#dems have ALSO criticized some of her work/legislation

[artsekey]

It really does look like pivoting to Harris has thrown the Republican party for a loop. She's speaking clearly, concisely, and with wit; if she were to be put in the ring with Trump, it would be a knockout if only because she's coherent.

I'm voting blue regardless, but I've started to feel like I've moved from voting for the 'least bad' option to someone I might actually be more passionate in supporting.

[fernstream]

For months, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr as he sought to defeat President Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

To your first point, Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

Well, Conor Lamb did win. So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy?

These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

Is there anything from Tuesday that surprised you? Or made you rethink your previously held views?

The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realizing what work we have to do.

We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. Because if we keep losing white shares and just allowing Facebook to radicalize more and more elements of white voters and the white electorate, there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.

But the problem is that right now, I think a lot of Dem strategy is to avoid actually working through this. Just trying to avoid poking the bear. That’s their argument with defunding police, right? To not agitate racial resentment. I don’t think that is sustainable.

There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington, that this is just about special people that kind of come down from on high. Year after year, we decline the idea that they did work and ran sophisticated operations in favor of the idea that they are magical, special people. I need people to take these goggles off and realize how we can do things better.

If you are the D.C.C.C., and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms. But instead, we banned them. So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.

The leadership and elements of the party — frankly, people in some of the most important decision-making positions in the party — are becoming so blinded to this anti-activist sentiment that they are blinding themselves to the very assets that they offer.

I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.

So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.

What is your expectation as to how open the Biden administration will be to the left? And what is the strategy in terms of moving it?

I don’t know how open they’ll be. And it’s not a personal thing. It’s just, the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grass roots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election.

I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach. Because Obama’s transition set a trajectory for 2010 and some of our House losses. It was a lot of those transition decisions — and who was put in positions of leadership — that really informed, unsurprisingly, the strategy of governance.

What if the administration is hostile? If they take the John Kasich view of who Joe Biden should be? What do you do?

Well, I’d be bummed, because we’re going to lose. And that’s just what it is. These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.

If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

You are diagnosing national trends. You’re maybe the most famous voice on the left currently. What can we expect from you in the next four years?

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years?

I genuinely don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.

Really? Why?

It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.

I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.

But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

It was at the tail end of 2017 when Cora*, a frontline worker for a south London organisation supporting women who have survived sexual violence, realised that undercurrents of transmisogyny had become a new precedent for her workplace.

“I just remember there being far more comments like ‘Yeah we only support real women’,” Cora says.

Both visibility and hostility were on the rise for trans people in the UK thanks to proposed reform to the Gender Recognition Act. As a result, many junior workers were attempting to ensure inclusivity for trans survivors. But senior staff, made up of cis women, responded by shutting down the conversation altogether.

Cora’s organisation is not an island. On record, gal-dem has spoken to workers in the violence against women and girls [VAWG] sector, who have spent time at organisations including Imkaan, Rape Crisis, Refuge, Amnesty International and Liberty, academics working in the field of gender studies and members of the dedicated gender-based violence branch of union United Voices of the World. Of the workers who spoke to gal-dem, all were too terrified of reprisals to use their real names.

Alongside interviews, gal-dem examined records of public statements made by senior members of organisations like Nia, Southall Black Sisters, and the Centre for Women’s Justice. What emerges is a hostile landscape to navigate for trans survivors of sexual violence, both in accessing immediate frontline services and overcoming ideology that seeks to shut them out of the gender-based violence sector (GBV) in general. With one in six trans women experiencing domestic violence between 2017 to 2018 (and more recent figures suggesting violence against trans people remains high), this landscape’s hostility is undoubtedly already having damaging effects.

At Cora’s organisation, it quickly became apparent that senior staff were deliberately shelving pressing trans-related issues, in the hope that they would disappear altogether. Cora alleges that the CEO Rachel*, who had served as the head of the organisation for nearly three decades, encouraged a culture that was openly hostile to trans women.

Regular requests for the centre’s policy regarding trans women were lodged, but the policy didn’t exist. A lone attempt to create a gender inclusion policy ended with the firing of the employee tasked with producing it. As Cora remembers it, the day after the employee submitted their work, they were told their position was no longer viable. Although it wasn’t cited as a factor in the decision, Cora believes the incident speaks for itself. The policy was not adopted by the centre.

Staff soon began to organise and demand an outright commitment to supporting trans people, pushing the transphobic views of senior management into the open.

“We do get abusive callers on the helpline. But they present as men, not as trans women”

Cora remembers one member of the counselling department declaring that it was “unsafe” for cis survivors using the centre’s services to have people in the building who had not fully medically transitioned. She was challenged by Cora and her colleagues, who explained that this transmisogyny went against the fundamental principles of sexual violence workers: that you must believe survivors.

“I find it fascinating in a horrific way that this bedrock of [sexual violence services] is thrown out of the window immediately,” Cora observes. “They say, ‘Oh, men will just call up pretending to be women, and saying that they’re trans to get into the space to enact harm’.

“Do you not think we are trained in such a way that we are able to speak to someone and know? Because we do get abusive callers on the helpline. But they present as men, [not as trans women]… When you get a call like that, you know. As soon as you pick up the phone, it doesn’t feel right. The gut that you’ve honed so wonderfully and beautifully to do this work, it knows”.

When Cora and her colleague refuted transmisogynistic claims, the goalposts shifted. Senior staff instead claimed they weren’t equipped to work with trans women because they wouldn’t “understand” their experience with sexual violence. Tellingly, one staff member who used such a defence said they would feel comfortable supporting trans men who had “experienced violence as women” – revealing that they didn’t recognise trans men as men.

“There is a real focus on the penis,” Cora says.

Cora left the organisation a few years ago, in part due to the virulent transmisogyny that had become the norm. Rachel stepped down from the CEO position in 2020, after what Cora describes as “successful unionising efforts” from the organisation’s staff. While the new CEO is “far more inclusive”, Cora says, her former co-workers report that hostility to trans survivors persists.

“The problem is much deeper than top down,” she says. “It runs through most of the services.”

Women vs women

Cora’s organisation has become part of a larger war. Transphobia – or ‘gender criticism’ as its proponents like to position it – has become a battleground for a small but powerful pocket of UK feminists. With access to mainstream media platforms, large social media audiences and political influence, these ‘gender-critical’ feminists are attempting to turn trans people from a minority group into a full-scale moral panic.

But where does the antagonism towards trans people in the VAWG sector come from? Academic Alison Phipps, professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, links it to “political whiteness”. Transmisogyny in the UK is focused on violence against white, cis women and “lasers in” on the male body as the source of that violence, Phipps explains. “There’s a lot of straight, [white], privileged [cis] women involved. Whiteness has a lot to do with it. Whiteness and class privilege.”

Weaponising woundedness against marginalised groups has always been a core component of white womanhood and political whiteness, adds Phipps. “It’s Carolyn Bryant [Emmett Till’s accuser] all over again,” she says. “[Trans-exclusionary feminism] is grounded in fear and, in some cases, a hatred of the Other and a deep need for protection.”

For the last few years, trans-exclusionary feminists central objective – achieved for the time being – was to prevent reforms to the Gender Recognition Act that promised to make the process of legally identifying as trans or non-binary (which isn’t a recognised legal identity at the time of writing) far quicker.

A spotlight fell on women-only services for survivors of sexual and domestic abuse as a result. In order to provide rationale for their aversion to trans individuals, the gender-critical cabal alighted upon whipping up fear around trans women who might need to access such spaces. For trans-exclusionary feminists, the argument goes that allowing self-determination through GRA reforms would open up ‘single-sex’ sites to ‘predatory men’, who would supposedly pretend to be women in order to perpetuate abuse.

Yet trans women, with some exceptions, already have access to single-sex spaces under the 2010 Equality Act, which would remain unchanged by any amendments to the GRA. Furthermore, no countries that already allow self-determination have reported any sudden trend of cis men engaging in such behaviours. A 2018 Guardian investigation found that Ireland, which introduced self-determination in 2015, has seen “no evidence” of new legislation leading to men “falsely declaring themselves female”.

No matter; gender critical feminists in the UK still insist that the sex assigned at birth must decide who is admitted to women-only spaces. Never mind that multiple global studies show that trans women report sexual and domestic violence at double the rate of cis women (with trans women of colour facing the most peril) – but, as with cis women, the perpetrators were most likely to be men.

“Trans-exclusionary feminism is grounded in fear and, in some cases, a hatred of the Other”

Phipps believes many transphobic, white radical feminists also think that acknowledging their own privileges compared to the likes of trans women is tantamount to erasing their traumatic experiences. “It’s as if they think ‘if you tell us we’re privileged because we’re cis, that means we haven’t been raped or haven’t experienced these awful things’,” she observes. “Well of course you have and that’s awful and it’s because of your gender. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also have race and class and cis privileges.”

In the VAWG sector in particular, Phipps says there is the feeling of “living in the past”, with particular aping of the 1970s women’s liberation movement. It’s a notable reference point for trans-exclusionary feminists, many of whom experienced the movement as young women. But they’ve created a warped pastiche that erases contemporary critiques of white radical feminism that were made at the time, says Phipps.

Radical feminist texts of the 1970s were often trans-inclusive. While the likes of Andrea Dworkin held problematic notions around issues like sex work, they weren’t trans-exclusionary and didn’t see the body in “essentialist” terms. In stark contrast, trans-exclusionary feminists of the present, do.

The crusade against trans women is tragic, says Phipps, a focus of energies on completely the wrong target. “There is a war against women worldwide,” she says. “But trans women are also [victims] of this war, not the perpetrators.”

A worsening situation

Frontline VAWG workers say that hierarchical power structures mean transmisogyny is often sanctioned from the top. Close ties between powerful names in the sector mean it is hard to challenge for fear of being blacklisted from multiple organisations. Nevertheless, those who spoke to gal-dem said they did so out of a desire to lift a lid on the situation and encourage more scrutiny of the reality behind the press releases.

“I couldn’t [continue to] work for an LGBTQ charity that poses like it’s inclusive,” says Lily* a former employee of one high profile organisation serving sufferers of domestic violence. She says she witnessed virulent transmisogyny during her time there.

One incident occurred when Lily’s workplace was developing a helpline for clients. She and her colleagues were concerned that the helpline wasn’t inclusive enough because the organisation didn’t have a gender inclusion policy. They asked for clarity on who the helpline was for.

“The reply from [Martha* the director of operations at the organisation] and another senior staff member was that ‘if they sound like a woman on the phone, talk to them’,” remembers Lily. “‘If they don’t sound like a woman, it doesn’t matter if they say they are, hang up. We’re not supporting them’.”

Lily also heard references to “men-women”, assertions that only “biological women” should have access to refuges and accusations from a senior staff member that junior employees were behaving like “perpetrators” by supporting trans-inclusivity as it put them on the side of “men”.

“They told us: if they don’t sound like a woman, it doesn’t matter if they say they are, hang up”

According to those present at one group meeting, a staff member declared that there needed to be a “step back” on giving “privileges” to trans women because they were damaging support being provided to “women”. The staff member is also alleged to have said this view was the organisation’s “policy” as well, blaming trans-inclusive terms like “person with a cervix” for having “erased” cis women.

Allegations of increased transmisogyny are mirrored across the sector. Eva, a non-frontline VAWG worker who has spent time at multiple women’s organisations, says she became aware the issue wasn’t going away in 2016.

One early indicator came when Eva posted on a social media platform, from the official account of one prominent organisation about the death of a trans woman in a men’s prison. The next day, she says, she was handed a social media policy that “explicitly stated” she was not allowed to post about trans people anymore.

Even in supposedly inclusive environments within the women’s sector, transmisogyny simmers, says Eva. Her organisation, which focuses on ending gender violence for Black women and girls, still throws up obstacles when it comes to officially including trans women, including a failure to create and implement a trans-inclusive policy.

She also believes economic factors have caused trans women to become a lightning rod of the frustrations and fears of some cis women within the field.

As she explains it, many of the more senior positions in the modern VAWG sector are filled by women who have been there since its foundation. They’ve seen funding and resources chipped away by successive governments, resulting in resignation that “they’re never going to win a victory over the government”.

Collective fightback

Eva stresses that she doesn’t believe the sector itself to be transphobic and that younger, more junior members of staff tend to be fiercely trans-inclusive. There are some power players in the sector attempting to make change.

Cara English, head of public engagement at trans-led charity Gendered Intelligence (GI), says that she’s been approached by CEOs of VAWG organisations to provide training on trans inclusivity to staff. But plans have been stymied by the individualised structures of centres and refuges subject to the decisions of CEOs.

“[GI] met with the CEO of probably the largest VAWG service provider in the UK,” Cara recounts. “She was saying transphobia is very prevalent and she’s not content with it. But there’s not really a great deal they can do apart from bringing training from trans organisations in house.”

The situation is particularly dire in England and Wales. Scotland however, while no utopia for trans survivors, offers a look at how trans inclusivity can begin to be implemented.

Simple commitments have made huge differences to services says Mridul Wadhwa, manager of the Forth Valley Rape Crisis Centre in central Scotland. One such initiative is the LGBT Charter, a programme which includes education on trans inclusion. Completion of the course sees organisations given a digital “badge” to display on-site, letting survivors know they are an inclusive space.

As a trans woman managing a refuge, Wadhwa says she has received “unnecessary negative attention”, despite over 15 years of experience in the sector. After a recent bid to become an SNP candidate, she was even hit with accusations online that she had “lied” by not disclosing her trans identity when she was first employed in 2005 by Shakti Women’s Aid.

“This was before the Equality Act,” she remembers. “I said in an interview that if [Shakti Women’s Aid] had known I was trans, they would not have hired me. But everyone knew I was trans when I was [hired] for my current position.”

Wadhwa’s experience has taught her that many trans women survivors seeking support are too fearful of being faced with transmisogyny to approach services in the first place. This renders them invisible within the sector, despite being a group disproportionately affected by sexual and domestic violence.

“You have to be explicit that you’re inclusive, you cannot assume that people know,” Wadhwa says, adding that as a member of intersecting minority groups, she expects to be “oppressed in every place I go”.

“You have to wear the badge – these things make a huge difference, as well as word of mouth recommendations spread by survivors who have worked with you. There also needs to be a trans-inclusive workplace policy”.

“You have to be explicit that you’re inclusive, you cannot assume that people know”

For workers who want to push back against institutionalised transphobia, organising collectively offers a glimmer of hope.

Cora tells me that challenging transphobia was a key driver of unionising efforts by herself and colleagues who didn’t feel “safe” enough to do so as individual unprotected workers. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the workers union United Voices of World, which has a dedicated arm for workers in the gender-based violence sector, says that one of the union’s goals is fighting transphobia in the field.

Those pushing for change recognise that while the pocket of women they’re up against is small and unrepresentative, they’re powerful, with a reach that extends into the upper echelons of journalism, the legal system and the halls of Westminster. All workers who spoke about the transphobia they’d witnessed feared the impact their whistleblowing might have on the sector, which they stressed still does vital work. But as Eva puts it, if the services are not working for all women, they’re ultimately failing in their purpose.

“If frontline services aren’t working for all women, they’re not working for any of us really,” she says. “They’re not rooted in our liberation or justice.”

Pulling trans-inclusive training in-house, as suggested by Cara English is also a key goal. But it will take determination and demand on the part of the workers within those organisations.

And ultimately, it will need the battle-weathered radical feminists perpetuating transmisogyny in the the GBV sector to do something they are unused to: rethink the dogmatic approach that has for so long served as a survival technique but now works to oppress a deeply vulnerable group of women.

The entire situation is, says Cara English, a “degradation”.

“The fact we’re still in a position when we’re actively having to humanise trans women and trans people to services that would seek to exclude us, in order to get into places that we should have the right to access… this is just an obscene position to be in,” she adds.

“It’s a wholesale failure to take into account the needs of trans people. It’s embarrassing. The issue isn’t that trans women aren’t accessing VAWG services. It’s that people aren’t seeing this joint fight against the patriarchy and the oppression of all women.

“That’s where we need to be focusing our attention. It’s about solidarity between all people who need help and an escape”.

*Names have been changed to protect identities

[masterthespianduchovny]

Why do “progressives” keep treating the DNC as some big, bad boogie man because Bernie didn’t win opposed to realizing that most voters didn’t want him?

I know the Bernie or bust crowd believes that people who didn’t support him were “low info” and bought into propaganda, but has it ever occurred to any of y’all these criticisms may apply to y’all.

I’ve noticed that whenever talking to a never Biden person, most of them consistently say that Biden doesn’t support something that he’s on record supporting. There is a fundamental difference between not believing he’ll follow through in his word and saying he does support “x” at all.

And, more times than not, these Bernie or bust/never Biden people AREN’T Democrats, yet they have the nerve to speak for the party. Which explains why they’re confused as to how Bernie lost and/or blame the dnc. Bernie was rejected by actual democrats because 1. He kept shitting on the party 2. He doesn’t share their values. But, you say, “saving human lives aren’t their values???” Yes, but it has to be realistic meaning the legislation has a chance at being passed.

These voters constantly mock people for asking “how is he going to pay for this” as if it’s not a valid question. Let’s think about it this way: even if bernies plans were supported, they would be denied based off of shitty budgeting. His M4A plan has a 15 trillion GAP. It costs 32 trillion and, when the math was broken down, they had no idea how to account for 15 TRILLION dollars.

Who the fuck is going to pass a god damn plan like that?

Loans worth a couple thousand have been denied for less, but y’all don’t think appropriately accounting for the money for a plan worth trillions of dollars is important?

And Bernie had fucking years to fine tune this plan, so what the fuck?

The other part: dem voters don’t believe that Bernie is the only person who can achieve certain things. When talking about M4A, which is a FORM OF universal healthcare, Bernie supporters act as if Bernie is the only person supporting this and to ever support this (in America). Both of these beliefs are false.

Hillary supported universal healthcare in THE 90s. And I believe she supported it even before Bernie was a national name. Outside of her, most of the candidates supported universal healthcare, but had different paths to achieve this.

People can say “it’s not far left enough” until they are blue in the face, but a healthcare policy not matching your politics doesn’t mean it’s not universal healthcare. For those who are confused, using another form of insurance as an example: I was a claim associate for a car insurance company. At my company, not sure if this applied to other companies, but when someone said they had full coverage, it applied to: collision, comprehensive, tow, and rental. Now, people literally thought that meant everything including uninsured and additional medical coverage, etc. But, it only referred to FOUR key things.

