#congressional elections

[gwydionmisha]

Primaries are Ongoing:

Important! Remember to vote in all primaries!!!

NOTE: Important non-Presidential Primaries are also ongoing! Remember to vote in all the races, not just the top of the ticket. Who runs congress, your state, and your local government really matters. In some states this is a separate primary. Check the rules for your state. This is how you push the party and the government left.

Colorado (House), New York (Senate and House), South Carolina (Run Off), Utah (Several important primaries): 6/25/24

Arizona (Congress), South Dakota (Run off): 7/30/24

Tennessee (Congress): 8/1/24

Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Washington 8/6/24

Know your state's schedule and where to vote. Make sure you and your friends are registered. If you are voting in person, plan how to get there.

Never, ever sleep on a chance to vote.

It is always better to vote for someone who will listen to us than to let someone who is actively trying to kill us.

[chaos-in-one]

I am BEGGING fellow Americans, for once, to pay attention to elections other than the presidential election. Yes, who is president is important, but the president isn't who makes the laws. The congress is. Not paying attention to who is elected into congress or voting in those elections is exactly how we end up with awful fucking bills trying to strip minorities of our rights time and time again.

[enny43]

Let's talk about Colorado's 3rd congressional district.

Lauren Boebert and Adam Frisch are locked in a ridiculously close election in a race a lot of people are watching very closely. Seeing Boebert unseated would be a huge win and may turn out to be crucially important in a midterm the Dems (shockingly) still have a chance to take the House in. It has been razer thin for several days, and over a long lapse in reporting, Fisch lead by less than 70 votes with ~90% of the vote in.

As of right now, Boebert holds a lead of 1,136 votes with about 98% of the votes counted. It might take until next Thursday for the remaining votes to be counted and a winner declared, as there are an estimated 5,898 votes still to be counted. This does not include overseas and military votes or ballots that need to be cured, but we'll get to that.

First lets address a question many people have:

Why is this taking so long?

The short answer is, it's not. The main reason it seems to be taking longer than most races is directly related to how close the race actually is. See when news media "call" races, they are actually just projecting the winner based on the possibilities in remaining math. If it becomes reasonably impossible for a certain candidate to win, they call the race. The projected loser may even concede at this time. But that is not an official result, nor does the counting stop at that point. Just like in CO-3, counting continues following the guidelines set by the state to tabulate an official result. This race only hasn't been called yet because with the remaining votes, either candidate can still win. Colorado also has a gold-standard level election system.. so we can expect counting to take a little longer due to such a high percentage of ballots there being mail-in (Colorado sends ballots to all voters by default)

As far as the timeline goes, this is not abnormal.

So what are Adam Frisch's odds of winning and how can we calculate them? This is a more complicated answer, but I'll do my best to keep it simple.

As I said, there are an estimated 5,898 votes remaining to be counted. The bulk of them (2,365) come from Pueblo County which favors Frisch by 3.3%, and another large share (700 votes) comes from Pitkin County which favors Frisch by 29.2%

If all math followed those numbers, this would be a pickup of 565 votes for Adam Frisch. Boebert also has an advantage in Mesa County of 7.8% where there are 726 estimated votes remaining. This would give her a pickup of ~112 votes. In the remaining counties where there are less than 300 votes remaining to be counted, we can estimate that the votes would mostly cancel out, with a slight edge for Frisch.

All the math with these smaller counties included points to Frisch coming up short by about 770 votes (this would still fall in the range of an automatic recount).. but this does not account for all the outstanding ballots.

