<GOP Sen. Josh Hawley has positioned himself as a populist ally of workers.

That's included rallying with striking auto workers with the UAW last year.

But the UAW just backed his likely Democratic opponent, Lucas Kunce, while calling Hawley a "joke."

In recent years, Sen. Josh Hawley has sought to position himself as populist Republican and a staunch ally of organized labor.

That's included rallying with striking auto workers in his home state of Missouri last September, courting support from labor unions, and even voting against a recent GOP-led effort to overturn a new rule from the National Labor Relations Board.

Despite those moves, the United Auto Workers are endorsing Democrat Lucas Kunce over Hawley as the Missouri Republican seeks reelection this year.

"Josh Hawley calling himself pro-worker is a total joke. There is only one candidate in this US Senate race who has earned the trust of Missouri autoworkers, and that's Lucas Kunce," said Fred Jamison, President of the UAW Region 4 Midwest States Cap Council, in a statement first shared with Business Insider.

A spokesperson for Hawley did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Kunce, a self-styled populist Democrat who also ran for Senate in 2022, is likely to prevail in the August 6 primary. Observers generally consider the race to lean Republican, though organizers are hoping to put a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights on the ballot this November — a move that could drive Democratic turnout.

"I'm honored to have the support of UAW in this race," Kunce said in a statement to Business Insider. "The only way we'll put Missouri and America first in the next generation of industry is by investing in and empowering workers like them. In the US Senate, I'll fight like hell for them. Let's pass the PRO Act and Make @#$% In America Again!"

Hawley has made some pro-worker moves in recent years, including voting to give seven extra days of paid sick leave to rail workers during a looming strike in December 2022 and supporting a $15 minimum wage for workers at companies that generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

The Teamsters, one of the country's largest labor unions, contributed $5,000 to Hawley's reelection campaign in April. They also gave $45,000 to the Republican National Committee — along with the same amount to the Democratic National Committee — and have seemingly considered endorsing former President Donald Trump.

But Hawley previously supported right-to-work laws, and he remains opposed to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a top priority of organized labor. The Democratic-backed bill is designed to strengthen workers' ability to form unions.

"I'm not a huge fan of the PRO Act," Hawley told Business Insider in September. "My worry would be that it might, you know, hurt workers more than it helps."

He went on to say that "we can have a debate about" the bill, but that the "real question" is whether certain jobs will remain in the US at all.

"If you want to talk about how to divide up a shrinking pie, I suppose we can do that," said Hawley. "But why don't we think about how we get more pie for labor in this country?"

Hawley has also criticized public sector unions, which account for slightly less than half of all union members in the US and include teachers and police officers.

"I just think that public sector unions for a long time have held government hostage, held vital government services for people hostage, and that's different," Hawley told the Kansas City Star in October. "But when you're talking about private sector unions that are trying to get folks bargaining power, these multinational corporations, particularly in the last 30 years, they're really less and less tied to this country and less and less tied to American workers.">

As Meghan McCain saith to Loser Lake: 'No peace, <biyatch>!!'

<Sailors used to communicate between ships by using flags. Christian nationalists do the same thing. Rather than being upfront about their desire to remake the U.S. into a right-wing Christian utopia, they like to use flags to do their talking for them.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) are shouting at us right now.

Alito’s love of flags is only coming to light now, but it dates back to the time of the January 6 insurrection. Shortly after that traitorous event, the justice and his wife flew the U.S. flag outside their house upside down. The upside-down flag was adopted by the right-wing, including many who stormed the Capitol, as a sign of their dissatisfaction with losing the election.

At the time the flag was flying, the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear a case involving the outcome of the election. Alito opted to hear the case, putting him in the minority.

In explaining that event, Alito blamed it on his wife and some neighbors with whom she was in a dispute. Apparently, the neighbors put up a sign with a curse word in it that Alito said his wife found “personally insulting.” Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, explained the upside flag away as an “international signal of distress.”

Alito and his wife, like his fellow Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, apparently have no problem letting the world see themselves as sympathetic to a cause that undercuts one of the basic tenets of a constitutional republic. But just to make sure you know how radical they are, they whipped out another flag for their beach house.

That flag, an “Appeal to Heaven” flag, is directly tied to Christian nationalism. While it dates back to the American Revolution, it has been popularized in recent years by Dutch Sheets, a self-proclaimed prophet who is influential in a movement to remake the U.S. into a “Christian nation,” even at the price of “spiritual warfare.”

“They are praying for total changeover in American culture to restore America to its original covenantal purposes and covenantal arrangement with God,” Matthew Taylor, author of the forthcoming book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, told MSNBC. “Abortion and same-sex marriage are seen as impediments to this.”

Taylor says that the Sheets has a particular focus on the Supreme Court and its ability to reshape the nation in the image that Christian nationalists seek.

While pundits wring their hands about the ethical violations that the flag represents, the bigger issue is that Alito knows he can act with impunity. He remains a key suspect in the leak of the early draft of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. He taunted his critics, including foreign leaders by name, who disagreed with his ruling in Dobbs. Like Thomas, who likes to pocket money from his wealthy friends, Alito feels he’s above criticism – and possibly the law he is pledged to protect.

It’s not as though Alito’s actions are surprising. This is the justice who believes the rights of Christians are under attack. In a recent case, he argued that a homophobic juror was the victim of religious discrimination for being dismissed as a prospective juror in a case involving a lesbian suing her employer. Indeed, Alito wants to roll back LGBTQ+ rights as far as he can, starting with marriage equality, which he believes was wrongly decided by the Court.

But Alito is emboldened enough to discard the pretense that he is an objective justice. He is proclaiming his affinity for an ideology that would not just reshape American society but would mortally wound American democracy. By characterizing political differences as a spiritual battle between good and evil, it sets the stakes so high that no compromise is possible. Indeed, violence seems almost justifiable.

The victory of this philosophy is the great threat of a Trump second term. But the fact is that, as Alito shows, it’s already embedded in the highest levels of government. And Alito is far from alone. House Speaker Johnson, another veteran of the battle against LGBTQ+ rights, flies the same Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office.

When two of the most powerful men in American government today subscribe to the belief that the laws and society should explicitly reflect a Christian – and a very specific kind of Christian – code of conduct, we’re well past the time to believe that Christian nationalism is dependent upon Donald Trump’s electoral success. The time to worry is now, because the future has already arrived.>

<The Brennan Center for Justice accused Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito of misconstruing its research in a South Carolina gerrymandering case.

Last week, the Supreme Court upheld a Republican-drawn congressional district in South Carolina, reversing a lower court decision that said the district’s boundaries were an unconstitutional form of racial gerrymandering.

A three-judge panel found race was the predominant factor in why the new map was drawn the way it was, shifting about 30,000 Black Charleston-area voters to a new district.

Republican state lawmakers said the boundaries were changed because of politics, not race, and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

In his opinion on the case, which was decided 6-3, Alito cited 2021 research from the Brennan Center that showed the racial voter turnout gap will worsen with restrictive voting laws.

Alito questioned why a nonpartisan staffer with reapportionment experience would have drawn the congressional lines based on racial data “as a proxy for partisan data” when he had access to sub-precinct-level partisan information.

Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar at the center, wrote in a report that it’s “necessary to add some clarity to Alito’s thinking.”

Morris noted that in South Carolina, voters do not register with political parties. Under a person’s voter file, it indicates which partisan primary they participate in. He said it should be a good proxy for voting habits but isn’t as reliable as self-identifying.

“Alito accepts that race could be a better predictor of vote choice than party affiliation in South Carolina, but he cites our study to speculate that lower relative turnout of nonwhite voters probably renders racial data unhelpful in map drawing,” Morris wrote. “Quite the opposite.”

In South Carolina, voters self-identify their race when they register to vote, and their voter files hold data on how they voted dating back to the 1990s.

“Put plainly, an ideal place to predict a party nominee’s likely votes in South Carolina is in exactly the sort of place the evidence indicates the state looked: files with racial data,” Morris argued.

Morris questioned why Alito cited their 2021 research when the center released a more comprehensive report just months ago that found South Carolina is the prime example of how race and voting have differed across the country — and how the court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision has affected voting trends over the last decade.

Since 2014, South Carolina’s white and nonwhite voter turnout has grown more quickly than the rest of the country. And in Charleston County, where the Supreme Court case is focused, the gap has grown quicker than anywhere else in the state, the center found.

“In sum, we agree with Alito when he noted that ‘non-white voters turn out at a much lower rate than white voters.’ But his conclusion that this fact means that racial data cannot be used to draw maps that could discriminate is simply not the case,” Morris wrote.

“What this data can and does establish, however, is that the Court’s retreat from protecting voting rights for people of color has resulted in increasing gaps in participation in places like South Carolina,” he concluded.>

<Some state Republican parties held their conventions over the long weekend. Obviously, the party is retooling itself against the perils of Trumpism and seeking a brighter day for us all.

Except, maybe, not so much. From The Texas Tribune:

Republican Party of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties. Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform included proclamations that “abortion is not healthcare it is homicide”; that gender-transition treatment for children is “child abuse”; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and “publicly honor the southern heroes”; support for declaring gold and silver as legal tender; and demands that the U.S. government disclose “all pertinent information and knowledge” of UFOs.

(Conservatives have gone a little buggy these days over UFOs, seeing them, I guess, as another Deep State project along with the microbots in the Covid vaccines.)

Perhaps the most consequential plank calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college.

Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office. In 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott carried 235 counties, while Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried most of the urban, more populous counties and South Texas counties. Statewide, Abbott won 55% of the popular vote while O’Rourke carried 44%. However, some attorneys question whether such a proposal would be constitutional and conform with the Voting Rights Act because it would most likely limit the voting power of racial minorities, who are concentrated in a relatively small number of counties. (The party’s platform also reiterates its previous calls for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act).

They simply can’t leave the poor embattled franchise alone. They are planning to rig the system out two more generations as the country increasingly diversifies and scares the members of their base right out of their orthopedics. And you surely didn’t think that white people’s Jesus would not get a mention. The 2024 platform goes significantly further: It urges lawmakers and the State Board of Education to “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance,” and supports the use of religious chaplains in schools—which was made legal under a law passed by the state Legislature last year. The new platform comes as Republicans increasingly embrace once-fringe theories such as Christian nationalism, which argues that the United States’ founding was God-ordained, and therefore its institutions and laws should reflect conservative, Christian views. Barton’s ideas have been a key driver of that movement, and were repeatedly cited by lawmakers last year during debates over the chaplains bill and in legislation that would have required the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms. Barton’s group, WallBuilders, was also an exhibitor at this year’s Texas GOP convention, and the party has increasingly aligned with two far-right, fundamentalist Christian billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks....>

<....Two camels looking for a needle with a bigger eye.

Things were not much better up in Washington state, where the state GOP insisted in its convention on finding the least likely candidates to be elected, and then nominating them anyway. From the Washington State Standard:

And leaders of the Washington State Republican Party will leave Spokane Saturday evening with an endorsed slate of candidates but also continued discord in their ranks. “This is a family feud. We have to sit around here and figure out how the family comes back together,” said Mathew Patrick Thomas, chair of the King County Republican Party. Tensions center on whether delegates are backing candidates who might check certain boxes—supporting Donald Trump, eschewing the establishment, committing to more conservative positions—at the expense of electability in a state that’s tilted increasingly Democratic. Republicans hold zero statewide offices in Washington, are minorities in both chambers of the Legislature, and control just two of the state’s 10 U.S. House seats. And in North Carolina, the GOP finished the process of anointing Mark Robinson for governor, which guarantees us a few more months of hilarity. RNC chairman Lara Trump phoned in a bit of her own special sauce. From the AP:

“What we have going on in this country right now is not Republican versus Democrat or left versus right,” Lara Trump, a Wilmington, North Carolina, native, said during the couple’s almost 40-minute address. “It’s good versus evil.”

Can’t argue with that.>

<Few are clamoring for Herschel Walker’s return to politics since he flamed out in his Georgia Senate bid nearly two years ago. But they sure are interested in his campaign cash.

Georgia and national Republicans, in dire need of money, are furious that Walker is sitting on more than $4 million in leftover campaign funds and seems to have no intention of using it to help the GOP or Donald Trump in the key battleground state in November.

With the Georgia Republican Party nearly broke and the Republican National Committee regularly getting outspent by its Democratic counterpart, Republicans say Walker’s unspent millions could go a long way toward addressing the GOP’s cash crunch.

“Those resources were solicited and given to support his candidacy as a Georgia Republican, and unless he intends to use them again for his own candidacy, I sure hope the favor would be returned,” said John Watson, a former Georgia state GOP chair. “Georgia Republicans should be supported by those dollars in whatever legal fashion the campaign can.”

Since the political novice and former football star lost to Democratic Rev. Raphael Warnock in the high-profile race, he has all but disappeared from political circles. Walker had a glidepath through the primary, but his campaign was dogged by multiple personal scandals, revealing children born out of wedlock and concealed abortions that undercut his conservative values campaign pitch. He was consistently out fundraised by Warnock, and his campaign’s strategy was undermined by Walker’s interference.

After the race, Walker eventually reenrolled at the University of Georgia to finish his undergraduate degree — the same school where he won a Heisman Trophy as a junior decades ago.

When reached by phone, Walker denied his seven-figure bank balance of unspent funds in his campaign account.

“It wasn’t money left in my account. Everyone keeps saying that,” Walker said.

Asked to clarify what he meant, Walker quickly ended the call, saying he was in the middle of writing a paper. He said, “we could talk about it some time” but did not respond to multiple further inquiries, including most recently last week.

A Georgia GOP strategist with knowledge of Walker’s campaign said the unspent funds should be refunded to donors, shared with Republican committees or used to help Trump in the 2024 contest.

“Republicans are being outspent everywhere up and down the ballot and there’s a significant sum of resources just sitting there,” said the strategist, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue. “It could be supporting Trump, who did a ton for Herschel’s campaign.”

