<Donald Trump has done it again. In a video which appeared on his Truth Social blog Trump asked his supporters to “take a stand” and “save our country” as he lashed out against the Colorado trial seeking to remove his name from the presidential ballot.

Unfortunately in the midst of trying to garner support, he accidentally labelled his MAGA supporters “tyrants”.

In the video he is captured saying, “Our country is being destroyed by people who have no idea what they’re doing or even worse, they may very well have an idea they may hate our country and they may want to see it destroyed.

This truly is our last chance to save America, and with the 2024 election now less than one year away, this is your chance to take a stand against tyrants that support the one and only movement that can save our country and make America great again. We must win in 2024.” This latest slip comes after Trump made a bunch of gaffes while campaigning last week. He called the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, the leader of Turkey during an October 23 rally in Derry, New Hampshire.

A MAGA Gaffe

Last month he made a one-hour speech to 1,000 supporters in Las Vegas, Nevada where he said that his legal battles are political and called them ‘proterrortism.’

He also accidentally said Canya for Canada when speaking about trade deals. He said Hungary fronts both Ukraine and Russia when it actually shares a border with Ukraine not Russia.

People on X had a field day with his mistakes.

One user said, “He’s campaigning against himself?”.

“For once I agree with him,” he said.

The Lincoln Project, a centrist political action committee said on X that the former president is ‘falling apart’.

One other commenter also pointed out that although in the video Trump says that the election is less than a year away it’s actually just over a year away.

Well, it just goes to show it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black in so far as Trump making fun of Biden for his gaffes, it appears he isn’t any better in that department either.>

<A Connecticut judge's decision to redo a local primary election contest, citing videos showing possible ballot stuffing, has renewed claims about the 2020 presidential election.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge William Clark rejected results from a Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, the state's largest city, saying he had seen evidence to order a rerun, even though the general election is in four days, the Associated Press reported.

In the wake of the decision, conservative commentators began responding with what they said was evidence of ballot stuffing in the 2020 White House race.

Former President Donald Trump is facing 13 charges in Georgia for his alleged efforts to overturn his election loss in the state to Joe Biden. He and his co-defendants face racketeering charges. Trump, who has claimed that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' case is politically motivated, maintains his innocence.

The Claim

A post by conservative commentator End Wokeness on X, formerly Twitter, posted on November 2, 2023, viewed 8.1 million times, said that at an election night count in Georgia in 2020, "suitcases of ballots" were pulled out from under a table and run through "machines for hours unsupervised."

"A judge in Connecticut just overturned an election over a video showing 2 people stuffing ballot boxes," the post read.

"Trump was arrested in Georgia for trying to make this happen in 2020.

"This is a video from Georgia in 2020 after poll watchers were forced out over a mysterious 'water pipe burst.'

"They literally pulled suitcases of ballots from under the table and ran them through the machines for hours unsupervised."

The Facts

The Bridgeport election story has attracted conservative theorizing across social media, with X owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk joining the discussion.

On Thursday, Musk reposted a story about Bridgeport, adding: "That this happened here is beyond reasonable doubt. The only question is how common it is."

However, the post by End Wokeness about stuffing ballots in Georgia is based on falsehoods that Trump has shared before, linking events that happened hours apart.

On November 5, 2020, Trump alleged that a count at Georgia's State Farm Arena stopped "for four hours" after a "pipe burst," alleging "a lot of things happened" during that time.

During a leaked call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump added it was a "major water main break" and that no poll watchers came back afterward....>

<.....Georgia Secretary of State's Office Voting Systems Manager Gabriel Sterling, a Republican, has repeatedly addressed the claims about a leak, saying at a press conference on January 4, 2021, that it was discovered at about 5.23 a.m. November 3, 2020, at State Farm Arena.

It briefly delayed the processing of Fulton County absentee ballots but was resolved within two hours. While it was initially described as a pipe burst, it was later found to be a urinal leak.

Frances Watson, chief investigator for the Georgia Secretary of State, said in an affidavit that the counting of votes was not affected.

The affidavit said: "The Secretary of State's Office opened an investigation into the incident at State Farm Arena. Our investigation revealed that the incident initially reported as a water leak late in the evening of November 3rd was actually a urinal that had overflowed early in the morning of November 3rd, and did not affect the counting of votes by Fulton County later that evening."

The footage posted by End Wokeness was recorded nearly 14 hours after the leak, many hours after it was resolved.

As for the suitcases, multiple fact-checking debunks, including from FactCheck.org, AP and PolitiFact, found that these were ballot containers on wheels. This was also stated by Gabriel Sterling during his press conference on January 4, 2021.

The claim by End Wokeness that workers were forced out is also wrong. At the press conference, Sterling said that the video showed two groups of people at State Farm Arena: cutters, who open stack and prepare ballots for scanning, and scanners.

In the video, the cutters began putting away their equipment as Sterling said everyone had been under the impression that everyone would be going home. Later, however, scanners were asked to stay and continue working.

Watson corroborated this account in her affidavit, saying that "observers and media were not asked to leave. They simply left on their own when they saw one group of workers, whose job was only to open envelopes and who had completed that task, also leave."

The affidavit also said that "review of the entire security footage revealed that there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables."

"Video taken hours before shows the table being brought into the room...at 8.22 a.m.," Watson said. "Nothing was underneath the table them [sic].

"Around 10 p.m., with the room full of people, including official monitors and the media, video shows ballots that had already been opened but not counted placed in the boxes, sealed up, stored under the table.

"This was done because employees thought they were done for the night and were closing up and ready to leave."

"When the counting continued into later in the night, those boxes were opened so that the ballots inside could then be counted."

While observers were not present during some of the scanning, this is not a requirement under Georgia Code § 21-2-408 regarding poll watchers. As stated by the United States Election Assistance Commission, each state has its own laws on when and where observers can be present.

As stated by Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron in an interview with AP, an election board monitor arrived to oversee the scanning at 11:52 p.m. and a state investigator arrived at 12:15 a.m., both remaining there until the count concluded. Sterling also mentioned the arrival of the monitor and the investigator in his press conference.

In short, a water leak at State Farm Arena on Election Day was not linked to events in a video of ballot workers, a video that did not depict workers being told to leave, nor did it depict workers surreptitiously counting or "stuffing" ballots.

The Ruling

False.

While there was a water leak at a facility where absentee ballots were counted in Georgia in 2020, it happened nearly 14 hours before the video footage of election staff working at that facility was recorded.

The footage of the staff leaving does not show them being asked to leave, nor does it show staff taking "suitcases" of ballots, scanning them unsupervised. It shows a group of staff packing up and leaving for the evening before another group, tasked with scanning ballots, returned to continue scanning ballots at the request of election officials.

The "suitcases" were ballot containers on wheels. They were not secret ballots, either; they were opened but uncounted from the same day.

Georgia state law does not require the scanners to be observed. However, scanners called back later were nonetheless joined by a monitor and state investigator after returning to work.>

<A New York federal judge cited former President Donald Trump’s “repeated public statements” Friday among reasons why a jury will be anonymous when it considers damages stemming from a defamation lawsuit by a writer who says Trump sexually abused her in the 1990s.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued an order establishing that the jury to be chosen for the January trial in Manhattan will be transported by the U.S. Marshals Service.