There are still an indeterminate number of absentee ballots from overseas and military votes to count, in addition to provisional ballots that may have been cast on Election Day (Colorado has same-day voter registration, so these are uncommon).. and there is also a curing period for ballots that may have had a mistake and need to be verified (such as someone forgetting to sign the envelope when mailing their ballot in)

We can expect the military and overseas ballots to favor Frisch. Not only does the military slightly lean Dem as it is, Southern Colorado is home to a lot of active duty Air Force which has an even more liberal tilt than the military broadly. As for the cured ballots, it's hard to say.. but my intuition tells me Democratic voters would be more energized and likely to fix their ballots by the deadline (there's also a lot of outreach being done to help people through this process, something I imagine the Boebert camp will be less capable of doing)

Are there any guarantees the remaining votes will follow the trend exactly? Of course not. They may favor one candidate or the other to a greater degree than the averages represent. Without knowing how many outstanding ballots there are from the military, overseas, and cured counts.. it is fundamentally impossible to know how this race will turn out. What I can say is not to expect many updates between now and next week. This one is going to come down to the wire, and whatever candidate ends up winning will do so by a very tight margin. No matter the result, I expect a recount will be triggered leading us to even more waiting to find out the official results.

My suggestion to everyone is to be patient and let this process play out. I have no reason to be worried about the results of this race, which is already much closer than anyone expected it would be going into Election Day. After all, CO-3 is an R+6 district. The race being this close is something no one expected.

Here's a chart with all of the data I discussed:

[reportwire]

The Next Presidential Election Is Happening Right Now in the States

The Next Presidential Election Is Happening Right Now in the States

Kristen McDonald Rivet let out a big, slightly rueful laugh. “I was underestimating the level of national attention this race was going to get,” she told me. “In the extreme, I was underestimating it.” A city commissioner in Bay City, Michigan, McDonald Rivet decided earlier this year to run as a Democrat for the State Senate. She knew the race would be competitive in a closely divided district.…

[deadpresidents]

"He was remarkable in the House [of Representatives]. He came [to Congress] winning a Republican seat. So he was a red to blue candidate. He came as the longest-serving noncommissioned officer in the military ever to serve in the Congress. So he was on a path of veterans affairs and the rest. He came having worked in farming as a child and so rural America was a big priority for him.

He's very popular in the House. Members are so excited about him because he's a wonderful person. He called me right after this, shall we say, opportunity arose. Told me: 'I know how to make this case. I know how to differentiate. I can get this done. I'm putting myself out there.' And, you know, here he is, governor of Minnesota, and he's putting himself out there.

And then he comes up with 'weird,' which becomes viral, and here he is. So, I have to give him a lot of credit for not only being a great governor, and values-based, and visionary, and all that,, but being quite an adept politician."

-- Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on presumptive Democratic Vice Presidential nominee and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in an interview with the New York Times.

I haven't done the research to confirm what Speaker Pelosi said, but that's a pretty fascinating historical tibdbit if Tim Walz really was the longest-serving noncommissioned officer in the military to serve in the 235-year history of the United States Congress! I've reached out to the Office of the Historian of the House of Representatives to see if they can confirm that fact.

[tishinada]

US politics and history time for a moment...

The people who want to claim that voting for Biden would mean they supported genocide remind me a great deal of the people in the 1830s - 1860s in the North who wanted immediate abolition because they believed slavery was a sin and God would hold them guilty of that sin if they didn't oppose slavery. This sometimes resulted in them supporting 3rd party candidates that, SURPRISE!, did nothing but push the election toward the most rabid pro-slavery candidates.

You know what most of those moral anti-slavery people didn't care about? What happened to Black Americans. They were concerned only about their own guilt, not Black Americans' welfare.

None of these people making this a moral issue now show any signs of caring what happens to Palestinians OR to all of the other groups that will suffer if the dumpster wins instead.

Biden can't wave his hand and make it go away because the US doesn't have unilateral power worldwide (though some Americans seem to believe that, sigh.) There are limits on his powers, especially since he has to negotiate with a hostile House of Representatives. He has chosen what is actually a pretty effective route and fought for at least some aid to get to Palestinians. And currently he has *some* leverage with the Israelis.

The question you should be asking yourself if you really care about genocide is which choice will do the most to help the Palestinians? Do you really think the dumpster would do even as much as Biden? Or would he be actively helping them and every other imperialist country (*cough*Russia*cough*)? And who else will suffer if he wins that would not under Biden?

If that isn't what matters most to you, then you're no different from the moral abolitionists and other Northerners who wanted slavery restricted (because it depressed wages for free white men) but also wanted to make it illegal for African Americans to move into new states like Ohio and Indiana and Illinois (racism and fears of wage competition.) Or to ship them to Africa, no matter how many generations had been in the US?

