<....Science is dismissed and disdained in this war on reality. For example, a late June decision upholding bans on homeless people sleeping in public places criminalizes human biology, as the dissent noted. A frankly despicable decision this year to legalize bump stocks turned on gun fetishists’ scholastic argument that holding your finger taut while a rifle bucks around it—pumping bullets into men, women and children, with more than 400 (400!) people shot and 60 killed this way in Las Vegas in 2017—is not truly automatic weaponry. That’s despite research showing a growing trend of greater fatalities in mass shootings, enabled by just such technology. The 2022 vaccine mandate decision, another 6-3 masterpiece, turned on sophistry that workplace rules only covered hazards found solely in the workplace (but somehow excluding, say, forced air-breathing with infected employees), and ignored the deeper reality that vaccines save lives. The majority justices doubtless contributed to the hundreds of thousands of deaths of unvaccinated people in the U.S. from COVID with their decision.

A Clean Waters Act case last year decreed wetlands only environmentally protected if their waters possessed a “continuous surface connection” with a larger body of water. This invented requirement is wholly at odds with how water and wetlands actually work, leaving up to half of the country’s protected wetlands now available for dredging.

The 2022 Dobbs case ended the right to abortion, a basic medical procedure that helps people manage their own health and bodies and has saved countless lives. The only arguments against abortion are not scientific but theological. The Court waved away concerns about the very predictable health impacts of Dobbs. Two years later, news reports abound of women facing dangerous pregnancies and people in states with stringent abortion restrictions reporting worse mental health. Infant mortality is up almost 13 percent in Texas.

The court’s July 1 decision to immunize Donald Trump from prosecution for “official acts” undertaken in office as president means, “It can never again be said that in America ‘no man is above the law,’” retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig noted in response to the decision. No evidence of an official act undertaken as part of a criminal unofficial one is permitted, the Court added, as well as no inquiry into the chief executive’s motives, both curious exclusions from criminal investigations that should rest on facts.

“Facts are stubborn things,” observed John Adams in 1770, speaking at a murder trial of Redcoats who fired into a crowd at the Boston Tea Party, before a judge sworn to serve a king. “Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact,” added Adams.

Not so for our Supreme Court majority. Before taking office, justices must take an oath to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties.” In rejecting facts to please their political party—and their patrons—the justices of the Court’s majority have broken their oath, made to both the Constitution and the American people.>

<A liberal watchdog organization is warning that former President Donald Trump is on a mission to make it harder for people to vote in 2024 and beyond, and he is ready to discredit the results if he loses.

In a new report this week, the American Civil Liberties Union pointed to Trump and his allies’ refusal to commit to accepting the results of this year's presidential election.

Even if he does win, the ACLU said, Americans should expect Trump will abuse his executive power to interfere with elections, such as prosecuting spurious claims of voter fraud, purging voters from rolls, and using federal police powers to intimidate local election workers.

It’s one of the strongest nonpartisan warnings yet of the potential consequences of a second Trump presidency, as anxious Democrats say that democracy is on the ballot but Republicans counter that the purpose of their new election laws is to make it harder to cheat.

The report comes on the eve of the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee. The party's platform says "Republicans will ensure election integrity" and fix "our very corrupt elections" through laws related to voter identification and proof of citizenship, among others.

"It’s typical that the fake news media obsessively cover President Trump’s commitment to ensuring the integrity of our nation's elections,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. She said “voters know he is the only one who can make America great again.”

Here are three things the ACLU is saying to expect from a Trump administration.

1. Weaponizing the Department of Justice

The ACLU says that Trump would use the Department of Justice, or DOJ, to pressure states into removing massive numbers of people from voter rolls. He would also ask it to launch spurious investigations and prosecutions into allegations of voter fraud, as he did in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

During his first term, Trump appointed DOJ with leaders who were loyal to him. And one of Trump’s major proposals over the years has been to update federal guidelines to make it easier to fire nonpartisan, rank-and-file civil service workers, including those who staff the Department of Justice.

The ACLU says Trump and his allies are likely to use the department to spread false claims about voter fraud and embark on “bad-faith investigations and prosecutions.”

“Even if those prosecutions ultimately are unsuccessful, and you trust the court to sort of hold the line, the fact of the investigation and prosecution can wreck somebody’s life, financially, reputationally,” said Mike Zamore, the national director of policy and government affairs for the ACLU.

“What does that do to people’s willingness to participate at all?” he asked. “How does that shape the decision making along the way?”....>

<....2. Federal pressure on local election administration

The ACLU warns that a second Trump administration would use federal policing power to intimidate people at the polls, which are run by local governments, and use federal agencies including the Department of Justice to force local governments to purge voters from their rolls.

Trump said in 2020 that he would send sheriffs and law enforcement to the polls to guard against voter fraud. And the Republican National Committee has vowed to place thousands of poll watchers around the country. The ACLU said Trump may deploy law enforcement himself or encourage state governments to deploy the National Guard.

Attempts to clean voter rolls have become a popular tool on the right. It’s a central theme in the Trump-controlled Republican National Committee’s litigation program, in lawsuits brought by right-leaning groups like Judicial Watch, and of grassroots activists who do their own data analyses.

The ACLU said Trump’s false claims about illegal voting are behind these efforts, and that a Trump administration would use its power to “force aggressive voter purges directly.”

3. Rolling back the motor voter law

The primary federal law the ACLU says is in danger is the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that directed states to make it easier to register to vote through methods like checking off a box when a person applies for their driver's license, and regulates how states can remove people from voting rolls.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2021 expanding voter registration under that law, and it’s led to more people being registered in tribal communities through Indian Health Service locations and veterans being registered through Veterans Affairs hospitals. The ACLU predicted Trump would rescind the executive order.

Trump’s allies in the House have already passed another bill that would update the voter registration law to make it harder to be registered. The bill would require people to show proof of citizenship before getting on voter rolls. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the initiative during an April visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters.>

<If reelected, former President Trump will assert sweeping power to withhold money that Congress has appropriated. His allies are pushing unilateral cuts to an array of programs, for which Trump will “simply choke off the money.” His administration would do this at a massive scale, targeting “large chunks” of federal agencies’ budgets.