“In view of Mr. Trump’s repeated public statements with respect to the plaintiff and court in this case as well as in other cases against him, and the extensive media coverage that this case already has received and that is likely to increase once the trial is imminent or underway, the Court finds that there is strong reason to believe the jury requires the protections” anonymity provides, Kaplan wrote in an order.

Lawyers for Trump did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Another jury that was also anonymous in May awarded $5 million in damages to columnist E. Jean Carroll, 79, after finding that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 in the dressing room of a luxury department store and defamed her with comments he made in the fall of 2022 that disparaged her claims. The jury rejected Carroll's claim that Trump raped her. Kaplan presided over that trial as well.

The Jan. 15 trial stems from a lawsuit first filed in 2019 in response to comments Trump made after she wrote in a memoir that Trump attacked her after their chance late-day encounter in a midtown Manhattan store near Trump Tower, where Trump resided. The progression of the lawsuit was slowed by appeals. A federal appeals court has yet to rule on Trump's claim that absolute presidential immunity protects him from the lawsuit.

After the May verdict, Kaplan ruled that Carroll's lawyers will not have to re-establish to a new jury that Trump sexually attacked Carroll. Instead, they'll be left to decide what damages, if any, he should face for his remarks.

That lawsuit has been updated by Carroll's lawyers to include remarks Trump made on a televised town hall a day after the verdict. Carroll seeks at least $10 million in compensatory damages and substantially more in punitive damages.

A week ago, Trump, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was fined $10,000 by a New York state judge for violating a gag order prohibiting him from attacking court personnel in a civil fraud case.

The state judge, Arthur Engoron, required Trump to sit in a witness box and answer questions. Trump denied he was referring to a senior law clerk when he told reporters outside court that someone “sitting alongside” Engoron was “perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

After Trump, 77, testified, the judge said: “I find that the witness is not credible.”

Engoron, who had earlier fined Trump $5,000 for violating the same gag order after the judge found that he had targeted his principal law clerk on social media, even suggested the possibility of holding Trump “in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him” for further violations.

Trump also faces four criminal indictments. He has pleaded not guilty in two cases accusing him of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, along with a classified documents case and charges that he helped arrange a payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels to silence her before the 2016 presidential election.>

<Officials in a suburban Chicago community have issued municipal citations to a local news reporter for what they say were persistent contacts with city officials seeking comment on treacherous fall flooding.

The tickets from Calumet City, a city of 35,000 located 24 miles (39 kilometers) south of Chicago, allege “interference/hampering of city employees" by Hank Sanders, a reporter for the Daily Southtown, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday.

It's the latest of several recent First Amendment dust-ups involving city officials and news outlets around the country, following this week's arrest of a small-town Alabama newspaper publisher and reporter after reporting on a grand jury investigation of a school district, and the August police raid of a newspaper and its publisher's home in Kansas tied to an apparent dispute a [sic] restaurant owner had with the paper.

Sanders reported in an Oct. 20 story that consultants told Calumet City administrators the city's stormwater infrastructure was in poor condition before flooding wrought by record September rains. Officials say Sanders continued to call and email city employees, drawing complaints including from Mayor Thaddeus Jones, who is also a Democratic state representative.

The Tribune, which shares an owner with the Daily Southtown, reported that Sanders was told to channel requests for information through Jones’ spokesperson, Sean Howard, but according to one citation sent 14 emails to the city during a nine-day period in October asking questions about flooding.

Mitch Pugh, executive editor of the Chicago Tribune, said one reason Sanders continued asking questions was for a follow-up flooding story that has yet to be published.

While the citations are not of “the same degree and magnitude” as the other recent incidents, Pugh said, “it seems to be on the same through line of a real lack of understanding of what the First Amendment protects, what a journalist’s job is, what our role is.”

“You get used to it a little bit on the national scale, but now we’re seeing it in very small municipalities with mayors, and that’s a disturbing trend and we need to call it out when we see it,” Pugh told The Associated Press. “A public official ought to know better than to basically use a police force to try to intimidate a reporter who’s just doing his job.”

The news media’s freedom from government meddling or intervention is protected by the First Amendment.

Phone and text messages seeking comment were left for Jones. Howard referred questions to city attorney Patrick Walsh, saying it is a legal matter. A message was also left for Walsh.

Don Craven, president, CEO and general counsel of the Illinois Press Association, criticized the citations and said the media play a fundamental role in the functioning of democracy.

“We’re talking about a reporter who is doing his job,” Craven said, “and instead of saying ‘We’re working on the problem,' the city's response is, blame the reporter.”>

<Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the Mar-a-Lago confidential documents case against former President Donald Trump, reprimanded Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team over a legal filing the Justice Department submitted that didn't comply with the court's requirements.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, issued an order on Friday that appeared to be a rejection of a document filed by federal prosecutor Jay Bratt that warned the judge not to be "manipulated" into delaying the trial by Trump.

In the order, Cannon reminded all parties that "Except as authorized by Court order, the substantive content of any such notice (or response) may not exceed 200 words and may not be used as a surreply absent leave of Court." Smith's notice was 23 words over the character limit. Cannon warned that any further non-compliant filings would be "stricken without further notice."

Newsweek reached out to the Justice Department via email for comment.

Cannon's note comes a day after the Justice Department cautioned the judge against delaying Trump's scheduled May 2024 trial, noting that Trump was also planning to delay his March 2024 trial related to the federal election interference case. Smith's team is prosecuting both cases.

Smith's team shared Trump's request to delay the election-related case with Cannon on Thursday, telling the judge that Trump's defense "failed to disclose" that it was pursuing motions to delay the case in Washington, D.C. Trump's team had argued to Cannon that the Florida case should be postponed because it would conflict with the election interference trial.

"Defendant Trump's actions in the hours following the hearing in this case illustrate the point and confirm his overriding interest in delaying both trials at any cost," Smith told Cannon, adding that the court should not be "manipulated in this fashion."

Bratt had also told the judge during a Wednesday hearing that, "The court really cannot let and should not let the D.C. trial drive the schedule here."

"We don't know what is going to happen in this case. We don't know what's going to happen in the D.C. case. That trial could disappear," the prosecutor said.

Trump's team is attempting to delay his various trials until after the 2024 election. So far, three of Trump's four criminal trials have been scheduled. The Manhattan case involving the hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels is also set for March 2024.

Cannon, who heard arguments Wednesday, signaled that she would likely give into Trump's request to push the May 20 trial date but has not made a final decision.

"I'm just having a hard time seeing how realistically this work can be accomplished in this compressed period of time, given the realities that we're facing," she said during the hearing, adding that she'd set a new timeline "as soon as possible."

Critics and legal scholars have argued that Cannon has shown favor to Trump, initially raising concerns last year when she granted Trump's request for a special master.>

That's a good little shill....you got recommended by Leonard Leo....time to pay off and be set for life.

<As Medicare Advantage plans rely increasingly upon artificial intelligence to determine—and often deny—payment for patient care, a group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers on Friday urged Medicare's top official to strengthen oversight of AI and algorithmic tools used to make coverage determinations.

"In recent years, problems posed by prior authorization have been exacerbated by MA plans' increasing use of AI or algorithmic software to assist in their coverage determinations in certain care settings, including inpatient hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health," 32 House Democrats led by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) wrote in a letter to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Books LaSure.

"Advocates and the media report that the use of such software has led to coverage decisions that are more restrictive than allowed under traditional Medicare rules, as well as more frequent and repeated denials of care," the lawmakers wrote. "Absent prohibiting the use of AI/algorithmic tools outright, it is unclear how CMS is monitoring and evaluating MA plans' use of such tools in order ensure that plans comply with Medicare's rules and do not inappropriately create barriers to care."

