a health and welfare policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “Biden said last year the pandemic is over and then extended the [emergency] deadline for another 90 days, then did so again in January. It’s time for the mixed messaging to end.”
Initiated in January and March 2020 by then-President Donald Trump, two public health emergencies related to the pandemic will be more than three years old before they're allowed to expire late this spring. GOPers have been increasingly wary of extending those pauses as President Joe Biden took office and the disease gradually presented less of a threat.
The White House announced the pending end of those emergencies would come May 11.
But that announcement itself raises a whole host of policy questions. Perhaps the biggest is Biden's student loan cancellation program and the related student loan pause.
Both rest legally on the existence of a national emergency around COVID-19. The $500 billion cancellation program will be heard before the Supreme Court on Feb. 28, and the pause is set to last until June 30, nearly two months longer than the public health emergency used to justify it.
Fordham University law professor Jed Shugerman predicts the Supreme Court's conservative majority will in fact strike down the program either way.
"1. They're going to lose, 6-3 or worse. 2. Use the Higher Ed Act of 1965. 3. They’re running out of time,” he tweeted with a link to a Bloomberg article detailing the need for a student loan "plan B."
One option would be for the administration to effectively start over by saying loans can be canceled via the Higher Education Act of 1965 rather than the emergency-related HEROES Act of 2003, which was passed in the wake of 9/11 and written with service members in mind.
If the Supreme Court strikes down the policy, it would be a major setback for Biden after he promised to cancel student loans on the campaign trail.
Moffit called the loan issue a textbook case of Biden stretching his authority via the pandemic.
"It's a classic example of Biden overreaching and going beyond his statutory authority," he said. "He’s using the pandemic as a pretext for a policy that is unrelated to public health."
But there are other looming headaches with the formal end of the pandemic for the federal government.
Roughly half of federal employees are still working from home, which has drawn the ire of politicians ranging from Democratic Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY). That, too, was initiated at the outset of the pandemic and has largely remained in place even as private companies bring workers back in person.
The White House still requires proof of vaccination and negative tests for visitors and pool reporters covering the administration, a policy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended just days ago.
The administration is also engaged in a legal battle over its ability to reimpose the federal mask mandate, which was struck down by a judge last April. It's unclear what effect the end of the public health emergency will have, if any, on these debates.
Two issues that seem to be resolved are pandemic funding and expanded Medicaid. Congress has refused to issue new funding related to the pandemic for months despite pleading from the White House. Beginning in April, states will be allowed to begin removing ineligible people from Medicaid, and Pfizer and Moderna have already said they are considering selling their COVID-19 vaccines in the range of $110 to $130 per dose once the transition to the commercial marketplace is complete.
But Biden's mixed messaging about the pandemic may not be over just yet.
Speaking with reporters on the South Lawn on Tuesday, he was asked about ending the emergency.
"Well, the emergency will end when the Supreme Court ends it," Biden said. "We’ve extended it to May 15 to make sure we get everything done. That’s all. There’s nothing behind it at all."
It's unclear if Biden was confused and meant to refer to Title 42 , another pandemic-related policy dealing with immigration that the Supreme Court is expected to rule on over the summer. The White House did not respond to questions from the Washington Examiner seeking clarification about Biden's comments.
House Republicans, meanwhile, have both taken credit for the emergency ending and continued efforts to end it sooner.
“I’m glad that my bill finally forced President Biden to act,” said Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), who introduced the “Pandemic is Over” bill. “The American people have been living under a COVID-19 public health emergency for three years and should not allow President Biden four more months of emergency powers." | US Federal Policies |
Wisconsin GOP leader downplays pressure to impeach state election administrator
Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly leader is downplaying pressure he’s receiving from former President Donald Trump and fellow GOP lawmakers to impeach the state’s nonpartisan elections administrator, saying such a vote is “unlikely” to happen
MADISON, Wis. -- Wisconsin's Republican Assembly leader on Tuesday downplayed pressure he's receiving from former President Donald Trump and fellow GOP lawmakers to impeach the state's nonpartisan elections administrator, saying such a vote is “unlikely” to happen.
Some Republicans have been trying to oust state elections administrator Meagan Wolfe, who was in her position during the 2020 election narrowly lost by Trump in Wisconsin. The Senate voted last month to fire Wolfe but later admitted the vote was symbolic and had no legal effect.
Five Assembly Republicans in September introduced 15 articles of impeachment targeting Wolfe, a move that could result in her removal from office if the Assembly passed it and the Senate voted to convict. The Republican president of the Senate has also called on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to proceed with impeachment.
A group led by election conspiracy theorists launched a six-figure television advertising campaign last month threatening to unseat Vos if he did not proceed with impeachment. On Monday night, Trump posted a news release on his social media platform Truth Social from one of GOP lawmaker's who sponsored the impeachment. The release from state Rep. Janel Brandtjen criticized Vos for not doing more to remove Wolfe.
Vos on Tuesday said Republicans were “nowhere near a consensus” and no vote on impeachment was imminent.
“I can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future, but I think it is unlikely that it’s going to come up any time soon,” Vos said.
Vos has previously said he supports removing Wolfe, but he wanted to first see how a lawsuit filed on her behalf to keep her in the job plays out.
The Assembly can only vote to impeach state officials for corrupt conduct in office or for committing a crime or misdemeanor. If a majority of the Assembly were to vote to impeach, the case would move to a Senate trial in which a two-thirds vote would be required for conviction. Republicans won a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate in April.
Wolfe did not immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday. In September, Wolfe accused Republican lawmakers who introduced the impeachment resolution of trying to “willfully distort the truth.”
Vos called for moving on from the 2020 election.
“We need to move forward and talk about the issues that matter to most Wisconsinites and that is not, for most Wisconsinites, obsessing about Meagan Wolfe,” Vos said.
The fight over who will oversee elections in the presidential battleground state has caused instability ahead of the 2024 presidential race for Wisconsin’s more than 1,800 local clerks who actually run elections. The issues Republicans have taken with Wolfe are centered around how she administered the 2020 presidential election and many are based in lies spread by Trump and his supporters.
President Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin, an outcome that has withstood two partial recounts, a nonpartisan audit, a conservative law firm’s review and multiple state and federal lawsuits. | US Local Elections |
Biden argues Trump is an existential threat to America; Trump tries to point finger back at Biden
Democracy and election denialism could be defining issues in the 2024 race.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday labeled rival Donald Trump an existential threat to the country's system of government as he responded to the former president's recent comments pushing back on such criticism by claiming it is Biden who is really the "destroyer of American democracy."
The back and forth reflects how the issue of protecting democracy and Trump's baseless attacks on the 2020 election could be key in 2024.
"I don't think anyone doubts our democracy is even more at risk [than in] 2020," Biden said at the first of three campaign fundraisers in Boston on Tuesday, adding, "This time, we're running against the election-denier-in-chief."
"Trump's not even hiding the ball anymore -- he's telling us what he's going to do, he's making no bones about it," Biden said.
"Let's be clear about what's at stake in 2020 ... Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican determined to destroy American democracy," he said.
But, he said, "Don't take my word for it: Listen to what he's actually saying these days. He said it out loud. He says 2024 is the 'final battle.'"
Biden was referring to Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail in which he argues that unless he is elected back to the White House, "I truly believe our country is doomed," as he said in March in Texas.
The president, who looks increasingly likely to be headed for a rematch against Trump next November, has sought to define the 2024 presidential election in terms of protecting not just democracy from Trump -- but personal liberty.
In a video earlier this year announcing his reelection bid, Biden said, "Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they've had to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. And this is our moment. Let's finish this job, I know we can."
On Tuesday, Biden attacked Trump for the latter's role in ending Roe v. Wade by naming three Supreme Court justices, all of whom joined an opinion in 2022 that reversed the national guarantee for abortion access.
"He's proud to say he killed Roe v. Wade," Biden said, adding, "He's running again to get rid of the Affordable Care Act."
Of Roe, Trump has said on social media, "After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the 'shock' of everyone. ... Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing."
On the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Trump recently contended it is a "disaster" and is going to "give much better health care than what you have right now."
As he has in previous fundraisers, Biden on Tuesday raised Trump calling his political enemies "vermin," saying immigrants in the country without documentation were "poisoning the blood of our country" and vowing to represent "retribution."
"You don't expect to hear a president say these things, but he is -- and out loud," said Biden, noting that Trump has previously indicated he would give presidential pardons to many of the people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as Congress had gathered inside to certify Biden's election victory.
Biden also referred to Trump last year suggesting that some of the Constitution should be terminated because of his unfounded claims of widespread election fraud. Trump later insisted he was being misunderstood.
"I've never walked away from what Trump wants to do. We're not going to walk away now," Biden said at the fundraiser. "We need every American who loves democracy to join us in 2024 to make sure that we make our democracy stronger, not weaker and jeopardized."
Trump tries to go after Biden on democracy
Trump devoted most of a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Saturday to looking ahead to the general election -- potentially against Biden -- while trying to reverse Biden's democracy attacks.
His speech, focused on "saving democracy," started with him spouting false information about the 2020 presidential election, including wrongly claiming that Democrats "rigged" and "stole" it.
The 2020 results have been certified by a slew of local officials from both political parties and all claims of widespread fraud failed in court.
"Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy. Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy and it's -- it's him and his people," Trump contended. "They're the wreckers of the American dream. The American dream is dead with them in office. It's sad."
Trump, who has also called himself a "very proud election denier," sought to link Biden to the populism that has been a key part of his campaign pitch since 2015.
"For decades, you watched as a corrupt political class in our nation's capital looted your money, trampled on your dignity and pushed their radical agenda into every aspect of your lives. You know it very well. But in 2016, you voted to stand up to those liars, losers, crooks and creeps and you elected an outsider as your president and it was about America first," he said.
"This campaign is a righteous crusade to liberate our republic from Biden," he went on to say.
ABC News' Soo Rin Kim and Kendall Ross contributed to this report. | US Federal Elections |
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This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy.
The Texas House of Representatives gave crucial approval on Tuesday to a Republican-backed effort rooted in conspiracy theories that would remove the state from a national coalition that helps prevent voter fraud.
Senate Bill 1070, authored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, was approved by the House on a 85-61 vote. The bill would allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a multistate program used for checking duplicate voter registrations and cleaning voter rolls. The bill is now headed back to the Senate for approval of changes proposed by Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, that would add requirements to comply with federal and state privacy guidelines if an alternative system is contracted by the state.
ERIC, considered by election administration experts across the country to be the best tool for preventing double voting across state lines, has been a target of viral conspiracy theories spread since early last year by a fringe conservative publication, The Gateway Pundit. The nonpartisan program compares voter registration rolls from all its member states, along with other data, to flag voters who have died, moved away or registered elsewhere so that states can remove outdated registrations from their rolls.
Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, spoke against the bill Tuesday and said it was concerning to see the Texas Legislature take such action based on a conspiracy theory.
“That’s why I don’t understand why we have this bill before us, particularly when we know the data shows that ERIC has helped Texas identify duplicate registrations, and that’s exactly what we should be trying to do,” Turner said.
Right-wing activists and conservative media have falsely said that the program is led by left-wing activists, that its funding comes from Democratic megadonor George Soros and that it shares voters’ private data with outside groups seeking to give Democrats an advantage, among other allegations. Since last year, eight Republican-run member states — most recently Virginia — have announced their withdrawals, apparently due to political pressure.
In a written statement to Votebeat, ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin said the program has provided the Texas secretary of state with reports identifying more than 900,000 out-of-date or inaccurate voter records.
“Consistent with ERIC’s mission, these reports enhanced Texas’ ability to maintain accurate voter rolls,” Hamlin said Tuesday. “ERIC will continue to support Texas’ active use of its membership.”
In Texas, an “ERIC task force” was created more than a year ago by members of the Texas GOP, ignited by those same viral false claims. The task force was spearheaded by the party’s vice chair, Dana Myers, and Alan Vera, then the Harris County GOP ballot security chair. Vera, an influential activist who spent decades raising questions about voter fraud and is also known for challenging thousands of voter registrations in Harris County, drafted language for a bill and submitted it to Hughes’ staff in January. A month later, Hughes and Rep. Jacey Jetton, R-Richmond, filed bills incorporating the suggestions from Vera and the task force.
Vera died at the Capitol earlier this month, moments before he was scheduled to testify on election legislation. Jetton on Monday renamed SB 1070 “The Alan Vera Memorial Act.”
Texas law requires the state to participate in a multistate data-sharing program to clean its voter rolls, and the state has been a member of ERIC since 2020. The Texas Legislature budgets about $1.5 million to participate in the program. About $115,000 of those funds pay for annual fees to use ERIC’s voter-matching data. The rest of the funds go to paying for postage, mailing, and printing costs to send notices to residents ERIC identifies as eligible voters who are not yet registered, an effort the program requires of its member states.
Members of the ERIC task force argued the state was spending too much money on the program and suggested Texas could instead use private-sector alternatives. Members of the ERIC task force also pushed for the state to stop spending funds on such mailers for eligible voters.
Hughes’ bill directs the secretary of state to build its own version of a multistate cross-check program or to find a “private sector provider” with a cost that won’t exceed $100,000.
In March, the secretary of state announced it was taking steps to build its own version of the program and researching viable options in the private sector. Votebeat reported those efforts could stall or take years.
The bill nonetheless requires such a system to identify voters whose addresses have changed, who have died or who are ineligible to vote, including because they have been convicted of a felony. Lastly, the bill also requires that a contract with the private sector provider “may not require any additional duty of the state” that isn’t listed in the legislation — such as the mailers to unregistered but eligible voters that ERIC requires its member states to send.
Bucy proposed changes to the bill that election policy experts say are “guardrails” on systems that could potentially replace the program.
Bucy’s amendment strikes language in the bill that seeks to identify “voters who have been convicted of a felony; and who are not eligible to vote including a felony conviction” and changes it to “voters who are ineligible” under the state Election Code. The amendment also now requires any system the state uses to comply with federal and state laws relating to the protection of personal information.
The changes, which would have to be approved by the Senate before the bill goes to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, also say the secretary of state may not contract with a private-sector system unless the contractor requires a background check for its employees. Such a system must also use data from the National Change of Address database to screen for voters who have moved.
“Adding that extra component of verification beyond whatever this mystery vendor might provide is probably a good change,” said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy USA, who added that the requirements could help with the state obtaining more accurate information. “But the question is now whether the Senate will accept those amendments.”
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at [email protected].
Disclosure: Secure Democracy has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Freedom Caucus announces opposition to Speaker Johnson stopgap plan
The House Freedom Caucus took an official position against House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) plan to avert a government shutdown, which he will aim to pass with support from Democrats on Tuesday.
“The House Freedom Caucus opposes the proposed ‘clean’ Continuing Resolution as it contains no spending reductions, no border security, and not a single meaningful win for the American People,” the group said in its position statement, released Tuesday morning. “Republicans must stop negotiating against ourselves over fears of what the Senate may do with the promise ‘roll over today and we’ll fight tomorrow.'”
“While we remain committed to working with Speaker Johnson, we need bold change,” the Freedom Caucus added.
The position was unveiled after Johnson reportedly met with the House Freedom Caucus on Monday night, a highly unusual move for a Republican Speaker or party leader. But many of its members publicly expressed opposition to the bill, disappointed that it does not include spending cuts or attempt to extract conservative policy concessions from Democrats and the White House.
It also comes after GOP leaders announced Monday night that they will seek to fast-track the bill through a floor vote in order to avoid being torpedoed based on Republican opposition. But that will require support from two-thirds of the whole House, meaning relying on support from dozens of Democrats.
An official position from the Freedom Caucus requires support from 80 percent of the group, which has around three dozen members. But the caucus is not unified in opposition to the continuing resolution plan.
Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Harris (D-Md.) is an architect of the two-tiered stopgap funding plan.
Under the bill, part of government funding would run out on Jan. 19, with the rest running out on Feb. 2. Harris, like Johnson, has argued that the two-step plan is the best way to avert a massive omnibus funding package pushed by the Senate, and allows Congress more time to negotiate on fiscal year 2024 funding.
“The two-step CR is a way to get the broken appropriations process back on track without resulting in a massive omnibus spending bill,” Harris said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, over the weekend.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Congress |
Texas jury convicts woman of fatally shooting cyclist Anna “Mo" Wilson in jealous rage
A Texas jury has convicted a 35-year-old woman of murder in the May 2022 shooting death of rising professional cyclist Anna Moriah Wilson in a case that led investigators on a 43-day international search for the killer
AUSTIN, Texas -- A Texas jury on Thursday convicted a woman of murder in the May 2022 shooting death of rising professional cyclist Anna Moriah Wilson in a case that led investigators on a 43-day international search for the killer.
Kaitlin Armstrong, 35, faces up to life in prison when sentenced. Prosecutors said Armstrong gunned down the 25-year-old Wilson in a jealous rage. Wilson, who was also known as “Mo,” had briefly dated Armstrong’s boyfriend several months earlier. Wilson had gone swimming and to a meal with him the day she was killed.
A Vermont native and former alpine skier at Dartmouth, Wilson was an emerging star in pro gravel and mountain bike racing. She was visiting Austin ahead of a race in Texas where she was among the favorites to win. Investigators said Armstrong tracked Wilson to the apartment where she was staying and shot her three times.
Armstrong briefly met with police before selling her vehicle and using her sister’s name and passport to fly to Costa Rica. Investigators said she spent more than $6,000 on a nose job there and changed her hairstyle and hair color to evade authorities before she was arrested as a beachside hostel.
Armstrong's defense attorneys had urged the jury to find reasonable doubt in what they called an inadequate and sloppy investigation. They accused investigators of “tunnel vision” in quickly identifying Armstrong as the suspect.
Armstrong's lawyers noted there were no witnesses to the shooting or video surveillance that captured it. They questioned why police did not strongly consider as suspects Colin Strickland, Armstrong's boyfriend who was with Wilson the day she died, or two other male acquaintances.
But investigators said they quickly eliminated Strickland and the others and that the evidence pointed solely to Armstrong. Investigators said Armstrong tracked Wilson’s location through a fitness app, and they found deleted digital maps to the garage apartment where she was killed.
Armstrong’s Jeep was seen near near the apartment around the time Wilson was shot and bullet casings found near Wilson's body matched a gun Armstrong owned. Two of Armstrong’s friends testified that she had previously said she wanted to, or could, kill Wilson.
After selling her Jeep for $12,000, Armstrong fled to Costa Rice where she tried to establish herself as a yoga instructor before federal authorities found her, investigators said.
Armstrong again tried to escape authorities during an Oct. 11 doctor’s appointment outside of jail. She faces a separate felony escape charge. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
The US Republicans have had many opportunities to move into the post-Trump era of politics but they have consistently refused to take them.Such is the ex-president's threatening and manipulative grip on his party that he has turned each potentially devastating setback into a comeback.
In November 2020 the Republican leadership could have stood against Trump's transparently false claims that he had won the election and that it had been stolen from him through electoral fraud.After the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January the Democrat-led US House of Representatives did vote to impeach him. Republican Senators wavered, then declined to make up a majority to convict him. If Donald Trump had been convicted, then he would have been barred from ever running for office again.Throughout this summer a congressional investigation, spearheaded by the maverick Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, has piled up evidence of Trump's involvement in the January 6th insurrection. Most other Republican lawmakers have dismissed the hearings as "a witch hunt". This week came what might have been expected to be the knock-out blow to any of Donald Trump's hopes of a future in American politics. Yet his latest troubles only seem to have united the Republican Party in his defence, making it a near certainty that he will soon be the Republican's undisputed nominee for the 2024 Presidential Election - even as the threat of prison hangs over Trump more ominously than ever.
Worthy of a 'banana republic' More from US US attorney general says he personally approved FBI search of Donald Trump's Florida home 'Arthur Knight': Man in UK accused of being US fugitive 'tried to organise fake memorial mass by posing as grieving widow' Umbrella swept by wind kills woman at South Carolina beach For the first time ever, the FBI, the United States' supreme law enforcement agency, launched a criminal investigation of a former president. The Federal Bureau of Investigation showed "probable cause" and obtained a warrant to raid Mar-a- Lago, Trump's Florida base, for evidence of criminal activity.The US Attorney General Merrick Garland is declining to comment on why the warrant was issued. He would be a US Supreme Court Justice now had Republican Senators not unprecedentedly obstructed his nomination by President Obama.The FBI is not permitted to explain its actions at this stage. Trump is free to publish the contents of the search warrant but he has chosen not too, even as he denounces the raid as carried out by "the radical left", worthy of a "banana republic".Agents have been seen taking boxes of documents from Trump's private home. The removal from official premises or the destruction of presidential documents is punishable by a possible prison sentence and, crucially, exclusion from office, under US statutes.Astonishingly, for those unfamiliar with the polarised state of US politics, the FBI raid gave a massive boost to Trump's political prospects. Leading Republicans - including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick DeSantis of Florida - came to his aid and attacked the FBI.'A dark day for our republic'Trump has been re-cemented as the keystone of the modern Republican party. Opposing the FBI investigation is being used by Republicans as a fund-raising opportunity ahead of this November's mid-term elections.The organising Republican National Committee sent out immediate appeals for donations as did Trump himself, urging: "Return the power to the people! Will you fight with me!"J D Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, who is now running in Ohio for the US Senate, was once a strong critic of Trump. Now he expressed "solidarity" with President Trump, backing up his own Twitter appeal with "alarm" emojis.Senator Rick Scott of Florida argued that the raid should "scare the living daylights out of ordinary Americans". The Fox News star Sean Hannity chimed in that it was "a dark day for our republic".In the run up to the mid-term elections, when opinion polls were suggesting that they could strengthen their position in the Senate and win back control of the House, the Republicans had been campaigning on the cost of living, inflation and incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden's low ratings.Trump had been side-lined; candidates he backed enjoyed mixed success in primary contests. De Santis was consolidating his position as the likely 2024 candidate. Now all that has been turned on its head.Read more: How FBI raid may have helped Donald Trump as he considers second White House bidThe Republicans are back dancing to Trump's tune: that he embodies the party and that he is subject to unjustified persecution by a "Deep State" radical elite.Never mind that Christopher A Wray, the current director of the FBI, was appointed by President Trump in 2017. Never mind that Trump repeatedly said during the 2016 campaign that Hillary Clinton should be disqualified from running for the White House because she was under active FBI investigation over her emails.Trump argues that he is only under investigation because he could be re-elected. "If I announced I wasn't running the persecution would stop!" he has claimed.Why plead the fifth?Whatever follows from the Mar-a-Largo raid and the evidence gathering over 6 January, Trump is already under civil - and potentially criminal - investigation in New York over his tax and business dealings.This week Trump "pled the fifth amendment" against self-incrimination in response to what he called "the vendetta", "the greatest witch hunt in US history!" by the state's attorney general."I once asked [of others], 'if you are innocent why are you taking the fifth amendment?'," Trump explained. "Now I know the answer. When your family, your company and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt you have no choice."Contrary to his protests, the politicisation of his legal difficulties probably helps Trump. It intimidates the forces of law and order from moving against him, as well as providing a rallying call for fresh donations to his cause.Many are now criticising the FBI for not foreseeing the consequences of launching its investigation into Trump and are demanding a full explanation from the Bureau.But as then-FBI director James Comey insisted at the time of the investigation into Hilary Clinton, the FBI is meant to be the unflinching servant of law and order: independent of partisan politics.It is too early to tell what the consequences will be of refocussing the 2022 and 2024 US Elections on Trump's personal melodrama. In polls the majority of Republican sympathisers accept his claim that the last election was stolen but are ambivalent about him standing again (when, remember, he lost). A different Republican candidate for the White House now seems increasingly unlikely.It is possible that the slowly grinding wheels of justice across the range of Trump investigations could pull him down before the next presidential election, although he's proved adept at avoiding them so far.For good or ill, the Republican Party has placed itself irrevocably in the orbit of Donald J Trump as it bids to take control once again of the most powerful country in the world. | US Political Corruption |
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - New U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has joined his conservative Republican colleagues in voting against abortion and same-sex marriage, but has drawn the most attention for his efforts to overturn Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat.
His new role gives him huge clout steering the chamber, and a seat at the table with Democratic President Joe Biden and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer in negotiating bills of all kinds. But after action Congress took last year he'll have little ability to interfere with the 2024 presidential election, unless he refused to follow the law.
Since winning the speaker's gavel on Wednesday, the 51-year-old Louisiana lawmaker has declined to comment on his work with former President Trump following the 2020 election, or say whether he believes Biden legitimately won.
While he and 199 of his colleagues voted against the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which was bundled in a year-end spending bill, that legislation will make it much harder for lawmakers to do anything but formally accept the results.
The bipartisan law, passed as a response to the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, requires approval of one-fifth of the House and Senate to consider a challenge to a state's results -- a much higher bar than existed before, when any single lawmaker from each chamber had the ability to trigger a challenge.
"If it's followed we should be in good shape, and there should be every expectation that it would be followed," said Edward Foley, an election-law expert at the Ohio State University.
Democratic groups have blasted Johnson for his legal work advocating for conservative social causes before being elected to the House in 2016.
He defended his state's ban on same-sex marriage against two lawsuits in 2013, which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide two years later.
He also represented a biblical theme park in a religious discrimination lawsuit against the state of Kentucky and opposed a court ruling that struck down laws criminalizing gay sex.
In Congress, Johnson has voted with most of his fellow Republicans against legislation that would legalize abortion nationwide and provide some protections for same-sex marriage if the Supreme Court reverses his decision.
He voted against a September stopgap funding bill that narrowly averted a partial government shutdown, though he has since said that he now plans to support one ahead of the next looming funding deadline on Nov. 17.
TRUMP ELECTION FIGHT
Following Trump's defeat, Johnson crafted a legal brief, signed by 125 other House Republicans, that sought to persuade the Supreme Court to reject election results from several contested states Trump had lost to Biden.
Johnson argued not that the election had been tainted by widespread voter fraud, as Trump and many of his allies falsely claimed, but instead that some states Trump lost had illegally changed their election procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic, rendering the results from those states invalid.
Johnson stuck with those arguments even after the Supreme Court rejected the case.
"We are convinced the election laws in certain states were changed in an unconstitutional manner," Johnson wrote in a statement that was signed by 36 other House Republicans and released on Jan. 6, 2021, hours before a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to disrupt the election certification.
Hours later, Johnson and 138 other House Republicans voted against certifying Biden's victory.
Johnson could be in a more prominent position in January 2025, when Congress meets to certify the results of next year's presidential race, provided Republicans retain control of the House and keep him as speaker.
Even then, he would have little ability to influence the outcome. "The speaker has a very limited and almost nonexistent role in Electoral College process," said Michael Thorning, an election-law expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The law also clarifies that vice presidents only play a ceremonial role when they preside over the certification.
Foley said a House speaker could, in theory, refuse to follow the law or even declare themselves acting president. A House speaker also would have the ability to influence proceedings if it had to declare a winner if no candidate won a majority of electoral votes.
"It feels unrealistic, but what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, felt unrealistic, too, until it happened," he said.
Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Andrew Goudesward Editing by Alistair Bell
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | US Congress |
Politics Updated on: January 13, 2023 / 8:56 PM / CBS News Yellen warns U.S. to hit debt limit Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns U.S. to hit debt limit next Thursday 03:12 Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned congressional leaders on Friday that the United States is expected to hit the debt limit on Jan. 19 and urged them to raise the debt limit as soon as possible. She said the Treasury Department will start taking necessary steps to keep paying the country's bills, but without congressional action, the United States could default as soon as June."I am writing to inform you that beginning on Thursday, January 19, 2023, the outstanding debt of the United States is projected to reach the statutory limit," Yellen wrote in a letter addressed to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. "Once the limit is reached, the Treasury will need to start taking certain extraordinary measures to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations."This comes after Congress last raised the debt ceiling in December 2021 to more than $31.3 trillion. At the time, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. But with the new Congress sworn in earlier this month and the House under Republican control, it is unclear whether lawmakers will be able to reach a bipartisan compromise. The last time the House voted to raise the debt limit, all the Republicans except one voted against it. Failing to raise the debt limit would result in the first U.S. credit default in history.It "would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability," Yellen wrote. Starting this month, Yellen said the Treasury Department will start taking so-called "extraordinary measures" to continue paying the bills. They include redeeming and suspending new investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund as well as suspending reinvestment of the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan. After the debt limit is resolved, the funds would be made whole. Extraordinary measures have their limits, though, and Yellen predicted that those measures would put off default just until some time in June.Yellen said it is critical for Congress to act in a timely manner to either increase or suspend the debt limit. "The period of time that extraordinary measures may last is subject to considerable uncertainty due to a variety of factors, including the challenges of forecasting the payments and receipts of the U.S. government months into the future," Yellen wrote. "While Treasury is not currently able to provide an estimate of how long extraordinary measures will enable us to continue to pay the government's obligations, it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June." Raising or suspending the debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it allows the government to make payments on existing debt amassed under multiple administrations. While the debt limit was most recently raised under President Biden in 2021, Congress has voted to raise the debt limit under both Democratic and Republican administrations, including three times under President Trump. McCarthy this week compared the debt limit to a kid having a maxed out credit card and increasing the limit endlessly. He said Congress has to address the wasteful spending in the country. He did not rule out raising the debt limit, suggesting instead that the deal between Trump and Pelosi in 2019 could provide a path forward – with an agreement to cap spending. "I had a very good conversation with the president when he called me, and I told him I'd like to sit down with him early and work through these challenges," McCarthy said at a press conference Thursday. In: Debt Ceiling Sarah Ewall-Wice CBS News reporter covering economic policy. Twitter Thanks for reading CBS NEWS. Create your free account or log in for more features. Please enter email address to continue Please enter valid email address to continue | US Federal Policies |
Ahead of the meeting with president Joe Biden later today, the Congressional Black Caucus released a statement regarding its request to meet Biden following the death of Tyre Nichols who died after being brutally beaten by five Memphis police officers last month.
On behalf of CBC members, CBC chairman and Democratic Nevada representative Steven Horsford wrote:
“The Congressional Black Caucus takes its role to advocate for the safety and protection of the people in our communities very seriously.
To that end, CBC is requesting a meeting with the President this week to push for negotiations on much needed national reforms to our justice system - specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement…
We are calling on our colleagues in the House and Senate to jumpstart negotiations now and work with us to address the public health epidemic of police violence that disproportionately affects many of our communities,” it added.
Democratic representative Ilhan Omar tweeted a expletive-filled threat that her office received last week, writing, “These threats increase whenever Republicans put a target on my back.”
She added that there is a “very real human cost” to Republican attacks against women of color like herself.
The tweet comes amid attempts by new House Republicans seeking to oust Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. Last Tuesday, House speaker Kevin McCarthy blocked California Democratic representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from rejoining the House Intelligence Committee.
Last Congress, Democrats removed Georgia’s Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona’s Paul Gosar from their committee assignments following incendiary remarks they made about their colleagues.
Biden to discuss police reform with Congressional Black Caucus
Good morning, US politics blog readers. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris are scheduled to meet members of the Congressional Black Caucus this afternoon to discuss police reform.
The meeting comes a day after Tyre Nichols’ funeral where Harris urged Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would address police brutality and racial profiling. Politico reports that CBC members are preparing a list of executive actions that they want to see the Biden administration take.
Among the attendees will be California Democratic representative Maxine Waters. In a statement reported by Politico, Waters said": “I’m not optimistic. I’m not confident that we are going to be able to get real police reform … I approach working on this issue as a responsibility that I have to do – that we must try.”
Here’s what else we can expect today:
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on whether to remove Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar from the House foreign affairs committee, an apparent move about her former criticisms towards Israel but according to Democrats, about “spite” for removal of far-right extremists in the former Congress.
Biden and former president Bill Clinton will convene at the White House to mark the 30th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act – the 1993 legislation that guaranteed US workers up to 12 unpaid weeks off to recover from illnesses or childbirth.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will deliver a press briefing at 12.45pm EST. | US Police Misconduct |
Rubio: House GOP don’t ‘care what senators think about their affairs’
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a Sunday interview he did not think House Republicans cared what Senators thought about their ongoing struggle to select a Speaker of the House.
“I don’t vote in the House. I’m not a House member. I don’t think they listen or care what senators think about their affairs,” Rubio said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when asked what his message would be to House Republicans.
“I can’t control what happens there, so they need to obviously work through that process and figure it out. And I hope that they do, obviously,” he continued.
While Rubio acknowledged the importance of having a Speaker in place in the House to conduct legislative business, he pointed to his bipartisan bill with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) which codified a $3.3 billion minimum amount of annual aid to Israel.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to have to come back at some point and put additional funding, but, luckily, the reason why we codified that support is because I always suspected and feared that a crisis involving Israel would move much faster than the ability of Congress to respond,” Rubio said.
Rubio noted the looming government shutdown deadline of Nov. 17, which Congress would only be able to meet – or extend – if there’s a Speaker elected. Still, Rubio said, he said he has no intention of intervening in the process on the other side of the Capitol.
“At some point here soon, we will need a speaker. We will need a functioning House, and there are things we’re going to have to do to help Israel, including fund the government in less than 35 days or keep it open,” he said.
“So that’s all going to have to happen. And I will watch and hope, like everybody else, that the House will be able to work through that process. I’m not going to try to steer it or influence it. I don’t think I have any influence over what the House does. And, hopefully, we will be in a situation here soon where that won’t be a factor.”
Rubio’s comments come as the House has been without a Speaker for nearly two weeks, when eight Republicans joined Democrats to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from the position.