It's not idealism. You're self-centered and egotistical and actively choosing evil if you think "punishing" Biden is the result of not voting.

Vote pragmatically. Vote strategically. Vote with the welfare of the most people possible in mind.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Harris and Legitimacy: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

A lot of this is inspired by comments made by people I respect, both in my personal life such as those made by a good friend over dinner who is an avowed leftist, as well as some public-ish figures like Justin Robert Young of Politics! Politics! Politics! and Jennifer Briney of Congressional Dish. Two thinkers I have immense respect for but I think have made some lame takes about Harris being "coronated."

Your problem with Kamala Harris is structural not personal.

Warning: This gets windy. It clocked in at about 3100 words and 7 pages in a Google doc.

TL/DR: We have a complexity and opacity problem when it comes to how elections work and I don't actually know what we should do or expect when a Presidential nominee drops out in July, but for all sorts of reasons a Primary "do over" is unrealistic and massively problematic. Which is why candidates who are likely to drop out in July because they're increasingly incapable of campaigning and deeply unpopular shouldn't run in the first place because once they run, there's actually no good way to stop them if they have an incumbency advantage. There's no "remove your candidate before its a problem" button under breakable glass, and I don't know how we'd build such a button into the system in a way that wouldn't feel more undemocratic.

I do not love the way that Harris became the nominee. However, I don’t love it not because I think it's wholly illegitimate or undemocratic. Her not having directly faced voters in a primary at the top of the ticket is not wholly undemocratic.

No, not because of the super lame excuse that she was on the ticket as VP.

That’s why she’s the legitimate nominee from a legal and party rules standpoint. Because party rules and election laws ensured that it couldn’t play out any other way.

At least not without Biden having dropped out much, much earlier.

The principle reason for this is actually fairly reasonable - if you accept our electoral machinery “as is” which I do not encourage you to do so but you go to war with the electoral process you have not the electoral process you want. We absolutely should debate reforms after this cycle because what Biden did was undemocratic and unconscionable - it's just that Kamala Harris should not be punished for accepting reality as it is rather than waving a wand and remaking the entire process to be more in keeping with what you or I or Ezra Klein would want.

The principal reason that it had to be Harris is that there is no ironclad, bad faith actor resistant mechanism to spin up a brand new primary election after one is already essentially complete. 

The reason for this is two fold. First is that because this is a state by state process rather than a national one, each state sets conditions for qualifying to be on the ballot and sets deadlines for fulfilling those conditions so there is adequate time to plan the election: recruit and train staff who run the voting sites, print ballots, make sure voting machines are working properly - and whatever else.

There are 50 Democratic Primaries, not 1 and Democratic Party rules can’t legally bind actual lawmakers

This is where it gets weird! Because we are told the parties are essentially NGOs - private clubs - that make their own rules for who gets to be a candidate or not and when primaries are even held. 

Which is true! 

Sort of. 

State elected officials are not beholden to the parties and its state governments who are actually operating the voting process itself. This how you get situations like New Hampshire very nearly not having its delegates seated at the convention because it held its primary election earlier than the position in the schedule dictated by the Democratic National Committee. 

So the Democratic National Committee attempted to force New Hampshire to vote later while New Hampshire has a state law mandating that it have the first primary election. Which the state technically has the right to do because the DNC is not actually a federal authority, it’s a private organization remember? But the DNC also threatened to refuse to allow New Hampshire’s votes to count since the DNC decides how to pick its candidates for President.

Now this story has a happy ending because New Hampshire’s delegates were seated, but only after the New Hampshire state Democratic Party (a legally autonomous but theoretically subordinate entity to the Democratic national party) held its own separate vote later in the election cycle which did count. Incidentally Joe Biden was the only one on the ballot. 

So technically because it felt it should have more authority than a state elected government, the Democratic National Party caused New Hampshire to run an election that didn’t actually count in an act of ill advised pettiness and micromanagement (and in what was widely assessed to be an attempt to minimize the chances of any of Biden’s challengers from getting any momentum by having the first few elections in states where Biden was unpopular with Democrats - see also the saga of Michigan & Uncommitted.)