The lawmakers are calling on CMS to take steps including, but not limited to:

・Requiring MA plans to report prior authorization data including reason for denial, by type of service, beneficiary characteristics (such as health conditions), and timeliness of prior authorization decisions;

・Comparing "guidance" generated by AI and algorithmic tools with actual MA coverage decisions;

・Assessing how and to what extent initial prior-authorized AI determinations for services are adjusted to account for unanticipated changes in a patients' condition;

・Requiring attestation from MA plans and contractors that their coverage guidelines are not more restrictive than traditional Medicare; and

・Determining whether MA plans are inappropriately using race/other factors in these algorithms.

MA plans are not part of Medicare. They are a private health insurance "scam" created by a GOP-controlled Congress and signed into law 20 years ago by then-President George W. Bush "as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies," according to frequent Common Dreams opinion contributor Thom Hartmann.

A report published last month by Physicians for a National Health Program revealed that MA plans are overcharging U.S. taxpayers by up to $140 billion per year, enough to completely eliminate Medicare Part B premiums or fully fund Medicare's prescription drug program.

The lawmakers' letter is endorsed by advocacy groups including the Center for Medicare Advocacy, Public Citizen, Social Security Works, Center for Health and Democracy, and Business Leaders for Health Care Transformation.

"The use of AI by Medicare Advantage insurers to deny needed care to seniors and people with disabilities represents the most recent and dangerous step by greedy companies focused on profit instead of patients," Public Citizen executive vice president Lisa Gilbert said in a statement.

"Now is the time for CMS to crack down on companies that are using AI and other mechanisms to deny care that would be covered if the enrollee were covered by traditional Medicare," Gilbert added. "Understanding how Medicare Advantage insurers are using AI to deny needed care and holding bad actors accountable are crucial steps to protecting seniors and the Medicare program."

Last year, a U.S. Senate probe found that insurance companies and other brokers are "running amok" with "fraudsters and scam artists" making false or misleading claims to dupe senior citizens into purchasing MA plans.

Progressive lawmakers have also criticized President Joe Biden for delaying promised curbs on Medicare Advantage plans amid heavy insurance industry lobbying.

Earlier this year, Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.)—one of the 32 lawmakers who signed the letter to Brooks LaSure—Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and Jan Schakowsky reintroduced a bill to change the official name of MA to "alternative private health plan" to make clear that such coverage is offered by for-profit companies.

"The scheme is called Medicare Advantage," Pocan and Khanna explained. "But in reality, so-called 'Medicare Advantage' is neither Medicare nor an advantage.">

<Embattled Republican Rep. George Santos of New York is adamant that his inflated resume didn't get him into Congress. And he's vowing to ask the same people he lied to to send him back even if his current colleagues kick him out.

"Nobody elected me because I played volleyball or not," Santos told CNN's Manu Raju in an interview that will air in full on Sunday. "Nobody elected me because I graduated college or not. People elected me because I said I'd come here to fight the swamp, I'd come here to lower inflation, create more jobs, make life more affordable, and the commitment to America."

Santos' defiant stance comes after his colleagues once again voted down an effort to expel him from Congress. On Wednesday, Santos survived on a 179 to 213 vote, well short of the two-thirds majority needed to make him just the sixth lawmaker to ever be kicked out of the House. The latest vote came after Santos' fellow New York freshmen Republicans abruptly turned against him and forced another expulsion vote.

"Look, could I have won the general election last time? Nobody said I could," he said. "Elections are tricky. There's no predetermined outcome."

The Cook Political Report rates Santos' seat as "Lean Democrat," the second-worst outlook for any district that is currently represented by a Republican.

Santos' survival may be short-lived. Many of the 31 Democrats who voted against his expulsion stressed that they were only doing so because Santos had not been found guilty in federal court. Some lawmakers also pointed out that the House Ethics Committee has yet to complete its own investigation of Santos. Leaders of the ethics panel in a rare public statement said it would announce its next action no later than November 17.

After multiple bombshell reports, Santos admitted that he lied to voters about graduating from college and having played for Baruch College's volleyball team. Even more troubling for Santos, he faces federal charges of conspiracy, wire, credit card fraud, and identity theft. In a development that helped spark the latest expulsion vote, Santos' former campaign treasurer flipped and admitted to prosecutors that she and Santos falsified nonexistent campaign donations to inflate his fundraising totals.

Santos is a mixture of a pariah and a punchline inside the Capitol. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended the New Yorker with due process concerns, though he laughed about Santos' reelection prospects. Newly-elected Speaker Mike Johnson has been even more explicit that part of the reason GOP leadership has opposed Santos' expulsion is that they can't afford to make their razor-thin majority even smaller. Unlike the Senate, House vacancies cannot be filled by appointment; they can only be elected via a special election.>

<During an exclusive interview with former Trump Administration Press Secretary and current Fox News Host Kayleigh McEnany, the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA), attempted to address the accusation that he does not support the separation of church and state.

McEnany: Here is the House Speaker responding to the accusation that he does not want a separation of church and state.

Johnson: The establishment clause was the first clause, and the framers of the Constitution considered it important because they had experienced the merging of church and state in England. They wanted to ensure that no laws would dictate a specific faith, denomination, or religion.

What was not mentioned is that Johnson delivered a speech in April 2023 in which he argued that the separation of church and state was not meant to keep religion from influencing the government.

Johnson: Most people today insisting on a strict separation of church and state may not be aware that this phrase does not originate from the Constitution itself but rather from a personal letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. Jefferson explained that the First Amendment was designed to safeguard individual rights of conscience by ensuring that the government would not establish a religion or hinder religious practices. The intention was not to keep religion from influencing civil government but to prevent the federal government from obstructing religious freedom. The founders aimed to protect religious institutions from undue government influence. Most of the founders, having witnessed the abuses of the Church of England, were committed to preventing the official establishment of any single national denomination or religion.

The discussion also did not include McEnany's previous statements on the separation of church and state.

McEnany: It's ironic to me that God, someone you can trust, is being marginalized in society. God was an integral part of our founding, mentioned in many of our founding documents. The term 'separation of church and state' is not found in our founding documents, yet it has been used to create a religion of secularism.>

Gooood little cutout: c'mere, good little cutout.

<Rep. Ken Buck has had enough.

When the Colorado Republican announced this past week that he would not seek reelection, he began with the type of criticism of Democratic policies that is standard fare for a hard-line conservative. But then Buck turned his ire to fellow Republicans, spending most of the three-minute announcement video accusing them of being “obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”

Buck’s scorched-earth approach caught few on Capitol Hill by surprise.

With a deadpan demeanor, an independent streak and a background as a federal prosecutor, Buck has gained national prominence as a House Republican fed up with Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and the Trump allies in Congress who amplify them. It’s a stand few others in the GOP are taking and is a remarkable turn that shows just how deeply Trump’s once-fringe lies about that race have settled into the Republican mainstream.

Buck regularly appears on networks such as CNN and, with no plans to leave Congress before the end of his term, he probably will be a prominent foil to Republicans during his final months in office. His political heresy extends to the impeachment inquiry into Biden, which Buck has dismissed as baseless.

“Our nation is on a collision course with reality, and a steadfast commitment to truth — even uncomfortable truths — is the only way forward,” Buck said in the video.

