Likely no subpoenas from Jan. 6 probe for sitting lawmakers

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

Anonymous sources cited in a report published by ABC Wednesday have cast new doubt that the Jan. 6 committee will pursue enforcement of subpoenas it has issued to a handful of sitting Republican lawmakers with alleged ties to the Capitol attack.

Reports of a similar nature have circulated for months as investigators have continued taking deposition and records from over 500 witnesses, including high- and low-level aides and Trump White House staff, election officials, and many others.

According to ABC, GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania have had “no follow-up discussions” about their cooperation since receiving their respective subpoenas.

The decision to drop the pursuit of the Republican legislators' records and testimony has “not been formalized” and ABC said their “sources caution that the committee's plans could change,” but “the emerging consensus is to proceed without taking this step.”

A representative for the Jan. 6 committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment to Daily Kos on Wednesday.

Forcing compliance with sitting lawmakers is tricky for the panel both politically and legally. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson has said since late last year that if those lawmakers targeted do not come forward, he was uncertain what tools the probe might have in its chest to force their testimony.

Committee members have been outwardly devoted to pursuing the investigation regardless of the political toll it exacts—Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership role in the GOP after joining the committee. But the fact remains that political retribution could be swift if Republicans take back the House and Senate in the coming elections.

Rep. Jim Jordan, for example, is among Trump’s most fierce lapdogs in Congress and has been spurned by the Jan. 6 committee already when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rejected his nomination to the panel by McCarthy.

Jordan has made it clear since Trump’s first impeachment when he defended the former president unflaggingly that he would relish a chance to drag Biden White House officials through public hearings should the GOP retake Congress.

Jordan is a member of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and is also a member of a Jan. 6 shadow committee. That committee has no subpoena power, but it has been running a parallel investigation to the official probe for months, largely relying on U.S. Capitol Police testimony to support its contention that security and intelligence failures were solely to blame for the rioting.

Investigators allege Jordan spoke to Trump on Jan. 6. They have based this on Trump White House call logs received from the National Archives in February.

Jordan has flip-flopped on his account of the day, regularly buckling under scrutiny in interviews. But with or without his testimony, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has already given the probe text messages illuminating how Jordan was campaigning for then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop the certification.

Constitutionally, Pence did not have that authority.

As for Perry, the committee asked him to voluntarily comply in December. Thompson alleges that Perry was the engine behind a scheme to install a Trump-friendly lawyer Jeffrey Clark at the Department of Justice as the nation’s attorney general.

Scott Perry Letter by Daily Kos

Scribd Content

Politico reported on March 2 that committee investigators “have repeatedly asked witnesses to describe contacts with Perry.”

The panel has already conducted over 550 interviews. Frustrating it may be for watchers of the probe, the lack of participation by certain lawmakers does not preclude the reams of evidence and other materials the committee has already amassed.

Before eventually turning his back on the committee following extensive cooperation, Meadows turned over heaps of text messages and other correspondence, only some of which has been made public.

Meadows has since been held in contempt of Congress. It is up to the Justice Department to decide whether it will bring a criminal indictment for his obstruction.

The Meadows messages alone painted a frantic picture of the White House and Washington both before and after the attack.

—@Liz_Cheney reads texts sent by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Donald Trump Jr. to Mark Meadows during the insurrection, imploring him to get Trump to do something. pic.twitter.com/mgzFeHiHsy
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 14, 2021

The committee itself does not have the ability to indict anyone. It has taken pains to reiterate this as Republicans like Meadows, Jordan, and several others already subpoenaed actively claim the probe acts beyond the scope of its authority.

They argue the select committee moves as a law enforcement arm, not a legislative arm.

But the committee has underlined, time and again, it does not need to indict.

It needs only to amass information and investigate all of the different avenues in which the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election was undertaken.

If it finds criminality or evidence of criminality, it will be up to the Department of Justice to act next.

Rand Paul Proposes Amendment To Eliminate Fauci’s Government Position Entirely

Posted on March 16, 2022 by John Hanson

Republican Senator Rand Paul has come up with a novel solution to what he considers the Fauci problem. He said he will propose an amendment that would eliminate the entire government position currently held by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The idea would be to separate his job into three different positions so that “one person wouldn’t have a monopoly of so much power that they could use against their enemies.”

Paul made his remarks during an interview on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Monday.

Will Dr. Fauci be FIRED? Senator @randpaul explains how he may get Congress to do so #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/0FWehPgWgy

— Jesse Watters Primetime (@jesseprimetime) March 14, 2022

Sen. Paul: ‘If you don’t agree with their political opinions, they’ll go after you’

In a statement from his office, Paul argued, “We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed “dictator-in-chief.” No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”

On Fox, Sen. Paul told Jesse Watters, “I will present an amendment that will get a vote on eliminating Anthony Fauci’s position. I think we should eliminate his position, divide it into three, and appoint three new directors that will be approvable by the Senate.”

“The problem with having only one person and having everything go before him for like 40 years is that he’s monopolized power and he’s created a culture that’s not conducive to scientific inquiry,” Paul continued. “You need people who question.”

“That’s what science is about,” the senator noted. “It’s about questioning and putting forth your hypothesis and then trying to prove it with experiments.”

Paul claimed Fauci has made his job too political.

“But he’s shown, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, have both shown that they’ll get into the mud,” Paul claimed. “If you don’t agree with their political opinions, they’ll go after you. That’s why, the last time I had an exchange with Dr. Fauci, we asked him about some emails between him and Dr. Collins. And in the emails, he says let’s do a dramatic takedown of three scientists who they disagreed with politically.”

No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans. https://t.co/I3g6pbm6nW

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 14, 2022

Paul on Fauci: ‘It’s long past time that we remove him from government’

“Well, when a person like Dr. Fauci controls $5 billion worth of money, it’s not good that we have a really petty tyrant who wants to take down the people he disagrees with, and that’s not conducive to scientific inquiries,” Paul said.

He added, “So, it’s long past time that we remove him from government. And I think really the power should be split up into three different positions, and then one person wouldn’t have a monopoly of so much power that they could use against their enemies.”

Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci have gone at it multiple over the course of the Covid pandemic and has been a skeptic about government mandates.

He has long called for Fauci to be fired.

You can read Paul’s statement about his proposal here.

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Morning Digest: MAGA House hopeful bails after Trump memory-holes endorsement and backs someone else

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Daily Kos Elections

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Check out our podcast, The Downballot!

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LEADING OFF

● MI-04: State Rep. Steve Carra on Tuesday ended his August Republican primary campaign against Reps. Bill Huizenga and Fred Upton days after he learned the hard way that Donald Trump's "Complete and Total Endorsement" isn’t actually complete and total when redistricting is involved. Carra on his way out joined Trump in supporting Huizenga's intra-party bid against Upton, who voted to impeach Trump and still hasn't confirmed if he'll even be running for a 14th term.

Carra last year had picked up Trump's backing when he was taking on Upton in the old 6th District, but that was before the new map ensured that Huizenga and Upton would be running for the same new 4th District if they each wanted to remain in the House. Carra himself eventually decided to run for the 4th even though it didn't include a shred of his legislative seat, and for more than a month he was able to take advantage of the GOP leader’s silence about where things stood post-redistricting and continue to run as the only Trump-backed candidate.

Huizenga himself acknowledged weeks ago that he wasn’t sure if Trump’s earlier endorsement of Carra in the 6th still applied, saying, “I'm aware that there are people within the organization that are looking at it and are trying to figure that one out.” Those calls seemed to have worked because on Friday, Trump announced that Huizenga was his man in southwestern Michigan. Carra, who is now seeking re-election, said Tuesday that he’d spoken to Trump’s people and learned that "[t]he key decision maker that led to this was the fact that I don't live in the district."

Upton, for his part, began a $213,000 ad campaign last month that seemed to confirm he'd be running again, but his camp insisted at the time that he still hadn't made a decision. We don't know if Upton was just being cute or really is still making up his mind, though prolonged public deliberations from him are nothing new. Last cycle the longtime congressman kept everyone guessing about his plans even after he handed out "Upton 2020!" buttons at a September 2019 party gathering; it was only the following February that he finally said he'd be running again.

We'll finally have our answer for 2022 before too long, though. Michigan's filing deadline is April 19, and since House candidates need to turn in at least 1,000 valid signatures to make the primary ballot, Upton would need to get moving before then if he's to go up against Huizenga. How long it would take for "Upton 2022!" buttons to roll off the printer, though, we can't say.

Redistricting

● KS Redistricting: Kansas' Republican-run state House has introduced a new map for its own districts, following the same action in the upper chamber the other day. Just two states have failed to unveil any sort of legislative maps at all: Mississippi and Montana.

Senate

● OH-Sen: Former state GOP chair Jane Timken's latest commercial for the May primary has her proclaiming that "border security is national security" and dubbing herself "the real Trump conservative." The spot ends with old footage of Trump, who is still making Timken and her many opponents grovel for his endorsement, calling her "unbelievable."

● OK-Sen-B: Former Rep. Kendra Horn, who represented Oklahoma's 5th District for one term, announced on Tuesday that she'll run in the November special election to replace departing GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe. Horn's entry gives Democrats an unusually credible candidate for a Senate race in Oklahoma, but it's still … Oklahoma. Democrats haven't prevailed in a race for statewide office since 2006, and they haven't won a Senate contest since David Boren's last re-election campaign in 1990 (which saw him romp in a remarkable 83-17 landslide).

Horn won the most astonishing upset of the 2018 midterms when she unseated Republican Rep. Steve Russell in a 51-49 squeaker for an Oklahoma City-based district that Donald Trump had carried by a wide 53-40 spread two years earlier. Russell had run a disastrous campaign—after his loss, he compared the people who'd voted him out to "a dog lapping up antifreeze"—but long-term suburban trends and outgoing Gov. Mary Fallin’s horrible numbers in the area were also working against him.

Unfortunately for Horn, though, those trends weren't enough to keep her in Congress: Even though Trump's margin shrank to 51-46, she lost her bid for a second term to Republican Stephanie Bice 52-48. And to win statewide, especially in a difficult midterm environment, would require an even more herculean feat than the one Horn managed four years ago, seeing as Trump carried Oklahoma 65-32 in 2020, making it his fourth-best state in the nation.