My point: many of you are talking about something you don’t understand when you’re really showing how much you don’t understand.

Part of the reason we can’t go far left is that republicans are going to shoot that shit down on sight, but the other part is about budgeting and feasibility. These people have to work through details we don’t even have to think about—Bernie’s plan is super inclusive, but the budgeting part is utter shit!

Circling back: Bernie doesn’t resonating with dem voters who ACTUALLY vote. This doesn’t mean these voters “don’t” care for young people or the sick, but many of these people—older—have spent years watching and listening to politicians made grand promises. Whether or not these politicians believe what they say is irrelevant because voters know when someone will be able to accomplish what they’ve promised.

Bernie isn’t that person.

He’s promising a lot of free shit and, yeah, it ain’t going to happen.

Even if he were elected potus, the presidency isn’t a dictatorship and trump has only “accomplished” the shit he has with the backing of congress. Which...Bernie doesn’t have. And more times than not, those back trump are a majority of republicans who control the congress.

But, also, don’t try to put this on those who don’t believe Bernie can accomplish shit, because the fact still remains that people, not me, are voting these people into their position. Attacking dems won’t get rid of your republican problem or the fact that voting dems don’t think Bernie will be able to accomplish shit because they’re realists.

Then there’s the fact that many of you motherfuckers DON’T vote. Y’all think because people like Bernie on social media, that means he’s “won.” But, anyone can be popular online. Which leads to: y’all overstating how popular Bernie was.

Bernie’s wins in 2016 had people the people’s choice back then, when really, anti Hillary/Clinton and sexism/misogyny was why he over performed. Don’t believe me, look at the voting trends this year.

Bernie knee he didn’t have the votes and wanted a brokered convention. He had a black voter problem and they are the backbone of the party. People who insist that Biden only regained the lead because of the Obama connection are being racist. Joe’s role in the Obama administration played a part, but not enough to have joe winning the way he is.

Joe was not most peoples first choice. But, misinformation, which torpedoed several candidates, or lack of funds caused many to drop out. Since the field was no longer split, candidates started supporting Biden, and Bernie’s far left policies didn’t resonate with older voters, Biden started becoming “popular.” Biden appeals to many voters regardless of party affiliation. And that’s what helped him win the dem nom.

Not the DNC.

But, keep peddling this conspiracy and living in your echo chamber.

[creepingsharia]

Dem Senator Kirsten Gillibrand fires Muslim aide after Politico investigates sexual harassment claims

Source: Former Gillibrand aide resigned in protest over handling of sex harassment claims – POLITICO h/t FPM

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), one of the most outspoken advocates of the #MeToo movement who has made fighting sexual misconduct a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, spent last summer pressing legislators to update Congress’ “broken” system of handling sexual harassment.

At the same time, a mid-20s female aide to Gillibrand resigned in protest over the handling of her sexual harassment complaint by Gillibrand‘s office, and criticized the senator for failing to abide by her own public standards.

In July, the female staffer alleged one of Gillibrand’s closest aides — who was a decade her senior and married — repeatedly made unwelcome advances after the senator had told him he would be promoted to a supervisory role over her. She also said the male aide regularly made crude, misogynistic remarks in the office about his female colleagues and potential female hires.

Less than three weeks after reporting the alleged harassment and subsequently claiming that the man retaliated against her for doing so, the woman told chief of staff Jess Fassler that she was resigning because of the office’s handling of the matter. She did not have another job lined up.

The woman was granted anonymity because she fears retaliation and damage to her future professional prospects.

“I have offered my resignation because of how poorly the investigation and post-investigation was handled,” the woman wrote to Gillibrand in a letter sent on her final day to the senator’s personal email account. Copied were general counsel Keith Castaldo and Fassler, who is now managing the senator’s presidential bid.

“I trusted and leaned on this statement that you made: ‘You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable.’ Your office chose to go against your public belief that women shouldn’t accept sexual harassment in any form and portrayed my experience as a misinterpretation instead of what it actually was: harassment and ultimately, intimidation,” the woman wrote.

The senator and her staff never responded to the letter.

…

Since she left last summer, the woman has been doing part-time contract work. The male aide, Abbas Malik, kept his job.

Two weeks ago, however, POLITICO presented the office with its own findings of additional allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct by Malik. Among the claims were that he made a “joke” about rape to a female colleague — a person whom the office had failed to contact last summer despite repeated urgings by Malik’s accuser to reach out to the person.

Gillibrand’s office opened a new investigation and dismissed Malik last week. Malik did not respond to requests for comment.

…

Malik had spent years by Gillibrand’s side as her driver — the senator officiated at his wedding — while the woman was a more recent hire and had significantly less stature in the office. He was accused not of physical harassment but of making unwanted advances and using demeaning language — behavior that can be easier to downplay and can require a higher level of diligence to get to the bottom of.

Gillibrand’s advisers said they took the woman’s claims seriously, consulted with Senate employment lawyers for guidance and punished Malik at the time for what they could substantiate. But after “a full and thorough investigation into the evidence, including multiple interviews with current employees who could have witnessed this behavior, the office concluded that the allegations did not meet the standard of sexual harassment,” the office said of its initial internal investigation.

That inquiry, however, left out key former staffers. The aides who led it — deputy chief of staff Anne Bradley and Castaldo — did not contact two former employees whom the woman said could corroborate and add to her allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct. Gillibrand’s office interviewed only current employees.

“Anyone doing a thorough investigation would contact any witness that had or was likely to have relevant information, particularly when there is a hostile working environment alleged,” said Les Alderman, an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment in the workplace and represented an alleged victim in a case against former Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) that garnered national attention last year. “The idea that an employer is somehow restricted from contacting former employees who could shed light on the situation is laughable.”

POLITICO reached out to more than 20 former Gillibrand staffers to see if there was a pattern of behavior by Malik, including the two aides the woman specifically asked the office to contact.

One of those two former staffers said Malik often called her fat and unattractive to her face and made light of sexual abuse. She recalled one instance in which Malik remarked that a particular woman they were talking about “couldn’t get laid unless she was raped.” The person did not report that behavior at the time but now says she wishes she had.

Two more staffers who worked for Gillibrand said the woman’s claims of Malik’s inappropriate workplace behavior matched their own experiences. They said Malik regularly made misogynistic jokes, frequently appraised what they wore, disparaged the looks of other female staffers and rated the attractiveness of women who came in for interviews.

The office also dispensed with the allegations of Malik‘s retaliation without informing the woman of its conclusions or any disciplinary action.

Gillibrand’s office acknowledged it found evidence that Malik had made unspecified inappropriate comments and revoked his expected promotion, which would have come with a raise. It also moved his desk and gave him a final warning. This was not the first time the senator’s top aides dealt with an allegation of bad behavior by Malik: According to a firsthand witness of an incident in 2015, Malik confronted a fellow aide in the office. He got in the man’s face, pushed his desk and threatened to “fucking” hurt him, the witness said, describing the confrontation as “violent.”

But Fassler and Bradley told the woman that her claim of inappropriate advances was a case of “misinterpretation” and too much of a “he said, she said” to warrant Malik‘s dismissal, according to contemporaneous notes taken by the woman.

The office did not deny those terms were used but disputed that characterization of the investigation. “This case was never viewed as ‘he said, she said.’ Upon conclusion of the full and thorough investigation, it was determined that the evidence revealed employee misconduct that, while inappropriate, did not constitute sexual harassment,” the office said.

“When I had the courage to speak up about my harasser, I was belittled by her office and treated like an inconvenience,” the woman said of Gillibrand in an interview. “She kept a harasser on her staff until it proved politically untenable for her to do so.”

…

Malik became Gillibrand’s driver in 2011 after serving two tours in the Iraq War. He became such a constant presence in Gillibrand’s life — he had a set of keys to her home and often drove her children to school with her — that some staffers dubbed him “the keeper of her purse.” The office changed his title to “military adviser” in 2015 despite his responsibilities remaining largely the same.

Though she said she was put off by Malik’s comments about other female aides, the woman said her dealings with him had been generally cordial. But that changed when Gillibrand told him on July 10, 2018, that she wanted him to direct advance work for her future trips. All the details of the new job hadn’t been settled, but Abbas told the woman that he would be “in charge” of her position, she said.

“I have treated [A]bbas the same the entire year I have worked here,” the woman wrote in a detailed timeline of events that she later sent to Bradley, the deputy chief of staff. “It wasn’t until after this ‘promotion’ that he decided to hit on me.”

According to that timeline and documentation sent to Gillibrand’s office at the time, the alleged harassment started almost immediately after word of the planned promotion, with increasingly aggressive advances. In one late-night text message, Malik told her he now understood the meaning of the clown emoji — it meant “down to clown,” an innuendo for having sex from the movie “Blockers,” he elaborated the next morning.

On one day alone, July 13, she said Malik made four unwanted advances, which were all rebuffed. The first occurred alone in the office early in the morning when Malik told the woman he had a secret for her: Her boss had just quit.

“Ugh I shouldn’t have told you. You are totally going to tell people,” he said, according to her notes. “Why do I love you! I should hate you!”

After Malik prodded her for a secret of her own, she said Malik walked up to her desk and asked, “If we had met in a bar would it have happened for us?”

And at a birthday party for another staffer that evening, Malik told her privately that “I thought by debrief you meant you were hitting on me,” referencing an earlier text message.

She asked him if he was kidding. “No, I’m not kidding,” he responded. “[O]h wow ok no I was absolutely not hitting on you,” she replied, according to her timeline. He pressed two more times, prompting the woman to chide him in a text: “You’re married!!” He still sent a string of flirtatious texts later, including one with a clown emoji.

The woman said she tried to stay away from Malik the following week. But he began complaining that she was being mean to him because of his expected promotion, and said that he would give her the silent treatment until she apologized. “This seriously was so upsetting to me because I was not upset about that. I was upset with him sexually harassing me and he is trying to create his own narrative,” she wrote in her timeline.

On July 25, the woman emailed Bradley her detailed recollection of events, which she had written over the previous week. In addition to the advances, the woman claimed that Malik “said derogatory and inappropriate things about women since I started here.” She alleged that Malik called a female colleague “fat” and “ugly,” would rate the appearance of potential hires, and told colleagues that the office’s new fellow — essentially a young female intern — “wanted him.”

There’s more, but you get the idea. The #MeToo movement seems to end with Muslim misogyny.

[someguyscaliforniavoterguide]

Select L.A. County Races - November 2018

Select L.A. County Races

Broadly speaking: vote for the Democrat. I am not going to give super detailed explanations for a lot of races unless they are warranted. Where they are, I have footnoted them. I live in the East Valley so a lot of what I looked at was Valley related. I also looked into Santa Monica because Measure SM is a big deal.

State Board of Equalization 3: Tony Vazquez

In 2017, the State Board of Equalization was largely stripped of its powers and duties and gutted from 4800 staffer to 400 staffers. Still, it remains a constitutionally mandated agency that administers Property Taxes, Alcoholic Beverage Taxes, and Taxes on Insurers programs. The point of the board is to ensure that taxes are assessed fairly statewide. Yeah, it’s weird. Anyway, the GOP candidate in the race has used his platform to attack the SB60 Gas Tax (more on this later). Forget that. Tony Vazquez is a former Santa Monica mayor and while his platform for the BOE is thin, it’s better than actively destructive.

Los Angeles County Sheriff: Alex Villanueva

I’m not thrilled about either candidate in this race, to be honest. Both have ties to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) but both pitch themselves as reform candidates who will address years of endemic abuse and corruption within LASD. Neither seems to be up to the job. I’ve heard some people say that Jim McDonnell, the acting sheriff, should be given a chance to put his mark on the department. I have also watched as rank and file have swung to Alex Villanueva as McDonnell has tried to enact reforms. McDonnell has ties to the former sheriff, Lee Baca, who was convicted of obstructing an investigation into jail abuses by the LASD. McDonnell has endorsements from politicians but Villanueva has the support of the local party clubs. It’s really a coin toss for me, but since I’m picking, I guess I’ll go with Villanueva - he’s the slightly more outside candidate for now, and I’ll keep an eye on this for 2022.

Los Angeles County Assessor: Jeffrey Prang

Jeff Prang is endorsed by Kamala Harris and is the incumbent assessor. His opponent is literally listed with the name John “Lower Taxes” Loew on the ballot and couldn’t even get a website together for this election. This is a pretty easy call.

Justice, California State Court of Appeal; Second District

Electing judges is dumb but since we do it, here’s some thoughts. Look: these are all qualified and smart jurists. I base my endorsements here on a mix of reviewing various endorsements with a critical eye to judges who score too high on conservative groups’ questionnaires about judicial philosophy. The L.A. Times endorses “yes” on all these candidates as a show of judicial independence, but I don’t hang with that. Judges make political choices and while I believe we shouldn’t have the power to vote on them, if we do then we might as well use that power to vote for judges who reflect our Democratic values. Certainly the GOP votes for judges that will enact their visions.

Division 1

Helen Bendix: No

Victoria G. Chaney: No

Division 2

Elwood G. Lui: Yes

Victoria Chavez: No

Division 3

Luis A. Lavin: Yes

Hamlin Dhandina: Yes

Anne Egerton: Yes

Division 4

Thomas Willhite: No

Nora Manella: No

Division 5

Lamar W. Baker: Yes

Carl Moor: Yes

Dorothy Kim: Yes

Division 6

Arthur Gilbert: Yes

Martin J. Tangeman: Yes

Division 7

John Segal: Yes

Gail Feuer: Yes

Division 8

Tricia Bigelow: No

Los Angeles Superior Court

Personally, I feel too often we see prosecutors elevated to judgeships, it’s like a pipeline from the DA to the Superior Court. To me, it’s best that a candidate have some sort of judicial experience before they get the post - as a Judge Pro Tem or as a mediator of some kind. All respect to my prosecutor friends out there, but being a judge is a different job. That said, if nobody in the race has that experience - a not uncommon event - it’s worth looking at what else they bring to the table.

Los Angeles Superior Court, Office 4: Veronica Sauceda

Los Angeles Superior Court, Office 16: Patricia “Patti” Hunter  This is the one judicial race that I really want to highlight. Hunter’s opponent - Sydne Michel - has a lot of ties to the gun industry. Her kid and her dog are both named after guns, her husband is an NRA lawyer, and the pro-gun website calguns.net made it clear that voting for her was important to advancing their interests. Vote for Hunter here folks. We don’t need pro-gun voices packing our courts.

Los Angeles Superior Court, Office 60: Holly L. Hancock  I like that Ms. Hancock is a Public Defender - we don’t see enough PDs become judges. 

Los Angeles Superior Court, Office 113: Michael Ribons

California State Senate

SD 18 – Bob Hertzberg  Sen. Hertzberg was officially reprimanded by the California State Senate in March of 2018 for his habit of hugging colleagues and constituents. In accepting the reprimand, Hertzberg stated ”I understand that I cannot control how a hug is received, and that not everyone has the ability to speak up about unwelcome behavior. It is my responsibility to be mindful of this, and to respect the Rules Committee's request to not initiate hugs." SD 20 – Connie Leyva SD 22 – Michael Eng SD 24 – Maria Elena Durazo SD 26 – Ben Allen SD 30 – Holly Mitchell SD 32 – Bob J. Archuleta SD 34 – Tom Umberg

California State Assembly

AD 36 – Steve Fox AD 37 – Monique Limón AD 38 – Christy Smith AD 39 – Luz Rivas AD 41 – Chris Holden AD 43 – Laura Friedman AD 44 – Jacqui Irwin AD 45 – Jesse Gabriel AD 46 – Adrin Nazarian AD 47 – Eloise Reyes AD 48 – Blanca Rubio AD 49 – Ed Chau AD 50 – Richard Bloom AD 51 – Wendy Carrillo AD 52 – Freddie Rodriguez AD 53 – Miguel Santiago AD 54 – Sydney Kamlager AD 55 – Gregg Fritchle AD 56 – Eduardo Garcia AD 57 – Ian Calderon AD 58 – Cristina Garcia AD 59 – Reggie Jones-Sawyer AD 62 – Autumn Burke AD 63 – Anthony Rendon AD 64 – Mike Gipson AD 65 – Sharon Quirk-Silva AD 66 – Al Muratsuchi AD 70 – Patrick O’Donnell

U.S. House of Representatives

CD 23 – Tatiana Matta CD 25 – Katie Hill CD 26 – Julia Brownley CD 27 – Judy Chu CD 28 – Adam Schiff CD 29 – Tony Cardenas Post-2016 I have often wondered what it would take for me to vote to give a seat up to a Republican - is there a figure as odious as Trump in the Democratic party? This is the race that currently comes closest for me. Tony Cardenas - my rep - has been accused of rape and is facing a civil suit from a Jane Doe; he has denied the charge and asked for a House ethics investigation. I’m begrudgingly going to vote for him, but I am hoping he either a) clears his name in the next year, b) steps aside, or c) is faces a legitimate primary because the Dems have to do better than having an accused rapist on the ballot in 2018.  CD 30 – Brad Sherman CD 32 – Grace Napolitano CD 33 – Ted Lieu CD 34 – Jimmy Gomez Kenneth Meija is a longshot Green candidate in this district - I don’t like his take on SB1 and his call to repeal it, but I would imagine a lot of people I respect might disagree with me on him overall.  CD 35 – Norma Torres CD 37 – Karen Bass CD 38 – Linda Sanchez CD 39 – Gil Cisneros CD 40 – Lucille Roybal-Allard CD 43 – Maxine Waters CD 44 – Nanette Barragán CD 47 – Alan Lowenthal

County Measure W: Yes

This is a 2.5¢ per acre parcel tax on impermeable land (i.e. the parts of land that doesn’t absorb water) to raise funds that will be used to fund projects to capture stormwater, clean it, and percolate it into underwater aquifiers. This money would double the amount that the County Flood District (if you’re in L.A. county you’re almost definitely in it, unless you’re north of Palmdale) captures and help us reduce dependence on water from outside sources.