Manufacturing Irregularity and Illegitimacy

Now I know what you’re saying, how does this anecdote help the argument that Harris’ candidacy isn’t undemocratic and illegitimate?

It sort of doesn’t, but I also want you to understand from a practical standpoint the problems that Biden caused by running again and then waiting practically until it was almost impossible for him to get his name off the ballot to drop out. The complexity and dubiousness of the primary process to begin with is why the only smooth and legally sound transition was to Harris.

The Democratic National Party could not force New Hampshire’s Republican controlled legislature to change its law requiring New Hampshire to hold its election first in any Presidential primary election. I am not defending the DNC’s attempt to threaten a state government into obeying its election calendar. I’m also not defending the New Hampshire legislature and its quest to go first come hell or highwater.

But do you think New Hampshire and other states would acquiesce to holding a “do over” primary for the Democrats? Do you think maybe they might engage in some legal chicanery? 

Let's say Republican controlled states refuse to allow a “do over” and the state parties hold privately funded and organized contests like New Hampshire did to get its delegates back. Might this provoke legal wrangling over whether the new nominee should be allowed ballot access to the general election? 

I’m not personally aware of any laws stating that the winner of a primary election in any particular state or nationally has to be the person who goes on the ballot for that party in the general election - that would be silly for a lot of reasons. Which is why Harris is able to become the new Democratic party nominee in the first place. Yet it's not inconceivable that some states might rush to try to change their election laws in the event of a more chaotic process. 

There were threats made and speculation of that happening even with Harris taking over as candidate. These threats ultimately don't seem to have manifested real world action, but don’t forget that in 2020 Trump went to court almost 80 times to dispute this or that aspect of the election process. It's now in our culture that the law is a tool you can wield to try to stop election results you don’t like or, failing that, poison the results so that while the election result may be honored legally, tens of millions of people wind up feeling like something was wrong.

Again, I am not defending our election methods, I am describing the context in which candidates are selected.

Trying to defend elections and voters against fraud

The second reason that there is no mechanism for a primary election “do over” is money. As I mentioned, the Democratic Party kinda, sorta jerked around New Hampshire voters and the state government. It engaged in a game of chicken wherein if New Hampshire’s Republican controlled legislature didn’t change its laws to delete the requirement that it go first in any Presidential Primary, then the delegates from that election wouldn’t be permitted to cast New Hampshire’s votes. Paid election workers had to be paid for their efforts, ballots had to be printed, voters had to vote. Time, effort, and money was expended for a contest that didn’t count.

Now imagine asking everyone to do it again.

What should have happened to the money the Biden - Harris campaign raised when Biden suspended his campaign is probably the critical question that I would pose to people who are cranky about Harris being “annointed.”

According to Forbes this is the scenario: 

Harris can use the money because she is part of the campaign. The VP can use the money if the President steps aside. There’s paperwork involved.

Now if being the VP should be disqualifying for automatically getting the money and the campaign machinery, this is absolutely a conversation we can have! 

Now worthwhile questions to ponder though are should this actually be disqualifying or should we care more about who the VP nominee is? Because we are technically voting both for a candidate and the person who will step in if, after winning, the President dies, is incapacitated, or resigns because of some sort of insurmountable scandal. All of which have historical precedents. Although it's possible Nixon will be the last President ever to resign because they committed what are empirically understood to be crimes and the general public was not okay with this.

If we think that the VP pick shouldn’t inherit the campaign operation and money if the Presidential nominee simply drops out rather than drops dead (and maybe not even then) then we do have to have the conversation of what happens to the money and the campaign operation? If the campaign has to be shut down and the balance of the money refunded to donors, then are we in effect handing the election to the opponent of the ex-nominee if this is a major party candidate we are talking about?

I think the argument made by many pundits in March of 2024 when Ezra Klein became the most prominent voice calling for Biden to drop out and the Dems to hold a modified Primary is that “no, the penalty from having to dismantle and rebuild the election machine around a new person is outweighed by lots of factors: 

The media taking to novelty and drama like catnip. 