That makes Inhofe's seat a particularly attractive prize to Republicans, though one potential contender is reportedly staying out. Politico says that Rep. Kevin Hern, who had been considering a bid, won't run, though Hern himself has not yet confirmed the news.

Governors

● GA-Gov: While Stacey Abrams faces no competition in the May Democratic primary, the once and future nominee is launching its opening $1 million TV and digital ad buy. The first spot features Abrams saying, "When I didn't win the governor's race, not getting the job didn't exempt me from the work. And so I didn't quit." She continues by talking about how her organization last year "paid off the medical debt of 68,000 Georgians," and how she aided small businesses. "I was raised that when you don't get what you want, you don't give up," Abrams says, "You try again. You try because it's how things get better, it's how the world moves forward."

● IL-Gov: Candidate filing closed Monday for Illinois' June 28 primary, and the state has a list of contenders available here. Not everyone who filed may make the ballot, though, because it's very common for candidates in the Prairie State to challenge their opponents' petitions to try to get them disqualified. Indeed, Barack Obama himself won his state Senate seat in 1996 by getting all his Democratic primary foes—including incumbent Alice Palmer—thrown off the ballot for a lack of sufficient signatures.

Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is seeking a second term in this very blue state, but Republicans are hoping they'll still have an opening in the fall. A total of eight GOP contenders are running, and the best-funded will almost certainly be Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin. Irvin, who would be the state's first Black governor, has the support of billionaire Ken Griffin, and the state's wealthiest man has already given him $20 million. (Illinois has notoriously lax campaign finance regulations.) The mayor, though, has participated in several Democratic primaries in the past and has sometimes voiced moderate views, which could be a big liability in the primary.

State Sen. Darren Bailey, meanwhile, has received $1 million from a different conservative megadonor, Richard Uihlein, and he also has the backing of far-right Rep. Mary Miller. Another well-connected contender is venture capitalist Jesse Sullivan, who launched his bid over the summer with $11 million in donations mostly from four California tech titans. Businessman Gary Rabine and former state Sen. Paul Schimpf, who badly lost the 2014 general election for attorney general, are also in, but they haven't attracted much outside support yet.

● NH-Gov: State Sen. Tom Sherman announced a bid against Republican Gov. Chris Sununu this week, making him the first notable Democrat to join the race. After serving two terms in the state House, Sherman, a physician, challenged Republican state Sen. Dan Innis in 2016 but lost 52-46. Two years later, he tried again, this time prevailing 53-47; he went on to win re-election in 2020. Sununu is seeking to become just the second person to win a fourth two-year term as governor in state history, following Democrat John Lynch, who left office in 2013.

● OH-Gov: Former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley is spending $280,000 on his opening spot for the May Democratic primary. The candidate is shown inspecting an abandoned factory as he declares that "Ohio deserves a comeback. I know it won't be easy, but I've faced long odds before." Cranley continues, "When we started the Ohio Innocence Project, they said it was impossible. It has freed 34 innocent people. When I became mayor of Cincinnati, they said the city would never grow again. We defied the odds."

House

● FL-07: Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who previously hadn't ruled out a bid for Florida's open 7th Congressional District, announced on Tuesday that she'd seek re-election to the legislature.

● FL-15: Former Rep. Dennis Ross announced Tuesday that he'd try to return to the House after a four-year absence by seeking the Republican nomination for the newly drawn 15th District in the Tampa area. GOP state Rep. Jackie Toledo is also campaigning for what would be an open seat even though Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has pledged to veto the congressional map that she and her colleagues passed.

Ross was elected in the 2010 tea party wave to succeed Adam Putnam, a fellow Republican who left to successfully run for state agriculture commissioner (he later lost the 2018 primary to none other than DeSantis) in what was then numbered the 12th District. Ross, whose reliably red constituency was redubbed the 15th two years later, rose to become senior deputy majority whip, but he rarely attracted much attention otherwise; indeed, national observers sometimes referred to him as the other Dennis Ross when they referred to him at all.

The congressman unexpectedly announced in 2018 that he would not seek a fifth term, though characteristically, his declaration was vastly overshadowed by Speaker Paul Ryan's own retirement that same day. (The Florida Man said he learned of Ryan's parallel departure as he was telling his own staff about his decision and happened to look at a TV tuned to Fox.) Ross explained his decision by saying, "Eight years takes its toll on you. When you feel like a stranger in your hometown, it's time to say, 'There's got to be an exit strategy at some point.'"

However, Ross now very much is looking for a re-entry strategy, declaring, "Seeing what's happened in the last few years has just forced me to get off the sidelines and get back in the game, and that's exactly the way I feel. And I feel compelled to do that in, I think, a very statesmanlike fashion (that) I think the voters are craving for."

● GA-10: Marine veteran Mitchell Swan earned a mere 4% in the 2014 Republican primary for a previous version of this seat, but he seems to have decided that anti-trans bigotry will help him stand out this time. Swan is running a TV spot for the May primary where he declares, "I oppose transgenders in our ranks."

● IL-01: Rep. Bobby Rush is retiring after 15 terms, and a massive field of 20 fellow Democrats have filed to succeed him in a safely blue seat based in the South Side of Chicago and the city's southwestern suburbs. Rush himself is supporting Karin Norington-Reaves, who is a former CEO of the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership. Another well-connected contender is construction contracting firm owner Jonathan Jackson, who is the son of two-time presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and the brother of former 2nd District Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.

The race also includes two sitting elected officials, state Sen. Jacqueline Collins and Chicago Alderman Pat Dowell. Another notable name is former Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority official Charise Williams, who lost a 2018 primary for a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

Also in the mix is businessman Jonathan Swain, real estate executive Nykea Pippion McGriff, and activist Jahmal Cole, who was running a long-shot campaign against Rush before the incumbent retired; it's possible one of the other 12 candidates could also attract attention in the two-and-a-half weeks ahead of the primary.

● IL-03: Legislative Democrats created a new seat based in heavily Latino areas in southwestern Chicago and the western suburbs, and four Democrats are competing for this safely blue constituency. The two frontrunners appear to be Chicago Alderman Gilbert Villegas, a Marine veteran backed by VoteVets, and state Rep. Delia Ramirez, who has EMILY's List in her corner. Ramirez has earned the backing of several progressive groups while Villegas, who has emphasized public safety, is campaigning more as a moderate.

Villegas ended 2021 with a wide cash-on-hand lead, while Ramirez has since picked up the support of 4th District Rep. Chuy Garcia, who currently represents 43% of the new 3rd. The only poll we've seen was a recent Lake Research Partners survey for the pro-Ramirez Working Families Party that showed her leading Villegas 19-11; a mere 1% went to Iymen Chehade, a history professor at the center of an ethics probe involving Rep. Marie Newman (who is seeking re-election in the 6th District). A fourth candidate, Juan Aguirre, has attracted little attention.

● IL-06: Redistricting has led to an incumbent vs. incumbent Democratic primary between Marie Newman and Sean Casten in a seat in Chicago's western inner suburbs that would have favored Joe Biden 55-44.

Newman's existing 3rd District makes up 41% of this new seat while Casten's current 6th District forms just 23%. However, Newman also faces an ethics investigation into charges she sought to keep a potential primary opponent out of the race when she ran in 2020 by offering him a job as a top aide if she won. The only poll we've seen was a mid-February Newman internal from Victoria Research that showed a 37-37 deadlock.

Six Republicans are also campaigning here including two mayors of small communities: Keith Pekau of Orland Park and Gary Grasso of Burr Ridge, who has the support of state House Minority Leader Jim Durkin and DuPage County Board Chair Dan Cronin.

● IL-07: Longtime Rep. Danny Davis faces a rematch against anti-gun-violence activist Kina Collins, whom he beat 60-14 in the 2020 Democratic primary for this reliably blue seat. Two other Democrats have also filed for this district, which includes Chicago's West Side and downtown.

● IL-08: There's little indication that Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi has much to worry about in his primary, but he does face a notable intra-party opponent in the form of Junaid Ahmed, who runs a technology consulting firm. Ahmed, who is portraying himself as a progressive alternative to the incumbent, ended 2021 with $421,000 on hand, a credible sum that was still utterly dwarfed by Krishnamoorthi's $11.55 million war chest. No other Democrats filed for this seat in the Chicago western outer suburbs, which would have supported Biden 57-41.

● IL-13: Republican Rep. Rodney Davis decided to run in the 15th District after Democratic mapmakers transformed the 13th into a seat that now stretches from East St. Louis northeast through Springfield to the college towns of Champaign and Urbana and would have backed Biden 54-43.

Three Democrats are campaigning here, but former Biden administration official Nikki Budzinski quickly emerged as the clear frontrunner after raising a serious amount of money and consolidating support from Sen. Dick Durbin, much of the state's House delegation, and several unions. The field also includes financial planner David Palmer and progressive activist Ellis Taylor, but neither of them have picked up any major endorsements yet.

Four Republicans are campaigning here with the hope that the new 13th isn't as blue as it looks. The two main contenders seem to be former federal prosecutor Jesse Reising and activist Regan Deering, whose family ran the agribusiness giant Archer-Daniels-Midland for more than 40 years.

● IL-14: Democratic mapmakers sought to protect Rep. Lauren Underwood in this seat in Chicago's western exurbs by augmenting Biden's margin of victory from 50-48 to 55-43, but six Republicans are still betting she's vulnerable. Team Red's field includes Kendall County Board Chair Scott Gryder, former Kane County Board member Susan Starrett, and conservative radio host Michael Koolidge.

● IL-15: Republican Reps. Rodney Davis and Mary Miller are facing off in a safely red seat in rural central Illinois, and both have powerful allies.

Donald Trump and the anti-tax Club for Growth are pulling for Miller, a far-right extremist who declared last year during her first days in office, "Hitler was right on one thing. He said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'" Davis, who has to present himself as a moderate in order to win under the previous map, has the Illinois Farm Bureau on his side, and he also ended 2021 with a huge financial edge. Miller's current 15th District makes up 31% of this constituency, while Davis' existing 13th forms 28%.

● IL-17: Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos announced her retirement months before her party transformed this constituency in the state's northwest corner from a 50-48 Trump seat to one that would have favored Biden 53-45, and seven fellow Democrats are campaigning to succeed her.