L.A. City Charter Amendment B (Public Bank): Emphatically Yes

This charter amendment would give the city the power to establish a public bank. A public bank is a government owned bank that holds the city’s deposits and can be used to make loans to projects the city supports. North Dakota has a public bank that is extremely profitable and which funds public works projects throughout the state. Additionally, debt service payments and institutional fees can be reduced when the city has its own bank, saving us all in the long run. To be clear: Amendment B would not actually establish a bank - this would take legislative action and involve a lot of detailed analysis and rulemaking. This is just the first step in a long process, but a necessary one.

L.A. City Charter Amendment E (Realign City Election Dates): Yes

This amendment would realign the city’s primary dates to match state primary dates, lowering costs and reducing voter fatigue. We should do this.

LAUSD Charter Amendment EE (Realign LAUSD Election Dates): Yes

This amendment would realign LAUSD’s primary dates to match state primary dates, lowering costs and reducing voter fatigue. We should also do this.

Burbank Measure P (Sales Tax for General Fund): Yes

The city will experience a $20M revenue shortfall, this is a 0.75¢ sales tax to close that gap. Yes, sales taxes are regressive, but until we address Prop 13 its one of the few tools cities have to close budget gaps in California. Vote yes or get ready to see local services cut.  

Burbank Measure QS (Parcel Tax for Schools): Yes

A parcel tax differs from a property tax in that the parcel tax is applied based on a characteristic of the land while a property tax is based on its value. Here, Burbank proposes to tax each piece of improved land at 10¢ per square foot to raise $9M for schools. On a side note, this will require 2/3 of voters to confirm.

Glendale Measure S (Sales Tax for General Fund): Yes

Much like Burbank, Glendale proposes a 0.75¢ sales tax to generate about $30M annually. Vote yes or get ready to see local services cut.

Santa Monica Measure SM (Require Supermajority Council Approval for Floor Area Ratio and Height Limit Changes): NO NO NO NO

This Charter amendment would require 5 of 7 council members to approve any changes to the downtown community plan for ten years. Folks, this is slow growth nonsense. The city charter already requires a majority vote to approve any changes, requiring a supermajority simply makes it more difficult to address any projects that might be slightly out of compliance. Don’t make it harder to build things.

Santa Monica Measure TL (Term Limits for Council Members): No

This would limit any council member to three terms, whether consecutive or not. I just fundamentally disagree with the idea of term limits, and encourage you to vote no on this.

[patriotsnet]

What Republicans Are Against The New Healthcare Bill

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-against-the-new-healthcare-bill/

What Republicans Are Against The New Healthcare Bill

Senate Republicans Say They Will Not Vote On Health Bill

20 Republicans Vote Against GOP Healthcare Bill | MTP Daily | MSNBC

By Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear

WASHINGTON Senate Republicans on Tuesday officially abandoned the latest plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, shelving a showdown vote on the measure and effectively admitting defeat in their last-gasp drive to fulfill a core promise of President Trump and Republican lawmakers.

The decision came less than 24 hours after a pivotal Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, declared her opposition to the repeal proposal, all but ensuring that Republican leaders would be short of the votes they needed.

We havent given up on changing the American health care system, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after a lunchtime meeting of Republican senators. We are not going to be able to do that this week, but it still lies ahead of us, and we havent given up on that.

Mr. McConnell said Republicans would move on to their next big legislative goal: overhauling the tax code, a feat that has not been accomplished since 1986.

Democrats, who have spent all year fighting to protect the Affordable Care Act, a law that is a pillar of President Barack Obamas legacy, responded by calling for the resumption of bipartisan negotiations to stabilize health insurance markets. Republican leaders had squelched those talks as the latest repeal plan, written by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, gained steam.

And health care is sure to be an issue in next years midterm elections.

Senate Gop Blocks 9/11 First Responders Health Plan Bill

Senate Republicans on Thursday morning filibustered legislation to monitor and treat first responders and emergency workers who suffered illnesses related to 9/11.

A vote to quash the filibuster failed by a vote of 57 to 42, three votes short of the necessary threshold. As a result, the proposal is unlikely to pass this year.

The bill would provide funding for a health program to treat first responders, construction and cleanup workers and residents who inhaled toxic particles after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

The $7.4 billion cost of the legislation over 10 years is paid for by a provision that would prevent foreign multinational corporations from using tax havens to avoid taxes on U.S. income.

Harry Mason ReidWhite House says ball is in Congresss court on voting rights, abortionBiden grapples with twin crisesFive takeaways from Bidens week of chaos in AfghanistanMORE blasted Republicans after the vote.

Republicans denied adequate health care to the heroes who developed illnesses from rushing into burning buildings on 9/11. Yet they will stop at nothing to give tax breaks to millionaires and CEOs, even though they will explode our deficit and fail to create jobs. That tells you everything you need to know about their priorities, Reid said in a statement.

Schumer said some of the police officers and firefighters who rushed to the flaming towers have already been diagnosed with cancers.

This story was updated at 12:29 p.m.

Reddit

Democrats Republicans And Your Health Insurance

Shereen Lehman, MS, is a healthcare journalist and fact checker.;She has co-authored two books for the popular Dummies Series .

Healthcare reform has been a contentious political topic in the U.S. for many years, and is shaping up to play a major role in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. What does each party want? Let’s take a look at how the priorities of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party;could impact your health insurance.

Also Check: Who Is Right Republicans Or Democrats

Republican Health Care Bill Falls Short Dealing Blow To Trump Agenda

EmbedEmbed

Republican Health Care Bill Falls Short, Dealing Blow To Trump Agenda

Audio will be available later today.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., speaks to reporters following a town hall meeting earlier this month. Moran and Utah Sen. Mike Lee joined the “no” vote on the Republican-sponsored Obamacare replacement bill. John Hanna/APhide caption

toggle caption

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., speaks to reporters following a town hall meeting earlier this month. Moran and Utah Sen. Mike Lee joined the “no” vote on the Republican-sponsored Obamacare replacement bill.

After seven years of promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republican efforts at passing a health care bill on their own may have ended Monday night as the bill working its way through the Senate was effectively blocked. Two more GOP senators Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas came out in opposition to the bill, which means it cannot get enough support to pass.

My colleague and I will not support the MTP to this version of BCRA. #HealthcareBill

Senator Jerry Moran

Shortly afterward, President Trump wrote, “Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!”

McConnell has previously said turning to Democrats to come up with fixes for the current health care system is his next step, and several senators who criticized the crafting of the current bill in private have called for such a bipartisan process.

Board Of Governors Professor School Of Public Affairs & Administration

The Trump administrations efforts to sabotage the ACA and their consequences receive detailed attention in a recently released Brookings book, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism. For present purposes, I highlight six major sabotage initiatives which emerged in the wake of congressional failure to repeal and replace the ACA.

1. Reduce outreach and opportunities for enrollment in the ACAs insurance exchanges. Established to offer health insurance to individuals and small business, the exchanges have provided coverage to some 10 million people annually. The Obama administration had vigorously promoted the ACA in part to attract healthy, younger people to the exchanges to help keep premiums down. The Trump administration sharply reduced support for advertising and exchange navigators while reducing the annual enrollment period to about half the number of days.

2. Cut ACA subsidies to insurance companies offering coverage on the exchanges. ACA proponents saw insurance company participation on the exchanges as central to fostering enrollee choice and to fueling competition that would lower premiums. The law therefore provided various subsidies to insurance companies to reduce their risks of losing money if they participated on the exchanges. The Trump administration joined congressional Republicans in reneging on these financial commitments.

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Day One Legal Challenges

On March 23, 2010, the same day the ACA was signed into law, attorneys general from 14 states began the process of challenging the ACAs individual mandate via the court system. A total of 26 states eventually joined in the lawsuit, which went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In June 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the individual mandate, but ruled that the federal government could not withhold Medicaid funding from states that didnt expand Medicaid. This had the effect of making the ACAs Medicaid expansion optional, which has, in turn, hobbled the ACAs progress in many states.

Universal Coverage Vs Market

Democrats generally continue to support the Affordable Care Act , but would like to fix its flaws and generally improve the law. Democrats want to empower states to use innovation waivers to create their own approaches to healthcare reform that are as good asor better thanthe current system. Many Democrats also support fixing the ACA’s “family glitch” by basing affordability calculations for employer-sponsored coverage on family premiums rather than employee-only premiums, and most also support expanding premium subsidies to higher income ranges in order to soften the subsidy cliff.

But increasingly, Democrats are also getting behind the idea of a transition to some sort of universal coverage system. All of the Democrats who ran for the 2020 presidential nomination were in favor of universal coverage, although they had differing opinions on whether we should transition entirely to a single-payer system or use a combination of government-run and private health coverage .

Biden’s healthcare proposal also calls for an end to surprise balance billing, premium-free coverage under the public option for people who are caught in the Medicaid coverage gap , and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.

The Republican Party has not rolled out a new healthcare platform for 2020, and is instead utilizing the same platform they had in 2016. So in general, their approach can be expected to be the same as it has been for the past several years.

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Insurers Come Out Swinging Against New Republican Health Care Bill

By Robert Pear

WASHINGTON The health insurance industry, after cautiously watching Republican health care efforts for months, came out forcefully on Wednesday against the Senates latest bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, suggesting that its state-by-state block grants could create health care chaos in the short term and a Balkanized, uncertain insurance market.

In the face of the industry opposition, Senate Republican leaders nevertheless said they would push for a showdown vote next week on the legislation, drafted by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

That puts Republican senators in a squeeze, especially those whose states would lose money under a complicated formula in the bill. Generally, it would shift federal funds away from states that have been successful in expanding coverage to states where Republican leaders refused to expand Medicaid or encourage enrollment.

Republican senators from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio and West Virginia will all have to decide whether to heed the pleas of consumers who like the current health law or yield to the will of Republican leaders, donors and voters who demand an end to the Affordable Care Act.

Senate Republicans are already under pressure from 11 governors including five fellow Republicans and a pivotal Alaskan independent who this week urged the Senate to reject the last-ditch repeal effort.

Groups Opposing The American Health Care Act

Why Republicans are turning against the GOP health care bill

Over 50 organizations oppose the proposed healthcare plan that will make Americans will pay more for less.;The list includes nurses, doctors, hospitals, teachers, churches, and more. You can see a few here:;

AARP: AARP opposes this legislation, as introduced, that would weaken Medicare, leaving the door open to a voucher program that shifts costs and risks to seniors.

Before people even reach retirement age, big insurance companies could be allowed to charge them an age tax that adds up to thousands of dollars more per year. Older Americans need affordable health care services and prescriptions. This plan goes in the opposite direction, increasing insurance premiums for older Americans and not doing anything to lower drug costs.

On top of the hefty premium increase for consumers, big drug companies and other special interests get a sweetheart deal.

Finally, Medicaid cuts could impact people of all ages and put at risk the health and safety of 17.4 million children and adults with disabilities and seniors by eliminating much-needed services that allow individuals to live independently in their homes and communities. Although no one believes the current health care system is perfect, this harmful legislation would make health care less secure and less affordable.

AARP stands ready to work with both parties on legislation that puts Americans first, not the special interests.

That just wont do.

That is, above all, why physicians must be involved in this debate.

Don’t Miss: What Is The Lapel Pin The Republicans Are Wearing

The Road To Health Care Overhaul

The House of Representatives passed the bill by a 219-212 vote late Sunday after a raucous day of debate and negotiation. Thirty-four Democrats voted “no” on the health care bill.

This morning, an emotional Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., said on “Good Morning America” the health care bill’s passage fulfills the dream of his father, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

“He always believed our country was about expanding opportunity for more and more Americans, and I believe this, as he said, was the unfinished business of Americans,” said Kennedy, who choked up when talking about his father. “This is a program for the middle class. Too often in America, they’re the ones who are left out. … Not now.”

The road to passing health care was a turbulent one for Democrats. After anti-abortion Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., struck a deal with the Democratic leadership and the White House, they were bombarded with charges of supporting abortion.

As Stupak was speaking on the House floor Sunday, an unidentified Republican lawmaker shouted, “Baby Killer!”

Today, Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, admitted that he was the one.

“While I remain heartbroken over the passage of this bill and the tragic consequences it will have for the unborn, I deeply regret that my actions were mistakenly interpreted as a direct reference to Congressman Stupak himself,” Neugebauer said in a statement today.

What Does the Health Care Bill Mean For You?

Satisfying Activists And Donors

One main school of political scientists defines a political party as consisting of three parts: the partys voters, its elected officials, and the party-as-organization, meaning the groups that support and influence the party, including powerful labor unions on the Democratic side and groups like the National Rifle Association for the GOP.

Polls suggest a majority of Republican voters support the health care repeal effort, but it is nowhere near universal. A recent Kaiser poll, for example, found that 67 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of the House version of the Obamacare repeal legislation, while 18 percent viewed the bill unfavorably and another 15 percent didnt give an opinion.

And crucially, a recent Survey Monkey poll conducted for FiveThirtyEight showed that while 89 percent of core Trump supporters like how the president is handling health care, only 58 percent of reluctant Trump supporters1 feel the same way. These reluctant voters put Trump over the top in the Electoral College in 2016 and will play a major role in determining the GOPs fortunes in 2018, and 40 percent of them disapprove of how Trump has handled health care.

It may actually make political sense to push a health care bill that is broadly unpopular with the public but keeps party volunteers knocking on doors and donors giving money.

Also Check: How Many Democrats And Republicans In The Senate

Mcconnell Reacts To ‘skinny Bill’s’ Failure

We told our constituents we would vote that way and when the moment came, the moment came, most of us did,” he said.

“This is clearly a disappointment,” McConnell added. “It’s time to move on.”

The return of McCain to Washington after a brain cancer diagnosis added drama to the already tense proceedings. It was his vote the 50th that allowed Republicans begin debating the measure.

McCain gave a heartfelt speech upon his return to the Senate on Tuesday, decrying the rise of partisanship. And it was McCain who put an end to the partisan repeal effort.

McCain spoke to Trump last night on the phone and the president urged him to vote to for the skinny repeal bill assuring him it wouldnt end up passing into law, according to one source with direct knowledge of the call.

Vice President Mike Pence, who arrived in the chamber in a bid to rescue the bill and in preparation to cast the deciding vote, stood alongside McCain’s desk and then joined the senator in the cloakroom. By the time they re-emerged, separately, the vote had begun.

McCain went back to his desk and sat after casting his “no” vote. He eventually made his way to the Democrats’ side of the chamber and was greeted with hugs and cheers.

“I believe each of us stood up for the reasons that we felt were right”

Several Republicans said they did not know where McCain would fall, and there were audible gasps in the chamber when he turned down his thumb to indicate his decision.

Actions To Hinder Implementation

Under both ACA and the AHCA, CBO reported that the health exchange marketplaces would remain stable. However, Republican politicians took a variety of steps to undermine it, creating uncertainty that adversely impacted enrollment and insurer participation while increasing premiums. Concern of the exchanges became another argument for reforms. Past and ongoing Republican attempts to weaken the law have included:

Read Also: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Changes Required By The Affordable Care Act In 2011

A provision goes into effect to protect patients choice of doctors. Specifics include allowing plan members to pick any participating primary care provider, prohibiting insurers from requiring prior authorization before a woman sees an obstetrician/gynecologist , and ensuring access to emergency care.

Young adults can stay on their parents insurance until age 26, even if they are not full-time students. This extension applies to all new plans.

All new health insurance policies must cover preventive care and pay a portion of all preventive care visits.

A provision goes into effect that eliminates lifetime limits on coverage for members.

Annual limits or maximum payouts by a health insurance company are now restricted by the ACA.

The ACA prohibits rescission when a claim is filed, except in the case of fraud or misrepresentation by the consumer.

Insurance companies must now provide a process for customers to make an appeal if there is a problem with their coverage. ;

NOTE: In January,;2011:;eHealth publishes 11 guides on the top;child-only health insurance coverage;that examined differences in implementation in numerous states.

House Democrats Approve Health Bill Seeking Contrast With Trumps Obamacare Assault

The vote was aimed at shoring up Democratic support in swing districts that fueled the partys House takeover in 2018.

06/29/2020 06:50 PM EDT

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House Democrats on Monday approved a major expansion of Obamacare, underscoring the health care laws central role in their campaign pitch and drawing sharp contrast with President Donald Trumps efforts to eliminate the entire law.

Two Republicans New Jerseys Jeff Van Drew, formerly a Democrat, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania joined virtually every Democrat in supporting the bill, which would expand the laws subsidies for private health insurance, encourage hold-out red states to expand Medicaid and reverse Trump administration policies seen as undermining the Affordable Care Act. The Democrats bill, which will likely be shunned by the Republican-controlled Senate, also contains pieces of the partys, including a requirement for the government to negotiate prices.

Progressive lawmakers who have pushed sweeping Medicare for All legislation largely backed the more moderate health bill, which is aimed at shoring up Democrats support in swing districts that were pivotal to the party retaking control of the House in the 2018 midterms. The vote comes shortly after Trumps Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare in a case later this fall, despite warnings from some Republicans that voters would punish the party in November.

Just one Democrat voted against the bill.

Filed Under:

Read Also: What Caused Republicans To Gain Power In Congress In 1938

[statetalks]

How Many Republicans Are On The Supreme Court

Dispute Over The Constitution

GOP senators confronted by past comments on Supreme Court nomination

The legal divide over voting and elections begins with a basic dispute over how to read the Constitution and American history.

As written in 1787, it gave voters a very limited role. Members of the House were to be chosen by the people, but state legislatures would choose their U.S. senators, appoint the electors who chose the President and set rules for elections.

But the Constitution has been repeatedly amended to broaden and bolster voting rights, including protections against discrimination based on gender and race.

The Warren court saw this evolution as putting the voters in charge of Americas democracy, but todays conservative justices espouse originalism and focus on the words of the 18th century Constitution.

Its a very different court now, USC law professor Franita Tolson said, much more deferential to the states, but also, she added, they are privileging the status quo of 1787 when the electorate was mostly white men and ignoring the more egalitarian Reconstruction Amendments.

The major ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act highlights the difference. Congress passed that law under the 15th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to protect Black Americans from having their votes denied or their voting power diluted.

In striking down a key part of the law, Roberts wrote that the framers of the Constitution intended the states to keep for themselves the power to regulate elections.