All of this would happen in defiance of federal law — namely the Impoundment Control Act. Passed in 1974, the law requires the president to comply with appropriations laws and spend federal funds, unless he gets approval from Congress to do otherwise.

In Trump’s view, the Impoundment Control Act poses no threat to his plans, because he believes the president possesses an inherent constitutional power to refuse to spend, or “impound,” appropriated funds. Although the Constitution nowhere mentions a “power to impound,” Trump’s allies have in recent weeks defended this view as deeply rooted in American history and tradition. They argue that the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutionally infringes on the president’s alleged inherent impoundment power. And they cast impoundments as an innocuous tool to save taxpayer money.

On each point, Trump and his advisers are wrong. Neither American history and tradition nor the text and structure of the Constitution support the notion of an inherent presidential impoundment power on which the Impoundment Control Act encroaches.

Although Trump and his allies are right that presidents going back to the founding have at times spent less money than Congress has appropriated for a given purpose, they are wrong to suggest that this supports the notion of an inherent presidential power to impound.

First, in many instances, presidents have been able to spend less than the full amount appropriated because Congress gave them this discretion in statute. Such was the case when President Thomas Jefferson impounded funds for gunboats in 1803. Congress had authorized Jefferson to spend “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars” on a “number not exceeding fifteen gun boats.” Almost 150 years later, when President Harry S. Truman impounded funds for federal programs deemed not to advance the Korean War effort, it was because Congress gave him that discretion in sections 1211 and 1214 of a 1950 omnibus appropriations law.

Only three presidents appear to have explicitly claimed an independent constitutional power to impound funds. Truman seems to have done so at a 1950 press conference, where he noted that if the president “doesn’t feel like money should be spent, I don’t think he can be forced to spend it.” President John F. Kennedy appears to have done the same in a 1962 letter to Congress. And President Richard Nixon did so repeatedly — both in court and through congressional testimony.

Each of these presidents governed in the last 80 years. The idea of an inherent power to impound is thus not deeply rooted in American history but rather recent, and quite infrequently invoked at that.

Indeed, it appears that it was not until the Nixon administration that any president pressed this argument in court. When Nixon did, he resoundingly lost in federal courts in Louisiana and D.C....>

<....These cases reflect only a small slice of the numerous lawsuits filed against the Nixon administration for impounding billions of dollars in funds for public housing, drug rehabilitation, disaster relief, urban development, rural environmental assistance and other programs. In 1973 alone, Nixon impounded $18 billion in authorized and appropriated spending, representing 34 percent of all discretionary domestic spending that year. For the coming fiscal year, for which nondefense discretionary spending is capped at $711 billion, withholding the same percentage of funds would result to more than $240 billion in impoundments.

Nixon impounded funds at this scale not to save taxpayers money but to nullify the will of Congress and defund programs he disagreed with on policy grounds. And he claimed unbounded constitutional power to do this in order to put himself above the laws he sought to flout.

This is why Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act in 1974 — to definitively outlaw this practice. And it is why federal courts ruled against Nixon — because the idea of a presidential power to impound cannot be reconciled with the text and structure of the Constitution, which creates co-equal branches of government and divides power among them, so none reigns supreme.

When it comes to federal spending, the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, not the president. To claim that the president has an inherent impoundment power is to place the president outside of and above the system of checks and balances that the Constitution’s framers so carefully designed.

This is exactly what Trump seeks to do now in claiming an inherent power to impound — not to pursue cost savings for the American people, but seize for himself the authority to do whatever he wishes as president and brush aside checks on his power.

Trump previewed this approach to impoundments in 2019 when he placed an unlawful hold on American security assistance to Ukraine in an effort to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating his likely opponent in the 2020 presidential race, then-former Vice President Joe Biden.

Last time, Trump backed down and released U.S. assistance to Ukraine. This time, he’s saying he would not have to — indeed, that he has had the power all along to spend or not spend appropriations as he sees fit. Neither American history and tradition nor the Constitution’s text and structure provide support for this vision of governance.>

<When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.

Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again....>

<....One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subdued to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

<It was a hot July day in Butler, Pa., where the median household income is about $39,000, the population numbers about 13,000 and the vast majority of those people are White. The tragedy happened on a stage bedecked in patriotic colors with an American flag blowing overhead. That stage was set up on a grassy expanse that regularly serves as a home to carnival midways and livestock shows. This is not the sort of place where most people in this country live, but it is the sort of place that some folks like to refer to as the real America. Not the urban cauldrons of countless ethnicities, languages and cultures, but the exurbs and rural communities that call to mind an idyllic fantasy of small-town neighborliness and front doors left unlocked, because everyone trusts everyone.

It was on that stage that former president Donald Trump was standing when, in the first minutes of his campaign rally, shots from an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon pierced the air. One of the bullets clipped his ear, he said, and had him ducking for cover and left his face wet with blood. Other shots killed an audience member, injured two others and left a nation shocked but not surprised. Because this is America.

Secret Service agents moved in swiftly to form a human shield around Trump as he crouched down low. (Don’t we all long for such a protection in a country filled with guns?) Law enforcement killed the shooter. Secret Service uses the word “neutralized,” which suggests that the danger is gone, when the danger has merely been paused. This is America, after all.

When Trump finally stood, his ear and cheek were visibly smeared with blood. His expression whiplashed between confusion and shock, then quickly settled on anger. From the microphones still live at the now-askew lectern, one could hear Trump ask to retrieve his shoes as he sought to right himself. In the tangle of dark suits, one could make out another splotch of red. A bloodied handkerchief? No, Trump had retrieved the MAGA baseball cap which he’d been wearing.

As the agents sought to hustle their protectee to the waiting motorcade, Trump demanded that they “wait, wait, wait.” The agents who’d risked their lives by standing between him and the shooter now paused so Trump could attend to his crowd. He thrust his fist into the air in a gesture of cinematic bravura, and his mouth clenched into a single word, “Fight.” The crowd roared.

Because this is America, it’s impossible to fully understand the meaning, the impact of that single word. A metaphor aiming to inspire tenacity or bravery registers like a call for violence. A fair warning about the dire state of the democracy is interpreted as absolution for terrorism. Facts land like grenades. A difference of opinion hits like a fusillade....>

<....Everything is a conspiracy. All our communications are colored by anger and mistrust, so much so that it’s as though we’re speaking different languages: red state patois, blue state dialect. But the aftermath of the attack on Trump is familiar to us all: the belongings and trash scattered after a crowd ducked from gunfire, the crime scene tape, the disrupted sense of safety, the anxiety, the promise for a full investigation.