Yet under political pressure in Colorado, Buck decided there was no way forward for him in Congress.

Trump celebrated Buck’s impending departure, saying on social media that the congressman “knew long ago he could never win against MAGA, so now he is, like some past and present, auditioning” for a network television job. “MAGA” is short for the 2016 Trump campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Buck is hardly the first GOP lawmaker to step away from Capitol Hill in frustration in recent years. But unlike other outspoken House Republicans who grew alienated from their colleagues before leaving office, such as former Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Buck hails from the far-right House Freedom Caucus, putting him at the center of the conservative movement.

Nearly every week, Buck leaves the Capitol complex to attend caucus meetings, where lawmakers strategize about how to disrupt business as usual in Washington. He has proposed drastic budget reductions, strict sanctions against TikTok and cuts for educational material that teaches slavery was central to the nation’s founding.

Buck was also among the eight Republicans who voted to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. as speaker and accused him of failing to follow through on his promise to slash spending.

“The critical issue for me is to bend the spending curve and you do that with institutional changes,” Buck told The Associated Press in September. “Nobody has been willing to change this place.”

While Buck in his five House terms has aggressively pushed policy to the right, he has simultaneously resisted what he calls “a populist flavor in the party” that has ascended with Trump.

“Ken is a constitutionalist who tries to make good decisions based on principle,” said Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a fellow caucus member. “I think he’s an important voice, and I’ll certainly miss him.”

Buck has publicly feuded with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a high-profile Trump ally who calls Buck a “CNN wannabe.” Buck has criticized how Greene and other Republicans have become public advocates for people charged in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

“When I was teaching law school, I learned and taught certain constitutional principles,” Buck told a Denver radio show, referencing his time at the University of Denver. “When Marjorie Taylor Greene was teaching CrossFit, she learned a whole different set of values, evidently, because my idea of what this country should be like is based on the Constitution.” Greene was once a co-owner of CrossFit affiliate gym in Georgia.

Buck’s experience in constitutional law predates his time teaching law school. After completing a bachelor’s degree at Princeton University and a law degree at the University of Wyoming, Buck worked for then-Wyoming Rep. Dick Cheney, who was the top Republican on the committee investigating the Reagan administration for the Iran-Contra affair. Cheney, who is Liz Cheney’s father, eventually issued a minority report that argued that President Ronald Reagan had wide latitude to conduct foreign policy and described the president’s actions as “mistakes in judgment, and nothing more.”.....>

<....Buck called Iran-Contra a “constitutional crisis” that impressed upon him the importance of Congress not overstepping its powers. He also said a different approach to politics ruled Washington in those days: Democratic and Republican lawmakers were genuinely friends and built trust that led to bipartisan achievements.

Buck later returned to the West and a law career that included directing the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Colorado. He departed the office after receiving a reprimand for remarks he made about a case to a defense attorney for gun dealers that undermined the prosecution. Buck was later elected as a district attorney in northeast Colorado.

Buck reentered national politics as the tea party gained prominence and he ran seat against Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in 2010. Buck lost, and Colorado, then a battleground state, has become increasingly dominated by Democrats.

In 2014, Buck made a comeback, winning a House district that spans the entire eastern third of the state, from ranch land to Denver suburbs.

During his five terms in Congress, Buck for a time held a spot on the powerful House Rules Committee, where he sat next to Liz Cheney. He also was the top Republican on the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee. He gained a reputation as a strict conservative who would listen to Democrats and work with them on occasion.

“I’ve always found him to be incredibly straightforward, intellectually curious, willing to disagree without being disagreeable,” said Rep. Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat who represents a district adjacent to Buck’s.

Buck formed an unlikely alliance with former Rep. David Cicilline when the Rhode Island Democrat was chairman of the antitrust panel. They managed to advance a series of bills that sought to diminish the power that tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Meta and Google hold in the online market. Some bills were signed into law by Biden.

Cicilline said Buck defied the will of both Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who was the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican and is now the chairman, and McCarthy, who was the House Republican leader before becoming speaker, as Buck worked on the investigations into the tech companies.

“He has demonstrated that he does what he thinks is right, even if it means standing up to his own party leadership,” said Cicilline, who left office in May to head a nonprofit.

In recent weeks, Buck was at the center of moves against both McCarthy and Jordan. He provided a crucial vote to oust McCarthy. Then when hard-line conservatives made Jordan the Republican nominee for speaker, Buck voted against him. Alone among Republicans, Buck said he was opposing Jordan because he had not clearly stated that Biden won the 2020 election.

Buck said opposing Jordan unleashed a wave of vitriol from Republican activists and led to him being evicted from a district office in Colorado.

This past week, Trump called Buck a “weak and ineffective Super RINO,” or Republicans In Name Only. The next day, Buck testified about a legal effort in Colorado to ban Trump from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrection clause.” True to form, Buck’s stance defied easy categorization. He testified against banning Trump from the election.

Buck said the events of recent weeks showed him the House no longer allowed for reasonable disagreement.

“This is a real honor to serve here,” he said, “But it’s also a pain in the rear end.”>

<Exactly a year out from the 2024 elections, the battle for control of Congress is as tight as it possibly could be and might be headed for one of the more historic outcomes ever.

Needing a net gain of just five seats to claim the majority, House Democrats are close to an even-money bet to prevail Nov. 5, 2024, according to a survey of top nonpartisan analysts, with 11 Republican seats in deep-blue California and New York among the Democrats’ top targets.

Democrats are trying to buck almost 75 years of history in which the House majority has not changed hands during a presidential election cycle.

And Senate Republicans, needing a two-seat gain for a full majority, enter 2024 without a single seat of their own in jeopardy, so far, as Democrats defend three seats in states Donald Trump won easily in 2020 and four others the ex-president lost narrowly.

All this turmoil has created the possibility of a historic anomaly that would befit the incredibly volatile political climate of the past three decades: Never before have the House and Senate majorities switched hands in the same election with a different party taking over in each chamber.

Amy Walter, the editor of the Cook Political Report, labeled this the era of “both incredible stability and volatility all at once.” So many voters reflexively support their political team that neither party can gain much of an edge, but these majorities are changing hands at a historically unusual pace.

The House has flipped five times since the 1994 elections, the Senate six times.

The post-World War II era of Congress had a similar but brief period of flip-flopping majorities. But the 1954 elections started a 40-year run in which the House remained Democratic and the Senate majority changed just twice.

As Nathan Gonzales, the editor of the nonpartisan Inside Elections, noted, the result is that both chambers are locked into such close ranges that predicting majorities is like a roll of the dice.

Even the outcome of the presidential race, with a rematch of Trump against President Biden appearing likely, could produce strange down-ballot effects because of the differing political territory each party is targeting.

“Republicans can win the Senate by simply winning states that Trump could win in a presidential loss. And Democrats can win the House by winning districts Biden could win in a presidential loss,” Gonzales said.

Think about that: A narrow Trump win in the electoral college could give the GOP a Senate majority, but could come with Republicans losing the House, while a narrow Biden win probably would help Democrats reclaim the House but not do enough to help them hold the Senate.

Recent political events that have dominated the news cycle — such as the Israel-Gaza war or the three-week-plus shutdown of the House during the GOP’s speaker melodrama — might not have any impact a year from now on the small percentage of undecided voters in those few House districts and Senate races that will determine the outcomes.