The attention economy running wild. 

And what I think we can now describe as a “sugar high” that comes from replacing a certain to fail candidate with someone who, while not descended from heaven free of scandal or questionable policy stances and affectations, at least represents a different set of pros and cons and changes how we talk about the issues and candidates.

But that was also March. March!

Biden waited to drop out until July. When all of the Primaries had been held, all of the delegates awarded, and he was cruising to the nomination more or less solely on the basis that nobody who could give him a serious fight was willing to risk throwing down with the sitting President in a year where said President was up against Trump. If Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee, all bets are off. The Primary might have been a blood sport with Mitt Romney on the opposing side, but with Trump as the presumed nominee the risk aversion among Democrats was incredible and tragic to behold.

But it was also their risk to not take. You can’t just make people who could theoretically give the incumbent President a serious fight actually do it. And the rub is that I don’t know how to rejigger any sort of laws or formal Democratic party processes to make it so that running and losing is consequence free. 

I don’t know how to encourage more competitive elections when there’s an incumbent, other than a political culture that is A LOT thicker skinned and doesn’t gripe perpetually about being robbed when voters don’t do what they want. Why yes I am still irritated by a conversation with a friend who simultaneously thinks Harris is illegitimate because “nobody voted for her” but still to this day thinks it would be fine if a candidate won a primary with less than a majority because the liberals collectively had more votes overall but were splitting them too narrowly and that it was dirty pool for them to drop out and consolidate the vote.

Dropping out in July

So what do you do if the presumed nominee who (technically) won an (uncompetitive) primary in July?

In an ideal world the candidate should have seen the writing on the wall and never ran.

Failing that, they should have dropped out before the voting started.

But if they don’t?

There is no explicit mechanism to force someone out of the race before it’s started. There are all sorts of shenanigans that can be played with funding opponents, withholding funds, creating blacklists of people who aren’t allowed to work on campaigns if they work for person XYZ (ask AOC about the DNC kneecapping candidates who primary incumbents by trying to scare campaign staffers with “you’ll never work in this town again.” It was a whole thing.)

Despite the presumption of being dastardly oligarchs unaccountable to voters who just do what they want, the DNC actually can’t keep people from running as Democrats. Hell, RFK Jr. started as a Democrat. Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Manchin, and Krysten Sinema all have run as Democrats. Anybody can be a Democrat if they check the right box on a form. 

Same with the Republicans. The Republican establishment pulled every lever they had to try to stop Trump from being the nominee in 2016, but they didn’t have a big red button that says “you’re not a candidate anymore. Kick rocks” if that person can pull together the money, attention, and votes to be a viable candidate in the face of establishment opposition.

This is, incidentally, why the Dems originally wanted superdelegates: to override the voters if there were a Trumpian scenario where a candidate had less than a majority of the overall votes cast but the other candidates were splitting the opposition vote instead of consolidating around a candidate who would be palatable to the establishment, if not one of them.

Why Biden couldn’t give the money to someone else.

That Biden can’t give the money to another candidate, at least not in total, and has to donate it either to the national committee or refund it, is reasonably well discussed in the media. Why he couldn’t is less well discussed.

Because I haven’t seen it discussed, this is where I’m going to get very speculative.

I think it's a check against fraud. I think it may even be a check against the very thing people are accusing Biden and the Democrats of doing: pulling a fast one and changing candidates at the last minute. Except she was, for lack of a better word, Biden’s legal beneficiary should he decide he as an individual was out of the campaign.

But you could easily imagine a scenario much like the Dem 2020 Primary or the GOP 2016 Primary where, surprise! All the very popular but not popular enough candidates drop out and give not only their endorsements, but all of their money and campaign staff to their preferred candidate. We’d definitely be living in a different world if all the establishment Republicans had been able to transfer their cash and organizations to Mitt Romney.

I know a lot of people who may very well have walked away from electoralism entirely and never voted again if Klobuchar, Buttigieg et al. had been able to not just suspend their campaigns and clear the center left lane for Biden but also directly give him all of the money they’d raised.

Essentially what I’m talking about is longshots and badfaith candidates entering a race largely just to raise money, only to funnel it to another person late in the game.

