<Republicans scrambled as they tried to defend former president Donald Trump's racist lies about Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president.

Trump, at an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists last week, launched a racist attack against Harris by falsely accusing her of misrepresenting her racial background. "She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage," Trump said. "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black… So I don't know. Is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't. Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person."

Trump's vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance, who has three mixed-race children, applauded and doubled down on the attack: "I thought it was hysterical. I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris," Vance said Wednesday.

GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, who himself is the father of mixed-race children, called Trump's comments a "phony controversy," saying on ABC's This Week on Sunday, "I don't really care, most people don't." But Donalds then went on to repeat Trump's slur against Harris' racial identity and lie about an Associated Press (AP) story from when Harris was first elected to the Senate.

"When Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was AP that said she was the first Indian American United States senator," Donalds said. "It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she's running nationally, obviously the campaign has shifted. They're talking much more about her father's heritage and her Black identity. It doesn't really matter. The [former] president barely mentioned it."

What the AP actually wrote is this: "Harris will enter the chamber as the first Indian woman elected to a Senate seat and the second Black woman, following Carol Moseley Braun, who served a single term after being elected in 1992." (Emphasis added.)

Donalds went on to obfuscate and blame Harris for "massive inflation" and "her failure as border czar" even though Republican claims that Harris was Biden's "border czar" have been labeled misleading by fact checkers.

But George Stephanopoulos did not let Donalds get away with lying about Harris' racial background. "You just repeated the slur again. If it doesn't matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity? She's always identified as a Black woman. She is biracial. She has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. She's always identified as both. Why are you questioning that?"

"This is something that's actually a conversation throughout social media right now," Donalds dodged. "A lot of people are trying to figure this out."

"Sir, one second, you just did it again! Why do you insist on questioning her racial identity?" Stephanopoulos asked indignantly.

This racist talking point was debunked long ago. In 2020, the AP ran a fact check that ruled these claims are false. "Kamala Harris for years has identified herself as both Black and Indian American," the AP's Amanda Seitz wrote. "In interviews, she has regularly talked about how her mother, who was from India, raised her as Black."

"George, now that you're done yelling at me, let me answer," Donalds testily fired back at Stephanopoulos. The MAGA congressman again pivoted away from the question to say that Trump spent time attacking Harris' record at his Saturday rally (during which the former president also perpetuated lies about election fraud and cheered the appointment of MAGA loyalists to the Georgia State Election Board.)

"I know you guys like to glom onto this that he talks about in jest or in a serious manner for about a minute or so, but what you do not cover is the litany of failures of Kamala Harris," Donalds said.

"So questioning someone's racial identity for two minutes is OK?" Stephanopoulos responded.

Donalds again falsely claimed the AP "brought… up" the claims that Harris is the first Indian senator to be elected in the Senate, repeatedly neglecting that they also in the very same sentence called her the "second Black woman" elected to a Senate seat. "None of this matters to the American people," Donalds added....>

<...."If it doesn't matter," Stephanopolous replied, "I don't understand why you keep on repeating it, why the [former] president keeps on repeating it, why those introducing the [former] president yesterday keep on repeating it."

"George, actually, I'm not the one who keeps repeating it. George, you're the one that's bringing it up now," Donalds replied.

"Sir, you've done it three times. Every single answer you gave me - now let me finish, sir - every single answer you gave, you repeated the slur," Stephanopoulos said.

Donalds then tried to get Stephanopoulos to change the subject, but the anchor continued: "AP did not say that Kamala Harris is not Black. She is biracial. She is Indian. She is Black. You continue to repeat the… slur. I don't understand why you and the [former] president do it, but it's clear you're not gonna say that it's wrong, and you've now established that for our audience."

"Let's move on," Donalds pleaded after five minutes of back-and-forth.

Over on on CBS's Face the Nation, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton got off comparatively easy when he was asked about these attacks on Harris by Ed O'Keefe.

"Are you personally OK with him questioning whether she's Black?" O'Keefe asked Cotton.

"Ed, he wasn't saying what matters is how she identifies as her race," Cotton said. "He explicitly said he didn't care. One was fine. The other was fine. Both was fine. She identifies as a dangerous San Francisco liberal. That's the danger to the American people."