“Things that would have had huge consequences back in the 1990s — impeachment, House speaker chaos, a January 6th type of event — only move things slightly on the margins,” Walter said.

In eight of the last 17 presidential campaigns, the victor helped his party down ballot but not enough to deliver a House majority. In two other races — 2000 and 2016 — the Democratic nominee won the popular vote while losing in the electoral count, helping gain a few seats, but the GOP majority held on in the House. (The other presidential contests ended with a winner whose party already held the House and retained control.)

Recent midterm elections have brought political upheaval: Five of the last eight resulted in the House majority changing hands.

But the coming House elections are considered a toss-up, the best chance the minority has had to win the chamber in a presidential year since 1952, when the House GOP swept to the majority after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s landslide victory for the White House.

Gonzales’s Inside Elections rates 16 GOP seats in its most competitive range, either pure “toss-up” or a “tilt” toward the Republicans. Just 10 Democratic seats fall into those categories. The Cook Political Report has a similar range, with 15 GOP seats and nine Democratic in the most competitive range....>

<.....Dave Wasserman, a senior editor and analyst with the Cook Political Report, laid out some stark numbers for House Republicans in an essay published Wednesday:

18 Republicans hold seats in districts that favored Biden in 2020.

11 of those are in California and New York, deeply Democratic states that expect much better liberal turnout in a presidential election.

A majority of those endangered Republicans are freshmen, with less brand durability built up on the basis of their voters.

Democrats are defending just five seats in districts won by Trump.

By some estimates, House Republicans whiffed on eight seats last year because of far-right candidates who were out of touch with most voters.

Wasserman credited House GOP leaders with an early focus on raising money directly into their incumbents’ campaign coffers, putting less focus on donations to the National Republican Congressional Committee. That approach has produced a median cash on hand of $1.4 million for endangered Republicans, as of Oct. 1, more than triple the cash-on-hand median for their Democratic challengers, according to Wasserman’s analysis.

This is a new focus for Republicans, who have spent the past several elections relying on a dozen or two megadonors who give seven- and eight-figure checks to their super PACs, the con Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund, trying to offset the overwhelming fundraising edge that Democrats have with individual, small-dollar donors.

Inside Elections and the Cook Political Report are awaiting the resolution of legal disputes about the redrawing of congressional district maps, along with better information about some potential retirements, before getting into detailed overall predictions about the House. Republicans are poised to gain several seats in North Carolina, barring the outcome of lawsuits, but Democrats should pick up a few seats from newly drawn districts in the Deep South to meet a Supreme Court ruling to uphold the Voting Rights Act.

A potential new map in New York state could give Democrats the overall edge, very slightly, in this bout of redistricting.

“Developments that used to seem like drops in the bucket — a court striking down a redistricting map here, a retirement or special election there — have taken on outsize importance,” Wasserman wrote.

In the Senate, currently 51-49 in favor of the Democrats, the biggest wild card, just as in the House races, isn’t likely to be the national political environment.

It’s the looming decision of Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who is considered the only Democrat who could possibly win in that deeply conservative state.

Should Manchin, 76, retire, Republicans should easily win that seat and Democrats would be forced to win every other competitive race and retain the White House to maintain control of the Senate.

The majority in a 50-50 Senate will be determined by whoever holds the vice president’s tiebreaking vote in 2025, as was the case in 2021-2022 with Democrats and Vice President Harris.

The Trump effect remains a key concern for Senate Republicans, after they saw poor candidates closely aligned with the ex-president lose four 2022 races that should have been a coin flip, at least.

The GOP believes Dave McCormick, the runner-up in the 2022 U.S. Senate primary in Pennsylvania, and Tim Sheehy, an aerospace chief executive in Montana, are those types of candidates — and both are super rich and can self-finance their races.

But in Arizona, Trump-fixated Kari Lake is the front-runner, and in Ohio, a multicandidate field has emerged with the top contenders trying to run to the right.

Charlie Cook, the unofficial godfather of American political analysts and the founder of the Cook Political Report four decades ago, believes Trump, not abortion rights, played the biggest role in saving Democrats from big losses in the 2022 midterms.

From the 2018 midterms to 2022, Democrats’ vote total dropped from about 61 million to 51 million in all 435 races for the House, Cook Political Report estimated, with Republicans going from 51 million to 54 million.

The 2018 races provided extraordinary liberal anti-Trump energy, except in deeply conservative states, which helped Senate Republicans gain two seats as Democrats picked up more than 40 and won the House majority.

In the 2022 midterms, more-mainstream Republicans held up just fine, or won big, in congressional and gubernatorial races. If Trump is on the ballot again, his presence should energize those voters in conservative states such as Montana but also energize liberal voters on the coasts.

That could help shift the Senate to Republicans and the House to Democrats.

<Before Donald Trump faces a jury of his peers, the former president appears increasingly likely to seek help from a Supreme Court that he helped build.

In a series of court filings and arguments in recent weeks, Trump’s legal team has laid the potential groundwork for a review by the nation’s highest court and its conservative majority of a bevy of legal questions unique to his post-presidency and American history.

Trump’s legal team appealed a partial gag order in the election-subversion case to a mid-level federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. late last month, and in the same case, asked a judge Wednesday to halt all proceedings until she rules on their motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds of “presidential immunity.” In response to litigation across the country this year, Trump and his allies have intimated that the Supreme Court may hold the best hope of granting the former president a favorable ruling.

“We will appeal, and we will win that appeal,” Trump said of his D.C. indictment in a video posted to social media later that month. “It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede,” Trump said in another post on Truth Social.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority includes three jurists nominated by Trump: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. But they are still not shoe-ins to side with him. The high court has sided against Trump or failed to take up his arguments in recent cases involving Congressional efforts to obtain his tax returns, the 2020 election, and other topics. The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case brought by his former 2020 election attorney, John Eastman stemming from a dispute with the Congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The legal jockeying falls against the backdrop of a political landscape in which any delay could be just as helpful to Trump as a high court victory. The former president holds a commanding lead in the race for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nod. While 91 state and federal felony charges stand in the path of his return to the White House, a victory in the presidential race would give Trump the constitutional power to try and pardon himself of any federal convictions – but not state convictions. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges in all four jurisdictions in which he has been indicted this year.

Gag order prompts threat of SCOTUS appeal

The first item to make its way through to a federal appeals court in the two federal criminal proceedings against Trump–and to bring about the prospect of a Supreme Court appeal–is the former president’s appeal of a gag order in the Washington, D.C. case.

On Oct. 17, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a three-page gag order prohibiting not just Trump but all parties to the case from making statements that “target” prosecutors or their staff, defense lawyers or their staff, court staff and supporting personnel, and "any reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony."

Trump’s legal team responded to the gag order with a two-pronged approach, filing an immediate appeal with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and a separate motion asking Chutkan to remove the gag order while the appeal was pending.

"No court in American history has imposed a gag order on a criminal defendant who is campaigning for public office—least of all, on the leading candidate for President of the United States," Trump's lawyers wrote in their Oct. 20 motion seeking the removal of the gag order.

Chutkan temporarily paused the gag order to give both parties an opportunity to present briefings on the topic. After prosecutors filed a briefing citing Trump’s “continued targeting of witnesses,” Chutkan reinstated the order in an order on Oct. 30.

Trump’s legal team on Thursday night escalated the matter, filing an emergency motion with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals asking for the gag order to be administratively paused while their appeal is pending–and threatening a possible Supreme Court appeal.