It’s tempting to say that Americans exist along a bell curve, where extremists huddle on either end and the middle bulges with good people who just want everyone to get along. But that would be fallacy. We are a nation of roiling resentment, of low-information voters, of self-righteous Christians, of condescending secularists, of disaffected young people, of stubborn old people, of greedy rich, of embittered poor who’d rather see themselves continue to suffer if it means <those> people — Black, immigrant, refugee, Muslim, gay, whoever — might benefit from some governmental crumbs.

America is angry. It has settled into the kind of anger that contorts the face and tenses the muscles and renders people unrecognizable — even to themselves. It’s the kind of anger that recalls those sepia-toned images of women in shirtwaist dresses and cat-eyed glasses and men in short-sleeve dress shirts and skinny ties from back when political violence took a heavy toll as the country fought over segregation and civil rights, which was really just a fight over the kind of country people wanted this to be. For segregationists, the anger was sparked by having to share space with those who didn’t look like them. They believed that what was rightfully theirs was being taken away while failing to realize that simply possessing something doesn’t mean that it was ever rightfully yours. Theirs was anger over privilege being revoked.

A famous photograph depicts a 15-year-old girl making the lonely walk to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. A mob of segregationists stand behind her yelling, but one in particular stands out. She has short dark hair and her mouth is open wide in a nearly perfect circle so that the full volume of her fury can spew forth. Her eyes are narrowed and her brow is furrowed and the anger is volcanic.

Here we are three generations later. We remain a segregated America in many churches and neighborhoods. We’re still arguing over the kind of country this should be; people are still worried about losing things they’ve never owned. They’re clinging to privileges, denying the ugly bits of history and deeply distrustful of difference. Justice may not move in a straight line, but must it make a hairpin turn?

In the minutes after Trump was removed from the stage and before his motorcade had even departed, the crowd began chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A” in response to Trump’s raised fist. Many in the packed audience were angry, rather than frightened or stunned, and sought to dispense blame for the bloodshed. And instead of looking at each other or at themselves, they unleashed their vitriol into the assembled video cameras.

One man in particular stood out. He was wearing a red T-shirt and a moss-colored baseball cap. His beard was gray and dark sunglasses shielded his eyes. He screamed, “F--- you!” and jabbed the air with his middle fingers with as much vigor as he could muster. His arms were hyperextended and his biceps flexed as the rage flooded through his body. But he wasn’t alone. America is seized up with anger. Convulsing with it.

“Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is [more] important than that right now — unity,” President Biden said.

What should this country be? Surely, America doesn’t have to be this.>

<U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for the Southern District of Florida dismissed the Mar-a-Lago records case against Donald Trump on Monday.

Per the order, Cannon dismissed the case after finding that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution.

Cannon’s determination that Smith was unlawfully appointed effectively endorses a legal theory tested multiple times in previous cases and dismissed, rooted in the idea that the Attorney General cannot appoint and fund a special counsel absent authorization from Congress. That was seen as an absurd notion, and one contravened by decades of special counsel investigations under the current statute.

But it received a boost both after Cannon held a multi-day hearing on the question and after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas supported the idea in a concurrence in the Trump immunity ruling. Cannon cited that concurrence throughout her order.

The immediate effect of the dismissal will be to end what was seen as the simplest and most threatening of the criminal cases against Trump. Trump’s decision to retain classified records after the government repeatedly asked for them to be returned took place nearly entirely after he left office, and purportedly imperiled some of the most sensitive national security information the government possesses.

The outright dismissal will allow Smith to appeal Cannon’s ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Until Monday, Cannon had mostly ruled in ways that deprived the parties of the ability to appeal, effectively delaying any potential trial until after the November election.

The ruling caps more than a year of stunning decisions from Cannon, beginning in the investigation’s pre-indictment phase. Then, Cannon broke with fundamental principles of criminal law to order a halt to the investigation after Trump filed a civil suit seeking the same.

The 11th Circuit reversed Cannon’s decision, ending that case. But after Trump was indicted in the Southern District of Florida, the case was assigned once again to Judge Cannon.

Cannon’s subsequent behavior sparked heated public speculation over whether she was acting out of ineptitude or malice. But the result has been clear: She took a case over the illegal retention of national security secrets and transformed it into months of interminable delay, avoiding making key rulings and entertaining even Trump’s most tenuous and far-fetched arguments, often by holding full hearings to examine them in great detail.

In this case, Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case by finding that Smith was unlawfully appointed reads more like an appellate – or Supreme Court – ruling than that of a district court judge, typically charged with applying existing precedent.

Cannon’s ruling both nakedly benefits Trump and contravenes rulings issued by other conservative judges. Hunter Biden, for example, moved to dismiss the gun charges against him by arguing that Special Counsel David Weiss was improperly appointed. The judge in that case, a Trump appointee, rejected the motion.

It’s one of many examples in which other judges – even of the same ideological stripe – rejected the legal theory that Cannon endorsed on Monday.>

<U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn used her speech Monday night at the Republican National Convention to hammer President Biden's economic record on inflation, taxes and business regulations.

Blackburn has emerged as a leading conservative voice. Her role in shaping the latest Republican platform — which she presented to the convention crowd earlier in the day — as well as her prime speaking slot could position her as a key ally if President Trump is reelected.

Her speech did not reference the assassination attempt against Trump. Instead, she criticized Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and focused on the economic theme of night one of the convention.

The six-minute speech was packed with conservative red meat. Blackburn blasted diversity and inclusion requirements and said Trump would reverse Biden's energy policies, fire scores of new IRS employees and chop regulations for small businesses.

Blackburn said the Republican platform was "dedicated to the forgotten men and women of America."

"You know who will return us to an era of prosperity: Donald Trump.">

<Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing calls to resign on social media after she quickly blamed Democrats for the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, saying Republicans are in a “battle” against the “party of pedophiles.”

Greene has been characteristically outspoken after a gunman identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on a Trump rally in rural Pennsylvania on Saturday evening, striking the president’s [sic] ear just minutes into his speech.