Walker, a former NFL running back who entered the 2022 Georgia Senate race with Trump’s support, ended his failed campaign with more than $5 million in the bank. He still had $4.3 million in his account as of the end of March, according to the latest financial disclosures filed to the Federal Election Commission.

Walker did transfer $100,000 to the National Republican Senate Committee’s legal recount fund and has given around $400,000 to various nonprofits and charities. But the bulk of his leftover campaign money is still in his account.

The FEC limits what campaign funds can be spent on. The money must be used for electioneering purposes — on a campaign or transferred to another active committee — or Walker could donate it to charity. Walker and his treasurer remain stewards of the funds, and they can’t transfer the money directly to Walker.

But the campaign cash could be helpful for the GOP’s bottom line.

At this point in the 2020 election cycle, the Georgia Republican Party had $1.2 million cash on hand. Now it reports having less than half of that amount. It’s also spending a significant portion — $1.9 million since the start of 2021 — of its funds on legal fees for Republicans charged in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ election racketeering case, according to the latest financial disclosure forms.....>

<....Georgia GOP Chair Josh McKoon, who fundraises for the state party, declined to discuss any personal conversations he may have had with Walker about the unspent campaign funds.

This year, state Republicans are focused on the presidential race and maintaining their majorities in the state legislature, and one Georgia GOP strategist, Brian Robinson, said Walker’s money would best be used to help legislative candidates in competitive districts.

“I would give directly to candidates at the legislature level because to maintain the majorities in Georgia, we’re really having to fight here,” he said.

A senior national Republican Party official said Republicans have not heard from Walker in months and that they weren’t aware of any party committees or campaigns currently pursuing a check from Walker’s old campaign account.

But Walker has been giving away some of his campaign cash, though not primarily to the party.

Though Republicans grumble that Walker hasn’t contributed money to the party, the campaign committee donated about $410,000, mostly to nonprofits like the Horatio Alger Association, the Boys and Girls Club and Herschel’s 34 and Johnson City Class of 1980, a nonprofit that’s been registered since 2016 in Walker’s hometown of Wrightsville, Georgia, according to FEC filings.

He also gave $100,000 to Polaris Action Inc, a national security-focused group that was founded by Morgan Ortagus, a former Trump administration State Department official who stumped for Walker on the campaign trail.

“Nobody would be surprised if and when he starts spending that money that it went to any group of newly formed charities in or around Dallas, Texas,” a second Georgia GOP operative said, making a reference to where Walker lived before running for Senate in Georgia.>

<The Democratic National Committee announced Tuesday that it would hold a “virtual roll call” ahead of the party’s August nominating convention in Chicago to pick President Biden as the 2024 candidate, ensuring that he appears on the Ohio ballot — bringing to an end an unnecessary chapter of uncertainty about Biden’s appearance on the ballot in the state, an issue that other states were able to resolve without drama.

Not so with Ohio Republicans, who have used the issue to try to jam through another piece of legislation related to the state abortion ballot proposal that passed with strong support last year, despite state Republicans’ efforts to complicate and tank the measure. Let’s unpack.

The Democratic National Convention is set to take place on Aug. 19-22, which is when the Democratic Party planned to officially nominate Biden as the party’s presidential nominee this year. After the dates were set, Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced back in April that completing the nomination process in late August would mean missing Ohio’s ballot certification deadline, which falls on August 7. This issue has come up in presidential elections in the past, but state election officials have typically avoided the issue by granting provisional ballot access to major party nominees regardless of the date of conventions. Or they have asked the state legislature to extend the certification deadline. Experts say its historically unprecedented for a state election administrator to enforce the statute, but LaRose penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Monday defending his decision.

Alabama state law presented a similar issue for the Biden campaign this year as well, but state lawmakers there passed a bill to extend the deadline that Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law as soon as it reached her desk earlier this month.

Ohio lawmakers have been bickering over how to resolve the dilemma for weeks and party leaders in the state legislature announced earlier this month they were at a stalemate over how to address the issue before the end of the legislative session.

So, last week, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine announced a special legislative session to pass legislation to get Biden on the ballot. But he also announced the special session would include consideration of a bill that would “prohibit campaign spending by foreign nationals” in Ohio elections.

That provision is a non-starter for Ohio Democrats. It is already illegal for foreign nationals to donate to candidates in Ohio. But the legislation is primarily meant to assuage the feelings of state Republicans still upset about the success of “Issue 1,” the citizen-led ballot initiative last year that enshrined abortion access in the state constitution. The campaign to protect abortion in the state became an issue of national focus, particularly after Ohio Republicans tried and failed to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives in the state ahead of the general election.

Abortion rights groups and others got involved in fundraising for “Issue 1.” One of the groups involved was the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which is heavily funded by a Swiss billionaire — hence Ohio Republicans’ hysterics about “foreign nationals” interfering in Ohio elections.

The Ohio Senate came into special session this afternoon and ultimately passed legislation that would push the Ohio ballot certification deadline to Aug. 23, after the Democratic convention — and also ban foreign donations to ballot question campaigns. No Ohio Democratic senators supported the measure, likely because the vote took place after the DNC announced it virtual nomination vote fix.

The bill still has to pass the Ohio House, but Democratic state lawmakers are annoyed — and were happy to let the DNC step in.

“We don’t need your fix. The DNC just released a statement several minutes ago that says we’re going to hold a virtual vote of our delegates across the country and nominate President Biden to the ballot,” State Democratic Sen. Bill DeMora said on Tuesday. “We don’t want a legislative fix that holds the voters and their rights to the whim of the majority.”>

<With all the violence and vandalism on Jan. 6, it's easy to forget that Trump and his henchmen's real game plan was to send the election to the House and let them decide the winner as the Constitution anticipated would happen in case of a tie. This was to be accomplished by submitting competing sets of electors to the VP who would throw up his hands and say that he didn't know how to count the votes so Congress would have to decide the election. According to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, they had hoped that in the event Pence didn't cooperate, having the mob storm the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification but they were thwarted when Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress that night. (There is no word on whether Justice Alito had been apprised of his role but it's not a stretch to think he would have been happy to oblige considering his history of flying insurrectionist flags during that period.)

Had they persuaded Pence to twist the constitutional process for a tie vote into a process for resolving (fake) competing slates of electoral votes and had the House of Representatives taken it up, Trump would have won because votes are counted by state delegation and there are more Republican delegations than Democratic. There was a whole group of Republicans ready and willing to declare Trump the winner and let the courts and anyone else try and stop them under this unprecedented, unconstitutional plot. This was the coup.

Essentially, they were willing to stretch their undemocratic electoral college advantage in controlling rural, lower-populated states to an even more undemocratic electoral advantage in the House to steal the election. If Pence had cooperated, they might have pulled it off.

It's obvious that the framers made a huge error with this silly process of having the House delegations decide the election in case of a tie. It should be the popular vote winner. (It should be the popular vote winner in all cases but for some reason, we seem to be stuck with this antediluvian artifact of a compromise that should have been fixed over a century ago.)