McCarthy’s No. 2, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), managed to clinch the GOP nomination to replace McCarthy this past week, but he withdrew from the race after it became clear he couldn’t get enough support on the House floor. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was then elected the party’s nominee and now must work to unite the party behind him, to ensure he can get the support from the majority of the full House.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Congress |
Democratic voters don't want Biden to lead them into 2024 presidential election – new pollGood morning, US politics blog readers, it’s summer time but the living isn’t easy in Washington whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It’s going to be a busy day at the start of a busy week, so let’s get going. A new opinion poll in the New York Times this morning makes stomach-dropping reading for the US president, Joe Biden, reporting that 64% of Democratic voters don’t want Biden to be their presidential candidate in the 2024 election. The newspaper says: “With the country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism, the president is hemorrhaging support … [the majority of Democratic party voters would] prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 campaign,” according to a NYT/Siena College poll, “as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33% job-approval rating.” The House January 6 committee investigating the insurrection by extremist Trump supporters at the US Capitol in 2021 is due to hold two hearings this week, tomorrow and Thursday. It will spell out tomorrow afternoon the connections between the leading rightwing domestic extremist groups in the US as they planned to descend on Washington to try to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and, ultimately, will set about “connecting the dots” between those groups and the then Republican president himself and his role in inciting their actions. Joe Biden and US vice president Kamala Harris will speak at the White House this morning at an event to mark the passing, against the odds on Capitol Hill these days, of the gun reform bill that followed the mass shootings in New York and Texas but before the Fourth of July massacre in Illinois. The January 6 panel is expected to hold a primetime hearing on Thursday evening as its grand finale after setting out vivid and potent testimony and evidence about the attack on the US Capitol in the dying days of the Trump administration. A court filing this morning has revealed that Justin Clark, an attorney to former president Donald Trump, was interviewed by the FBI late last month. The interview is ostensibly linked to the criminal contempt case against Steve Bannon for refusing congressional demands for his testimony in relation to the Capitol attack. But details are sparse so far and we’ll keep you abreast of developments. Key events:3m agoStrong majority of Democratic voters want party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden for president next time - poll25m agoDemocratic voters don't want Biden to lead them into 2024 presidential election – new pollShow key events onlyPlease turn on JavaScript to use this featureStrong majority of Democratic voters want party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden for president next time - pollJoe Biden’s approval rating has been struggling mightily for a year and the US president’s popularity is now shockingly low even among his own supporters across America, with 64% of Democratic voters saying they want someone else to be the party’s presidential nominee in the 2024 election, according to a new opinion poll carried out by the New York Times and Siena College and published by the newspaper this morning.It describes Biden “hemorrhaging support” amid a bleak national outlook on life and politics, and only 26% of Democratic US voters telling pollsters that they want the party to renominate the current president to run for a second term.The results make shocking and grim reading for the White House this morning.The report laments a “country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism” and notes that voters across the nation gave the president a dismal 33% approval rating amid, overwhelmingly, concern about the economy.More than 75% of registered voters think the US is “moving in the wrong direction” with a pessimism that “spans every corner of the country, every age range and racial group, cities, suburbs and rural areas, as well as both political parties,” the NYT reports.Only 13% of American voters said the nation was on the right track — the lowest point in Times polling since the depths of the financial crisis more than a decade ago. Biden had earlier as the presidential nominee signaled that he regarded himself as preparing the way for a new guard of Democratic leaders, but since he became president and has been pressed on whether he would seek a second term he has repeatedly said he would.At 79 he is the oldest US president in history and, alarmingly, the Times reports that among Democratic voters under the age of 30, a staggering 94% would prefer a different presidential nominee for their party going into the 2024 presidential election.Three quarters of voters surveyed said the economy was “extremely important” to them but only one percent think that current economic conditions are excellent.Democratic voters don't want Biden to lead them into 2024 presidential election – new pollGood morning, US politics blog readers, it’s summer time but the living isn’t easy in Washington whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It’s going to be a busy day at the start of a busy week, so let’s get going. A new opinion poll in the New York Times this morning makes stomach-dropping reading for the US president, Joe Biden, reporting that 64% of Democratic voters don’t want Biden to be their presidential candidate in the 2024 election. The newspaper says: “With the country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism, the president is hemorrhaging support … [the majority of Democratic party voters would] prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 campaign,” according to a NYT/Siena College poll, “as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33% job-approval rating.” The House January 6 committee investigating the insurrection by extremist Trump supporters at the US Capitol in 2021 is due to hold two hearings this week, tomorrow and Thursday. It will spell out tomorrow afternoon the connections between the leading rightwing domestic extremist groups in the US as they planned to descend on Washington to try to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and, ultimately, will set about “connecting the dots” between those groups and the then Republican president himself and his role in inciting their actions. Joe Biden and US vice president Kamala Harris will speak at the White House this morning at an event to mark the passing, against the odds on Capitol Hill these days, of the gun reform bill that followed the mass shootings in New York and Texas but before the Fourth of July massacre in Illinois. The January 6 panel is expected to hold a primetime hearing on Thursday evening as its grand finale after setting out vivid and potent testimony and evidence about the attack on the US Capitol in the dying days of the Trump administration. A court filing this morning has revealed that Justin Clark, an attorney to former president Donald Trump, was interviewed by the FBI late last month. The interview is ostensibly linked to the criminal contempt case against Steve Bannon for refusing congressional demands for his testimony in relation to the Capitol attack. But details are sparse so far and we’ll keep you abreast of developments. | US Federal Elections |
Florida Republicans are on the verge of passing new restrictions on groups that register voters, a move voting rights groups and experts say will make it harder for non-white Floridians to get on the rolls.
The restrictions are part of a sweeping 96-page election bill the legislature is likely to send to Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk soon. The measure increases fines for third-party voter registration groups. It also shortens the amount of time the groups have to turn in any voter registration applications they collect from 14 days to 10. The bill makes it illegal for non-citizens and people convicted of certain felonies to “collect or handle” voter registration applications on behalf of third-party groups. Groups would also have to give each voter they register a receipt and be required to register themselves with the state ahead of each general election cycle. Under current law, they only have to register once and their registration remains effective indefinitely.
Groups can now be fined $50,000 for each ineligible person they hire to do voter canvassing. They can also be fined $50 a day, up to $2,500, for each day late they turn in a voter registration form.
Those restrictions are more likely to affect non-white Floridians. About one in 10 Black and Hispanic Floridians registered to vote using a third party group, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who closely studies voting rights. Non-white voters are five times more likely to register with a third-party group in the state than their white counterparts, “a fact likely not lost on those pushing the legislation”, Smith said.
“This will likely be the final nail in the coffin for third party groups to be able to register voters in Florida,” added Smith, who has served as an expert for groups challenging similar new restrictions.
The bill passed the Florida senate on Wednesday and is expected to clear the Florida House later this week.
The measures are the latest in a wave of new restrictions Florida Republicans and DeSantis, who is on the cusp of a presidential bid, have enacted in a little over four years. After the 2020 election, the state passed sweeping legislation making it harder to request and return a mail-in ballot. Republicans have also made it nearly impossible for Floridians with a felony conviction to figure out if they are eligible to vote. Last year, DeSantis created the first of its kind state agency to prosecute election crimes.
The new measure marks the second time since the 2020 election that Florida Republicans have raised the maximum fine for third-party voter registration organizations. In 2021, the legislature raised the maximum fine groups could face in a year from $1,000 to $50,000. The new bill would increase the maximum fine to $250,000.
The higher fines will likely cause some groups to stop registering voters, said Cecile Scoon, the president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, which frequently hosts voter registration drives.
“I think there are a lot of small organizations that don’t feel they can play in that league of fines,” said Scoon. “I think you’re going to get a lot of people that say ‘hey we can’t handle this. We’re just a little church. We’re just a little chapter of a sorority. We don’t have the resources.”
Republicans dispute that the bill will make it harder to vote.
“This bill does not and will not hinder anyone’s right to vote, nor would I ever subscribe my name to something that could even remotely be concluded to be voter suppression. There is nothing in this bill that makes it harder for a lawfully registered voter to cast their ballot,” state senator Danny Burgess, a Republican who chairs the state elections committee, said during debate on the floor, according to the News Service of Florida.
The Office of Election Crimes and Security, a new office created under DeSantis to target voter fraud, has targeted voter registration groups during its first year in operation. In 2022, the agency levied $41,600 in fines against voter registration groups, and made several criminal referrals.
A spokesman for the Florida department of state, which oversees the agency, did not provide a detailed breakdown of the groups fined or their offenses.
In an annual report filed with the Florida legislature, the office said that it had reviewed “a large number of complaints” involving voter registration applications that were turned in late.
The new legislation would make it even harder for groups to turn in applications on time, giving them four fewer days to do so. That cut increases pressure on groups that take time to review the applications they collect to ensure that the information in them is accurate and that the voter is eligible.
When a group hosts a registration drive, they’ll often get people signed up from many counties who pass by. But a law passed in 2021 makes it so voter registration groups have to turn in applications they collect to the county in which the voter resides – they previously could return it anywhere – making it even more difficult to turn in the forms on time.
“You’re either gonna burn gas and find the time to drive an hour or two hours to wherever it’s located from wherever you are. And where your volunteer is. Or are you gonna put it in the mail and cross your fingers,” Scoon said.
Burgess, the Republican pushing the bill, said that it would ensure voters can get on the rolls.
“The reality is if a third-party voter registration organization fails to submit timely somebody’s voter registration, that voter is disenfranchised,” he said, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
The language in the bill barring non-citizens from participating in third-party voter registration groups will also make it harder to reach immigrant communities, said Andrea Mercado, the executive director of Florida Rising, a non-profit group.
“When we do our work to help register new citizens, it makes sense to hire people who come from that community. Sometimes they’re on the path to getting their US citizenship, but they don’t have it yet,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not excellent at reaching out to other people in the Colombian community, in the Venezuelan community, in the Jamaican community and talking to them about why voting matters and why you should be registered to vote.”
The bill also appears poised to cause even more confusion about voting eligibility for people with felony convictions. The measure would change the language on the card people in Florida receive after registering to confirm their addition to the voter rolls to say that possession of the card is not proof of eligibility to vote. Republicans are making the change after reporting revealed that 19 people with felony convictions who were charged with illegal voting last year had received voter registration cards in the mail and had not been warned they were ineligible to vote.
The sweeping changes are the latest move to restrict voting rights for people with felonies after Floridians approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 expanding the right to vote to many people with criminal histories. After the measure passed, the Florida legislature passed a law that required those with felonies to pay off any outstanding debts before they can vote again. Florida has no centralized database where people can look up how much they owe, and the state has been backlogged reviewing the applications.
“Changing the law and adding such a disclaimer to Florida’s voter ID cards is a direct admission by the state that it is unwilling to or incapable of creating a centralized voter system to determine voter eligibility,” the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the main group that pushed the constitutional amendment in 2018, said in a statement.
The bill is an alarming growing attack on voters in Florida, Mercado said. “It represents a really dangerous trend in Florida and across our country that is moving away from democracy,” she said. | US Federal Elections |
WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) - U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks has received "credible death threats," she said in a statement on Wednesday, after voting against Representative Jim Jordan for speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Jordan, a hardline conservative, was formally nominated by a majority of his party last week but has been unsuccessful in getting the necessary 217 Republicans to back him in two House votes so far, with more lawmakers from his own party opposing him on Wednesday than in the first vote on Tuesday. A third vote is expected to take place on Thursday.
Miller-Meeks, a Republican who represents a politically competitive district in Iowa, voted for Jordan the first time but switched to vote for Representative Kay Granger, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, on Wednesday afternoon.
Since then, Miller-Meeks said in a statement, she has received "a barrage of threatening calls" in addition to multiple death threats. She added that the authorities have been notified and her office is fully cooperating.
"One thing I cannot stomach, or support is a bully," she said. "I did not stand for bullies before I voted for Chairwoman Granger and when I voted for Speaker designee Jordan, and I will not bend to bullies now."
It was not immediately clear who made the threats.
"We condemn all threats against our colleagues and it is imperative that we come together," Jordan said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Stop. It's abhorrent."
Jordan has struggled to win over both moderates who do not feel he understands the issues their districts face, and others who have expressed concern about Jordan's ability to unite the party.
Although lawmakers who are withholding their support have said Jordan himself has been courteous and kind in conversations attempting to win them over, many have spoken out about the bullying tactics of his supporters.
"The last thing you want to do is try to intimidate or pressure me, because then I close out entirely," Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican who has refused to support Jordan, told reporters earlier this week.
Read Next
Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Christopher Cushing
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | US Congress |
A child rapist was convicted in New Jersey nearly three decades after committing his crimes - using the blood of his own child.
In 2021, Brian Avis, 61, was convicted of sexually molesting a 10-year-old girl in 1996 after New Jersey police analyzed the DNA of Avis' child, who was born in 2012.
A little-known rule means that every baby born in New Jersey's DNA is harvested for 23 years and can be used by law enforcement without a warrant.
DailyMail.com revealed this week that similar laws - lawyers have said violate Americans' Fourth Amendment - are in place in all but eight states, which has sparked an ethical debate.
While the number of crimes solved with newborn DNA is unknown, New Jersey police have opened the lab five times, and California has done the same, resulting in one arrest.
Institute for Justice (IJ) attorney Brian Morris told DailyMail.com: 'There are constitutional ways to solve crimes.
'That's what New Jersey should be doing. Of course, if every American had to turn over their DNA and fingerprints, it might be easier for police to solve crimes.
'But that's why we have the Fourth Amendment. The Founders rejected the idea that the King could take whatever or whomever he wanted.
'But that's what New Jersey is doing here. And it's taking from our most vulnerable and innocent population - babies.
Many states offer parents the option to have samples destroyed after testing is completed, but many do not.
Nebraska, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia and Wisconsin do not provide a form for destruction.
All 50 US states mandate newborn genetic screening within 48 hours of the child's birth to test for rare disease, which is sent to a government-owned lab for testing.
However, the leftover samples are shipped to warehouses where police officers can access them when needed or sold to third-party researchers - and most states do not require a parent's consent.
State police sequence the DNA and run a further analysis using investigating genetic genealogy.
The sample is then uploaded to a genetic database to identify relatives of unknown suspects, which narrows down the search.
New Jersey's incidents have recently come to light in recent lawsuits sparked by a 1996 cold case resolution that came about through the use of DNA.
Avis has not been named in the 2022 news regarding police obtaining DNA samples, but his case matches the same crimes and was solved through DNA linking.
News broke in 2022 that law enforcement used blood taken from an infant to link the child's father to a 1996 sexual assault case.
DailyMail.com has contacted the Atlantic County Prosecutors Office for comment.
Avis was accused of breaking into a home on East Evans Boulevard and assaulting the sleeping child in 1996.
'When the victim woke up, the suspect fled the scene,' according to a 2021 press release from the New Jersey State Police.
Detectives collected evidence at the scene and obtained a DNA sample of the suspect from the victim's bed.
Avis had a DNA profile created in 2002, which was then uploaded into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a national DNA collection database - but no matches were found.
In January 2021, detectives from the New Jersey State Police Cold Case Unit and Brigantine Police Department reopened the case in a cooperative investigation.
'On July 26, 2021, detectives submitted the DNA to a private laboratory for analysis,' the press release states.
'The laboratory conducted Microarray Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) testing for IGG analysis in an attempt to identify genetic relatives of the suspect based on the DNA sample obtained at the scene.
'Through various investigative means, detectives identified Brian Lee Avis as the suspect.
On September 12, Avis was located by police, who issued a search warrant for his DNA, and one day later, he was charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child under 13 years old, burglary, and endangering the welfare of child
Chief Rich Casamento, Brigantine Police Department, said in a September 17, 2021 release: 'Several months ago, Detective Sergeant Glasser of the Brigantine Police identified this evidence as a case that could be solved using current DNA technology.'
DailyMail.com reached out to the Brigantine Police Department, and when asked to speak with someone about Avis, an officer said, 'I don't know anyone by that name.'
'The State Police successfully obtained the child's blood spot sample, sequenced the DNA, and then ran further analysis utilizing a technique known as investigative genetic genealogy,' claims a lawsuit filed by the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (OPD) against the New Jersey Department of Health.
'The State Police alleges those results showed the newborn blood spot sample belonged to the genetic child of the suspect.
'From there, the State Police used those results to form the basis of an affidavit of probable cause to acquire a warrant to obtain a buccal swab from OPD's client, who is the child's father. OPD's client was then criminally charged.'
The document continues the claim that by using a subpoena, the State Police sidestepped its constitutional obligation to develop probable cause and obtain a warrant.'
C.J. Griffin of Pashman Stein Walder Hayden PC told DailyMail.com that the state's health department also let at least three health-related entities access the bloodspots for research.
New Jersey is one of the many states that do not inform parents that their child's DNA is being held for up to 23 years, and parents who have recently learned about the practice filed a lawsuit against the state, which IJ is representing.
'This case feels like a minority report,' said Morris.
'It is like you presuppose these kids will do something. Use it against them if you need to.
Erica Jedynak, of Morris County, is one of the two plaintiffs and told DailyMail.com that she was disgusted upon hearing of the decades-long retention after she initially declined blood be taken from her newborn in 2022.
Jedynak explained it was a long process for her to become a mother, noting her son is a miracle baby and thought the hospital room was a sacred room to 'observe the joy and the grace of god.'
'The state government is also in that room and kept his blood for unknown reasons; it is concerning,' she said.
'We should have to agree to have our genetics taken by others. I want to do anything I can to protect our son. That room should be with just you and your baby.'
Sharon Terry, president and CEO of Genetic Alliance, commented on the retention of newborn DNA in a 2010 study in which she quoted a nurse and a new mother.
'We were appalled when we found out. Why do they need to store my baby's DNA indefinitely? Something on there could affect her ability to get a job later on or get health insurance.'
Terry states, 'We need to hear the spectrum [of opinion]. We also need to figure out how to balance all the needs.'
This was the same reaction Jedynak had when she learned about the storage practices.
'I think about a lot of times that I want to do anything to protect my son in his life; this is a violation,' she said.
'He is not even two years old. The fact that the state government wants to track him is assuming the guilt of tiny babies who have done nothing wrong in their lives.' | US Federal Policies |
Here’s some good news for the sizable number of Republican megadonors and the handful—only a slight understatement—of Republican voters desperate for an alternative to Donald Trump: It’s still August in an odd-numbered year. That means voters will not start casting ballots to decide the next GOP presidential nominee for more than five months. Between now and then you can expect, per Trump himself, two more indictments (at least!) and, it goes without saying, a whole lot of bad press. There will be debates (probably?) and, with them, the potential for other candidates to have star turns (maybe?). There is, at least in theory, still time to turn all of this around.
Here’s the bad news: everything else. On Monday, The New York Times and Siena College released their first 2024 Republican presidential poll, and it’s brutal. Trump leads the Republican donor class’s handpicked candidate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by 37 points—54 percent to 17 percent. No other candidate in the poll topped 3 percent, with South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the likeliest home for those ready to jump ship from DeSantis, polling at the same level as Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who may very well be the most hated man in American politics.
It somehow gets even worse from there. Just look at this paragraph from the Times’ writeup of the poll:
In the head-to-head matchup, Mr. Trump was far ahead of Mr. DeSantis among Republicans who accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, and among those who do not; among those who want to fight corporations that “promote woke left ideology,” and among those who prefer to stay out of what businesses do; among those who want to send more military and economic aid to Ukraine, and among those who do not; among those who want to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are, and among those who want to take steps to reduce the budget deficit.
Presidential primaries are usually dominated by the discussion of “lanes”—specific avenues of appeal that candidates might try to occupy to ease their way into the competition—but it’s clear that there is only going to be one lane in the 2024 Republican presidential primary: the Trump lane. Running an overtly ideological campaign, as DeSantis has, is clearly a mistake, but it’s not clear that there’s anywhere else he can go. It is, similarly, unclear if another candidate can emerge as a viable alternative. Right now, Donald Trump is crowding out every other candidate.
What is clear at this point, however, is that the Republican establishment’s preferred theory of running against Donald Trump—that the best way to beat him is to run candidates who resemble him in many key respects but are less volatile—has failed remarkably. Republican voters like Donald Trump. A lot. And the anti-Trump establishment has wasted years trying to concoct a strategy to defeat him based upon this notion.
“Trumpism without Trump” is the name for this nominal approach to electoral politics. DeSantis is its most prominent adherent, but there are others. In Virginia, there’s Governor Glenn Youngkin, who is less bombastic than DeSantis (who is, in turn, less bombastic than Trump). Many of Trump’s ostensible rivals for the 2024 nomination, like former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, have adopted Trump’s positions and, in Ramaswamy’s case, his outsider persona, and largely refrain from criticizing him.
The working theory behind “Trumpism without Trump” was that you could essentially reverse-engineer much of Trump’s appeal, pushing pugilistic culture-war policies that placate his voters while also taking a more disciplined—and donor-friendly—approach to politics itself. The base would still get the culture-war stuff they thrill to, in a less improvised and somewhat sanitized fashion. The donors would get someone less liable to fly off the handle and, for that matter, less likely to pursue personal pet policies (trade wars) and vendettas. The thinking was that everyone could get what they wanted: The donors get an electable candidate; the base gets a candidate that is programmed to sound and act like Donald Trump. Everybody wins.
There are two big problems with this theory. The first is that it is, by its very nature, highly dependent on the “Trumpism without Trump” candidates being extremely solicitous to Donald Trump. It is required that you praise Trump’s presidency and his policy record. Candidates adopting “Trumpism without Trump” must argue that they are best suited to carry on his legacy and agenda, despite the fact that the genuine article is sitting right there, running for president.
This has the obvious effect of only reinforcing that Trump’s presidency and approach to politics are the ideal while also failing to do the one thing you are supposed to do when running a campaign: Draw a contrast with your opponent. The subtext—and occasional text—of this argument is that these candidates would be more effective at accomplishing this agenda. But because it is also dependent on winning over Trump voters, candidates rarely say why Trump is ineffective—namely that he is world historically scandal-prone and inept. No matter how you try to navigate this lane, you’re burdened with a question: All things being equal, why not just elect Donald Trump?
This leads to the second problem: Republican voters have stuck with Trump for a long while; they’ve heard his critics say that he’s reckless and ineffective, and they’ve become used to tuning out these discouraging words. This self-reinforcing phenomenon has only been helped along by Trump’s two arrests, something anti-Trump donors couldn’t anticipate. But it has also been aided by the field’s steadfast refusal to actually criticize Donald Trump or frame his legal troubles as an obvious reason to invest in a Trump alternative. DeSantis is Trump’s main rival for the nomination but has largely been muted in his criticism. With the exception of long-shot candidates like Pence and Chris Christie, the same is true of the rest of the field.
But this also gets to an arguably more important point: Voters like Donald Trump the person more than they like Donald Trump’s policies. They like his combative, reckless, often very chaotic and stupid approach to politics. They do not want a disciplined version of it. They do not want a knockoff version of it. There is no place for an “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Donald Trump”—at least not while the real thing is around. Thus far, the various plastic Trumps, DeSantis most of all, have had the unanticipated effect of reminding voters why they like the real thing.
That’s not to say that “Trumpism without Trump” might not eventually supplant Trumpism. Hey, at some point Trump will either retire from politics or mortality will make that decision for him. It is possible—though I remain skeptical—that the law will catch up with him or that his various legal problems will reach a kind of critical mass with GOP voters, who will decide enough is enough. But the Republican Party is already being remade in his image, and there has been so much progress so quickly to this end that it is almost certainly irreversible. But this too is a failure of Trump’s opponents. Rather than attempting to present themselves as a genuine alternative, they have tied their hopes to the idea that they can trick voters into believing that they’re a better version of Trump than Trump himself. They failed spectacularly. | US Federal Elections |
Pretending we only exist in election years is a losing strategy for the left. October 17, 2022 Generally, Latinos are rendered invisible by the US mainstream—and a lot of the left—media. The exceptions are the “perp walk” images featured in local TV news outlets, usually showing “suspected gang members” being taken in by the police. But let’s also not forget the persistent images in US films and television of Latinos as drug dealers/drug lords, or other types of criminals—on the few occasions we are able to crash the industry. The most recent research shows that Latinos make up about 4 percent of those represented in US films, TV, and commercials. It is a remarkable feat of magic to make the 62 million Latinos in this country invisible. Latinos are nearly 19 percent of the US population, accounting for 51.1 percent of the country’s growth, according to the 2020 US Census. By 2060, the Latino population is projected to nearly double in size to 111.2 million people, accounting for 28 percent of the US population. The three largest US Latino population groups are Chicanos/Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans (not including those on the island), and Central Americans. These are all overwhelmingly working-class populations, and they share a tortured history with the US government: Puerto Ricans, direct US colonialism; Chicanos, US annexation of Mexico’s northern territories; and Central Americans, displacement by US-supported wars or coups in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua. Other larger Latino populations from Cuba and Latin America (Venezuelans, Argentines, Chilenos) tend to be more middle- and upper-class.
In an evil bit of irony, Mexicans did make the front pages of US newspapers and were often the lead in TV news shows in 2015—when Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign by characterizing Mexicans as “rapists and criminals,” and pledging to build a 2,000-mile wall along the US-Mexico border to prevent any further incursion by Mexican immigrants. Trump capped that despicable pledge by also promising to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States—the overwhelming majority of whom are Latino. While the mainstream media carefully avoided the term “ethnic cleansing,” that is exactly what Trump was promising—to the hysterical cheers of his MAGA base, and the fired-up testosterone of the armed racist militias waving their guns at Mexicanos on the other side of the border.
But other than the examples I have cited, the Latino population in this country is most often out of sight and out of mind, even in the media of the US left, which mostly continues to frame US politics within a strictly “Black-white “framework. There is, however, a new exception to the ghosting of Latinos in the broader US society. And that has to do with the growing numbers and potential power of the Latino electorate. When important elections roll around, lo and behold, we are suddenly found! Since the 2020 elections, there has been a veritable deluge of articles about Latino voters.
Misconceptions about Latino voters
These articles fall roughly into two categories. The one that has received the most attention is the notion that Latinos are essentially a conservative population, moving toward support for the Republican Party. The rationale for this assertion is that the GOP has been able to successfully appeal to the Latino values of family, church, and patriotism. This is not a new phenomenon, but one whose history extends as far back as the Nixon administration, which undertook a lukewarm effort to seduce Latino voters with these same threadbare arguments. One unspoken assumption of this argument is that there are other communities in the US that do not value family, faith, and country—a reflection of dominant thinking about African Americans within the Republican Party, and a cheap effort to divide Latinos and African Americans.
Another set of political articles argues that “there is nothing to worry about,” that Latinos continue to be strong supporters of the Democratic Party and are not going anywhere. In fact, an analysis by the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute of the 2020 elections strongly supports this assertion. Most of the articles warning about a Latino defection to the Republicans rely on exit polls for their analysis. The UCLA study, however, analyzed the record of ballots cast, thereby avoiding the errors that often emerge from the small and not necessarily representative sample provided by exit polls. Exit polls also fail to take into account the impact of early and absentee voters, or possibilities of language bias. The UCLA study analyzed Latino voting results for the US Senate in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, and Texas. The data strongly debunks the “Latinos are going Republican” myth. It turns out that Latinos in those states voted overwhelmingly for Democratic Senate candidates, with no data indicating a decline in Democratic support for the Senate. Latino voters went 3-1 for the Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia, and by a 2-1 margin in New Mexico, and Texas. What may be of interest, however, is that, except for Texas, Latino voters gave more votes to the Democratic candidates than to Joe Biden. Donald Trump received 2 to 3 percent more votes in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico than did the Democratic Senate candidates. The Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia received 10 percent more Latino votes than did Biden. Only in Texas was there no significant difference among Latinos in their votes for the Democratic Senate candidate and their votes for Joseph Biden.
Although not a component of the UCLA study, Latino voters in the important swing of state Nevada also voted overwhelmingly Democratic. And, of course, Latino voters provided a significant part of Biden’s huge electoral victory in California.
As a Colorado homeboy, I was particularly interested in how the Chicanada had voted there is 2020. There are about 323,000 Latino registered voters in Colorado, accounting for 10.4 percent of the state’s registered voters. According to the UCLA study, 315,000 cast their ballots in the 2020 election, shattering the myth that Latinos never show up at the polls. Latinos in Colorado voted for Biden and the Democratic Senate candidate, John Hickenlooper, by a 3-1 margin over the Republicans, or, put another way, 73 percent voted for Biden, and 76 percent for Hickenlooper. This demonstrates a level of voter loyalty that any serious political party would die for. By the way, less than half the white voters in my home state supported either Democratic candidate.
Let’s also look at Georgia, with its fast-growing Latino population. Most of us know that the victories in Georgia US Senate races by Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were key to the Democrats’ gaining a 50-50 split in the US Senate, enabling Vice President Kamala Harris to cast tie-breaking votes. But most people don’t realize how important the Latino vote was to those victories. An estimated 178,000 Latinos in Georgia voted in the 2020 election, representing 3.6 percent of the state’s electorate. But—and this is a major “but”—the Georgia Senate elections were decided by fewer than 12,000 votes. Latino voters voted for the Democrat senatorial candidates by a greater than 3-1 margin (75 percent and 80 percent), clearly contributing to their margin of victory; they voted 67 percent for Biden. By contrast, less than 20 percent of white voters in Georgia supported any of the three Democratic candidates. A similar picture is advanced by the UCLA study for the other states, which demonstrates that the Latino electorate remains strongly in the Democratic column. Texas, again, presents a very interesting and somewhat different picture. There are more than 5 million eligible Latino voters in Texas, representing 28.4 percent of the state’s electorate. In the 2020 elections, nearly 3 million cast their ballots, supporting the Democratic US Senate (M.J. Hegar) and presidential candidates by a more than 2-1 margin; in other words 70 percent of Texas Latinos voted for the Hegar and Biden, compared to less than 20 percent of that state’s white voters. The UCLA precinct-level data confirms that Latinos continue to be a reliable electorate for the Democrats. However—and this is an important “however”—Donald Trump did increase his support among Latino voters, despite his outrageous racism, the Border Wall, and his promise to deport undocumented immigrants. But the study also warns that a significant number of Latino voters are “persuadable swing voters.” Texas also continues to be a state where Latinos have been unable to counter gerrymandering—which is designed to dilute the power of the Latino vote. Latinos Are Key to Progressive Change
The bottom line is that Latinos are highly visible at election time. But our invisibility the rest of the time hides the hideous reality of our racial and national oppression: a massive wealth gap compared to whites, poor and under-resourced schools, police and migra repression, poor housing, super-exploitation in many workplaces, over-representation in the criminal justice system, and underrepresentation in higher education, suppression of our voting rights, oppression of our language and cultures, environmental and climate racism, and the continued loss of the our little remaining farmland.
The electoral arena is one important arena for addressing these issues, and for building Latino power as a major progressive force in US politics. After all, polls continue to demonstrate strong Latino support for unions, for women’s reproductive rights, for an expansion of voting rights for all oppressed communities, for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, for strong polices to address climate change, for universal medical care, expanded access to higher education, etc.
Currently, the greatest threat to Latino voting power—and to democracy in general—comes from the Republican right. Common sense and an understanding of our community’s interests should warn us to resist the siren song of the Republican Party, trying to reap the voting power we have worked so hard to grow and harvest.
But we should also call out the Democratic Party for too often taking us for granted (Are you listening Joe Biden?), for failing once again to give sufficient priority to our issues and investing far too few resources into helping build our electoral power—not only as voters but also as candidates for office at the local, state, and national level. Without such support, the Democrats will indeed face grave danger—not from millions of our voters running to the Republicans, but from our people staying home at voting time, based on the feeling that we too often remain invisible and ignored. | US Federal Elections |
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider whether to strike down President Joe Biden's student loan debt relief plan, the type of expansive use of presidential power about which the conservative majority has often expressed skepticism.
The program, which would allow eligible borrowers to cancel up to $20,000 in debt, has been blocked since the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary hold in October, and there are major doubts it will ever go into effect.
The court is hearing two cases, one brought by six states, including Missouri, and the other brought by two people, Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor, who hold student loan debt. Supporters of Biden's plan are expected to rally outside the court ahead of the oral arguments.
The challengers argue that the administration’s proposal — announced by Biden in August and originally scheduled to take effect last fall — violates the Constitution and federal law, partly because it circumvents Congress, which they said has the sole power to create laws related to student loan forgiveness.
A key threshold question in the case is whether any of the challengers have legal standing to sue in the first place. Many observers think that if the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, finds that the challengers had standing to sue, it will almost certainly then conclude that Biden's plan is unlawful.
Of the various challengers, Missouri may have the best argument for standing based on its association with the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, a state-created entity that services many student loans. The Supreme Court only has to find that one challenger has legal standing in order to reach the merits of the case.
The justices could decide the case based on a legal argument made by the challengers that the Supreme Court has recently embraced called the “major questions doctrine.” Under that theory, federal agencies cannot initiate sweeping new policies that have a significant economic impact without having express authorization from Congress. A ruling is expected by the end of June.
The conservative majority cited the major questions doctrine last year in blocking Biden’s Covid vaccination or test requirement for larger businesses and curbing the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions from power plants.
The Biden administration says debt relief is permitted under a 2003 law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act. The law states that the government can provide relief to recipients of student loans when there is a “national emergency," allowing the government to take action to ensure people are not in “a worse position financially” as a result of the emergency.
The challengers say the language in the HEROES Act is not specific enough to authorize a proposal as broad as Biden’s plan.
Both Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, cited the HEROES Act in suspending loan payments during the pandemic. Although Biden plans to end the Covid emergency in May, this should not affect his loan plan, his administration says, because it addresses economic harms that took place during the pandemic.
Biden’s program would cancel up to $10,000 in debt for borrowers earning less than $125,000 a year (or couples who file taxes jointly and earn less than $250,000 annually). Pell Grant recipients, who are the majority of borrowers, would be eligible for an additional $10,000 in debt relief. The overall program could help more than 40 million borrowers, the administration has said.
The administration closed the application process after the plan was blocked. Holders of student loan debt currently do not have to make payments as part of Covid relief measures that will remain in effect until after the Supreme Court issues its ruling.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in September that Biden’s plan would cost $400 billion. | SCOTUS |
Pelosi says Tapper ‘wasting time’ with Gaetz; doesn’t say how she’ll vote on McCarthy
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in a Sunday interview, arguing the latter was a self-promoter and that the media was wasting time giving him attention.
She also said Gaetz had no real following or support in the House.
“You’re wasting your time on that guy because he has no sway in the House of Representatives, except to get on TV and raise money on the internet,” Pelosi, the longtime Speaker who stepped down from that role in this Congress, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
Gaetz earlier on the show said he would file a motion this week to vacate the chair — a procedural tool to essentially end McCarthy’s Speakership.