"Let's move on to other things," O'Keefe said, allowing Cotton to get away with his lie.

But Republicans should have to face up to the harmful, vile racist falsehoods being spewed by their party's candidate, especially because they are part of the Trump campaign's broader strategy. Sources told Rolling Stone that Trump and his aides have planned these race-baiting attacks, despite House Republican leadership begging its members to avoid the topic of Harris' race, according to Politico.

"It's not by accident; it's intentional," a person close to Trump told Rolling Stone of the attacks. "We're behind the [former] president, 100 percent.">

<The Trump campaign’s intense pushback to Project 2025 amid sustained attacks from Democrats is frustrating conservatives inside and outside the effort who worry that the disavowal will result in the former president alienating his most loyal supporters.

It was one thing for former President Trump to separate himself amid Democratic messaging centering on the Heritage Foundation-led project’s policy blueprint, which sometimes differs from that of the former president and was intended to kick-start a transition to a conservative White House.

But the extremely public criticism, with one recent statement from the Trump campaign cheering the potential demise of Project 2025, is prompting concern about potential damage to Trump’s relationship with the conservative ecosystem that supports him — as well as how it could inadvertently fuel more Democratic messaging centered on Project 2025.

“There’s been a lot of talk in MAGAworld about whether Trump has learned from the personnel mistakes of his first term. Disavowing Project 2025 is a signal to his base that he has not learned those lessons,” one former Trump administration official told The Hill. “The types of people that listen to [Steve] Bannon’s ‘War Room’ are going to be very demoralized by that.”

Project 2025 is perhaps now best known for the more-than-900-page “Mandate for Leadership” book of policy proposals, continuing a tradition of crafting a suggested new administration roadmap that first started in the Reagan era.

But it also includes a personnel-vetting effort filled with thousands of individuals. The idea was to kick-start recommendations to fill roles in the next administration, to avoid a repeat of the rocky 2017 Trump transition and selection of appointees who do not align ideologically.

The Trump campaign has long said that the effort does not speak for its transition work, and Project 2025 has sought to clarify the same. But the public statements have become steadily more intense as Democratic attacks have gone viral, breaking out into social media and celebrity statements.

As initial stories about Project 2025 trickled out in the fall of last year, Trump campaign senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement that while “efforts by various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,” they would only be recommendations.

By the Republican National Convention last month, LaCivita called Project 2025 “a pain in the a–.” Last week, as news broke that Project 2025 Director Paul Dans — also a former Trump administration official — would step down from his post, the campaign was openly hostile.

“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement on Tuesday.

Republican National Committee (RNC) co-Chair Lara Trump piled on in a Washington Times op-ed on Thursday, calling Project 2025 an “absurd vision” that has “little, if any” common sense.

Though the statements are intended to neutralize the Democratic attacks, one contributor to the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” policy book said that the op-ed and campaign statement were “pouring gasoline on the fire” and have been met with a “redoubled” effort from the left to tie Project 2025 to Trump.

“The whole brouhaha is saddening,” a second contributor to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” book told The Hill, saying their own policy work was undergone “in the hope of bringing our movement together.”

The Trump campaign statements also led a number of conservative commentators to raise concerns publicly.

“Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration. Interesting,” Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, posted on the social media site X on Tuesday.

Some see a misguided strategy in the insistence that “Project 2025 is not a blueprint for anything resembling a second Trump administration,” as Lara Trump put it in her op-ed.

There are some notable policy splits between the think tank’s wish list and Trump’s, such as on the politically tricky issue of abortion: Whereas Project 2025 calls to rescind federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, Trump has said he will not block access to abortion pills.....>

<....But there is also plenty of overlap. The Trump-approved 2024 GOP platform, for instance, calls to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY,” while the Project 2025 policy book says the next administration must prioritize “border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation.” Many former Trump administration officials wrote sections of the policy book.

“If they don’t want to go with the ideas in the book, that’s fine, but there’s lots of great ideas in the book,” the first Project 2025 contributor said. “You’d have to be creative to come up with a lot of policy ideas that are not in the book.”