Team Blue's field consists of Rockford Alderman Jonathan Logemann; Rockford Alderwoman Linda McNeely; Rock Island County Board member Angie Normoyle; former TV meteorologist Eric Sorensen; former state Rep. Litesa Wallace; and two others. A January survey from Public Policy Polling for 314 Action, which has since endorsed Sorensen, gave him a 13-11 edge over Wallace in a race where most respondents were undecided. Things are far clearer on the Republican side where 2020 nominee Esther Joy King, who lost to Bustos 52-48, faces just one unheralded opponent.

● MT-01, MT-02: Filing also closed Monday for Montana's June 7 primary, and the state has its list of candidates here. Big Sky Country has regained the second congressional district it lost after the 1990 Census, and all the action this year will almost certainly be in the new 1st District, a seat in the western part of the state that would have supported Trump 52-45.

The frontrunner among the five Republicans very much looks like Ryan Zinke, who resigned as the state's only House member in 2017 to serve as secretary of the interior. Trump endorsed Zinke's return to Congress last summer, a development that came about two and a half years after Trump reportedly pressured him to leave the cabinet in the face of 18 federal investigations.

Zinke since then has earned bad headlines over how much more time he's spent in Santa Barbara, California compared to his home state. Last month, federal investigators also released a report concluding that he violated federal ethics rules while in the cabinet by taking part in talks with developers about a project involving land owned by his foundation and then lying about his involvement in the negotiations. And while most of the probes into Zinke ended after investigators concluded he hadn't committed wrongdoing or because Interior Department staffers didn't cooperate, one matter looking into whether he lied about why he denied two tribes permission to operate a casino in Connecticut is still unresolved.

However, it remains to be seen if any of Zinke's four intra-party foes are strong enough to take advantage of his problems. The most notable of the group appears to be former state Sen. Al Olszewski, but he finished last in both the four-way primary for Senate in 2018 and the three-way nomination fight for governor two years later.

Meanwhile, three Democrats are campaigning here, all of whom also unsuccessfully sought office in 2020. Public health expert Cora Neumann left the Senate primary when then-Gov. Steve Bullock launched his bid, while attorney Monica Tranel, who rowed in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, lost a close general election for a seat on the Public Service Commission. The third contender is former state Rep. Tom Winter, who ran for the at-large U.S. House seat that year but lost the primary to 2018 nominee Kathleen Williams in a 89-11 landslide; Williams went on to lose to Republican Matt Rosendale.

Rosendale, for his part, is running in the new 2nd, a 62-35 Trump seat in the eastern portion of the state, and there's no indication that any of his three intra-party foes are ready to give him a serious fight.

● NC-13: Donald Trump has joined his one-time enemies at the Club for Growth in endorsing Bo Hines, a 26-year-old law student who previously played as a wide receiver at North Carolina State in 2014 before transferring to Yale, in the packed May primary for this competitive open seat in Raleigh's southern suburbs.

● OR-05: Moderate Rep. Kurt Schrader is spending a reported $200,000 on his first TV ad for the May Democratic primary, which features the seven-term incumbent talking about his veterinary career while surrounded by cute animals. "In Congress, I'm making a real difference for their owners too," he says, before he talks about working to lower insulin costs and drug prices.

● PA-17: Allegheny County Council member Sam DeMarco announced hours before candidate filing ended on Tuesday that he was abandoning his week-old campaign for the Republican nomination for this competitive open seat. DeMarco cited his duties as county party chair and argued that it "needs a full-time chairman who will devote himself 24/7 to making certain that the Republicans recapture the office of governor, secure a U.S. Senate seat and maintain control of the general assembly."

‘He shoots from the hip, and that’s part of his charm’

Posted on March 16, 2022 (Updated March 16, 2022) by By Andrew Desiderio

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will address Congress on Wednesday as a wartime Ukrainian president with formidable powers of persuasion over U.S. lawmakers, after perhaps the steepest Capitol learning curve any foreign leader has faced in a generation.

It’s a historic moment for a former comedian whose only political experience before 2019 was playing an accidental candidate on TV. And it promises to illustrate Zelenskyy’s striking success at using Congress to get what he wants while Russia attacks his country.

Zelenskyy has a unique combination of moral authority and uncensored authenticity that has helped rally the West around him. He has made particular inroads with Congress lately: From a Russian oil ban to a supercharged military aid package, Zelenskyy is rallying legislators behind his priorities even as he deliberately shuns traditional Washington-speak and diplomatic norms.

“He shoots from the hip, and that’s part of his charm,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who along with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has had more direct face time with Zelenskyy than any American official. “I think it has sometimes gotten him into some political hot water, but the upside of his style is ten-fold more advantageous than the occasional downsides.”

The results haven’t been perfect, though, and there are limits to Zelenskyy's strategy; most of his outstanding requests, like the establishment of a no-fly zone, have been ruled out by members of both parties. Some lawmakers have even mused about Zelenskyy’s personal style undermining his own goals. But that hasn’t stopped him from appealing to Americans’ emotions on the brutality of Russia’s war, even on demands he knows can never be met.

“When I first met him, I thought I was going to be meeting a comic. And instead I met a statesman,” said Portman, who has met several times with Zelenskyy face-to-face. “Some people underestimated his political abilities from the start. I have not. … He’s become one of those rare figures who can actually direct the course of history.”

Zelenskyy’s evolution from entertainer, to NATO hopeful seeking an audience with former President Donald Trump, to an anti-Russia icon shows that his anything-but-buttoned-up energy can pay off on Capitol Hill. He’s said to be eager to address lawmakers on Wednesday morning — an engagement that came about at Zelenskyy’s personal request, according to a congressional official.

First elected in 2019 on a vow to stamp out corruption and integrate Ukraine with Europe, the 44-year-old assumed office at a fraught moment. His nation’s military was advancing thanks to training and support from the U.S. and other major allies, but Russian-backed separatists in his east were trying to make Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dreams of taking Ukraine a reality.

Zelenskyy came into power with a strong mandate, having won a supermajority with no prior political experience. Just a few months into his tenure, he was dragged into U.S. politics after Trump pressed him during a now-infamous phone call to investigate both then-candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

Trump held back crucial military aid from Zelenskyy at the same time, setting his first impeachment in motion as Democrats accused him of seeking to extort a foreign leader. After the Senate acquitted Trump, Murphy led a bipartisan trip to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy and reassert U.S. support for a besieged European ally.

Now that Russia is attacking, Murphy said this week, “it would be negligent of him to not ask for everything. His people are dying. ... We’ve got to come to our own conclusions about what we’re willing to do and what we can’t do.”

Other lawmakers who have spent time with Zelenskyy as he has weathered American political storms described him as unscripted and candid — sometimes to his own detriment with officials more used to careful diplomatic wordsmithing. Those members of Congress who know Zelenskyy best said his efforts to shame Western nations into sending additional assistance to his country have not surprised them, given his track record.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said the Ukrainian president has always been crystal clear about the kind of support he needs. Zelenskyy’s leadership and resolve in the face of Russia’s aggression “is fundamental to keeping the Ukrainian military and people’s spirit strong in the face of such devastation,” Shaheen added.

The standard practice for foreign leaders dealing with U.S. officials and lawmakers requires caution and choreography that Zelenskyy and his top aide, Andriy Yermak, have often eschewed in intimate settings.

Their posture has sometimes forced Biden administration officials to question whether Zelenskyy is serious about his urgent pleas for additional military assistance, including MiG fighter jets from Poland that the U.S. is thus far unwilling to transfer out of concerns about escalation with Russia.

As a result, Biden administration officials often consult with those lawmakers who have met frequently with Zelenskyy to get their read on his intentions.

But other lawmakers have scratched their heads at the Ukrainian president's handling of Washington in recent weeks, among them congressional Democrats who became especially frustrated with Zelenskyy’s full-throated endorsement of Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) legislation to sanction the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The Russia-to-Germany project was taken offline after Russia’s invasion, but Zelenskyy wanted the pipeline shut down sooner. And he endorsed the GOP-led legislation even though the Biden administration wasn’t yet prepared to impose those sanctions.

Some Democrats saw Zelenskyy’s support of the Cruz bill as inadvertently undermining the White House’s efforts at trans-Atlantic unity against Russia’s aggression.

Republicans, meanwhile, view Zelenskyy as the impetus for the Biden administration’s reversals on several sanctions against Russia that had initially met White House resistance. Through his private Zoom meetings with lawmakers and his dramatic public pleas, Zelenskyy got Capitol Hill on board for additional military assistance and a ban on Russian oil imports within days — unheard-of speed for Congress.

“He’s clearly grown dramatically into his presidency. He’s truly proven himself to be a world leader of great courage and conviction,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who has met with Zelenskyy twice, including an hourlong sit-down in his office in Kyiv last September.

“It does seem to me that the administration has to be dragged along and pushed to do the right thing,” Barrasso added. “Zelenskyy’s courageous leadership is making a significant difference.”

In his public remarks, Zelenskyy has sought to strike a delicate balance between expressing gratitude for the assistance Western nations have already provided and pleading for even more. That has often put him at risk of seeming ungrateful to the U.S. and other NATO allies, which have provided his nation with essential military, humanitarian and economic assistance.

That posture was on full display on Tuesday when he addressed the Canadian Parliament. He doubled down on his push for a no-fly zone, detailing the devastation that Russian forces have caused in his country.

“How many bombs have to fall on our cities before you make this happen?” Zelenskyy said. “You all need to do more to stop Russia, to protect Ukraine, and by doing that, to protect Europe from Russian threats.”

While Zelenskyy has united both parties, that hasn’t stopped fringe voices from seeking a political upper hand. Freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) recently called Zelenskyy a “thug” and a liar who’s seeking to drag the U.S. into his war, a message other Republicans have resoundingly rejected.

“People are inspired by him and by the heroism,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a recent interview. “We need to help them quickly and efficiently.”

Zelenskyy’s pivot from Trump impeachment character to heroic figure provides rare lawmaker unity

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Dylan Wells and Ledyard King, USA TODAY

World leaders often address Congress. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be different: a foreign head of state under siege by Russia.

The Qronicles: Biolabs, and JFK conspiracy is back. This time he’s moonlighting as Donald Trump!