There has long been a belief among a certain set of America's white elites that democracy is good in theory and a very nice idea, but really we can't let the riff-raff have the last word. Our history of denying the voting franchise to vast numbers of citizens goes all the way back to the beginning and we're still fighting over it. That's also why we're stuck with the Senate which gives two senators to states that have more cows than people and two senators to states that have many more people than cows. They finally managed to allow direct election of those senators, which was a step in the right direction, but the Senate is an undemocratic institution.

And after the debacles of the 2000 and 2016 elections in which Republicans won the presidency with victories in the electoral college while losing the popular vote, it's not necessary to make any argument that our presidential elections have a very serious, potentially fatal flaw for a modern democracy. It's really no wonder that the Republican Party, faced with the fact that it is a minority party, has decided to push the envelope even further.

Vote suppression and disenfranchisement are no longer enough. They have discovered they can change the system itself in their favor now. The latest example comes from Texas, which held its GOP convention last week. Aside from the odious culture war issues they installed in their platform, such as labeling gender-affirming care as child abuse, requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools and calling for "equal protection for the preborn" which means abortion can be punishable as a homicide, they are proposing to create an electoral college system in their state:

The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county....>

<....In other words, they want to create a system in which every county has exactly the same vote, whether the county has 20 people or 5 million people. As Paul Waldman wrote in his newsletter The Cross Section, this would be the equivalent of California and Wyoming each having one electoral vote for president. Waldman ran some numbers and the outcome is astonishing:

In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the smallest 178 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 481,548 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with just 4 percent of the vote.

That’s right: You could get blown out 96%-4% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.

Texas isn't the only red state to attempt such an end run around democracy and majority rule. In Missouri where their ballot system was allowing some progressive policies to be passed by a majority of citizens, they tried to change the law to require that not only do they need a majority of voters to pass, but they must have a majority in five of their eight congressional districts which gives rural GOP districts the upper hand. Arizona has proposed a similar initiative. So far they haven't had any luck enacting any of these changes, and the Texas proposals are just part of the GOP platform for now, but does anyone think that MAGAfied parties in red states won't do it if they get the chance?

The old saw that "states are the laboratories of democracy" has long been one of the rationales for states' rights adherents to excuse their anti-democratic behavior. Donald Trump's Big Lie and coup attempt have given permission to these same political actors to experiment with ways to permanently advantage their shrinking constituency by corrupting the election systems in the states. And because of the electoral college, that will likely permanently advantage them in presidential elections as well.

Donald Trump will not win the popular vote next November but he might be able to eke out another win in the electoral college. The opposition which is fighting so energetically to save democracy is already fighting with one hand tied behind its back and it's only going to get worse.>

<Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito rejected calls to recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, telling members of Congress Wednesday that such calls are politically motivated.

Alito said the flags flown over his homes, which experts say are connected with false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, were raised by his wife and were not in support of the "Stop the Steal" movement.

"A reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that this event does not meet the applicable standard for recusal," Alito wrote in a letter to lawmakers. "I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request."

The high court is deciding two cases related to the attempts by former President Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the election, decisions that will affect the criminal election interference charges pending against Trump.

Democratic members of Congress and some ethics experts have said Alito should not participate in those decisions because an inverted American flag flown at his Virginia home in January 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag flown at his New Jersey beach house were carried by some of the people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“By displaying the upside-down and ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flags outside his homes, Justice Alito actively engaged in political activity, failed to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and failed to act in a manner that promotes public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote in a letter Friday to Chief Justice John Roberts.

The senators, top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Alito’s recusal from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is “both necessary and required.”

They asked for a meeting with Roberts to discuss to “the Supreme Court’s worsening ethics crisis.”

Alito said the decision to recuse is his to make, not the chief justice’s.

And he said the decisions to fly the flags were made by his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, an “independently minded private person” who is "fond of flying flags."

“She makes her own decisions and I honor her right to do so,” Alito wrote.

In fact, Alito said, he asked his wife to take down the inverted American flag but she refused to for several days.

The justice said neither he nor his wife were aware of the connection of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag with the 2020 election deniers.

“She did not fly it to associate herself with that or any other group,” he wrote, “and the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings.”

The "Appeal to Heaven" flag − a white flag with a green pine tree in the center − was used during the American Revolution. It has become a symbol for Christian nationalists.>

<Judge Aileen Cannon has been criticized for letting unresolved legal issues pile up in Donald Trump's classified documents case, but the Trump appointee has herself bristled at the notion that she is delaying justice. While "it may not appear on the surface that anything is happening," Cannon recently snapped at a prosecutor on special counsel Jack Smith's team, "there is a ton of work being done."

According to a New York Times report, while plenty of legal work is done behind the curtain, prosecutors and legal experts are annoyed over what is plain to see: that Cannon has granted full hearings on even the most far-fetched issues that Trump's legal team has raised — and then declined to rule decisively on those issues, consciously or not playing into the former president's strategy of delaying the trial until after the 2024 election.

Trump, who is charged with stealing classified national security documents, including nuclear secrets, and hiding them at his Mar-a-Lago estate, could have the case dropped altogether if he's elected president again.

There is no indication that Cannon is ready to have the case go to trial, despite handling it since last June. At seven public hearings, the Times reported that Cannon has raised eyebrows by repeatedly asked the same questions and not appearing to grasp the answers she received.

For example, when Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta, asked Cannon to make prosecutors turn over their internal messages so he could better argue that the charges were brought vindictively, Cannon asked him what he actually wanted from the government. Woodward responded that he wanted anything that mentioned him by name, before Cannon asked him to say it again, but more "slowly."

“All right,” she said, looking through her notes. “So I understand your request. It’s, quote, ‘All documents, communications concerning Mr. Woodward.’”

Prosecutor David Harbach then argued that the claims were "fantasy" — Woodward asserts that a Justice Department official threatened his career during a meeting about the case — and that the law prohibits defense counsel from sniffing around government communications. But Cannon seemed to miss the point, asking Harbach repeatedly about whether or not he had the messages that Woodward wanted, even as Harbach impressed upon her that Woodward had no evidence that could justify the surrender of any messages.

Exasperated, Harbach all but shouted that Woodward's request had no legal or factual standing. "That is what I'm trying to tell you," he said. Cannon responded by telling Harbach that he needed to "calm down."

The contentious exchanges Cannon has had with prosecutors stand in contrast to her more gentle treatment of Trump's lawyers, prompting critics to accuse her of bias.

"Regardless of her motives," the Times noted, "Judge Cannon has effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.">

<U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is under pressure by Senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican and Donald Trump ally, to investigate Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the former president's New York City criminal trial.

After more than six weeks in the courtroom, a jury is deciding if Trump is guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claims that she had an affair with Trump in 2006, which he denies. Trump, who is the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and he, and his allies, claim the case is politically motivated.

On Wednesday, Vance sent a letter to Garland, asking him to "open a criminal investigation into the conduct of Juan Merchan and his possible coconspirators," claiming that the judge's actions in the case have violated federal law for "'subject[ing] [a] person ... to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States.'"

Newsweek reached out to Trump's spokesperson and the New York State Unified Court System via email and the U.S. Department of Justice via online form for comment. It also reached out to Vance's office, which said it had nothing to add to his public comments.