Another source, from a conservative organization outside the Heritage Foundation but one that is supportive of the project, said that the core dispute is not actually about policy, but about who would be in control of the next Trump administration.

“The idea that, like, ‘Oh, Project 2025 is hurting us’ is absurd,” the person said. “Everyone who’s really honest — what’s really manifesting here is sort of a power struggle over who’s going to decide the personnel for the next administration.”

“Of course the president is going to pick his personnel, no matter who it is,” the person added, saying that Project 2025 was not intended to forcefully push personnel in.

There is a possibility that despite the public criticism now, Trump could still take the think tank’s recommendations to guide his transition if he wins. His campaign has not publicly announced a transition team leader yet, falling behind the timeline in 2016, when former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) was announced as head of the transition that May.

“We’ll see how this cookie crumbles. I — or the people I know who worked on [Project 2025] — don’t feel blackballed. And still are working like dogs to get Trump elected,” the second Project 2025 contributor said. “I don’t like seeing Republicans go after their own, but this is a political campaign.”

A Trump campaign official told The Hill that the campaign is focused on securing victory on Election Day, and “will be ready to transition President Trump to the White House in January 2025.”

Asked about the conservative criticism of how it is handling Project 2025, the Trump campaign provided a statement from senior adviser Danielle Alvarez reiterating its independence from outside policy efforts that Democrats highlight.

“President Trump’s 20 promises to the forgotten men and women and RNC Platform are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term,” Alvarez said in the statement. “Dangerously liberal Kamala Harris and the DNC are LYING and fear-mongering because they have NOTHING else to offer the American people. Remember these are the same people that [sic] lied to Americans and hid Joe Biden’s cognitive decline all these years.”>

Remember, <coprophagic antichrist>, <I> control content here. That a problem? Stay away!

<After Donald Trump denied that Vice President Kamala Harris is Black, several Republicans worried that their presidential nominee had stepped in it this time. During his appearance at the Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump tried out a new attack on Harris, whose father was Jamaican and mother was Indian: "I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?" Raving about the horrors of miscegenation only confirms the Harris campaign's characterization of Trump as "old and quite weird," so it's no surprise that other Republicans are scurrying away from his remarks. The cowards mostly remained anonymous, telling Axios that they found his performance "embarrassing," "awful" and "not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters."

Well, they'd better buckle up. It looks like this was no accident or gaffe from Trump, but a summation of his campaign's strategy. As Matt Gertz writes at Media Matters:

But this wasn’t just a one-off comment, however despicable; it was the launch of a new talking point. Trump doubled down on social media, his campaign projected purported evidence of Trump’s claim at an event Wednesday night, his surrogates went on TV to defend his comments, and Vance — who once described his running mate as potentially “America’s Hitler” — told reporters Trump’s remark was “hysterical” and that the former president “pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris.”

Even the event itself suggests deliberation. The reporter did not ask Trump to opine on the legitimacy of mixed-race people. She asked if Trump believes Harris is qualified to run for president. He was looking for a way to say this and forced it into the conversation.

There's an exhausting rationale, involving false claims that Harris "switches" her identity and that somehow makes her "phony." This is a lie, of course, as there's a long public record of Harris identifying with both of her parents for her entire life. As Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic, "The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry." Trump wants to make a spectacle out of Harris' racial heritage, in hopes of provoking white anxieties about how multiracial societies are too "confusing" to be tolerated.

It's been long-documented, if not publicized enough, that Trump has an unsettling obsession with racial "purity" and eugenics. It's not something he bothers to hide, as evidenced by his claims that nonwhite immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." But that the larger campaign is harping on this suggests they really think it's smart strategy. As political scientist Nicholas Grossman writes in the Bulwark, MAGA devotees have convinced themselves "their ideas have widespread appeal, and the only reason their ideas aren’t dominant is that right-wing viewpoints are being erased from the public discourse by the people who control it."

