<Four Texas Republicans are set to introduce a resolution opposing a bill to add the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to the federal grid.

The resolution, first shared with The Hill, is co-sponsored by Reps. Randy Weber, Troy Nehls, Pat Fallon and John Carter, and will be introduced Friday, Weber’s office told The Hill.

It says the House “recognizes the role and responsibilities the Electric Reliability Council of Texas as decided by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature, not the Federal Government; and “condemns any action by Congress or a Presidential administration to federalize Texas electricity markets.”

“In Texas, we proudly maintain our own electric grid, overseen by Texans, not the federal government, and we intend to keep it that way. Some of my Democrat colleagues had a brilliant idea to lasso the state into the national electric grid, filled with its own challenges and failures,” Weber said in a statement to The Hill. “I will continue to fight to ensure that Texas’ grid stays in the hands of Texans and not bureaucrats sitting in Washington.”

Texas’ self-contained grid made national news in early 2021 when it was knocked offline by a bout of extreme winter weather that killed hundreds of Texans. In February, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) co-sponsored a measure with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to place ERCOT under the purview of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

In a statement to The Hill, Casar mocked the resolution’s sponsors as the “pro-blackout caucus,” and added “Texans can’t afford the status quo.”

“I’m ready to work with my colleagues — Republicans and Democrats — to prevent mass blackouts, grow our economy, and save our consumers money. That’s what connecting the grid will do,” Casar added.

A spokesperson for Casar’s office also noted that part of Weber’s district, the 14th, is located in a part of the state’s southeastern region not covered by ERCOT.>

Their pertinacity is deserving of a better fate.

<You may have heard that Kari Lake, the Trump-loving election denier running for an Arizona seat in the U.S. Senate, is in an all-out sprint trying to distance herself from her extreme, antidemocratic views.

On Tuesday, she faceplanted when Arizona’s Supreme Court declined her request to toss a defamation lawsuit filed against her by a Phoenix-area election official she targeted after her failed candidacy in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race. Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican who serves as Maricopa County recorder, is suing Lake in his personal capacity over falsehoods she spread widely on social media after her loss. Lake, who has repeatedly told her followers that she was a victim of election “sabotage,” has characterized Richer’s lawsuit as an attempt to silence her.

The lawsuit is just one of the ways that voters in Maricopa, the state’s most populous county, could be reminded of Lake’s assault on their voting system as they cast their ballots. As The Arizona Republic noted, the case “could go to trial during a contentious election year in which both Richer and Lake will be running for elected offices, or immediately after in 2025.”

Lake’s team has been hard at work trying to paper over her extremism in recent weeks. On Monday, her lawyer withdrew a notice that Lake would appeal after losing her third lawsuit challenging her election loss. Lake had sought access to more than 1 million ballot envelopes, but now she doesn’t want to move forward with the charade.

Some of Lake’s attempted backpedaling has earned mockery and rebuke. This was clearest when she tried to trivialize her attacks on the late Sen. John McCain, seemingly out of concern that his Republican allies won’t back her in November. The unmistakable resentment from Meghan McCain, the senator’s daughter, in response was just a peek into the struggles that Lake is likely to face in winning over non-MAGA voters this fall.

Further complicating things is the fact that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., just announced that she won’t be running for re-election. That means non-MAGA voters will have a clear choice between Lake — assuming she wins her primary — and the Democratic opponent, which is almost certainly going to be Rep. Ruben Gallego, who has lots of name recognition in the state as a member of Arizona’s congressional delegation.

Not a great political outlook for right-wingers when it comes to this Senate race.

And the fact Lake was recently photographed with someone who has ties to white nationalism won’t help her as she tries to whitewash her extremist ways. If Republicans thought draining the “swamp” was hard, just wait until they find out how difficult it is to cleanse a Lake.>

Jaysus, wot a disingenuous dumbass.

<On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) engaged in a heated verbal altercation with British journalist Emily Maitlis. The confrontation took place at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where Greene was present as a prominent right-wing congressional ally of former President Donald Trump.

Maitlis, who is currently affiliated with The News Agents podcast but gaining recognition for her 2019 BBC interview with Prince Andrew, initially questioned Greene about her message for Republican candidate Nikki Haley following a successful Super Tuesday for Trump.

Maitlis also inquired whether Greene aspired to become Trump’s running mate in the upcoming November election. However, the conversation took a turn when Maitlis broached the topic of conspiracy theories.