The motion sets up a decision for Democrats, who could save McCarthy by voting for him, or possibly by voting president. The motion is likely to succeed if Democrats vote against McCarthy, since Republicans have such a slim majority in the House.
Pelosi did not say how she plans on voting, but said Democrats should take their cue from House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
“My advice to my fellow Democrats is simple: Follow the leader,” she said.
She praised Jeffries for his handling of the anticipated government shutdown and for ultimately reaching a continuing resolution (CR) that prevented the shutdown from taking place.
“It was a victory for Democrats, a defeat for the MAGAs,” Pelosi said of the CR, referring to hard-right Republicans.
Pelosi went on to rip Republicans for what she described as hypocrisy, saying most of them backed a huge tax cut she said benefitted the wealthy but then voted against a measure to keep the government funded under the argument of fiscal conservatism.
Pelosi added a shot at former President Trump, who she described as “what’s his name.”
“It’s such a fraud when they the [say] the basis of this is spending,” Pelosi said, adding, “these are people who gave a tax cut to the richest people in American to the tune of $2.5 trillion to our national debt when what’s his name was president of the United Sates. Two Trillion dollars to the national debt.”
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Congress |
Ariana Drehsler/AFP via Getty Images
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Voters wait in line to cast their ballots in November 2020 in Tombstone, Ariz., of Cochise County.
Ariana Drehsler/AFP via Getty Images
Voters wait in line to cast their ballots in November 2020 in Tombstone, Ariz., of Cochise County.
Ariana Drehsler/AFP via Getty Images
Two Republican supervisors of Arizona's Cochise County are facing criminal charges after they risked more than 47,000 people's votes by refusing to meet the state's legal deadline for certifying the 2022 midterm elections.
The supervisors — Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd — are charged with felony offenses of conspiring to delay the counting of the county's votes and interfering with the ability of Arizona's top election official, the secretary of state, to complete the statewide counting, according to the Nov. 27 indictment released by the Arizona state attorney general's office on Wednesday.
Although the board of supervisors in the sparsely populated, southeastern Arizona county ultimately made its local results official following a court order, the delay raised alarms among many election watchers around the country, stoking fears that the move could inspire those who cast doubt on election results to try to disrupt certification and put more people's votes at risk in future elections.
The office of Arizona's secretary of state called for an investigation into Crosby and Judd after the board finally certified the results three days late, at a court-ordered meeting that Crosby skipped.
"Supervisors Crosby and Judd's actions not only demonstrate a complete disregard for the law but also jeopardize Arizona's democracy. Had a court not intervened, the failure of these two Supervisors to uphold their duty would have disenfranchised thousands of Cochise County voters. This blatant act of defying Arizona's election laws risks establishing a dangerous precedent that we must discourage," Kori Lorick, Arizona's state elections director, wrote in a letter to the Arizona attorney general and Cochise County attorney.
The office of Arizona's state Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has now brought the charges.
"The repeated attempts to undermine our democracy are unacceptable," Mayes said in a statement. "I took an oath to uphold the rule of law, and my office will continue to enforce Arizona's elections laws and support our election officials as they carry out the duties and responsibilities of their offices."
Crosby and Judd did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.
The judge who ordered the county board to make its results official had said the Republican-controlled panel "exceeded its lawful authority" in delaying the vote. The board found no legitimate problems with the county's 2022 election counts.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Research by Julia Wohl | US Federal Elections |
Donald Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, but can still appear on the Republican presidential primary ballot in Colorado next year, a Denver District Court judge ruled Friday in a case that could have national consequences.
Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s 102-page ruling comes in a lawsuit filed by a liberal political nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It alleged that Trump’s role in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol disqualifies him from running for president under the 14th Amendment. Section 3 of the amendment bars “officers of the Unites States” who took an “oath … to support the Constitution of the United States” and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding federal or state office again.
Wallace found that while Trump “incited an insurrection … and therefore ‘engaged’ in an insurrection,” the 14th Amendment “does not apply to Trump” because he is not an “officer.”
“Part of the court’s decision is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent of Section Three,” she wrote.
Wallace’s ruling came after she heard five days of testimony, including from police officers who were at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, two congressmen and constitutional experts.
While Trump is unlikely to win in Colorado in 2024 — he lost to President Joe Biden by 13 percentage points in the state in 2020 — the ballot-access case could still have major consequences on the national stage.
The nonprofit that brought the case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which doesn’t disclose its donors, is likely to appeal the ruling. Legal experts believe the questions of whether Trump should be allowed to run for president again will eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Similar lawsuits have been filed in other parts of the country, none of which have been successful.
On Tuesday, Michigan Court of Claims Judge James Redford said deciding whether an event constituted “a rebellion or insurrection and whether or not someone participated in it” are questions best left to Congress and not “one single judicial officer.” A judge, he wrote, “cannot in any manner or form possibly embody the represented qualities of every citizen of the nation — as does the House of Representatives and the Senate.”
Last week, Minnesota’s Supreme Court rejected another effort to block Trump from appearing on Minnesota’s GOP primary ballot next year.
The Colorado lawsuit was brought by the on behalf of a group of Republican and unaffiliated voters. The defendant was Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat whose office took a neutral stance on the case.
“The court determined that Donald Trump is eligible to be placed on the Colorado ballot in the March presidential primary,” Griswold said in a written statement on Friday. “This decision may be appealed. As secretary of state, I will always ensure that every voter can make their voice heard in free and fair elections.”
Colorado’s presidential primary will be held on March 4.
This is a developing story that will be updated. | US Federal Elections |
MINNEAPOLIS — A new law in Minnesota prohibits the misuse of manipulated video, images and audio — "deepfakes" — that seek to influence elections.
The provisions, which took effect this summer, are among the first state regulations like them nationwide, said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. And it addresses growing fears among officials that artificial intelligence poses a threat to elections.
The statute prohibits using this AI-generated content if it's created without the consent of the person depicted and with intent of hurting a candidate or influencing an election, within 90 days of Election Day.
A deepfake can look and sound identical to the person whose likeness it intends to represent, but it is created without the individual's knowledge through artificial intelligence.
"It's really the same old poison in a different bottle, meaning we're looking at disinformation and dishonesty and lies about the election system, and how that can be spread," Simon said in an interview. "And this is a new way to spread it."
He described next Tuesday's local elections in Minnesota as a "dress rehearsal" for what will be a high-stakes and intense 2024 presidential election contest. Four years ago, people cast doubt about the results, contributing to lies that the election was stolen and rigged for President Joe Biden.
Minnesota's new law, he believes, helps to bolster confidence that elections are run fairly.
"It's not a different threat, but it's a new way to amplify the old threats, and we want people going into the 2024 election to have that basic level of trust and confidence," Simon said.
Minnesota joins just seven other states with laws regulating deepfakes, according to a Bloomberg report. The change passed nearly unanimously in the state legislature this past spring.
A person can face prison time and fines for violating the new rules, which also extend to distributing AI-generated content that show sexual acts without the approval of the person whose likeness is in the video or photo.
President Biden on Monday signed an executive order with. He is instructing the U.S. Department of Commerce to develop guidance for authenticating and clearly labeling AI content.
Dr. Manjeet Rege, director of the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence at University of St. Thomas, said safeguards regulating artificial intelligence like these are crucial because now the technology is widely available.
"To preserve our democracy, I think having AI laws is extremely important, so that both the good and the bad guys know the repercussions of misusing AI," Rege said. "AI can do a lot of good, but we don't want AI in the wrong hands where it does a lot of damage."
for more features. | US Federal Elections |
Former Vice President Mike Pence called out several of his Republican opponents in the 2024 presidential primary on Sunday, hitting them for what he claimed is "signaling retreat from America's role as leader of the free world" following the fatal Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel Saturday.
He specifically named fellow presidential candidates former President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and Vivek Ramaswamy during his appearance on CNN's State of the Union.
"I also believe this is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America's role as leader of the free world," he claimed.
"I look what happened in Ukraine—was an unprovoked invasion by Russia. What happened this weekend was an unprovoked invasion by Hamas in Israel," Pence explained.
This is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America’s role as leader of the free world. When I’m President of the United States, we’ll lead from American Strength. pic.twitter.com/gW3HaN4fIp— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) October 8, 2023
"I really believe, now more than ever, both the debate within the Republican Party and the debate within America is whether or not we're going to once again stand without apology as the leader of the free world as the arsenal of democracy," the former vice president said.
According to him, "the heartbreaking images coming out of both of these theaters of operations remind us that America is the indispensable leader of the free world and if I'm President of the United States, we'll lead from American strength."
Pence's stark criticism of his opponents on foreign policy comes as the Republican Party faces a significant division on issues of foreign aid and military involvement.
Following the Saturday terrorist attack, Pence told Republicans in Iowa that the populist and isolationist trend within the party is in part responsible for Hamas's ability to successfully attack Israel. “Voices of appeasement like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis that I believe have run contrary to the tradition in our party that America is the leader of the free world," he said in rebuke of his opponents.
Throughout Pence's presidential bid, a return to Republicans and Americans as global leaders rather than bystanders has been a rallying call for his supporters. He has denounced the growing popularity of populism within the GOP, making the case for former President Ronald Reagan's brand of "peace through strength."
He called on his competitors Saturday "to abandon the language of appeasement—to say that we will stand strong with Israel, we will stand strong with Ukraine, we will stand as the leader of the free world. And as President of the United States, I will.”
Trump, Ramaswamy, and DeSantis have each condemned the terrorist attacks and pledged their support for Israel. | US Federal Elections |
WASHINGTON -- Phoenix retiree Saundra Cole has been watching the news about the debt limit negotiations in Washington with dismay — and limiting her air conditioning use to save money just in case her monthly Social Security check is delayed due to a default.
For her, air conditioning is no small thing in a city where the average daily high hits 94 degrees in May. If the government can't make good on its obligations, she says, “I would be devastated.”
“What I’m worried about is food banks and electricity here because you know, we’ve had deaths with seniors because of the heat,” says Cole.
Politicians in Washington may be offering assurance that the government will figure out a way to avert default, but around the country, economic anxiety is rising and some people already are adjusting their routines.
Government beneficiaries, social service groups that receive state and federal subsidies and millions more across the country are contemplating the possibility of massive and immediate cuts if the U.S. were to default on its financial obligations.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned last week that a default would destroy jobs and businesses, and leave millions of families who rely on federal government payments to “likely go unpaid,” including Social Security beneficiaries, veterans and military families.
“A default could cause widespread suffering as Americans lose the income that they need to get by,” she said.
The number of people potentially impacted is huge. According to the Census Bureau, in 2020 roughly 35% of U.S. households included someone receiving Social Security benefits, 36% received Medicaid benefits and more than 13% of the total population received food stamps.
A recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 66% of Americans said they’re very or extremely concerned about the impact on the U.S. economy if the debt limit is not raised and the government defaults, though only 21% said they’re following the debate closely.
Robert Gault, 63, who depends on a $1,900 monthly Social Security disability payment, says an economic default “would make life so real awfully hard on me.” The former longtime factory worker said he suffers from chronic back pain caused by degenerating disks in his spine.
Gault, who lives in Bradford, Pennsylvania, near that state's border with New York, said he thinks about the debate — and the stalemate — in Washington a lot.
He hasn't made any drastic changes to the way he lives, but said, “I'm more conscientious of everything and I think about everything I do now.”
Negotiations between the president and congressional leaders are down to the wire as they try to break an impasse. GOP lawmakers have been pressing for spending cuts in exchange for agreeing to increase the government's borrowing authority and President Joe Biden wanted a “clean” debt ceiling increase without conditions.
Without a deal, the U.S. could default as soon as June 1, according to Yellen.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was asked Monday if people should start preparing for default, and insisted “no, no, no, no.”
But people on fixed incomes and organizations that serve the poor — already feeling the after-effects of the pandemic and dealing with inflation — are bracing for a potential debt default that would deal an overwhelming blow to their finances.
Clare Higgins, executive director of Community Action Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, said demand at the organization's food banks has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic, and is growing again.
With a possible debt default, she said, she's seeing more demand for food from the three pantries that the organization either runs or financially supports.
"Yes, demand has gone up — but it was already up before," she said.
“We're already behind the eight-ball in what we're able to pay teachers,” she said of the organization's head start and early learning programs. “And the inflation that has happened in the economy has already reduced our ability to stretch the dollar.”
Higgins said while she's hopeful that Biden and McCarthy can reach a compromise, she's concerned the deal will include Republican-sought budget cuts that would affect the organizations she manages. And if a default does happen, Higgins said, “I hope it's for a short period.”
William Howell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said the notion of older people and recipients of government benefits doomsday prepping for disruptions every time budget season comes around is symptomatic of a “dysfunctional” democracy.
“It’s not how a healthy democracy handles its business,” he said, adding that the consequences of the brinksmanship will impact the government's ability to function and plan in coming years.
“In this era of hyper-polarization, the way you get compromise is walking right up to the edge of economic catastrophe and threatening default — on the other side we have a president almost threatening to invoke the 14th Amendment to do away with the debt ceiling," he said. “This is the stuff of partisan politics."
Adriene Clifford, 58, knows about balance sheets because she is an accounting professor in New York state. The Delhi resident said she was concerned enough about possible disruptions to the banking system in the event of a default that she withdrew money from the bank “just to tie me over.”
“I've been most concerned about the banking system going down and the FDIC not being there,” Clifford said. She was referring to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the independent federal agency that exists to maintain stability and public confidence in the U.S. financial system.
At the Kids' Stop Learning Center in Rome, Georgia, Lance Elam, owner of the family business that has been in operation since 1984, says he’s not worried that a default will actually occur. But he still has done the calculation on how long operations could last without the subsidies that the organization receives for its three locations in Rome and Cartersville, Georgia.
“We have enough liquid funds to carry on for six to eight months,” he said, adding that state and federal funds helped the Kids' Stop Learning Center stay in business through the pandemic.
“We have so many kids on our waiting list,” he said, that the center would likely begin dropping kids who couldn't pay without subsidies and prioritize families that can pay out of pocket. | US Federal Policies |
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told congressional leaders Friday the U.S. would hit its debt limit next week -- setting up a showdown between the White House and House Republicans, who have vowed to tie any increase in the debt ceiling to spending cuts.The nation will reach its $31.4 trillion borrowing limit on Jan. 19, Yellen said in a letter, adding that the Treasury Department will begin implementing so-called "extraordinary measures" to manage the government's cash flow if lawmakers don't act to raise it."While Treasury is not currently able to provide an estimate of how long extraordinary measures will enable us to continue to pay the government's obligations, it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June," Yellen wrote in the letter.If the debt ceiling isn't raised and the government goes into default -- essentially, unable to pass its bills -- it could be disastrous for the American economy and global financial markets.Seniors could stop receiving Social Security payments, U.S. military service members could stop receiving paychecks, public health funding could stop, and the nation's creditworthiness could be downgraded -- spiking interest rates, which would raise mortgage, car and credit card payments.Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen delivers remarks at the Center for Global Development on Oct. 6, 2022 in Washington, DC.Alex Wong/Getty Images, FILEMeasures deployed by the Treasury this year could include curtailing investment in some retirement funds.According to some independent analysts, the U.S. will likely not hit the debt limit until late summer or early fall, but Yellen's letter is sparking concerns on Capitol Hill where Republicans hold a slim majority.The faction of conservative Republicans that held up Speaker Kevin McCarthy from winning the gavel for days has indicated it won't agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agree to significant spending cuts -- and there's not much Democrats appear willing to rescind funding from.In a joint statement, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Friday that Democrats "want to move quickly to pass legislation addressing the debt limit so there is no chance of risking a catastrophic default.""We've seen in previous debt ceiling stand-offs that even the threat of default leads to even higher costs for working families," the statement said.Schumer and Jeffries note the debt limit was increased in a bipartisan way three times under former President Donald Trump and twice when GOP had majorities in the House and Senate."A default forced by extreme MAGA Republicans could plunge the country into a deep recession and lead to even higher costs for America’s working families on everything from mortgages and car loans to credit card interest rates," the statement said.U.S. Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks at a news conference in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol Building, Jan. 12, 2023 in Washington, DC.Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesRep. Brendan Boyle, D-Penn., incoming ranking member of the Budget Committee, also called the news "enormously concerning.""Defaulting on the full faith and credit of the United States should never be an option, and I am tired of Republicans thinking it's acceptable to use our economy as a political hostage to try and force an extremist and deeply unpopular agenda. Republicans need to do the right thing and come to the table to raise the borrowing limit before it’s too late — before our economy and millions of American jobs have been put at risk," he said in a statement.The White House repeated its position Friday that it will not negotiate over raising the debt limit.“As you’ve heard us say before, we will not be doing any negotiation over the debt ceiling,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in an afternoon briefing.She referenced past instances of bipartisan cooperation when the debt limit had to be raised and said “that’s how it should be” this time around as well.“It's not and should not be a political football. This is not political gamesmanship," she said. "This should be done without conditions and that's how we see this process moving forward."White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Jan. 13, 2023 in Washington, DC.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesWhen asked if the White House stance on not negotiating also applies to spending cuts, which Republicans have promised to pair, Jean-Pierre repeated, “This should be done without conditions.”“We have seen both Republicans and Democrats come together to deal with this issue. It is one of the basic items that Congress has to deal with and should be done without conditions -- so there is going to be, there's going to be no negotiation over it. This is something that must get done.”Back in 2011, the debt limit impasse cost the nation its AAA rating. The term "extraordinary measures" became familiar at that time.ABC News' Zunaira Zaki, Lauren Peller, Allison Pecorin and Justin Gomez contributed to this report. | US Federal Policies |
Jason Davis/Getty Images
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Graduates attend Tennessee State University's commencement ceremony in Nashville on May 7, 2022. Under a new repayment plan, millions of student loan borrowers will see their monthly repayment amounts cut in half or more.
Jason Davis/Getty Images
Graduates attend Tennessee State University's commencement ceremony in Nashville on May 7, 2022. Under a new repayment plan, millions of student loan borrowers will see their monthly repayment amounts cut in half or more.
Jason Davis/Getty Images
The Supreme Court may have struck down President Biden's plan for sweeping student loan forgiveness, but another plan that could gradually achieve similar results is in the works. In fact, millions of borrowers can begin to benefit from it as early as this fall, when they're expected to begin making monthly loan payments after a three-year pause.
Now, this forgiveness isn't simple. It won't happen suddenly, in one lump sum. It will instead come slowly through a complex new repayment plan — called the SAVE plan, for Saving on a Valuable Education — that will save borrowers thousands of dollars by keeping their monthly payments small (as small as $0) while also preventing interest from exploding what they owe.
"[It] has the potential to massively change student loan repayment in our country as we know it," says Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University.
SAVE is a new form of income-driven repayment plan that the Department of Education says will phase out the current Revised Pay As You Earn plan (REPAYE).
If this doesn't sound like loan forgiveness, get this:
The department says that under the old plan, borrowers repaid $10,956 for every $10,000 they borrowed. Under the new plan, they would pay back just $6,121.
"This is a big new loan forgiveness policy, particularly for undergraduates," says Jason Delisle, who studies higher education at the Urban Institute.
In a January review of the SAVE plan, Delisle and his colleagues found that for bachelor's degree recipients, "the share fully paying off their loans would fall from 59 percent under current [income-driven repayment] to 22 percent."
Based on current estimates, SAVE could end up costing the government anywhere from $138 billion (the department's estimate) to $230 billion (the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's estimate) to $361 billion (a Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis) over the next 10 years. As a comparison, the forgiveness program just scuttled by the Supreme Court was expected to have a one-time cost of roughly $400 billion.
Here's a handy guide to what it all means for borrowers.
What is the SAVE plan, and how does it work?
Like current income-driven plans, SAVE bases monthly payments on a borrower's income and family size. But in several ways, the terms of SAVE will be far more generous.
First, roughly a million more borrowers will qualify for $0 monthly payments. How?
Repayment plans include an income "floor," says Baker, below which "the government says, 'Oh, you don't have to make any payments. We think that's the money that you need to live — for food, for gas, for things of that nature.'" This income is essentially exempt.
The SAVE plan raises this floor, protecting more of a borrower's income from that monthly payment math — bumping to 225% of the federal poverty guideline, from the current 150%.
According to an Education Department fact sheet, "This change means a single borrower who earns less than $32,805 a year ($67,500 for a family of four) will not have to make payments."
Second, as long as borrowers make their monthly payments, the new SAVE plan also stops interest from accumulating. Under previous plans, borrowers with low or $0 payments — too low to cover their monthly interest charge — saw that interest accrue. Now, that won't happen.
Third, borrowers with undergraduate loans will see their monthly payments cut in half because of a big shift in what's called the assessment rate. Simply put, the Education Department will base payments on 5% of borrowers' remaining income, not the current 10%.
And fourth, SAVE includes a more generous forgiveness mechanism. In the past, undergrad borrowers could have their debts forgiven after 20 years of payments. Under SAVE, those who borrow $12,000 or less can have their debts wiped away after just 10 years of payments.
What's more, a borrower with $13,000 in debts wouldn't have to wait 20 years for forgiveness — just 11. Every $1,000 over the $12,000 mark simply adds an extra year of required payments.
Borrowers with much larger undergraduate debts can still qualify for forgiveness after 20 years of payments, while borrowers with graduate school debts can qualify for the plan's more generous monthly terms but would have to wait 25 years for forgiveness.
The first two of these provisions ($0 payments and no interest) will go into effect soon. The latter two become effective in July 2024.
Who qualifies for SAVE?
SAVE is for student borrowers with federally held loans, including all direct subsidized, unsubsidized and consolidated loans, as well as PLUS graduate loans.
Those with Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL) or Perkins Loans that are held by a commercial lender would need to consolidate into a direct loan in order to qualify.
Parents who took out a federal loan to help their children pay for college (known as Parent PLUS loans) are not eligible for SAVE.
Future borrowers, however, will be eligible for these benefits. Unlike the forgiveness plan that the court struck down, SAVE isn't a one-time move but a permanent program.
But just as it was with the now-defunct forgiveness plan, borrowers won't receive SAVE benefits unless they apply. (Keep reading for some handy tips on that below.)
How and when can I apply?
After three years of pause extensions, student loan payments are set to resume in October, with interest starting to accrue again in September.
Even without SAVE, the return to repayment is a huge undertaking for the Department of Education and student loan servicers — and it could get messy. Back in January, NPR reported serious concerns about funding shortfalls inside Federal Student Aid (FSA), the Education Department office tasked with managing the government's student loan portfolio.
The Biden administration hasn't yet released the formal application for SAVE, saying the Department of Education will notify borrowers when it becomes available later this summer.
But borrowers can apply now for REPAYE, the plan that SAVE will replace. Those on REPAYE will then automatically be shifted onto SAVE when the changes take effect this fall.
You can check whether you're on the REPAYE plan by logging in to StudentAid.gov and clicking on the "My Aid" link under the "My Info" sidebar.
The department suggests that you do so now, before payments resume, noting that it may take "a few weeks" to process your request, given that it will need to verify income and family size.
Also, given those funding problems at FSA, borrowers who wait until September or October to call their loan servicer could be in for a lot of hold music.
The department says it's redesigning the applications for all income-driven repayment plans so that they eventually take "10 minutes or less" to complete.
As part of that redesign, borrowers will have the option to opt into an IRS integration that allows the Education Department to access their tax returns. This step allows the department to automatically recertify borrowers' enrollment every year so they don't have to keep applying and updating.
Could SAVE be ended by another legal challenge?
Anything's possible.
"The White House itself is suggesting that SAVE participants ... will be repaying about $0.71 of every dollar they borrow. That doesn't sound like a loan. It sounds like a quasi-grant program," says Nat Malkus, who studies higher education at the American Enterprise Institute.
Malkus believes that the SAVE plan will almost certainly face legal challenges and that the courts will again have to answer the question, "Does [the SAVE plan] actually transform the student loan system into something that Congress would never have authorized?"
But the certainty of a legal challenge does not make the plan's downfall a certainty. In fact, multiple experts tell NPR that SAVE is not nearly as legally vulnerable as the debt forgiveness plan that was just struck down.
The Supreme Court's decision hinged on a question about the HEROES Act, a 9/11-era policy that allows the secretary of education to "alleviate the hardship" of federal student loan debt during a national crisis. The court ultimately found that trying to use that law to justify the erasure of debt was an overstep on the part of the secretary.
The SAVE plan, on the other hand, relies on the Higher Education Act. This law has allowed the department to create and change income-driven repayment plans for years, without legal interference.
"Congress clearly gave the authority to the secretary of education to design income-driven repayment plans," says Delisle at the Urban Institute. "So it's in law." | US Federal Policies |
With some states only months away from their presidential primary, proponents of these changes say they are trying to ensure election integrity and build back public trust that has been tarnished from the previous election cycle.
The restructuring of election boards is in part compelled by the fallout from former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, with multiple lawmakers and officials across the nation alleging voter fraud or refusing to certify results.
GOP election board takeover in North Carolina
North Carolina Republicans are attempting to gain more control in election boards, with a GOP-backed bill clearing the state House on Tuesday. It must pass one more stat Senate vote before heading to Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D-NC) desk.
Senate Bill 749 would change the makeup of state and local election boards, requiring them to have a bipartisan coalition.
“It’s not hard to see how folks might think there are problems in our elections when the very entity that’s overseeing those has a partisan lean,” Republican state Rep. Destin Hall said on the floor Tuesday. “This bill takes that partisan lean out of it.”
The North Carolina State Board of Elections is currently made up of five people appointed by the governor – three Democrats and two Republicans. The legislation proposes an increase to eight members, which would be evenly split between the two parties and would take away the governor’s power to appoint state election officials. The bill would give appointment power to the House speaker, the Senate leader, and the minority party leaders – the Republican Party currently controls both chambers of the state legislature.
While Cooper would likely veto the legislation, the North Carolina legislature has veto-proof majorities, setting Republicans up to vote to override the governor's order.
Trump barely won North Carolina in 2020, beating President Joe Biden by slightly over 1%, a contrast to 2016 when he defeated Hillary Clinton by over 3%.
Several lawmakers representing the state and officials have backed Trump’s election fraud claims after his narrow defeat in 2020. Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) was one of multiple GOP members who objected to Biden’s victory, calling for a change in 2021 to the electoral process, stating, “every region needs to have a voice.”
Former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) also made claims that the election had been stolen from the former president and faced several controversies during his reelection regarding his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. The one-term congressman was ousted from office by current Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) in May 2022.
Republicans pushed through another election change bill this month, Senate Bill 747, which would have curtailed absentee voting. Cooper vetoed the bill, warning that the measure diminishes equal access to ballots. It remains unclear whether or not the North Carolina legislature will override Cooper’s veto.
“The North Carolina local and state elections boards conducted secure and accurate elections that resulted in a Republican supermajority and a Trump win in NC,” Cooper said in an August statement. “But now, using the ‘big lie’ of election fraud, this same legislature wants to block voters they think won’t vote Republican, legitimize conspiracy theorists to intimidate election workers and anoint themselves to decide contested elections.”
Wisconsin tries to oust top election commission official
Wisconsin Senate Republicans voted to remove a top election official in the state last week in an attempt to change who is overseeing elections in the battleground state.
Prior to the full state Senate ruling, which voted along party lines of 22 to 11 to fire Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, a Republican-led committee recommended her removal. However, Wolfe will likely remain in her post due to Democratic pushback.
”It’s hard to believe that we’re still at a place where those now very well analyzed and debunked claims about our system seem to still be driving decisions that are being made,” Wolfe said during a press conference held after the vote.
“Would I have expected three years ago that we would still be having discussions like this today and that the same claims were still going to be circulating and actually being used to drive decision making? No, I think that is quite unbelievable that it’s still the case,” Wolfe said.
The push to remove Wolfe dates back to earlier this summer when the Wisconsin Elections Commission was deadlocked on Wolfe's renomination in June.
Democratic members have cited a 2022 state Supreme Court ruling that allows officers to stay in their role indefinitely if they do not step down when their term expires. Wolfe will likely keep her position as the fight to replace her as the commissioner plays out in court.
Wisconsin Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit shortly after the Republicans' decision, siding with Democrats in saying there are no legal grounds for firing her, ensuring Wolfe will remain in her role.
”The Senate’s action today where [they] claimed to have voted on an appointment that was not before them, has no legal effect whatsoever,” Kaul said. “So, she remains the administrator. The court, I’m very confident, will confirm that, but once we get that confirmation hopefully that will end any uncertainty about this.”
Wolfe has led the agency since 2018 and faced sharp GOP criticism following the 2020 election, with Republicans rebuking the top election official for Trump’s loss and the handling of absentee ballots, as well as her response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Certified election results show Trump lost to Biden in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The former president launched numerous efforts to overturn those results, including two recounts paid for by Trump.
Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman led a Republican-ordered, taxpayer-funded inquiry into the 2020 election, which lasted 14 months and turned up no evidence of widespread fraud, yet he insisted on decertifying the results, which legal experts say is unconstitutional.
Gableman was fired by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in the summer of 2022, and he pushed back against government officials shortly after, calling for a revolution over the 2020 election.
"Our comfort is holding us back from taking the action that is necessary," Gableman said at a Sept. 9, 2022, dinner hosted by the Republican Party of Outagamie County. The comments can be heard in an audio released by activist Lauren Windsor.
Georgia's State Election Board shakes up Fulton County
In perhaps the biggest election scandal from 2020, where Trump was indicted for a fourth separate case this year in August, Atlanta prosecutors charged him over his efforts to unlawfully overturn his election loss in Georgia. Trump faces a total of 13 counts in the indictment, and other charges are included against 18 of his Republican allies.
The latest update in Trump’s election interference case came on Wednesday when Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis told a judge that six of the attorneys defending some of those indicted have conflicts of interest.
In the aftermath of 2020, Georgia Republicans overhauled local election boards facing concerns. Under a 2021 law, the State Election Board has the final authority in determining whether to replace local state-appointed election officials after conducting an investigation or a performance review.
A Republican Georgia official told the Washington Examiner, “Most of Georgia’s constitutional leaders have shown a commitment to staying above the fray. When it comes to knee-jerk policy decisions, there’s a loud chorus out there in the peanut gallery demanding a grab bag of half-cocked ideas, but in reality it only represents 5% of Georgians.”
Republicans requested a performance review of local election officials in Fulton County, becoming the first Georgia county to do so, resulting in a 17-month evaluation of election operations. While the investigation panel didn't find any truth to the claims of rampant voting fraud or intentional misconduct by election workers, the report listed a number of issues in Fulton County with training processes and overall organization, noting improvements with those factors.
“In prior years, disorganization and a lack of a sense of urgency in resolving issues plagued Fulton County elections,” the report read. “However, Fulton County has shown improvement in administering elections from 2020 to 2022.”
“Prior staff that oversaw elections, voter registration, redistricting, and absentee ballots are no longer with the office, and new staff can bring new energy and renewed Commitment,” the report said.
Georgia’s State Election Board declined to take over elections in Fulton County despite the report showing improvements, voting unanimously in June to end its performance review into the county.
In the weeks following, former U.S. District Judge William Duffey stepped down from his role as chairman for 14 months on the board. Duffey cited Georgia’s 2021 election law in his departure after being appointed in June 2022.
“Now that a new board structure is in place, it is important to name the next chair in sufficient time for that person to continue to prepare for the 2024 election cycle,” Duffey said.
In an effort to bolster election integrity in Georgia, officials said the state is currently running hardware and software checks in voting systems across all counties, working in partnership with the Election Assistance Commission.
“We’ve been conducting these checks in all 159 counties to prepare for a secure and fair 2024 election,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “We’re looking at all the hardware, software, and letting Georgia voters know why our state has the most secure elections in the country.” | US Federal Elections |
Campaign launches to revamp Arizona primary system, eliminate partisan ballots
A bipartisan group of Arizonans has formally launched a campaign asking voters to amend the state constitution next year to remake the state primary election system and allow independents to participate more easily.
The Make It Fair Arizona Act would implement a series of changes to Arizona elections, with supporters arguing it brings competition and fairness in a state where independent and unaffiliated voters outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans.
A key part of the initiative would allow independent and unaffiliated voters — those who choose not to register with a major party — to vote in primaries by eliminating partisan ballots in favor of a single ballot given to all voters. This type of election is often called an "open primary."
"It’s time we fixed an election system that discriminates against the majority," Sarah Smallhouse, an independent voter and chair of the Make Elections Fair Committee, the group backing the initiative, said in a statement. "Our taxpayer-funded elections should give all voters in Arizona the same opportunity to participate."
Arizona elections:Your ballot likely will have fewer ballot measures in 2024. Here's why
Those voters can vote in statewide primaries in August now but must choose which partisan ballot they'd like to receive.
To vote in Arizona's separate presidential preference election, they must change their registration to join a party.
The presidential preference election in March has been around for three decades. Lawmakers broke off the presidential ballot from the August primary and moved it earlier in the year, when the results could better affect national momentum for candidates in the race.
The initiative's other changes include barring taxpayer dollars from funding private partisan elections for roles like precinct committee members, and making uniform the number of signatures a candidate must collect to appear on the ballot.
The initiative also creates a framework for the Legislature, with the governor's approval, to determine how many candidates advance from the primary to a general election, setting outer limits on how many candidates can appear on the November ballot.
For example, in races for a single office — like governor or attorney general — there must be between two and five candidates on the November ballot.
If the Legislature allows three or more candidates to advance, then it must also create a process using voter rankings to determine who is elected if no candidate gets a simple majority.
The initiative process begins in earnest with the filing of proposed language with the Arizona secretary of state, which occurred Monday. That language will be reviewed by the Legislative Council, per state law, and then the group must gather 383,923 voter signatures to get the measure on the November 2024 ballot.
Chuck Coughlin, a political consultant at the Phoenix firm HighGround who is working on the initiative, said the group aims to file 500,000 signatures by June. The extra signatures would create a buffer, should the effort be subject to legal challenges aiming to keep it off the ballot, which are likely.
If approved by voters, the initiative's provisions would go into effect in 2026, when Arizona will elect statewide offices like governor and secretary of state as well as members of the Legislature.
This is a developing story. Return for additional updates.