The Georgia Republican congresswoman baselessly alleged there’s a conspiracy afoot, insisting “Democrats wanted this to happen” and have “wanted Trump gone for years and they’re prepared to do anything to make that happen.”

After attacking Democrats for repeatedly calling Trump a threat to democracy, she soon blasted the party with more extreme rhetoric, calling the country’s polarized politics a “battle.”

“We are in a battle between GOOD and EVIL,” she wrote on X on Sunday.

“The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars.

“They want to lock up their political opponents, and terrorize innocent Americans who would tell the truth about it.

“The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.”

Greene was slammed for her comments, with one X user writing: “Resign in disgrace. It was a Republican.”

“Donald Trump almost got shot dead by a Republican gun nut wielding an AR-15 — and this is how you respond? You’re truly beyond deplorable,” Omar Rivero, the co-founder of Occupy Democrats, told Greene.

“Your rhetoric is REPREHENSIBLE. Sit down,” X user Art Candee wrote, adding in another post that Greene “has been crying about Democrat’s [sic] rhetoric for almost a day. Then she posts this. Vile hypocrisy from that woman.”

“You’re a disgrace to the United States Congress. This is so pathetic. Resign,” Bryce Allers added.

According to federal campaign records, the rally gunman donated $15 to a progressive political action committee in 2021 but he subsequently registered as a Republican, Pennsylvania voter data show.

A former classmate of Crooks, Max Smith, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “He definitely was conservative. It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.”

Smith added that Crooks once took part in a debate where the teacher posed government policy questions and asked students to stand on one side or the other depending on their stance on the issue.

“The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith told the paper. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”>

<The corruption allegations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are only getting worse after a review discovered last week that the RV-loving, yacht-riding, jet-setting judge did not recuse himself from a 2004 health insurance case despite a clear conflict of interest.

In 1999, Thomas took a $267,230 loan from health insurance executive Anthony Welters to buy a motor coach, a term he will defend more vehemently than the well-being of the nation’s populace. Welters was CEO of AmeriChoice when he gave Thomas the loan. The executive claims it was just money given to a friend… who happened to serve on the Supreme Court when they met. The HMO would be acquired by UnitedHealth in 2002, where he remained an executive. While Justice Thomas recused himself from two cases involving UnitedHealth, Rolling Stone found that not only he participated in a case but he also wrote the court’s unanimous decision.

Aetna Health Inc. v. Davila, the 2004 case in question, confirmed that insurers couldn’t be held liable for malpractice when the health plan denies life-saving or medically necessary treatment. While UnitedHealth wasn’t a named party in the case, the decision had massive ramifications for the entire healthcare industry. Coincidentally, Welters extended Thomas’ loan by a decade in 2004, and it was eventually forgiven in 2008. Rolling Stone spoke with one of the lawyers from the case:

George Parker Young was the lawyer for the patients in Aetna Health. After the decision, he says, he stopped handling cases suing health insurers on behalf of patients and doctors. “I just got out of it,” he says. “It had been 100 percent of my cases, and I wound up that docket.”

Young notes the Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous, and his clients may well have lost 8-0 if Thomas had recused himself in the case — instead of authoring the opinion.

“What I won’t do … is say, ‘Oh my gosh, if Justice Thomas had recused, I would have won that case.’ I can’t say that, and that would be disingenuous for me to say that,” he says. But looking back now at the RV loan provided by Welters, Young says, “It does stink.”

He says if he knew about the loan during the case, “I would have moved to recuse,” adding that “there’s no question this case was going to impact all national HMOs that did any kind of employer-based health care.”

The outcome might not have shifted but the gravity of cases deliberated before the Supreme Court requires the most stringent impartiality possible. In the 2004 decision, Thomas wrote that denied patients should just pay out of pocket for their life-saving care. To hold that opinion, Justice Thomas either views $267,000 as an inconsequential amount of money or he was swayed by the lavish gifts sent by corporate interests. Either way, the judge is far more out of touch with the average American despite his love for cross-country road trips.>

<Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) proclaimed at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday that Democrats are a "clear and present danger to the country" — an odd departure from the GOP's own message, following former President Donald Trump's near assassination on Saturday, demanding that Democrats stop calling Trump a danger to the country.

Johnson apparently realized the hypocrisy was a bit too much to ignore, because he had an explanation when PBS News Hour's Amna Nawaz asked him about it: it was the teleprompter's fault.

"I asked Wisc @SenRonJohnson about him calling Democratic policies a 'clear and present danger to the country' while calling for unity - he says speech he just delivered at RNC was not the one he intended to give, that prompter loaded old version, new one called for unity," wrote Nawaz on X.

Commenters on social media weren't buying the excuse.

"Blame the teleprompter," wrote MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell sarcastically.

"I hope the teleprompter goes haywire around 22:00 Central standard time tonight, and brings out quotes like 'Eat the rich' or 'bring back the guillotine.' That’d be so great, I’d tune in!" wrote the account @tevitauhatafe.

"The whole convention will be just a series of primal hate screams with them immediately walking straight to reporters to say it was really a speech about unity," wrote the account @CuriousAudioUS.

Many others mockingly compared Johnson to Ron Burgundy, the fictional inept newscaster played by Will Ferrell in "Anchorman."

This is not even the first teleprompter mishap to be had on the first day of the RNC.

Earlier in the day, House Speaker Mike Johnson froze up after his teleprompter malfunctioned, unable to deliver his speech, at which point the convention's live band took over to try to fill the silence.>

<It looks like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be taking matters into her own hands since President Joe Biden doesn't seem likely to withdraw from the election.

Politico's Jonathan Martin wrote on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Pelosi is "convinced Biden will lose." She's also been "working the phones" since the CNN debate in a behind-the-scenes bid to remove Biden from the ticket," Martin wrote.

Last week, Pelosi was seen openly talking to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the House Democratic cloakroom, Martin reported, citing a Pelosi colleague who saw the exchange.

And on Friday, Jeffries said in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that he had met Biden in a private meeting on Thursday.

"In my conversation with President Biden, I directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives, and conclusions about the path forward that the Caucus has shared in our recent time together," Jeffries wrote.