In this case, the presumption is that most voters share Trump's repulsion for "impure" people whose gender or race falls outside rigid boundaries he has defined for them. In the same week he appointed himself the arbiter of Harris' race, he also decided he could strip her husband, Doug Emhoff, of his Jewishness. In an interview with a right-wing radio host, Trump agreed that Emhoff is a "crappy Jew" because he married Harris. There was an elaborate excuse for this accusation, involving false claims that Harris "doesn’t like Jewish people." But, as with the whining about Harris' parentage, this is mostly about drawing the public's attention to what old-timey racists called "race-mixing."

Trump repeatedly mocks others for what he perceives as physical flaws, as if that will distract people from noticing that he's a lumbering 78-year-old man with a comical combover.

The campaign is making the same play with gender, as well. On Fox News this week, Trump and host Laura Ingraham were making unfunny jokes about "gender-fluid" people and Trump issued a bizarre proclamation: "I don't want pronouns." As many folks noted, he used a pronoun in the sentence, but his audience understood what he meant. He's expressing anger at the practice of sharing pronouns, which developed because it's not always easy or wise to guess someone's gender identity. To MAGA conservatives, it's an outrage that anyone's gender could be ambiguous enough that you can't just assume it.....>

<....It got even uglier on Thursday, when Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, labeled a cis woman a "man" because he disapproves of her inborn biology. The whole thing started when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif beat Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics. Khelif was previously disqualified from another organization's tournament based on what the IOC has called an "arbitrary" gender test. Olympic officials, however, say Khelif was "born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport." Anti-trans bigots pounced, falsely claiming that Khelif is a "man" with an unfair advantage. There is nothing wrong with being trans, but it's simply false to apply that label to Khelif, based on a vaguely defined test. This doesn't appear to be a case of obvious athletic advantage, as Khelif has lost matches to other cis women.

But none of this matters to the candidate for vice president of the United States. He decided to pander to the worst people on the internet by smearing an Olympic athlete he knows nothing about. Vance tweeted on Thursday, "This is where Kamala Harris's ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match."

This is the same Vance who has repeatedly denounced women who have not given birth as "sociopathic" and "miserable cat ladies." He was called out by actress Jennifer Aniston, who pointed out that some women want to give birth but cannot. Vance wouldn't even apologize to the unhappily infertile. Instead, he said they should "try everything" to have biological children, "because I believe families and babies are a good thing."

No one denies that babies or families are a good thing, for people who want them. But Vance's apparent definition of a "good thing" is that everyone should do it, at the same time and in the same way. This rigid view excludes even those who, for medical reasons, cannot follow his strict blueprint for a "good" life. If there's any lingering doubt about Vance's desire to control women's basic biology, he stripped it all away by denying a woman's gender based on evidence that isn't public and that he doesn't understand.

No wonder Trump picked Vance, despite so many warnings from other Republicans that the Ohio senator was bad news. Both men express contempt for people whose body or identity doesn't conform to their exceedingly narrow views of what it "should" be. It calls to mind the story of Trump expressing irritation at the sight of disabled veterans at Army events, telling his staff, "No one wants to see that."

Vance even made excuses for Trump's sneering at biracial people, even though Vance's wife is Indian-American and his kids, like Harris, have a biracial heritage. This hypocrisy is something he shares with Trump. Trump repeatedly mocks others for what he perceives as physical flaws, as if that will distract people from the fact that he's a lumbering 78-year-old man with a comical combover. That's how it's always been with fascists, who never meet their own impossible standards of Aryan perfection. No one can — and no one should even want to, since it's all made-up nonsense anyway.

The good news is that Harris is responding with both humor and grace, calling Trump's faux-confusion over her race "the same old show" of "divisiveness and the disrespect." Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, but I suspect Trump and Vance's gambit won't work. Most Americans find this obsessive policing of other people's bodies and identities gross, even if they don't know its deeper fascist history. It feels "old and quite weird" to want a full readout of everyone's biological and ethnic heritage, so Old Man Trump can decide if it's good enough for his liking. But if this is what the Trump-Vance campaign is setting out as its principal strategy, we're in for an ugly fall season.>

<Children—and the millions of private decisions to have or not have them—are in the news these days, for regrettable reasons. Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has made a habit of excoriating progressives who don’t have a record of procreation. In November 2020, he implied that childless Democratic leaders are “sociopathic.” In an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021, he lamented that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Later that year, in an address in Southern California, he said he wanted “to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left … because I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.”