Reach reporter Stacey Barchenger at [email protected] or 480-416-5669. | US Local Elections |
Several of the eight House Republicans who voted to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., indicated they have no regrets for the move that has led to two weeks without a speaker.
Fox News Digital reached out to the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy from the speakership via Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz's motion to vacate, asking if they felt responsible for the possible Democrat-backed deal to expand the interim speaker's power.
Gaetz has since blasted the potential expansion of Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry's powers in the wake of his motion to vacate as making the interim speaker the "speaker light."
"I am against ‘speaker light,’ I am against Bud Light," Gaetz told reporters Thursday. "I believe it is a constitutional desecration not to elect a speaker of the House. We need to stay here until we elect a speaker."
Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane told Fox News Digital that the "only things" he feels "responsible for are representing the voices of the people who sent me here and reversing the course of this Conference so that we can get on a track towards fiscal responsibility and draining the Swamp."
"The American people want a speaker who will be honest and represent them, not business as usual in Washington," said Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C. "It is disgraceful for a number of elected officials, many of them in safe GOP districts, to support a plan to empower Democrats."
"Voting against the will of your constituents is the definition of the swamp," Mace continued. "We hope the American people see who is standing with them and who is standing with Washington."
Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana said, "Bringing forward a resolution to grant additional power to a Speaker that is unelected is an attempt by the D.C. Cartel to dismiss the voice of the American people and sets a dangerous precedent."
"I will not support a resolution that would delay the process of selecting a Speaker and empower someone that was appointed by Kevin McCarthy and not elected by the Republican Conference," Rosendale added. "That’s why I am urging my colleagues to go back into Conference and work to nominate a candidate immediately, so we can get back to doing the work the American people elected a Republican majority to do."
The office of Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., did not provide comment on the potential expansion of McHenry's powers.
Gaetz's office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Neither did GOP Reps. Bob Good of Virginia, Andy Biggs of Arizona, or Tim Burchett of Tennessee.
It's unclear whether House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan will hold a third vote on his nomination to be speaker of the House of Representatives. Jordan said Thrusday he would back a move to empower McHenry until January, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Jordan lost support on the second ballot Wednesday — winning only 199 votes after getting only 200 in the first ballot Tuesday.
He needed 217 to become speaker, and could afford few Republican defections. Fox News was told he was expected to lose further votes in a ballot on Thursday.
Jordan's team had said they intended to keep going with a third vote, with supporters optimistic that he could gain support. However, there had also been other potential candidates emerging from the wings amid the stalemate.
Republicans had held a closed-door meeting Thursday morning amid escalating tensions within the House GOP, with several of Jordan’s critics stating that they had gotten credible threats because they did not vote for him for speaker. Jordan has repeatedly condemned those threats.
The House of Representatives will soon recess after a third speaker's vote was put on hold on Thursday.
Fox News Digital's Adam Shaw and Brooke Singman contributed reporting. | US Congress |
President Biden on Thursday unveiled a "sweeping" plan to go after COVID-19 pandemic aid fraudsters who stole billions of taxpayer dollars, and to help victims who lost their benefits to identity thieves.
The White House proposes to spend $1.6 billion on a three-pronged crackdown investigating and prosecuting systemic pandemic fraud, developing new tools to prevent identify theft, and providing resources to victims who not only lost the aid they needed, but also may have had their credit scores deteriorate or face tax liabilities through no fault of their own.
"There's no question when the Biden administration walked in the door, we inherited a historic degree of fraud due to the pandemic programs designed and administered at the onset of the pandemic," said Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to the president who is coordinating the implementation of Biden's COVID-19 relief law.
Sperling told reporters on a conference call that the White House coordinated with Department of Justice (DOJ) watchdogs and key members of the oversight community to identify how much funding law enforcement needs to prosecute the "explosion of fraud" that occurred during the pandemic.
"We want to not only capture them, get their funds, we want to send a signal to them that you can run, but you cannot hide," Sperling said.
To that end, Biden proposes to spend $600 million creating 10 new DOJ "strike force teams" consisting of U.S. attorneys and other federal law enforcement officials to prosecute pandemic fraud. These teams would build on the work of three "strike forces" that Biden announced in his State of the Union Address that have successfully seized and recovered $286 million in stolen pandemic relief funds.
The president is also proposing that Congress increase the statute of limitations to 10 years for fraud involving the pandemic Unemployment Insurance program, which would give prosecutors more time to investigate and bring criminals to justice. Included in Biden's request is $300 million to hire new investigators at the Small Business Administration and Department of Labor Inspector General's office to recover fraudulent payments from COVID-19 benefit programs.
The second component of Biden's plan includes another $600 million to strengthen fraud prevention and identify theft prevention for federal benefits programs. Biden would expand existing anti-fraud programs and modernize federal agency verification systems to prevent identity theft. In the president's upcoming budget request, to be released on March 9, 2023, Biden will ask Congress to pass reform legislation to prevent, detect and recover improper payments made through the Unemployment Insurance program.
Biden will also make $1.6 million in American Rescue Plan funding available to states to modernize their Unemployment Insurance systems and prevent fraud, identity theft and payment error.
Lastly, the president proposes $400 million in new spending to provide help to victims of identity fraud. This would include developing an "Early Warning System" to alert individuals when their identity information is being used to access public benefits programs and give them the option to stop potentially fraudulent transactions. Biden wants to improve IdentityTheft.gov to be a "one-stop shop" both for reporting identity crimes and accessing recovery assistance — with the federal government coordinating, as appropriate, with state and local non-profit legal services and community-based organizations to do so.
Additional funding would be made available to non-profit groups to provide direct services to victims under Biden's proposal.
The federal government paid out more than $4.6 trillion in COVID-19 pandemic relief under programs enacted by Biden and President Donald Trump. Congress rushed to approve trillions in spending, providing an opportunity for sophisticated crime syndicates and everyday criminals to take advantage of the government's generosity and steal benefits meant for people who lost their jobs or had to close their businesses during COVID-19 lockdowns. There were also "improper payments," which shouldn't have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported last month that the full extent of fraud in COVID-19 relief programs is not yet known, but estimated there was over $60 billion in fraudulent payments in the Unemployment Insurance program alone.
From March 2020 through January 13, 2023, at least 1,044 individuals pleaded guilty to, or were convicted at trial on federal charges of, defrauding COVID-19 relief programs, GAO said. This included the Small Business Administration's (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (COVID-19 EIDL) program, the Department of Labor's (DOL) Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs and economic impact payments issued by the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service.
There are also pending federal charges against 609 individuals and entities for attempting to defraud COVID-19 relief programs, GAO said.
If Biden's proposals to increase funding to prosecute these crimes moves forward, that number will likely increase. | US Federal Policies |
Fani Willis Agrees to Share Names of All 30 Unindicted Co-Conspirators with Trump and Other Georgia Defendants
That was the first and most immediate result of a hearing before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee
ATLANTA - Georgia prosecutors agreed Thursday to privately reveal the identities of the 30 unindicted co-conspirators in their sweeping election-racketeering case to the lawyers for Donald Trump and the 18 other co-defendants who are preparing for their own upcoming criminal trials.
That was the first and most immediate result of a hearing before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the entire criminal case tied to the former president's alleged bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Fulton County District Attorney last month secured the grand jury indictment charging 19 people overall, including Trump, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, and Justice Department loyalist Jeffrey Clark.
The sweeping criminal charges also mentioned co-conspirators identified as “Individual 1” through “Individual 30." Those people's names are seen as essential for the defense attorneys as they ready for trial, and their disclosure typically comes within 10 days before trial or at a time prescribed by the court.
Aiming to kickstart that handoff, two pro-Trump attorneys who have used Georgia's speedy trial laws to force their case to the front of the line filed a recent motion to get the names of their alleged co-conspirators. The trial for the lawyers, alleged false electors scheme architect Kenneth Chesebro and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, is set for Oct. 23 in Atlanta.
Nathan Wade, a lead prosecutor under Willis, told McAfee at the start of Thursday's hearing that the state planned to hand over the information but was concerned about the names getting out publicly.
- Sidney Powell Asks Court To Disclose Identities of Unindicted Co-Conspirators in Georgia Indictment
- How Georgia DA Fani Willis Investigated the Wide-Ranging Case Against Trump
- Fani Willis Requests a March 2024 Start Date for Trump Georgia Trial
- Trump Campaign Targets Georgia DA’s Family After Indictment: ‘The Truth About Fani Willis’
- WATCH LIVE: Georgia Hearing for Pro-Trump Lawyers Seeking Grand Jury Access, Unmasking Co-Conspirators
- Trump Attorney and Co-Defendant Seeks Dismissal of Georgia Charges
"The reason why the individuals names are not in the indictment is that it is frowned upon to put names of those who are not charged," he said.
McAfee called the request from Chesebro and Powell a straightforward request. After offering to issue a protective order blocking the information from being made public, he ruled the motion as moot. The handoff then happened in the courtroom when the prosecutors passed a piece of paper over to the defense counsel.
Thursday's hearing is ongoing and includes debate over a motion from Chesebro and Powell as they seek to interview the grand jurors who charged them with election-related racketeering. They are also seeking McAfee's permission to inspect the sealed transcripts of the special grand jury whose report was a prelude to their prosecution.
Amid arguments, McAfee said he didn't plan to rule from the bench on the motions, noting they are "complicated" issues.
Earlier Thursday, McAfee ruled that Chesebro and Powell were officially separated from Trump and his other allies in their criminal cases. That means the former president will face a jury separately and at a later date in at least one other trial. Splitting up the case was an "absolute necessity" to avoid the pitfalls that come with "mega-trials," the judge said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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The soon-to-be ex-wife of Gilgo Beach triple-homicide suspect Rex Heuermann cryptically mentioned the ongoing probe of her jailed spouse Friday morning after arriving at the family’s suburban home.
“The sheer depression of what I saw was enough trauma,” said Asa Ellerup outside the Massapequa Park house of horrors where authorities recently uncovered a massive amount of evidence in the long-cold case killings of three Long Island sex workers.
The wife reappeared a short time later on the porch, placing a hand on her heart before deeply sighing.
“I got over the hurdle of what I saw inside,” said Ellerup before waving reporters off with her hand. “You guys gotta leave. Get going.”
Earlier, after exiting the Long Island home around 9:30 a.m, she matter-of-factly told reporters there wasn’t much to say about the headline-making case and her husband’s arrest.
“You guys know this is an ongoing investigation,” she said. “It’s not over and I cannot speak to you ... If you want to stand up here and wait for something, I have a lot of work to do. If you want to take pictures go ahead. I’m OK with it now.”
She stood at one point behind a hedge row, peering out at the media as they snapped her photo in the front yard.
Her 59-year-old-husband and father of two remained behind bars following his July 13 arrest on a Manhattan street near his architecture office. He stands accused of three homicides in 2009 and 2010, with investigators looking into a fourth murder of another sex worker.
Heuermann entered a plea of innocence at a court appearance one day after he was put in handcuffs by investigators. His wife filed divorce papers last week as authorities were still sorting through the family home in their hunt for evidence in the case.
Breaking News
Ellerup left the house Friday with her daughter Victoria after her visit to the home in as many days. The suburban mom returned to sit outside the home with son Christopher and an elderly man who walked up to the porch and danced with his little black dog.
She was also accompanied to the house Thursday by Christopher, who posed for photos but declined comment on his father’s arrest.
Authorities last week brought in an excavator to dig up the yard behind the house in the hunt for evidence linking Heuermann to the crimes.
Ellerup, wearing pink flip-flops with a T-shirt and blue pants, previously left the house and stopped to chat with a neighborhood dog walker.
“She’s seen me around and has always been pleasant,” the 59-year-old man told the Daily News. “I’ve seen the monster (Heuermann) and never interacted with him.”
The neighbor said Ellerup stopped him to pet the dog before they briefly spoke.
“I said, ‘How you feeling?’” he recounted. “I said, ‘I’m with you, God bless you.’ (She said) ‘Feeling OK.’” | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
- Rep. Ocasio-Cortez condemned the Supreme Court's ruling striking down Biden's student debt plan.
- The New York Democrat called on Biden to continue working to get borrowers relief.
- She also accused the Supreme Court of corruption.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the Supreme Court's Friday decision striking down President Joe Biden's student-loan forgiveness plan and called on her own party to continue fighting for student-debt relief.
Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and prominent supporter of student-loan forgiveness, also accused the high court of corruption, arguing that recent reporting finding Justice Samuel Alito took gifts from a billionaire "undercuts its own legitimacy by putting its rulings up for sale."
"Justice Alito accepted tens of thousands of dollars in lavish vacation gifts from a billionaire who lobbied to cancel the student loan forgiveness," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "After the gifts, Alito voted to overturn."
The Supreme Court's decision came in two separate rulings. The high court ruled that the plaintiffs in one case, US Department of Education v. Brown, did not have standing — but the second case, Biden v. Nebraska, prevailed and the six GOP-led states had standing to sue on behalf of student-loan company, MOHELA.
The New York Democrat noted that the SCOTUS ruling does not strip away Biden's ability to pursue student-loan forgiveness. The Higher Education Act is one option for continuing loan forgiveness before payments are scheduled to resume in October.
"We still have the power to cancel and must use it, or we're looking at an economic crisis for millions of people," Ocasio-Cortez wrote in another tweet.
Last year, the Department of Education forgave $6 billion for around 200,000 defrauded students under a sweeping settlement, including students who applied for relief over seven years ago. In 2019, former President Donald Trump also wiped out debt for disabled veterans under the Total and Permanent Disability Discharge. Advocates have also pointed out that Biden could use a different act — the Higher Education Act — to provide relief.
A slew of other Democratic lawmakers issued statements condemning the student debt ruling on Friday morning and calling on the Biden administration to take additional action to get relief for borrowers.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the decision by the "the MAGA Republican-controlled" high court "disappointing and cruel" and vowed "the fight will not end here." | SCOTUS |
House GOP plagued by internal funding disputes despite shutdown dodge
The House dodged a near shutdown before rolling out of town, but Wednesday showed that GOP leaders face a seriously difficult task ahead in getting their fractious group behind measures to keep the government in business next year.
House Republicans must pass five more regular appropriations bills through their razor-thin GOP majority without help from Democrats, who oppose spending cuts proposed by Republicans.
But it is internal GOP problems that are now holding up the work. All five bills have been punted, blocked, or otherwise face issues that have long roiled the House GOP conference.
On Wednesday morning, 19 House Republicans torpedoed consideration of the party’s bill to fund the Department of Justice for most of next year — mostly because of objections from members of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Other members are frustrated with the tactics.
“It’s never easy to get work done around here. It’s a lot harder when you have people who, I think, are prone to emotionally immature decisions,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-Pa.), chair of the Main Street Caucus.
“The uber-conservatives that just brought down the rule are ultimately going to make it harder for us to get conservative wins,” he later added.
The members voting against the procedural rule were pressing for steeper cuts, and also raised scrutiny around the FBI.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), one of the defectors, said the measure “didn’t go far enough to defund some of the policies and practices going on with [the] Department of Justice and FBI weaponization of the government.”
Other hard-liners said the vote was also partly a protest of the legislation Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) brough to the floor Tuesday to prevent a shutdown. That measure passed with the help of Democrats.
Members of the Freedom Caucus repeatedly have tanked procedural votes to pressure their leaders to include more right-wing priorities in legislation, something that hasn’t slowed under Johnson.
In addition to the procedural vote Wednesday, House GOP leaders punted plans to move on two funding bills last week amid internal division.
The new development under Johnson further complicating things is that House GOP moderates are now flexing their power on procedural votes, too.
Four swing-district Republicans from New York also opposed the procedural rule vote to fund the Department of Justice on Wednesday.
Part of their opposition was over policy. Rep. Nick LaLota (N.Y.), one of the Republicans who voted against the rule, said he was concerned the proposed cuts would hurt law enforcement.
Another source said they were not happy the rule would have allowed floor votes on controversial amendments, such as one that would reduce the salary of special counsel Jack Smith — who is leading investigations into former President Trump — to $1.
They also wanted to protest the House GOP leadership’s funding strategy. Moderates, in a sense, took a page out of the Freedom Caucus playbook.
“My ‘no’ vote on the underlying rule was a message to my party’s leadership to stop wasting members’ time with doomed bills and start concocting more reasonable ones which can pass the House and which don’t disproportionately negatively affect my district,” LaLota told The Hill.
The vote is only the latest example of the delicate balancing act that GOP leadership has faced in trying to pass government funding to get a stronger hand ahead of eventual spending talks with the Senate.
Under the stopgap funding bill passed Tuesday, lawmakers have until mid-January to fund some government agencies — including the departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development. Others, including the Defense Department, would see funding expire Feb. 2.
The thinking is this will provide enough time for each chamber to finish passing its individual appropriations bills, allowing the House and Senate to hash out compromises on each of them.
But some veteran appropriators are also pushing for leadership to start negotiating a bipartisan agreement on overall funding levels sooner rather than later.
“We just can’t even start negotiating until we have that top-line number,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, while also telling reporters Wednesday that the sooner a bipartisan agreement is reached, “the better.”
At the same time, conservatives are still dialing up the pressure on leadership to pass the party’s remaining spending bills.
“The Speaker has said he won’t do another [continuing resolution]. We’re going to hold him to that; we’re going to take him at his word,” Good said, adding: “That means we’ve got to pass the remaining five bills, as my colleagues have said, that puts us in the strongest negotiating position.”
It is unclear how the House GOP can overcome its internal disagreements to do so.
The five remaining bills have seen opposition from various factions of the conference over issues including abortion, funding for a new FBI headquarters, and cuts in transportation operations.
Another bill Republicans hoped to pass before leaving Washington on Wednesday would have funded the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education for most of next year, but not without steep cuts that faced staunch resistance from some moderates.
Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) told The Hill on Tuesday that he could not support that bill.
“The cuts are too deep,” Molinaro said. “They’re disproportionately hurt states like mine and constituents like mine, and I am a firm ‘no.’”
House lawmakers are scheduled to be in session for about five weeks before the mid-January funding deadline, giving Congress a tight schedule to finish its work.
“Speaker Johnson has now the time over Thanksgiving to coordinate a plan,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus, told reporters on Wednesday.
“We expect to see tangible results to move us down the field in the right direction at the right magnitude,” said House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Congress |
Authorities are on the hunt for a suspect in connection to the murder of Pava LaPere.
The 26-year-old, who served as CEO of EcoMap Technologies and was featured on this year's Forbes 30 Under 30 list, was found dead in her Baltimore apartment with signs of blunt-force trauma on Sept. 25, police confirmed to NBC News.
During a press conference held the following day, authorities announced that they have issued an arrest warrant for Jason Dean Billingsley in connection to her case, stating that the 32-year-old is wanted for first-degree murder, assault, reckless endangerment and additional charges.
"This individual will kill, and he will rape," Commissioner Richard Worley said during the press conference. "He will do anything he can to cause harm."
Worley also went on to issue a warning directly to the suspect.
"Every single police officer in Baltimore city and the state of Maryland, as well as the U.S. Marshalls are looking for you," he said. "We will find you, so I will ask you to turn yourself into any officer at a police station because we will take you into custody eventually."
Authorities also shared their belief that Billingsley is "probably armed and dangerous" at this time.
"We ask anyone who may have seen him, knows him or knows his whereabouts," Worley continued, "to contact police immediately by calling 911."
Billingsley was previously sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 16 years suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense in 2015, per NBC News, who cited court records. He had also pleaded guilty, according to the outlet, to first-degree assault in 2009 and second-degree assault in 2011.
Shortly after LaPere's passing, her company EcoMap Technologies reflected on their founder's legacy, noting that she "was not only the visionary force behind EcoMap, but was also a deeply compassionate and dedicated leader."
"Her untiring commitment to our company, to Baltimore, to amplifying the critical work of ecosystems across the country," their Sept. 26 statement shared to Facebook read, "and to building a deeply inclusive culture as a leader, friend and partner set a standard for leadership, and her legacy will live on through the work we continue to do."
E! News has reached out to the Baltimore Police Department for additional updates on this case and has not heard back. NBC News was unable to reach Billingsley's public defender for comment.
(E! and NBC News are part of the NBCUniversal family.) | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
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Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Matt Gaetz is not serious. At all. About anything.
I don’t happen to believe that’s the case, but I can understand why somebody would. But I don’t think it matters. It doesn’t matter, because he’s now the equivalent of a free radical bouncing around the molecular structure of Congress, and nobody quite knows how the drama currently unfolding will end. Including Gaetz, as he conceded even before he launched his successful putsch against Kevin McCarthy, rendering the House speakerless since Tuesday.
On Wednesday, taking Gaetz’s grievances about the way the House is run seriously, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna proposed a series of reforms that would reduce the power of big money in politics, bank stock trading by members of Congress, and democratize the functioning of the House.
On Thursday, Gaetz responded: “Ok. Let’s negotiate.”
Gaetz noted that his GOP colleagues want to change the rules around the “motion to vacate,” which was the procedural tool he used to oust McCarthy. His colleagues don’t want a small handful of renegades to have that much leverage, so they want to require a higher number of members for the motion to be able to be brought up for a vote. “If we enact the reforms @RepRoKhanna lays out here,” Gaetz tweeted, “How high would you like the MTV threshold to be? Because I’ll basically give you whatever you want on the MTV for this stuff.”
So what is this stuff?
Khanna laid out a five-point program:
- Ban money from lobbyists and political actions committees to congressional candidates
- Ban members of Congress from trading stocks and from ever becoming lobbyists
- Term limits for members of Congress
- Term limits for Supreme Court justices
- An ethics code for Supreme Court justices
The first objection from Democrats about Gaetz’s offer to implement these ideas in exchange for handing over his MTV weapon is that the stuff could never pass and he isn’t serious. But it doesn’t matter if he’s serious: He and his small crew of Republicans teamed up with Democrats to oust McCarthy. There is quite literally, and quite seriously, nothing stopping them from doing the same to reform the House rules.
Some immediate objections arise, of course. When I floated some of this on what’s left of Twitter, Chris Hayes noted, “you can’t do a term limit without a constitutional amendment so it’s a non-starter.” He is correct that constitutional scholars agree that term limits would require an amendment.
And I’d go further than Chris and say term limits are an actively bad idea. They’re the kind of thing that’s appealing as a last resort to an enormously frustrated electorate, but it’s merely nostalgia for a citizen legislature that never existed, where yeomen farmers would serve their country in Congress and then return to the fields. In reality, in states with term limits, politicians just race up the ladder as fast as possible and then when they’re termed out, they cash in as lobbyists. It makes the swamp swampier rather than draining it.
But some of the other reforms go the opposite direction, and turn public service back toward what it ought to be, serving the public rather than enriching oneself or one’s corporate backers. In response to Chris, Ro Khanna noted – in apparent acknowledgement of the constitutional hurdles – that his main bullet points are the ban on lobbying by members of Congress and the ban on contributions by PACs and lobbyists. He noted that the Supreme Court term limits would be constitutional, though the justices would have to be given seats on a lower court. The ban on stock trading would also be warmly met by the public.
Knowing our Supreme Court, anything could be ruled unconstitutional, and those reforms, if passed, could be challenged, too — but it’s still a fight worth having. Make the justices overturn immensely popular ethics reforms while facing their own ethics scandal.
And even if some of these reforms wouldn’t make it through the Senate, they could be written into the House rules in such a way that they’d have a deterrent effect.
Gaetz’s unprecedented ouster of a speaker has produced a rare moment in Washington, in which nobody can truly be certain how it ends. The key part of his response was “let’s negotiate.” Term limits are counterproductive? Fine, ditch those and come up with something new to suggest – like, say, a requirement that the president get congressional authorization before deploying troops overseas. Republicans want to reform the rules to change the way you can boot a speaker. So while they have the hood up, let’s see what else we can do to that engine.
Gaetz, at least, is continuing to negotiate. This evening, he responded to Chris’s response to my post, saying:
Things in Khanna-Gaetz that can happen merely by changing House Rules:
– Ban lobbyist and PAC donations to members
– Lobbyist/Foreign Agent Registration Ban for former members
– Ban Congressional Stock Trading
– Increase MTV threshold
– Single Subject Spending Bills requirement
Most of that is self-explanatory, but “single subject spending bills requirement” was the bone he picked with McCarthy, complaining that the House hadn’t passed all 12 of its appropriations bills. Insisting the House does so is reasonable, and could also be overcome by suspending the rules to avert a shutdown, which requires two-thirds of the House. But if Gaetz thinks Congress can work the way it used to, and pass spending bills one by one rather than lumping them all together, let him try.
Republicans plan to return next week to elect a new speaker – and even Donald Trump is threatening to go to Capitol Hill to see whether he wants the job.
Even if Democrats aren’t serious about seeing any of Khanna’s reforms make it into the rules or into law, they could at least behave cynically. Both parties are good at that, after all. Democrats who are so sure Gaetz and his gang are faking their offer to negotiate have nothing to lose by taking them up on it and making them walk away publicly. Let the Republicans kill the reforms that poll at 90 percent. And, if by cynically supporting these ideas in hopes of making Republicans look bad, Democrats accidentally turn them into law, oh well. We won’t tell anybody they never meant it to happen. | US Congress |
Card was the subject of a dayslong manhunt after the shocking violence in the city of Lewiston, Maine, and his death was confirmed by the police department in Lisbon, Maine.
“All we can confirm is that he’s deceased and there’ll be a press release,” a department spokesperson told Reuters on Friday night.
Card, 40, is believed to have taken his own life in an area near a recycling facility where he had been recently fired from, reported CNN.
The dramatic development came the day after a dramatic raid was executed on Mr Card’s home in Bowdoin on Thursday night, with Maine police and FBI agents heard shouting “FBI! Open the door!”
The dramatic scene however ended with no arrest and no sign of the US Army Reservist.
Mr Card has been described as “armed and dangerous” and members of the public have been warned not to approach him if they see him.
Due to Mr Card’s experience in the military, he is well-trained in the use of firearms.
Mr Card, 40, is a US Army reservist and a certified firearms instructor, joining the forces in 2002.
He has had no combat deployments and is currently a Sgt 1st class and Petroleum Supply Specialist.
Law enforcement officials said that Mr Card had recently made threats to carry out a shooting at a National Guard facility in Saco and had reported mental health issues including hearing voices.
He spent two weeks in a mental health facility this summer.
Mr Card’s family members are said to be cooperating with the investigation and have suggested that he might have been looking for an ex-girlfriend at one of the shooting locations, ABC News reported.
It is not clear who this former partner may be – or if this did form part of a motive for the shooting – but court records show that Mr Card was divorced by his ex-wife in 2007.
In total, 18 people were killed in the shootings which took place across two locations on Wednesday night.
Maine police said that the gunman first targeted the popular bowling alley just before 7pm, killing seven people, including one female and six males.
The suspect then went to the Schemengees Bar & Grille Restaurant and opened fire there minutes later, according to authorities.
Seven males were killed inside the restaurant and one male was killed outside.
Three other victims died after they were taken to a local hospital.
Another 13 were injured in the attacks, with their conditions currently unclear.
The youngest victim so far named is a 14-year-old boy who had gone to the bowling alley with his father that tragic night.
Aaron Young, 14, was with his father Bill Young at the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley for an evening with their bowling league on Wednesday night, Bill’s brother Rob Young told Reuters.
If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected], or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Helpline on 1-800-273-TALK (8255). This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are in another country, you can go to www.befrienders.org to find a helpline near you. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., declined to say whether Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., should resign from his position Wednesday afternoon, as the senator and his wife face federal corruption and bribery charges.
"Tomorrow he will address our caucus, and we'll see what will happen after that," Schumer said.
Schumer said he was "deeply disappointed" and "disturbed" when he read the indictment, which detailed repeated actions by Menendez to benefit Egypt, despite U.S. government misgivings over the country’s human rights record that in recent years has prompted Congress to attach restrictions on aid.
"Look, I've known Sen. Menendez a very long time. And it was truly, truly upsetting. But we all know that senators, for senators there's a much, much higher standard and clearly when you read the indictment, Sen. Menendez fell way, way below that standard," he said.
Prosecutors, who detailed meetings and dinners between Menendez and Egyptian officials, say Menendez gave sensitive U.S. government information to Egyptian officials and ghostwrote a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt, one of the top recipients of U.S. military support.
Menendez and his wife pleaded "not guilty" on Wednesday at a Manhattan federal courthouse. Both will turn in their personal passports, but Menendez maintains his official passport as a senior senator.
The Democrat senator was also ordered to refrain from communicating with Senate staff and will be under pre-trial supervision. His personal recognizance bond is set for $100,000. His wife's bond was set at more than double that amount at $250,000.
So far, Menendez has refused to resign his seat but stepped down from his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Friday.
Menendez was also indicted on federal bribery charges in 2016 in a case related to a wealthy Florida eye doctor and longtime friend who gave generous donations to Menendez and allegedly received benefits in return. Menendez was acquitted of the charges in 2018 following a mistrial. The new charges are unrelated.
Menendez insisted at a press conference Monday that he will be exonerated, as he detailed his decades-long record in Congress and insisted hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash the FBI found at his home was withdrawn from his personal savings account.
As of Wednesday, more than half of the Senate Democratic Caucus have called on Menendez to resign.
Fox News' Danielle Wallace and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report. | US Political Corruption |
The following is a transcript of an interview with 2024 Republican presidential hopeful and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that aired on Dec. 3, 2023.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to the former Governor of New Jersey and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie, good to have you back on the program. We know, sir, the RNC is supposed to announce tomorrow who will be on that December 6 debate stage. Has the RNC told you you've qualified to be there and if you haven't, will you drop out?
2024 GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE CHRIS CHRISTIE: I don't think they've told anybody yet who all of us are going to be on the stage, but I'm confident, Margaret, that I will be there and that we have all the qualifications necessary to get there.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Because, you told CNN over Thanksgiving, you will stay in the race through the Convention, which would put you into the summer months. Does the field need to consolidate to beat Donald Trump, which you say is one of your prime motivations in running.
CHRISTIE: Look, this field has already consolidated more than any non-incumbent field in this century Margaret. Back this time, eight years ago, we had 13 candidates still in the race. At this time back, you know, in 2011, we had eight candidates in the race. At this time back in 2007, we had nine candidates in the race and so this field is consolidated significantly, and I suspect it will consolidate more after folks vote in Iowa and New Hampshire.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But, isn't it a little bit different that you have the 45th President of the United states running, a known entity who has this automatic platform. It's just a different model. It's a different case.
CHRISTIE: Yeah, the other thing that makes it different, Margaret, is he's got 91 counts of indictment against him. The day before Super Tuesday, he's going to start a criminal trial, where his former chief of staff and one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus is going to testify that he committed crimes on his watch and was directed to commit crimes by Donald Trump. There's a lot of things different about this and that's why anybody tried to predict this is just shooting in the dark.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But why don't- why hasn't that turned off the GOP electorate? When you look at CBS polling, and others, he is leading, as you know. And then I mean, you've made clear when some of the other competitors are using really harsh rhetoric that you think that should disqualify them. Why hasn't that extreme rhetoric turned the GOP off of these other candidates either?
CHRIS CHRISTIE: Well, look, I- first off, I don't think you know exactly what's going to happen at all until people vote. Look, if we listen to all the polling, Margaret, Hillary Clinton would be in her second term. So I don't believe that polling is nearly as reliable as it used to be and I don't believe that people tell the truth to pollsters. And so at the end of the day, everybody who's trying to make these decisions now is just wrong. Let's remember something, in this- in the Republican primary in '07, do you know who was winning at this time in '07? Mitt Romney. You know who was winning at this time in '11? Newt Gingrich. And winning this time and '15 was Ben Carson. I don't remember any of those presidencies, Margaret. So you know, my view, we can't worry about that kind of stuff. What we need to worry about is the direction this country is going in, and most people don't agree with it. And if you don't agree with the direction of the country, why would you vote for either Trump or Biden, who have put us in this direction?
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, I have a lot more to talk to you about including on the issues and the things that we know from our own polling voters want to hear from candidates like you. So I'm going to ask you to stick with us because I do have to take a commercial break and we'll have more questions on the other side of it.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face The Nation. We have more now from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, candidate for the Republican nomination. Sir, I want to pick up where we left off. You know, we hear from political pundits all the time, oh, Americans just don't care about national security when it comes to how they vote, but you are the only candidate who has gone to both Israel and Ukraine during this campaign, at least only one still standing. Why was it important for you to go?
CHRISTIE: So, I think if you want to be President of the United States, you have to see these things for yourself. You can't count on reports from pundits or the press, or from other folks in public life. You've got to see it for yourself and I will tell you, when I went to Israel, Margaret, just a couple of weeks ago, the inhumanity I saw that Hamas rained upon the Jewish people in Israel, I went into one home of a 24-year-old couple recently married, both were murdered in their small three-room home. And there were 140 bullet holes in the walls to kill two people, Margaret, it's not just the inhumanity that Hamas executes, it's the joy they take in that inhumanity. And that's why Israel has to do what they need to do to eliminate that military threat. And I think I would not have completely understood it, and couldn't be an effective president if I didn't see it for myself.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We'll see if some of the other candidates go, one of the things that I also want to pick up on that we see voters responding to thus far is abortion. You know, it's been a galvanizing issue in favor of Democrats. We've seen that a few times now. Are you concerned that in a head-to-head that that will help to buoy the President himself as he runs for reelection? And how does a Republican candidate like yourself, take the issue to the national stage when the message for decades has been it's a state issue?
CHRISTIE: Look, Margaret, I've been consistent on this. I believe the conservative smart approach is to let the states make these decisions and that's what I think they should do. And that's why I said, I wouldn't sign a six-week national abortion ban as Governor DeSantis and now just recently in Iowa, Governor Haley has said she would sign a six week ban. I don't think you can say one thing in one place and something else in another, you need to be consistent. For 50 years, Republicans have argued that the Supreme Court took this decision away from the people. I think this belongs in the hands of the people of each individual state, we see a great democratic, small d, event going on right now across the country, in places like Michigan and Kansas, in Ohio, where people are voting, but let's let the American people vote in their individual states, and decide what they want this policy to be.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So better for the party not to have a national policy, essentially, is what you're saying.