Another possibility is out and out grifters. Which we already kind of know this happens, but in an exquisitely legal way that still sometimes manages to trip up otherwise very competent candidates who are taking advantage of their campaign donations to live a little more opulently and provide huge paydays for their friends and family. But as is, they have to spend the money and they have to spend it in ways that can be scrutinized by the Federal Electoral Commission. They can spend profligately but they have to save the receipts.

What they can’t do is just brazenly take the money and run.

Probably.

It’s not entirely clear to me to what degree if any there is a firewall between Trump’s re-election fund and Trump’s legal defense fund. There may be some sketchy legalese involved.

So by forcing Biden to either 1. Give the money to Harris. 2. Give the money to the DNC. 3. Refund the money; it keeps him somewhat above board and it minimizes the potential for an insincere grifter to fundraise, quit, and then use the money for whatever.

So where does that leave us?

I’m actually a bit at a loss for how to prevent another scenario like Biden dropping out in friggin’ July. This is if not literally than essentially unprecedented.

At the risk of repeating myself, ideally he should have never run again. I would hope that a future President facing dire prospects would not monopolize time and money this way or play stupid games with the lives of hundreds of millions of people. I would expect there would be pressure on such a hypothetical President not to do so. Yet I cannot rule out family and staffers with careers on the line gaslighting an increasingly out of touch or deeply arrogant President.

In an election year where until just two months ago now, both presumptive nominees of their Parties were the oldest candidates ever AND where one was nearly assassinated, we should take more care to scrutinize who is the VP pick. Because we are not just voting for President, we are voting for the backup President.

As for Harris inheriting all of this mess in July, I don’t love the circumstances, but at the same time I think we need to be much more introspective about Primaries - how they’re run, what they mean, the complicated dance between the national parties who technically have no direct legal authority over states and the states who can be coerced but not directly cowed by parties if the states feel like being obstreperous like New Hampshire. 

There’s all sorts of pain points that the Republicans may try to attack to sabotage the legally very smooth ascension of Harris to being the Presidential nominee, especially if it looks like she’s going to win. Those pain points and more would have been wielded against someone wholly separate from the Biden - Harris campaign as a legal matter. In the very best scenario, we are looking at an election where the Republicans will spend the next four years waving around their failed legal challenges like OJ Simpson’s bloody glove and creating a miasma of illegitimacy and rage around Harris’ presidency.

We have a complexity and an opacity problem when it comes to the election process. It's taken me too dang many words to explain up to this point in what I hope is plain enough English which makes it very prone to sabotage and very difficult for the average person to scrutinize carefully. And that is how you end up with a narrative in which Harris’ candidacy is undemocratic and illegitimate. But if it is, and I’m not actually saying it's not, then we should indict the system and ponder how to improve its ability to reliably serve up candidates who are selected democratically and are rich in legitimacy.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alanna Vagianos at HuffPost:

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday described in detail what it’s like for many women to have to travel out of their home state to access abortion care, marking the first time in recent memory that such a prominent political figure has magnified the real-life hurdles to obtaining care. In a speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s leadership conference, the Democratic presidential nominee provided a riveting warning about what could happen to the country if her rival, former President Donald Trump, wins the election in November. She reminded the crowd that Trump nominated three of the conservative justices who overturned the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade — and the landscape for reproductive health care has been dire ever since.

She broke down, step-by-step, what traveling for abortion care really looks like. Harris noted that around 40% of Latinas in the U.S. live in states that have enacted abortion restrictions since the repeal of federal abortion protections. “Understand that the majority of women who seek abortion care are mothers. Understand what that means for her,” Harris said to the crowd in Washington, D.C. Around 55% of women who have an abortion have already had one or more births, research shows. “So, she’s got to now travel to another state — God help her that she has some extra money to pay for that plane ticket. She’s got to figure out what to do with her kids — God help her if she has affordable child care,” she continued. “Imagine what that means: She has to leave her home to go to an airport, stand in a TSA [airport security] line — like, think about this.” Harris emphasized how terrifying it is for women to travel to a city they’ve never visited and receive medical care from a doctor they’ve never met.