Notably, Jeffries' letter did not say whether the House Democratic Caucus wanted Biden to step aside or stay the course.

Martin further reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Pelosi has also been communicating with big-name Democrats. She's also told a former elected official that the destruction of the Democratic Party shouldn't be a part of Biden's legacy, per Politico.

It's worth noting that Pelosi failed to endorse Biden during an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday.

"It's up to the president to decide if he is going to run," Pelosi said. "We're all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short."

"I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that's the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with," Pelosi continued.

A Pelosi representative later issued a statement on the same day, reiterating that it was up to Biden to decide whether to stay on. Again, the statement did not fully endorse Biden's candidacy.

"Speaker Pelosi fully supports whatever President Biden decides to do. We must turn our attention to why this race is so important: Donald Trump would be a disaster for our country and our democracy," Ian Krager, a spokesperson for Pelosi, said in an email to The Washington Post.

To be sure, Pelosi may not be alone in her stance — as multiple Democratic lawmakers have lost faith in Biden's ability to pull off a win this year.

The presumptive Democratic nominee has faced growing calls to step down after his disastrous performance at his June 27 presidential debate with former President Donald Trump.

At least 18 House Democrats and one Democratic senator have called on Biden to quit following his poor debate performance.

Biden, on the other hand, has remained steadfast in wanting to stay in the race.

"I'm old. But I'm only three years older than Trump, number one. And number two, my mental acuity's been pretty damn good," Biden said in an interview with NBC News' Lester Holt on Monday.

"I've gotten more done than any president has in a long, long time in three-and-a-half years. So I'm willing to be judged on that," he continued.

Representatives for Pelosi and Biden didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.>

<Jimmy Carter’s warning should sound familiar to voters today. The nation, the president declared 45 years ago Monday, faced “a fundamental threat to American democracy.”

Carter uttered those words in a July 15, 1979, address that Americans mostly remember as his “malaise” speech, when he called out a “crisis of confidence” in a nation reeling from high inflation and gasoline shortages.

Nearly a half-century later, when President Biden and fellow Democrats (and some Republicans) warn of a threat to democracy, they have someone specific in mind: former president Donald Trump. They cite, among other things, his attempt to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss, and his comment that he won’t be a dictator if he wins this year’s election “except for Day One.”

The political backdrop of Carter’s speech was a presidency reeling from “a genuine political despair, perhaps unmatched in any modern White House, except in those very last days of Nixon,” The Washington Post reported that summer. “It is a despair that Carter may have been so severely crippled by the latest gasoline crisis — and by a public perception that he is not coping with it — that he may be kept from reelection.”

Carter didn’t actually use the word “malaise” in his speech, but that was certainly the vibe of the primetime address. Some people had already invoked the term: Carter’s domestic adviser Robert Strauss said in a July 10 PBS interview that when an incumbent president faces “the kind of problems he’s facing, with a bit of malaise around the country, if you will, a good deal of it, and frustration, I think it’s natural that he would be down in the polls.”

Originally, Carter had planned to focus on the energy crisis in his speech, at a time when angry Americans were standing in long lines to fill up their gas tanks. But he wasn’t happy with the draft that speechwriters had come up with, so the White House canceled an address scheduled for July 5. He spent the next 10 days at Camp David, Md., meeting with mayors and governors (including Arkansas governor and future president Bill Clinton), business and labor leaders, and private citizens. “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government,” one governor told him.

Carter wound up delivering a much more sweeping speech on July 15. Sitting at an Oval Office desk in a blue suit and a striped tie, he started off with his hands folded, but occasionally clenched his fist for emphasis. Carter told the 100 million TV viewers that he had tried, with limited success, to put his campaign promises into law.

“I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation,” he said. “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.”

He called it “a crisis of confidence,” saying, “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Against the backdrop of polls showing Americans had lost confidence in the president’s ability to lead, Carter said that they were losing faith “not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

Carter identified an erosion of trust that continues to this day: “As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.”

The Post wrote that almost two-thirds of the address “amounted to something of a sermon” and that the president was “clearly trying to overcome his public image as a weak leader.”

Carter, a former Georgia governor and peanut farmer who had run for president as a Washington outsider in 1976, tried to rekindle that insurgent spirit as he argued the government’s failure to deliver was endangering democracy.

“What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action,” he said, adding, “Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide.”

Carter blamed national traumas including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the Watergate scandal....>

<....News stories the next day painted Carter’s speech as a gambit to revive his sagging presidency. The Boston Globe noted one inherent problem with Carter’s message: “The president attacked, as ineffective, the government he has headed for 2½ years.”

Carter didn’t help his standing in the aftermath of the speech when he fired several members of his Cabinet a few days later. The president admitted in a meeting of more than 300 White House staffers that asking for the Cabinet resignations “may have been a mistake.”

Just like Biden, Carter — perceived as a struggling president and weak candidate — began facing calls for his replacement from worried Democrats in advance of the next year’s election. “The jump-ship impulse among Democrats spread from the back benches of the House to the front benches of the Senate,” Newsweek reported, “where liberal George McGovern of South Dakota pronounced Edward M. Kennedy ‘the most logical candidate’ for 1980.”

Kennedy wound up mounting a primary challenge to Carter. Carter prevailed, but he was no match for Ronald Reagan, who projected sunny optimism and said, “I find no national malaise.” Reagan won in a landslide.

Five years later, the Republican president still found it helpful to use Carter’s speech as a punching bag.

“The last time I visited the New York Stock Exchange was in 1980, and the mood sure was different then,” he said in 1985 remarks to brokers and staff at the exchange. “But in the last five years, we’ve moved from malaise to hope, confidence and opportunity.”>

<The Supreme Court’s new presidential immunity rule, announced in Trump v. United States, seems on its face to cut against the grain of the court’s recent jurisprudence.

This court has deliberately curtailed executive power, has shown a strong preference to decide only questions before it and no more, and has strong institutionalist and textualist leanings. A new, broad presidential immunity rule, which is how many commentators understand its ruling in the Trump case, seems inconsistent with these principles.

Something does not add up.

Lazy and thoughtless analysis has tried to resolve the contradiction by declaring the court hypocritical or in the tank for Trump. But I have a rule that has served me well in my legal practice. When something seems contradictory, I assume there is a good chance that I have understood it wrong and should try to understand it better.