Bonica And Woodruff Campaign Finance Scores

See also: Bonica and Woodruff campaign finance scores of state supreme court justices, 2012

In October 2012, political science professors Adam Bonica and Michael Woodruff of Stanford University attempted to determine the partisan outlook of state supreme court justices in their paper, “State Supreme Court Ideology and ‘New Style’ Judicial Campaigns.” A score above 0 indicated a more conservative-leaning ideology while scores below 0 were more liberal. The state Supreme Court of Pennsylvania was given a campaign finance score , which was calculated for judges in October 2012. At that time, Pennsylvania received a score of -0.02. Based on the justices selected, Pennsylvania was the 24th most liberal court. The study was based on data from campaign contributions by judges themselves, the partisan leaning of contributors to the judges, orin the absence of electionsthe ideology of the appointing body . This study was not a definitive label of a justice but rather an academic gauge of various factors.

Prior Public Service Of Incumbents

Brett Busby and Jane Bland are former Court of Appeals justices from Houston, whose re-election bids failed in November 2018 when Democrats won all of the judicial races in that election. Blacklock previously served Governor Greg Abbott as general counsel. Huddle was a justice on the First Court of Appeals in Houston.

Blacklock replaced Don Willett, who now sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that hears appeals from federal district courts in Texas. Busby succeeds Phil Johnson, who retired in 2018, and was sworn in on  March 20, 2019. Jane Bland was appointed in September 2019 to fill the vacancy left by Jeff Brown, who resigned from the SCOTX to accept appointment to a U.S. district court bench. Rebeca Huddle was appointed in October 2020 to replace Paul Green, who retired from the Court on August 31, 2020. Eva Guzman, the second-most senior member of the Court, resigned on June 11, 2021, and is preparing to challenge incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP primary for that office.

Go For It Democrats Pack The Court

Youve got a plan to pack the Supreme Court with four new justices. And nothing says unity like Democratic dominance.

Soon you can add the whole of the federal government to your grip on the culture academia, journalism, entertainment, sports, philanthropy and now even corporate America.

As an earlier president once said, Elections have consequences.

With your 50-50-plus-one split in the Senate and your hulking six-person advantage in the 435-member House, you have all the mandate you need to control the court. To control all of us.

Make all of your policy fantasies come true your Green New Deal, defund the police, reparations for slavery, the $15 minimum wage, critical race theory, soaring corporate taxes. They can all be a river to your people.

Please dont read this as sour grapes. This is encouragement. After the Capitol riot, many of us conservatives thought the Republican Party would spend the next decade in the wilderness.

But you wont let that happen. Your hard push to the left is awakening conservatives across the country.

Dissenting Opinion Byron White

Bryon White was born in 1917 in Fort Collins, Colorado, and was educated at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he met the future President John F. Kennedy. He worked as a law clerk and in private practice and later ran campaigns for John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy appointed him Deputy Attorney General and nominated him as Associate Justice to the Supreme Court in 1962. White was a notable conservative, and he dissented in the Roe v. Wade decision on what he viewed as disregard for potential life.

Some Republicans Feel Protected By 6

WASHINGTON Republican voters fearing a potential Joe Biden presidency are taking some solace in the belief that a newly conservative Supreme Court with Justice Amy Coney Barrett will restrain Democratic ambitions.

Some of President Donald Trumps supporters believe the new 6-3 majority of Republican appointees will be a bulwark against a Biden administrations attempts to move the country in a more progressive direction.

We have no fears because theres a conservative Supreme Court now, said Cynthia Manville of Buckeye, Arizona, who attended a Trump rally in Phoenix last Wednesday. We feel if Democrats cast legislation thats radical liberal, it wouldnt stand the test of time.

God has a certain way of watching over this country, said Manville, who attended with her husband, Steve, both of them wearing red Make America Great Again hats.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito

President George W. Bush nominated Samuel Alito to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had decided to step down from the bench earlier in the year. He was confirmed by a vote of 58-42 in January of 2006. Aliton has proven to be the better of the Justices appointed by President Bush. Chief Justice John Roberts ended up being the deciding vote in favor of keeping Obamacare, to the befuddlement of many conservatives. Alito dissented in major opinions on Obamacare, as well as a ruling in 2015 that effectively legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Alito was born in 1950 and could serve ont he court for decades to come.Justice Alito was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2006 by Republican President George W. Bush.

Was Roe Vs Wade Decided By A Republican Court

The landmark abortion case of Roe v. Wade was decided by what theoretically should have been a “conservative” Supreme Court. The decision recognized a womans right to make individual medical decisions, including abortion in line with the constitutional right to privacy. The Court ruled that the state had no interests in a womans pregnancy in the first trimester and the woman thus had a right to terminate the pregnancy. The decision remains the most controversial of the Supreme Courts rulings in the US.

Is The Us Supreme Court Republican Or Democrat

Romney Supports Vote On Supreme Court Nominee As Senate Republicans Push Forward | NBC Nightly News

The Supreme Court of the United States is composed of nine justices who have been given lifelong appointments by sitting presidents upon approval of the Senate. As the highest component of the judicial branch of the government of the United States, SCOTUS is responsible for reviewing the constitutionality of all U.S. laws. Sometimes they uphold the laws, sometimes they do not. SCOTUS was established by the U.S. Constitution and is one of the checks and balances to the other two branches of the government legislative and executive .

The justices who sit on the Supreme Court have been nominated by a president and confirmed by the Senate. SCOTUS is particularly important because when one side or another push through legislation or executive order, the courts and the justices evaluate and determine the constitutionality and legitimacy of the said items. They also decide legal disputes among states and discrepancies in lower court rulings. This is why an impartial reviewing of the law would be critical.

The Supreme Court should be non-partisan: judges who are appointed to it are not supposed to bring their allegiances as Republicans or Democrats to the bench. However, as the appointments are made by presidents, judges are often perceived as having ideological leanings, whether to the Republican side or the Democratic side.

Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist

From his appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 until his death in 2005, Supreme Court Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist served as Chief Justice of the United States and became a conservative icon. Rehnquist’s term on the High Court began in 1972, when he was appointed by Richard M. Nixon. He wasted no time in distinguishing himself as a conservative, offering one of only two dissenting opinions in the controversial 1973 abortion-rights case, Roe v. Wade. Rehnquist was a strong supporter of state’s rights, as outlined in the Constitution, and took the concept of judicial restraint seriously, consistently siding with conservatives on the issues of religious expression, free speech and the expansion of federal powers.

Liberal Push To Expand Supreme Court Is All But Dead Among Hill Dems

Senate Republicans are still seizing on the issue in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms.

04/26/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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Supreme Court expansion was one of the lefts most galvanizing ideas during the 2020 Democratic primary. But the idea is going nowhere with sitting Democratic senators.

I dont think the American public is interested in having the Supreme Court expanded, said Sen. Michael Bennet .

Sen. Mark Kelly , who represents a particularly valuable swing state, said the more responsible thing to do is to keep it at nine justices. And Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said she opposes adding seats that politicize the court.

That trio is facing reelection in 2022, making their opinions particularly important to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer . But as Sen. Ed Markey formally pushes for high court expansion, resurfacing the popular progressive cause in response to the GOPs relentless drive to fill court seats during the Trump years, its clear that few of Markeys colleagues agree with him.

While liberal measures on election reform, police bias and congressional ethics remain relatively popular with the 50-member Senate majority, expanding the Supreme Court is close to dead among the chambers Democrats.

This is in the category of things that couldnt muster 50 votes and probably couldnt muster 40 votes, said Sen. Brian Schatz . We have a historic opportunity to make change here and we should focus on those issues where we can get a majority.

How Many Republicans Are In The Supreme Court

Supreme CourtRepublicancourtsRepublicancourtscourts

As of October 6, 2018, of the 9 judges on the Supreme Court, 5 were appointed by a Republican president, and 4 were appointed by a Democratic president. As of February 11, 2020, of the 13 federal appeals courts, Republican appointees have a majority on 7 courts, while Democrat appointees have a majority on 6 courts.

Secondly, how many Supreme Court Justices are conservative? Both graphs indicate that the current Roberts Court remains conservative, with four conservative justices and the median position held by Justice Anthony Kennedy , who has also become more liberal (except Kennedy

who are the 9 Supreme Court Justices and who appointed them?

All justices

Samuel Chase

Who is currently on the Supreme Court?

Current justicesThe Supreme Court consists of a chief justice, currently John Roberts, and eight associate justices.

Nonpartisan Election Of Judges

In a nonpartisan election, some states require candidates to declare their party affiliations, while some states prohibit them from doing so. If primaries are held, they do not narrow the candidates to one per party; instead, they typically narrow the candidates to two for each seat regardless of party.

In 2020, there were 31 nonpartisan state supreme court elections. Of these elections, there were:

31 nonpartisan seats.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan

Justice Elena Kagan joined the Supreme Court in 2010 after being nominated by former President Barack Obama.

Elena Kagan, 58, has served on the Supreme Court since 2010. She was nominated by former President Barack Obama.

Kagan has degrees from Princeton University, Oxford University and Harvard Law School. She previously was a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School. A Democrat, she also served in the Clinton administration, clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and served as the Dean of Harvard Law School.

Facts About The Supreme Court

For the second time in four years, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin its term on Monday with only eight of nine justices, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in mid-September. The high court last carried out its duties with eight justices after the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016.

As it did four years ago, the death of a sitting justice has thrust the court into the center of a bruising political campaign for the White House. Republican President Donald Trump has nominated federal appellate judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy left by Ginsburg, even as Trumps opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, calls for confirmation proceedings to be postponed until after voters have cast their ballots for president. Republicans control the U.S. Senate and have vowed to move forward with Barretts confirmation over the objections of Biden and other Democrats.

As the high court gets back to work and hears arguments in a new set of cases including one that seeks to invalidate the 2010 Affordable Care Act here are five facts about the Supreme Court, based on surveys and other recent analyses by Pew Research Center:

In the summer, before Ginsburgs death, seven-in-ten U.S. adults said they had a favorable view of the Supreme Court. That included three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic leaners, according to an online survey using the Centers American Trends Panel.

In 2013 Reid And Democrats Lowered Vote Threshold On Most Nominees But Not For Supreme Court Picks

In 2013, Democrats held a majority in the Senate while President Barack Obama occupied the White House. 

For four decades, a 60-vote supermajority had been required to advance all federal judicial nominees and executive-office appointments, per The Washington Post.

Then, Senate Republicans attempted to filibuster multiple Obama nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, his pick for Defense secretary, and his choices to lead the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In response, Reid orchestrated a move to lower the Senate vote threshold to 51 to confirm most presidential appointments  but not nominees to the Supreme Court.

Those nominees, and legislation, could still be filibustered.

The Democrat-controlled Senate voted 52-48 in favor of the change, which was dubbed the “nuclear option.”

At the time, McConnell condemned the move.

Its a sad day in the history of the Senate, he told reporters, calling it a power grab” by Democrats.

Agreement Among The Justices

Will Republicans Have The Votes To Fill Ruth Bader Ginsburgs SCOTUS Seat? | Sunday TODAY

While the highest levels of agreement were among justices in the same ideological blocs, some pairs, particularly among the more conservative justices, agreed much less often than they did last term.

91%

Alito-Roberts

78

On the whole, Justice Breyers voting record in the last term tilted left. He voted with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the courts most liberal member, 91 percent of the time in divided cases in which all of the justices participated, up 18 percentage points from the previous term. Only one other pair of justices agreed that often: Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh, also at 91 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, Justices Alito and Sotomayor agreed just 22 percent of the time. And there were signs of division on the right side of the court. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, Mr. Trumps first two appointees, agreed 65 percent of the time, down 20 percentage points from the previous term.

The court decided just 54argued cases with signed opinions, the second-smallest number since the 1860s. The smallest was in the last term, at 53.

The Court Is Deciding Fewer Cases

The number of decisions in argued cases has fallen fairly steadily since the 1980s.

150

2010

2020

The courts docket in the term that starts in October may not be larger, but it will contain at least two potentially far-reaching cases: a challenge to the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade and the most important Second Amendment case in more than a decade.

Marin K. Levy, a law professor at Duke, said the decision issued on Thursday upholding voting restrictions in Arizona fundamentally changed how this term will be remembered.

It puts an exclamation point on what had otherwise been a fairly quiet term, she said. It also sets the tone for next year, when the court will hear cases on hot-button topics including gun regulation and abortion.

How Republicans Have Packed The Courts For Years

Jackie CalmesTimesDissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court

While Republicans lately have been attacking Democrats for plotting to pack the federal courts with like-minded judges, their party has been doing it for years.

Through bare-knuckle tactics in the Senate, an animated base of voters and an institutionalized and well-funded pipeline for judges, Republicans have stocked the federal bench at all levels with conservatives who share the rights support for whacking at the wall between church and state and at the powers of federal regulatory agencies, banning abortion and expanding gun rights.

Republicans ruthless success in the judicial wars is most evident on the highest court in the land. As the Supreme Court with its new 6-3 conservative majority ends its term this month, the question for court-watchers isnt whether it will rule in a conservative way. Its how far-reaching will those rulings be.

The courts bent was perhaps most evident in its decision last month to review a Mississippi law generally barring abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, after two lower courts ruled the statute plainly violated Supreme Court precedents that the Constitution protects a womans right to have an abortion until a fetus is viable. The case will be decided in the courts next term that starts in October.

List Of Elections In 2020

The map and table below detail which states held elections for supreme court seats in 2020. The darker shade of green a state appears in the map, the more seats were on the ballot. States shown in gray in the map did not hold supreme court elections in 2020.

2020 State Supreme Court Elections State November 3, 2020

Incumbent Win Rates By Year

Incumbents tend to do better in elections for any office than newcomers facing incumbents. This is no less true in state supreme court elections. Across all types of state supreme court elections, incumbent justices running for re-election won 93% of the time from 2008-2020. No more than six incumbent justices have lost in a single year during this time frame. 2008 was the year with the lowest incumbent win rate at 89%.

Incumbent win rates in state supreme court elections Election year

How Conservative Is The New Supreme Court Majority Really

The 360 shows you diverse perspectives on the days top stories and debates.

Whats happening

The Supreme Court began its summer recess last week, bringing an end to a term that served as the first test of its new 6-3 conservative majority, with all three of former President Donald Trump’s appointees on the bench.

During Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the final weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Democrats warned and some Republicans hoped that a court dominated by conservatives would be primed to radically rewrite the nations laws on a host of major issues through a series of partisan decisions. That prediction, for the most part, didnt come to pass.

Over the course of this past term, the court considered a number of controversial cases, but only a few ended in 6-3 rulings along ideological lines. All nine justices sided with a religious foster care agency that had sued the city of Philadelphia after having its contract canceled because it refused to place children with same-sex couples. In a 7-2 vote, the court rebuffed the latest Republican attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act. The justices were also unanimous in knocking down restrictions on education-related spending for college athletes. Trumps efforts to challenge the results of the election were rejected by the court, with the only disagreement being among conservative justices.

Why theres debate

Whats next

List Of Nominations To The Supreme Court Of The United States

This article is part of the series on the

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest ranking judicial body in the United States. Established by Article III of the Constitution, the Court was organized by the 1st United States Congress through the Judiciary Act of 1789, which specified its original and appellate jurisdiction, created 13 judicial districts, and fixed the size of the Supreme Court at six, with one chief justice and five associate justices. During the 19th century, Congress changed the size of the Court on seven occasions, concluding with the Judiciary Act of 1869 which stipulates that the Court consists of the chief justice and eight associate justices.

George Washington holds the record for most Supreme Court nominations, with 14 nominations . Making the second-most nominations were Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Tyler, with nine each . Three presidentsâWilliam Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Jimmy Carterâdid not make any nominations, as there were no vacancies while they were in office, and there have not been any vacancies during the current administration of Joe Biden.

Retention Election Of Judges

In a retention election, an incumbent judge does not face an opponent. A question is placed on the ballot asking whether each judge shall be retained for another term, and voters choose “yes” or “no.” Judges must receive majority “yes” votes in order to remain in their seats.

In 2020, there were 29 retention state supreme court elections. Of these elections, there were:

28 nonpartisan seats

one Democratic-controlled seat

Roe V Wade Was Decided By A Republican

Trump, Republican on rapid pace to fill Supreme Court justice seat | GMA

One of the major issues in this presidential election concerns the nomination and subsequent appointment of at least one Supreme Court justice and possibly two or more justices.

It seems that among evangelical Christians, two issues in particular are driving support for Donald Trump: the nomination/appointment of Supreme Court justices, and the fact that he is Republican.

Moreover, at the center of the Supreme Court discussion is the 1973 Court decision on Roe vs. Wade.

During the final debate between Clinton and Trump, held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on October 19, 2016, and moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News, Wallace opened the debate with discussion of the Supreme Court. Below are the excerpted responses from Clinton and Trump on the issue of nominating Supreme Court justices, especially as such concerns Roe vs. Wade.

Clinton:But I feel that at this point in our countrys history, it is important that we not reverse Roe v.Wade.

Thats how I see the court, and the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on behalf of our rights as Americans.

Trump:I feel that the justices that I am going to appoint and Ive named 20 of them the justices that Im going to appoint will be pro-life. They will have a conservative bent.

But let us consider the assumption that justices nominated by Republican presidents will lead to overturning Roe vs. Wade.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-are-on-the-supreme-court/

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Have you heard the one about two Republicans and 5,000 Democrats who walk into a primary election? It’s not much of a joke to Democrats. In at least three U.S. House primaries in California on Tuesday, Democrats are in real danger of not advancing a candidate to the November general at all, thanks to the Golden State’s unusual “jungle primary” rules. That’s inspired panic among liberals and frantic — often counterintuitive — efforts to game the system. But there’s a greater chance than people realize that the jungle primary system will burn Republicans as well. In fact, if the GOP is locked out of the two biggest races on the ballot this year — for U.S. Senate and governor — the jungle primary could hurt them a lot more than it does Democrats.

Jungle primaries can be confusing even to locals, so let’s start with a refresher. In California,1 all candidates regardless of party run on the same ballot in the June primary. The top two vote-getters (again, regardless of party) advance to a head-to-head election in November. When this system went into effect in 2012, moderates were supposed to benefit because candidates would have to appeal to the whole electorate rather than just their partisan base. But three elections later, Californians disagree on whether it has succeeded.

What it has done is occasionally let two candidates of the same party slip through to the general election, which critics say deprives voters of a true choice in November.2 Let’s say you have a district that’s perfectly split — 50-50 — between Democratic and Republican voters, but 10 Democratic candidates run for the seat compared with only two Republicans. The two Republicans might get 25 percent of the vote apiece, while the Democrats each receive 5 percent. That would advance the two Republicans to the general election, locking up that district for the GOP.