“The prosecution’s request for a gag order bristles with hostility to President Trump’s viewpoint and his relentless criticism of the government—including of the prosecution itself,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the Thursday filing. “The gag order embodies this unconstitutional hostility to President Trump’s viewpoint.”....>

<.....Trump’s lawyers asked for the appellate court to rule by Nov. 10, and to pause the gag order while it considered the motion. “If the Court denies this motion,” the former president’s defense team wrote, “President Trump requests that the court extend its administrative stay for seven days to allow him to seek relief from the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The D.C. Circuit late Friday answered Trump with an administrative stay of Chutkan's gag order that will last at least until Nov. 20 oral arguments before a three-judge panel.

Legal experts expressed skepticism about Trump’s likelihood of scoring a high court victory on the gag order.

Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb said he does not expect the gag order issue to get to the Supreme Court.

“I don't see the Supreme Court ever taking that up, as gag orders are routine and Trump’s status as a presidential candidate is not a legal defense to a gag order any more than if Jeffrey Dahmer had decided to run for president,” he said.

Anthony Coley, a former Biden Justice Department spokesman, also said he expects Trump to lose on the gag order appeal.

“This court, even with this conservative majority, will come down on the side of decorum and the evenhanded administration of justice and will ultimately uphold this limited gag order Judge Chutkan has put in place,” Cooley said.

A Trump spokesperson said Friday in a statement to The Messenger: “As reflected in [the] emergency stay motion filed in the D.C. Circuit yesterday, we are vigorously defending President Trump’s constitutional rights and those of the tens of millions of Americans who follow his speech."

“We are seeking immediate review on appeal, and will do the same in the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary," the spokesperson added. "We will apply the same vigorous defense to other issues raised in the criminal cases, such as those raising First Amendment and Presidential immunity defenses.”

Precedent for appeals to ‘move expeditiously’

Legal experts said while there are few downsides for Trump’s legal team in appealing as many issues as possible, pre-trial appeals in criminal cases are rarely fruitful.

While it is likely that an appeal might eventually get to the Supreme Court if there's a guilty verdict in one or more of Trump’s cases, it is far less likely that the highest court will rule on any appeals before a final judgment.

Some legal observers envision fast action on any preliminary activity related to the Trump criminal cases given their historic nature, intense publicity, and proximity to the 2024 presidential election.

Coley noted as one example how quickly the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals got involved last fall to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. The appellate court ruled that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction" in granting Trump’s request for a special master to review materials seized in the execution of a federal search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

"There's precedent for the appellate court certainly, if not the Supreme Court, to move expeditiously with these types of court cases,” Coley said.....>

<.....The former president’s legal team has also argued that Trump has “presidential immunity” from criminal prosecution, and that he was merely acting on advice of his election lawyers in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest–two claims that could lay the groundwork for a high court appeal.

A former senior Trump DOJ official predicted the gag order fight could make it to the Supreme Court before the DC trial, but sounded skeptical on anything dealing with the merits surrounding the charges.

“There’s a multitude of things that could happen so why would they get involved in the substantive charges unless they need to,” the former DOJ official said.

Trump’s attorneys have also argued that he should be immune from prosecution on matters related to the 2020 presidential election because the U.S. Senate, with a 57-43 vote in Trump’s second impeachment trial in February 2021, acquitted him of an incitement of insurrection charge. The Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits the government from prosecuting anyone twice for the same crime.

Cobb, Trump’s former White House attorney, said that the double jeopardy argument is “frivolous” because impeachment is a legislative procedure, while criminal cases are conducted via the judicial branch of the government.

"All of these motions are frivolous,” he said. “They're only interposed for delay."

‘They don’t help me much’

After Trump’s social media post calling for Supreme Court intervention in his Washington, D.C., case his allies and defenders shared mixed reviews.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University School of Law, said Trump’s plea on social media for the high court to intercede was “entirely tone deaf.”

“The justices are not keen on being called forth with a MAGA cheer,” wrote Turley, who is also a contributing columnist for The Messenger. “That is true even if they agree, as I do, that this indictment goes too far and should be addressed by the Court.”

Others, including Harvard University Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz , said Trump was justified.

“I think he may lose in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but he will probably win in the United States Supreme Court, if they grant review,” Dershowitz said in a Fox News interview. “And they should grant review. When you have the president of the United States’ people going after his opponent in a political election, it has to be beyond reproach. It has to be without any problem. It has to be the strongest case in history. This doesn’t meet this standard.”

Trump, for his part, has acknowledged that he may face steep odds even in a Supreme Court where one-third of the judges are his appointees. The current Supreme Court has sided against Trump or declined to hear his appeals in matters ranging from a Congressional subpoena for his tax returns to litigation over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“We have great judges, great justices,” Trump said in remarks at a September rally in South Dakota. “I face volatile attacks from the radical left. With three Supreme Court justices–all outstanding people–they don't help me much. I've got to tell you that. They vote against me too much.”

“They are outstanding people and great scholars, brilliant,” Trump added. “They've done a very good job. Except for me, they've done a very good job.”>

<Special Counsel Jack Smith, may regret "toughing it out" instead of seeking to recuse the judge overseeing the Donald Trump classified documents case, a legal analyst has said.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance wrote that Trump appointee Aileen Cannon is locked in "an inexplicable grudge match with the special counsel's office." Vance served as United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017.

Smith is a Department of Justice special counsel in charge of prosecuting Trump for both the classified documents case and the former president's Washington D.C. indictment for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election.

Writing in her Civil Discourse blog on the Substack writing site, Vance said that Smith should have sought Cannon's removal "straight off the bat when he had the opportunity." During his presidency, Trump appointed Cannon as a federal judge for south Florida, where he is currently indicted for allegedly hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.

"The reality is that Judge Cannon lacks the temperament to be a federal judge, at least in a case involving the man who put her on the bench. Perhaps she wants to avoid displeasing people whose support she thinks she may need in the future. Perhaps she would have ruled this way in any event," Vance wrote on Saturday.

Vance was reacting after Trump's lawyers asked Cannon to delay the Florida trial because it was scheduled too close to his election interference trial in Washington D.C. After making the request in Florida, the former president's legal team then asked the judge in the district to delay that trial as well.

Prosecutors wrote a brief note to Cannon questioning why Trump's lawyers were seeking to delay the Florida trial if they were also seeking to delay the D.C trial—potentially causing another clash.

"I wondered whether Judge Cannon, who has been so unstinting in her criticism of prosecutors, might have some to spare for Trump's lawyers now," Vance wrote.

"But she did not. Instead, she chastised prosecutors for violating local rules. She didn't show any concern about the Trump lawyers' failure to advise her of the motion they'd made in D.C."

"Lawyers have a duty to be candid with the court[...]Judges take it seriously. At least, most judges do," Vance wrote, adding that she believed Trump's lawyers were trying to deceive Cannon by not telling her that they were also seeking a delay in the Washington D.C. case.

"She acted as though prosecutors had committed a major offense, rather than trying to set the record straight when the defense failed to do so. Perhaps the judge believes it would be better to litigate in a world where parties are afraid to bring deception to the court's attention for fear of being sanctioned? That is not how the American system of justice is supposed to work," Vance wrote.

Last week, prosecutors also objected to Cannon's decision to delay the pre-trial schedule.

Cannon's ruling could significantly delay the Florida trial, which is due to start in May.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told Newsweek that Smith would face major hurdles in any efforts to remove Cannon.