CHRISTIE: I believe that's- I believe that's true. I believe that's what the Constitution guides us to do. And that's where we should stay and that's where I've been. And I'm concerned, quite frankly, Margaret, that, you know, candidates in this race have been all over the block on this. And it's not right, people deserve to have a straight answer from you and that's my straight answer.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, also, giving a fairly straight assessment is Liz Cheney, the former Congresswoman who just did an interview with my colleague, John Dickerson, and told him, 'the United States is sleepwalking into a dictatorship.' Bob Kagan, writer in the New York- in the Washington Post had an op ed saying, 'after Super Tuesday in March, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee and what happens there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic in his favor,' saying all Republican critics, perhaps even yourself will fall silent out of self preservation. Is that how you see your party behaving after March?
CHRISTIE: Look, I can't speak for everyone in my party, I can only speak for myself, Margaret. And anybody who knows me knows I will not be silent. I haven't been silent since the day I got into this race. And in fact, unlike others, you know, Nikki Haley says he was the right president for the right time and that for some reason, you know, drama and chaos seem to follow him. The reason is that he acts like someone who doesn't care about our democracy acts like someone who wants to be a dictator. He acts like someone who doesn't care for the Constitution. In fact, he's even said himself he'd be willing to suspend the Constitution if an election wasn't going in his direction. Margaret, I was the only one on that stage going back to August, when I- when we were asked would you support someone who, you know, was convicted of a felony for President of the United States? Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, they all raised their hands. I did not and I think I've made it very very clear how I feel about this and if folks want to return to some decency and civility why would you ever vote for Donald Trump.
MARGARET BRENNAN: All right, Chris Christie, we'll watch. Thanks for your time, we'll be right back.
for more features. | US Federal Elections |
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., denied that the information contained in Hunter Biden's laptop hard drive is accurate on Thursday, reviving a debunked claim that the laptop contained Russian disinformation.
Goldman questioned journalist Michael Shellenberger on the topic of Biden's laptop during a Thursday hearing with the House Judiciary Committee. Goldman has repeatedly denied the veracity of what was found on the laptop despite FBI testimony to the contrary.
"You are aware, of course, that the ‘laptop,’ so to speak, that was published in the New York Post was actually a hard drive that the New York Post admitted here was not authenticated as real?" Goldman asked.
"It was the same contents," Shellenberger responded.
"How do you know it's the same contents?" Goldman pressed.
"Because it's the same contents. Everyone has verified that it's the same contents," Shellenberger said.
"You'd have to authenticate it to know that it's the same contents. You have no idea. You know hard drives can be manipulated," Goldman argued.
"Are you suggesting that the New York Post participated in a conspiracy to construct the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop?" Shellenberger asked.
"No, sir. The problem is that hard drives can be manipulated by Rudy Giuliani or Russia," Goldman suggested.
"What's the evidence that that happened?" Shellenberger pressed.
"There is evidence of it, but the point is it's not the same thing," Goldman said.
"So you're engaging in a conspiracy theory," Shellenberger said before being cut off.
Skeptics of the New York Post's original story on Biden's laptop suggested that it may have contained Russian disinformation, citing FBI speculation at the time. FBI agent Laura Dehmlow, who served as Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force at the time, testified in July that the bureau "conditioned" social media companies to believe the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, despite knowing it was legitimate.
"Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray this summer.
The laptop hard dive contained salacious information about Biden's personal life as well as his business dealings.
Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report. | US Political Corruption |
WASHINGTON -- Efforts to deceive the public about voting and elections remain a top concern for state election officials as they dig into preparations for the 2024 election.
Misinformation and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence tools to create false and misleading content were cited in interviews with several secretaries of state gathered recently for their national conference. Other top concerns were staffing and the loss of experienced leaders overseeing elections at the local level. The officials were gathered in Washington for the annual summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State.
“The cliché here is true,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat. “You hope for the best, but plan for the worst. So, we’re planning for the worst, which is that multiple communications channels will be filled with false and misleading information.”
State election officials in Michigan and Colorado said they were particularly concerned about the rise of AI and the implications of it being misused by foreign adversaries seeking to meddle in U.S. elections. They pointed to altered videos, known as deepfakes, that rely on facial mapping and AI to make it appear that real people are saying things they never said.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said she convened a working group in her office to game out potential risks, after a 2020 presidential election that was marred by false claims and attacks on voting. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said state and federal regulations requiring disclosures of AI-generated content are needed along with boosting public awareness.
“We can’t necessarily put the genie back in the bottle, but we can educate citizens about how to receive that information,” said Benson, a Democrat. “And it becomes much easier if there are disclaimers alongside it that says, hey, this is fake.”
Some state election officials said they would not be deterred by a recent court order by a federal judge in Louisiana that limited federal agencies when it comes to contacting social media companies about content deemed false or deceptive with a few exceptions. On Friday, an appeals court temporarily paused the order.
“The injunction doesn’t apply to state officials, so I’m going to keep talking to whoever the hell I want to talk to,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “If you know somebody is out there lying and it hurts voters, they’re literally telling voters the wrong day or the wrong places to vote, literally giving them bad information on purpose, you should be able to shut that down because that’s interfering with the voter’s right to vote.”
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and others pointed to various ways of combating misinformation that don't involve communicating with social media companies. LaRose, a Republican, mentioned one instance in which his staff took a social media post that was spreading misinformation, added a “false” label across it and reposted it while contacting local news to ensure they were aware the original post was not true.
“We’ve worked to actively combat false information, but the way we do it is by spreading copious amounts of truth,” LaRose said.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, praised the federal court ruling and said he was more concerned about the federal government being the one to spread false information. He said he is supportive of efforts by House Republicans to investigate federal agencies over their activities before the 2020 presidential election.
“I think this is the big story going and it far outweighs all this other stuff that we’re talking about here at this conference with regards to cybersecurity and, you know, trusted sources, and on and on,” Warner said. “The federal government shouldn’t be in there telling Americans what they can and can’t hear, see, believe, Google, that sort of thing. So hopefully we’re gonna get it straightened out.”
Chris Krebs, the former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency during the Trump administration, has defended the work his agency did in 2020. In a social media post after the court order, Krebs said his agency only connected state and local election officials with social media companies and did not filter or review any content.
Officials in Pennsylvania and Kentucky both cited staffing as a concern. In Pennsylvania, there has been considerable turnover among those overseeing local elections, driven largely by retirements and increased stress. Al Schmidt, a Republican appointed as Pennsylvania’s chief election official, said the risks are many and the margin for error is small.
“The most dangerous thing is when you lose experienced election workers, you lose institutional memory, you lose all that experience, and it’s replaced by people who are less experienced and who are more likely to make a mistake — and to make a mistake in an environment where every mistake is being perceived as being deliberate or malicious,” he said.
The multi-day conference was the first since several Republicans announced plans earlier this year to leave a bipartisan effort aimed at improving the accuracy of voter lists and identifying fraud, prompting consternation from their Democratic counterparts.
The decisions were made as the Electronic Registration Information Center, more commonly known as ERIC, was targeted by conspiracy theories surrounding its funding and purpose. Republicans cited other reasons for their exit and have been working on an alternate system for sharing data among individual states.
Several Democratic officials said they were uninterested in any alternative to the ERIC system, which still includes a few Republican-led states. They expressed hope that large-population states like California and New York, which are not currently part of ERIC, will join.
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, said he is exploring his state’s options. A court order requires the state to participate in ERIC, according to Adams, but several surrounding states and Florida, where many of his state’s residents retire, are leaving or do not participate.
“Even if ERIC were hunky-dory, I still need to find ways to get information from 30-plus states that aren’t in ERIC,” Adams said.
The conference largely avoided controversial subjects during panel discussions, focused instead on sharing best practices. Several officials said partisan divisions are set aside so they can collaborate on improving elections.
Warner said a Michigan official approached him to talk about efforts in West Virginia to improve voting among active-duty military, and Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he planned to talk with his staff about plans to assist voters with hearing impairments after learning of Minnesota’s efforts.
“There’s still so much more that we agree on than what we disagree on,” said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. “And we’re all a bunch of thieves at the end of the day — we steal ideas from each other and it’s like that’s a really cool program, I want to do that in my state.”
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LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — Police teams had already searched a recycling center in Maine twice before eventually finding the body of the man suspected of killing 18 people in Lewiston was found, authorities said Saturday.
Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck said the teams that scoured the Maine Recycling Corp. property that features as many as 60 trailers, including a tactical team, on Thursday night. He said another state police team returned the site Friday and found Robert Card’s body in a trailer rthat hadn’t been searched.
The 40-year-old Card of Bowdoin — a firearms instructor who grew up in the area — was suspected of also injuring 13 people during a shooting rampage at a bowling alley and bar on Wednesday night in Lewiston. Card died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Jim Ferguson, the ATF special agent in charge in Boston, told The Associated Press that the weapons used in the shooting had been purchased legally. Many firearms were recovered from Card although he declined to say their make, model or how many exactly.
WATCH: ‘Never thought I’d grow up and get a bullet in my leg,’ says 10-year-old victim in Maine
“There were a lot more than three,” Ferguson said.
In the Saturday press conference, Sauschuck said Card had a history of mental illness, but there was no evidence that he had ever been involuntarily committed. “Just because there appears to be a mental health nexus to this scenario, the vast majority of people with mental health diagnosis will never hurt anybody,” he said.
As for why Card chose his targets, Sauschuck said it was likely due to paranoia, that he thought people were talking about him.
He also said the note found in Card’s home was meant for a loved one with the pass code to his phone and bank account numbers. Sauschuck said he wouldn’t describe it as an explicit suicide note but that the tone indicated that was the intent.
Street life returned to Lewiston Saturday morning after a days-long lockdown in the city of 37,000. Joggers took advantage of the warm weather. People walked dogs through downtown and picked up coffees and visited other shops that had been closed since the shooting.
“Right now, we want Maine to be remembered as the community that came together after this tragic event,” said Lisbon Police Chief Ryan McGee, recalling how he drove into town Saturday and saw ”people walking the streets, people sitting on porches, waving. Giving the thumbs up.”
Whitney Pelletier hung a hand-drawn “Lewiston Strong” sign in the glass door of her downtown cafe, Forage, on Saturday morning.
Like other local businesses, Forage has been closed for days as police searched for Card.
“Last night when they found his body, I think the fear that I had been holding onto just living in downtown Lewiston was replaced with sadness,” she said.
The deadliest shootings in Maine history stunned a state of 1.3 million people that has relatively little violent crime and had only 29 killings in all of 2022. In Lewiston, the 37,000 residents and those in surrounding communities were told to stay in their homes as hundreds of police officers, sheriff’s deputies, FBI agents and other law enforcement officials swarmed the area.
The stay at home order was lifted Friday and hours later authorities announced they had found Card’s body.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills announced Card had been found dead at a Friday night news conference. Then, she called for the healing process to begin.
“Like many people I’m breathing a sigh of relief tonight knowing that Robert Card is no longer a threat to anyone,” Mills said.
Hearts are nailed to trees on Oct. 27, 2023 after two mass shootings Wednesday night at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Card was a U.S. Army reservist. Leo Madden, who said he ran Maine Recycling Corp. for decades, told the AP that Card worked there for a couple of years and nothing about him stood out. Madden said he didn’t remember when Card was employed or whether he was fired or quit. The facility is located in Lisbon, not far from Lewiston.
Last summer, Card underwent a mental health evaluation after he began acting erratically during training, a U.S. official told the AP. A bulletin sent to police across the country shortly after the 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.
The military said Card was training with the Army Reserve’s 3rd Battalion, 304th Infantry Regiment in West Point, New York, when commanders became concerned about him. State police took Card to the Keller Army Community Hospital at West Point for evaluation.
On Wednesday, Card attacked the bowling alley first, then went to the bar. Police were quickly sent to both locations but Card was able to escape. For the next two days authorities scoured the woods and hundreds of acres of Card’s family-owned property, and sent dive teams with sonar to the bottom of the Androscoggin River.
Law enforcement officials had said they hadn’t seen Card since his vehicle was left at a boat ramp Wednesday shortly after the shootings.
Hours before Card’s body was found, the names and pictures of the 15 men, two women and 14-year-old boy who died in the shootings were released at a news conference.
The Maine Department of Public Safety said it would open a Family Assistance Center in Lewiston starting Saturday morning to offer help and support to victims at the Lewiston Armory.
The Maine Educational Center for the Deaf said the shootings killed at least four members of their community.
Tammy Asselin was in the bowling alley with her 10-year-old daughter, Toni, and was injured when she fell in the scramble as the shooting began. She had said she hoped the shooter would be found alive because she and her daughter had many questions that they hoped he could answer.
On Saturday morning, she told the AP in a text message that her daughter was relieved by the news, and she was able to sleep peacefully.
“I am relieved as well, but also saddened at a lost opportunity to learn as much as we can,” she said. “Now we are on the journey to heal, and I am looking forward to working on this. It will be difficult but I’m optimistic we will be stronger in the long run.”
The Cards have lived in Bowdoin for generations, neighbors said, and various members of the family own hundreds of acres in the area. The family owned the local sawmill and years ago donated the land for a local church.
Family members of Card told federal investigators that he had recently discussed hearing voices and became more focused on the bowling alley and bar, according to the law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. When he was hospitalized in July in New York, Card had told military officials he had been hearing voices and said he wanted to harm other soldiers, the officials said.
Sauschuck also praised Card’s family called investigators to provide his name to law enforcement soon after police released surveillance pictures of the shooter.
“This family has been incredibly cooperative with us,” Sauschuck said. “Truth be told the first three people that called us … were family members.”
The Lewiston shootings were the 36th mass killing in the United States this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire and Whittle from Portland, Maine. Associated Press journalists who also contributed: Robert Bukaty and Robert Bumsted in Lewiston; Michael Balsamo in New York; and Michael Casey in Boston.
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On Friday morning, George Santos was still a member of Congress. By Monday, he was a member of Cameo. The expulsion of Santos, a serial liar and subject of a 23-count federal indictment, could’ve given Republican leadership a chance to take a sliver of moral high ground. (Santos, by the way, has pleaded not guilty.) And yet Speaker Mike Johnson told his colleagues to “vote their conscience” and didn’t whip votes either way. Of course it’s worth wondering if Johnson, neophyte when it comes to leadership, could actually whip a vote since he’s had some problems passing other bills since his unlikely ascension.
Regardless, the top rung of GOP leadership—Johnson, Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik, and Tom Emmer—all voted against expelling Santos, who, after losing his seat, spent the weekend taking aim at former New York congressional colleagues like Jamaal Bowman, Mike Lawler, and Nicole Malliotakis on X before being used by John Fetterman to troll Bob Menendez.
The ugly resolution of the Santos saga could’ve been the biggest stain on the GOP this month—that is, if the House wasn’t still pursuing its evidence-free (and just embarrassing) Joe Biden impeachment crusade. The GOP’s latest attempt to portray Biden—as opposed to, say, Donald Trump—as corrupt comes in the form of a 78-page report, which Politico already noted Tuesday morning “contains no smoking gun.” Just like when Kevin McCarthy was running the show, the GOP’s case is more about high vibes and misdemeanors (or lack thereof).
But Johnson doesn’t just serve at the pleasure of Matt Gaetz and his band of arsonists who took out McCarthy, but at the pleasure of King Trump. And there’s only one thing the quadruply indicted former president wants besides not going to jail, and that’s to muddy the waters enough so that he can get reelected as the 47th president of the United States. And all he wants for Christmas is Biden’s impeachment.
Texas Republican Troy Nehls, who—surprise!—voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection, acknowledged that targeting Biden is good politics as it’ll give Trump “a little bit of ammo to fire back” by pointing out that Biden was also impeached. Johnson, too, has reportedly suggested behind closed doors that there’s a political rationale for impeaching Biden.
While Nancy Pelosi made a point of protecting her vulnerable members, and even McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry without a full House vote, Johnson seems to have no such anxiety about forcing Republicans in Biden-won districts to formally vote for it. Some appear ready to do so: Punchbowl News reported last week that four vulnerable republicans—Marc Molinaro, Nick LaLota, Brandon Williams, and John Duarte, who won his 2022 California race by less than 1,000 votes—support opening an impeachment inquiry. Duarte told Axios’s Andrew Solender that the vote will be “very soon…I think if we have the votes, it’ll be by the end of the year.”
This past weekend, Johnson and Stefanik went on Trump’s favorite morning show, Fox & Friends, and indicated that his Christmas gift would be under the tree. Impeachment, according to Johnson, had “become a necessary step.”
How better to celebrate the inability to pass a spending bill, than with impeaching a president in the hopes of satiating your autocratic front-runner?
Since we’re the United States of Amnesia, no one seems to remember what happened the last time Republicans tried to impeach a Democratic president. So I called Democratic strategist James Carville, who told me, “I’m begging House Republicans to go through with this and have public hearings, and I promise them it will end very poorly for them.” Shortly after launching the impeachment of Bill Clinton, in October 1998, Republicans performed poorly in the midterms despite enjoying the traditional advantage of being the party of the White House, losing five House seats and making no Senate gains. This defeat created an impeachment hesitation in Washington that today’s GOP’s burn-it-all-down caucus seems to have forgotten, or perhaps, doesn’t care about.
The problem Republicans have can be best summed up by Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, who emailed me, “After weeks without a House Speaker, Republicans should be focused on passing legislation to bring down the cost of food, of gas, and of child care. Instead, their attention is once again on impeaching President Biden. The problem is they have no evidence that the president has done anything wrong. They’ve been looking and they haven’t come up with anything. So this is not a serious effort, it’s a cynical, political stunt to distract from the disarray their caucus is in.” | US Congress |
A Superior Court judge has ordered a new Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, ruling that challenger John Gomes’ claims of unprecedented absentee ballot fraud merit a new election.
The judge ordered the two sides and city election officials to meet within the next 10 days to begin discussions about when to hold a primary and to have an answer by Nov. 17.
Gomes, who previously worked in Ganim’s administration as a chief administrative officer, called the court’s decision “a victory for the people of Bridgeport.”
“Our campaign always believed that the integrity of our democratic process must be upheld and Superior Court Judge William Clark agreed,” Gomes said in a prepared statement.
But the judge’s decision on Wednesday to hold the new primary may not be the end of the legal drama.
Attorneys representing the city said they may file an emergency appeal to the state Supreme Court, raising the possibility that the state’s highest court will be hearing legal arguments as voters go to the polls Tuesday.
Clark’s ruling does not impact actual voting on Tuesday, as the judge has no authority to halt an election.
Gomes is challenging incumbent Mayor Joe Ganim as a third-party candidate.
In his statement Ganim focused more on the upcoming election than the ruling.
“Certainly, today’s decision by the court is a substantial one in the court case, and I’ll wait to be apprised by the lawyers as to whether or not they want to take an appeal,” Ganim said.
“But what hasn’t changed, and what’s really important, is this November 7th, Tuesday, in the city of Bridgeport is Election Day. It’s a general election for mayor and all the municipal offices,” Ganim said, adding.
“I’m the endorsed Democratic candidate on the top line, and I’m asking everyone to come out and vote in this election. Let’s send a powerful message that we want to keep the progress going in Bridgeport.”
The result of next week’s general election will determine what happens next.
If Gomes wins, his attorney William Bloss said, he would withdraw the complaint, and Gomes would be mayor. If Ganim wins Tuesday’s election, another Democratic primary will take place, according to Clark’s order.
If Ganim wins the new primary, he would be reelected mayor, and another general election wouldn’t be necessary, because the relief Gomes was seeking was a new primary election. If Gomes wins the new primary, however, a new city-wide election would have to be held to determine the winner of the mayoral contest, Bloss said.
Gomes and Ganim are going up against Republican David Herz and petitioning candidate Lamond Daniels on Tuesday.
All other city races will be decided on Election Day and are not subject to a new primary.
Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas issued a statement late Wednesday saying she was “pleased” with the judge’s ruling.
“We’re pleased Judge Clark is protecting the integrity of our elections by ordering a new Primary Election,” Thomas said. “Per the Court’s decision, the Secretary of the State’s office will confer with the mayoral candidate campaigns, elections officials in Bridgeport, and other officials to determine the date of the new Primary within 10 days.”
Thomas said her office will work with the interim election monitor to determine next steps, and we will issue a new election calendar, which will be posted to MyVote.ct.gov once the new primary date has been set.
“The Court’s finding that there was a ‘significant mishandling of ballots’ should be of great concern to all,” Thomas said. “Our office will continue to advocate for policies such as drop box surveillance, a Connecticut Election Court, and investment in voter education – all of which will strengthen our election system.”
Still, the city could appeal Clark’s decision directly to the state Supreme Court under what is known as “an expedited public interest appeal,” which would allow the court to hear the appeal immediately, perhaps even before Election Day, which is what occurred during the last Bridgeport mayoral election in 2019 when Ganim defeated Marilyn Moore by about 300 votes in the primary.
Ganim easily won re-election in 2019, after Moore ran as only a write-in candidate. Three weeks after the election, the Supreme Court sided with a previous decision not to order a new primary ending the lawsuit.
Ganim defeated Gomes by 251 votes in the Sept. 12 Democratic primary, but Gomes filed the lawsuit seeking to overturn those results after a video surfaced of Democratic Town Committee vice chairwoman Wanda Geter-Pataky apparently placing multiple absentee ballots into one of the four absentee ballot drop boxes in the city.
“The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all of the parties,” Clark wrote.
Clark said the numerous videos of Geter-Pataky delivering ballots to the drop boxes and assisting other people in dropping off ballots highly suggested that she was breaking the state’s election laws.
“These instances do not appear to the court to be random,” Clark wrote in his opinion.
“The issue in this case is not the applications or even the push to deliver absentee votes. The issue is whether that advocacy crossed a line of the established laws. Specifically, whether individuals who were not the voter and were not authorized under statute handled ballots,” Clark said. “Based on the video and the numbers of absentee votes submitted through the drop box method in Districts 136 and 139 in particular, this court finds that such violations did occur.”
Geter-Pataky was one of eight witnesses who testified during the five-day hearing. She asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions from Bloss 71 times during her testimony.
City Council challenger Eneida Martinez also asserted her Fifth Amendment right when Bloss showed her videos that he claimed were of her dropping multiple ballots into a drop box.
Geter-Pataky and Martinez’s decisions to assert their 5th Amendment rights on the witness stand ultimately assisted Gomes in his lawsuit, the judge wrote.
Clark said he made an “adverse inference” based on their refusal to testify. That essentially means the judge could interpret their silence to mean that they did inappropriately handle other voters’ ballots.
“The counting of any ballots that were mishandled in violation of state law and placed into drop boxes by Ms. Geter-Pataky, Ms. Martinez, and others, was a mistake in the vote count,” Clark wrote. “Given the volume of votes at issue, the miscounting of those statutorily invalid votes leaves this court unable to determine the result of the primary.”
Geter-Pataky and Martinez were followed to the witness stand by Ganim, who testified that he has never talked with Geter-Pataky about distributing absentee ballots for his campaign. Ganim repeatedly referred to her as a “volunteer” and testified his paid campaign staff is trained to never touch someone else’s ballot.
Bloss showed multiple clips of Geter-Pataky and others apparently placing absentee ballots into drop boxes.
“Nearly everyone who looked at the videos was shocked as Judge Clark,” Bloss said. “An election won by breaking the rules isn’t a fair election.”
Bloss based his argument that a new primary is needed on numbers — arguing that as many as 1,253 were submitted through drop boxes, while 2,100 hours of surveillance videos of the city’s four drop boxes show only about 420 people placing ballots in them.
“The number of ballots at issue, when considering the corroborating evidence of the video, documentary evidence and calculations which show a large number of votes in drop boxes and a large percentage of absentee votes in districts connected to Ms. Geter-Pataky and Ms. Martinez, along with the negative inference to be drawn against their preferred candidate, Mr. Ganim, brings the reliability of the primary into serious doubt,” Clark wrote. | US Local Elections |
Ransomware gang files SEC complaint over victim’s undisclosed breach
The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware operation has taken extortion to a new level by filing a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission complaint against one of their alleged victims for not complying with the four-day rule to disclose a cyberattack.
Earlier today, the threat actor listed the software company MeridianLink on their data leak with a threat that they would leak allegedly stolen data unless a ransom is paid in 24 hours.
MeridianLink is a publicly traded company that provides digital solutions for financial organizations such as banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders.
Hackers snitch to the SEC
According to DataBreaches.net, the ALPHV ransomware gang said they breached MeridianLink’s network on November 7 and stole company data without encrypting systems.
The ransomware actor said that “it appears MeridianLink reached out, but we are yet to receive a message on their end” to negotiate a payment in exchange for not leaking the supposedly stolen data.
The alleged lack of response from the company likely prompted the hackers to exert more pressure by sending a complaint to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about MeridianLink not disclosing a cybersecurity incident that impacted “customer data and operational information.”
To show that their complaint is real, ALPHV published on their site a screenshot of the form they filled out on SEC’s Tips, Complaints, and Referrals page.
In their own words, the attacker told the SEC that MeridianLink suffered a “significant breach” and did not disclose it as required in Form 8-K, under Item 1.05.
Following a barrage of security incidents at U.S. organizations, the SEC adopted new rules that require publicly traded companies to report cyberattacks that have a material impact, i.e. influence investment decisions.
Cybersecurity incident reporting is “due four business days after a registrant determines that a cybersecurity incident is material,” the new rule states.
However, the SEC’s new cybersecurity rules are set to take effect on December 15, 2023, Reuters explained at the beginning of October.
ALPHV also provided on their site the reply they received from the SEC to the complaint against MeridianLink, to show that the submission was received.
MeridianLink confirms cyberattack
In a statement for BleepingComputer, MeridianLink said that after identifying the incident it acted immediately to contain the threat and engaged a team of third-party experts to investigate.
The company added that it is still working to determine if any consumer personal information was impacted by the cyberattack and it will notify affected parties if so.
While many ransomware and extortion gangs have threatened to report breaches and data theft to the SEC, this may be the first public confirmation that they have done so.
Previously, ransomware actors exerted pressure on victims by contacting customers to let them know of the intrusion. Sometimes, they would also try to intimidate the victim by contacting them directly over the phone. | US Crime, Violence, Terrorism & cybercrime |
Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator “just for day one” of his presidency if he is re-elected amid a spate of grim warnings over consequences if the twice-impeached president wins the 2024 elections.
Mr Trump appeared to duck the question twice during a Fox News townhall on Tuesday when Sean Hannity categorically asked him to say that he will not abuse presidential powers if he wins the elections.
“Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if re-elected president, to abuse power?” Hannity asked. “To break the law? To use the government to go after people?”
“You mean like they’re using right now?” Mr Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination said, deflecting the questions.
Mr Trump lamented that what happened to his administration has not happened in the history of America and that he has been indicted more times than the gangster Al Capone.
But Hannity pressed Mr Trump again to promise Americans that he will never abuse power as a president.
“You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” he repeated.
“Except for Day 1,” Mr Trump said swiftly. "I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill."
“Look,” Mr Trump said to the crowd in Davenport, Iowa. “He’s going crazy,” he joked referring to Hannity.
"I love this guy," he said of the Fox News host. "He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator."’
It comes as lawmakers and commentators are issuing warnings and predicting consequences of Mr Trump’s return to power.
Several Democrats, including Joe Biden, have expressed alarm over Trump’s campaign rhetoric and ambitious proposals for a second term that include the mass dismissal of large swaths of the federal bureaucracy and a focus on targeting his political adversaries.
"Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s re-elected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one. Americans should believe him," president Joe Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement in response to Mr Trump’s comments.
Mr Biden on Tuesday again warned that Mr Trump and his allies are out to "destroy" democratic institutions as he assailed the GOP front-runner at a series of fundraisers.
"If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running. But we cannot let him win,” he said at a campaign event in Massachusetts.
Mr Trump was US president between 2017 and 2021, and has refused to concede that he lost to Mr Biden in the 2020 election.
Since then Mr Trump has spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a conspiracy that fueled the deadly insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Trump’s election lies also form a cornerstone of his current White House campaign.
Liz Cheney, a vocal critic of Mr Trump within the Republican Party, has also expressed concerns about the nation "sleepwalking into dictatorship" and said she is considering a third-party presidential candidacy as a potential measure to prevent such a scenario.
The questions at the town hall appeared to be a part of efforts by a longtime Mr Trump supporter and adviser Hannity to coach the former president to say things that will benefit him politically.
It comes a day before Mr Trump‘s leading rivals gather at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for the fourth GOP debate that the former president is expected to miss. | US Federal Elections |
ProPublica has long detailed how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and other companies have worked against making tax preparation easier and less costly.
For the past quarter century, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has worked to thwart one clear threat to its profits: a free, publicly funded tool to file taxes online. The company’s success at preventing that threat was near total — until earlier this year, when the IRS announced a plan to test such an approach. Advocates cheered, seeing it as a first step to a system where Americans, particularly low-income taxpayers, could easily avoid paying big fees for tax preparation.
It’s a new chapter in the long-running conflict over free tax filing, but Intuit has fallen back on some tried-and-true tactics, ones previously documented by ProPublica. In Washington, D.C., the company has deployed 63 lobbyists this year, according to OpenSecrets, to stalk the halls of government. Meanwhile, op-eds and stories that parrot Intuit’s talking points have appeared in at least 20 newspapers and other publications across the country.
The centerpiece of this PR push has been an argument that Intuit unveiled on its website in May. Seeking to capitalize on recent research that found racial disparities in IRS audits, the company has argued that an IRS tax filing tool would only make things worse. It’s a conclusion rejected by authors of that research, but the idea has certainly made for some eye-catching headlines.
“IRS Free Tax Service Could Further Harm Blacks,” is how the Defender, a Black paper in Houston, put it in a June headline. The piece cited unnamed “industry experts” as raising the concern but quoted only one person by name: Intuit’s spokesperson Derrick Plummer. The story was produced by Trice Edney News Wire, a service that provides content to local Black papers across the country. Hazel Trice Edney, the service’s editor-in-chief, did not respond to requests for comment.
Later that month, an article in Black Enterprise (“Critics Claim The IRS Free Tax Prep Service Could Hurt Black Americans”) took a similar approach. The story’s arguments were attributed to “industry skeptics” or other unnamed opponents of the IRS proposal, while Intuit’s Plummer was the only critic identified by name, and he was quoted at length. Ida Harris, Director of Digital Content for Black Enterprise, which touts itself as “the premier business, investing, and wealth-building resource for African Americans,” told ProPublica that “the story came to fruition through information shared by a fellow media professional,” but declined to identify who that was. The article was “not sponsored content, no payola was involved,” she said.
Internal Intuit documents from last decade, previously divulged by ProPublica, made clear that “pushing back through op-eds” was part of the company’s strategy against what it called government “encroachment.” One specific goal: “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media.” ProPublica did not find evidence that Intuit has paid to place stories this year, but otherwise, the 2023 campaign seems to be following that template.
TurboTax has long dominated the market for online tax filing, in part by luring customers with the promise of “free” filing. A wave of government investigations, prompted by ProPublica’s reporting, has accused Intuit of frequently misleading customers with that promise. Most recently, a Federal Trade Commission judge ruled that the agency’s fraud suit against Intuit can proceed. Intuit has denied wrongdoing and has vowed to appeal.
Back in 2014, ProPublica reported on an Intuit-backed campaign against the idea of return-free filing, a government service that would pre-fill tax return information, just as governments do in many other countries. A rabbi, a state NAACP official and others penned pieces claiming return-free filing would hurt “the most vulnerable people.” Various PR firms and lobbyists were involved in organizing the effort.
This time around, the threat to the tax prep industry is what the IRS has called a direct file option. The agency will build an online tool similar to TurboTax that allows people to file their taxes by answering simple questions. The option will not be widely available next tax season, however, since it is only a test run. The agency has yet to detail who will be eligible to use it.
“The fact of the matter is that the industry is targeting black and brown communities trying to stoke fear of a direct file tool,” said Brandon Tucker, senior policy director of Color of Change, an online activist organization devoted to racial justice that supports direct file. “Black people are critical to their profit margins.”
In a statement, Plummer, Intuit’s spokesperson, declined to comment on the company’s role in the recent spate of op-eds, except to deny it had paid to secure the pieces. “With an idea as bad as the Direct File scheme we don’t have to pay anyone to talk about how terrible it is,” he wrote. “The fact that Americans across the political spectrum and people of color are raising alarm bells about how harmful the Direct File scheme will be to the most vulnerable should be a wake-up call to its cheerleaders.”
In July, Benjamin Chavis penned the highest profile entry in the current wave of Intuit-friendly op-eds. Chavis is a former executive director of the NAACP who currently heads the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade association for Black papers. He also is the national co-chair of No Labels, which seeks to raise $70 million to launch a third-party presidential ticket for 2024. (“Dr. King was a centrist” and would have supported No Labels, Chavis has argued.) Chavis did not respond to questions from ProPublica. His Chicago Tribune op-ed did not quote Intuit, but used language that echoed the company’s arguments. “The IRS has an alternative to TurboTax. But will that widen the racial wealth gap?” was the headline.
One of Chavis’ arguments, that an IRS tool could lead Black taxpayers to miss out on tax credits, came from a report by the Progressive Policy Institute. Despite its name, the nonprofit think tank is aligned with the pro-business wing of the Democratic Party and has a long history with Intuit. (One Intuit document listed PPI as part of its “coalition.”) After the company’s long-tenured chief lobbyist retired, he joined PPI’s board. PPI declined to say whether Intuit had contributed to the organization. In a statement, PPI President Will Marshall said, “No funding source has a vote on the subjects PPI tackles or the positions it takes.”
The core of Chavis’ piece was the same as the earlier stories by Trice Edney News Wire and Black Enterprise — an argument from an Intuit blog post.
Earlier this year, a study by a team of academic and government researchers found that the IRS audited Black taxpayers between three and five times the rate of other taxpayers. As a result, Intuit argued, having the IRS prepare the taxes of Black taxpayers “would likely increase these inequities.” Chavis more timidly offered that it “may increase racial income inequality.”