Vance pointed to a gag order Merchan imposed on Trump before the trial began that barred him from making public comments on certain people involved in the case such as potential witnesses and jurors. Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Trump, are not protected under the gag order. The order was later expanded to include the families of Merchan and Bragg.

"On Merchan's orders, a Republican presidential candidate has been made powerless to question the credibility of the witnesses testifying against him, the motivations of the prosecutors pursuing him, or the impartiality of the apparently conflicted judge fining him," Vance's letter said.

Trump has been fined thousands for breaking the gag order on multiple occasions.

The former president has repeatedly called the gag order unconstitutional, claiming that it infringes on his First Amendment rights. Gag orders are used to prevent information presented outside of court from affecting the trial outcome. Trump had a gag order in his New York civil fraud trial and is currently subjected to one in his federal criminal election interference case.

Trump has maintained his innocence in all cases and claimed they are all politically motivated. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the election interference case and has appealed the ruling in the fraud case, which imposed a $355 million fine and barred him from doing business in New York for three years....>

<.....Vance also claimed that Merchan "has done his best to deprive" the former president of "a fair trial by an impartial jury." He claimed that the judge "refused to dismiss prospective jurors with obvious bias...forcing President Trump's attorneys to burn critical peremptory strikes."

However, Glenn Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and frequent Trump critic, said on YouTube before the trial began that jurors' political views do not automatically disqualify them.

"The people who are called to the courthouse for jury duty, they're all going to have some views perhaps about Donald Trump. They may have a political party affiliation. They may even be activists on the left or on the right. None of that is disqualifying," Kirschner told political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen on The Legal Breakdown.

Vance also claimed that during the trial, Merchan "has bent over backwards to allow the prosecution to introduce whatever evidence it wants," citing Daniels' detailed account of her rumored sexual encounter with Trump that was put into court records.

"But he has taken a strong hand against defense evidence at every opportunity," Vance added, citing that Merchan instructed Trump's lawyers not to tell the jury that the case is "novel, unusual, or unprecedented."

Vance also mentioned Merchan's daughter, Loren Merchan—who has served as the president and partner of Authentic Campaigns, a progressive political consulting firm—and prosecutors from Bragg's office who "repeatedly urged Merchan to deprive President Trump of his First Amendment rights in court filings and oral advocacy."

Newsweek reached out to Bragg's office via email for comment.

"I'm skeptical [Garland] actually will do anything," Vance told host Dana Perino on Fox News' America's Newsroom on Wednesday, adding that the attorney general "has shown that he is completely uninterested in justice and is completely motivated by politics."

He added: "What I'm trying to motivate him to do here is to do just a basic document-retention request so that a future attorney general could prosecute if there is corruption in this case."

In his letter, Vance asked Garland to notify him by June 28 whether a criminal investigation will be opened.

"If you will not open an investigation, please let me know whether you will consider issuing a document-retention request," he added.>

<Texas’ efforts to make elections more transparent allows the public — in limited instances — to pierce the anonymity of the ballot and find out how people voted, undermining the secrecy essential to free elections.

The choices voters make in the private voting booth can later be identified in some cases using public, legally available records, a review by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune found.

Since 2020, requests for such records have skyrocketed, fueled by unsubstantiated concerns about widespread voter fraud, and Texas lawmakers have supported changes to make election records easier to access soon after elections.

County elections administrators, trying to fulfill activists' demands for transparency, have also made information public that can make it easier to determine how specific people voted.

An effort to link a voter to specific ballot choices is more likely to succeed in circumstances involving less populous counties, small precincts, and low-turnout elections.

"What bothers me is that people cannot vote in secret in the United States,” said Williamson County District Attorney Shawn Dick about the potential lapses in ballot secrecy. “If people's ballots don't remain anonymous, that's a huge affront to our system of government and our system of elections."

Several election officials said there have been concerns and ongoing discussions about the possibility of people exploiting public records and data to detect or narrow down how individuals voted, particularly in smaller counties.

And the Texas Secretary of State’s office has been aware that publicly available information could be used to link a particular ballot to the voter who cast it, according to sources who spoke to Votebeat and the Tribune on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the issue. Nonetheless, state lawmakers have spent the last several years making it easier to mine voter and ballot data.

Votebeat and the Tribune were able to verify and replicate a series of steps to identify a specific person’s ballot choices using public records. But to protect the secrecy of the ballot, the two news outlets are not detailing the precise information needed or the process used to match ballot images with individual voters.

Election administration experts and voter advocates say Texas lawmakers need to find a better balance between transparency and voters’ ballot privacy — and clarify the roles county elections administrators and the Secretary of State’s office play in getting there.

“If we don't share this information, we're not able to determine whether or not the ballot is secure,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University and an election administration expert. “On the other hand, if people think that these are things that shouldn't be shared, then their confidence goes down.”

Earlier this month, the independent news site Current Revolt published what it said was the image of the ballot that former Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi cast in the March 5 GOP primary, provided by a source it did not name.

The site did not explain in detail how its source was able to find the ballot and connect it to Rinaldi.

State and county elections offices maintain an array of election records that are available via open records requests and even published online in some instances. That includes which candidates won individual precincts, where and by which method people voted, the original ballots they cast, and electronic images of those ballots. To be clear, voted ballots do not contain a voter’s name or identifying information such as identification numbers or Social Security numbers. Many kinds of identifying information must also be redacted from other election records before they are released.

But in certain circumstances, finding someone’s ballot is possible by identifying and cross-referencing a series of variables that are public.

There was no personally identifying information printed on the ballot Current Revolt claimed was Rinaldi’s, so it’s impossible to say with 100% certainty that it was his. Rinaldi has neither confirmed nor denied that it was his ballot.

Rinaldi did not respond to requests for comment from Votebeat and the Tribune. The Republican Party of Texas referred Votebeat and the Tribune to a statement it released on social media saying that the party’s legal counsel advised Rinaldi not to comment and that it was “investigating potential civil and criminal acts including defamation” against Current Revolt....>

<....The state’s chief elections officer is Secretary of State Jane Nelson, who is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. Her agency declined to comment on whether officials there knew about the vulnerability in ballot secrecy. In a public statement last week, Nelson’s office said county elections administrators need to balance ballot secrecy with election transparency — but the statement provided them no guidance on how to do that.

On Tuesday, after Votebeat and the Tribune told her office about vulnerabilities with ballot secrecy, Nelson said in an emailed statement that she was advising county elections administrators that "they have a duty to redact personally identifiable information” but did not detail what that includes or what information may be redacted.

“No one should have their ballot privacy compromised,” Nelson said.

Texas election records are an open book

Texas stands out among other states for its expansive approach to making election records public, an effort to provide transparency in a state where unsupported theories about election fraud are widespread.

The public can obtain data from electronic poll books used at individual voting precincts, showing which voters have cast ballots and detailing exactly when they did so; “cast vote records,” the electronic representation of how voters voted; and ballot images, which are copies of actual ballots as marked by voters.

By law, counties are supposed to redact identifiable information such as names, Social Security numbers, state identification numbers, birthdates, or phone numbers.