“On any public policy, you have to ask: How is this going to affect a real person?” she said. “Go through the details.”

Last year alone, over 166,000 people traveled across state lines to get abortion care amid local restrictions on procedures. Abortion care providers have told HuffPost that many of the women who are forced to travel have never been on a plane before or don’t speak English. Often, they need to travel by themselves because they can only afford one plane ticket. Many have to rely on already struggling abortion funds to pay for travel and lodging costs. “She’s going to have to get right back to the airport because she [has] got to get back to those kids. And it’s not like her best friend can go with her because her best friend is probably taking care of the kids,” Harris said. “All because these people have decided they’re in a better position to tell her what’s in her best interest than she is. … It’s just simply wrong.”

Harris’ comments were only a small part of her speech Wednesday, but they were extremely powerful. They show how differently she approaches abortion policy than President Joe Biden. Although Biden supports restoring Roe, he has never been a full-throated advocate for abortion rights and rarely even says the word “abortion.” Harris has been the Biden administration’s biggest defender of abortion rights since the Supreme Court ruling that repealed Roe.

Speaking at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s leadership conference on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris (D) gave details about the reality of obtaining abortion services, which is a costly and expensive endeavor for a lot of people, as it involves lodging, gas, child care, and food costs. #HarrisWalz2024 #WeWontGoBack

[antigirlb0ss]

seeing french youth rallying around their newly elected left wing government as an American is like wow. I want that so bad. good for them. (Waves of jealousy visibly radiating from my body)

[maxknightley]

Are you also not voting this year

I'm voting for Hamas

[taviokapudding]

There's bipartisan talks in US Congress to send back all Palestinians (yes even US born ones) back to Palestine via a bill

In my opinion every single member of Congress and staff showing support for the idea need to be removed from office, have their hard drives investigated, and banned from all levels of public service and public office until further notice.

Palestinans don't want to leave home, but Congress using US tax payer dollars to fund Israel to murder all Palestinians regardless of religion (yes, some of the Christian families who's ancestors knew Jesus Christ personally who had been living in Palestine have had their bloodlines fully eradicated) or ethnic status (there are US citizens who are mixed that have been unaccounted for or trapped in the bombing zone) is why Palestinians are US citizens and permanent residents in the first place.

Israel has universal health care, education, and access to US weapons because of Congress lying and gas lighting US tax payers about their spending. There would be no Israel if the US never got involved in the first place. And the majority of US citizens bipartisanly don't want to fund Israel at all at any level - we want our money to go to our infrastructure. It's ridiculous to suggest a mass deportation that would solve nothing the US masses want and only hurt more innocents.

Let it be known- that bill and backing it is an admission of guilt for the enthic cleaning and genocide of the Palestinians by the US government- US Congress is okay with sending unarmed civilians (even US citizens) to their deaths to hide their crimes.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden’s plans to cancel student loan debt as “vile” and suggested that the program will be “rebuked” if he is elected.

The Biden administration has canceled loan balances for nearly 4.8 million people by relying on a mix of existing programs and new policies after the Supreme Court struck down his campaign-trail promise for sweeping relief last year.

In a rambling campaign rally speech in Racine, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Trump compared debt relief to what he said is “illegal amnesty” for immigrants married to American citizens.

“He did that with the tuition and that didn’t work out too well, he got rebuked, and then he did it again, it’s going to get rebuked again, even more so, it’s an even more vile attack, but he did that with tuition just to get publicity with the election,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, he blamed student loan relief for a climbing federal budget deficit.

“Because he’s throwing money out the window,” Trump said. “This student loan program, which is not even legal, it’s not even legal, and the students aren’t buying it, by the way. His polls are down. I’m leading in young people by numbers that nobody has ever seen.”

Last year, the Supreme Court blocked Biden’s plans for student debt relief after a pair of lawsuits from Republican attorneys general and conservative legal groups.

At a campaign event that same day, Trump hailed the decision and called Biden’s plans “very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence.”

Project 2025, a right-wing special interest-backed plan for Trump’s return to the White House, has also called for reversing student debt cancellation and eliminating the Office of Federal Student Aid.