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Walter Einenkel

The Qronicles is a series that will collect some of the news, videos, and general mis/disinformation roiling around the conspiracy world of QAnon. You can cringe, you can laugh, but these folks are organizing and showing up at the polls!

WelQom back! (YAYYYYY!!!!!) It’s time for some Qronicles! The QAnon world is always busy because conspiracy theories need water, webs, roots, and a boatload of manure to grow. You need to trim those offshoots that didn’t work out and move the goalposts all the time. If you didn’t constantly tend to it, your massively outrageous conspiracy theory would die on the vine. Just ask QAnon toe-dipper Robert “RJ” Regan of Michigan, who blamed the media after he made a strangely triple-offensive remark concerning his daughters, the Big Lie, and sexual assault. There are benefits to keeping QAnon folks frothy with mystery and the dopamine-inducing empty epiphany.

Related: JFK’s return didn’t materialize. Now QAnoners drink from a communal bleach punch bowl—literally

Related: JFQ Jr. announces Senate run

Related: QAnon Chronicles: Somehow, the JFK Jr. conspiracy crew got even weirder

First up is Ukraine. We discussed in the last Qronicles that QAnon’s conspiracy theories of Donald Trump and his secret war against all that is evil in the world had folded the invasion of Ukraine by Russia into the grand design. The narrative is that there are secret biolabs—wait, stop. These biolabs aren’t secret, they are well known and have published information that pretty much anyone can see. Shut up! There are biolabs, and they are secretly making bioweapons! Ukraine is making bioweapons? No, dummy! Dr. Anthony Fauci is making bioweapons with the help of Hillary Clinton and George Soros! It’s New World Order shit, daddy-o! They are going to begin controlling the new world from Ukraine!

That’s why Vladimir Putin is invading Ukraine? Exactly. Remember how all of those Ukrainians and Americans in Ukraine testified and released evidence that Donald Trump attempted to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden? Totally! He was impeached for that. But isn’t this the New World Order that can control the government, make it seem like Joe Biden is the actual president while the real president is playing golf in Florida, and hold the occasional rally? Didn’t they let Hunter Biden’s laptop get into the hands of Fox News and those folks?

Yup. They’re depraved!

It’s weird how QAnon folks seem to be arrested for things like child abuse and child pornography, and the conservative party they’re tied to seems to be filled with those kinds of cretins. Forget about all of that logic! I said biolabs!

Russia’s early struggles to push disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine have picked up momentum in recent days, thanks to a variety of debunked conspiracy theories about biological research labs in Ukraine. Much of the false information is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.

This hogwash was recently parroted by former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard on Sunday, March 13. It has also received the now-common (and always profitable) libertarian wing of journalism’s seal of “We’re just asking questions.” Represented by folks like Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey, these are usually once somewhat respected anti-establishment journos who have found a lucrative financial niche in maintaining their anti-establishment bonafides while pretending not to notice that the right-wing-o-sphere makes up an extraordinarily large part of the media landscape. This allows them the chance to make a lot of money speaking to (mostly) men who, while they’re not against gay marriage and may even know some Black folks they call friends, do feel like capitalism has let them down. But they aren’t willing—or are too narcissistic—to put the blame on the systemic inequalities in our society and the need to make changes to deal with them. This makes them feel like they’re getting left further behind, and they’ve cornered themselves in a shame circle shaped like a penis.

Here’s an offshoot of this Ukraine conspiracy theory, care of VICE: Some QAnonites believe that Dear Leader Trump has long been telegraphing the secret mission now being undertaken by both himself and Putin! Specifically, his strange pronunciation of “China.” Even more specifically, some QAnoners believe the code-cracking is that Shpyl'chyna is the “Chy-na” Trump has been saying all these years—while also talking about the global superpower China at the same time. (12-dimensional chess and all that.)

The Ukrainian “chy-na” is in fact just part of the name of what appears to be a village on the outskirts of Lviv. In Ukrainian, it is called “Шпильчина,” but on Google Maps, it’s referred to as “Shpyl’chyna.” Unfortunately, this is a bad transliteration: The ‘y’ is meant to represent a very soft ‘i’ sound that’s hard to transliterate, because it’s rarely used in English.

English, shminglish! Let’s get back to John F. Kennedy!

After JFK, his son, and his wife failed to materialize—in fact, even Trump didn’t show up and technically he is alive—Michael Protzman, the originator of this JFK-based conspiracy theory, just dug in deeper. The people that stayed are very easily described as a cult. In fact, this Q-offshoot group has worried many of its adherents’ friends and family members.

Michael Protzman aka -48 told his online followers after the rally that it wasn’t Trump on stage, It was JFK because of his height. He brings people on stage so you can see it’s not him. pic.twitter.com/Pt9VWyrz9L
— 2022 Karma 🌻🌻 (@2022_Karma) March 13, 2022

So Trump was wearing a John F. Kennedy suit? Wow. That had not occurred to me. Does this mean Donald Trump has always been dead and JFK has always been Donald Trump? Maybe it has something to do with an island. QAnon folks love a secret rich guy island where nefarious things happen. (Unless it’s Donald Trump hanging with well-known sexual predator and human sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.)

Speaking of John F. Kennedy Jr.: That guy—Vinnie Fusca, the one that some QAnon folks believe is actually JFK Jr. openly hiding at events—has decided to try and cash in on his cult celebrity. He’s looking to run for Senate in his home state of Pennsylvania. I mean, I thought he lived in Manhattan, or at least on the secret Joe Biden island with Michael Jackson and Princess Diana. It’s hard to keep up.

If you haven’t heard, gas prices are rising. Some people believe it’s inflation. Some people believe it’s fossil fuel interests using the invasion of Ukraine and “supply chain” issues as cover for gouging prices for higher profits, and some people think it’s President Joe Biden’s fault. However, some people in the land of Q believe that Biden is at fault for the higher gas prices but that he isn’t really president, and that Donald Trump is still in control of everything. But the gas issue, that’s Biden’s problem. Not Trump. Something about waking people up. Try to keep up.

Trump is still president but definitely don’t blame him for high gas prices. We got the news from this genius. pic.twitter.com/LuftMs2Hmd
— Davram (@davramdavram) March 3, 2022

Then there is the fear of being “digitiled.” What, you say, is that? It’s not technically a word, but as we can see in the clip, it’s a word now!

Asked a member of the trucker convoy what issues were important to her. Her answer was… interesting. pic.twitter.com/q7UDZHNxSE
— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) March 7, 2022

It kind of seems to sound like what it is. How that might happen to this lady, be it by wearing a mask or by getting an injection, is unclear. I mean, I suspect her car has Bluetooth and she has a phone that sends occasional signals to and from satellites by way of cellular towers. Hopefully she never needs a pacemaker or any other such medical monitoring device as that would surely count as being “digitiled.”

And finally, there’s this.

This woman at the Trucker Convoy explained to us what covid19 REALLY means. pic.twitter.com/6XGRK1qcFr
— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) March 14, 2022

The Gematria thing: It’s a numerology tool of sorts. Hebrew Gematria is much more involved and has the mysticism of being of “ancient” lineage. Unfortunately, Hebrew Gematria doesn’t get anything resembling the number of the beast. However, Simple Gematria does count “corona” as 66. It also counts my name as 154. According to numerology nation, this is a good sign for me! I’m in! COVID-19 is the Antichrist! Wait ... Oh, right, the surrender sheep thing. In Hebrew, “ovid” means “worker.” Ovid was a very famous Roman poet who lived from around 43 BCE to 17 CE. Maybe she meant “ovis?” “Ovis” is the Latin word for “sheep.” But this person with the very patriotic get-up must have missed the debunking of this “theory” done almost two years ago. The “19” code for “surrender” is not a thing.

So let’s fix it and call COVID-19 COVIS-surrender-in-202? I put the question mark there since we want to leave open the ongoing end of times date. Maybe it should be 20 just in case we end up in the next decade before the Clintons and Obamas finally take over the world and drink everybody’s baby blood.

Before we laugh too hard, remember: QAnon isn’t fringe. The most far flung aspects of the ideas may be fringe but they’re just the logic conclusions being reached by people who are having their ideas reflected back at them by pretend legitimate media outlets like Fox News. In turn it is the fountain from which all the right-wing news takes its propaganda cues these days. As the two views photocopy each other in an endless cycle, reality fades further and further away until the conspiracy has to be real otherwise what else will they have?

I’ll tell you one thing: People like Laura Ingraham will be richer—that’s for sure.

QAnon has a lot of funny wacky beliefs but I think important to remember the core of it is a day of the rope-style mass murder fantasy https://t.co/DdnKnykTfK
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) March 10, 2022

‘Bound to respect’: A reflection on hate and reconciliation after passage of anti-lynching bill

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

The sacrifice Mamie Till Mobley made when she decided to show the world exactly what hate and racism did to her son Emmett Till was motivated by such profound love for her child that its power altered the course of history.

Most recently, the flame of that legacy has been kept burning by the passage of a federal law named after her son, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, that, once and for all—and after 200 attempts—makes lynching a hate crime in the United States.

In an interview with Daily Kos, Congressman Al Green of Texas, a Democrat now 74 years old, choked back tears as he weighed the impact of Emmett’s life and what has happened in the decades since his death.

Much has changed, and much, as the nation witnessed with the murder of Ahamud Arbery, has not.

Green is an American. He is also Black. He was a child like Till when Till was killed in 1955. Green has sat on segregated busses and in segregated movie theaters. He drank from “coloreds only” water fountains. He has known what it is to hurriedly step off a sidewalk to clear the way for white people traveling the same concrete as himself lest he invite trouble, or something much worse, into his life.

So, when the Senate unanimously codified lynching as a crime motivated by hatred, this was no small or rhetorical distinction. Its meaning is not abstract.

As his tears fell, Green cast his eyes all the way back to 1857, a little under 100 years before Till would be mutilated and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

That year the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford and Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Africans or Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

“The whole notion of due process did not apply to Black people, according to Taney,” Green said.

The Dred Scott case, he remarked, ultimately set the foundation for a deeply flawed belief to take root from the very top of the nation’s power structure on down among those who were racist or ignorant or both.