The push for increased transparency gained momentum after the 2020 presidential election when former President Donald Trump launched a campaign, bolstered by two fellow Republicans, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, to convince voters the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Conservative activists searching for proof of voter fraud routinely began requesting original voted ballots and cast-vote records in almost every Texas county.

At the time, voted ballots, by law, had to be kept secure and were not available for 22 months after an election. But in August 2022, Paxton — who had tried unsuccessfully to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in four battleground states outside his jurisdiction — released a nonbinding legal opinion advising county officials to release voted ballots as soon as they are counted, while redacting any information that could identify the voter.

After at least three counties challenged Paxton’s advice in court, the Texas Legislature rewrote the law.

During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed House Bill 5180, allowing public access to ballot images, cast-vote records, and the original voted ballot just 61 days after election day.

“This is about giving our citizens confidence in their elections while protecting our election administrators,” the bill’s author, state Rep. Terry M. Wilson, R-Marble Falls, said during a committee hearing on the legislation in April 2023.

Supporters argued this bill was necessary for third-party groups to conduct audits of elections in a timely manner.

Christina Adkins, then acting director of the Secretary of State’s elections division, told lawmakers during the hearing that the bill provided much needed clarity for the state agency.

But opponents of the legislation noted that election departments in Texas and across the country had seen an increase since the 2020 presidential election in records requests seeking more technical information about an election....>

<....Stephanie Swanson, the Austin-area director of the League of Women Voters, warned that the legislation would result in an even greater flood of public records requests, which could be used as a means of voter intimidation.

“If election records are no longer under the control of election officials, this can lead to a significant risk of the records being lost, stolen, altered, compromised, or destroyed,” Swanson said.

Election administrators look to the Legislature for help

One potential solution pits the state against the counties in terms of where the responsibility lies to fix the problem.

On Friday, the Texas Association of Election Administrators as well as county and district clerks sent a letter to the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee, which deals with voting issues, suggesting that there could be changes to what’s considered “identifiable” information.

“County election officials are working with the Secretary of State's office to improve the redaction of information that can be used to identify a voter and his/her precinct,” the letter reads.

Dick, the Williamson County prosecutor, said his county is aware of possible ballot secrecy issues and said that the attorney general’s office is looking into the matter. A spokesperson for Paxton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

A ballot Dick previously cast in a Texas election was apparently included as evidence in an unrelated lawsuit filed earlier this year, also accusing Texas of ballot security vulnerabilities.

That lawsuit alleges that Nelson and election officials from three Central Texas counties violated voters' equal protection rights by allowing the public to track down a voter’s ballot through a unique identification number. The plaintiffs did not describe the method in the lawsuit and declined to share it with Votebeat and the Tribune. It could not be verified.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including Laura Pressley, have made similar allegations in past lawsuits that courts have dismissed. Since at least 2014, when she lost a race for the Austin City Council, Pressley has frequently sued counties, election administrators, and the Texas Secretary of State for not following the Texas Election Code as she interprets it. She rarely succeeds in court.

She and her allies have long pushed for the state to get rid of the popular countywide polling place program — used by more than 90 jurisdictions in the state. The Texas Senate State Affairs Committee is set to hear testimony on election issues, including the use of the program on Wednesday in Austin.

Pressley has also advocated for counties to stop using electronic voting equipment and has demanded the use of sequentially numbered, preprinted ballots, which experts say could further threaten ballot privacy.

If businesses or politicians are able to track down how individuals voted, Dick said, it would change the way those entities target voters for profit and campaign purposes — and could open the door to voter intimidation.

Dick said the issue needs to be resolved immediately but he doesn’t believe the answer is to shut down public access to ballot records and voting information.

Other states, too, have grappled with whether and when to make cast vote records and ballot images public.

In South Carolina, a judge earlier this month shot down a group’s request to examine voters’ cast vote records from the 2020 presidential election. The judge determined that if the documents become public under the Freedom of Information Act, it would violate voters’ right to a secret ballot in the state.

In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections recently removed the precinct-level details of election results for each county from its website. The state argued that because of the particularly low turnout in the state’s recent primary, it could be too easy to determine how some people voted.

In Texas, some county elections administrators say the Legislature needs to craft a law that settles what information must be made public so elections administration is transparent — as well as what can be withheld, so ballot secrecy is protected. Without that, they say, vulnerabilities will persist.

In addition, there are other steps lawmakers could take that would make it harder to breach voters’ privacy, said Jennifer Doinoff, Hays County elections administrator and the president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.

For example, she said, they could change the law to raise the minimum number of voters allowed in a precinct, which would make it more difficult to link a ballot to a specific voter. Lawmakers could also rethink how to release information about voters in small precincts, or not release specific polling location records, she said.

<President Joe Biden has suggested he will appoint progressive justices to the Supreme Court if he wins a second term in the White House in November.

"The next president, they're going to be able to appoint a couple of justices... Look, if in fact we're able to change some of the justices when they retire and put in really progressive judges like we've always had, tell me that won't change your life," he said during a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Wednesday.

The conservative justices appointed by his rival, former President Donald Trump, are "already gutting voting rights, overturning Roe, decimating affirmative action, and so much more," Biden said. "Are we going to let that happen? We can't."

Newsweek has contacted the Biden and Trump campaigns for comment via email.

The comments serve as a warning about the high stakes of November's election, given Trump's appointment of three justices in one term in office cemented the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority.

Two of the court's conservative justices—Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—are in their seventies, while Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, will turn 70 next month.

If Biden wins in November and has the opportunity to nominate justices to replace any who retire, his appointments could affect the county for decades.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has promised to appoint more conservative justices if he wins back the White House.

"You know many presidents never get the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice. I had three, they are gold," he said at an event in 2023. "And maybe we'll get three or four more. Can you imagine? Let's have seven. Let's have seven or eight or maybe even nine."

Biden's comments on Wednesday were part of a renewed effort to mobilize Black voters ahead of November's election. Black voters helped secure Biden's 2020 win, but some polling has suggested Biden is losing support among the key demographic.

At Girard College, a boarding school with a predominantly Black student body, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris thanked Black voters for sending them to the White House in 2020 and argued that their agenda has massively improved the lives of Black Americans.

Biden pointed to his appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black female justice on the Supreme Court as a "promise made and a promise kept."

"Because you voted, I was able to keep my commitment to appoint the first Black woman on the United States Supreme Court—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson," he said.

"And I appointed more Black women to the federal circuit courts than every other president in American history combined."

Harris also pointed to the lasting impact of Trump's presidency on the nation's highest court, saying he had "handpicked three members" of the Supreme Court "with the intention that they would overturn Roe vs. Wade," the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

"And as he intended, they did," Harris said. "If he wins a second term, I promise you: He's going to go even further. So, all of this is to say, who sits in the White House matters.">

<A group of Arizona House Republicans has recommended Attorney General Kris Mayes be impeached for what it describes as abusing her authority, attacking political opponents and selectively enforcing state laws.

The House Ad Hoc Committee on Executive Oversight released a 102-page document outlining its findings and exhibits on Wednesday, recommending the Legislature use its power to impeach Mayes, a Democrat.