Vance’s commentary is rude and revisionist. Childless adults aren’t psychotic, and many childless people are desperate to bear children. Suggesting that their unsuccessful reproductive efforts amount to sociopathy is cruel. More substantively, in 2022, it was progressive Democratic leaders—that witchy coven of child-loathing felinophiles—who pushed for an extension to the refundable child tax credit, while Republicans overwhelmingly rejected a deal that would have sent tens of billions of dollars to parents.

But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.

First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new analysis of Census data by Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves. Yes, the pace of the urban exodus was fastest during the high-pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. But even at the slower rate of out-migration since then, several counties—including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under-5 population in 20 years. (To be clear, demographics have complex feedback loops and counter-feedback loops; the toddler population of these places won’t necessarily halve by the 2040s.)

Nor is the exodus merely the result of declining nationwide birth rates. Yes, women across the country are having fewer children than they used to. The share of women under 40 who have never given birth doubled from the early 1980s to the 2020s. But the under-5 population is still declining twice as fast in large urban counties as it is elsewhere, according to O’Brien’s census analysis.

So what’s the matter with Manhattan (and L.A. and Chicago)?

After the Great Recession, during a period of low urban crime, young college-educated people flocked to downtown areas to advance their career. Retail upscaled, and housing costs increased. Soon, families started to leave. In 2019, the economist Jed Kolko showed that in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., young, high-income, college-educated whites were moving in, and multiracial families with children were moving out. The coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in school closures and loosened the tether between home and office, pushed even more families to flee.

“I’m deeply worried about a family-exodus doom loop,” O’Brien told me. “When the population of young kids in a city falls 10 or 20 percent in just a few years, that’s a potential political earthquake. Almost overnight, there are fewer parents around to fight for better schools, local playgrounds, or all the other mundane amenities families care about.”

Behavior is contagious, as the Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis has shown. If you have a friend who smokes or exercises, it significantly increases the odds that you will do the same. The same principle might hold for having or not having kids. As young children become scarce in big cities, people in their 20s and 30s who are thinking about having children will have fewer opportunities to see firsthand how fulfilling parenthood can be. What they’re left with instead are media representations, which tend to be inflected by the negativity bias of the news....>

<....At a glance, these trends may not seem like they have anything to do with contemporary progressivism. But they do. America’s richest cities are profoundly left-leaning, and many of them—including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are themselves ensconced in left-leaning states. These places ought to be advertisements for what the modern progressive movement can achieve without meddlesome conservatism getting in the way, at the local or state level. If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.

Right now it’s hard to make the argument, because urban progressivism is afflicted by an inability to build. Cities in red states are building much more housing than those in blue states. In 2024, Austin, Raleigh, and Phoenix are expected to expand their apartment inventory more than five times faster than San Diego, Baltimore, or San Francisco. Housing policy is the quantum field of urban life, extending across every sector and making contact with every problem. When cities fail on housing policy, the failure ripples.

Housing has for several years been the most common reason for moving, and housing in America’s biggest and richest blue cities is consistently the least affordable. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, among the cities with the highest median price-to-income ratios in 2023, nine of the top 10 were in California or Hawaii. The five cities with the most cost-burdened renters and owners were Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, Honolulu, and Oxnard, followed by Riverside, Bakersfield, the New York metro area, and Fresno.

One hidden effect of expensive housing is that it raises the cost of local services and creates shortages of workers willing to accept low wages in labor-intensive industries, such as child care. As a result, large urban areas have more expensive child care, even relative to their higher levels of income. A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Women’s Bureau found that infant child care devoured the highest share of family income in large urban counties. Nationwide, the average family with at least one child under the age of 5 devotes about 13 percent of family income to pay for child care. But the typical infant day-care center in San Francisco and Chicago consumes about 20 percent of a local family’s income. In Boston, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, it’s more like 30 percent. Child care is just another example of how constrained housing supply can poison parts of the economy that don’t immediately seem to have anything to do with it.