That’s exactly what Democrats fear will happen in California’s 39th, 48th and 49th congressional districts — and perhaps in the 10th and 50th districts as well. Those districts’ swing status attracted a large number of credible challengers in what has been a great recruiting year for Democrats, but that high Democratic enthusiasm could backfire as a result of the jungle primary.

Crowded fields in California

Primary races by the total number of candidates on the ballot

Candidates running Race Incumbent party Open seat Dems Reps Other/ No Party Total Senate D 10 11 11 32 Governor D ✓ 12 5 10 27 District 39 R ✓ 6 7 4 17 48 R 8 6 2 16 49 R ✓ 4 8 4 16 10 R 6 2 0 8 1 R 4 2 1 7 12 D 4 1 2 7 50 R 3 3 1 7 52 D 1 6 0 7 4 R 4 2 0 6 22 R 3 1 2 6 23 R 4 1 1 6 36 D 1 5 0 6 45 R 4 1 1 6 51 D 1 3 2 6 53 D 1 4 1 6 7 D 1 2 2 5 8 R 3 2 0 5 17 D 3 1 1 5 25 R 4 1 0 5 29 D 2 1 2 5 43 D 1 3 1 5 5 D 1 0 3 4 11 D 2 1 1 4 26 D 2 2 0 4 30 D 3 1 0 4 42 R 2 1 1 4 44 D 2 2 0 4 46 D 1 1 2 4 2 D 2 1 0 3 3 D 2 1 0 3 9 D 1 1 1 3 15 D 1 1 1 3 18 D 1 1 1 3 20 D 2 0 1 3 24 D 1 2 0 3 28 D 2 1 0 3 31 D 2 1 0 3 33 D 2 1 0 3 34 D 1 0 2 3 35 D 2 1 0 3 47 D 1 2 0 3 6 D 2 0 0 2 14 D 1 1 0 2 16 D 1 1 0 2 21 R 1 1 0 2 27 D 2 0 0 2 37 D 1 1 0 2 38 D 1 1 0 2 40 D 1 0 1 2 41 D 1 1 0 2 13 D 1 0 0 1 19 D 1 0 0 1 32 D 1 0 0 1

Show more rows

Source: California secretary of state

The most clear and present danger for Team Blue seems to be in the 48th District. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a magnet for controversy, from his friendliness and contacts with Russia to his belief that homeowners should be able to refuse to sell their houses to gay people. It’s made him a Democratic target in this light red seat (R+4 going by FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean),3 and even some fellow Republicans are fed up. Former Rohrabacher protégé Scott Baugh is running against his old mentor, providing a viable alternative to buttoned-down Orange County Republicans who may disapprove of the Trumpish incumbent.4 That’s motivated national Democrats to campaign hard against Baugh to secure a top-two finish for one of their eight candidates on the ballot. In an effort to improve that terrible math, three of those Democrats have withdrawn from consideration, and the party is handing out pamphlets reminding voters not to pick their names.

Two major Democratic candidates remain: Stem-cell researcher Hans Keirstead won the California Democratic Party’s endorsement, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has sided with entrepreneur Harley Rouda. The DCCC’s move was intended to consolidate support around Rouda, but it may have only formalized the party’s schism. Why the preference? The DCCC no doubt appreciates Rouda’s ability to self-fund and was reportedly scared off by unsubstantiated allegations of Keirstead sleeping with female graduate students and punching one of his female students in the face. The two candidates share a solidly progressive platform, but Rouda may also hold more crossover appeal as a Hillary Clinton-supporting former Republican (like many voters in the district).

But in California’s two open House seats, both parties are at risk of a top-two lockout. In the 39th District (D+3), no fewer than four Democrats and three Republicans have realistic shots at a place on the November ballot. Former state Assemblywoman Young Kim, whom outgoing Rep. Ed Royce has endorsed, is considered the GOP front-runner, but that may be an overly hasty assumption. Two internal polls of the race put Kim in a virtual tie with fellow Republicans Bob Huff, a former state Senate minority leader, and Orange County Supervisor Shawn Nelson.

In turn, just a few points away sit the race’s two independently wealthy Democrats, who have far outspent the rest of the field. Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran who won a $266 million lottery jackpot in 2010, has lent his campaign $3.5 million, while insurance executive Andy Thorburn has invested “only” $2.8 million. Worried that their high-dollar war of words was just pushing both of them down in the polls, Democratic leadership brokered a cease-fire between them last month. The DCCC initially campaigned here only to drag down Huff and Nelson (apparently ceding one runoff slot to Kim) but has lately started airing ads supporting Cisneros — despite a Democratic legislative candidate’s accusations that he made inappropriate sexual advances toward her. Finally, two other Democrats, Emily’s List-backed pediatrician Mai Khanh Tran and former Obama administration appointee Sam Jammal, could also be factors in the race. The bottom line is that any of the top seven candidates — and therefore any combination of parties — could finish in the top two.

And in California’s 49th District (D+1), national Republicans have been at least as active in trying to manipulate the field as national Democrats have been. The American Future Fund has spent more than $1 million propping up state Board of Equalization member Diane Harkey and Assemblyman Rocky Chávez and fending off a third GOP candidate, San Diego County Supervisor Kristin Gaspar. Meanwhile, the DCCC has spent $1.7 million against Chávez (who is the most moderate Republican and probably the most electable) without picking sides among the Democratic contestants. The strategies seem like they’ve been effective: According to a SurveyUSA poll taken at the end of May, Harkey led the race with 24 percent, followed by Democrats Doug Applegate and Sara Jacobs with 11 percent, Democrat Mike Levin with 10 percent and Chávez (who actually led in SurveyUSA’s previous poll of the race) with 8 percent.

But polls of U.S. House races and primaries are notoriously error-prone, and there’s been plenty of upheaval among the Democrats. Applegate, a retired Marine colonel, was Democrats’ November candidate for this seat in 2016 but has been dogged by 14-year-old allegations that he stalked and threatened his ex-wife, although she has defended and endorsed him in 2018. Meanwhile, Jacobs, whose grandfather is the billionaire co-founder of Qualcomm, has benefited from Emily’s List’s largest-ever independent-expenditure campaign ($2.3 million), but the 29-year-old has been dinged for exaggerating her work experience. And the race’s leading fundraiser is a fourth Democrat, real estate investor Paul Kerr.

In two final districts with vulnerable GOP incumbents, it’s also possible (but less likely) that either party will be shut out of the top two. In the heavily Latino 10th District (D+1), Rep. Jeff Denham has cultivated a moderate reputation, especially on immigration. His lone Republican challenger, Ted Howze, hopes to rally the district’s hard-core conservatives with cries of “amnesty.” Among Democrats, venture capitalist Josh Harder has raised a strong $1.5 million, beekeeper Michael Eggman has plenty of name recognition from his failed 2014 and 2016 campaigns, and former Riverbank Mayor Virginia Madueño enjoys the support of Emily’s List.

Finally, the R+19 50th District wouldn’t be competitive under normal circumstances, but Rep. Duncan Hunter is under FBI investigation for personal use of campaign funds. Democrats Ammar Campa-Najjar and Josh Butner have gone nuclear on each other, potentially paving the way for Republicans Bill Wells or Shamus Sayed to finish second to Hunter. Wells is mayor of El Cajon, a city of more than 100,000 people on the district’s western edge, but businessman Sayed has raised five times as much money. In mid-May, a SurveyUSA poll found all the non-Hunter candidates within the margin of error of one another.

But here’s the thing: If Democrats (or Republicans) miss out on the general election in any of those races, the most either party could lose is one House seat.5 That’s bad, of course, but the damage would be limited. Not so, however, if a party is locked out of the general election in a high-profile statewide race. Unfortunately for conservatives, it’s Republicans who are likely to miss out in November on California’s U.S. Senate race and possibly also the gubernatorial election. And that could have bigger consequences than just one race.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone writes, California’s general election for the U.S. Senate is likely to come down to two Democrats representing two different visions for the party: more moderate Sen. Dianne Feinstein and progressive upstart Kevin de León, the former state Senate president. Even worse, Republicans could also be shut out of California’s other major statewide race this year: governor. Everyone else is basically just trying to make the runoff with Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has raised the incredible sum of $36 million. Not to be outdone, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has raised $34 million and also gotten a $20 million assist from a pro-charter-schools outside group. State Treasurer John Chiang has raised “only” $14 million and hopes to win over Democrats turned off by Newsom’s and Villaraigosa’s past scandals.

Meanwhile, President Trump has urged Republicans via tweet to consolidate behind businessman John Cox instead of state Assemblyman Travis Allen. Newsom has also subtly tried to lift Cox in an effort to face a Republican in the fall. The trend in polling (which, weirdly for this primary season, has been ample) suggests these developments may have made a difference, but Cox — and the GOP — could easily still lose that second runoff spot.

Latest polls of the California governor’s race

Democrats Republicans Dates Pollster Newsom Villaraigosa Chiang Cox Allen May 29-30 Competitive Edge 31% 13% 4% 23% 10% May 22-28 UC Berkeley 33 13 7 20 12 May 21-24 Emerson College 24 12 10 16 11 May 12-24 YouGov 33 9 8 17 10 May 21 SurveyUSA 33 8 10 17 12 May 11-20 PPIC 25 15 9 19 11 Apr. 18-May 18 USC Dornsife/LAT 21 11 6 10 5 Average 29 12 8 17 10

Both California’s senatorial and gubernatorial races were always going to be safely Democratic in this D+26 state, so it may seem like no big deal if Republicans fail to advance in them. It’s even happened before: Democrats Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez were the top two vote-getters in the 2016 Senate primary before facing off in the general election. But this year, without a presidential race on the ballot, the races for Senate and governor matter more than just for their own sake. As the two races headlining California’s 2018 ballot, they have the power to drive turnout across this state of 40 million — and all 53 of its congressional races.

A Republican shutout at the top of the ticket could depress conservative turnout statewide, perhaps nudging districts where the Republican is currently favored, like the 4th and 21st, more toward the toss-up column. That could damage the party’s chances in a dozen swing districts, not just in one, like a shutout in an individual House race would. In 2014, poor turnout in “orphan states” — those without competitive races for governor or Senate — cost Democrats House seats that they didn’t even know were in danger. The biggest consequence of the jungle primary could be that California becomes 2018’s version of an orphan state — for Republicans.

[orbemnews]

Cash Walks Company America rethinks political donations Large companies typically donate to each political events and say that their assist is tied to slender problems with particular curiosity to their industries. That grew to become more and more fraught final week, after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and a few Republican lawmakers tried to overturn Joe Biden’s win within the presidential election. A flurry of firms have since reviewed political giving by way of their company political motion committees. Some huge banks are pausing all political donations: Goldman Sachs is freezing donations by its PAC and can conduct “a radical evaluation of how individuals acted throughout this era,” a spokesman, Jake Siewert, instructed DealBook. JPMorgan Chase is halting donations by its PAC for six months. “There will likely be loads of time for campaigning later,” stated Peter Scher, the financial institution’s head of company accountability. Citigroup is placing all marketing campaign contributions on maintain for 1 / 4. “We wish you to be assured that we are going to not assist candidates who don’t respect the rule of legislation,” Candi Wolff, the financial institution’s head of presidency affairs, wrote in an inner memo. Some firms are pausing donations to particular politicians: Marriott stated it would pause donations from its PAC “to those that voted in opposition to certification of the election,” a spokeswoman instructed DealBook. Blue Cross Blue Protect, Boston Scientific and Commerce Bancshares are taking an identical, focused strategy to donation freezes. The e-newsletter In style Info is monitoring the responses of those and different firms that donated to lawmakers who challenged the election outcome. A pause is just not everlasting. The suspensions coincide with the primary quarter after a presidential election, which is often gentle on fund-raising anyway. Efforts by some firms to pause PAC donations to all lawmakers — those that voted to uphold the election in addition to those that sought to overturn it — are elevating eyebrows. And firms can nonetheless give to “darkish cash” teams that don’t disclose their donors however typically increase far more cash than company PACs. Right here’s an intriguing query: Will firms ask for his or her a refund? Ken Gross, a accomplice on the legislation agency Skadden, stated he hadn’t seen proof of that, however he famous that the pauses could also be extended, relying on “how the mud settles” on potential impeachment proceedings and the character of the debates over Mr. Biden’s cupboard nominees. Company PACs aren’t the one teams below scrutiny. The Republican Attorneys Normal Affiliation is taking warmth following stories {that a} fund-raising arm, the Rule of Regulation Protection Fund, urged individuals to march on the Capitol. A number of firms instructed DealBook that they had been reviewing their assist of the group, although none stated they deliberate to chop ties. (Most famous that they supported attorneys basic from each events, a difficulty Andrew addressed in a column final yr.) A consultant for the affiliation stated that it and the Rule of Regulation Protection Fund “had no involvement within the planning, sponsoring or the group of Wednesday’s occasion.” Right here’s what we heard from among the huge company donors to the group: “We’re appalled and condemn these actions within the strongest potential phrases and have communicated that to R.A.G.A.,” stated John Demming, a spokesman for Comcast, which donated $200,000 final yr, in line with Documented. The corporate would search “assurances that they take steps to make sure that nothing like this may occur once more,” he stated. Randy Hargrove, a spokesman for Walmart, which donated $140,000, stated: “As we conduct our evaluation over the approaching months, we will definitely issue final week’s occasions into our course of.” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, which donated $50,000, stated: “We constantly re-evaluate our memberships, and we’ll proceed to take action with final week’s occasion in thoughts.” In different fallout: The P.G.A. of America stated it will not maintain its signature championship on the Trump Nationwide Golf Membership in Bedminster, N.J.; the social app Parler, in style amongst conservatives as a substitute for Twitter, went darkish this morning after Amazon minimize it off from computing providers; the cost processor Stripe banned the Trump marketing campaign from utilizing its providers; YouTube blocked Steve Bannon’s podcast channel; and the debate continues over tech giants’ affect over public speech. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING U.S. states battle to roll out coronavirus vaccines. New York abruptly loosened its pointers, after medical suppliers had been pressured to discard doses due to difficulties discovering certified sufferers. Florida’s distribution plans are in disarray as demand far outstrips provide. And federal officers are being criticized for supplying syringes that can’t effectively extract all of the liquid from vials. Chicago takes warmth for its plan to reopen public faculties. Greater than 6,000 college students are set to return as we speak, however a significant proportion of the town’s academics aren’t anticipated to point out up, as their union argues that the plan doesn’t defend their well being. The voting machine maker Dominion sues a Trump ally for $1.3 billion. Dominion accused Sidney Powell, a lawyer who pushed baseless election conspiracy theories in regards to the firm, of defamation. The lawsuit, the corporate stated, is supposed to “set the file straight.” Investigators look at the most recent Boeing crash. The airplane concerned, which took off from the Indonesian capital of Jakarta and was stated to be carrying 62 individuals, was a workhorse mannequin, the 737-500, with a good security file. Crypto’s wild journey continues. Bitcoin fell 11 % in a single day, whereas Ether and different high cryptocurrencies plunged as effectively. Some analysts speculated that buyers had been locking in income after the value of Bitcoin doubled over the previous month. Jay Timmons makes a press release Amid the flurry of company condemnations of final week’s violence on the Capitol, one stood out. In its assertion, the Nationwide Affiliation of Producers referred to as out President Trump immediately and urged Vice President Mike Pence to contemplate eradicating him to “protect democracy.” The Instances’s Jim Tankersley, Peter Eavis and DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch obtained the again story of the unexpectedly extreme assertion, maybe the starkest signal of company America’s break with the Trump administration. As soon as a dependable conservative ally, the commerce group has hosted Mr. Trump at annual conferences, labored carefully along with his administration on deregulation and tax cuts, and gave Ivanka Trump an award final yr. N.A.M.’s president, Jay Timmons, has lengthy ties to the Republican Occasion, and beforehand served as chief of employees to Senator George Allen of Virginia. What modified? Fairly doubtless, the explanation that the group was in a position to communicate out so forcefully final week was that Mr. Timmons did not ballot the board’s membership earlier than issuing the assertion (he declined to say whom he did seek the advice of). When The Instances reached out to the corporate’s board members, most referred to their very own vaguely worded statements condemning the violence. Few would touch upon N.A.M.’s name for the removing of Mr. Trump. Mr. Timmons has develop into more and more dismayed by the Trump White Home, and when his father died from Covid-19 final month, he launched a press release by way of N.A.M. by which he blamed “careless” conduct by individuals inspired by “nationwide leaders” who weren’t urging masks or different precautions. After a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, “it was a transparent and current menace to our democracy,” Mr. Timmons instructed The Instances. “I believed it was vital to talk up.” The week forward The Home is anticipated to vote as quickly as Tuesday on impeaching President Trump for a second time. However the Senate gained’t take up a trial till at the least Jan. 19, in line with Senator Mitch McConnell. Home lawmakers may also vote on a decision calling on the cupboard to take away Mr. Trump by invoking the twenty fifth Modification. Right now, the Paycheck Safety Program reopens for small-business debtors, by way of a choose group of group lenders. Additionally as we speak, American inventory exchanges will delist Chinese language firms focused by a Trump administration govt order (and American banks are dropping linked funding automobiles in Hong Kong because of this). Large banks start reporting their newest earnings, with Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo releasing numbers on Friday. A busy week for I.P.O.s is anticipated to see firms increase greater than $4 billion, together with greater than $1 billion for Playtika and debuts for Affirm, Petco and others. Unique: Former WWE execs introduce a brand new fund George Barrios and Michelle Wilson — the previous co-presidents of World Wrestling Leisure who abruptly left the corporate a yr in the past — are saying their subsequent venture as we speak: Isos Capital Administration, an funding agency centered on media, leisure and sports activities. The thought was hatched in the summertime. Mr. Barrios and Ms. Wilson are veterans of the sports activities and leisure enterprise, together with greater than a decade at WWE. “We really feel actually happy with all the things that was completed throughout our tenure, so we’re excited in regards to the subsequent chapter with Isos,” Ms. Wilson instructed DealBook. After WWE, they each thought-about a number of alternatives — together with C.E.O. roles — however determined as an alternative to proceed working collectively. An business in flux. The brand new fund will goal firms in any respect levels of improvement, in industries which can be present process speedy technological shifts. “There are areas — whether or not it’s video gaming, e-sports, sports activities betting — that may drive fan engagement, and that digital transformation will actually develop into the car to make that occur,” Ms. Wilson stated. As cash has poured into the house and deal making has picked up, the fund’s founders consider their expertise and contacts set them aside — at WWE, for instance, they led the corporate’s aggressive worldwide push. “Capital is vital, but it surely’s fungible,” Mr. Barrios stated. “What Michelle and I carry is experience, credibility and a world community.” THE SPEED READ Offers Barry Diller’s IAC pledged a further $1 billion to assist MGM’s takeover bid for Entain. However Mr. Diller stated he was skeptical of MGM’s possibilities of success. (Bloomberg, FT) The funding agency World Infrastructure Companions agreed to purchase Signature Aviation, a private-jet servicing firm, for $4.6 billion, beating Blackstone and Carlyle. (Reuters) Dr Martens, the famed boot model, plans to go public on the London Inventory Trade. (FT) Politics and coverage The tax invoice of huge U.S. banks might rise as a lot as $11 billion a yr if President-elect Joe Biden rolls out his marketing campaign’s company tax proposal. (Bloomberg) Nellie Liang, a former high economist on the Fed, is reportedly a high contender for a key Treasury Division put up. (WSJ) Mr. Biden’s selection of Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island for commerce secretary is “particularly encouraging,” given her file on balancing capitalism with social equality, writes Mike Bloomberg. (Bloomberg Opinion) Tech There’s a growth for start-ups launching nanosatellites. (WSJ) Amazon and Walmart more and more determine that it’s not definitely worth the money and time for patrons to return some objects for refunds. (WSJ) Better of the remaining “The Lies We Inform Throughout Job Interviews” (WSJ) The pandemic has created a scarcity at sperm banks, giving rise to an underground fertility financial system on Fb. (NYT) We’d like your suggestions! Please e-mail ideas and strategies to dealbook@nytimes.com. Supply hyperlink #Money #Walks

[denisehil0]

2020 Watch: Will Tuesday clinch the nomination for Biden?

WASHINGTON — Presidential politics move fast. What we’re watching heading into a new week on the 2020 campaign:

Days to next set of primaries (Indiana, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, District of Columbia): 1

Days to general election: 155

___

THE NARRATIVE The only real open question going into Tuesday’s eight primaries is whether Joe Biden will rack up enough votes to formally clinch the Democratic presidential nomination. That he we will win those contests is not in doubt.