The study itself, however, lends no support to that conclusion. The authors pinpointed audits of people who claim the earned income tax credit as the driver of the racial disparity. The EITC is one of the main anti-poverty programs in the U.S. and is aimed primarily at low-income, working parents: Most recipients earn under $20,000 a year. For decades, the IRS has disproportionately audited EITC claimants because of pressure from Republicans in Congress as well as laws that require a special focus on “improper payments.”
Together with the gutting of the IRS’ budget, which caused audits of the rich to tank, the focus on the EITC meant the agency audited those who claimed the credit at about the same rate as the top 1% of taxpayers by income. Another clear consequence was that Black taxpayers, who on average have lower incomes, were disproportionately audited. ProPublica examined these problems in articles in 2018 and 2019. One of those articles reported that “the five counties with the highest audit rates are all predominantly African American, rural counties in the Deep South.” ProPublica’s work was cited in Congress as well as in the study.
The researchers found that the way the IRS selected EITC audits made the disparity even worse, but put the blame on “seemingly technocratic choices about algorithmic design,” not conscious bias.
Evelyn Smith, one of the co-authors of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Michigan, disagreed with Intuit’s take on her work. “With free, assisted filing, we might expect EITC claimants to make fewer mistakes and face less intense audit scrutiny, which could help reduce disparities in audit rates between Black and non-Black taxpayers," she said.
Last week, in response to the study’s findings, the IRS announced major changes to how it audits EITC claims. The agency will “substantially” reduce the number of EITC audits, said IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel. The move is part of the IRS’ broader shift to focus more on high-end tax evasion.
The recent PR push against direct file has not been limited to Black publications and authors. In Nevada, a pair of accountants and the state’s former controller penned op-eds in local newspapers with almost the same wording. “We urge Nevadans to speak out about this congressional proposal and urge our elected officials in Washington D.C. to not let the IRS have more power than it already has!” said one. “I urge all Nevadans to speak out about this Congressional proposal and urge our elected officials in Washington D.C. to not let the IRS have more power than it already has!” said the other. Neither the writers nor the editors of papers they appeared in responded to requests for comment.
In Arizona, a lawyer named Phillip Austin, vice chair of the East Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, argued in the Arizona Republic in July that the IRS providing free tax filing “would disproportionately hurt the Hispanic community.” Austin told ProPublica that he was not compensated for writing the piece. “I submitted the letter as an Op-Ed, reflecting my opinion, citing research,” he said, but declined to say how he came to write it.
Meanwhile, there’s been a steady supply of op-eds and letters from right-leaning and centrist nonprofits denouncing direct file in politically oriented Washington, D.C., publications. In July alone, The Hill ran four op-eds against the idea. One came from Center Forward, a group that says it aims to “give voice to the center of the American electorate.” Recently listed as among the group’s “stakeholders” was H&R Block’s chief lobbyist. Neither Center Forward nor H&R Block responded to requests for comment.
While the op-eds keep coming, the tax prep industry did get one early win in Congress. In July, the House Appropriations Committee passed a provision barring the IRS from spending money on “a free, public electronic return-filing service option.” A similar provision almost became law in 2019.
This provision is unlikely to pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate, however. Instead, the IRS is on track to launch its direct file pilot next tax season. What happens after this spring is unclear — except that Intuit will continue to work to make sure the idea goes no further. | US Federal Policies |
Lawmakers voted Tuesday to oust embattled Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Such a move is the first in time history that the top member of the House has been removed from the job. Eight Republicans sided with every Democrat in a 216-210 vote.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., introduced a measure against McCarthy known as a motion to vacate on Monday night, accusing him of breaking promises he made to win the speaker's gavel in January.
"For the last eight months, Speaker McCarthy has been in breach of that agreement," Gaetz said Tuesday in a statement. "All of Speaker McCarthy’s failure theater resulted in him teaming up with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution that funds Ukraine, funds Jack Smith’s election interference against President Trump, abandons E-Verify, and does nothing to put the interests of the American people first."
Here are the eight Republicans who broke with their party to oust McCarthy:
Rep. Andy Biggs, Arizona
During remarks on the House floor, Biggs said McCarthy's passage of a budget resolution only further negatively impacted the national debt and immigration.
"Until you leverage the budget and spending, you will not see enforcement by this administration," he said.
In a statement earlier, he said McCarthy had failed as an effective leader.
"He has gone against many of the promises he made in January and can no longer be trusted at the helm," he wrote.
Rep. Ken Buck, Colorado
Buck said his vote stemmed from McCarthy's fiscal moves he says has elevated the national debt.
"We are $33 trillion in debt and on track to hit $50 trillion by 2030," he wrote on social media. "We cannot continue to fund the government by continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills. That's why I voted to oust @SpeakerMcCarthy. We must change course to sensible budgeting and save our country."
In another statement, Buck said he initially supported McCarthy in January because he was in the best position to keep the GOP's promises to the American people.
"It’s clear that we need a principled Speaker who can keep his word not just to members of Congress, but to the American people," he wrote.
Rep. Tim Burchett, Tennessee
Burchett described McCarthy as a friend but that his vote to oust McCarthy was "a choice between that and my conscious."
"This was a tough decision. I voted for McCarthy for Speaker of the House back in January and I consider him a friend," he said in a statement. "However, I had to vote for what I think is best for the American people."
"We need leadership that will take real action to address our country’s serious financial crisis and steer us in a better direction, and we shouldn’t settle for anything less than that," he added.
Before the vote, Burchett said he was poised to remove McCarthy over the $33 trillion in debt, saying the House needed to change direction in leadership.
Rep. Eli Crane, Arizona
Crane didn't mention McCarthy by name but said after the vote that change is needed to overhaul the "ineffective and dishonest way" Washington works.
"I'm prepared to support a speaker who agrees," he said.
Earlier, he said Republicans have capitulated to Democrats to support their measures.
"Each time our majority has had the chance to fight for bold, lasting change for the American people, leadership folded and passed measures with more Democrat support than Republican," he said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida
Gaetz led the effort to remove McCarthy, whom he often criticized for negotiations over the debt ceiling and other measures.
In an interview after the vote, he called the former speaker a "feature of the swamp."
"He has risen to power by collecting special interest money and redistributing that money in exchange for favors," he said. "We are breaking the fever now."
In a social media post, Gaetz said: "The fight is not over. Now we must elect a Speaker."
Rep. Bob Good, Virginia
Good cited this past weekend's continuing resolution, which kept the government open, in his remarks.
"The American people need a Speaker who will fight to keep the promises Republicans made to get the majority, not someone who cuts fiscally irresponsible deals that get more Democrat votes than Republican votes," he said in a statement.
Rep. Nancy Mace, South Carolina
Mace said McCarthy had not "lived up to his word" on how the House would operate.
"There has also been no action on many issues we care about and were promised," the South Carolina congresswoman in a statement. "We were promised we would move on women’s issues and legislation to keep our communities safe. Those things never happened.
"I came here to take difficult votes and do the right thing, regardless of the pressure and regardless of the threats (bc there’s been plenty of both)," she added. "Today I’m voting against 95 percent of my party in the hopes of fixing how Congress operates."
She said as long as McCarthy remains as house speaker, "this chaos will continue."
Rep. Matt Rosendale, Montana
Rosendale accused McCarthy of working against the Republican Party and supporting "ploys to aid the left."
"This demonstration of failed leadership is exactly why I plan on supporting the motion to vacate this afternoon," he said in a statement.
Before the vote, he told Fox News in a statement that he planned to help oust McCarthy over him working with Democrats on the debt limit deal earlier this year, not negotiating with the Senate over the NDAA, and pushing a continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown over the weekend.
Fox News Digital's Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report. | US Congress |
Mike Pence and wife Karen strolled through the Iowa state fair, their little fingers locked together, as soap bubbles drifted by and chairlifts trundled overhead. The couple donned red aprons – his said “Vice President Mike Pence” – and flipped pork chops on a giant grill while smiling for photographers.
Then, with a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead and settling on his cheek on a hot August day, Pence told reporters that he was the “most qualified candidate” and “most consistent conservative in the field” for the Republican nomination for US president in 2024.
But the carefully choreographed scene hit a glitch. Andrew Wallace was wearing a “Make America great again” cap and “Buck Fiden” T-shirt and holding a “Trump” sign as well as Pence’s memoir So Help Me God. The 21-year-old from Wisconsin said loudly: “Mike Pence is a traitor and we all know it. He could have sent the votes back to the states but he chose not to do it because he’s a coward.”
The episode offered a stark reminder that Pence, once loyal to the point of sycophancy, now stands accused of treachery by supporters of former president Donald Trump over his refusal to overturn their defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Some called for the then vice-president to be hanged as they stormed the US Capitol on January 6 2021 (this week in Iowa a man approached Pence and remarked: “I’m glad they didn’t hang you.”)
Now Pence has emerged as one of the central figures in a criminal indictment of Trump over his alleged effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Filed earlier this month by special counsel Jack Smith, the indictment documents Trump’s many attempts to pressure Pence to disrupt the certification process on January 6. At one point, Trump allegedly told Pence, “You’re too honest.”
Although constitutional experts agree that Pence had no authority to challenge the election results, his role in certifying Trump’s defeat has won him few fans with Republican voters, 70% of whom believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. That reality has complicated, if not erased, the hopes of a man seen by many as a throwback to a Republican party that has largely ceased to exist.
Pence used his platform at the Iowa state fair – a rite of passage for candidates to gorge on fried food and woo middle America – to defend his actions in protecting the constitution, affirm a hawkish approach foreign policy and endorse cutting welfare benefits in the name of fiscal responsibility. He spoke of his faith in God, civility and former president Ronald Reagan. These would once have been uncontroversial, even essential foundations of any Republican candidacy, especially in religiously conservative Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses in January.
But Trump took over the party of Reagan and transformed it from within. He attacked constitutional democracy with a barrage of lies, promoted “America-first” isolationism and ran up a huge national debt. There is nothing traditional about his approach to civility or God. All of which has left Pence out of step with the party base.
One example is over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Pence has pledged continued US support but Trump and his allies in Congress want to halt funding. Wallace, the Trump supporter, said: “If Mike Pence was a true conservative, he would join the conservative movement and oppose the war in Ukraine.”
John Rusk, a Republican who opposes Trump, retorted: “How would you like it if your country was overtaken – your democratic country was attacked, bombed, raped, murdered, looted? Come on. That’s not the American way. The American way is to stop people like that, stop tyrants.”
Wallace replied: “Talk to the majority of young Republicans. They did a poll of that kind down in West Palm Beach and 96% opposed it. Those are the young people, Gen Z, millennials. If the people that are going to be fighting in a war don’t want to fight the war then why are the people like you, the older generation, fighting for us to go to Ukraine?”
With that he left and Rusk shouted after him: “You want Russia to come here then, don’t you? You’d love it.”
Pence is also the only major candidate who supports a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. Recent voters across America suggest this could be an electoral liability. But Pence said on Friday: “I reject the notion that … standing for the sanctity of life is a political loser. There are things more important than politics but I really believe that, when we stand for the sanctity of life on principle and with compassion, the American people will rally to our cause.”
Earlier, the former vice-president drew a crowd of about a hundred people to an event hosted by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. Wearing checked shirt, blue jeans and brown boots, the white-haired Pence, once described by Trump as “central casting”, looked the part of a Republican candidate from another era. He played folksy by praising the food at the state fair, saying he would see its famed butter cow sculpture and recalling a meeting in Iowa with a cow called Chippy.
Sherry Power, 78, a retired nurse from Corona, California, who said: “I love him. He’s got integrity like we don’t see any more here and he’ll build on that if he gets in. He doesn’t have bad things to say about any of the other people that are running for president and I like that. He has experience and that is the big difference between he and a lot of the other people that are running.”
But Pence’s poor standing in opinion polls underscores the monumental challenge he faces. According to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, he stands at a distant fourth in the race, winning the support of roughly 5% of likely Republican primary voters across the country. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Pence at just 3% in Iowa, which will hold its caucuses in January.
In one bleak sign of his primary prospects, Pence raised a meagre $1.2m during the second quarter of the year. That haul put Pence behind two other candidates, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who announced their campaigns the same week that he did.
The Pence campaign is remaining upbeat and content with the notion that he represents traditional values. Marc Short, an adviser, said: “I would argue that he’s the only classical conservative in this race. But as he says, what the Trump-Pence era did was to build upon that, not to replace it. It took that as the foundation and there were some populist policies added on top of that. There’s a much broader number of classical Republicans still in our party and we’ll test that theory.”
But political analysts regard his chances as slim. Michael D’Antonio, co-author of The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, said: “I don’t know what he’s doing in this race other than trying to keep himself in the public eye. His candidacy is really puzzling. I don’t get it. Maybe he’s trying to recover some of the dignity he lost as vice-president.”
D’Antonio suggested the former vice-president’s campaign may be intended for the history books rather than the primary voters of today. “The stand that he took on January 6 is the main thing that has distinguished him as a public official, and he could be trying to make sure that history doesn’t forget,” he said. “In a way, defying Trump’s base is similar to defying Trump himself on that day.”
But in Iowa, David Stelzer, who at the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox asked Pence if he had committed treason, thinks he should have spoken out much sooner after January 6. “The sad thing is he won’t get that chapter in a future Profiles in Courage book because he didn’t finish the job and it was because he’s so worried about alienating the Trump base.”
Stelzer, 63, a retired federal government employee who lives in Denver, added: “His chances in the Republican primary are zero. This is the tragedy. He will not win because the Trump base will not allow it. I mean, Jesus, they set up gallows for him.” | US Federal Elections |
I watch the news for a living and come across moments of political dysfunction at a regular clip.
So, I was not shocked to learn that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who until last month was second in the presidential line of succession, shoved a congressman in a “clean shot to the kidneys.” Nor was I particularly outraged to learn that on the same day across the Capitol, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Republican, challenged a union leader to a brawl, only to later go on Fox News and claim more members of Congress should normalize physical fights in order to maintain “respect” for the institution.
The episodes this week, equal parts reprehensible and dumb, were not aberrations on the right, where viral shitposting has effectively replaced public service. As I started to eye-roll the latest fisticuffs out of my brain, I recalled a 2019 conversation my colleague Tim Murphy had with Yale historian Joanne Freeman, an expert on congressional violence during the antebellum era. After January 6, I had been wondering how we should separate the performance of violence from the real thing, and what is risked when weaponized incompetence replaces enforcement of the most basic rules. I called Freeman to learn more. The following interview is edited for length and clarity.
What was your initial reaction to the Kevin McCarthy and Markwayne Mullin incidents?
My initial thought, as a historian who’s spent a lot of time focused on physical violence in Congress in the 19th century, was that this sort of thing happens in the modern Congress every now and again but what happened yesterday, all in one day, felt to me like a really obvious indication of the fact that the Republican Party is not a party right now.
Because if there was a functional party there, they would impose some discipline. They would have some kind of shared purpose or cause that would be keeping people in line and cooperating.
Lashing out happens from time to time. Maybe not as publicly or as often as it’s happening right now. But still, some of what we’re seeing now is explicitly because there are no brakes on the Republican Party. There are people who are extreme and are pushing things in an extreme direction. And others aren’t really saying very much about what’s going on. In some cases, silence is compliance.
Let’s talk about lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), people who frequently invoke violence and name-calling against their perceived opponents. What do they suggest about Congress in 2023?
Looking back in time, the violence and the threats that happened in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s mostly came from Southerners who were willing to do or say anything to protect the institution of slavery. They didn’t necessarily care about the rules. What that meant was you had a group of people who were willing to engage in this violent bullying mode of politics. Not only were they not called to account for it but some of their constituents cheered them on for it.
On the other hand, you had mostly Northerners sometimes who did not like that kind of behavior—who very often after a bad incident, would [invoke] the rules. Now, strikingly, that’s what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did yesterday—when Mullin seemingly took his wedding ring off, stood up, and was ready to engage in a fistfight.
Right now, there’s not a lot of respect, particularly on the right, for the institution of Congress. Republicans don’t seem to be allowed to cooperate, to compromise, to do anything in league with the other side.
Mullin was later on Fox News where he invoked Andrew Jackson and the history of “caning” in the Senate to suggest that more members of Congress should normalize this behavior. What do you think of that?
There were so many aspects of yesterday that hit me over the head as a historian and that was one of them. In the days of dueling, the argument among those who approved of it echoed what Mullin asserted: That if people are afraid they are going to get shot for what they say, then they’re going to be careful of what they say. Once you had the Civil War, and the Southerners came back to Congress, many of them assumed that they would march right back in and behave that way again. But Northerners, having won that war, you saw them stepping in and saying: We’re a different kind of country now. We don’t operate that way anymore. That’s not acceptable.
Another interesting thing that Sen. Mullin said is that his constituents want him to behave this way. There was a member of Congress named Henry Wise, a great opponent of John Quincy Adams and a supporter of slavery from Virginia. Wise got involved in more fights than anyone else and [Mullins’ argument] was essentially his argument too. In the same way that Mullin supposedly removed his wedding ring, Henry Wise would roll up his sleeves and get ready to fight at any given moment.
At some point, someone said to him: You should be ashamed of yourself. Your constituents should just boot you out. His response, and I’m paraphrasing, was something like: Go ahead, throw me out because you know what my constituents put me here to do that. They put me here to fight in whatever way I need to fight for their rights.
Henry Wise was reelected six times. So he was right; there was an audience and support from Southerners for that kind of behavior.
In any other working environment, you would be fired for this type of behavior. It’s crazy to me that Congress lacks similar rules.
Well, they have the rules. They’re just not enforced.
Exactly.
There’s such a long history of people in government behaving in corrupt and inappropriate ways and having absolutely no accountability for that. What’s happening now is in part because of social media. We see these moments that spread very quickly. There was a similar moment in the late 1840s and early 1850s with the telegraph, when suddenly the entire nation could learn something that happened in Congress within 45 minutes without congressional spin. Suddenly, members of Congress realized that whatever they did, it was going to go out into the world and that they couldn’t control it.
The telegraph meant that whatever happened in Congress became national property very quickly, and that scrambled democratic politics very quickly. We are very much living in a similar moment. Democratic politics relies on communication between the people and those in government, so any form of technology that scrambles that kind of conversation scrambles democracy.
One thing that struck me reading your conversation with my colleague Tim Murphy from a few years ago is the idea that, for the most part, people in government making these types of threats don’t truly want to inflict real harm. Has your opinion on that changed since January 6?
I still believe that most of the goals around this type of behavior, both today and in the period I write about, are not to be violent. It’s to frighten people off. To silence them and force them into compliance. As long as the threat is credible, you don’t necessarily have to be violent to have an impact. We are living in such a moment of crisis of accountability, in which no one wants to be held accountable for anything. You have election denial. You have people who feel free to be able to say anything. One of the core components of a democracy is that people with power are held accountable for the ways they use that power. That’s why free and fair elections and voting rights are core elements of a functioning democracy, and we’re watching them get eroded.
How do we separate the performance of violence from actual physical violence?
It’s hard to do. Some of this is and always has been performative, even in the period that I have written about. Back then, they did what they did, and then behind the scenes, they would try and talk things out. The problem right now is you don’t get the sense that there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes going on.
Henry Wise at one point threatened John Quincy Adams during a debate by telling him, “If you weren’t who you are, you would feel more than the force of my words.” (Adams in his diary later wrote, “So Wise, just threatened to kill me!”) But apparently, not long after Wise’s threat, he personally walked over to Adams and asked if they could talk it out. So clearly, some of that was obviously performance to both members of Congress and performance to the public. But right now, I’m not sure that the line is so obvious.
It’s all about manhood and power. The brute force, chest-beating, and threat-tossing. That’s part of what we’re seeing.
The other part of what we’re seeing is that we are in a moment when the people who have power want to keep power and do not respect the rights of people who are not like them. When other people gain power—whether it’s demographically or democratically—they see it as an attack. It doesn’t represent more people having rights. It represents them losing what they feel that they deserve. They feel so absolutely entitled to power and they behave in a way that is manly, that allows them to pose as strong.
But it’s fundamentally a posture of fear and weakness. | US Congress |
Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the ongoing civil fraud trial of former President Donald Trump and other defendants in New York, upheld aon Wednesday over comments Trump made outside the courtroom.
Engoron announced the decision Thursday about an hour after Trump's attorneys asked him to reconsider the fine.
The judgein the case on the second day of the trial earlier this month, barring Trump from posting or commenting about members of his staff. The order came shortly after Trump posted a photo of Engoron's clerk on his Truth Social platform. The post was automatically syndicated to Trump's campaign website, where it remained even after it was deleted on Truth Social. Engoron for that violation last week, and warned Trump that he would face more serious sanctions for future offenses, including possible jail time.
The gag order became an issue at the trial again on Wednesday. Trump attended the proceedings to observe the testimony of Michael Cohen, his former attorney who is a key witness for the state. During a break, Trump spoke to reporters outside the courtroom and referenced "a person who is very partisan sitting alongside" Engoron. The judge's clerk typically sits right next to him.
Engoron called Trump to the stand to explain himself, and the former president claimed he was referring to Cohen, not the clerk. In a written version of his ruling imposing the $10,000 fine Thursday morning, Engoron wrote that he was not persuaded by Trump's explanation.
"Donald Trump testified under oath that he was referring to Michael Cohen. However, as the trier of fact, I find this testimony rings hollow and untrue," the judge wrote. "The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'alongside' as 'close to the side of; next to.' Witnesses do not sit 'alongside' the judge, they sit in the witness box, separated from the judge by a low wooden barrier."
The judge wrote that Trump's "past public statements demonstrate him referring to Michael Cohen directly by his name, or by a derogatory name, but in all circumstances, he is unambiguous in making it known he is referring to Michael Cohen."
At the start of Thursday's proceedings, Trump attorney Christopher Kise argued that the $10,000 fine was unconstitutional.
Kise argued that if the judge watched video of Trump's comment, he might conclude he was in fact talking about Cohen. But even if Engoron didn't agree, Kise argued the matter deserves First Amendment consideration.
"Barring a defendant from commenting on his perception of fairness in a proceedings, based on his own perception, is not constitutional," Kise said. "His perception is based on sitting in a courtroom, watching your law secretary pass notes to you, talking to you."
Kise said he intended to appeal the ruling. He asked the judge to allow the defense to photograph the bench, so the appellate court could assess whether it was fair to say that Cohen was sitting alongside the judge, as opposed to the clerk.
Lawyers from New York Attorney General Letitia James' office supported the judge's finding. Andrew Amer, an attorney for that office, said, "You put Donald Trump on the stand, you heard his testimony. You assessed his credibility and you made a decision."
Amer later added, "We think it was appropriate under the circumstances, and there's no reason Your Honor should change" it.
Engoron initially said he would "reconsider" his fine but soon said he was "adhering to that decision" after reviewing footage of Trump's comment.
"There was a brief, but clear transition … from one person to another, and I think the original person he was referring to was very clear," Engoron said, indicating he believed Trump was not talking about Cohen.
Trump's attorneys have frequently argued that his status as a candidate should factor into any ruling that could limit his freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Before upholding the fine, the judge implied that Trump's presidential candidacy would not weigh on his decision.
"Anybody can run for president. I am going to protect my staff, which is basically about three people," Engoron said.
for more features. | US Political Corruption |
Nov 15 (Reuters) - Lawyers representing a group of Colorado voters are set to deliver closing arguments on Wednesday in a lawsuit seeking to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state's ballot next year over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
The voters are seeking to use the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, which bars officials who have engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" from holding public office, to argue that Trump is ineligible to run for president in 2024. The provision was ratified in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War.
The case represents a test of legal efforts to use the 14th Amendment to block Trump's candidacy. It is the first such case to go to trial.
The voters, represented in the case by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), sued Colorado's secretary of state, the state's top elections official, in a bid to block Trump's inclusion on the ballot. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Biden in the 2024 U.S. election.
Lawyers in the case on Wednesday will make their final pitch to Colorado District Court Judge Sarah Wallace, who will decide the case, following a weeklong trial that featured testimony from U.S. lawmakers, legal experts and Republican political operatives.
Thousands of people stormed the Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden's 2020 victory over Trump. The lawyers for the voters have sought to convince the judge that Trump's actions in spreading false claims of voter fraud, summoning his supporters to Washington on the day of the riot and initially refusing pleas to quell the violence amounted to an insurrection.
Trump's lawyers have denied that he incited his supporters to violence and have argued that disqualifying him from the ballot would set a dangerous precedent.
Colorado is regarded as a safely Democratic state by nonpartisan election forecasters. Regardless of whether Trump is on the ballot, Biden would be expected to win there. But CREW and other activists are seeking to bring a series of legal challenges to Trump's eligibility based on the 14th Amendment language.
Courts in Michigan and Minnesota have ruled that Trump can remain on the ballot for the Republican primaries in those states, but declined to immediately decide on his eligibility for the November 2024 general election.
The cases raise several unsettled legal questions. Many experts view the effort as a legal longshot. The U.S. Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three Trump appointees, may ultimately weigh in.
Reporting by Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | US Federal Elections |
In response to Israel’s war against Hamas, President Joe Biden and the now criminally indicted leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have demonstrated very different models of leadership. The stark differences between the two leaders are another example of how America’s democracy crisis is not “just” a political problem: It is a moral and cultural sickness that is far greater than any one political leader, political party, or political movement.
President Biden has given a series of speeches and interviews where he condemned Hamas’ barbarism, reinforced America’s commitment to Israel, emphasized the need to find a long-term solution to peace in the region, attempted to calm worries that the war could spiral into a larger regional conflict, cautioned against the temptations of antisemitism and hatred in their various forms, and spoke directly about the need to protect the human rights of the people of Gaza, the majority of whom have no connection to Hamas. President Biden traveled to Israel on Wednesday to signal America’s support for the war against Hamas. While there, he also announced humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza.
Ultimately, whatever one may think about America’s foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East and Israel, Biden’s leadership style and demeanor in this time of crisis are most certainly “presidential." By comparison, how have Donald Trump and the other leading Republican fascists and members of the right-wing movement behaved in response to the horrible events of October 7? Their reactions and behavior have, for the most part, been partisan, tribal, petty, egomaniacal, narcissistic, conspiratorial, dishonest, irresponsible, hateful, willfully ignorant, and more generally contrary to the principles of responsible governance.
In a time not too long ago, America’s mainstream political leaders, on both sides of the partisan divide, followed an informal rule that politics and partisanship stopped at the ocean. In the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism, that rule has been jettisoned by the right wing because getting political power at any cost with the goal of ending America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy is more important than standing in unity in a time of crisis.
On the same weekend that Israel was attacked by Hamas, Donald Trump wallowed in his malignant narcissism and megalomania. He attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for supposedly not taking his advice while president, praised Hamas as “very smart," and suggested that the group would not have dared to attack Israel if Trump were still president. Trump even managed to connect the Big Lie about the 2020 election and how it was “stolen” from him and his MAGA movement to the crisis. Taking their cues from Trump, leading Republicans, and other right-wing propagandists and influential, used the October 7 terrorist attacks as an opportunity to tell lies like the Democrats "hate” Israel and support Hamas via Iran. In an especially loathsome example of this behavior, Sen. Tim Scott went so far as to accuse President Biden of “having blood on his hands,” because he is somehow responsible for Hamas’ terror attack on Israel. Not to be outdone in the amount of vitriol he can spout, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, told NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday that Palestinians “are all antisemitic” to argue against allowing refugees from Gaza into the United States.
Donald Trump and the other Republican fascists and members of the white right are also using October 7 as a chance to amplify their white supremacist paranoia and conspiracy theories about “invaders” and “terrorists” (in this iteration “Hamas”) who have supposedly infiltrated the Southern Border and are operating in secret terrorist cells, waiting for their moment to attack (White) America. Of course, this is a lie. Nonetheless, a large percentage, if not majority, of Trump and Republican voters (and right-wing independents) believe such fictions, which are reflections of the larger white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory.
At a time when the United States, and the world, desperately need decency and moral clarity, President Biden has provided both. His words regarding the wanton atrocities Hamas has committed against hundreds of Israeli civilians, as well as many Americans and citizens of other countries, in the past week have been unequivocal. In remarks to a gathering of American Jewish leaders Wednesday, he described the mass murder as “sheer evil” and likened it to “the worst atrocities of ISIS.”
In condemning the terrorism, and offering support to Israel’s military response, the president also reminded the new emergency war government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of its responsibilities under “the law of war.” These measured statements put the United States in just the right place: supportive of Israel but positioned, if need be, to influence and temper its response.
Mr. Biden has so far met the elementary test of political leadership amid crisis, as those who placed their trust in him at the ballot box three years ago hoped he could.
They're just not comparable. Joe Biden is a good man, a dedicated and effective public servant who's trying to do a good job, who believes in our institutions, who believes in our values, who believes in alliances, who believes people are fundamentally good, and who is the kind of person that Donald Trump thinks is a sucker. Donald Trump is a bad man; he is all about himself. He doesn't care. He has no moral code whatsoever. He doesn't believe in the rule of law. He doesn't believe in the Constitution. He doesn't believe in American values…. How can those Republicans and others on the right say that they stand with Israel while they support Donald Trump who is an antisemite.
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Via email, Rick Wilson, who is cofounder of the pro-democracy group The Lincoln Project said this about the profound differences between Trump and Biden as reinforced by their reactions to the terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas:
President Biden has demonstrated great moral leadership and resolve in supporting Israel in the fight against terrorism and hatred. He understands that freedom and individual rights must be supported through strength, deterrence, international alliances, and, when necessary, force. Stopping authoritarianism abroad helps to prevent it from gaining ground here in the United States.
Trump on the other hand, is a transactional actor only concerned about how he can exploit this movement for his own personal benefit. He cares nothing about human rights and renewing democracy.
There is a feedback loop between the public and their leaders in a democratic society. Leaders take cues and directives from the public because they need their support to remain in power. Those same leaders also shape and influence the beliefs and values of their supporters and the public more generally. As such, what does the irresponsible, hateful, and morally compromised behavior of Donald Trump and other leading members of the right wing in response to the Israel – Hamas war further “reveal” about their supporters?
In the most basic sense, they have normalized deviance and embraced antisocial and other anti-democratic values and beliefs as a function of what psychologists have described as “malignant normality”. A series of recent public opinion polls offer support for this conclusion.
A 2018 Gallup poll shows that in the Age of Trump, Republicans now believe that presidential moral leadership is increasingly unimportant: "Republicans are much less likely now than they were during the Bill Clinton years to say it is very important for the president to provide moral leadership for the U.S. Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to believe moral leadership is important now, with Donald Trump in office, than they were under Clinton.
Gallup continues:
By 59% to 40%, Americans believe Trump provides weak rather than strong moral leadership. Republicans and Democrats diverge greatly on this question, with 77% of Republicans believing Trump provides strong moral leadership and 91% of Democrats saying he provides weak leadership. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats believe his moral leadership is "very weak." Independents are much more negative than positive about Trump's leadership on morals.
Here are some of the key findings:
Roughly two-fifths of voters said former President Donald Trump would do a good job while nearly half said he was doing a poor job and 11% said they didn’t know.
Out of GOP voters, 7 in 10 approved of his moral leadership, while only 14% of Democrats said the same. Meanwhile, roughly 36% of independent voters said he did a good job….
Chris Karpowitz, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and a professor of political science at Brigham Young University, also said the results of the poll showcase “partisan cheerleading.”
The survey coincided with news of Trump’s third indictment, to which he pleaded not guilty on Thursday. The court documents allege that the former president “was determined to remain in power” after losing the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden, and he “repeated and widely disseminated” false claims about the election’s legitimacy, as Deseret News reported.
“These numbers are particularly striking, given that Donald Trump has now been indicted three times and was recently found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial,” said Karpowitz.
A September 2023 poll, also by HarrisX for Deseret News, found that a majority of Republican registered voters believe that Donald Trump “is a person of faith” – this is a higher percentage than for Mike Pence, who is an evangelical Christian.
His personal history is also one that would seem, at a glance, to be potentially troubling for Christian conservatives.
Trump has been divorced twice and is in the middle of a lawsuit surrounding his alleged paying of hush money to a former adult film star to stay quiet about an alleged affair. He’s also been accused of cheating on his wife with a former Playboy model.
But Trump has consistently won the support of social conservatives, and the results of the poll could provide some insight into how people see him.
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Whatever one may think about the specific content and morality of the type of White Christianity that is practiced by Michael Pence, it is clear that he is more religious and “a person of faith” than Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his discomfort with, if not outright disinterest and contempt for, the religiously minded. It Trump is in any way “religious”, it is transactional as a way for him to get votes from the Christian Right.
Racism, white racial resentment, hostile sexism, and other forms of prejudice and hatred in the form of social dominance behavior and authoritarianism have also played a powerful role in why Republicans and other “conservatives” have embraced the moral corruption of Trumpism and American neofascism. This is channeled through a yearning for a return to “the good old days” and “traditional values” and “Making America Great Again”.
Approximately three-quarters of Americans agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction, but there is considerable division over whether the country needs to move backward — toward an idealized, homogeneous past — or forward, toward a more diverse future. Though most Americans favor moving forward, a sizable minority yearn for a country reminiscent of the 1950s, embrace the idea that God created America to be a new promised land for European Christians, view newcomers as a threat to American culture, and believe that society has become too soft and feminine. This minority is composed primarily of self-identified Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and white Americans without a college degree.
With their embrace of Trumpism, American neofascism, and hostility to real democracy more broadly, have the MAGA people and other members of the right-wing just forgotten basic standards of human decency, morality, and good leadership? Or have they instead actively chosen Donald Trump and what he represents knowing how destructive and evil such forces are because the power is intoxicating and a way to get what they want in an America they feel increasingly hostile to and alienated from – even if that means ending democracy?
Which of the two scenarios is worse? I am not sure.
In the end, how and if American can escape the Trumpocene and this time of democracy crisis in the long-term will greatly depend on the answer to these questions. | US Involvement in Foreign Conflicts |
The media’s coddling of John Fetterman looks pretty embarrassing right about now
Why does our free press exist, if not to ask inconvenient and uncomfortable questions of the powerful?
In the case of the junior senator from Pennsylvania, our vaunted Fourth Estate simply is not up to the task.
On Sept. 17, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that the sergeant-at-arms would no longer enforce the chamber’s dress code on the Senate floor.