"Will Cannon be removed? Smith has to go to the circuit to get a new judge and success in any such effort at this point seems highly improbable. Frankly, one might be forgiven for concluding that Cannon doesn't want to try the case. If Trump wins, she won't have to," Gillers said, suggesting that Trump will have the Florida case annulled if he is reelected president.

Stephen E. Smith, a legal professor at Santa Clara University in California, told Newsweek that he "can't imagine or even picture the procedure" by which Cannon might be removed. "The chief judge of the district is not going to reach into a case and reassign it just because they think mistakes are being made," he said.

While Cannon has been criticized for delaying the schedule, she has had to face Trump lawyers arguing over the disclosure of more than 1 million pages of evidence.

There was also the added complexity of establishing secure rooms in which both prosecutors and defense lawyers can review the highly sensitive documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump pleaded not guilty in June to 37 criminal counts related to his handling of materials after prosecutors alleged he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information. In August, Trump maintained his innocence in three additional felony charges in the Florida case.

The same month, he pleaded not guilty to charges of illegally attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.>

<Ballot initiatives are an essential evolution of American democracy. Created over a century ago, they give millions of Americans a direct means to shape the laws that govern their lives and a check on legislative power when it’s not responsive to the people. In recent months, though, conservative politicians’ efforts to undermine the ballot process have taken a disturbing shift. Beyond their continued attempts to impose supermajority voter thresholds to make passing such initiatives nearly impossible, they have also resorted to manipulating ballot titles to deliberately confuse voters. The 2023 elections are a testing ground for this insidious tactic. Unless met head-on, it will spread like wildfire in 2024.

The ballot title is a concise summary intended to accurately convey the gist of a proposed law or measure. For many voters, this title is the only information they see before casting their ballots. As a result, the title needs to be accurate, concise and impartial. Research has shown that the change in ballot language dramatically impacts the support of initiative.

States differ in laws governing whether the ballot title is determined before signatures are collected or after. In some states, the government determines the ballot title before signatures are collected, without the direct input of the citizens who initiated the petition. This happens in states like Arizona, Michigan and Nebraska, and further highlights the importance of ensuring that the government’s role in determining the ballot title is transparent and impartial.

Roughly two-thirds of states with ballot initiatives, including California, Massachusetts, Missouri and Ohio, use ballot titles that rely on language within the petition. This approach ensures continuity and fairness, as the language in the petition was shared during voter outreach. But while a fundamental aspect of direct democracy is preserved, this method remains vulnerable to manipulation by disingenuous politicians.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and the success of stopping abortion bans and protecting reproductive rights at the ballot box, attacks on the initiative process have escalated. Conservative politicians recognize the combined strength of the reproductive freedom movement alongside ballot initiatives’ potential to advance policies that resonate across party lines.

Over the summer, Ohio took center stage in this fight. The Republican-controlled Legislature proposed State Issue 1, which would have unreasonably increased signature requirements and raised the voter threshold for approving future initiatives to 60%. Had it passed, the measure would have made citizen-led initiatives infinitely more costly and difficult to get on the ballot, let alone pass. Ohio Republicans spent approximately $20 million to place the measure in an August special election, hoping low voter turnout would let it sneak to passage. Instead, over 3 million ballots were cast, and State Issue 1 was irrefutably defeated, demonstrating Ohioans’ dedication to preserving direct democracy.

Undeterred, Ohio Republicans then manipulated the title of a pro-abortion measure on the ballot on Tuesday, including removing the language of fetal viability. After Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights launched a lawsuit against the Republican-controlled state Ballot Board, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled that one element of the disputed ballot language was misleading and must be rewritten. While most of the word choices targeted in the lawsuit remained unchanged and deliberately deceiving, without the people’s intervention, it could have been worse....>

<....The effort to protect the initiative process is far from over. Conservatives in Idaho and Florida have made similar attempts to implement inaccurate ballot titles. In Missouri, the appeals court is set to hear arguments after a county judge rewrote the ballot language for six proposed initiatives. And the Missouri State House approved a 57% threshold in the closing days of this year’s session in May. Though that effort died in the state Senate, conservative state representatives are pressuring legislative leadership to act in the face of a possible reproductive rights initiative.

Even when we are successful in thwarting these efforts, we must stay prepared for these attacks to continue ahead of the 2024 election. Fortunately, voters in states like Arkansas, Ohio, Idaho and Missouri are fighting these calculated tactics, safeguarding the integrity of the initiative process and the will of the people. The resistance that’s developed across the country, including in deep red states, shows that people and lawmakers are willing to stand up against tactics that erode our fundamental democratic rights.

After facing ongoing, calculated attacks, one thing is certain — the fight to protect the initiative process is a battle of voters being able to have their voices heard. Next year, we are likely to see ballot initiatives address issues like abortion rights in Florida, paid sick leave in Nebraska and redistricting in Ohio. The deliberate manipulation of ballot titles is a brazen attempt to confuse voters, deny their right to representation and erode the people’s trust in the initiative process. If biased and inaccurate ballot titles become standard, conservative leaders will be able to further undermine the initiative process and consolidate their power.

Despite these mounting efforts to erode direct democracy, voters continue to show up, to vote, to protect this initiative process. But we must never take this for granted. So much is at stake for the future of democracy. Only proactive defense of ballot initiatives can ensure that the will of the people prevails.>

<On election day, Nov. 7, Americans will vote for thousands of candidates for public offices — governors, state officials and legislators, mayors, a multitude of county and town supervisors. Their elections will be run by an army of poll workers, many of them citizen volunteers who receive only token payment for their efforts.

They will open the polls, check voter lists, monitor voting machines and count votes. These unsung jobs embody the machinery of democracy in action, where political partisanship meets the hard reality of numbers. To work, this machinery depends on the trust of the American public, if republican government is to survive.

In recent years, we have seen right-wing activists abetted by demagogic mainstream politicians fuel baseless and ultimately subversive theories of widespread election fraud. Two-thirds of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Such suspicion has spread to infect even local contests and the most benign election practices. In 2022, no fewer than one-third of election workers reported that they knew at least one person who quit because of fears and threats.

The systematic assault on elections has begun to recall the most politically fraught period in our history, the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era of the 1860s and 1870s.

The raw violence of that era was far worse than we see today. White supremacist Democrats knew that the fragile Republican Party’s survival in the South depended on Black voters, who would have to be scared away from the polls if the Democrats were to prevail.

Thousands of newly enfranchised Black Americans and their white allies were threatened, beaten and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan simply for daring to attempt to vote in the former Confederate states. Registrars were menaced while they were making out certificates. White mobs physically pushed Black voters away from the ballot boxes. In some localities, Black voters were herded to the polls by armed men and forced to vote Democratic. In some counties, constables were too frightened to guard the polls. In Savannah, Ga., local police shot and killed several Black people and drove the rest away from the polls.

In scores of counties, the Republican vote was simply erased.

Despite such dangers, astonishing numbers of determined Black voters continued to flock to the polls enabling the Republicans to retain their majorities in Congress. Had it not been for the hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners who cast their ballots for Ulysses S. Grant, he would have lost the elections of 1868 and 1872, and Reconstruction would have come to an abrupt halt.