The door that Taney opened with his ruling has a through line that can be traced all the way to the Mississippi courtroom where defense attorney Sidney Carlton told an all-white, all male jury that if they did not free Milam and Bryant, their “Anglo-Saxon ancestors” would “turn over in their grave” in shame at the lack of their courage to acquit.

The jury did acquit and the men lit up cigars in the courtroom and kissed their wives to celebrate after the verdict came down.

Bryant admitted to the murder in 1956, recalling with bravado what he told Till after he abducted him.

“I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand,” Bryant said.

He called Till ‘Chicago boy’ because the teenager had come to Mississippi from Illinois to visit his cousins. Emmett’s mother had reservations about her son traveling to the South.

Last December, the Justice Department announced it was renewing an investigation into Till’s murder. Witnesses said Till, just 14, whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Donham Bryant, at a store where she worked in Money, Mississippi.

A historian, Timothy Tyson, claimed in 2017 that Donham Bryant told him she lied about Till whistling at her. Relatives denied she recanted her remarks, according to the Associated Press, and Donham Bryant told the FBI she never went back on her original story. The DOJ asked Tyson for recordings or transcripts of the admission but he was never able to produce them.

“These two white men went into [Till’s great uncle’s] home and abducted him [at gunpoint]. Somehow, they thought that society expected this of them after this lady had been somehow abused without having been touched, without having any assault perpetrated upon her. So they took him out and brutalized him in ways we can’t imagine,” Green said.

When authorities pulled Till’s naked body from the river, his eye was dislodged from its socket. He was beaten about his hips and back. He had been shot above the right ear. Around his neck with barbed wire, his body had been weighted with a large fan blade.

Witnesses passing by where Bryant and Milam spent hours torturing Till before his death later said they heard Till crying: “Mama, save me. Please don't do it again.”

Mamie Till Mobley only recognized the body belonged to her young son because of a ring he wore that somehow, Milam and Bryant had left on Till before throwing him into the river.

As Green relived these abuses and specifically, how Till’s mother made the choice to expose the horrors of her son’s mutilated body at his funeral without censorship, Green’s voice cracked as he uttered each word thoughtfully.

“Even in the segregated South, there are some things that seem to have an impact beyond what’s anticipated. People saw his body. They saw the mutilation and when they saw it, they knew that there was something inherently wrong with what happened,” Green said. “It was a part of the spark that ignited the civil rights movement.”

Indeed, in the late 1980s the Rev. Jesse Jackson told Vanity Fair that Rosa Parks told him she was motivated by Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Till had been murdered just 100 days before.

Bryant and Milam acted with the permission Taney gave them a century ago, Green argued.

“Their actions were indicative of people who felt they were not bound to respect [Emmett Till’s] life,” he said before reflecting back on Emmett’s mother.

“She changed the course of history because she insisted that her son be shown to the world as he was,” Green said.

The legislation written in Till’s name and first introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois evokes Mamie in a similar way. It calls out the criminality of hate for what it is and does not seek to dull or hide this abject failure in the nation’s history.

Fast-forwarding to 2019, the Department of Justice reported over 3,900 hate crimes or crimes motivated by race or ethnicity. In 2020 that number shot up to over 5,200 hate crimes.

Green believes the U.S. is now experiencing the outflows of what he calls the “Trump Effect.”

“One of the great mistakes of contemporary times was our failure to indict, or more appropriately, impeach President Trump for the hate that he engendered and caused to rear its ugly head in ways that it hasn’t for some time,” Green said as he let out a heavy sigh.

Green, who has been in office for eight terms, was the first lawmaker in Congress to call for accountability of Trump’s conduct. Long before Trump was impeached for abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and later, incitement of insurrection, Green was the canary in the coal mine and called for Trump to be impeached no less than three times.

He demanded Trump be impeached for obstruction of justice when Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Then, Green demanded Trump be impeached after the 45th president lashed out at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley on Twitter with a series of racist messages.

Trump had already exhibited a "long history of abusing his office for the unconstitutional purpose of promoting racism and bigotry,” Green said at the time.

“He gave people reason to believe that Black people, people of color, women, they had no rights bound to respect,” Green told Daily Kos before reflecting on the white nationalist rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Trump gave racists “reason to believe they could march through the streets with tiki torches and say ‘Jews will not replace us’ as their mantra,” Green lamented.

Trump’s conduct accelerated bad behavior and hateful acts came out more into the open because there was a nod of approval from on high.

Green reflected on men like George Floyd, a Black man who was killed in Minnesota by a police officer when that officer, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck despite Floyd’s protests and pleas of being unable to breathe.

“That police officers could put a knee on the neck of a person and watch the life evaporate … I sincerely believe in my soul that they did it because they wanted to teach those who were watching a lesson and let them know that they had no rights that they were bound to respect,” Green said.

Till, Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery—who Green called a “modern day Emmett Till”—were all accosted by white men who believed they were above the law and above the Black human beings before them.

If they didn’t say it with their words, they did not need to. Their actions spoke for them and juries, this time, have agreed.

“We do have rights,” Green said, crying. “We do have rights that they are bound to respect. Dr. Martin Luther King was right. The moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.”

The passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act does not solve racism. It does not solve violent, racially motivated crimes. But it is a change for the better, for the good. And it is a change made for a world that Green acknowledged he may not be around to see.

He reflected on the words of Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle, who Martin Luther King once employed in a speech of his own.

“’No lie can live forever,’” Green said before then reciting poet William Cullen Bryant. “Truth crashed to earth shall rise again.”

The anti-lynching bill will officially be enshrined into law with President Joe Biden’s signature.

Green hopes one day the U.S. will find a way to reconcile its past more completely.

He has called for the formation of a cabinet-level Department of Reconciliation that would ensure efforts to “achieve racial harmony are never abandoned.” He has also called for a Slavery Remembrance Day, akin to Holocaust Remembrance day, and he has called for the Russell Senate office building to be renamed given Richard B. Russell’s self-proclaimed position as a white supremacist.

Green delivered his letter to President Biden in late February and has not yet heard back.

“I won’t give up,” he told Daily Kos. “As long as I’ve got pen and paper, I won’t give up.”

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“My hope is that one day, maybe not in my lifetime, we’ll have a Department of Reconciliation because we have not reconciled, we have not dealt with the hate, in a very transparent and candid way and it is needed,” he said. “Things don't always happen as quickly, in my opinion, as they should. But I hope that at some point, in somebody’s lifetime, we will reconcile. We won't have perfect harmony but we will know that women, people of color and persons who know their gender better than persons who encounter them, will have rights that all people are bound to respect.”

And there are signs of hope.

On Monday, officials in Indiana announced that they were formally updating the death record for George Tompkins, a young Black man found hanging from a tree in Indiana a century ago with his hands bound behind his back.

Police ruled it a suicide. No one was arrested.

After much pushing from activists, authorities changed the death record from suicide to lynching and homicide.

Biden And Obama Must Answer For Russiagate

Posted on March 15, 2022 by RealClearWire

By J. Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics

What did Barack Obama and Joe Biden know about the Russiagate collusion hoax their fellow Democrats ginned up to kneecap Donald Trump – and when did they know it? How much did their chicanery contribute to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade the Ukraine?

Those questions are coming into sharp relief following a definitive report by my RealClearInvestigations colleague Paul Sperry last week that places the worst political scandal in our nation’s history and Putin’s brutal war directly inside the White House.

Drawing on a wide range of documents, many never previously reported, Sperry details how the Obama administration worked closely with the Clinton campaign and a foreign government – Ukraine – in a “sweeping and systematic effort” to interfere in the 2016 election. It turns out Democrats were guilty of every false charge they lodged against Trump.

Their maneuverings began in 2014 when Obama officials supported the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych because he was too close to Putin. Biden, then the vice president, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. Sperry reports that leaked transcripts of conversations between two high-level officials in both the Obama and Biden administrations – Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan – reveal that Biden gave his blessing to the formation of a new coalition government.

Sperry writes that Nuland even “traveled to Kiev and helped organize street demonstrations against Yanukovych, even handing out sandwiches to protesters.”

A few months after the anti-Putin government took power next door to Russia, Putin marched into Crimea. Eight years later, he invaded Ukraine.

Top Obama administration officials continued to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs. Biden, for example, would later boast of threatening to withhold aid until the government fired its chief anti-corruption prosecutor – who, among other matters, was investigating the gas company Burisma that was paying his son, Hunter Biden, $83,333 a month for a largely ceremonial position for which he had no qualifications other than his family name. [In 2019, House Democrats would impeach Trump for temporarily withholding aid to Ukraine to pressure it to investigate the Biden family’s dealings there.]

During its final two years, the Obama administration’s dealing with Ukraine became increasingly focused on the 2016 election. Sperry reports that Nuland received some 120 reports on Ukraine from an outside contractor – Christopher Steele.

A former British intelligence officer, Steele would soon start working for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion’s crown jewel was the so-called Steele dossier, a series of salacious and false memos allegedly cobbled together by Steele that formed the basis of the Trump/Russia collusion theory.

Steele and his Fusion colleagues weren’t the only political operatives working behind the scenes in the Obama administration. In April 2015, the Democratic National Committee hired a Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa as a $5,000-a-month consultant.

Chalupa was convinced that Trump’s Achilles heel was Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who had done work for the party led by Viktor Yanukovych. Her effort to attack Trump by exposing Manafort’s alleged Russian ties was the seed of the collusion hoax. Sperry reports that the DNC operative visited the White House at least 27 times during 2015 and 2016.

Among the government officials she worked closely with was Eric Ciaramella, the CIA detailee to the White House who would later be the “whistleblower” regarding Trump’s 2019 call with the Ukrainian president that led to his first impeachment.

At the same time, the Obama administration was politicizing its foreign policy for domestic goals. In one of the more damning passages in his article, Sperry reports:

The Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Manafort, shifting resources from an investigation of a corrupt Ukrainian energy oligarch who paid Biden’s son hundreds of thousands of dollars through his gas company, Burisma.

“Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort,” said a former senior NSC official who has seen notes and emails generated from the meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

As it became increasingly clear that Trump would be the GOP’s 2016 nominee, Chalupa and the administration ratcheted up the pressure on Ukrainian officials to denounce Clinton’s rival in order to sanitize their dirty tricks. [Fusion GPS did the same with Steele, having him present himself as an independent former British intelligence agent – while hiding his ties to Clinton – so that his smears would seem apolitical.]