To be fair, one might argue that federal policy nudges families toward the suburbs. Federal spending on highways lubricates suburban transportation while urban transit sputters, and the mortgage interest deduction reduces the tax hit from homeownership. But a national trend toward the burbs doesn’t explain why cities in red states have managed to build houses, or restrain child-care inflation, better than those in blue states.

Conservatives like J. D Vance think they’re getting mileage out of judging the private-life decisions of urban progressive men and women. But these decisions exist … well, in the context of all in which we live. They are shaped by place and by policy. The steady march of the childless city is not merely the inevitable result of declining birth rates. It’s the result of urban policy, conceived by, written by, and enacted by liberals. Progressive leaders aren’t family-hating sociopaths, but they currently preside over counties that young families are leaving. They should pride themselves instead on building places where those same families would want to stay.>

<Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money trial won’t be delayed by a long-shot lawsuit from Missouri’s Republican attorney general, whose challenge to a gag order against the former president was shot down by the Supreme Court.

The challenge from Andrew Bailey argued that a gag order and a potential jail sentence against the Republican presidential nominee amounted to election interference and would deprive Missouri voters from hearing the candidate before they cast their ballots.

Justices denied that challenge in a brief order on Monday. The order also noted that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would have allowed Bailey to at least file the suit, but would not have granted him his requested emergency relief.

“New York is working to hijack our national election and jail President Trump. Missourians absolutely have an interest in ensuring that does not happen,” Bailey wrote on X. “The fight is not over.”

After a seven-week trial in Manhattan, a jury convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records against him on May 30.

He was found guilty of submitting fraudulent checks and invoices related to reimbursement payments to his former attorney Michael Cohen, who paid off adult film star Stormy Daniels in the weeks before Election Day in 2016 to avoid her politically damaging story about having sex with Trump from going public.

Before the trial was underway, New York Justice Juan Merchan had issued a gag order — which has been scaled back — to prevent Trump from publicly attacking jurors, witnesses, court staff and staff with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He violated the order at least 10 times and was fined $10,0000, with a warning from the judge that any future violations could result in jail time.

Bailey — who took the rare step of filing a challenge directly to the Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over interstate disputes — argued in his case that “radical progressives in New York are trying to rig the 2024 election by waging a direct attack on our democratic process.”

He has also recently testified to Congress about what he called the “politically motivated, legally specious, and corrupt prosecution” of the former president and demanded that the Department of Justice turn over documents about Trump’s prosecutions.

The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James argued in briefs to the Supreme Court that Bailey’s argument “consists of generalized and speculative grievances.”

Trump “can already speak about all of the topics” that Bailey claimed he is barred from, James wrote.

His complaint “is clearly and impermissibly seeking to further the individual interests of former President Trump,” she added.

Trump’s attorneys have tried to overturn his conviction in the hush money case by pointing to the Supreme Court’s presidential “immunity” ruling, which they argue should apply to the evidence used to convict him.

Merchan is expected to issue a decision on those arguments by September 6, and Trump is set to be sentenced on September 18.>

<When political observers describe J.D. Vance as "weird," what they usually mean is the Republican vice-presidential nominee's ranting about childless people, his extremism on questions like abortion and divorce, or perhaps his choice of eyeliner.

But there is a deeper level to Vance's political weirdness that places him amid the most sinister political forces in the nation today -- and calls into question the supposed patriotism that motivates him and the "America First" movement he and Donald Trump now represent. To understand what Vance really stands for, and why his ideology is so distant from the constitutional democracy he has sworn to uphold as a United States senator, it is necessary to examine the chief sponsor of his political and business career, a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.

Born in Germany and raised in South Africa, Thiel made his enormous fortune as a venture capitalist and executive in tech companies such as PayPal and Palantir. Attracted from an early age to far-right ideologues like the addled author Ayn Rand, Thiel has identified himself as a "conservative libertarian" and a critic of democratic systems. Not so long ago, he was heard to say that democracy and freedom -- or at least his idea of "freedom" -- are no longer compatible.

If that sounds ominous, it is a sentiment that Thiel has advanced for decades now -- and that has long characterized a strain of anti-government extremism on the American right. It is a worldview that dates back at least three decades, when a self-proclaimed economic guru named James Dale Davidson began promoting it in his investment newsletters and video presentations.