Here, then, is the better interpretation of Trump v. United States, which fits comfortably within the court’s judicial philosophy.

The new rule of “absolute immunity” states that when the Constitution grants the president “conclusive and preclusive” power — meaning that the Constitution delegates a specific government function to the executive branch alone — the legislative branch cannot make any laws, including criminal laws, to restrict him. So the president cannot be prosecuted for a veto or an appointment, for example.>

<....The president is also “presumptively immune” for “official acts” if a prosecution would intrude on executive branch power.

To demonstrate that this rule is narrow, evaluate the argument proposed by the dissenting justices that a president who stages a coup, assassinates a rival, or takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon would now be immune from prosecution. None of these hypothetical fact patterns would qualify for “absolute immunity,” because each involves competing Constitutional powers. In such cases, the president’s acts would not be “conclusive and preclusive.” Each would also involve unofficial conduct, which remains fully prosecutable. Presumptive immunity would be overcome for the same reasons.

The specific holdings in the Trump ruling underscore this view. For example, the court held Trump immune for threatening to remove his attorney general if he did not comply with unlawful acts. Although this sounds disconcerting at first blush, the court decided only whether Trump is immune for alleged discussions with his own attorney general.

The court did not hold, however, that a president would be immune for exercising the fearsome powers of the Department of Justice to extort state officials into corruptly overturning an election (the equivalent of a coup).

Suppose the attorney general had gone along with Trump’s plan. Or suppose that Trump had used the military to stage a coup or assassinate a rival. In any of those cases, the court would not be assessing only the president’s removal power or his commander-in-chief power, but whether competing Constitutional duties, such as those involving elections and the peaceful transfer of power, were “conclusive and preclusive” powers of the executive. They are not.

And the court could also find in those instances that Trump acted in his “unofficial” capacity as a candidate, not as president. The outcome of the case would thus turn against Trump.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote last year, “Other cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions.” Likewise with selling pardons.

The Constitution limits the president’s pardon power by listing bribery as an impeachable offense and stating that any party impeached and convicted by the U.S. Senate “shall” be subject to criminal prosecution. And the majority opinion in the Trump ruling wrote that accepting a bribe is unofficial conduct — meaning it can be prosecuted.

Chief Justice John Roberts declined to spell this out clearly, choosing instead to be strategically ambiguous. He clearly worries that Trump, who leads in the polls and is being prosecuted under current President Biden, will follow through on his threats of retribution. Roberts wrote that the greater threat facing the nation is not a tyrannical presidency (for which there are other judicial remedies), but “an executive branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive president free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next.”

Roberts is nothing if not consistent. Twelve years ago, as the fifth vote to save the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius, he wrote “[i]t is not our job to save the people from the consequences of their electoral choices.” It is clear he still feels that way, and he is right. Ultimately, it is up to us to make better electoral choices if we want to get out of this mess.

But make no mistake: the chief justice left plenty of room for a future court to distinguish the Trump ruling and hold a corrupt or treasonous president subject to criminal prosecution.>

<Florida governor Ron DeSantis launched into an impassioned defense of his one-time political rival at the start of his Republican National Convention speech: “Let’s send Joe Biden back to his basement, and Donald Trump back to the White House.”

The Florida governor mocked President Joe Biden’s “Weekend at Bernie’s presidency,” in an apparent reference to the 1989 comedy in which the lead character who’s dead is being propped up.

“I am alarmed that the current president of the United States lacks the capability to discharge the duties of his office. Our enemies do not confine their designs to between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.,” the Republican governor said. “We need a commander-in-chief who can lead 24 hours a day and seven days a week. America cannot afford four more years of a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency.”

Following his disastrous debate performance earlier this month, even some of the president’s allies have begun to question whether he has the vigor to serve a second term.

The president’s old age and mental decline have since come to the forefront of the Democratic Party’s concerns for his reelection bid, causing numerous Democrats to urge him to step down in favor of a younger replacement. DeSantis then focused his attention to Democrats more broadly, accusing progressive prosecutors of caring more about “coddling criminals than about protecting their own communities” and calling DEI “division, exclusion, and indoctrination” instead of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

By the end of the speech, he called on the convention audience to vote for Trump in November and make him “the 47th President of the United States.”

“Let’s elect Republicans up and down the ballot, and let’s heed the call of our party’s nominee to fight, fight, fight for these United States,” DeSantis concluded, referring to Trump’s defiant words after he was shot on Saturday.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention Tuesday to offer her “strong endorsement” of her former political rival, former president Donald Trump.

Haley, who after serving as Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations became a controversial figure in Trump world for her criticism of the former president during her own unsuccessful presidential bid, received a warm reception from the crowd at the RNC on Tuesday night as she called for party unity and urged her supporters to get behind Trump.

She called on Americans who may not always agree with the former president to vote for him anyway.

“My message to them is simple: You don’t have to agree with Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him. Take it from me, I haven’t always agreed with President Trump, but we agree more often than we disagree,” Haley said.

“We agree on keeping America strong,” she continued. “We agree on keeping America safe and we agree that Democrats have moved so far to the left that they’re putting our freedoms in danger. I’m here tonight because we have a country to save and a unified Republican Party is essential for saving her.”

In a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) accused President Biden of making the country less safe by failing to control the crisis at the U.S. southern border.

The Texas senator, whose state has been hard hit by an influx of illegal immigration, noted 11.5 million people have crossed the border illegally under President Biden.He offered attendees a startling statistic: “This arena holds about 18,000 souls. Now imagine 639 arenas just like this filled to the brim. That is 11.5 million people. Larger than all but eight states in the nation.”

But the numbers “don’t show us the true price that our country had paid,” Cruz said, pointing to murders, rapes and assaults committed against by illegal immigrants against U.S. citizens.

The senator cited the murder of 32-year-old Kate Steinle, who was shot by an illegal immigrant from Mexico in 2015 while walking on a San Francisco pier. He urged attendees to think also of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant while out for a run earlier this year, and Rachel Morin, a mother of five who was raped and murdered in Maryland last August by an illegal immigrant. Or Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl who was brutally raped and murdered in Houston last month by two men who were also in the country illegally....>

<....“These aren’t just stories or statistics,” Cruz said. “They’re our daughters, our sisters, our friends. The families don’t care about the empty numbers they care about the empty chairs at the dinner tables. About the voices they’ll never hear again. About the laughter lost and about the dreams that will never be fulfilled.”