The former vice-president needs to win 89% of all delegates at stake to do so. That sounds easy since he’s the last candidate standing in a once-crowded primary field. But supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have continued to urge voters to cast ballots for him so he can amass delegates and have a greater influence on the party policy platform ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

Biden has met the 89% threshold in only two contests since Super Tuesday: Mississippi (94%) and Nebraska (100%). Protests nationwide, as well as the coronavirus, meanwhile, continue to overshadow the presidential race. Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island all had earlier primaries that were pushed back to Tuesday because of the pandemic. New Jersey was supposed to vote Tuesday but delayed its primary until July 7.

___

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Will mail-in voting pass another key test?

Nearly all of Tuesday’s primary balloting will be by mail, just like in most of the states voting in recent weeks amid the vrius outbreak, including Ohio. Still, activists in Maryland and Pennsylvania have expressed concerns that delays in efforts to send ballots to eligible voters may mean they don’t arrive in time for the primaries there — and similar problems could arise in other places.

President Donald Trump has been an outspoken critic of increasing voting by mail for November’s election, arguing it is a recipe for widespread fraud — even though such cases are exceedingly rare. He’s also hinted that political calculations could be at the core of his claims about protecting voter integrity, tweeting that widespread mail-in ballots “WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY.”

Federal courts are still mulling the issue, but Texas’ Supreme Court ruled recently that fear of contracting the coronavirus wasn’t an adequate excuse for requesting an absentee ballot.

Will this be Steve King’s last stand?

A Republican congressional primary in Iowa on Tuesday could cripple the career of veteran Republican Steve King, who was stripped of his committee assignments last year after suggesting that white nationalism wasn’t offensive. King is facing four challengers for his party’s nomination.

Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucus was marred by chaos. This time, officials mailed out absentee ballot request forms so voters could participate in the primary by mail — but in-person balloting will also be available.

How much worse will it get?

Racially charged protests erupted at virtually the same time the United States surpassed the 100,000 coronavirus deaths, even as the economic downturn sparked by shutdown efforts to slow the pandemic continued to deepen. More than 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment, and the nation’s Gross Domestic Product fell at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter.

As many states start to ease stay-at-home orders, Trump is arguing that an economic recovery could be quick and has begun touting the slogan “Transition to Greatness.”

Biden has struck a far more sombre tone. He says that the Trump administration’s incompetence in the face of the virus cost lives and that, while he will use the outbreak to push for an overhauled economy that can work better for more Americans, he’s not making any promises about how long it might take. Instead, the former vice-president is urging people to listen to health experts and authorities rather than rush back to some approximation of normal life.

Will some top veepstakes contenders see their stock fall?

The violence raging across the nation is likely to increase pressure on Biden to choose an African American woman as his running mate.

Among those who are now in the spotlight: Rep. Val Demmings of Florida, a former police chief who also served on the House committee that voted to impeach Trump, and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who struck out powerfully against the violence in her city.

They would join an unofficial list that also includes Sen. Kamala Harris of California and former Georgia state legislator Stacey Abrams, among others.

Some top Democrats have suggested that the fallout from Minnesota will remove home-state Sen. Amy Klobuchar from Biden’s perceived shortlist for running mate. Meanwhile, two governors had coronavrius-related dust-ups that could perhaps hurt their standing on Biden’s perceived shortlist for the veepstakes. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer faced fierce criticism and eventually suggested her husband was joking when he attempted to use her name to pressure a dock owner to move their boat into the water ahead of his trip to their vacation home for Memorial Day weekend. Whitmer had urged residents to “think long and hard” about such travel.

Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico was criticized for ordering jewelry online and picking it up at an Albuquerque store amid stay-at-home orders she directed.

Biden said he hoped to make a pick by around Aug. 1.

___

THE FINAL THOUGHT

The violence over the weekend underscored a core truism of presidential politics. It is the uncontrollable events, rather than the controlled ones, that typically determine the outcome.

A global pandemic and economic free fall would have seemed to be enough to make that true. But now add violent protests rooted in what Biden has called “systemic” racism.

___

2020 Watch runs every Monday and provides a look at the week ahead in the 2020 election.

___

Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.”

Will Weissert, The Associated Press

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[theconservativebrief]

War veteran and 2020 Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has consistently gotten less media coverage than other contenders. Her tussles with the Democrat establishment are certainly a factor, seeing as many Democrat elites fear Gabbard; unlike Joe Biden, she’s not an easily malleable puppet and she’s conducted herself very differently from other Democrats seeking to become the next president.

“Tulsi Gabbard” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore

Earlier this week, the Hawaii congresswoman called out Fox News anchor Dana Perino for airing a segment in which Karl Rove referred to Elizabeth Warren as the last remaining female candidate. Of course, Warren is not the only remaining candidate, seeing as Gabbard is still running for president.

In challenging Perino, the war veteran also called out Elizabeth Warren, branding the Massachusetts senator as a “fake, indigenous woman of color,” as reported by Breitbart News.

The Latest on Gabbard and Warren

Gabbard’s condemnation of the false report occurred via her social media channels. Not only is the congresswoman still in the race, but she’s also maintained her candidacy longer than other Democrats who previously dropped out. Some candidates who bowed out while Gabbard remains in the race include Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg.

In calling out Rove’s inaccurate statement about female Democrat candidates, Gabbard reminded Americans of Warren’s fake claims about being Native American. The Hawaii congresswoman did this by pointing out that while she herself is a “real, indigenous woman of color,” the same cannot be said for Warren.

.@DanaPerino I'm not quite sure why you're telling FOX viewers that Elizabeth Warren is the last female candidate in the Dem primary. Is it because you believe a fake indigenous woman of color is "real" and the real indigenous woman of color in this race is fake? pic.twitter.com/VKCxy2JzFe

— Tulsi Gabbard ???? (@TulsiGabbard) March 3, 2020

Warren has not yet publicly responded to Gabbard’s statement; however, the Massachusetts senator cannot escape her past lies about her heritage. Worst yet is that Warren used these lies to benefit her academic career and get ahead where she would have otherwise failed.

More on Gabbard’s Run for the Presidency

As Tulsi Gabbard continues running for president, she’s been outspoken about the coronavirus and preventing its spread. According to new updates from her social media channels, the war veteran recently voted in favor of emergency funding designed to prevent the expansion of coronavirus.

Good news — I just voted to pass emergency Coronavirus funding which passed with strong bipartisan support. It will provide $8.2B toward testing, masks, hygiene equipment for first responders, care providers, tele-health access and more. #CoronaAlert #Covid_19 #Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/9X3G9cI0TQ

— Tulsi Gabbard ???? (@TulsiGabbard) March 4, 2020

The legislation has received bipartisan support and contains $8.2 billion dollars meant to go towards tests and critical equipment for healthcare providers, first responders, and others working against the disease.

What do you think about Tulsi Gabbard’s criticism of Elizabeth Warren and those touting her as the last remaining female candidate? Sound off with your thoughts in the comments section below!

The post Tulsi Gabbard on Warren: She’s A “Fake Indigenous Woman of Color” appeared first on The Conservative Brief.

via The Conservative Brief

[trumpsupportersunited]

HAPPPPPPY SATURDAY, CENTIPEDES!Welcome to your Presidentially dank Afternoon Recap thread! This is your girl u/IvaginaryFriend back at it again with a weeks worth of spice for you lovely Deplorables! (◠‿◠✿)Let's get on with the show!Sunday, December 17th:TODAY'S ACTION:Readout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with President Vladimir Putin🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:As a candidate, I promised we would pass a massive TAX CUT for the everyday working American families who are the backbone and the heartbeat of our country. Now, we are just days away...Wonderful weekend at Camp David. A very special place. A lot of very important work done. Heading back to the @WhiteHouse now.More than a century after conquering flight, the #WrightBrothers continue to motivate & inspire Americans, who never tire of exploration & innovation. This GREAT AMERICAN SPIRIT can be found in the design of every new supersonic jet and next generation: http://45.wh.gov/WrightBrothersSIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Get Back to Work, Swedes! The Migrants Aren't Going to Pay For Themselves!Oh boo hoo, owners of $750k+ mansions in California are going to need to pay more in taxes. I thought the democrats wanted to #TaxTheRich?Four government critics found dead in Sweden. Everyone of them has had a heart attack. Everyone of them is less than 35. One of them was a journalist who was found dead the day before he was to release an in depth report about a journalist and his connection with ANTIFA and the Bilderberg group.Merry Christmas Deep State (Banned By Youtube last time!)🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:When you copy homework from your friend and change only a couple words...."He posts on T_D, guys!"I can hear the reeeeeeeeOffended a few coworkers tonightMonday, December 18th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Announces a National Security Strategy to Advance America’s InterestsA New National Security Strategy for a New EraRemarks by the Vice President Introducing the President for Remarks on the Administration’s National Security StrategyRemarks by President Trump on the Administration’s National Security StrategyText of a Letter from the President to the Congress of the United StatesPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Appoint Caren Harp to the Department of Justice🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Remember, Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional Races this year. The media refuses to mention this. I said Gillespie and Moore would lose (for very different reasons), and they did. I also predicted “I” would win. Republicans will do well in 2018, very well! @foxandfriendsIvanka Trump will be interviewed on @foxandfriends.The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!My thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in the train accident in DuPont, Washington. Thank you to all of our wonderful First Responders who are on the scene. We are currently monitoring here at the White House.Our deepest sympathies and most heartfelt prayers are with the victims of the train derailment in Washington State. We are closely monitoring the situation and coordinating with local authorities...Over the past 11 months, I have travelled tens of thousands of miles, to visit 13 countries. I have met with more than 100 world leaders and everywhere I traveled, it was my highest privilege and greatest honor to represent the AMERICAN PEOPLE!When the American People speak, ALL OF US should listen. Just over one year ago, you spoke loud and clear. On November 8, 2016, you voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!As the world watches, we are days away from passing HISTORIC TAX CUTS for American families and businesses. It will be the BIGGEST TAX CUT and TAX REFORM in the HISTORY of our country!So True Ivanka!Thank You Maria B!70 Record Closes for the Dow so far this year! We have NEVER had 70 Dow Records in a one year period. Wow!With the strategy that I announced today, we are declaring that AMERICA is in the game and AMERICA is DETERMINED to WIN!Together, our task is to strengthen our families, to build up our communities, to serve our citizens, and to celebrate AMERICAN GREATNESS as a shining example to the world....SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:COLLUSION FOUND: Obama Admin Colluded With Iran and HezbollahLinda Sarsour Accused Of Enabling Sexual Assault Against Woman Who Worked For HerCOLLINS IS A YES. WE HAVE THE VOTES TO PASS MAJOR TAX CUTS. NOT TIRED OF WINNING! Take a look at how much you'll saveAS WE PREDICTED!!!! - Franken urged to reverse his resignation The demands from Democrats that he step down were 'the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever seen done to a human being,' Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) says.The Trump Curse strikes again! ESPN CEO John Skipper resigns due to substance abuse!ESPN President*🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Russia Hacked SW8This should be common sense. Should.Liberalism is a mental disorderEvil Chick-Fil-A with its Christian "baggage" steps up to feed the people stranded at the Atlanta airport. On Sunday. When they're officially closed.Tuesday, December 19th:TODAY'S ACTION:Press Briefing on the Attribution of the WannaCry Malware Attack to North KoreaReadout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of UzbekistanReadout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with Prime Minister Theresa May of the United KingdomFour Nominations Sent to the Senate TodayPresident Donald J. Trump’s First Year of Foreign Policy Accomplishments🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:DOW RISES 5000 POINTS ON THE YEAR FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER - MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!Stocks and the economy have a long way to go after the Tax Cut Bill is totally understood and appreciated in scope and size. Immediate expensing will have a big impact. Biggest Tax Cuts and Reform EVER passed. Enjoy, and create many beautiful JOBS!A story in the @washingtonpost that I was close to “rescinding” the nomination of Justice Gorsuch prior to confirmation is FAKE NEWS. I never even wavered and am very proud of him and the job he is doing as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The unnamed sources don’t exist!Congratulations to Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Kevin Brady, Steve Scalise, Cathy McMorris Rodgers and all great House Republicans who voted in favor of cutting your taxes!The United States Senate just passed the biggest in history Tax Cut and Reform Bill. Terrible Individual Mandate (ObamaCare)Repealed. Goes to the House tomorrow morning for final vote. If approved, there will be a News Conference at The White House at approximately 1:00 P.M.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Let this sink in, Mueller confiscated every single Trump transition email without a subpoena. Hillary Bleach Bit her 30,000 emails, from an illegal server, that were under subpoena and it was dismissed as "careless."Harvard poll found only 1 in 3 Americans approve of the tax bill but when asked their opinion on specific parts of it they overwhelmingly approve of nearly all of it (pg. 53/54)FACEBOOK SUSPENDS USER FOR CALLING FOR “SENSIBLE MIGRATION POLICIES”: 7 day ban for user as social media censorship scales new heights!#1 It seems like some People here NEED to be reminded: THE MEDIA IS OUR ENEMY! ALWAYS BUILD YOUR OWN OPINION! TRUST NO-ONE!Actor Who Was Arrested for Assaulting Trump Supporter, Now Investigated for Violent Sexual AssaultPRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:Press Beating🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Twitter Censorship at its finestA year later and this monster isn’t banned and is still verifiedWowWhat America First Means. Updated. Made child the world.Totally Different Scenarios!Wednesday, December 20th:TODAY'S ACTION:Statement from President Donald J. Trump Regarding Final Passage of Tax LegislationRemarks by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Members of the CabinetCabinet Meeting Marks Tremendous Year of ProgressThe Tax Cuts Act Follows through on President Donald J. Trump’s Promise of Middle Class Tax CutsPresident Donald J. Trump Signs S. 1266 into LawReadout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi ArabiaPresidential Executive Order on a Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical MineralsPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Ninth Wave of Judicial Nominees and Tenth Wave of United States Attorney NomineesRemarks by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Members of Congress at Bill Passage EventPresident Trump Commutes Sentence of Sholom RubashkinEight Nominations Sent to the Senate TodayPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Appoint Personnel to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The Tax Cuts are so large and so meaningful, and yet the Fake News is working overtime to follow the lead of their friends, the defeated Dems, and only demean. This is truly a case where the results will speak for themselves, starting very soon. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!I would like to congratulate @SenateMajLdr on having done a fantastic job both strategically & politically on the passing in the Senate of the MASSIVE TAX CUT & Reform Bill. I could have not asked for a better or more talented partner. Our team will go onto many more VICTORIES!Together, we are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!We are delivering HISTORIC TAX RELIEF for the American people!WE ARE MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:President Trump Delivers Remarks at a Bill Passage EventIT’S HAPPENING!!! #Boeing announces $300M employee-related and charitable investment as a result of #TaxReform legislation to support our heroes, our homes and our future.Let's have a moment of silence for the 200,000 U.S. AT&T employees killed by the $1,000 bonus given to because of tax reformFifth Third Bancorp will pay more than 13,500 employees a bonus and raise the minimum wage for its workforce to $15 after the passage of the GOP tax plan that will cut the bank's corporate tax rate.Wells Fargo raises hourly minimum wage to $15, also to donate $400 million in 2018!COMCAST joins the party - Announces $1,000 bonus for employees and invest $50 billion in U.S. marketAl Franken confirms he will leave the Senate in January 2, 2018DEMS BTFO. Judge throws out Dem win by 1 vote in Va., rules that race was a pure tie. Re-vote expected. No fucking around; we have to go out and vote in this one.Tuesday’s seven-hour interrogation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas next week on DOJ and FBI personnel.Rosie O'Donnell just attempted to bribe two senators. Could face up to 15 years in prison!🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:🎶 On the eighth day of Christmas The Donald gave to me, 8 anchors lyin', 7 years remainin', 6 dems a gropin', 5 pepe memes, 3 fat koi, 2 icecream scoops, and no pardon for Hillary🎶Tax Cut Pepe!TFW ShareBlue won't give out $1,000 bonuses and still have to work overtime during Christmas and New Years day/pol/: It’s been a few hours since Trump’s Tax bill passed Congress and companies are already announcing $1,000 bonuses and pay increases for all employees as a result. Any Leftists at these companies who opposed this bill should turn down all extra money as a matter of principle.Thursday, December 21st:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Approves Disaster Declaration for the Pueblo of AcomaPresident Donald J. Trump Approves Alaska Disaster DeclarationUnder President Donald J. Trump, Americans Are Getting Back To WorkExecutive Order Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or CorruptionText of a Letter from the President to the Congress of the United StatesStatement by the Press Secretary on Saudi Arabia and YemenRemarks to the Troops by Vice President Pence in AfghanistanBackground Press Briefing on Year-End AccomplishmentsFour Nominations Sent to the Senate Today🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The Massive Tax Cuts, which the Fake News Media is desperate to write badly about so as to please their Democrat bosses, will soon be kicking in and will speak for themselves. Companies are already making big payments to workers. Dems want to raise taxes, hate these big Cuts!Was @foxandfriends just named the most influential show in news? You deserve it - three great people! The many Fake News Hate Shows should study your formula for success!Home Sales hit BEST numbers in 10 years! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAINHouse Democrats want a SHUTDOWN for the holidays in order to distract from the very popular, just passed, Tax Cuts. House Republicans, don’t let this happen. Pass the C.R. TODAY and keep our Government OPEN!THANK YOU to everyone who joined me at the @WhiteHouse yesterday. Together, we are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! https://instagram.com/p/Bc-U59UAVws/SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Oh, Rosie. Offering $2 million each to Susan Collins and Jeff Flake to change their votes on tax reform could result in criminal charges.Susan Rice - Could this be the high ranking Obama official Rand Paul was hinting at for investigation?“The US will move it’s embassy to Jerusalem, and no vote here at the UN will change that” Give it up to this firey MAGA woman for putting these people in their placePresident Trump Delivers a Statement Upon Departure: Heading to Walter Reed to spread some Christmas cheer to those who deserve it most! I LOVE THIS POTUS!🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:The US at the UN todayHappy Tax Cuts Day!A genius move by the UNKiss 2018 goodbye shitlibs. This man has saved America"If that f'ng bastard wins,we all hang from nooses." It's starting. . .Friday, December 22nd:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Signs H.R. 1370 and H.R. 1 into LawRemarks by President Trump at Signing of H.R. 1, Tax Cuts and Jobs Bill Act, and H.R. 1370Executive Order on Adjustments of Certain Rates of PayPresident Donald J. Trump: Year One of Making America Great AgainPresidential Proclamation to Take Certain Actions under the African Growth and Opportunity Act and for Other PurposesText of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the SenateText of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Our big and very popular Tax Cut and Reform Bill has taken on an unexpected new source of “love” - that is big companies and corporations showering their workers with bonuses. This is a phenomenon that nobody even thought of, and now it is the rage. Merry Christmas!So True!At some point, and for the good of the country, I predict we will start working with the Democrats in a Bipartisan fashion. Infrastructure would be a perfect place to start. After having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is time to start rebuilding our country!“The President has accomplished some absolutely historic things during this past year.” Thank you Charlie Kirk of Turning Points USA. Sadly, the Fake Mainstream Media will NEVER talk about our accomplishments in their end of year reviews. We are compiling a long & beautiful list.With all my Administration has done on Legislative Approvals (broke Harry Truman’s Record), Regulation Cutting, Judicial Appointments, Building Military, VA, TAX CUTS & REFORM, Record Economy/Stock Market and so much more, I am sure great credit will be given by mainstream news?Will be signing the biggest ever Tax Cut and Reform Bill in 30 minutes in Oval Office. Will also be signing a much needed 4 billion dollar missile defense bill.95% of Americans will pay less or, at worst, the same amount of taxes (mostly far less). The Dems only want to raise your taxes!Congressman Ron DeSantis is a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida. He loves our Country and is a true FIGHTER!The United Nations Security Council just voted 15-0 in favor of additional Sanctions on North Korea. The World wants Peace, not Death!Today, it was my great honor to sign the largest TAX CUTS and reform in the history of our country. Full remarks: http://45.wh.gov/TaxCutsRemember, the most hated part of ObamaCare is the Individual Mandate, which is being terminated under our just signed Tax Cut Bill.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Tucker Carlson Reveals Shocking New Gov't Statistic Democrats Don't Want You to HearToday I owned an entire sub...got gilded and upvoted to 1300 karma on a troll post. In the spirit of Christmas..this is my gift to my MAGA family."She Had Dreams Too" Kate Steinle Posters TRIGGERS Leftist Rage on Campus of UCSD🔴 ALERT: President Trump Signs Tax Cut Bill into LawPresident Trump presents the Purple Heart to one of our wounded heroes at Walter Reed Hospital.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:W e r e a l l g o n n a d i eTHAT'S MY VICE PRESIDENT!James Woods: Nikki Haley has my vote for President in 2024WTF I HATE SUCCESSFUL, PATRIOTIC, AND INDEPENDENT BLACK MAN NOW?!Sarah Huckabee Sanders: "No Intentions of Firing Bob Mueller... WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING THIS HOAX WRAP UP VERY SOON!" ahahhhahaaha give 'em hell, Sarah!Saturday, December 23rd:SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:So Obama allowed Hezbollah to traffic narcotics in the USA to secure the Iran deal. But then there was also that time he gave $221 MILLION to Hamas hours before leaving office just because he could.SESSIONS ORDERS DOJ REVIEW OF OBAMA AND HEZBOLLAH FUCKERY!!Cenk Uygur, ‘Young Turks’ founder, apologizes for ‘insensitive and ignorant’ posts about women — Step down Cenk! Resign! Peachmints!Here I thought CNN couldn't set the bar any lower, they go and prove me wrong by publishing this article.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:HAHAHA Tucker just made Fauxcahontas' fake Native American crab meat omelet recipe on the air. God bless him.UN's priorities are interestingJournalism these daysMy Favorite Picture of President Trumpaaand of course, what's a Christmas party without the proper Christmas tunes!?All I Want For Christmas Is YouSanta BabyThe Most Wonderful Time Of The YearMerry Christmas, Happy HolidaysI Saw Mommy Kissing Santa ClauseBaby It's Cold OutsideSimply Having A Wonderful Christmas TimeMERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!! via /r/The_Donald