Back then, Davidson's seething enmity for President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton led him not only to make the preposterous claim that they were behind the death of their friend Vince Foster (who had tragically committed suicide) but to insist that Clinton's policies would soon plunge the nation into a cataclysmic depression. The internet boom under Clinton, which boosted incomes and balanced the budget for the first time in decades, left Davidson looking foolish.

Undaunted by failure, he went on to write "The Sovereign Individual," a 1997 tome that predicted the rise of digital currencies, along with other less prescient notions. It eventually won favorable attention from Thiel, who provided a gushing preface to a new edition in 2020, two decades after its original publication, that emphasized its influence on his own political outlook and urged it upon readers as "an opportunity not to be wasted."

Why was Thiel drawn to Davidson's obscure screed? Aside from its advocacy of what we might now call cryptocurrency -- a dubious special interest promoted heavily by Vance ever since his elevation to the Senate -- "The Sovereign Individual" foretold a world ruled by people like him. Governments, nation-states and the social order would all collapse; digital currencies would replace all other forms of money, except among the poorest populations; taxation and regulation of corporations would become impossible. In its conclusion, Davidson and his co-author Lord William Rees-Mogg, a British peer, denigrated democracy as the twin of communism and welcomed the advent of a brutish and largely lawless world dominated by a tiny minority of the super-rich. It isn't hard to imagine that Thiel, who has financed technological research aimed at human immortality, envisioned himself as one of those godlike rulers.

Does Vance agree with Thiel's jaundiced view of democracy? Does he push crypto because digital finance will allow billionaires and their businesses to evade taxes and launder money? Does he look forward to a plutocratic dystopia replacing our republic?

No doubt the embattled Republican veep nominee would deny any such disturbing views. Yet Thiel isn't the only ultra-reactionary influence on Vance. The Ohio senator has also endorsed Curtis Yarvin, a cranky computer programmer who says America needs "a national CEO, or what's called a dictator," and embraced Rod Dreher, an American who now serves the illiberal regime of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban.

All that makes Vance something worse than merely weird.>

<Not long after President Joe Biden last month announced his plans to initiate reforms to the US Supreme Court before the end of his term, The Washington Post published an op-ed penned by the president, in which he laid out three steps he would take.

"First, I am calling for a constitutional amendment called the No One Is Above the Law Amendment," Biden wrote. "It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office…. Second, we have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years."

The president emphasized, "We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. Third, I'm calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. This is common sense. The Court's current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced."

Since Biden's announcement, Justice Neil Gorsuch warned during a Fox News interview that Americans should "be careful" when it comes to making changes to the High Court.

In an op-ed published by The Daily Beast Monday, former federal prosecutor Shan Wu warns against Gorsuch's warning.

He writes, "We should take that warning seriously, not because reforms to the Supreme Court threaten an independent judiciary, but because the fact that Gorsuch felt free to issue it shows the real dangers of an unchecked Supreme Court."

The ex-federal prosecutor adds, "While Justice Gorsuch may truly believe that the American people should be warned that changes to the federal judiciary may affect its independence, it’s his confident public expression of his views on a matter that is almost surely going to come before him if any reform is enacted that serves as the real warning. It’s warning that the sense of absolute power is not limited to only one justice but several."

Furthermore, Wu warns: "Gorsuch, like his Young Turk colleagues Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, is in his fifties. This group of three will continue to shape American law and society for a generation. That’s too long.">

<In one of his first big battleground-state rallies after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as his opponent, Donald Trump went off the rails on Saturday in Atlanta with unprovoked attacks on Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp and his wife. Kemp is the very popular chief executive with absolutely the best political organization in the state — you know, the organization on which Trump might rely for a crucial win in November. But the 45th president apparently could not help himself from making what some local Republicans called a “politically stupid” move.