“How did we get here? It happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children,” Cruz said, before going on to vow that former president Donald Trump would tackle the issue if he were elected in November. “Tonight I speak for Kate and Laken and Rachel tonight I speak for Jocelyn and let us go forward together and keep our sacred oath to defend the constitution and to protect the American people,” he said. “Let us secure our borders, enforce our laws, protect our children and restore the future.”...>

Denier F***head Johnson goes full-on chameleon, calling for unity one day, then 'Off with their heads!' another:

<....House speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) blasted the “radical” Left for trying to “tear down the foundations” of America in his primetime Tuesday night speech at the Republican National Convention.

Johnson said those who belong to the left hold “disdain” in their hearts for the principles of American conservatism and “have a very different vision of what America should become.”

“They want to tear down those values and remold us into some sort of borderless, lawless, Marxist, socialist utopia,” he continued. “We’re here to say, not on our watch. We will not allow that now.”

The pointed rhetoric marked a sharp departure from Johnson’s Sunday interview in which he issued an urgent plea to fellow political leaders to bring down the national temperature after the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

“We’ve got to turn the rhetoric down, we’ve got to turn the temperature down on this country. We need leaders of all parties, on both sides, to call that out and make sure that happens so we can go forward and maintain our free society,” Johnson said during an appearance on NBC’s TODAY.

After eight Republicans banded with a united Democratic caucus in ousting then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy back in October, the House Republican conference cycled through a number of speaker candidates before eventually uniting behind Johnson. He’s a man with “few enemies” and a “kid next door” attitude, said Thomas Angers of Lafayette, La., in a brief interview on the convention floor.

Since becoming the House speaker in October, Johnson has faced numerous threats from Republican hardliners, namely Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), who tried ousting him this spring. The effort ultimately failed.

“I think the toughest part for folks who know him best is hearing all the lies and the conspiracy theories and how he’s ‘compromised.’ We know this man,” Louisiana delegate Louis Avallone said in an interview with National Review in the convention hall. “So to hear the lies being spread about him — that somehow he’s not as conservative as folks believed him to be or that he’s somehow beholden to the the deep state — these are things that we know to be untrue. And that’s probably the toughest part is trying to explain to folks who aren’t from his district, that that’s not who he is.”

House majority leader Steve Scalise (R., La.) told attendees of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night that former president Donald Trump was one of the first people to visit him at the hospital when he narrowly survived a shooting at a practice for the Congressional Baseball Game in 2017.

Scalise’s comments come just days after Trump survived an attempted assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa.

“I was the survivor of a politically motivated shooting in 2017,” Scalise said Tuesday. “Not many know that while I was fighting for my life Donald Trump was one of the first to come console my family at the hospital.”

“That’s the kind of leader he is,” the Louisiana Republican said. “Courageous under fire. Compassionate towards others. Let’s put Donald Trump back in the White House this November so we can Make America Great Again.”

A gunman who had a clear hatred for Republicans opened fire as the members of Congress practiced at Eugene Simpson Park in Alexandria, Va., in June 2017. Scalise and four others were wounded in the attack.

Scalise was shot in the hip, with the bullet fracturing bones and injuring his internal organs, placing him in critical condition in the immediate aftermath of the incident....>

<....Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) took to the Republican National Convention stage in Milwaukee, Wis., Tuesday night to call out President Joe Biden for indulging the left-wing anti-Israel protesters who roiled college campuses this year as his administration gradually distanced itself from the Jewish state.

“Around the world, the feckless and failed Joe Biden has caused chaos, weakening our national security,” the House Republican conference chairwoman said. “From the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’s terrorist attack against our most precious ally, Israel.”

Though a prominent figure in the GOP for several years and a leader in Congress, Stefanik’s star rose with the House Education and Workforce Committee’s hearings with presidents of elite universities.

It was her questioning of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, and current Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth that, among other developments, led to the first two losing their roles at the helm of two of America’s most prestigious educational institutions.

Her question to Gay of whether calling for the genocide of Jews — referencing the eliminationist “from the River to the Sea” slogan — violated Harvard’s code of conduct went viral, and Stefanik reminded the audience of her role on the committee Tuesday night.

“What has been the response from the radical Left on our college campuses?,” she asked. “Vile antisemitism — chanting ‘death to Israel, death to Jews, death to America. This is Joe Biden’s Democrat Party. Who saw that congressional hearing with the college presidents of so-called ‘elite’ universities? President Trump will bring back moral leadership to the White House, condemning antisemitism and standing strong with Israel and the Jewish people.”

Stefanik did not only address Israel and antisemitism. She used her primetime speaking slot to hammer Biden on crime, immigration, and inflation — three of the most important issues to voters this election cycle.

“Under Joe Biden, the American people have suffered crisis after crisis, from the Biden border, the most wide-open border in our nation’s history; to Bidenflation, the highest rate of inflation in my lifetime, devastating hardworking families with skyrocketing prices for groceries, gas, and utilities; to Biden’s violent crime crisis fueled by Democrats’ pro-criminal sanctuary cities and defund-the-police policies like in my home state of New York,” Stefanik said.

Stefanik closed her speech by touting her early support for Trump’s 2024 campaign — the earliest among all her congressional colleagues.

“I have been proud to always stand in the breach during the toughest moments for President Trump,” Stefanik told the convention audience. “From leading the charge against the illegal impeachments to standing for election integrity to unifying House Republicans to being the first member of Congress to endorse him for re-election.”....>

Stupid, worthless twit actually believes she deserves a seat in Congress; God help us all if she rises higher.

<....Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake kicked off the second night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee by welcoming everyone in attendance except the “fake news” media.

“Frankly, you guys up there in the fake news have worn out your welcome,” she said in a seven-minute speech, adding that they’ve lied about former president Donald Trump and his supporters over the past eight years. Lake went on to criticize mainstream media for lying about “everything,” including President Joe Biden’s health, the economy, Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, and the border crisis.