By 1872, the worst violence was over. But new forms of voter suppression replaced overt terrorism as white supremacists steadily regained control of the Southern states. The Supreme Court ruled in a series of decisions that the enforcement of civil rights lay with the states, not the federal government, effectively crippling the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection. From the 1880s on, literacy tests and other forms of discrimination methodically subverted Black voting, and by the 20th century almost no Black Southerners were voting at all.

In our own day, the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol showed the climate of violence that increasingly infuses our political culture. The most immediate threat, however, may be the subtler assaults on the process of elections....>

<.....Death threats against ordinary election workers have become commonplace. In some states, local vigilantes claiming to be freelance “election monitors” have sought to intimidate both voters and poll workers. In the wake of the 2020 election, self-appointed “cyber sleuths” in several states were permitted access to county voting machines in their partisan effort to find evidence of widespread fraud that supposedly prevented Donald Trump from winning re-election. Frivolous lawsuits have targeted poll workers with limited means, forcing them to defend themselves.

Other sinister trends are also at work. The systematic spread of disinformation from extremist right-wing sources continues to undermine public trust in voting and democratic institutions. False rumors of fraud remain epidemic in the right-wing ecosphere.

In the 1960s, said Douglas, Ga., Mayor Pro Tem Olivia Coley-Pearson, officials created impossible “tests” at the polls to prevent Black people from voting. “Where we are [now] is a more sophisticated means of voter suppression,” she said. “We are currently moving backwards.” Coley-Pearson herself has been charged with crimes twice for trying to help inexperienced voters cast their ballots.

In many states, Republican legislatures have arbitrarily restricted mail-in balloting, curtailed the number of days for voting, barred same-day registration and aggressively purged voter rolls, all measures that are likely to have the greatest impact on minority voters. Just in the last few weeks, Virginia removed 35,000 legal voters from its rolls. In October, Republican lawmakers in North Carolina forced through a law that could ultimately allow the GOP-controlled State Assembly to decide contested elections.

Forceful and consistent action by federal and — where possible — state authorities as well as nonpartisan citizens’ groups is essential if we are not to let our democracy slip through our fingers.

The Department of Justice must move quickly to use its existing powers to counter the intimidation of poll workers and racial discrimination against voters. More public resources must be devoted to the safety of election workers.

More trust in the election system must be established through better civics education at all ages. Former elected officials from both parties should be enlisted to support and explain election administration to build public trust. More work is also needed at every level to combat election-related disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories.

Bipartisan citizens’ groups should demand independent redistricting commissions and work to halt partisan purges of voter rolls, racial gerrymandering and restrictions on easy access to polls and early voting. They should also be prepared to sue governments that refuse to act to protect the democratic process.

These are challenging goals. But they are not impossible ones. The urgent lesson to be drawn from Reconstruction is that rights can be snatched away by partisan forces bent on eroding democracy. Passivity in the face of subversion is not a policy.>

<Donald Trump is asking the court to be strict about imposing rules on page limits when it comes to filings by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Trump's attorneys on Saturday filed a response in the D.C. case, which is being overseen by Judge Chutkan, taking issue with Smith's bid to file a briefing that goes beyond 45 pages. In that case, Trump faces allegations that he attempted to subvert the 2020 election.

The Trump filing notes that the prosecution "requests leave to file an oversized, consolidated brief in response to President Trump’s Motion to Dismiss on Statutory Grounds and Motion to Dismiss on Constitutional Grounds."

"The prosecution advises its proposed brief would exceed the 45-page limit for responses provided by LCrR 47(e)," Trump's lawyers wrote in the weekend filing. "The Court should deny the prosecution’s application."

Trump argues that, "Because the Motions raise distinct bases for dismissal, the defense believes it is more efficient and organized for the briefing to remain separated."

"This will avoid confusion over the application of any arguments to the parties’ respective briefing and will also keep the record clear on appeal by either party," the filing says. "To the extent the Court grants relief, it should prohibit the prosecution from discussing either Motion for more than 45 pages, inclusive of any combined introductory or background sections. For example, the Court should not permit the prosecution to address Constitutional issues for 60 pages."

Trump concludes by saying that he "construes the prosecution’s application as concerning only its proposed response brief."

"Accordingly, President Trump intends to file separate replies in support of his Motions, consistent with LCrR 47(d), (e) and this Court’s prior order, Doc. 82," the document reads. "Any alteration to that standard right should require a separately noticed motion and full briefing.">

<During a campaign event held in Florida on Saturday, Donald Trump continued with his usual deal of crediting himself for unearned victories, claiming to have won all 50 states during the 2020 election, although Biden took Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia for 74 electoral college votes.

"We won, the last time, 50 states, think of it, 50 states," he told the Freedom Summit, outside Orlando, Florida. "We won every state. We then did great in the election. We got 12 million more votes or so … 12 million more votes than we got the first time."

As ABC News points out, Trump "faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments, two of which are related to election interference," but that doesn't seem to be slowing him down much when it comes to consistently refusing to admit that Biden took the win against him, and will likely do it again in 2024. Funny Son-In-Law Gift, Son In Law Gift, Gift For Son-In-Law, Son-In-Law Mug Funny Son-In-Law Gift, Son In Law Gift, Gift For Son-In-Law, Son-In-Law Mug Ad Etsy
"The whole thing is a lie … the whole election is a lie," Trump continued on Saturday.

Earlier in the evening, former state governors Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie did their best to offer alternatives to Trump, with Hutchinson reminding that "There is a significant likelihood that Donald Trump will be found guilty by a jury on a felony offense next year.">

<Ahead of former President Donald Trump's testimony in his New York civil fraud trial Monday, Inside with Jen Psaki host Jen Psaki spoke with legal analyst Andrew Weissman about what the court can expect from the MAGA hopeful."

Noting that it's possible that Trump pleads the Fifth, Psaki asked Weissman, "What do you think his best tactic here is?"

He replied, "Well, he obviously has to appear in court. He is subpoenaed as a witness, so he will show up. Whether he decides to answer all of the questions I think remains to be seen. And I think some of that goes to the strategy that the attorney general's office uses. Now, as you noted, there are a lot of things that they could cross examine him on that go to the size of his apartment, how he valued Mar-a-Lago — I mean's there are sort of black and white issues that I think it's extremely hard for him to come up with a consistent theory that's not going to get him in trouble."

Weissman continued, "But they could also go big in the questioning, and ask him about all of the lies that are laid out, according to the government, in the D.C. case and in the Florida case. In other words, it's relevant that the attorney general's office says they are dealing with somebody who sort of lies as we live and breathe. And so I think when it gets to questioning that might go big, he could take the Fifth and say if it relates directly to those outstanding criminal cases, I'm not going to answer. But I think he really is going to be sort of forced to answer strategically because...if he doesn't answer, this whole case is over. The court gets to say, 'I'm finding against you just based on your Fifth amendment.'">

<Already looking ahead to the public unrest his hypothetical re-election could cause, Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly circling an idea to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, deploying the military to act as domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post reported Sunday that the drafting of such plans has largely been “unofficially outsourced” to a coalition of right-wing think tanks working under the title “Project 2025,” according to one insider and internal communications obtained by the newspaper. In response to questions, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said, “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden. President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.” The Post also reported, citing people who’ve spoken to him, that Trump has remarked in recent private conversations that he’d like to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies, including former members of his administration like Bill Barr and Gen. Mark Milley.>

Yet, at any sign of adverse action, this hypocrite cries:

'Witch hunt!'

Like this one, do ya, <fredthebore>? Do tell, kid.