Democrats collaborated with several Ukrainian lawmakers who supported them. This is not surprising because, Sperry reports, while Ukraine might have been a relatively small and poor nation, one of its oligarchs contributed more money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state than any other group of foreign nationals, including the Saudis.

On March 30, 2016 Chalupa wrote to her contact at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington requesting that they express their grave concerns about Trump and Manafort. “Within minutes of sending the email,” Sperry reports, “Chalupa wrote the DNC’s communications director Luis Miranda, ‘The ambassador has the messaging.’ Then she reached out to a friend in Congress, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, about holding hearings to paint Manafort as a pro-Kremlin villain.”

Sperry reports that these efforts paid dividends in August 2016, when Manafort was forced to resign as Trump’s campaign manager because of his previous work in the Ukraine. [Manafort would later be sent to prison on various tax and other charges, none of which involved him doing Russia’s bidding.]

After Trump’s election that November, a Ukrainian lawmaker who had worked with Fusion GPS in the effort to damage the Republican told the Financial Times that his nation believed “a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy.” He said that most of Ukraine’s politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”

That, of course, was not the end of the story. Democrats, their allies in the FBI, CIA, and other branches of the government, as well as Never-Trump Republicans – all with the active collaboration of the media – would continue to peddle the Russiagate hoax to damage the commander in chief. On Jan. 5, 2017, just days before they left office, President Obama, Vice President Biden, and others met with then-FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office.

The next day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the bogus Steele dossier. CNN then used that meeting as a pretext for trumpeting the false claims of collusion, sparking a media feeding frenzy that led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate the charges bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.

Sperry’s reporting strongly suggests that Obama and Biden were involved in this scandal well before then. The hydra-headed smear campaign against Trump deployed the powers of the executive branch to take down a political rival.

It is long past time for the media to begin the process of restoring its integrity. It could start by correcting the record – and then pressing Barack Obama and Joe Biden to explain why they accused Donald Trump of doing precisely what they did so effectively, which was involve a foreign nation in a U.S. presidential election.

Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

The post Biden And Obama Must Answer For Russiagate appeared first on The Political Insider.

Morning Digest: Meet the Republican that the other Republicans don’t want to see run for the House

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Daily Kos Elections

Check out our podcast, The Downballot!

Embedded Content

Leading Off

● MN-01: Despite lots of grumbling from fellow Republicans, former Minnesota GOP chair Jennifer Carnahan on Monday announced a bid for the vacant congressional seat that had been held by her late husband, Jim Hagedorn, until his death last month.

Carnahan has given her party plenty of reasons to wish she'd just go away, but the other day, she added yet one more: According to former state GOP official Michael Brodkorb, a frequent Carnahan critic, the newly minted candidate got into a "physical altercation" with a member of Hagedorn's family at a DC restaurant following a memorial service. But that's just a capper on a long string of ugliness that's surrounded Carnahan for quite some time.

A wide array of figures called on Carnahan to resign as GOP chair last August after Tony Lazzaro, a close friend and party donor, was arrested on sex-trafficking charges. Carnahan denied knowing anything about the allegations against Lazzaro, with whom she once co-hosted a podcast, but the brief against her was much broader. Shortly after Lazzaro's arrest, a group of former staffers came forward to charge that Carnahan had "presided over a toxic workplace culture and unchecked sexual harassment"; a day later, under severe pressure, she resigned—after casting the deciding vote to give herself a $38,000 severance check.

And while widows of deceased office-holders are often greeted sympathetically, Carnahan has to contend with a recording of a phone call released last year in which she was heard saying of her husband, "I don't care. Jim, he's going to die of cancer in two years." Carnahan later said she'd uttered those words "in grief" after drinking at an RNC event.

She also apparently posted messages on Facebook last year complaining of her husband's supposed ingratitude regarding a birthday celebration, according to Politico. "I bought you dinner and wine at Chankaska. There is not a single post about it," she allegedly wrote, "but the post about your birthday is of your employees? It's degrading, condescending and upsetting to me on many levels."

The special election for Hagedorn's seat is set for Aug. 9, with a primary to take place on May 24.

Redistricting

● MO Redistricting: A panel of six appellate judges released a new map for Missouri's state Senate on Monday and says it plans to file the proposal with the secretary of state's office on Tuesday, which would make the map final. The judicial panel was assembled by the state Supreme Court in January and was tasked with crafting new districts after Missouri's bipartisan Senate redistricting commission failed to come up with a map of its own.

Meanwhile, the congressional redraw remains incomplete, as GOP leaders and far-right hardliners in the Senate still haven't reached a compromise: The former want a map that maintains the party's 6-2 advantage in the state's delegation, while the latter are pushing for a 7-1 gerrymander. The chamber just adjourned for a "weeklong spring break" and won't return until Monday, but lawmakers will have little time to act, since the candidate filing deadline is March 29. Two lawsuits have already been filed asking the courts to take over the redistricting process due to the ongoing impasse.

● WY Redistricting: Both chambers in Wyoming's Republican-dominated legislature passed new legislative maps late on Friday night, resolving a split between the two bodies and sending the plans to Republican Gov. Mark Gordon. The final maps add two new members to the House and one to the Senate, as the House had sought. The boundaries differ somewhat, though, from those the House approved last month, and the population differences between the largest and smallest districts are larger than those the courts typically allow, making the map susceptible to a possible legal challenge.

Senate

● AL-Sen: Alabama's Future, a super PAC that Punchbowl News says "has ties" to retiring GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, is running a new commercial against Rep. Mo Brooks ahead of the May Republican primary. The narrator charges the congressman with "voting to cut off funding to destroy ISIS terrorists in the middle of the fight." The spot continues by resurrecting an attack that derailed Brooks in the 2017 special election for Alabama's other Senate seat by reminding viewers that "he even said that voters faced a 'tough choice' between Trump and Hillary."

Meanwhile, former Business Council of Alabama head Katie Boyd Britt, who has Shelby's backing, uses her latest ad to once again talk about her conservative views and implore the audience to "stand with me in choosing faith and freedom."

● CA-Sen: Candidate filing closed Friday in three states—California, Georgia, and Idaho—and throughout this Digest, you'll find our rundowns of all the major candidates in all the key races. We begin with the biggest one of them all, California, which hosts its primary on June 7.

However, the state automatically extends the filing deadline five extra days in contests where the incumbent chooses not to file for re-election, so the field won't be set for several more races until Wednesday. (Five open House districts are affected by this extension: the 3rd, 13th, 15th, 37th, and 42nd.) The secretary of state will publish an official candidate list in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, we're relying on an open-source spreadsheet created and maintained by California political operatives.

The Golden State's top-two primary requires all candidates running for Congress and for state office to compete on a single ballot rather than in separate party primaries. The two contenders with the most votes, regardless of party, will then advance to the Nov. 8 general election—a rule that sometimes results in two candidates from the same party facing off against one another. Note that candidates cannot win outright in June by taking a majority of the vote except in some nonpartisan elections for local office.

At the top of the roster is the race for U.S. Senate, where appointed Democratic incumbent Alex Padilla faces no serious opposition in his bid for a full six-year term. A special election will also be held in June for the final months of now-Vice President Kamala Harris' term, but that contest should be just as uneventful.

● GA-Sen: Six Republicans have filed to take on Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who is seeking a full term after winning a crucial special election in January of last year, but almost all of the attention has gone to former University of Georgia football star Herschel Walker. The GOP field also includes state Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, former state Rep. Josh Clark, businessman Kelvin King, and banking executive Latham Saddler.

Walker's intra-party opponents have been hoping that ongoing media reports about his past, including allegations that he threatened to kill his ex-wife in 2005, will give them an opening, but none of them seem to be gaining any traction. Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have remained firmly in Walker's corner, and every poll we've seen has shown him taking well over a majority of the vote in the primary.

As for the general election, because Libertarian Chase Oliver is also running, it's very possible his presence could be enough to force Warnock and his eventual GOP rival into yet another runoff—which would take place in December rather than January after Republican lawmakers changed the timing last year in response to their dual Senate runoff losses.

● WI-Sen: In her opening ad for the August Democratic primary, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski begins, "Dairy farms disappearing, prices up, COVID still not gone." She then says of the Republican incumbent, "And what's Ron Johnson done? Voted against new jobs and told us to take mouthwash to cure COVID." (Yes, Johnson really said that.) Godlewski continues, "I grew up in Eau Claire where we're more interested in common sense than conspiracies," and calls for "[p]ractical ideas that just help people. Not mouthwash." The campaigns says the spot is part of a seven-figure TV and digital buy.

Governors

● CA-Gov: Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's landslide win in last year's recall election has deterred any strong Republicans from challenging him in this very blue state. Newsom's most prominent foe is state Sen. Brian Dahle, who the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month was still unvaccinated against COVID.

● GA-Gov: With Friday's filing deadline just passed, two new polls of the May 24 Republican primary find Gov. Brian Kemp with wide leads over former Sen. David Perdue, but they disagree whether the incumbent is already taking the majority of the vote needed to avoid a June 21 runoff.

A survey from the GOP firm American Viewpoint on behalf of Secure Democracy USA, an organization the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes as a "nonpartisan group that aims to improve voter access," has Kemp winning 51-35. But BK Strategies, a different Republican firm which did not mention a client, has the governor only at 48%, though Perdue lags well behind with 33%. Three other Republicans also filed (you can find a complete candidate list here), but none have generated much attention.

We've seen two other polls in recent weeks, and they also diverge on Kemp's precise standing. Fox5 Atlanta's numbers—from yet another Republican pollster, InsiderAdvantage—had the incumbent leading only 44-35. However, a Fox News survey from the Democratic firm Beacon Research and the Republican pollster Shaw & Company finds Kemp in stronger shape with a 50-39 edge. All these polls and Perdue's weak fundraising numbers, though, haven't deterred Donald Trump from going all-in on his quest to deny renomination to Kemp, a one-time ally who wound up on the MAGA shitlist when he refused to participate in the Big Lie despite Trump's interference.