Maitlis posed the question, “Can you tell me why so many people who support Donald Trump love conspiracy theories, including yourself?”

Greene promptly fired back with a smile and accused Maitlis of being a conspiracy theorist herself. Greene contended that it is the left and the media who propagate more conspiracy theories, and asserted her preference for truth and her commitment to uphold the Constitution, American freedom and place America first.

In an attempt to conclude the interview, Greene repeatedly stated, “We are all done here,” and turned to leave the conversation.

However, Maitlis persisted, “Tell us about Jewish space lasers,” a reference to the controversial statement made by Greene in a now-deleted November 2018 Facebook post in which Greene said the California wildfires may have been caused by “Jewish space lasers” linked to the Rothschild family.

The Rothschild family has been the subject of anti-Semitic tropes for many years. Greene later dismissed her crackpot theory as having been a “sarcastic social media post.”

This particular comment pushed Greene over the edge. She pointed her finger at Maitlis and retorted, “Why don’t you go talk about Jewish space lasers and why don’t you go -----?”>

She should take her act to the road with Loser Lake as the latest pairing of <dumbass and dumbasser>.

<Idon't mean to harsh Jason Palmer's mellow after his great upset victory out there in American Samoa, but while most of the elite political media was at the track handicapping the increasingly irrelevant horserace, the traditional Republican ratfcking of the eventual 2024 election has begun in earnest, and voter-suppression is already working smoothly and according to plan.

For example, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act — aka John Roberts' Day of Jubilee — is operating in the real world precisely the way it was meant to. From NPR:

A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that advocates for expanded voting access, measured the impact of the Shelby County decision between 2012 and 2022. The researchers looked at nearly a billion voter records and compared the rate at which white and nonwhite Americans vote in elections. The study refers to the difference between white voters and other groups as the "turnout gap." The gap can be wide: In three elections from 2018 to 2022, 43% of eligible white voters cast their ballots every time, while that figure for Black voters was 27%, 21% for Asian American voters and 19% for Hispanic voters, according to the Pew Research Center...the think tank found that the turnout gap was growing faster in places formerly covered under Section 5 and that it was growing fastest between white and Black voters in those areas. "What we found was that these jurisdictions fell back into their pattern of adopting laws and policies that made voting difficult for people of color," says Kareem Crayton, the center's senior director for voting rights and representation.

Yes, there are the perpetually cited "other factors" that may play into this situation, but the fact is that the destruction of the Voting Rights Act was central to the decades-long conservative project to roll back the achievements of the civil rights movement. Hell, it was the Chief Justice's reason for living from the time he was a baby reactionary. And we are now seeing how successful that project has become. The study compared the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in areas once covered under Section 5 with estimates of the turnout gap in places that were never part of Section 5 but had similar demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It found that between 2012 and 2022, the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in counties once covered under Section 5 grew by 9 percentage points, while the gap in noncovered counties went up by 5 points. Similarly, the gap between white and only Black voters in Section 5 areas grew by 11 points, while the gap in noncovered comparable areas rose by 6 points since the Supreme Court ruling. And, as a rather overlooked story in the New York Times reported on Sunday, there are forces at work to shore up the famous victory over voting rights that the Supreme Court handed to the conservative movement and to its public manifestation, the Republican Party....>

<....Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push. In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an active-duty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.

Round up the usual suspects.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation. Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections. The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. I thought we were pretty much done with the dangerous nuisance that is True The Vote when it got beaten like a tin drum down in Georgia back in the fall. From the AP:

A Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group’s refusal to share evidence with investigators. In their written response, attorneys for True the Vote said the group had no names or other documentary evidence to share...True the Vote’s assertions were relied upon heavily for “2000 Mules,” a widely debunked film by conservative pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. A State Election Board investigation found that surveillance camera footage that the film claimed showed ballot stuffing actually showed people submitting ballots for themselves and family members who lived with them, which is allowed under Georgia law. Unfortunately, in this, I had ignored my hard and fast rule regarding conservative chicanery — that, due to an almost limitless reservoir of corporate and conservative legacy money, nothing is ever truly settled, nothing is ever truly solved. No rights are entirely secure.>

<A senior member of Nikki Haley’s campaign team fired back at Kari Lake after the Republican Senate candidate from Arizona seemingly gloated about the end of her presidential campaign.