“There has been an informal dress code that was enforced,” Schumer said in an announcement. “Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor. I will continue to wear a suit.”
Though the announcement does not mention Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) by name, the change appears to have been made with him in mind specifically. The freshman senator has refused to wear a suit and tie in the Senate building, including in the chamber, since May, when he was hospitalized briefly for what he said was clinical depression. Since his hospitalization, Fetterman has “unapologetically” worn shorts and hoodies around the Senate building “as he goes about his duties,” according to the AP.
Schumer’s announcement comes in spite of Fetterman already having a workaround for registering his votes without violating the chamber’s expectations of appropriate attire: Clad in a hoodie and shorts, he would simply stand in the doorway of the Democratic cloakroom or the side entrance, shout his “yay” or “nay” answer, and then disappear. And Fetterman’s preference to lob his vote through doorways comes on top of the fact that he’s the second-most absent member of the Senate, just behind the 90-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
Fetterman, who suffered a near-fatal stroke in 2022 and was hospitalized in 2023, is rarely present in the Senate. When he is present, he rarely if ever enters the chamber itself. He simply shouts his responses to the chair from a nearby doorway. And now, even with the shouting workaround, Senate leadership has adjusted the chamber’s longstanding dress code to accommodate Fetterman’s preference not to dress appropriately for the job for which he campaigned at the apparent expense of his health.
For Fetterman’s office, most especially whoever operates the senator’s Twitter account, the entire ordeal is a bit of a joke.
“If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down,” the senator’s Twitter account declared this week, “and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week.”
In response to online grumbling, Fetterman aide Adam Jentleson also responded, “asking ‘why can’t john just do like everyone else’ fundamentally misunderstands john and his appeal while also accentuating it.”
This is insulting to everyone’s intelligence for at least three reasons.
First, Fetterman has cultivated a blue-collar image. But he graduated from Harvard in 1999, was financially supported by his parents well into his 40s and has spent most of the last two decades as a politician. He is no “working man.”
Second, despite what Jentleson and others suggest, working-class people understand the concept of “appropriate attire.” They don’t wear shorts to nice dinners.
Finally, pointing to Fetterman’s pretend blue-collar appeal still avoids the question: Why, exactly, does the junior senator from Pennsylvania refuse to wear a suit and tie to what is obviously a suit-and-tie job? Why the constant absences? Why the need for the accommodation?
This final point especially calls into question the press’s coverage of the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race.
Fetterman’s absence from the Senate isn’t the issue, nor is his dress, nor his cloakroom workaround. It’s that these things stand in such sharp contrast to how Fetterman was covered as a candidate, when the press assured voters that he was fit office. Now, we can’t get even a straight answer as to why the senator refuses to wear pants.
During the 2022 campaign, after Fetterman’s stroke, many in the media insisted that there was nothing to suggest he wouldn’t be up to the rigors of the office. They were clearly wrong.
Recall that NBC News journalist Dasha Burns was dragged over coals for breaking this unspoken embargo and commenting honestly in October of that year that “in small talk” before her interview with Fetterman, “it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”
Burns’s colleagues in the media, even within NBC, criticized her remarks, accusing her of everything from “ableism” to being just plain bad at making conversation. Fetterman, these Burns critics asserted, is perfectly fine.
Leading the charge was New York magazine editor-at-large Kara Swisher, who proclaimed: “Sorry to say but I talked to [Fetterman] for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.”
Even after a debate in which Fetterman clearly struggled both to understand his opponent and to articulate himself, major newsrooms found new ways of running interference for him. Many of the same news organizations that had insisted the Democratic candidate was doing just fine quietly amended their coverage, now insisting after the debate that his mere presence on the campaign trail was an important milestone for disabled persons everywhere.
“Whatever voters ultimately decide at the polls,” noted the Washington Post in a post-debate report, “Fetterman’s performance marks something of a milestone for the disability community, which remains underrepresented at every level of elected office.”
Said the New York Times: “For many people with disabilities who watched the Pennsylvania Senate debate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s performance against Dr. Mehmet Oz was both a sign of how far they had come in political representation and a reminder of how far they have left to go.”
Even Swisher was forced to scramble after Fetterman’s disastrous performance, searching out and sharing accommodating opinion articles, including one that argued the debate was a “Rorschach test of comfort with disability.” The post-debate article, which Swisher called the “best piece so far,” asserted, “We are a culture of soundbites, mic drops, and clap backs. To speak in any way that deviates from the norm is to summon ridicule and judgment.” Pick a lane, lady.
Pennsylvanians were explicitly promised during the campaign that Fetterman’s health condition would not hinder him from performing the usual duties of a senator. Recall that major news organizations were quick to cite Fetterman’s primary care physician, who published a statement in October claiming the Democratic candidate “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.”
Missing from much of this coverage was the fact that the doctor was also a Fetterman campaign donor.
Fetterman is the second-most absent member of the U.S. Senate. Now, the Senate has dropped its dress code to accommodate his preference for sneakers and baggy shorts, even after it had already tolerated his preference for shouting his votes from side rooms.
So, what part of “[he] has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office” is accurate? Does he really have “no work restrictions”? Can he work full duty? Because the way the Senate treats Fetterman, one cannot help but doubt the doctor’s assessment.
Is John Fetterman okay?
It’s a shame that so many journalists appear afraid to ask this and similar questions. They seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from their colleagues’ bullying of Dasha Burns. Because if anything falls under the header of “public interest,” it is surely the overall health and wellbeing of elected officials.
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | US Congress |
DeSantis inks law giving him 'all-clear' to run for president. Here's what else is inside
Editor's note: This story was updated to remove information indicating that the bill made harassing election workers in Florida a felony. That part of the bill was stricken from its final iteration.
Florida made headlines in April when the Senate fast-tracked and passed a bill (SB 7050) that included an amendment that gave Gov. Ron DeSantis the “all-clear” to run for president while maintaining his status as governor. DeSantis inked the bill into law hours after he announced that he entered the 2024 presidential election.
But the bill’s co-sponsor and the author of Florida’s original 2018 “resign to run” law, Republican Sen. Travis Huston of St. Augustine, believes that the law already allowed DeSantis to run without resigning.
“But it’s been talked about so much … that I thought, ‘Why don’t we just clarify this one step further?’” said Hutson. “I think he’s done a great job as our governor, and I think he should stay here as our governor.”
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Hidden beneath those headlines were the details of the 98-page bill the amendment was attached to, outlining sweeping changes to voter registration regulations that voter advocates call crippling.
Democrats questioned how DeSantis could simultaneously govern and campaign, calling it special treatment while voting rights groups said the bill would restrict votes from communities of color, which skews Democratic.
Florida SB 7050 proposed 27 changes to the state’s Elections Code
The bill makes changes to election laws that Democrats and voting rights groups say are unnecessary, harmful and would restrict votes from communities of color, which skews Democratic. And proposes 27 changes to the state’s Elections Code.
Their most loud concerns are about the changes to third-party voter registration organization regulations.
"Nonpartisan third-party voter registration organizations have worked in Florida for years, helping our neighbors join the democratic process by getting them onto the voter rolls and involved in their government," said House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell of Tampa. "Black and brown voters are far more likely than white voters to get registered by a third-party voter registration organization.
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"That is one important reason why it is problematic to attack nonpartisan voter registration organizations through the policies in this bill."
Proponents say it's geared at bad actors, protecting voters and making sure the groups are meeting high standards.
"We are putting a priority on that voter's personal information. It should be the most sacred part of the entire interaction," said Rep. Lawrence McClure, R-Dover, a sponsor of the legislation. "This bill protects the Florida voter, while making sure our elections remain the best in the nation."
Here’s a quick look at some of the highlights
- First-time voters without a verified social security number or Florida ID are required to vote in person.
- Third-party voter registration organizations are required to reregister with the state every election cycle.
- The bill expands the required list of maintenance activities.
- Reduces the frequency of reporting from monthly to quarterly until the qualifying period.
- Increases election law violation fines.
- Eliminates requirements that supervisors publish certain information in a local newspaper's legal ads, instead allowing the supervisors to post those notices on their website or the county's website.
- Expands training for signature verification of vote-by-mail ballots by mandating it for staff whose job duties include signature verification.
- Shortens the amount of time voter registration groups have to return completed forms to election offices from 14 days to 10 days.
- Increases penalties for returning forms late from $50 for each late application to $50 for every day it is late.
SB 7050 reduces frequency of campaign finance reports
Statewide candidates and political action committees, sometimes referred to as PACs, must by law file monthly contribution and expenditure reports until 60 days before the primary election when the deadlines move up to weekly. The reports must be filed daily starting on the 10th day before a general election, with the last report due on the fifth day before the election. The bill proposes reducing the frequency of reporting from monthly to quarterly until the qualifying period, at which time the current deadlines will resume.
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First-time voters without ID or social security number now required to vote in person
First-time Florida voters who have not gotten a state-issued driver's license, ID card or Social Security number would be required to vote in person, according to a legislative analysis. The only exception is "unless a federally mandated exception applies," the analysis states.
Election law violation fines are increased
Fines against political committees for campaign finance reports filed late are set at a maximum of $1,000 per violation. The bill would increase that maximum to $2,500 per violation and allow the Florida Elections Commission or an administrative law judge to triple that fine if a person commits three counts of the same category of offense.
SB 7050 places heavy burdens on third-party voter registration organizations
Citizens can register to vote directly with their county's Supervisor of Elections Office, or they can sign up through an organization whose mission is to promote voting. These third-party organizations have operated in Florida for years under rules requiring them to register with the state and deliver to the elections supervisors every application they collect within 14 days.
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The new bill proposes to require those organizations to reregister with the state for every general election cycle they plan to collect applications rather than a one-time registration. It also proposes to decrease the number of days in which they must deliver a registration application from 14 to 10 days, increases fines for late delivery, and requires the organization to give applicants receipts, to create a measure of accountability, according to Sen. Danny Burgess, R-Zephyrhills, chair of the Ethics and Elections Committee, who added that more than 3,000 registrations were submitted late in 2022. "I believe that 10 days is not only reasonable but critically important to make sure that it gets into the right hands and that it's secure," Burgess told the committee.
Public messages no longer need to be published in local newspapers
The bill proposes the elimination of requirements that supervisors publish certain information in a local newspaper's legal ads, instead allowing the supervisors to post those notices on their website or the county's website. These include notice of a special election or referendum 30 days prior and information on how a voter may update a signature.
Contributors: Mark Harper, The Daytona Beach News-Journal and Douglas Soule, USA TODAY Network-Florida | US Federal Elections |
An outside investigator recommended that an audit of the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission be pulled from the Secretary of State’s website and re-examined.
The investigation comes after it was revealed former Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, who at the time oversaw state audits, had accepted an outside job as a cannabis industry consultant while her office worked on an audit arguing for more lax regulation of the industry.
The investigators recommended pulling the audit despite finding no evidence it was compromised or that Fagan or others exerted influence over the final product. But they noted there were warning signs that Fagan could compromise the integrity of the audit and they could have done more to respond to those concerns.
“Given the known threat to independence introduced by former Secretary Fagan’s actions and the impact the perception of this threat had on the OLCC audit report, we recommend that the SOS pull the audit report from the publicly accessible website and reassess its issuance, including augmenting audit evidence to counteract the increase in audit risk,” the investigators wrote.
Gov. Tina Kotek asked the Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to conduct an examination of the audit in April. The state’s justice department worked with the California-based group Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting to do the work.
The audit was entitled “Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission (OLCC): Oregon Needs to Modernize Cannabis Laws to Help Grow the State’s Economy and to Ensure Equitable Opportunities and Benefits for all Communities.” Fagan’s side contract was first reported by Willamette Week.
The governor said in a statement Wednesday that performance audits are essential to ensuring “public resources are being well managed and that our government is held accountable for providing the best possible customer service.”
The new Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said the report, while showing the audit was not compromised, reaffirms what is known: that Fagan’s actions compromised public trust.
“In auditing we call this a ‘threat to independence in appearance,’” Griffin-Valade said in a statement.
“As a result, the report concludes that auditors should have gone further to reduce that risk by pausing their work and seeking stronger evidence for their conclusions.”
Griffin-Valade said she agreed with the recommendations and would personally oversee the audit’s re-examination.
“Depending on the results of that examination, I may take additional action and will inform the public as appropriate,” she wrote.
Gov. Kotek also requested an investigation into Fagan’s actions by the Oregon Government of Ethics Commission, which is ongoing. | US Political Corruption |
A top Republican election official in Wisconsin is facing calls to resign from his role after boasting about lower turnout last year in Black and Hispanic areas of Milwaukee.Robert Spindell is one of three GOP appointees on the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), the six-member bipartisan body that oversees elections in the state. He is also the chair of the Republican party in the fourth congressional district, which includes Milwaukee. After last year’s election, he sent an email to fellow Republicans touting the party’s “well thought out multi-faceted plan” that resulted in a drop in voter turnout in the city, which is home to a majority of Wisconsin’s Black population.“We can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas,” he wrote in an email, according to Urban Milwaukee, which first published portions of the message.The GOP efforts included “Biting Black Radio Negative Commercials”, aimed at Democrats and opening Republican offices in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, according to the email. “Promoting the Republican ‘Cares’ Message; pointing out the many flaws of the Democrat Candidates; coupled with a Lack of Interest, persuaded many voters not to vote,” he wrote.In a different email, provided to the Associated Press, Spindell also attributed the turnout drop to strong Republican candidates and the difficulty Democrats had in connecting with Black voters.“The Democratic candidates were unable to obtain – even though they really tried hard – the votes they needed, expected and demanded from the Black Community,” he wrote. “There is still a great deal of much more concentrated work we need to do in the Black and Hispanic Communities by continuing to show how the Democratic Elected Officials and Candidates are not watching out for the livelihoods of the people who live in these areas and the Republicans can.”Wisconsin is one of the most politically competitive states in America, and the high-stakes battle over voting access that has roiled the state for years. Over the last decade, Republicans enacted new voter ID requirements and distorted the boundaries of electoral districts to cement their power. The state has a Democratic governor, but Republican control over the state legislature is virtually guaranteed because of gerrymandering.Mark Thomsen, a Democrat who serves on the elections commission with Spindell tweeted on Thursday that he should resign. “My fellow commissioner Bob Spindell has shown he cannot be fair and should resign from the WEC.”Thank you for pointing out the obvious @badachie My fellow commissioner Bob Spindell has shown he cannot be fair and should resign from the WEC.@BobSpindell— Mark Thomsen (@MarkThomsenWI) January 11, 2023
Devin Remiker, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic party, also called in Spindell to resign and said the comments were “repugnant” and called on him to resign.Spindell did not respond to an emailed request for comment. He has said he will not resign. “The last thing I want to do is suppress votes,” he told the AP.Spindell’s comments amount to “saying the quiet part out loud”, Black Leaders Organizing Communities (Bloc), a Milwaukee group that works on voter engagement said in a statement. “It is incredibly racist to brag about lowering Black and Brown turnout, it is also unacceptable to have these comments and views held by an election official,” the group said in a statement. It urged Devin LeMahieu, the Republican leader in the Wisconsin senate, to rescind Spindell’s appointment to the body.Spindell is also under fire for his role serving as one of 10 fake GOP electors in Wisconsin after the 2020 election. The justice department is investigating that scheme across the country. He is also a named defendant in a civil lawsuit seeking damages for that effort. | US Political Corruption |
It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s regime. McGonigal’s indictments raise a boatload of questions and has spurred the bureau to scrutinize his actions when he was in charge of monitoring and thwarting the intelligence efforts of foreign powers (including Russia) aimed at the United States. In spy-movie parlance, the FBI will want to know when did he go bad (presuming he did go bad).
The McGonigal case also has cast attention on one of the more bizarre foreign influence operations to occur in Washington, DC, in recent years—a little-known and underreported Russia-linked effort to influence American politics about Albania.
The tale of this influence operation is a complicated one that Mother Jones revealed in 2018. The main disclosure was that a mysterious shell company registered in Scotland called Biniatta Trade—which was created by two Belize companies that were partly controlled by two British companies that were each controlled by a different Russian national—paid $150,000 in early 2017 to a Washington lobbyist named Nick Muzin to promote in the United States the Democratic Party of Albania, the conservative party opposed to Rama’s government.
Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s winning presidential campaign, used his influence to gather support within the Republican Party and the US conservative movement for Lulzim Basha, the DPA leader, who was campaigning for prime minister. Muzin set up a visit to Washington for Basha that included meetings with GOP House members. Basha attended the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner, which featured Trump as the speaker. Muzin contacted Steve Bannon, then a top White House adviser, and other White House officials on Basha’s behalf. He arranged for Basha to be interviewed by Breitbart News.
The aim was to round up backing in the United States for Basha, who was running in Albania as a populist nationalist and Trump fan and pushing the slogan “Make Albania Great Again.” As an ardent foe of Rama, a pro-West critic of Putin who had warned about Russia’s attempt to gain influence in the Balkans, Basha, presumably, was the Kremlin’s preferred candidate.
At one point, Muzin brought Basha to a GOP fundraiser in Wisconsin where Trump was the main speaker. At this event—where a $20,000 donation earned an attendee a VIP seat and a photograph with Trump—Basha had his photo snapped with Trump. In Albania, the DPA widely disseminated the picture, and Basha claimed he’d had an “extraordinary meeting” with Trump.
The Trump connection that Muzin helped Basha forge did not win the day for the Albanian. In the Albanian election that year, Rama’s Socialist Party picked up seats and won a full majority of the parliament.
In some ways, Muzin’s work for Basha and the DPA was not unusual. Foreign politicians and political parties often retain American lobbyists in the pursuit of support and influence in the United States. What was odd was that Biniatta Trade picked up much of the tab for Muzin’s toils.
There were no public signs this company was engaged in any commerce. It had a phony looking, generic website that was linked to similar websites for other companies that had no public footprints. (The Biniatta Trade website is no longer functioning.) The company shared a British phone number with an “international online dating service” that offered “beautiful Ukrainian women for dating and marriage.”
The only information on Biniatta Trade we could find was a paper trail of other shell companies that eventually traced back to two Russians who had controlled defunct enterprises and who could not be reached. A Russia-linked shell company is not the usual source of funding for American lobbying efforts, and this uncommon arrangement suggested that some Russian entity was trying to influence US politics to benefit Basha and the DPA.
A spokesman for Muzin told Mother Jones at that time that Muzin believed Biniatta Trade was a private company owned by supporters of the Democratic Party of Albania. Muzin declined to explain how he had first come into contact with Biniatta Trade.
Last fall, a US intelligence finding noted that Russia had spent about $300 million since 2014 to influence politics in other countries to its favor. An administration source told the AFP that this included spending “around $500,000 to back Albania’s center-right Democratic Party in 2017 elections.”
How does all this connect to McGonigal? The Justice Department indictment alleges that in or by August 2017 McGonigal struck up a business relationship with “Person A,” a naturalized US citizen who had been born in Albania and who had worked for an Albanian intelligence service decades earlier. Albanian news reports have identified this person as Agron Neza, a New Jersey businessman. In a letter to Albanian outlets, Neza admitted giving McGonigal money and called Rama an “acquaintance,” but he said he handed the funds to McGonigal for personal reasons.
According to the indictment, McGonigal and Neza made several trips together to Albania, where McGonigal met with Rama, the prime minister, and “Person B,” who, according to the New York Times, was Dorian Ducka, a former Albanian official and an informal adviser to Rama.
Neza allegedly paid McGonigal $225,000 in the fall of 2017, in three installments, including one in which Neza passed the FBI man $80,000 in cash in a car parked outside a New York City restaurant.
After McGonigal had met a second time with Rama, Ducka, according to the indictment, passed information to McGonigal about a “a U.S. citizen who had registered to perform lobbying work in the United States on behalf of an Albanian political party different from the one in which the Prime Minister was a member.” McGonigal conveyed this information to a Justice Department prosecutor for possible criminal investigation. He subsequently received more information about the lobbyist from Neza and Rama and transmitted the material to FBI investigators.
On February 26, 2018, the indictment reads, “the FBI-NY formally opened a criminal investigation focused on the U.S. citizen lobbyist at defendant McGonigal’s request and upon his guidance.” Neza and Ducka later provided assistance to the inquiry. McGonigal, according to the Justice Department “had not at any time disclosed [to the FBI] his financial relationship with Person A [Neza] to the FBI, nor had defendant McGonigal disclosed his ongoing contacts with Person B [Ducka] as required.”
The timing of events described in the indictment indicate Muzin was the lobbyist McGonigal was targeting. As the New York Times has reported, “The events detailed in the indictment and other public records seem to match the description of the lobbyist Nicolas D. Muzin.”
It’s uncertain how far any FBI investigation of Muzin proceeded. No charges were ever brought against him. Muzin told the Times in a statement that he had “no reason to believe that I was the victim of this false investigation. But if I was, that is unfortunate, and I hope that justice will be served.” Muzin did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Mother Jones.
The Mother Jones report in 2018 sparked front-page stories in Albanian newspapers. The following year, Albanian prosecutors charged Basha with money laundering and falsifying documents in connection to the Biniatta Trade matter. Basha denied accepting Russian money. The case was later suspended under murky circumstances. His party has insisted it paid Muzin only $25,000, offering no explanation of why another entity (that is, Biniatta Trade) would pay a US lobbyist a hefty amount to help the DPA.
In the 2021 Albanian parliamentary elections, Rama led his party to another victory over Basha’s DPA and earned a third term as prime minister. Basha left the DPA a year ago and was replaced by the party’s founder, Sali Berisha, who is barred from entering the United States due to what the State Department says is his “involvement in significant corruption.”
There remain plenty of questions about this episode. Why was the Albanian government so worried about the pro-DPA lobbying effort? What information did it pass to McGonigal? Did it involve the funding that went to Muzin? Did the FBI fully investigate Muzin? Did that inquiry include tracing the origins of the money that underwrote his lobbying? There still has been no explanation of why a mysterious Russia-linked shell company paid for a Republican lobbyist to use his clout with the GOP and conservatives to assist a right-wing Albanian political party.
The intersection of McGonigal’s tale and that of the financing of Muzin’s lobbying by Biniatta Trade makes two mysterious stories even more so. A US lobbyist received money tied to Russia to help a political party in a small Balkan nation. And an allegedly crooked FBI agent was involved in investigating that lobbyist, seemingly at the behest of a rival Albanian party. Albania, like Russia, is famously corrupt, wracked with allegations that many officials, including judges and prosectors, are on the take. The merged sagas of Biniatta Trade and Charles McGonigal show how easily that corruption infiltrated the United States. | US Political Corruption |
The judge separately ruled that Michigan’s secretary of state doesn’t have the power under state law to determine Trump’s eligibility for office based on the constitutional amendment.
The rulings mark a major victory for the former president, who has a commanding lead in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race, according to recent polling.
The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, says US officials who take an oath to uphold the Constitution are banned from future office if they “engaged in insurrection.” But the Constitution doesn’t say how to enforce the ban, and it has only been applied twice since 1919, which is why many experts view these challenges as a long shot.
These lawsuits have been filed by left-leaning advocacy groups, but a bipartisan array of legal scholars and former jurists have endorsed their attempts to disqualify Trump from office.
Michigan Court of Claims Judge James Redford said in his decision Tuesday that questions about Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection – and whether it constitutionally bars him from returning to the White House – should be addressed by elected representatives in Congress. He ruled that the matter was a “political question” that shouldn’t be decided by the judicial branch.
A court disqualifying Trump would’ve taken that decision away from “a body made up of elected representatives of the people of every state in the nation, and gives it to but one single judicial officer, a person who no matter how well intentioned, evenhanded, fair and learned, cannot in any manner or form possibly embody the represented qualities of every citizen of the nation,” Redford wrote.
Regardless of the initial rulings in these cases, most experts anticipate appeals that go all the way to the US Supreme Court, which could settle the issue for the entire nation.
This story has been updated with additional information. | US Federal Elections |
GOP ribs Pelosi after Roberts cites her in student loans decision
Republicans are calling out Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former House speaker, after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts quoted her in his majority ruling striking down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.
The court ruled 6-3 that the program, which would have forgiven thousands of dollars in student loan debt for many borrowers, that the Biden administration had not received congressional authority to grant the forgiveness.
Roberts quoted in the majority opinion comments that Pelosi gave during a press conference in July 2021, in which she said Biden did not have the authority to cancel student loans by executive order, only delay it.
“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” Pelosi said at the time.
Many GOP lawmakers chimed in after the ruling was handed down to call attention to her inclusion in Roberts’ opinion.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tweeted that the court “called out” Pelosi with the reference.
“I agree with her for once!” McCarthy said.
Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) posted an image on his Twitter with the quote from Pelosi, writing “Even former Speaker Nancy Pelosi agrees.” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also quoted her.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) noted that “even” Pelosi agreed that Biden did not have the authority to push the proposal forward.
Pelosi said in a statement on Friday after the ruling was released that the court’s majority “cruelly denied” debt relief to 40 million Americans in need.
“In doing so, the Court allows a crisis of debt to continue holding back families from buying homes, starting businesses and making ends meet,” she said. “Wrongly, the Majority Opinion in this case ignores the convincing arguments on the President’s legal authority that were made in the last year by the Department of Education and by former House Education Committee Chairman George Miller.”
She vowed that the fight to provide relief is “not over,” echoing Biden’s response to the decision.
Biden’s forgiveness plan would have cleared up to $10,000 in debt for borrowers making up to $125,000 per year. It would have forgiven up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
The administration argued that the Higher Education Opportunities for Students Act, which allows the education secretary to “waive or modify” federal student aid programs in cases of national emergency, gave the president the authority for the plan, coming amid the COVID-19 national emergency.
But Roberts argued the plan was not a modification or waiver and went beyond clear congressional authorization.
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | SCOTUS |
EXCLUSIVE — A cohort of top GOP lawmakers, 2024 presidential hopefuls, and other notable conservatives sold hundreds of thousands of hardcover copies for their 2023 books during the first weeks of the titles being released, data show.
The 10 Republicans, who range from the likes of former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), as well as Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), sold at the very least 194,540 combined week one book hardcover release copies in 2023, according to data obtained by the Washington Examiner. That figure is based on BookScan, which, according to its website, tracks 85% of trade print books sold in the United States from major retailers and other entities and doesn't account for all hardcover, e-book, or audio upload transactions.
"You can usually sort the winners and losers in politician books by looking at which ones are memoirs," a senior publishing industry employee told the Washington Examiner. "Most politicians only know and care about one thing: themselves. The books that sell much better are about topics voters care about."
Among GOP presidential candidates, BookScan data show DeSantis ahead with 94,285 hardcovers sold during the first week for the release of his February memoir, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. The data also list Trump with 15,979 first-week hardcover sales in connection to the former president's April book, Letters to Trump, by the Trump-allied Winning Team Publishing, which, like the DeSantis book, was a No. 1 Amazon bestseller.
Letters to Trump, which costs roughly $91 on Amazon, is a collection of correspondence to the former president from world leaders, sports figures, and celebrities. However, BookScan's first-week sales data for it likely captures a portion of its market success since the work has also been sold direct to consumers and at events like Trump rallies, which wouldn't necessarily be tracked through the data provider, according to the first employee and also another employee at a top publisher who spoke with the Washington Examiner.
BookScan notably tracks sales through the likes of Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Target, and Amazon, though sales through the Seattle company are reported to BookScan based on title metrics and not specific units in order to combat authors and companies trying to buy their way onto bestseller lists, according to the second employee. The data provider's owner is the NPD Group, a market research firm headquartered in Port Washington, New York.
Trump's campaign told the Washington Examiner that "the vast majority of sales by Winning Team Publishing are direct to consumer," noting that Letters to Trump for the first week sold "many times over" 15,979.
Meanwhile, 2024 Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy's April book, Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For, sold 1,174 hardcover copies during its first week through BookScan, according to data. The wealthy businessman notably admitted to falsely characterizing his voting history in an interview with the Washington Examiner earlier this week.
"BookScan is the industry standard when it comes to measuring book sales," said the second publishing industry employee who spoke to the Washington Examiner. "We understand that BookScan doesn't capture sales from all retailers, but it is an accurate tool used to track and observe sales patterns."
Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo's January book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, sold 34,630 hardcover copies during its first week, according to BookScan data. Pompeo is "pleased that so many Americans purchased and read the book."
"I believe it had great appeal because it wasn’t just about me, but about the great Americans that I served with over the past few years and how we never gave an inch on standing up for America," he told the Washington Examiner. "We worked hard to share the real work I did at CIA and State with audiences that normally wouldn’t read a political book and made reading it fun and interesting."
Ex-Rep. Trey Gowdy's January book, Start, Stay, or Leave: The Art of Decision Making, sold 18,482 hardcover copies during its first week, while hardcover sales for ex-Rep. Jason Chaffetz's June book, The Puppeteers: The People Who Control the People Who Control America, slotted 10,412 hardcover sales for week one, according to BookScan data.
David McCormick, the businessman who unsuccessfully ran in 2022 for the Pennsylvania Senate, clocked in at 9,170 first-week hardcover sales in connection to his March book, Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America.
"Our nation is in decline, and the American people are imploring their leaders to lay out a path for renewal," McCormick, who is mulling a 2024 Senate bid, told the Washington Examiner. "I am grateful that my battle plan to educate our people, confront China, and restore America is resonating with so many, and am hopeful that these ideas will be put into action in Washington."
Kari Lake, the Republican Arizona gubernatorial nominee in 2022, released a June book through Winning Team Publishing that sold 1,715 hardcovers in its first week, according to BookScan data. Lake is reportedly among four women being considered to be Trump's possible vice presidential pick but could also run for Arizona Senate.
"An unmatched champion for the America First movement, Kari Lake in her first book, 'Unafraid: Just Getting Started,' outlines her journey from being the most beloved newscaster and broadcast journalist in Arizona to the leader of the largest grassroots movement in the state's history," a description for the Lake book on Amazon reads.
Then there's Rubio, whose June book, Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America's Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity, slotted 5,382 hardcovers its first week, according to BookScan. The book focuses on China's influence, globalization, and open borders, among other topics.
"America faces serious challenges, and before we can solve them, we have to understand how we got to this point," Rubio told the Washington Examiner. "Allowing China into the [World Trade Organization] was a crucial turning point, but it wasn’t the only one. There were decades of bad decision-making in Washington and on Wall Street. The good news is that the post-Cold War consensus is crumbling, but we’ll never get America back on track unless we learn from our past."
Hawley's Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, released in May, sold 3,311 hardcovers, according to BookScan. A spokesman for the senator said the book has now sold roughly 14,000 copies and pointed to how his 2021 work, The Tyranny of Big Tech, has sold over 40,000 copies and was a New York Times bestseller. | US Campaigns & Elections |
Donald Trump's rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination are weighing in on Tuesday's blockbuster announcement that the former president's been indicted in the probe into the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
One of the first to release a statement was former CIA spy and former Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, a long-shot for the nomination and a very vocal GOP Trump critic.
"Let me be crystal clear: Trump's presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills. Furthermore, his denial of the 2020 election results and actions on Jan. 6 show he's unfit for office," Hurd charged.
It was a very different reaction from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who's a distant second to Trump in the latest GOP presidential nomination polls, but ahead of the rest of the large field of Republican contenders.
"As President, I will end the weaponization of government, replace the FBI Director, and ensure a single standard of justice for all Americans," DeSantis declared.
The former president was indicted on four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Trump's been ordered to appear on Thursday at 4pm ET before a federal magistrate judge in the nation's capital.
Trump was informed two weeks ago by the office of Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel in the case, that he was a target of their probe into his actions and state of mind on Jan. 6, 2021, and in the lead-up to that infamous day – when hundreds stormed the U.S. Capitol. The attack temporarily disrupted congressional certification of then-President-elect Biden's 2020 Electoral College victory over Trump.
The indictment alleges that Trump pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the 2020 presidential election results through three criminal conspiracies, and alleges that the then-president also corruptly obstructed and impeded the certification of the electoral vote.
Hurd, who drew plenty of boos from the crowd last weekend at the Iowa GOP's annual Lincoln Dinner when he criticized Trump, emphasized in his statement on Tuesday that "the 2020 election wasn't stolen, rigged, or fraudulent. It was lost by Donald Trump because he was incapable of uniting the country. Now, we've got to ask ourselves if we really want a president who's willing to violate his oath to the Constitution just to cling to power?
"The Trump of 2016 is a far cry from the desperate figure we see in 2024," Hurd argued. "It's about time our party, including the 2024 candidates, wake up to the fact that this guy only cares about himself, not our country's future."
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, another vocal Trump critic who's challenging the former president for the nomination, called this "another sad day for America with a former President being charged criminally for obstructing the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next."
"I have always said that Donald Trump is morally responsible for the attack on our democracy," Hutchinson emphasized. "Now, our system of Justice will determine whether he is criminally responsible. The latest indictment reaffirms my earlier call that Donald Trump should step away from the campaign for the good of the country. If not, the voters must choose a different path."
DeSantis, in his statement, stressed that he believes "we need to enact reforms so that Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, DC to their home districts. Washington, DC is a "swamp" and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality. One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses—I will end the weaponization of the federal government."
Vivek Ramaswamy, another rival for the nomination, charged in his statement that "the corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump. This is un-American & I commit to pardoning Trump for this indictment."
Ramaswamy, a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, best-selling author and crusader in the culture wars, argued that "Donald Trump isn’t the cause of what happened on Jan 6. The real cause was systematic & pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it."
Trump, who's the commanding front-runner in the GOP nomination race as he makes his third straight White House run, earlier this year became the first sitting or former president in U.S. history to be charged with a crime.
Trump pleaded not guilty in early April in New York City to charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The former president was indicted for allegedly giving hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to keep her quiet ahead of that year’s presidential election over her claims she had sexual encounters years earlier with Trump.
The former president denies sleeping with Daniels and denies falsifying business records to keep the payment concealed.
Trump was indicted and arraigned in early June for his alleged improper retention of classified records. He pleaded not guilty in federal court in Miami, Florida, to criminal charges that he illegally retained national security records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, following the end of his term as president, and that he obstructed federal efforts to recover the documents. In total, Trump faces 37 felony charges in the documents case.