Earlier this year, more than a dozen GOP-led states launched another federal court battle to challenge Biden’s latest debt relief plans. Biden is “unilaterally trying to impose an extraordinarily expensive and controversial policy that he could not get through Congress,” according a lawsuit led by Missouri’s Republican attorney general.

Before Biden’s plan was struck down, millions of people who took out federally backed student loans were eligible for up to $20,000 in relief.

Borrowers earning up to $125,000, or $250,000 for married couples, would be eligible for up to $10,000 of their federal student loans to be wiped out. Those borrowers would be eligible to receive up to $20,000 in relief if they received Pell grants.

Roughly 43 million federal student loan borrowers were eligible for that relief, including 20 million people who could have had their debts entirely wiped out, according to the White House. 16 million people had already submitted their applications and received approval for debt cancellation prior to the court’s ruling.

Still, the administration has been able to speed relief for nearly 5 million Americans by leaning on programs that have existed for years, including during Trump’s administration.

Last month, the administration aided $7.7 billion in relief, including wiping out debts for nearly 67,000 public servants enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, according to the Education Department.

Another 54,000 borrowers had their balances cleared under a new repayment plan that promises to cancel debts from loans of less than $12,000 if they had made their payments over 10 years. Another 39,000 borrowers who have been in repayment for more than 20 to 25 years as part of an income-driven repayment plan also had their balances cleared.

The administration’s student loan plans are also fuelling a federal budget deficit, which will hit $1.9 trillion this fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That includes a projected $145 billion spike from changes to the student loan forgiveness plan, including a proposal to waive interest for millions of borrowers.

The amount of debt taken out to support student loans for higher education costs has exploded within the last decade, alongside surging tuition costs, private university enrollment growth, stagnant wages and a lack of investments in higher education and student aid, which puts the burden of college costs largely on students and their families.

Many borrowers also have been trapped by predatory lending schemes with for-profit institutions and sky-high interest rates that have made it impossible for many borrowers to make any progress toward paying off their debt, with interest adding to balances that have exceeded the original loans.

[kimkimberhelen]

Okay, progressives, liberals, and fellow democrats, the congressional black caucus, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have all unambiguously stated that they have Joe Biden's back. It's time to stop crying. Let's rock n' roll and win this bitch.

Also, Kamala Harris is already on the ticket, so if something serious happened, she would literally be right there. That's why we have Vice Presidents, folks.

[zmyaro]

I just heard about the Fair Representation Act, which seems to aim to do a lot to inhibit the impact of gerrymandering.

More information about it:

Ask your representative to support it with a couple clicks:

(Put in your information, and it will identify your representative and auto-fill an example email. Sending something is more important than what you write, so you can just send that template if you don't have time/desire to write something else!)

[nyiibat2]

Politics are not for the people, politicians are not for the people, not anymore at least, not in the past four decades. They do not care about the tax payers, they care what the tax payers can do FOR them. The people that are currently in power sell lies about what the country should be and it’s all these radical far left or right ideas that sound like heaven to voters but once they’re in office nothing gets done. This system is what pushes the tax payers that run for congress out of the race or off the ballots, to make real change and flip this country we collectively need to start;

A,) looking to our communities for who’s running for state, government, senate, president and picking our options from there. There is still a lot of people in the 2024 race that are independent but not being shown on mainstream ballot

B.) we need to learn as much as we can about politics now and be the change we want to see, it’s not impossible with the right motivation and conviction. Run for office, it’s never too late.

C.) young people! We are the true voice of America and our countries governments. It’s our job to learn about politics and world issues and make our own educated opinions and stances on the uncomfortable topics. Looking to other people or parroting our elders views will get us no where.

We loose everything when we stand for nothing, nothings to be lost when we have everything to gain by fighting for a better world.

Oh but Nyi, your views and ideas seem to radical, too ahead of your time. Every idea was seen as radical at one point, the very same ideologies that brought us to this point today were once too radical. When it comes to anything but especially politics NOTHING is too radical if you’re truly dedicated to change and changing voters minds.