A Donald Trump-endorsed candidate, Ms Lake posted on X that Ms Haley was set to suspend her 2024 campaign, following “more humiliating, landslide losses on Super Tuesday”.

In a throwback to Meghan McCain’s “No peace, b****!” retort to Ms Lake in February, Ms Haley’s communications chief Nachama Soloveichik quoted Ms Lake’s latest post and used the same phrase.

Ms Lake’s post appeared to echo back to the feud she began with John McCain’s daughter in February when she criticised the late US Senator on social media and then tried to turn it around by appealing to Ms McCain as a fellow “mama bear”.

Wednesday’s post by the former television news anchor also appeared to backfire, with several replies saying her attitude was not the way to appeal to Haley voters or those who were undecided.

The earlier feud began on Monday 19 February, when Ms Lake appeared on Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos on the Phoenix radio station KTAR News.

During her appearance on the airwaves, she was asked about a campaign rally in 2022 at which she had said: “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!”

At around the same time, Ms Lake also told Real America’s Voice that McCain “ran Arizona with an iron fist” during his lifetime. She had also claimed that “John McCain may be dead, but he’s reaching up from the grave trying to keep power in Arizona,” characterising the Vietnam War hero as a power-mad control freak.

“Rarely did he do anything good for the people,” she added.

An avid supporter of Donald Trump – who himself feuded bitterly with McCain before the senator died from brain cancer in August 2018 – Ms Lake appeared to recognise her divisive comments could cost her at the ballot box and tried to claim that she had only been joking.

“It was said in jest. And I think that if John McCain, who had a great sense of humour, would have heard it, he would have laughed,” she said.

“I want everyone’s vote, whether you are a McCain… if you call yourself a McCain Republican, if you call yourself a middle-of-the-road Republican, a Trump Republican, an America First Republican, I want your vote and guess what? I want independents’ votes as well and I want disaffected Democrats – and there’s a lot of them who are waking up and saying, ‘This is not working out.’”

Having heard the broadcast and being less than convinced by Ms Lake’s sudden about-face, a furious Ms McCain took to X the next day.

“Kari Lake is trying to walk back her continued attacks on my Dad (& family) and all of his loyal supporters after telling them to ‘get the hell out’,” she posted.

“Guess she realised she can’t become a Senator without us. No peace, b****. We see you for who you are – and are repulsed by it.”

Ms Lake responded by reaching out to Ms McCain on the platform on Wednesday 21 February, offering an olive branch by appealing to their similarities as a fellow “Mama Bear” of two children, revealing her father Larry had also died from cancer and declaring that “our children’s future is too important to let it slip away over past grudges or hurt feelings”.

Ms Lake said she valued Ms McCain and her family and their passion for Arizona.

In response, Ms McCain quoted the post and repeated in all-caps: “NO PEACE, B****!”

That post went viral and then came back again on Wednesday with Ms Soloveichik’s post.

Ms Lake was also criticised on Wednesday for using the former UN Ambassador’s legal first name “Nimarata”, although she misspelt it as “Nimrata”.

“Ms. Lake, there is nothing wrong with Niki Haley’s given first name--it’s quite a beautiful name, really. But, like former president Trump, you use it in a prejudicial manner to make her seem foreign. That’s wrong. It’s unChristian and unAmerican. It appeals to the worst in us,” one user replied.

Another X user urged Ms Lake to “humble yourself” and seek to represent all Arizonans, while many others said her attitude towards Ms Haley made her less appealing as a candidate.>

“I think that people are angry because I’m going to do the right thing and I’m going to stand up for justice, no matter who is the person that may have done wrong in Fulton County," she told reporters. "So they can continue on with their games and I’m going to continue to do the work of the people.”....>

<....Cowsert was particularly interested in the workings of a special grand jury that aided Willis' investigation and in the rules surrounding the hiring of outside lawyers as special prosecutors in criminal cases. He suggested those are areas where legislators might consider adding statutory authority or limitations.

Cowsert seemed skeptical of the invoices Wade submitted to the district attorney's office, which have few details and charge by blocks of hours rather than the smaller increments generally favored by lawyers. He also wanted to know about the process for approving invoices for payment and asked a lot of questions about how Wade was paid much more than two other special prosecutors hired for the case.

Cowsert also wanted to hear how Merchant uncovered the relationship.