[emedhelp]

Dems Vote To Enhance Med Care for Illegals Now, Vote Down Vets Waiting 10 Years for Same Service

House Democrats voted Thursday to fast-track an electronic medical records system that would serve illegal immigrants, something America’s veterans have been seeking for years.

The House passed the bill on a largely party line vote of 230-184, American Military News reported.

Only two Republican congressmen supported the bill — Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Fred Upton of Michigan.

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The proposal has yet to be considered by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Democratic proposal would require the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to create an Electronic Health Records system.

Part of that system’s job will be to provide information to Congress on the health of migrants who enter the country illegally, according to The Hill.

The bill gives the DHS 90 days after the bill receives final approval to get the job done.

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In contrast, the Veterans Administration has been working for years to implement an EHR system for veterans.

Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois said it is important for Congress to ensure that workers at the border are doing their jobs.

Do House Democrats care about military veterans?

Yes No

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0% (0 Votes)

0% (0 Votes)

“As DHS works to improve its medical screening of children and migrants at the border to ensure there is a minimum standard of care, the need for proper record keeping on those screenings will only increase,” she said.

Underwood said that the bill was based on her experiences touring America’s southern Border.

“When I was at the border I saw busy, overworked Border Patrol officials having to keep health records on paper. I also saw how these records don’t follow migrants between facilities and transfers of custody,” she said.

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But critics wondered how adding more responsibilities to overworked Border Patrol officials would fix anything

“I oppose this bill because it is poorly conceived, erroneously drafted and extremely risky,” Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana said.

“This bill would require the Border Patrol to divert resources from its core missions and create a new medical screening for those who illegally cross and enter the country between ports of entry.”

Republican Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina said in a statement that the Democratic bill was wrong on multiple levels.

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“Earlier this week, I said impeachment was the House Democrats only agenda. I was mistaken. They just passed legislation that will give illegal immigrants better health care records than our veterans and servicemembers. More and more they are making their priorities clear and it’s absolutely shameful,” he said.

Walker noted that Democrats want illegal immigrants to have electronic health records faster than they are available for veterans.

“The Veterans Administration (VA) will not have similar electronic health records systems in place for nine years and the Department of Defense (DOD) will not have those systems for another five years,” he said.

Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett said in a Twitter video that Republicans added an amendment to the Democratic bill to ensure veterans receive the same treatment as illegal immigrants under the bill.

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Democrats voted down that amendment, Burchett said.

Amendment to give VETERANS same healthcare as ILLEGALS fails. Are you kidding me? We are so out of wack. pic.twitter.com/eYgqkklrMW

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) September 26, 2019

While a modern EHR system is set to be implemented in some VA hospitals as soon as 2020, the full modernization effort, which officially began last May, was set to be rolled out over a decade, the Military Times reported.

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But it gets worse, Walker said.

“Additionally, the new requirements are not funded, so DHS would be forced to take funds from other agency efforts including border security, combatting terrorism, stopping drug and human trafficking, and natural disaster response,” he said.

Republican Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee agreed.

“If we cannot deliver a modern medical record for the men and women who put their lives on the line for us sooner than that, it is impossible to think that we could or should deliver one …  for those who knowingly enter our country illegally,” Roe said in a statement.

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“We should not treat anyone, particularly someone who breaks our laws, better than we treat our heroes. DHS staff along the border are doing the best they can to keep up with screening illegal border crossers and this bill will make it harder for them to do their job without actually helping anyone,” he said.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

[statetalks]

How Many Senate Seats Republicans Picked Up

How Many Senate Seats Are Up For Grabs In 2022

In the Senate, there will be 34 out of 100 seats available. Special elections may be held to fill the vacant seats in the senate. Those senators elected in 2022 will begin their six-year term on January 3, 2023.

In the Senate, the Democrats have 14 seats up for election in 2022. The Republicans will have 20 seats up for grabs in the election. The Republican party will be defending 2 Senate seats in the states that President Joe Biden won.

Those seats are in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Democrats are not defending any senate seats that former President Donald Trump won in 2020.

Thirty-two of the thirty-four seats up in 2022 were voted on in 2016. The Democrats gained three seats in the 2020 election. The Democrats have total control of the House and the Senate.

Focus On Competitive Races

Democrats targeted Republican-held Senate seats in and . Seats in , and were also competitive for the Democrats. Republicans targeted Democratic-held seats in , , , North Dakota and West Virginia, all of which had voted Republican in both the 2012 presidential election and the 2016 presidential election. Seats in , , , and , all of which voted for Trump in 2016, were also targeted by Republicans. The Democratic-held seat in New Jersey was also considered unexpectedly competitive due to corruption allegations surrounding the Democratic incumbent.

What Advantages Do Senate Democrats Have In This Bare Majority

Perhaps the most significant advantage for Democrats is the ability to confirm Bidens Cabinet and Supreme Court nominations with a simple majority, or 51 votes. Each of these processes once required a 60 percent majority vote until senators moved in 2013 to lower the threshold to 51 votes to advance confirmations for most executive-level and federal judicial nominations. In 2017 senators established the same lower threshold to approve Supreme Court nominations.

Four Cabinet or Cabinet-level members have been confirmed by large margins for Bidens administration so far, including Lloyd Austin as the first Black secretary of defense and Janet Yellen as the first woman to serve as treasury secretary. Austin and Yellen were confirmed by 93-2 and 84-15 votes, respectively. Nineteen of Bidens nominees are still awaiting confirmation votes.

As the majority party, Democrats are expected to control the agenda for Senate operations, including policy and oversight committees.

READ MORE: How does the filibuster work?

Such committees include the Senate Judiciary, charged with confirmation hearings for federal judges and Supreme Court justices, as well as oversight of the Justice Department. The incoming Senate Judiciary chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has already expressed plans to probe former President Donald Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Opinion:the House Looks Like A Gop Lock In 2022 But The Senate Will Be Much Harder

Redistricting will take place in almost every congressional district in the next 18 months. The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in midterms following their inauguration President Barack Obamas Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trumps Republicans lost 40 in 2018 but the redistricting process throws a wrench into the gears of prediction models.

President George W. Bush saw his party add nine seats in the House in 2002. Many think this was a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America nearly 14 months earlier, but the GOP, through Republican-led state legislatures, controlled most of the redistricting in the two years before the vote, and thus gerrymandering provided a political benefit. Republicans will also have a firm grip on redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The Brennan Center has that the GOP will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats, though the final numbers could fluctuate once the pandemic-delayed census is completed. Gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity. In 2022, Republicans just have much better prospects. Democrats will draw districts in Illinois and Massachusetts to protect Democrats, while in Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas, the GOP will bring the redistricting hammer down on Democrats.

Grist Is The Only Nonprofit Newsroom Focused On Exploring Solutions At The Intersection Of Climate And Justice

Our team of journalists remains dedicated to telling stories of climate, justice, and solutions. We aim to inspire more people to talk about climate change and to believe that meaningful change is not only possible but happening right now.Our in-depth approach to solutions-based journalism takes time and proactive planning, which is why Grist depends on reader support.

Right now, we set a goal to raise $20,000 by this Sunday, August 15 to help support our wildfire coverage. As of today, were currently at 95% of our goal.Consider becoming a Grist member today by making a monthly contribution to ensure this important work continues and thrives.

Numerous Freshman Democrats Lost Reelection

The vulnerable first-term Democrats who Decision Desk HQ projects to lose reelection are Reps. TJ Cox, Gil Cisneros, and Harley Rouda of California, Reps. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala of Florida, Rep. Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, Rep. Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico, Rep. Max Rose of New York, Rep. Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, and Rep. Ben McAdams of Utah.

Rep. Collin Peterson, a long-serving Democratic representative in a Minnesota district that Trump won by 30 points, also lost reelection.

Some House Democrats who flipped Republican suburban and exurban seats in 2018 did win reelection, however, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Rep. Katie Porter of California, Reps. Elaine Luria, Abigail Spanberger, and Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.

Senate Seats Most Likely To Flip In 2022

Max Greenwood

Democratic control of Congress will be on the line next year as Republicans look to claw their way back into power after a disappointing 2020 election that cost them the White House and their Senate majority.

But despite the conventional wisdom that the party of a new president tends to lose ground in the midterms, Senate Democrats are staring down several offensive opportunities in 2022 as they look to expand their ultra-narrow majority in the upper chamber.

Still, the GOP has pickup opportunities of its own, especially in states that Democrats only managed to win recently.

Here are the nine Senate seats most likely to flip in 2022:

Pennsylvania

Joe BidenTom Cotton calls on Biden to ‘destroy every Taliban fighter’ near Kabul Pelosi ‘deeply concerned’ for women amid Taliban gains in Afghanistans narrow win here in 2020 have given Democrats what they see as one of their best opportunities to flip a Senate seat that has been held by Republicans for 50 of the past 52 years.

The Democratic primary field is also crowded, attracting candidates like Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a surrogate for Biden during the 2020 campaign. Others in the race include Val Arkoosh, the chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners.

More candidates could soon follow, including Rep. Conor Lamb , who is said to be considering a Senate bid.

Ohio

Georgia

Arizona

Wisconsin

New Hampshire

Nevada

Missouri

Cook Political Report: Senate Gop Spending Almost Entirely Defensive

The stakes are enormous for the legislative agenda of the next president a re-elected Donald Trump or apparent Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who leads in national polls and most swing states as well as the future of the courts. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leader of the liberal wing, turns 88 next year, and the next Senate might get to confirm her successor.

Trumps struggles in historically Republican states, like and , are creating collateral damage for his partys Senate candidates. Public skepticism of Trumps handling of the pandemic, and a Bidens expanding lead since the nationwide to George Floyds death, has put many GOP Senate candidates in a difficult position. Theyre forced to navigate a polarizing president whose ardent supporters they cannot afford to alienate and whose skeptics theyll likely need to attract to win.

Democrats currently have 47 seats four short of an outright majority and three shy of a controlling number should Biden win as his vice president could cast any tie-breaking votes. Theyre more likely than not to lose one seat in Alabama, held by Sen. Doug Jones, but have lots of pickup opportunities. GOP-held seats in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and North Carolina are rated toss up by the Cook Political Report.

Dems Keep House Gop Holds Key Senate Seats Nbc News Projects

Sahil Kapur

WASHINGTON Democrats will maintain of the House of Representatives, NBC News projects, but their path to taking control of the Senate has narrowed significantly as numerous Republican incumbents fended off strong opposition.

Democrats failed to pick up some of the Senate seats they were banking on to capture a majority. Their hopes for a big night were dashed up and down the ballot, as President Donald Trump outperformed his polls against Joe Biden in a race still to be decided.

In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins was by NBC News as the apparent winner.

Other GOP senators who were Democratic targets hung on: Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, Montana Sen. Steve Daines and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham were all re-elected, NBC News projected.

Adding some uncertainty, the Georgia special election is headed to a runoff on Jan. 5 between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, NBC News projects.

Democrats will pick up a Senate seat in Colorado as John Hickenlooper is projected by NBC News to unseat Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, marking the party’s first gain.

Offsetting that, Republicans will pick up a seat in Alabama, where Republican Tommy Tuberville is projected to defeat Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, NBC News projects.

In Arizona, the Democratic challenger Mark Kelly leads but NBC News rates it “too early to call.”

In North Carolina, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis leads Democrat Cal Cunningham narrowly but the race is rated “too close to call.”

Important Dates And Deadlines

The table below lists filing deadlines and primary dates in each state for Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates for congressional and state-level office.

Primary dates and filing deadlines, 2020 State Filing deadline for primary candidates Primary date 04/21/2020 & 05/08/2020 08/04/2020 04/24/2020 & 6/12/2020 05/05/2020 & 06/02/2020 09/01/2020 06/24/2020 07/10/2020 N/A

Potentially Competitive Us Senate Races In 2022

Held by Republicans

Maggie Hassan Biden +7.4

The Democrats could also have opportunities in Ohio, where Sen. Rob Portman is retiring, and in Florida, home of Sen. Marco Rubio , but both of these once-preeminent swing states have drifted toward the GOP in recent elections and could be tough to pick off in 2022.