Impeachment, which could lead to removal from office after a trial in the Senate, is exceptionally rare — and far from guaranteed given the slim GOP majorities at the Legislature.

“The people of Arizona deserve better from the state’s chief legal officer,” Rep. Jacqueline Parker, R-San Tan Valley, said in a statement about the report. Parker led the committee, which held two meetings in recent weeks before making its recommendation.

Last month, a grand jury in Maricopa County indicted 11 Arizona Republicans and seven top aides to Donald Trump on felony charges stemming from a plan to keep him in the White House by falsely certifying he won the state in 2020. Mayes is leading the case against the GOP fake electors and Trump aides, including his former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

All five GOP committee members signed the 23-page recommendation that the Arizona House of Representatives pursue an impeachment resolution because Mayes committed "malfeasance in office." Democrats were on the committee only nominally; none participated in the hearings.

The committee said Mayes committed "malfeasance in office," citing six examples. Those include Mayes' letter warning against a hand count of ballots in Mohave County, her unsuccessful lawsuit trying to stop delegation of election administration in Cochise County, her consumer alert about "crisis pregnancy centers" and town halls about water resources and possible nuisance lawsuits. The committee faulted Mayes for not testifying before it, and for refusing to defend a 2022 law preventing transgender girls from playing school sports.

"Based on Attorney General Mayes’ abuse of power, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office, the Committee finds that Attorney General Mayes has committed impeachable offenses," the final report says. "The Committee therefore recommends the House adopt a resolution impeaching Attorney General Kris Mayes and appointing a board of managers to prosecute her at a Senate trial."

Mayes, in a phone interview with The Arizona Republic, said none of the committee's findings would change her work. She said the committee's investigation was a "sham," "absurd" and politically motivated.

"It's not going to disrupt the way I do my job, which is to protect the people of Arizona and tackle the real issues they're facing," Mayes said.

That will be put to the test almost immediately, as Mayes plans to hold a listening session Thursday in Patagonia about water availability, including whether groundwater overpumping could be a violation of state nuisance laws.

It will mark another stop in her tour of the state that has drawn the ire of the committee. The committee alleged the events were a misuse of public resources and that Mayes was campaigning for a potential ballot measure.

"I'm not going to stop doing town halls and hearing out the people of Arizona, that's my job," Mayes said. "And perhaps if these, you know, extreme Republicans would spend more time listening to Arizonans they'd understand what our residents are dealing with every day. But they obviously don't see their jobs the same way I do."

A few hours after the committee made its recommendation, Mayes' campaign sent out a fundraising plea via text message, noting the impeachment recommendation and asking supporters to "make sure democracy remains protected."

The Arizona Constitution lays out a process to impeach public officers for "high crimes, misdemeanors, or malfeasance in office." It requires a majority vote in the 60-member House of Representatives, and a two-thirds vote in the 30-member Senate to convict....>

<....House Speaker Ben Toma, who convened the committee, on Wednesday said that he would vote to impeach Mayes based on what he read so far of the committee's report.

“I think she’s refused to do the job,” Toma, R-Glendale said, saying Mayes picks and chooses which cases against the state she will defend. “You run for the office; do the job,” he said. Asked to respond, Mayes noted only that Toma was in a competitive GOP primary seeking a seat in Congress.

Toma cautioned that he had not yet finished reading the report and didn’t have a sense of the 31-member GOP caucus in the House. He demurred when asked if he would allow late introduction of a measure that would trigger an impeachment vote, saying he would need to check the temperature of House Republicans.

“I happen to be pretty decent at math,” Toma said. “I understand to get to 20 in the Senate would be difficult.”

There are 16 Republicans in the Senate, meaning Democrats would have to join in and vote against a member of their party for the trial to be successful.

Parker did not respond to a voicemail or text messages from The Arizona Republic on Wednesday, and it is unclear if she will introduce an impeachment measure or lobby fellow GOP lawmakers to vote in support. Parker, a second-term lawmaker and member of the Legislature's most conservative coalition, the Freedom Caucus, is not running for reelection.

Committee recommends financial punishment
In addition to impeachment, the GOP members of the committee suggest Mayes' office could be punished through the state budget process. The Legislature could deduct funds from the Attorney General's Office equal to the amount that GOP Legislative leaders spent to defend cases Mayes would not, the report says. The Legislature could also reduce Mayes' budget to defund units lawmakers did not explicitly approve, like one focusing on preserving reproductive rights, the committee said.

"We are the top law enforcement office in the state of Arizona," Mayes said. "We have 60 hardworking agents working day in and day out fighting the drug cartels, doing dangerous work on behalf of the people of Arizona. And this Legislature wants to defund us? ... It would appear it's the Republican Party now that wants to defund the police."

Other GOP members of the House committee were Rep. Neal Carter of San Tan Valley, Rep. John Gillette of Kingman, and Rep. David Marshall of Snowflake. Rep. Austin Smith of Surprise, who recently faced allegations he forged voter signatures required to qualify for another term in office, was second in command of the committee. Smith withdrew as a candidate after the forgery allegations.

The Arizona Legislature last impeached and convicted a public official in 1988, according to records kept by the Arizona State Library. Then-Gov. Evan Mecham loaned inauguration funds to his auto dealership, and he and his brother were accused of concealing a six-figure loan from a Tempe developer. They were acquitted of criminal charges — but Mecham was convicted and removed from office by the Senate.

The House considered impeaching Republican Corporation Commissioner Jim Irvin in 2003 based on accusations he sought to influence a corporate bidding war on behalf of Southwest Gas. Irvin was ordered to pay $60 million in a related civil case.

<A Republican member of the election board in Georgia's Fulton County is refusing to certify May 21 primary election results, demanding that she first be given unusual access to “essential election materials and processes."

According to the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official, Julie Adams, wants "lists of all qualified county electors showing those who signed in at polling locations as well as those who returned absentee ballots, the numbers of votes cast on particular machines and during advance voting, information on provisional and “drop box” ballots, digital images of ballots as they were cast, and all absentee ballot applications and envelopes, among other data."

The rogue board member was a former director of the conservative Tea Party Patriots and one of two people nominated to the five-person board by the Fulton County Republican Party. Though her move to abstain and file a lawsuit did not stop the board from voting to certify last week's election, Adams has caused alarm as former President Donald Trump and members of the Republican Party routinely threaten to overturn elections that do not go their way.

Adams has asserted that “the board has not and clearly should be monitoring our elections," and that "it’s time to fix the problems in our elections.”

Aaron Johnson, a Democratic member of the board, noted that Fulton County, which encompasses the city of Atlanta, is the most heavily watched county in Georgia, and that the board's certification is part of a long process to ensure the election was legitimately conducted. “The State (Election) Board still has to certify,” he said. “It’s a continual process, it’s not something that ends today. The problem that we have in Fulton County is the continuous misrepresentation of what actually is going on.”

Last Friday, the Georgia Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee stepped in to foil the case, which Georgia party chair and U.S. representative Nikema Williams said was a "transparent attempt to set the stage" for a fight to block certification for the 2024 presidential election if Trump is defeated. He and 18 co-defendants are already being charged in an alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, where Joe Biden beat Trump by just under 12,000 votes.