Indeed, Trump has a March 26 rally set for Perdue and other endorsees that's taking place in the small city of Commerce, which is close to the governor's hometown of Athens. Trump last month also starred in a very rare direct-to-camera ad for Perdue that featured him trashing Kemp. The governor, meanwhile, has benefited from spending from the Republican Governors Association, which for the first time is running ads to support an incumbent in a primary.

The eventual winner will go up against 2018 Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams, who has no intra-party opposition in her second campaign. Georgia requires candidates to win a majority of the vote in the Nov. 8 general election in order to avoid a runoff on Dec. 6, so the presence of Libertarian Shane Hazel and independent Al Bartell could be enough to force a second round of voting.

Hazel himself played a small but crucial role in Perdue's 2020 re-election defeat: Perdue outpaced Democrat Jon Ossoff 49.7-48.0 in November while Hazel took a crucial 2.3%, but Ossoff quite famously went on to win the January rematch. GOP leaders soon changed the law to slash the time between the first general election and any potential runoffs from nine weeks to four.

● ID-Gov: Candidate filing also closed in Idaho Friday for the May 17 primary, and the state has a list of contenders here.

Gov. Brad Little faces seven fellow Republicans in this overwhelmingly red state, but the most prominent of the bunch is Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. No one has released any polling this year to indicate if Little is at all vulnerable, but he's enjoyed a massive fundraising edge over McGeachin, who spent the pandemic trying to undermine the governor's efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus. Also in the race are Bonner County Commissioner Steven Bradshaw and financial advisor Ed Humphreys.

● MD-Gov: Two SEIU unions representing 30,000 Marylanders have endorsed former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in his bid for the Democratic nomination for governor: Local 500, which represents education personnel, and 32BJ, which represents property services workers.

● NV-Gov: A new poll of Nevada's GOP primary for governor, conducted by Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling on behalf of the DGA, finds Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo leading with 26% of the vote while former Sen. Dean Heller and North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee are tied at 13 apiece. Attorney Joey Gilbert is just behind at 12%, Las Vegas Councilwoman Michele Fiore takes 8, and businessman Guy Nohra brings up the caboose with just 1%, though a 27% plurality are undecided. The general picture is similar to that found in the only other public poll released this year, a survey from GOP firm OH Predictive Insights that had Lombardo at 28 and everyone else in single digits.

● PA-Gov: Democrat Josh Shapiro's allies at Pennsylvania Works are airing a commercial commending him for standing up to "goliaths" and "bullies" as attorney general.

● RI-Gov: Businesswoman Ashley Kalus, who filed paperwork for a possible bid for governor last month, will reportedly enter the contest "within the next two weeks," according to NBC 10 News. Kalus would be the first notable Republican in the race.

House

● CA-05: Republican Rep. Tom McClintock faces intra-party opposition from Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig and three others in a 55-43 Trump constituency in the upper Central Valley and Sierra foothills. McClintock's existing 4th District makes up just over 40% of the new district, while fewer than 5,000 people are Magsig's constituents.

● CA-06: While Sacramento County Registrar of Voters Courtney Bailey-Kanelos took out paperwork last month for a possible independent bid against Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, she didn't end up filing ahead of Friday's deadline. Bera should have little trouble winning this 58-39 Biden seat based in Sacramento and its northern suburbs.

● CA-08: Democratic Rep. John Garamendi is the favorite for another term even though his existing 3rd District makes up just over 20% of this new seat, which is home to suburbs east of Oakland. However, he does face noteworthy intra-party opposition from Richmond City Councilman Demnlus Johnson. Johnson, who is Black, has argued, "The new congressional district was created to represent people like us. We can finally elect someone who knows our community because they're from our community."

People of color make up close to three-quarters of this new constituency, but Garamendi, who is white, is arguing that he knows this area well from his time "not only as a member of Congress, but also as lieutenant Governor and as insurance commissioner." (Garamendi is of Basque descent but does not identify as Hispanic.) Three other Democrats and one Republican are competing for this seat, which would have backed Biden 76-22.

● CA-09: Democratic Rep. Josh Harder decided to seek re-election in this seat, a Stockton-area constituency that would have backed Biden 55-43, right after fellow Democratic incumbent Jerry McNerney announced his retirement in January. Just over a quarter of the new 9th's denizens live in Harder's existing 10th District, but he doesn't appear to have any serious intra-party opposition. Three Republicans are running here, though the only one who looks noteworthy is San Joaquin County Supervisor Tom Patti.

● CA-21: Democratic Rep. Jim Costa should be the heavy favorite in a Fresno area district that Biden would have taken 59-39, though he struggled in the 2014 general election against a weak GOP foe in a similarly blue constituency. The only Republican who is going up against him this time is businessman Michael Maher, who is also campaigning in the special election for the old 22nd District.

● CA-22: Rep. David Valadao, who was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump last year, is running for re-election in a southern Central Valley seat that Biden would have won 55-42. Valadao faces two fellow Republicans, King County School Board Member Adam Medeiros and former Fresno City Councilman Chris Mathys, but neither of them has attracted any public support yet from Trump. Mathys ran for office a few times in New Mexico including in 2020, when he took last place with 24% in the three-way primary for the 2nd Congressional District.

On the Democratic side, state and national leaders have consolidated behind Assemblyman Rudy Salas, who doesn't face any serious intra-party opponents.

● CA-27: Republican Rep. Mike Garcia is defending a seat based in Santa Clarita and Antelope Valley that would have gone for Biden 55-43, and three Democrats are facing off against him. The most familiar name is former Assemblywoman Christy Smith, who badly lost the spring 2020 special election to Garcia but came just 333 votes shy months later as Biden was winning the old 25th District 54-44; Smith recently earned the endorsement of the state Democratic Party for her third bid.

The two other Democrats are Navy veteran Quaye Quartey and Simi Valley City Councilwoman Ruth Luevanos. Luevanos continued to run after her community was moved to the new 26th District, but she barely had any money available at the end of 2021.

● CA-31: While Democratic Rep. Grace Napolitano, who will be 86 when the new Congress is sworn in, has long been the subject of retirement speculation, she's running for a 13th term. She faces no serious opposition in an eastern San Gabriel Valley seat that Biden would have won 64-33.

● CA-34: Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez beat former prosecutor David Kim just 53-47 in the 2020 all-Democratic general election, and Kim is seeking a rematch. One Republican and an independent are also running, but it's very likely Gomez and Kim will advance to November in a downtown Los Angeles seat that Biden would have carried 81-17.

● CA-40: Freshman Republican Rep. Young Kim is seeking re-election in an eastern Orange County district where she currently represents just 20% of the population, a seat that Biden would have carried by a close 50-48 margin. Four fellow Republicans are challenging her. The most notable is Mission Viejo Councilman Greg Raths, a frequent congressional candidate who most recently challenged Democratic Rep. Katie Porter in 2020 for the old 45th District and lost 53-47. On the other side, state Democratic leaders have consolidated behind physician Asif Mahmood, who took third in the 2018 race for state comptroller.

● CA-41: Well, so much for that: While state Sen. Melissa Melendez took out paperwork last week for a potential intra-party challenge to her fellow Republican, 15-term Rep. Ken Calvert, she doesn't appear to have submitted it before Friday's deadline.

Calvert now faces only minor intra-party opposition in this suburban Riverside seat, though he could have his first serious general election fight since his surprise near-defeat in 2008. While the congressman's existing 42nd District backed Trump 53-45, the new 41st would have supported him only 50-49. For the Democrats, the state party has endorsed former federal prosecutor Will Rollins over engineer Shrina Kurani.

● CA-45: Freshman Republican Rep. Michelle Steel is seeking a second term in a western Orange County that would have supported Biden 52-46 and where only 16% of the population lives within her existing 48th District. State and national Democrats are backing community college trustee Jay Chen, who ran a respectable 2012 campaign in the old 39th against longtime Republican Rep. Ed Royce back when Orange County was considerably redder than it is now.

● CA-47: Rep. Katie Porter, who is one of the best fundraisers in the Democratic caucus, is seeking a third term in a seat located in coastal Orange County and Irvine that Biden would have won 55-43; just over 40% of the new 47th's residents live within Porter's existing 45th District. Her only notable foe appears to be former Orange County GOP chair Scott Baugh, who ran against Republican incumbent Dana Rohrabacher in the 2018 top-two primary for the old 48th and finished a close fourth.

● CA-49: Three notable Republicans are competing to take on Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in a coastal San Diego County seat that would have favored Biden 55-43. One familiar name is 2020 nominee Brian Maryott, who lost to Levin 53-47 even as Biden was carrying the old version of the 49th by that same 55-43 margin and has the state party endorsement for his second bid. The field also includes Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett and Oceanside City Councilman Christopher Rodriguez.

● FL-22: Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Ben Sorensen is the latest Democrat to say he's considering a bid for Florida's open 22nd Congressional District, though he adds that he's in "no rush" to make a decision.

● GA-02: Veteran Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop hasn't faced any serious general election foe since he almost lost in the 2010 GOP wave, but six Republicans are now taking him on in a southwestern Georgia seat that would have favored Joe Biden 55-44.

Only half of the field reported raising any money before the end of the year. Businessman Wayne Johnson, who is a former Trump official in the Department of Education, led Air Force veteran Chris West in cash-on-hand $135,000 to $104,000 thanks mostly to self-funding, while perennial candidate Vivian Childs had just over $6,000. The other Republicans are Army veteran Jeremy Hunt, teacher Paul Whitehead, and Rich Robertson, who is another Air Force veteran. Bishop, for his part, had $393,000 on hand to defend himself.

● GA-06: The new Republican gerrymander led Democratic incumbent Lucy McBath to seek re-election in the neighboring 7th District, and nine Republicans are competing for an open seat in the northern Atlanta suburbs that would have favored Trump 57-42.

The most familiar candidate may be physician Rich McCormick, who narrowly lost last year's race for the old 7th District to Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux (the old 7th makes up 30% of the new 6th) and once again has the backing of the anti-tax Club for Growth. Another well-connected contender is former state ethics commission chair Jake Evans, whose father, Randy Evans, is Trump's former ambassador to Luxembourg. McCormick ended 2021 with a small $1.15 million to $1 million cash-on-hand edge over Evans, who has also been doing some self-funding.

The field also includes pastor Mallory Staples, who had $476,000 on-hand thanks mostly to self-funding, and former state Rep. Meagan Hanson, who had $279,000 available. It remains to be seen if any of the other five candidates can stand out in this crowded race.