The Atlanta-area legal community is small and a lot of people had been surprised to see Wade appointed to the election interference investigation, she said. Merchant, who lives in Cobb County where Wade lived and practiced, said Wade's former law partner, Terrence Bradley, called her because he had seen a news article on her efforts to look into money that had been paid to Wade and his partners through contracts with Willis' office. He told her Willis had called him after that article was published.

Merchant said she then ran into Bradley at the courthouse and was sitting talking to him and other lawyers when he walked her through the timeline of the relationship, saying it began shortly after Willis and Wade met at a judicial conference in October 2019. He then continued to feed her details for the next several months and she used that information to guide her investigation and to file open records requests.

Bradley did not want people to know he had been talking to her, she said. He was also upset when people close to Wade reached out to him the weekend after Merchant's motion was filed to see if he was her source and encourage him not to talk, she said. When she called him to testify last month, expecting him to be a crucial witness, he repeatedly said he didn't know or couldn't remember key details.

At the end of the hearing Wednesday, State Sen. Harold Jones, a member of the Democratic minority, questioned Merchant. After going back and forth with her, he seemed unsatisfied with Merchant's explanation of how the relationship created a conflict that affected her client.>

<Well, that was perfectly pointless. For the first time since 2004, when George W. Bush was the incumbent Republican and Democrat John Kerry eliminated what remained of his competition, the two parties' presidential primaries are completely over after Super Tuesday. Now both parties head into the general election with unpopular nominees who give their beleaguered strategists night sweats at noon. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's challenge to former President Trump, which looked like it had maybe a way, way outside chance of succeeding before the voting started, will be remembered for little other than how unsuccessful it really was.

Just like in Iowa, where Haley really needed to place at least second to build momentum, and New Hampshire, which she needed to win outright, Haley fell short not just of the delegate targets she needed to remain a plausible candidate, but also of any kind of threshold of surprise that would make voters or analysts reconsider their appraisal of her longshot bid. Despite clobbering her opponents in the debates that Trump boycotted, scoring the backing of wealthy right-wing donors like the Koch network, and excelling at the kind of retail politics that were once thought to be the hallmark of a good campaign, Haley was really never in this thing.

Republican primary voters just proved themselves to be one of the most uniquely unreachable groups of people on the planet. Presented with a candidate who is, if nothing else, of sound mind, faces zero rather than 91 felony indictments and polls dramatically better against President Biden than Trump, the GOP primary electorate issued a collective "no thanks."

There is no peeling Trump's most ardent supporters away from him, but it is now also clear that a large slice of the party's remaining moderates are willing to sign off silently on his nomination. This is not an electoral bloc that votes strategically or agonizes over its choices, like Democrats who poured [sic] over New York Times polling in the fall of 2019 to determine who would give them their best shot at winning the general election. Trump will be their guy until he dies, goes to jail, or decides he doesn't want to keep running for president, whether he wins or not.

There was zero introspection on the Republican side. Between elections, Democrats have frequently tinkered with the sequencing of their primaries and caucuses in an effort to grease the skids for the establishment's preferred candidate. That is what President Biden's team did when they muscled South Carolina to the front of the line and demoted poor, hapless Iowa– to head off any potential dark horse challenge by putting the president's very best state first. Trump and his campaign not only didn't try to do anything like that, but they also really didn't even have to try. They let Iowa and New Hampshire go 1-2, even though they are both states where Trump has struggled, and he won them both going away.

They also left the first half of the schedule—where the nomination is almost always decided—virtually untouched since 2016. That lack of maneuvering suggests that the RNC is highly confident that whatever it's doing is working and that there is little need to mess with any of it. The debates that were held without Trump rarely featured serious intraparty jockeying over significant issues and instead were dominated by Vivek Ramaswamy's smug preening and the occasional exchange about whether the Republican Party still opposes fascists conquering America's allies in shooting wars. The takeaway from these primaries: it does not.

And why would they change? The critical dynamic on the Republican side of this race is that the party's rank-and-file, as well as the Trump cultists who now run the RNC, genuinely believe that they won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from them by Big City Libs who somehow forgot to also rig several critical senate elections. That pervasive magical thinking is enforced as the party line by Trump and his associates and rather obviously informs the GOP's overall strategy in 2024. Why engage in a post-mortem, or shift rhetoric and strategy around important issues when you think you've already landed on a winning formula? Months of polling consistently showing Trump ahead of President Biden in head-to-head matchups have only hardened the perception that Trump is a winner and that it's best to get out of the way and let him do his thing.

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