“But the really good news is that every day more and more people are turning off the fake news,” Lake said, as the crowd erupted into applause and cheers.

The Republican Senate candidate did not mention her past claims about voter fraud during the 2020 and 2022 elections. She repeatedly fought in court to overturn her loss against Katie Hobbs, claiming Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial election was stolen. Nonetheless, Arizona delegate Shelby Busch told National Review it wouldn’t have been “harmful at all” for Lake to talk about election fraud at the convention.

“I actually believe we have significant problems in our elections, and I believe most Americans recognize that. And it’s turned out to be a partisan issue when it really wasn’t and never should have been,” said Busch, a delegate from Maricopa County who lives in Democratic representative Ruben Gallego’s district. “I think it shows the people that she’s willing to stand up for what’s right.”

Lake instead focused on blasting Arizona’s fentanyl crisis and criticizing Gallego, who is running against her for a seat in the Senate.

“Gallego and the Democrats have handed over control of my state, Arizona’s border, to the drug cartels,” she said. “Because of them, criminals and deadly drugs are pouring in, and our children are dying. Our children are getting their hands on these drugs and dying.”

Busch said Arizonans are unhappy with Gallego for refusing to crack down on illegal immigrants entering the state. “I hardly think anybody wants him going to the Senate level representing the state of Arizona when he has done a disastrous job,” she said.

Other Arizona delegates were also displeased with Gallego’s stance on illegal immigration; one of them shouted “treason” when Lake mentioned that Gallego had voted for a bill that would let illegal immigrants vote in the November election.>

<The wife of Donald Trump's running mate clerked for two Supreme Court judges and some liberals are worried about the potential implications of this.

The former president announced that Ohio senator JD Vance was his White House candidate at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday.

It did not take long for attention to turn to Vance's wife Usha, currently a corporate litigator at a firm which represents clients in the entertainment, technology, energy and health care industries, according to her LinkedIn profile.

But most of the focus is on her previous roles, when she clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he was a Supreme Court Justice and the current Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men make up part of the highest court's six-three conservative majority.

History writer Michael Harriot was one of the people who posted on social media about the concerns this triggered.

He shared a screengrab of an article laying out this information and wrote: "Wait … The wife of Trump's VP pick clerked for Chief Justice John Robert AND Brett Kavanaugh? I'm sure that won't matter in a disputed election."

Beks (@antifaoperative), who describes herself as an "anti-racist, anti-child trafficking advocate" who supports BlackLivesMatter and identifies as a trans ally, wrote: "And now we know why Mango Mussolini picked him."

Similarly, Melly Cumberbatch (@MellyMelly10977) said: "That was deliberate. Analysts look at Mr Vance and don't see what he brings to the ticket. He brings Mrs Vance, and a pledge not to certify a Dem win in 28."

Chicago-based Derrick D. Brown commented on what multiple others said in the thread when he wrote: "So incestuous!"

Democrat supporter (@clalter69) sarcastically wrote: "I'm sure they no longer would be in contact or anything. Like secretly helping back channel to hide their communications? Of course not. Trump isn't like that. All honestly [sic] from that man."

Newsweek has contacted Trump and Vance, via their campaign teams' email addresses, for a response to these concerns.

Usha and her husband appeared holding hands on the RNC floor about an hour after Trump made the long-awaited announcement about his running mate. She was born to Indian immigrant parents, and grew up with a strong emphasis on education and hard work in a San Diego, California, suburb.

The couple met at Yale University, when Usha was studying history, and they ended up getting married in 2014, when they had two ceremonies, including one where they were blessed by a Hindu pandit. They now have three children.

Usha was actually a registered Democrat in 2014, according to voter registration records reviewed by Newsweek. She registered as a Republican in 2018.>

<Arizona is no stranger to election interference tactics, as 18 of Donald Trump's MAGA allies in April were "charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related" to the 2020 presidential election, according to The Associated Press.

Two years later, NBC News reported that a pair of "Republican supervisors in Cochise County, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, County — were charged for allegedly conspiring to interfere with the county’s midterm election — in part by pushing for a full hand count of ballots."

Now, according to a Tuesday, July 16 report published by Votebeat, "previously unreported text messages" reveal that Arizona Republican officials' "privately pressured county leaders across the state to count ballots by hand instead of using machines."

Votebeat reports that "newly obtained text messages from Cochise County, which American Oversight fought for in court and shared with Votebeat, show that a state senator was trying to pressure Judd during the public meeting when the supervisors held the key vote on hand-counting ballots."

Cochise County-based state Senator David Gowan (R), according to the report, "texted Judd just as the meeting began," writing, "Does the Cochise bos [sic] know there is no law prohibiting them from hand count? From President Fann" — "referring to the county supervisors."

Votebeat reports, "In Pinal County, the day supervisors discussed hand-counting ballots in this year’s election, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican who represents parts of Pinal County, texted Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh, also a Republican, to assert that hand-counting all ballots was legal — something the Secretary of State’s Office and state Attorney General’s Office have said is not true."

Rogers typed, "Don’t let them lie today."

NBC News last year reported:

After the 2020 election, the Arizona state Senate authorized a controversial hand-count audit of two races. The audit took months and cost millions, and — by its leadership’s own account in text messages obtained by The Arizona Republic — failed to result in an accurate count.

Furthermore, Votebeat notes:

The issue with hand-counting ballots is not just the law. Multiple studies, trials, and attempts to hand-count ballots across the country — including in Pinal and Mohave counties — have proven that hand-counting instead of using machines would cost more money, require hundreds to thousands more workers, lead to inaccurate results, and potentially delay or disrupt the certification of results. Yet the conversations about instituting hand counts continue in Arizona, especially as many of the county supervisors run for reelection this year.

The Guardian reported in May that "Judd told Votebeat that she wasn’t a driving force for a hand count in the first place and voted for it because of what she was hearing from constituents."

The GOP county supervisor said, "You can ask anyone. I never pushed for it."

Votebeat notes that "supervisors ultimately rejected" the requests from Senator Rogers and Supervisor Cavanaugh. "So far, all Arizona counties plan to use machines to count ballots for the upcoming election. The supervisors in Pinal and Mohave, specifically, decided against a hand count after the counties’ lawyers told them they would potentially be violating state law and could be held personally liable if they went ahead with it.">