● GA-07: The Democratic primary for this 62-36 Biden seat in Atlanta's northeastern suburbs is a three-way contest between Rep. Lucy McBath, who represents the current 6th District; Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, who holds the existing 7th; and state Rep. Donna McLeod. Bourdeaux represents 57% of the new seat compared to just 12% for McBath. However, the more progressive McBath may be more in line with primary voters than Bourdeaux, who last year joined a group of nine renegade Democratic moderates who threatened to derail Biden's Build Back Better agenda if they didn't get a vote on Congress' bipartisan infrastructure bill first.

McBath also has the backing of Stacey Abrams, who will be Team Blue's gubernatorial nominee again, while a super PAC called Protect Our Future funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has pledged to spend $2 million for her. The only poll we've seen this year was a January Data for Progress survey for that group that showed McBath leading Bourdeaux 40-31, with McLeod at 6%.

● GA-09: Freshman Rep. Andrew Clyde faces four opponents in the Republican primary for this safely red northeastern Georgia seat including Ben Souther, a former FBI agent and University of Georgia football player who launched his campaign last month specifically citing the fact that Clyde does not live in the new district. The congressman, for his part, has claimed that his home county of Jackson was moved into the 10th District as the result of "a purposeful decision made by a handful of establishment politicians" to target him for being a "hardcore conservative." Clyde ended 2021 with just $41,000 on hand, though it remains to be seen if any of his foes can put up a serious fight.

● GA-10: Far-right extremist Jody Hice is leaving to run for secretary of state with Donald Trump's blessing, and eight fellow Republicans are facing off to replace him in a safely red constituency based in Atlanta's eastern exurbs and Athens. The most prominent contender is former state Rep. Vernon Jones, a conservative Democrat-turned-Republican who earned Trump's support right after he ended his campaign for governor and started running here last month. Jones, though, never represented any of this area in the legislature or as DeKalb County CEO, and his opponents have sought to portray him as an outsider.

The contest also includes a few other familiar names. There's former Rep. Paul Broun, who gave up the previous version of the 10th in 2014 to unsuccessfully run for the Senate and went on to lose comeback bids for the old 9th in both 2016 and 2020. There's also businessman Mike Collins, the son of the late Rep. Mac Collins, who sought to succeed Broun in 2014 but lost to Hice 54-46. State Rep. Timothy Barr, meanwhile, has the support of Hice and 9th District Rep. Andrew Clyde.

The primary also features former Georgia Revenue Commissioner David Curry, businessman Marc McMain, retired Air Force Col. Alan Sims, and Mitchell Swan, who took a mere 4% in the 2014 primary. Former Trump administration official Patrick Witt was also running until last week, but he switched to challenging Insurance Commissioner John King in the GOP primary and endorsed Jones on his way out.

● GA-13: Rep. David Scott, who has long been one of the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus, took just 53% of the vote in the 2020 primary, and he now faces intra-party opposition from former state Sen. Vincent Fort, South Fulton City Councilor Mark Baker, and consultant Shastity Driscoll. This seat in Atlanta's western and southern suburbs would have backed Biden 80-19.

Fort, who was one of Bernie Sanders' most prominent Georgia supporters during the 2016 presidential primaries, is arguably Scott's top foe, though the former state senator took just 10% of the vote in the 2017 race for mayor of Atlanta. Scott ended 2021 with $1.1 million on-hand, while none of his foes had yet begun fundraising as of the end of last year.

● ID-02: Longtime Republican Rep. Mike Simpson faces a primary rematch against attorney Bryan Smith, whom he beat 62-38 in 2014, while three others are also running in this dark-red eastern Idaho constituency. A group called Idaho Second Amendment Alliance recently began airing an ad accusing Simpson of supporting "[r]ed flag gun confiscation, a federal gun registry, [and] universal background checks," though there's no word on the size of the buy. Simpson, meanwhile, has been running commercials arguing that Smith "got rich targeting veterans who can't pay medical bills."

● MI-04: In a painful blow to state Rep. Steve Carra, Donald Trump just snatched back his rose and instead awarded it to Rep. Bill Huizenga in the multi-way GOP battle for Michigan's revamped 4th Congressional District.

In September, Trump pledged his support for Carra at a time when the legislator was challenging Rep. Fred Upton—who had voted for impeachment—in the Republican primary for what was then the 6th District. But as a result of redistricting, Upton and Huizenga got tossed together in the new 4th, though Upton still hasn't confirmed his re-election plans. Carra, meanwhile, found himself drawn into the 5th but decided to test just how "Complete and Total" Trump's endorsement was by running in the 4th District anyway. The answer: not very.

● NM-02: Las Cruces City Councilor Gabe Vasquez earned the support of 80.4% of delegates to the New Mexico Democratic Party's recently concluded statewide convention, earning him automatic placement on the June 7 primary ballot. A question remains, however, about the fate of the only other Democrat in the race, physician Darshan Patel, who took 19.6%—seemingly just shy of the 20% necessary for securing a ballot spot without having to collect further signatures. Patel contends that his total should be rounded up, but a party spokesperson says they'll leave the matter up to state election officials.

● NY-22: The Working Families Party has endorsed attorney Josh Riley in the multi-way Democratic primary for New York's revamped 22nd District, an open seat that Democrats made considerably bluer in redistricting.

● PA-12: Edgewood Borough Council member Bhavini Patel has abandoned her campaign for the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania's 12th District, a safely blue seat in the Pittsburgh area that's the successor to the old 18th. Several other Democrats are still running for this district, which is open because longtime Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle is retiring.

Attorneys General

● CA-AG: Democrat Rob Bonta was appointed state attorney general last year after incumbent Xavier Becerra resigned to become Joe Biden's HHS secretary, and he now faces a potentially difficult fight for a full term.

Bonta's most formidable foe may be Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, a former Republican who became an independent in 2018 and, with the support of law enforcement unions, has been campaigning as a tough-on-crime prosecutor. While Schubert's lack of a party affiliation could be an asset in a general election in this blue state, though, she'll need to first put together enough votes to get past the actual Republicans in the top-two primary. Team Red's most notable contender is former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman.

● GA-AG: Republican Attorney General Chris Carr is seeking re-election, and he faces credible opposition from Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan. Libertarian Martin Cowen is also in.

● ID-AG: Five-term Attorney General Lawrence Wasden faces an intra-party challenge from former Rep. Raúl Labrador, who spent his four terms in the House as one of the most prominent tea party shit-talkers before losing his 2018 bid for governor in the GOP primary, as well as conservative activist Art Macomber. Labrador has been trying to take advantage of the incumbent's many battles with a legislature that's dominated by far-right hard-liners by arguing that he'd "be a true partner with conservative lawmakers in the Legislature as they work to draft and write good laws that will stand up against the gamesmanship of activist judges."

Secretaries of State

● GA-SoS: Republican incumbent Brad Raffensperger's refusal to participate in the Big Lie earned him a Trump-backed primary challenge from Rep. Jody Hice, who eagerly went along with Trump's attempt to overturn his defeat. The GOP field also includes former Alpharetta Mayor David Belle Isle, who lost to Raffensperger in 2018, and one other contender. On the Democratic side, state Rep. Bee Nguyen, who would be the first Asian American elected statewide, is the overwhelming favorite to advance, while Libertarian Ted Metz is also running.

Prosecutors

● Suffolk County, MA District Attorney: Boston City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo has earned an endorsement from Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the September Democratic primary against appointed incumbent Kevin Hayden.

Never Trumpers Close Ranks After Pro-Impeachment Republican Gets Blasted By Trump As ‘Total Fool’

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Becky Noble

As the divide in the Republican Party continues to grow between those who support former President Donald Trump and those who do not, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) can always be counted on by the anti-Trump forces.

On Sunday, Cheney rushed to the rescue of Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC), after the latter was called on the floor by former President Donald Trump at a rally in the Palmetto State.

Our country needs Republicans to be sane, responsible, and speak the truth. @RepTomRice is right. Most of our Republican colleagues know this. Their silence enables the danger.

GOP congressman calls Trump 'a would-be tyrant' | TheHill https://t.co/0PYw8RMsMk

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) March 13, 2022

Rallies That Still Draw Big Crowds

Trump held one of his signature rallies in Florence, South Carolina on Saturday. Despite rain and weather, thousands turned out to greet the former President. It was there that Trump, while talking about local candidates, called Rice “a total fool.”

“Right here in the 7th Congressional District, Tom Rice, a disaster. He’s respected by no one, he’s laughed at in Washington, he was never thought highly of in Washington.”

Rice was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2020.

Trump’s rally was in part to support his endorsed candidates, who include Rice’s challenger, State Rep. Russell Fry.

Following the rally, Rice released a statement that read,

“Trump is here because, like no one else I’ve ever met, he is consumed by spite. I took one vote he didn’t like and now he’s chosen to support a yes man candidate who has and will bow to anything he says, no matter what.”

Republican Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.) calls Trump 'a would-be tyrant' https://t.co/tmDUW7EBGx

— Accalia Iratus (@Loboenski) March 13, 2022

One Of Several Censured

Rice and Cheney have another thing thing in common, besides their disdain for the leader of their party. They have both been censured in their home states for their votes to impeach.

Rice was censured back in February by the South Carolina Republican Party for his impeachment vote. Cheney was not only censured by the Wyoming Republican Party, but in November, the party voted to no longer recognize her as a Republican.

A further similarity is that Trump has endorsed Republican primary opponents against both.

Trump endorsed Rice’s opponent Fry in February.

He made a rather curious endorsement against Cheney’s opponent, Harriet Hageman, last year.

Hageman was once a very close ally of Cheney, even serving as one of her fundraisers. Hageman had referred to Trump as “racist and xenophobic” and was part of the Establishment GOP’s effort to deny Trump the Republican nomination in 2016.

“Before we can defeat the Democrat Socialists at the ballot box this fall, we first have to defeat the RINOs and grandstanders in the primaries earlier this year.”

Looking at you Tom Rice and Nancy Mace

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 13, 2022

The post Never Trumpers Close Ranks After Pro-Impeachment Republican Gets Blasted By Trump As ‘Total Fool’ appeared first on The Political Insider.