But the indictments have only strengthened Trump's standing among his base of devoted supporters. And his lead over the rest of the field of GOP rivals has increased in the wake of the multiple indictments.
The Trump campaign, in a statement to Fox News, accused the Biden administration and the Justice Department of "election interference" and charged that "the lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes."
And the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc. argued that the former president "is undeterred and his unprecedented America First movement will carry him back to the White House, where he will dismantle the Deep State and bring the Biden Crime Family to justice."
This is a developing story. Check back for updates on FoxNews.com | US Federal Elections |
GOP leader McConnell returns to Senate after head injury
He visited his office Friday for the first time since his injury and is expected to be working a full schedule in the Senate this week.
He visited his office Friday for the first time since his injury and is expected to be working a full schedule in the Senate this week.
He visited his office Friday for the first time since his injury and is expected to be working a full schedule in the Senate this week.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is back at work in the U.S. Capitol on Monday, almost six weeks after a fall at a Washington-area hotel and extended treatment for a concussion.
The longtime Kentucky senator, 81, has been recovering at home since he was released from a rehabilitation facility March 25. He fell after attending an event earlier that month, injuring his head and fracturing a rib.
McConnell arrived at the Capitol early Monday and is expected to work a full schedule in the Senate this week.
"I am looking forward to returning to the Senate on Monday," McConnell tweeted last week. "We've got important business to tackle and big fights to win for Kentuckians and the American people."
McConnell returns to the Senate ahead of a busy stretch in which Congress will have to find a way to raise the nation's debt ceiling and negotiate additional aid for the Ukraine war, among other policy matters. And he comes back as several other senators have been out for medical reasons, raising questions about how much the Senate will be able to achieve in the coming months with a 51-49 split between the parties.
Already, the GOP leader's absence, along with those of Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman, among others, have added to the Senate's lethargic pace in the first few months of the year. Unlike the last two years, in which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was able to push through key elements of President Joe Biden's agenda with the help of a Democratic-led House, the Senate has been significantly slowed with Republicans now in charge in the House. And absences have made even simple votes like nominations more difficult.
One immediate question for McConnell upon his return is whether to help Democrats temporarily replace Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee as she continues to recover in California from a case of the shingles. Democrats have become increasingly frustrated as the Democrat's more than six-week absence on the panel has stalled confirmation of some of Biden's nominees, and Feinstein has asked for a short-term substitute on the committee.
Democrats can't do that, though, without help from Republicans, since the approval of the process would take 60 votes on the Senate floor. Two GOP members of the Judiciary panel, Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have already said they don't believe that Republicans should help Democrats replace Feinstein.
It is unclear when Feinstein, 89, will return to Washington. Her office has so far declined to say.
Also returning to the Senate on Monday was Fetterman, who was hospitalized for clinical depression in February. He was treated for six weeks at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and his doctors say his depression is now "in remission."
Fetterman's announcement that he was checking himself into the hospital earlier this year came after he suffered a stroke last year and has struggled with auditory processing disorder, which can render someone unable to speak fluidly and quickly process spoken conversation into meaning. The Pennsylvania Democrat, 53, now uses devices in conversations, meetings and congressional hearings that transcribe spoken words in real time.
In a statement when he was released from Walter Reed late last month, Fetterman said the care he received there "changed my life."
"I'm excited to be the father and husband I want to be, and the senator Pennsylvania deserves," said Fetterman, who won praise for his decision to seek treatment.
McConnell visited his Capitol office on Friday ahead of his Monday return. In a video captured by NBC News, he walked into the building without assistance as aides kept close by.
This was the second major injury for McConnell in recent years. Four years ago he tripped and fell at his home in Kentucky, causing a shoulder fracture that required surgery. The Senate had just started a summer recess, and he worked from home for some weeks as he recovered.
McConnell had polio in his early childhood and he has long acknowledged some difficulty as an adult in climbing stairs. | US Congress |
It’s rare for Donald Trump to follow anyone’s lead but his own, especially the lead of his only half-serious contender Ron DeSantis, but the former president has jumped on the shutdown bandwagon, perhaps convinced of its effectiveness as a campaign strategy.
Earlier this month, DeSantis reportedly spoke with some of the current members of the House Freedom Caucus, which he helped found, to lend them his support in their government hijacking efforts. An austerity-feigner himself, DeSantis reportedly saw some electoral advantage in supporting the hardliners as they buck party leadership, use appropriations bills to fight manufactured culture wars and yell about unrealistic spending cuts, refuse to compromise on a short term stopgap, tank the bills that actually manage to land on the House floor last minute and force a shutdown.
Donald Trump apparently does too.
“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”
Throwing his support behind the “burn-it-all-down caucus'” effort is only surprising in that he’s bucking “my Kevin” in the process. Trump has been a longtime ally of the House speaker and even got involved in his shakespearian speakership election. But the political needs of Kevin McCarthy take a school bus-length back seat to Trump’s desperation to both attack the Justice Department and to win the White House in 2024, both of which he views as crucial to fending off his increasingly serious legal woes.
Trump and DeSantis seem to be banking on the idea that President Biden and Democrats will be blamed for the near-guaranteed shutdown. Democrats have been trying to make it clear since before the August recess that any shutdown would be the fault of far-right MAGA Republicans. Since then, even McCarthy has echoed that messaging as he openly laments the fact that he’s “not quite sure what they want,” referencing the hardliners in his caucus.
But only a third of American voters appear to have their heads on straight, at least for now, about where the blame lies. A new Morning Consult poll out this morning found that one in three voters would blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown. The rest are convinced it’s Democrats’ faults: “23% would blame President Joe Biden and 21% would blame Democrats in Congress,” the poll said.
As the Senate works to advance a clean continuing resolution this week to buy everyone more time, McCarthy seems confident he will be able to get a least some package of spending bills passed on the House floor — bills that do nothing to avert a shutdown and everything to secure his standing as speaker.
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ATLANTA (AP) — Attorney and prominent conservative media figure Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a reduced charge over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, tearfully telling the judge she looks back on that time with “deep remorse.”
Ellis, the fourth defendant in the case to enter into a plea deal with prosecutors, was a vocal part of Trump’s reelection campaign in the last presidential cycle and was charged alongside the Republican former president and 17 others with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law.
Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She had been facing charges of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and soliciting the violation of oath by a public officer.
READ MORE: What you need to know about Jenna Ellis’ 2020 election charges
She rose to speak after pleading guilty, fighting back tears as she said she would have not have represented Trump after the 2020 election if she knew then what she knows now, claiming that she she relied on lawyers with much more experience than her and failed to verify the things they told her.
“What I did not do but should have done, Your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true,” the 38-year-old Ellis said.
The guilty plea from Ellis comes just days after two other defendants, fellow attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, entered guilty pleas. That means three high-profile people responsible for pushing baseless legal challenges to Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory have agreed to accept responsibility for their roles rather than take their chances before a jury.
She was sentenced to five years of probation along with $5,000 in restitution, 100 hours of community service, writing an apology letter to the people of Georgia and testifying truthfully in trials related to this case.
The early pleas and the favorable punishment — probation rather than jail — could foreshadow similar outcomes for additional defendants who may see an admission of guilt and cooperation as their best hope for leniency. Even so, their value as witnesses against Trump is unclear given that their direct participation in unfounded schemes will no doubt expose them to attacks on their credibility and bruising cross-examinations should they testify.
The indictment in the sweeping case details a number of accusations against Ellis, including that she helped author plans on how to disrupt and delay congressional certification of the 2020 election’s results on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob of Trump supporters eventually overran the U.S. Capitol.
READ MORE: Trump won’t try to move Georgia case to federal court after judge rejected similar bid by Meadows
Ellis is also accused of urging state legislators to unlawfully appoint a set of presidential electors loyal to Trump at a hearing in Pennsylvania, and she later appeared with some of those lawmakers and Trump at a meeting on the topic at the White House. The indictment further says she similarly pushed state lawmakers to back false, pro-Trump electors in Georgia as well as Arizona and Michigan.
Before her plea, Ellis, who lives in Florida, was defiant, posting in August on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “The Democrats and the Fulton County DA are criminalizing the practice of law. I am resolved to trust the Lord.”
But she has been more critical of Trump since then, saying on conservative radio in September that she wouldn’t vote for him again, citing his “malignant, narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
Along with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ellis was a leading voice in the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, appearing frequently on television and conservative media to tell lies about widespread fraud that did not occur and spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.
She was censured in Colorado in March after admitting she made repeated false statements about the 2020 election.
That punishment was due in part to a Nov. 20, 2020, appearance on Newsmax, during which she said, “With all those states (Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia) combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump, and we can prove that.”
READ MORE: Sidney Powell pleads guilty in deal with prosecutors over efforts to overturn Trump loss in Georgia
Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. Powell will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and has to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents.
Chesebro pleaded guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents just as jury selection was getting underway in his trial. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and 100 hours of community service and was ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution, write an apology letter to Georgia’s residents and testify truthfully at any related future trial.
A lower-profile defendant in the case, bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall, pleaded guilty last month to five misdemeanor charges. He was sentenced to five years of probation and agreed to testify in further proceedings.
Trump and the other defendants, including his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have pleaded not guilty.
Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
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- Trump has mixed up "Obama" and "Biden" numerous times in recent campaign speeches.
- In an early morning Truth Social post, he said each mix-up was intentional.
- "No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country."
In an early-morning screed, former President Donald Trump said the repeated times he's mixed up the names of former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden during speeches have been intentional.
"Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence running our Country, Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat's Radical Left 'Disinformation Machine,' go wild saying that 'Trump doesn't know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden. He must be cognitively impaired,'" Trump wrote. "No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country."
Trump made the post to his self-owned social media site, Truth Social, in the early hours of Monday morning. Trump has, indeed, mixed up the names of Biden and Obama on numerous occasions in recent months, as Forbes documented in mid-November.
Fellow Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has used these gaffes (intentionally committed by Trump or not) in an attempt to drum up support for his faltering campaign. In November, the campaign began a specific tally of Trump's goofs and implied that the missteps were a key reason Trump avoided debates.
"Trump confuses Obama and Biden again," wrote DeSantis' "War Room" account on X in October.
In his morning monologue, the former president also pointed to his recently released and vaguely written health exam that noted his overall health is "excellent," including a cognitive exam.
"Also, and as reported, I just took a cognitive test as part of my Physical Exam, and ACED it," Trump added. "Also ACED (a perfect score!) one taken while in the White House."
Since taking the latter test in 2020, Trump has repeatedly bragged about "acing" the "very hard" cognitive test despite medical experts saying that he's misrepresented what the test is actually for: identifying memory or thinking impairments, not intelligence.
At the moment, according to an average of national polls, Trump holds a commanding lead over the rest of the GOP field with an average of 60.3% support. The candidate in second place, DeSantis, is only averaging 12.6% support at the moment. | US Campaigns & Elections |
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Rep. Jim Jordan failed again Wednesday on a crucial second ballot to become House speaker, the hard-fighting ally of Donald Trump losing even more GOP colleagues who refused to give him the the gavel.
Next steps were highly uncertain as a bipartisan group of lawmakers floated an extraordinary plan — to give the interim speaker-pro-tempore, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., more power to reopen the House and temporarily conduct routine business.
What was clear was that Jordan’s path to become House speaker was almost certainly lost. He was opposed by two more than the 20 Republican detractors he lost in first round voting the day before.
The House gaveled in with angry, frustrated GOP lawmakers looking at other options. And as the rollcall was underway, a few new detractors emerged to oppose Jordan who did not seem to be picking up new votes beyond one lawmaker who was absent the day before.
READ MORE: A look at Jim Jordan’s often controversial record in Congress
Ahead of the morning vote, Jordan made an unexpected plea for party unity, the combative Judiciary Committee chairman telling his colleagues on social media, “We must stop attacking each other and come together.”
A surprisingly large and politically diverse group of 20 Republicans had rejected Jordan’s nomination the day before, many resenting the hardball tactics seeking to enforce support, and viewing the Ohio congressman as too extreme for the powerful position of House speaker, second in line to the presidency.
The House has hit a standstill, stuck while Jordan worked to shore up backing from Republican colleagues for the job to replace the ousted Kevin McCarthy. Republicans are exhausted by the infighting since McCarthy’s sudden removal by hard-liners, who are now within reach of a central seat of U.S. power.
The vote for House speaker, once a formality in Congress, has devolved into another bitter showdown for the gavel.
With Republicans in majority control 221-212, Jordan must pick up most of his GOP foes to win. Tuesday’s tally, with 200 Republicans voting for Jordan and 212 for the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, left no candidate with a clear majority, as the 20 Republicans voted for someone else. .
In nominating Jordan, veteran Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said it was time to end the upheaval that he had warned against with McCarthy’s sudden ouster.
“We have a chance today to end that chaos, end that uncertainty,” Cole said.
He said that Jordan was “not a shrinking violet” but someone who could lead the House.
Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar noted that Jeffries continues to win more votes and is the best choice to move the country forward.
READ MORE: GOP picks Jim Jordan as latest House speaker candidate, but unclear if he can win
“The country cannot afford more delays and more chaos,” Aguilar said.
Bipartisan groups of lawmakers have been floating ways to operate the House by giving greater power to McHenry or another temporary speaker. The House had never ousted its speaker before McCarthy.
The novel concept of boosting the interim speaker’s role was gaining favor with a pair of surprising high-profile Republicans: Former GOP speakers Newt Gingrich and John Boehner.
Gingrich said while he likes Jordan, he has “no faith” the nominee can get much beyond the 200 votes he won in the first vote.
“We can’t sit around and suck our thumbs and hope the world will wait until the House Republicans get their act together,” Gingrich told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on his show.
Boehner reposted Gingrich’s views saying, “I agree,” on social media.
The two men have deep experience with the subject. Both were chased to early retirement by threats of ouster from right-flank insurgents like those who toppled McCarthy.
“The Republicans are unable to function right now,” said Jeffries. He said talks would “accelerate” between Democrats and Republicans on alternative plans.
“Jim Jordan will be a great speaker,” Trump had said Tuesday said outside a courthouse in Manhattan, where he is facing business fraud charges. “I think he’s going to have the votes soon, if not today, over the next day or two.”
Flexing their independence, the holdouts are a mix of pragmatists — ranging from seasoned legislators and committee chairs worried about governing, to newer lawmakers from districts where voters back home prefer President Joe Biden to Trump.
Some Republicans resent being pressured by Jordan’s allies and say they are being threatened with primary opponents if they don’t support him as speaker. Others are simply upset at the way the whole process has dragged out.
One holdout, Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, said Tuesday that Jordan’s role in the runup to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his refusal to admit that Biden, a Democrat, won the 2020 election remained an issue.
Jordan has been a top Trump ally, particularly during the Jan. 6 Capitol attack by the former president’s backers who were trying to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Biden. Days later, Trump awarded Jordan a Medal of Freedom.
The political climb has been steep for Jordan, the combative Judiciary Committee chairman and a founding member of the right-flank Freedom Caucus. He is known more as a chaos agent than a skilled legislator, raising questions about how he would lead. Congress faces daunting challenges, risking a federal shutdown at home if it fails to fund the government and fielding Biden’s requests for aid to help Ukraine and Israel in the wars abroad.
First elected in 2006, Jordan has few bills to his name from his time in office. He also faces questions about his past. Some years ago, Jordan denied allegations from former wrestlers during his time as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University who accused him of knowing about claims they were inappropriately groped by an Ohio doctor. Jordan has said he was never aware of any abuse.
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
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- Marsallee Nicholas, a girl who was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 1983, is the inspiration for "Marsy's Law" The law expands the rights of crime victims. Her brother is funding efforts to put the law in place across the country.
- Wisconsin's Supreme Court ruled the law, which will expand Wisconsin crime victim's rights, was properly worded in a statewide referendum and therefore would be legally adopted.
- Wisconsin's voters initially ratified the law in April 2020, but the state's Justice Initiative sued claiming the amendment’s scope wasn't fully described on ballots.
An amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution expanding crime victims’ rights was properly worded in a statewide referendum and legally adopted, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
Voters ratified the amendment, known as Marsy's Law, in April 2020. The Wisconsin Justice Initiative sued, arguing that the amendment’s scope wasn’t fully described on ballots.
The court ruled 6-1 on Tuesday that the description was proper. The process outlined in the constitution for amending the document doesn't require an explanation of every element of the amendment on ballots, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote. The amendment was properly submitted to the people and is therefore valid, he wrote.
Dennis Grzezinski, an attorney representing the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, didn't immediately respond Tuesday morning to an email seeking comment.
The Wisconsin Constitution and state law provide a host of victim rights. The amendment largely duplicates that existing language but goes further in a number of areas.
For example, it grants victims the right to seal information or records that could be used to locate them and the right to be heard at plea and parole hearings. They also can opt out of participating in depositions conducted by defense attorneys or opposing attorneys in civil matters, making it harder for criminal defendants to sue them.
Nearly a dozen states have adopted similar laws expanding crime victims’ rights.
Supporters have dubbed the amendments "Marsy’s Law" for California college student Marsalee Nicholas, who was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 1983. Her brother has funded efforts to put the amendments in place across the country. | US Local Policies |
In the two weeks since former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced out of his job, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has been unable to coalesce behind an alternative, leaving several simmering issues unaddressed by lawmakers.
In the interim, a new crisis has erupted in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine has seen a major new offensive by invading Russian troops, and the United States has crept steadily toward a spending deadline that could force a government shutdown in November.
Experts say there are few, if any, historical precedents for one-half of the U.S. Congress being leaderless during such a fraught period in history. Some have expressed concerns about the message it sends to the American public and the country’s allies and adversaries around the world.
Roots of the problem
McCarthy’s tenure as speaker began in January with a tortuous 15-vote marathon on the House floor that saw the California representative offer concessions to hard-line members on the party’s far right. That included a rule that allowed a single member of the body to force a vote of the full House on a motion to “vacate” the job of speaker.
Representative Matt Gaetz invoked that rule on Oct. 3, and eight Republicans, as well as all House Democrats, voted in favor, ousting McCarthy from the job. The Republican advantage in the House is so slim that only about four of its members can break ranks if the Republicans are to maintain a majority on any given vote.
Since McCarthy’s ouster, Representative Patrick McHenry has been serving as acting speaker, a role that does not give him the authority to bring bills to the floor for a vote.
The Republican caucus is currently preparing to vote on the candidacy of far-right Representative Jim Jordan for speaker. The polarizing politician is a close ally of former President Donald Trump who, among other things, has supported the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
No vote on Israel
On Oct. 7, the Hamas militant group launched a brutal assault on multiple communities across southern Israel, targeting and killing well over 1,400 people, including the elderly and young children. The group also took nearly 200 hostages into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.
Under normal circumstances, the House most likely would have produced a joint resolution of support for the Israeli people and might also have taken steps to assure a flow of military and humanitarian aid to the Israeli government.
But without a speaker in place, the body has been unable to act on the crisis.
In an email exchange with VOA, William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program, said he has concerns about the message that a dysfunctional Congress delivers to the rest of the world.
“The continuing paralysis in the U.S. House of Representatives has prevented the passage of measures supporting Israel in its time of peril,” he wrote. “The inability of the U.S. government to act on this issue, aid to Ukraine, and a budget for the current fiscal year is weakening confidence in U.S. leadership around the world.”
Ukraine, government spending
The House has been similarly unable to act on a number of other high-profile issues. President Joe Biden’s administration is seeking additional authority to provide Ukraine with the weapons and other assistance it needs to fight off Russia’s full-scale invasion of its country.
In the days since the House lost its speaker, Russia has mounted a fierce new assault on the town of Avdiivka, north of the city of Donetsk, part of Ukrainian territory that Russia claims to have annexed.
In an appearance on CBS News’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Biden renewed his request for Congress to act on aid for both Ukraine and Israel. However, a portion of the House Republican caucus, including speaker-designate Jordan, has been highly skeptical about providing more aid to Ukraine.
At the same time, the U.S. is approaching a deadline to pass multiple government spending bills. Failure to do so would result in a partial shutdown of the federal government next month.
The House and Senate agreed to a stop-gap spending measure in late September that postponed the date of a shutdown into November. However, in the past two weeks, with the House consumed by the task of choosing a new speaker, little apparent progress has been made, increasing the likelihood of a shutdown.
‘Rudderless?’
“Broadly speaking, there are few historical precedents for this,” Dan Mahaffee, senior vice president and director of policy for the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told VOA.
Mahaffee said the drama in the House is forcing Americans to ask themselves, “Is the institution rudderless?” An additional concern is what would happen if a more serious crisis befell the body.
“Heaven forbid we had an issue with the House where you had a speaker incapacitated or some harm came to them,” he said. “This demonstrates that it's difficult to fill that [job] or to have an acting speaker do much in such an event.”
Lesson being learned
Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman who represented his Northern Virginia district in the House from 1995 to 2008, said what we are witnessing in the body today is a crop of relatively new legislators getting a lesson in how things work in Washington.
“When I was there, we had five- and six-seat majorities, and we operated just fine, because we recognized you had to operate as a team, and you had to compromise,” he told VOA.
Now, though, he said, “You have a new group of people in there that don't know how government can work. They're just sent there to say, ‘No,’ and stop the other guy.”
“So, it's just got to work its way out,” he said. “It may take another week or so. Who knows? But they have to work that out within the caucus.”
Davis said that in the short term, the crisis is harming the “Republican brand.” In the longer term, however, he said that he doesn’t believe the current crisis will seriously hurt the party.
“The election’s a year from now, and once you nominate a presidential candidate, that generally tends to suck up all the oxygen in the room,” Davis said. | US Congress |
Bernie Sanders Calls On Israel to ‘Stop the Bombing’
Sanders' comments come as lawmakers continue debating funding to Israel
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called on Israel to stop its airstrikes on the Gaza Strip if the country wants more funding from the US as it continues its conflict with the militant group Hamas.
"If you want this money, you have to change your military strategy," Sanders said Sunday in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," emphasizing that Israel needs to stop the bombing now."
Sanders' comments come as lawmakers continue to debate the future of funding packages to Israel.
The House of Representatives approved a $14.3 billion bill to aid the country on Friday, but that legislation is likely to meet a dead end in the Senate, where Democrats are expected to resist the IRS cuts to help fund the package.
Sanders' call joins a growing chorus of similar demands as the humanitarian crisis created by the Israel-Hamas conflict continues to worsen, leaving thousands of Palestinian civilians in danger.
"Israel has a right to defend itself," Sanders said. "But what Israel does not — in my view — have a right to do is to kill thousands and thousands of innocent men, women, and children who had nothing to do with that attack."
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WASHINGTON — The House voted Tuesday to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speaker's chair, with Rep. Matt Gaetz and seven other conservatives joining all Democrats present to remove him.
What happens next?
First, a temporary speaker takes over
The Office of the Speaker has been declared vacant. This does not immediately trigger a new speaker election, however, because of a succession list McCarthy, R-Calif., submitted to the House clerk in January. That list isn't public.
But Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., revealed shortly after McCarthy was removed that his name tops that list. McHenry will now serve as a temporary replacement under House rules.
Since 2003, House rules have required the speaker to submit a list of names to the clerk of members to act in the case of his or her vacancy. According to Rule I, clause 8 of the House rules, the next person on that list “shall act as Speaker pro tempore until the election of a Speaker or a Speaker pro tempore.” We now know that's Patrick McHenry; he'll take over as speaker in an acting capacity.
This is a different situation than in January, when the House started a new session and could not start any legislative business until a speaker was elected. Because it was the beginning of a new Congress, the House needed to elect a speaker in order to swear in members and pass the rules package.
McHenry suggested that members should meet in their party conferences before deciding on the path forward. An election for a permanent speaker could be delayed until the House is better prepared.
The House in uncharted territory
This is the first time in U.S. history that a speaker of the House has been voted out of office.
In 1910, Speaker Joseph Cannon, R-Ill., offered a motion to oust himself to put his detractors on the record. Republicans voted overwhelmingly to keep him in office. “Cannon, Shorn of His Power, Keeps Office,” read the New York Times headline the next day.
McHenry, as speaker pro tempore, is now in untested waters.
The acting speaker is unlikely to have the same powers as the speaker since "the intention was for them to act in a short-term capacity while the House selected a new speaker," said Catholic University professor Matthew Green, author of "The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership."
How quickly could the House move to elect a permanent speaker?
House rules do not lay out how long the speaker pro tempore can remain in power before the chamber votes on a new permanent speaker.
The House could proceed soon to the election of a new speaker or decide to hold it at a later time.
“In the event of a vacancy in the speakership, there is no time frame that the House must follow to elect a new speaker,” Green said earlier Tuesday. “However, as a practical matter, the House will want to elect a new speaker quickly in order for the chamber to move forward with its legislative business.”
There were some hints that McHenry was next in line
On Jan. 9, the House chair announced “that the Speaker has delivered to the Clerk a letter dated January 7, 2023, listing Members in the order in which each shall act as Speaker pro tempore." Essentially McCarthy gave a list of names of members he would want to act in his absence if he was no longer able to serve. These names were not public, so there was no way to know who is on the list until the speakership is vacant.
But separately in January, McCarthy also appointed members to act as speaker pro tempore to sign enrolled bills. These names were made public in the Congressional Record, offering a look at who McCarthy trusts in his absence.
McHenry, a top McCarthy ally who also helped led debt ceiling negotiations on his behalf, was at the top of that list.
Also on the list were: Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina; Rep. Adrian Smith, of Nebraska; Rep. Robert Wittman, of Virginia; Rep. Andy Harris, of Maryland; and Reps. John Joyce and Guy Reschenthaler, of Pennsylvania to act as speaker pro tempore to sign enrolled bills. These members are typically chosen mostly for one of two reasons: because they are allies of the speaker's or because of their districts' proximity to Washington, so they can preside over pro forma sessions when the House is out. | US Congress |
Democrats remain vexed by the House as Ukraine funding hits crisis point
A vote is being teed up for after the break. But no one is certain whether it can get through Congress.
Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Washington are looking at the three-week sprint after Thanksgiving as their best remaining hope of getting aid to the country.
But as Democrats continue to publicly express hope for the Biden administration’s nearly $106 billion funding request for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, they also remain vexed about how to move a bill through the Republican-run House.
The dynamics of the GOP House have alarmed the West Wing. Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated that he’ll at some point bring a vote on Ukraine, but those in the White House do not yet have a clear read on the new Republican leader or his negotiating style, according to two senior aides not authorized to speak publicly about private deliberations.
Few in Biden’s orbit have ever met Johnson, a religious conservative who was largely unknown until his stunning ascent to the speakership. And while the West Wing didn’t appreciate former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s grandstanding, they did feel like he eventually wanted to deal — and they are less sure about Johnson, according to the officials. Moreover, the same fringe group of Republicans who ousted McCarthy wield that same power over Johnson — and they are largely opposed to helping Ukraine, making a path to deal that much more difficult.
“People are well aware that if a vote were put up in the House of Representatives today, it would pass with an overwhelming majority of members — that the issue is not the level of support as it is getting to that vote,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.). “Because of the political conditions and the change in leadership, getting the vote has been the hard part.”
On two occasions already, Democrats tried but failed to get aid to Ukraine in a must-pass funding bill. With another deadline to spark action not coming until the latest stopgap funding bills expire in late January and early February, many of Congress’ strongest Ukraine backers fear the country can’t wait that long.
“I don’t know that Ukraine can survive until February of 2024,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “My sense is they start to run short on ammunition in the next several weeks.”
Believing there is an immediate need, Ukraine advocates are gearing up for a standalone Senate vote on funding when they return from break. Should that vote happen, it would provide a massive test both for the administration’s ability to work Capitol Hill and one of the bedrock elements of the president’s foreign policy agenda.
But the main obstacle still remains: what to do about Republican opposition.
Since passage of the last Ukraine supplemental, Kyiv’s counteroffensive has stalled and conservative support in Washington has crumbled with the GOP’s leader, Donald Trump, opposing it. The outbreak of war in the Middle East has led to the addition of aid to Israel — and growing demands by progressive Democrats for a cease-fire and conditions on aid to Israel.
While support for Israel has strong support in both chambers, senators and administration officials insist that Israel and Ukraine funding remain together.
The thornier challenge is meeting the Republican demand that the package address border policy. The administration’s request includes funding for border security, but the GOP insists it include policy changes to stem the number of people crossing the border, too.
“If Republicans want to have a serious conversation about reforms that will improve our immigration system, we are open to a discussion,” a White House spokesperson said. “We disagree with many of the policies contained in the Senate Republican border proposal. Further, we do not see anything in their proposal about creating an earned path to citizenship for Dreamers and others.”
The bipartisan group of lawmakers who are trying to negotiate a border compromise have continued to talk over the Thanksgiving break, according to a Senate aide. But for many lawmakers, the initial meetings before the holiday only brought the challenge into clearer view.
“They’ve been frustrating,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the lead Republicans in the group, said of the discussions. “We’ll see what happens. I’m not going to support an appropriation supplemental that doesn’t have real border security.”
Democratic Ukraine supporters have embraced the idea that they must include border policy reforms. And while they don’t like marrying the two unrelated issues, they do see an upside if they’re able to address the political thorny issue of the border.
“This is really important funding. I think it’s important for the civilized world to take a stand against dictators like Vladimir Putin and terrorist groups like Hamas,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said. “And I also think we have a failed policy at the southern border, and we need to look at ways to fix it.”
The White House is not directly involved in the border conversations, but officials have expressed support for them publicly and privately, according to several people involved in the discussions.
“President Biden and the leaders in the Senate, both Republican and Democrat, are rock solid in their support of Ukraine,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who is close with Biden, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We have to bear down, get this done and get this supplemental passed soon because the brave Ukrainians who are fighting as winter is coming are looking at losing the supplies they’ve needed for ammunition, for missiles, for drones, for defense, for armor, and we cannot possibly afford to abandon Ukraine,” he added. “If our Republican colleagues demand too much in this negotiation, we won’t be able to get it passed in the Senate and then in the House.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said border policy must be included in the deal in order to get Ukraine funding through Congress. Inside the White House, McConnell has emerged as an unlikely hero for his steadfast support of Ukraine, which has helped, to a large degree, keep his party in line. But the West Wing has growing fears that the Kentucky senator’s grip on his party has slipped, according to the two senior aides granted anonymity to speak about private discussions.
And a border deal carries risk for Democrats. A chief Republican policy proposal would increase the standard migrants must clear to gain asylum into the United States, an idea strongly opposed by progressives.
“We’ve been the beacon of light around this world for many, many generations, when it comes to people who are fleeing violence and fleeing for the sake of their life,” said Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.). “For us to actually weaken that process would be shameful on America. It would be a shame to any member of the House or the Senate that would ever put that on this president’s desk, and I don’t see this president signing a bill with that in it.”
Members of several House caucuses — the Congressional Asian Pacific American, Congressional Black, Congressional Hispanic and Congressional Progressive caucuses — said in a statement earlier this month that they deeply oppose attaching new policy to a funding bill. | US Federal Policies |
Earlier this year we learned that the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Washington, is spearheading a project to staff a future Trump administration with tens of thousands of pre-vetted appointees, who would be tasked with “dismantling the administrative state from day one.” On Monday, Axios published details about what the vetting process looks like, and it appears custom-tailored to generate an army of mindless Trump loyalists.
Heritage’s initiative, called Project 2025, has a reported budget of over $20 million, and it is designed to help Trump transform the federal government overnight if he wins the 2024 election. During his first term, Trump was routinely hamstrung in executing policies and abusing power because he either failed to fill key bureaucratic positions or he was foiled by resistant appointees. This time Trump allies are focused on gutting the federal government’s existing bureaucracy and replacing it with sycophants.
To ensure loyalty, Project 2025 has opted for hammers rather than scalpels.
Heritage helped Trump with staff members hired during his first term; Johnny McEntee, who was director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, is a senior adviser to the project. Heritage’s president told Axios that the project is “orders of magnitude” larger than any other such project for a party out of power. If Trump were to win, it could cause a major rupture in the way the federal government operates.
To ensure loyalty, Project 2025 has opted for hammers rather than scalpels. Heritage has contracted out Oracle to use artificial intelligence to screen loyalists, and the social media feeds of potential hires are being surveilled as part of the vetting process. There aren’t many details about how AI is being used to screen applicants, but Axios reports that social media feeds are being given “intense attention” and that applicants “queasy about testing the limits of Trump’s power will get flagged and rejected.” It also seems possible that Trump-affirming commentary could result in an algorithmic boost.
With this knowledge, one can imagine how applicants might contort themselves to appeal to the administration. If I were an applicant to serve in Trump’s administration, I would scrub anything in my timeline that could be construed as remotely anti-Trump out of fear that it could eject me from the process. I might also be inspired to repeatedly share praise for Trump to stand out in the algorithm.
Now, the reality is that many people who would serve in a second Trump administration may not have to change much about their social media presences, given the cultish proclivities of his long-term followers. But it’s worth observing how the application process is effectively asking people to behave as Trump-obsessed automatons prior to serving in a possible future administration.
The 2025 Project personnel application is also designed to screen for MAGA devotees. The application includes many blunt questions about applicants’ political orientations, asking about their beliefs on issues like abortion, trade, immigration, racism and labor unions. It even requires applicants to select what kind of conservative they identify as through a drop-down menu of answers (traditional, fiscal, social, etc.). Many people who want to serve in a future Trump administration are likely to have a lot of conservative beliefs that align with Trump’s. But this application cues applicants to at least outwardly conform to specific worldviews that align most neatly with Trump’s, and it incentivizes intellectual homogeneity and deference to leadership. On a number of occasions, applicants are asked to list living political figures they admire. One can’t help but wonder whether applicants who list Trump in at least some of these responses could be more likely to be rewarded in the hiring process.
The application does include a prompt for applicants to attach their résumés. But by and large the bulk of the questionaire is an ideological screening project, not a tool for understanding the experience and expertise of applicants.
It’s not surprising that Trump would value loyalty over expertise. But it is alarming that seasoned and well-financed conservatives are helping him bring his vision to fruition. A cadre of slavish acolytes can potentially turbo-charge his capacity to wreak havoc in office. | US Federal Policies |
Subsets and Splits