Adams and her lawyers say that a ruling in her favor by Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville would be "consistent with Georgia’s policy of building public trust and confidence in Georgia’s elections.” She is also taking aim at the county elections director, who she said should not conduct an election “with no oversight or access” by the board.

In response, the director told Adams that she and other board members could have observed the "reconciliation" of election results before certification. The problem was that she did not seek the materials on time before the certification deadline.>

<There is a reason that numbers nerds tend to like elections and sports: Each involves competition that can be tracked in intimate detail through data. There’s a human element, sure, voters voting and athletes athleting. But those activities aggregate into scads of data emerging over decades — data that can be pored over, reformed, dug through and assembled.

In the modern era, though, the availability of all that electoral data presents an increasingly familiar problem: cherry-picking. The internet allowed the pattern-seeking obsessiveness depicted by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind” to become a sort of leisure activity among conspiracy-minded political enthusiasts. Grab a quote from Whatever.gov and match it to a quote from a speech by President Biden and share it on X and watch the retweets roll in.

Or, if you are good with numbers and/or computers, riffle through sets of data related to the 2020 election — maybe county-level vote results, maybe census counts; use your imagination! — and uncover all the voter fraud that Donald Trump claims occurred. Maybe you can rake in money by turning it into a movie, even. It’s been a buyer’s market for nearly a decade and it shows no signs of slowing up.

Take Douglas Frank. After the 2020 election, Frank became something of a celebrity in Trumpworld for his math-adjacent assessments of how rampant voter fraud must have occurred. His analysis was not particularly robust: He used results from a few counties in a state to create estimates of data in the rest of the counties and then suggested that the accuracy of the estimates proved some process of manipulation. But he became a mini-celebrity anyway, offering a presentation before a Trump speech and becoming a sidekick to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on the voter-fraud event circuit.

The problem here, as with cherry-picked theories of malfeasance in general, is that the availability of information has wildly outpaced familiarity with the systems that produce that information. Frank thought he’d found evidence of fraud by plunking numbers into a spreadsheet, but he never endeavored to explain how such fraud would have been possible across different states and different counties with different processes for casting and tallying votes. He and those like him portrayed themselves as though they were Sherlock Holmes uncovering fingerprints at a crime scene but were, in reality, pulling together little arced lines from different areas on the moon’s surface.

Those who fervently believe in the existence of rampant voter fraud are generally unfamiliar with the existing checks aimed at preventing fraud — in part because those checks are often either obvious or behind the scenes. Voter registration itself, for example, is a key element: matching voters to names and addresses makes it far harder for people to cast illegal votes. Fraud is detected in every election, yielding a small number of criminal charges for double-voting or other illegal activity. The small number is, in part, because there is so little interest in casting a vote illegally; you’re going to commit a federal crime to give your preferred presidential candidate one more vote in your state? On occasion, there are arrests related to larger conspiracies — conspiracies that include more people and therefore make them more likely to be uncovered....>

<....In other words, there is evidence that the system works well as is and no evidence that it doesn’t. Which brings us to Elon Musk.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Tesla CEO and X owner has grown increasingly close to Trump. This isn’t terribly surprising; Musk’s Trump-friendly politics (and Trump-like persona) has been obvious for some time. But there was one new detail that stuck out.

“Musk and [investor Nelson] Peltz have told acquaintances they are working on a data-driven project to ensure votes are fairly counted, echoing Trump’s accusations of widespread fraud in the 2020 election,” the paper reports. The pair “described the initiative to Trump in the March meeting, according to a person familiar with that discussion.”

This is a very Muskian idea: take an existing product and use his tech savvy to revamp it. It worked for him with Tesla, to a large extent. It has not worked particularly well with his more-recent takeover of Twitter.

Unfortunately for his odds of success, a plan to overlay data analysis onto our elections to uproot fraud has more echoes of the Twitter effort than the Tesla one. For one thing, it is obviously rooted in Musk’s increasingly surreal view of politics. He’s not trying to prevent voter fraud because there’s rampant voter fraud. He’s doing it because the bubble in which he operates says there’s rampant fraud — just as the same people in that same bubble insisted, inaccurately, that Twitter was unfairly muting right-wing voices. For another, this idea is not particularly innovative.

This approach has been tried before, and not just by the Douglas Franks of the world. Trump himself instantiated a presidential commission centered on uncovering rampant fraud after he won the 2016 election. It collapsed in failure without uncovering any rampant fraud. Trump’s campaign hired researchers to prove fraud after the 2020 election. They didn’t find any. Trump’s campaign kept that to themselves.

It wasn’t only Trump. George W. Bush’s administration also tried to root out voter fraud, finding no evidence that it was occurring to a significant degree. Trump allies such as former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach (who also served on Trump’s commission) attempted to prove that rampant fraud occurred. They didn’t.

But Musk, true to form, seems to think that he will succeed where others have failed. The issue isn’t that the system works and has checks in place to prevent fraud from happening and, therefore, that rampant fraud doesn’t happen. The problem, instead, is that an insufficient level of genius has been applied to the problem, and once it is, reality will reveal itself like the blooming of a corpse flower. What is needed, the theory appears to be, is a guy who is good with numbers.

That’s what Douglas Frank thought, too.>

<Donald Trump has been accused of doing something "worse than falling asleep" in his first criminal trial, according to a forensic psychiatrist.

The ex-POTUS has dismissed claims that he's dozing off during court sessions, despite being seen with his eyes closed, and many questioning his 'odd' behavior.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a Harvard academic and writer, suggests there's another reason for Trump's drowsy demeanor.

"Given his emotional fragility, he is likely falling into a dissociative state to avoid the pain of facing intolerable facts about himself," she shared with Daily Express US. "His unusual behavior can be interpreted as frantic efforts to escape his own sense of inadequacy and worthlessness, and here he is trapped."

If convicted, Trump might find himself in a New York state pen without his Secret Service detail.

A pal of Trump's says the lower Manhattan court setting is causing him distress.

Lee reckons the strict rules on chatting, using phones, and even drinking could be adding to his discomfort.

"There are few ways for Donald Trump to escape reality in criminal court, which is the most rigorous in procedure and rules of evidence," she notes.

He's powerless to counter as he hears ex-colleagues and business partners disclose intimate details about his alleged affairs with two women and his attempts to conceal them.

"More deceptive, dangerous, and 'contagious' are Donald Trump's maladaptive coping mechanisms, where he is highly motivated by rage and revenge for his perceived grievances and paranoid attitude toward the world, where he needs constantly to attack, scapegoat, and 'hit ten times harder,' in his mind not to be attacked himself," Lee states.

She continues: "And even ordinary reality will be intolerable to him, to the point where he needs to seek 'retribution.' There will be no internal limits in him, until limits are set from the outside."

Lee, who edited "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.">

Know a thing or three about 'maladaptive coping mechanisms', do ya, <fredthebore>? S'okay: learn to love yer paranoia, in a world featuring every man's hand against ya!!