The GOPs top two pickup opportunities are also readily apparent: Arizona and Georgia. Both were among the most narrowly decided states that Biden won, and both have a history of favoring Republicans. Both are home to Democratic incumbents who won their seats in 2020 special elections: Sens. Mark Kelly and Raphael G. Warnock . The GOPs path back to a majority begins with reclaiming these two states.

Beyond that, though, obvious GOP opportunities are harder to come by. New Hampshire could be competitive if popular Gov. Chris Sununu challenges Sen. Maggie Hassan , but it has trended in the Democrats favor in recent years, going for Biden by seven points last year. Ditto Nevada, where first-term Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is up for reelection, but the GOP bench is somewhat limited as the state has also drifted blue in recent years.

Democrats control of the House is arguably more imperiled than their hold on the Senate. Thats a function of the Senate seats that are up for reelection as well as the lay of the land in the House.

About this story

Effect Of Republican Retirements

Indeed, 2020 was actually a Democratic-leaning year, with Biden winning the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. So theres a good chance that states will be at least a bit redder in 2022 than they were in 2020.

That could make these retirements less of a blow to Republicans than they first appear. Whats more, by announcing their retirements so early, Burr, Toomey and Portman are giving the GOP as much time as possible to recruit potential candidates, shape the field of candidates in a strategic way in the invisible primary and raise more money for the open-seat campaign. And in Ohio specifically, Republicans still look like heavy favorites. Even in the Democratic-leaning environment of 2020, Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points, implying that its true partisan lean is probably even more Republican-leaning. Ohio is simply not the quintessential swing state it once was; dating back to the 2014 election cycle, Democrats have won just one out of 14 statewide contests in Ohio and that was a popular incumbent running in a blue-wave election year .

Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight

Trump Makes History By Adding Seats To Gop Senate Majority In His First Midterm Election

Trump campaigned in Florida this past weekend.Republican Ron DeSantis won the governorship and Rick Scott won his senate race!

Thanks to President TrumpRepublicans picked up 4 new Senate seats on Tuesday with wins in Florida, Missouri, Indiana and North Dakata.Arizona, Montana and Nevada were still being decided.By the end of the night President Trump will gain at least one senate seat and as many as five new GOP senators.

This is historic.And President Trump was eager to tell the nation of his success tonight.

The President quoted Ben Stein tonight: Theres only been 5 times in the last 105 years that an incumbent President has won seats in the Senate in the off year election. Mr. Trump has magic about him. This guy has magic coming out of his ears. He is an astonishing vote getter & campaigner. The Republicans are unbelievably lucky to have him and Im just awed at how well theyve done. Its all the Trump magic Trump is the magic man. Incredible, hes got the entire media against him, attacking him every day, and he pulls out these enormous wins.Ben Stein, The Capitalist Code

Theres only been 5 times in the last 105 years that an incumbent President has won seats in the Senate in the off year election. Mr. Trump has magic about him. This guy has magic coming out of his ears. He is an astonishing vote getter & campaigner. The Republicans are

TRENDING:Fauci Says if Majority of Americans Get Vaccinated, Covid Will be Under Control by Spring of 2022

Trump’s Former Physician Wins House Seat

Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician who served under both Presidents Trump and Obama, has won his race in Texas’ 13th Congressional District. Jackson rose to prominence in 2018 when he gave a glowing press conference about Mr. Trump’s health.

Mr. Trump nominated Jackson to be Veterans Affairs secretary last year, but Jackson withdrew amid allegations that he drank on the job and over-prescribed medications. In his House race, Jackson has closely aligned himself with Mr. Trump. He has downplayed the coronavirus pandemic and criticized mask-wearing requirements. He has also promoted baseless claims about Biden’s mental health.

Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw also won reelection. Crenshaw is a conservative firebrand and a rising GOP star in the House.

The House’s Balance Of Power Is Tipped Toward Democrats

The Democratshave a narrow six-member margin in the current House of Representatives, meaning if just a handful of seats flip, Republicans can regain control of the House.

Democrats’advantagewill grow to seven when Troy Carter is sworn into fill a seat in Louisiana’s delegation left vacantby Cedric Richmond, who left the House to join the Biden administration as the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Cori Bush Becomes Missouri’s First Black Congresswoman Cbs News Projects

Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat and , has become Missouri’s first Black congresswoman, according to CBS News projections. With 88% of votes reported, Bush is leading Republican Anthony Rogers 78.9% to 19% to represent the state’s first congressional district, which includes St. Louis and Ferguson.

Bush, 44, claimed victory on Tuesday, promising to bring change to the district. “As the first Black woman and also the first nurse and single mother to have the honor to represent Missouri in the United States Congress, let me say this: To the Black women, the Black girls, the nurses, the essential workers, the single mothers, this is our moment,” she told supporters in St. Louis.

Read more .

How Is Senate Majority Chosen

The Senate Republican and Democratic floor leaders are elected by the members of their party in the Senate at the beginning of each Congress. Depending on which party is in power, one serves as majority leader and the other as minority leader. The leaders serve as spokespersons for their partys positions on issues.

Cori Bush Becomes Missouris First Black Congresswoman Cbs News Projects

Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat and , has become Missouris first Black congresswoman, according to CBS News projections. With 88% of votes reported, Bush is leading Republican Anthony Rogers 78.9% to 19% to represent the states first congressional district, which includes St. Louis and Ferguson.

Bush, 44, claimed victory on Tuesday, promising to bring change to the district. As the first Black woman and also the first nurse and single mother to have the honor to represent Missouri in the United States Congress, let me say this: To the Black women, the Black girls, the nurses, the essential workers, the single mothers, this is our moment, she told supporters in St. Louis.

Read more .

Iowa: Joni Ernst Vs Bruce Braley

Republican Joni Ernst defeated Rep. Bruce Braley in the Iowa Senate race to fill the open seat vacated by the retirement of Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democratic stalwart in the state. Ernst, 44, will be the first female senator to ever represent Iowa, a state that catapulted Barack Obamas career just six years ago.

Ernst, an Iraq war veteran, shocked the political establishment when she won a crowded GOP primary in June. Ernst, a little known state senator, burst onto the national scene after releasing an attention grabbing ad called Squeal, which featured her talking about castrating hogs.

Braley stumbled throughout his campaign from making remarks that insulted some Iowa farmers to threatening a lawsuit against his neighbor over roaming chickens. Republican and Democratic surrogates with potential 2016 ambitions flooded Iowa in the final weeks of the campaign to help their candidates.

Democrats Flip The Senate In A Devastating Blow To Trump And Republicans

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The Democratic Party has won control of the US Senate, according to the projected results of two crucial runoff elections in Georgia.

The Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as of early Wednesday were projected to win their races against Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

The Senate will now consist of 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and two independents who caucus with the Democrats, resulting in a 50-50 split. But Democrats will effectively control the chamber because incoming Vice President Kamala Harris holds the tiebreaking vote.

The Senate map was stacked against the GOP in the 2020 election cycle. Of the 35 senators up for reelection, 12 were Democrats and 23 were Republicans. Of those, Republicans had to defend 10 seats in races considered competitive, while Democrats had to defend only two.

Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama was widely expected to lose his seat, meaning Democrats hoped to pick up four seats to get to a 50-50 tie and five seats to gain a majority.

Business Insider

States Where One Party Gained Seats In Both Chambers

See also: Election results, 2020: Number of state legislators by party

There were 19 states where either Democrats, Republicans, or both had a net gain of state legislative seats in both state legislative chambers. Democrats had a net gain in both legislative chambers of six states. Republicans had a net gain in both legislative chambers of 15 states. This analysis includes seats vacant at the time of the election as its own category. This means a party may be recorded as gaining a seat that was most recently held by a member of the same party if that seat was vacant at the time of the election.

The table below shows these states and the net gains made by each party in both state legislative chambers. Democratic gains are shown on the left. Republican gains are shown on the right.

States where one party gained seats in both chambers, 2020 Democratic

See also: Election results, 2020: State legislative chambers that changed party control

Eighty-six of 99 state legislative chambers across 44 states held general elections on November 3, 2020. Partisan control flipped in two chambersRepublicans gained majorities in the New Hampshire House of Representatives and the New Hampshire State Senate.

Heading into the 2020 elections, Republicans had majorities in 59 chambers and Democrats had majorities in 39 chambers. In the Alaska House, there was a power-sharing agreement between the parties as part of a coalition.

Key Races That Could Determine The Senate Majority

To take the majority, Democrats would have to net three seats, should Biden win the presidency, or four seats, if Mr. Trump wins reelection, because its the vice president who breaks ties in the Senate. The current balance of the Republican-controlled Senate is 53 to 47.

Here is a rundown of the key Senate races in this years election:

Will 2022 Be A Good Year For Republicans

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Welcome to FiveThirtyEights politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah : Were still more than a year away from the 2022 midterm elections, which means it will be a while before we should take those general election polls too seriously. But with a number of elections underway in 2021, not to mention a number of special elections, its worth kicking off the conversation around what we do and dont know about Republicans and Democrats odds headed into the midterms.

Lets start big picture. The longstanding conventional wisdom is that midterm elections generally go well for the party thats not in the White House. Case in point: Since 1946, the presidents party has lost, on average, 27 House seats.

What are our initial thoughts? Is the starting assumption that Republicans should have a good year in 2022?

alex : Yes, and heres why: 2022 will be the first federal election after the House map are redrawn. And because Democrats fell short of their 2020 expectations in state legislative races, Republicans have the opportunity to redraw congressional maps that are much more clearly in their favor. On top of that, Republicans are already campaigning on the cost and magnitude of President Bidens policy plans to inspire a backlash from voters.

geoffrey.skelley :Simply put, as that chart above shows, the expectation is that Democrats, as the party in the White House, will lose seats in the House.

nrakich : What they said!

Poll How Many Senates Seats To Be Picked Up By Republicans

Registered User You didn’t put in how many seats will be picked up by Democrats. Remember, we have it on good authority that with the economy continuing to improve that the Republicans will lose even more seats, and by 2012 the “ex-community organizer” will win by a landslide. By the way, where is he? I haven’t seen him on here for a long time.

Tu ne cede malis The paratrooper has little tolerance for a non favorable demographic environment. The 8 year hate was a hothouse for that particular orchid. The emergence of open resistance across society from people who have finally had enough and who have learned to simply ignore the former golden bullets of ‘racist’ or ‘hater’ which comprises the bulk of the the rounds in the ‘progressive’ ammunition belt has resulted in a very different political scene, here and everywhere else.

Forever TMWT Pilot #11 All of those people who are truly afraid to say anything because of the caustic liberal environment they live and work in will be heard loudest at the ballot box. I don’t think even the most ardent Conservatives have any idea of what is going to happen this time around.

mikefast

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-senate-seats-republicans-picked-up/

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Elizabeth Warren Seeks to Cut Private Equity Down to Size

Digital Elixir Elizabeth Warren Seeks to Cut Private Equity Down to Size

Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which is co-sponsored by Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, seeks to fundamentally alter the way private equity firms operate. While the likely impetus for Warren’s bill was the spate of private-equity-induced retail bankruptcies, with Toys ‘R’ Us particularly prominent, the bill addresses all the areas targeted by critics of private equity: how it hurts workers and investors and short-changes the tax man, thus burdening taxpayers generally.

Not only would Warren’s legislation prohibit some of the most destructive private equity activities, but it would end their ability to act as traditional asset managers, taking fees and incurring close to no risk if their investments go belly up. The bill takes the explicit and radical view that:

Private funds should have a stake in the outcome of their investments, enjoying returns if those investments are successful but ab-1sorbing losses if those investments fail.

Needless to say, this upends the traditional private equity model of “head’s I win, tails you lose.”

Warren’s bill owes a considerable debt to the work of Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, who have been investigating the private equity industry for many years. Appelbaum also provided detailed testimony which provided additional backup for the provisions of Warren’s bill.

Critics will say that Warren’s bill has no chance of passing, which is currently true but misses the point. When Bernie Sanders talked about universal health care and other progressive policies in 2016, the media either ignored it or treated it as crazypants leftie. Those ideas are now part of the discourse, as elite Dems are wont to say. Warren is taking on the “value creator” myth of private equity and seeking to end or restrict their asset-stripping. Her bill isn’t just a step in the process of exposing the falsehoods that have kept the industry from being held to account. By (hopefully) putting private equity titans on the back foot, it should also help impede their efforts to allow mom and pop retail investors to partake of private equity’s egregious fee structure (which would be larded up even more to cut in retail fund management firms).

Because the bill itself has sections that amend the bankruptcy and Internal Revenue Code (meaning mere mortals can’t readily parse them), we’ll rely on Compliance Week’s summary of its main provisions as far as private equity is concerned:

…firms would share responsibility for the liabilities of companies under their control, including debt, legal judgments, and pension obligations to “better align the incentives of private equity firms and the companies they own.” The bill, if enacted, would end the tax subsidy for excessive leverage and closes the carried interest loophole.

The bill also seeks to ban dividends to investors for two years after a firm is acquired. Worker pay would be prioritized in the bankruptcy process, with guidelines intended to ensure affected employees are more likely to receive severance pay and pensions. It would also clarify gift cards are consumer deposits, ensuring their priority in bankruptcy proceedings. If enacted, private equity managers will be required to disclose fees, returns, and political expenditures.

This is a bold set of proposals that targets abuses that hurt workers and investors. Most readers may not appreciate the significance of the two-year restriction on dividends. One return-goosing strategy that often leaves companies crippled or bankrupt in its wake is the “dividend recap” in which the acquired company takes on yet more debt for the purpose of paying a special dividend to its investors. Another strategy that Appelbaum and Batt have discussed at length is the “op co/prop co.” Here the new owners take real estate owned by the company, sell it to a new entity with the former owner leasing it. The leases are typically set high so as to allow for the “prop co” to be sold at a richer price. This strategy is often a direct contributor to the death of businesses, since ones that own their real estate usually do so because they are in cyclical industries, and not having lease payments enables the to ride out bad times. The proceeds of sale of the real estate is usually dividended out to the investors, hence the dividend restriction would also pour cold water on this approach.

The bill also seeks to help workers by making the private equity firms liable for pension looting, and for giving unpaid wages and other employee consideration much higher status in bankruptcy.

I don’t mean to sound like a nay-sayer about ending the tax bennies of highly-leveraged deals, since it’s an appealing and sensible restriction. However, the Reagan Administration floated a proposal to limit the tax deductions for highly leveraged transactions. The Brady Commission report found that that was one of the two triggers for the 1987 crash. So it might need to be phased in.

Last but the opposite of least, one pro-worker measure would constitute a major change in shareholder rights and duties. the bill’s imposition of what is known as “joint and several liability” for portfolio company debts onto both the private equity fund that made the investment, as well as onto the fund’s individual investors themselves, breaks significant new ground.

Generally, a bedrock principle of corporate law in the U.S. is that stock owners are not liable for the debts of companies in which they own shares. Exceptions are rare and generally involve either fraud or some kind of legal determination that shareholders played more than a passive role and were actively involved in directing the company.

However, there is precedent in private equity for recognizing joint and several liability of an investment fund for the obligations of its portfolio companies. In a case that winded its way through the federal courts until last year (Sun Capital Partners III, LP v. New England Teamsters & Trucking Indus. Pension Fund), the federal court held that Sun Capital Partners III was liable under ERISA, the federal pension law, for the unfunded pension obligations of Scott Brass, a portfolio company of that fund. The court’s key finding was that Sun Capital played an active management role in Scott Brass and that its claim of passive investor status therefore should not be respected.

Needless to say, private equity firms have worked hard to minimize their exposure to the Sun Capital decision, for example by avoiding purchasing companies with defined benefit pension plans. The Warren bill, however, is so broad in the sweep of liability it imposes that PE firms would be unlikely to be able to structure around it. It is hard to imagine the investors in private equity funds accepting liability for what could be enormous sums of unfunded pension liabilities ultimately flowing onto them. Either they would have to set up shell companies to fund their PE investments that could absorb the potential liability, or they would have to give up on the asset class. Either way, it would mean big changes to the industry and potentially a major contraction of it.

I am surprised that Warren sought to make private equity funds responsible for the portfolio company debts by “joint and several liability”. You can get to economically pretty much the same end by requiring the general partner and potentially also key employees to guarantee the debt and by preventing them from assigning or buying insurance to protect the guarantor from being liable. There is ample precedent for that for entrepreneurs. Small business corporate credit cards and nearly all small business loans require a personal guarantee.

Warren’s bill also has strong pro-investor provisions. It takes on the biggest feature of the ongoing investor scamming, which is the failure of PE managers to disclose to the investors all of the fees they receive from portfolio companies. The solution proposed by the bill to this problem is exceedingly straightforward, basically proclaiming, “Oh yeah, now you will have to disclose that.” The bill also abolishes the ability of private equity managers to claim long term capital gains treatment on the 20 percent of fund profits that they receive, which is unrelated to the return on any capital that the private equity managers may happen to invest in a fund.

The policy arguments weigh heavily in favor of fee disclosure and repeal of the carried interest loophole, almost to the point of there not being much of another side to the arguments beyond the private equity industry’s strategy of misdirection and obfuscation.

Not surprisingly, the private equity industry and its hangers-on have reacted negatively to the proposed bill. Pitchbook News, one of the industry’s daily newsletters, headlined one of its daily email blasts in the last few days “Warren, AOC continue attacks on PE.” Ironically, the piece didn’t even deal directly with the Warren bill but mostly was about Warren and AOC’s efforts to get unpaid wages paid to workers at recently bankrupt retailer Shopko, which is an issue that the Warren bill also deals with. The private equity industry trade group, the American Investment Council, didn’t even try to refute the legislation, but instead put out a single sentence statement labeling it as “extreme” and claiming without evidence that it would harm Warren’s Massachusetts constituents.

The power of private equity is destined to decline as its returns continue to fall due to too much money chasing too few deals. But there’s a very real risk of the already-aggressive asset-stripping tactics of private equity firms intensifying as a way to offset deteriorating fundamentals. Thus Warren’s shot across the bow is that the more evidence they provide of the need for her legislation, the greater the odds that it will eventually pass.

Elizabeth Warren Seeks to Cut Private Equity Down to Size

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