There’s something about Georgia that seems to bring out the worst in Donald Trump. He did win the state by a comfortable margin in 2016, though he underperformed Mitt Romney’s percentage from 2012. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he got into an avoidable spat with Kemp, who annoyed him by reopening businesses at a faster pace than Trump recommended. Then he got into a much bigger fight with both Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when these two Republicans certified Biden’s narrow Georgia win in 2020; Raffensperger then refused Trump’s possibly criminal demand that he “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome. Worse yet, by loudly and frequently claiming that Georgia’s election machinery was “rigged,” Trump likely discouraged enough Republicans from voting to cost his party two crucial U.S. Senate seats in a January 2021 runoff, giving Democrats trifecta control of Congress along with the White House.

In 2022, Trump instigated a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to purge Kemp and Raffensperger, who both trounced Trump’s chosen candidates in the GOP primary. In November, the statewide candidate closest to Trump, Herschel Walker, proceeded to lose a winnable Senate race in what was otherwise a very good Republican year in Georgia.

2024 initially looked like the year Trump might get the loser label off his back in Georgia; he easily won the state’s presidential primary, and he led Biden there in every single public poll of the general-election race, often by robust margins (e.g., by nine points in a gold-standard New York Times–Siena survey in May). But now Trump seems determined to help put Georgia back on the table for Kamala Harris, even as the first few polls with her as the Democratic candidate show a tightened race (Emerson and Trafalgar Group–Insider Advantage have given Trump a two-point lead, while Bloomberg–Morning Consult shows the race tied in Georgia).

This is the moment when Trump decided to reignite his losing battle with Brian Kemp, as the local Fox News affiliate reported:

At Saturday’s rally, Trump assailed Kemp in a roughly 10-minute tirade, blaming him for his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden and for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him and several associates for his efforts to overturn the results.

“He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor,” Trump said. “Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.”

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein observed, Trump picked a weird time to call off the truce he’s had with Kemp since “little Brian” kicked his butt in 2022:

For months, Trump had refrained from publicly feuding with Kemp and other Republicans he wrongly blamed for his 2020 election defeat. And now, with the race in Georgia tighter than ever against Vice President Kamala Harris, he chose to reopen the raw rift? …

Martha Zoller, a conservative commentator, could only cringe at what she described as a massive miscalculation. Enthusiastic Democrats are closing ranks around Harris, and senior Republicans worry they need Kemp and his potent political network more than ever.

“Trump is under the misconception that MAGA Republicans are a majority of the electorate,” Zoller said. “And he is alienating people instead of bringing them together.”

Kemp, of course, is no stranger to the barrage of Trump insults. But dragging his wife Marty into the back-and-forth on the cusp of an election crossed a red line. Kemp made that clear in a scathing response that ended with six words.

“Leave my family out of it.”

<Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo has long been invested in the election of Republican attorneys general, who are well-positioned to challenge regulations and bring precedent-setting cases before his friends on the high court. Leo and his dark money network have taken a keen interest in the GOP primary for attorney general in Missouri, pouring millions into the race to replace a conservative appointee with a lawyer who calls Leo a mentor.

Leo's favored candidate, Will Scharf, has served as former President Donald Trump's lawyer, including in the presidential immunity case at the Supreme Court. The court ruled that the former president is entitled to immunity from prosecution for official acts committed as president, complicating and further delaying his criminal cases - while giving the executive a powerful shield to do crimes.

As Trump's judicial adviser, Leo helped him select three Supreme Court justices and build a 6-3 conservative supermajority. Scharf, meanwhile, has worked for Leo's network, his consulting firm, and in the Trump Justice Department. He worked to help confirm two of the Trump-Leo justices - Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The New York Times reported last fall that Trump and Leo, who received a historic $1.6 billion donation to supercharge his conservative dark money network, were on the outs. You wouldn't suspect that watching the pro-Scharf advertising Leo is funding paint Trump as an unfairly targeted hero - and lionize Scharf for representing him.

"When prosecutors lie, when judges put politics over justice, when the whole legal system is gunning for you, you need one heck of an attorney," says an ad for the group Leo is funding. "You need Missouri's own Will Scharf. President Trump relies on Will Scharf as one of his lawyers to defend him from legal persecution and election interference. Will Scharf is taking on the entire legal and media establishment to defend President Trump."

The ad says succinctly, "Will Scharf: Trump's attorney."....>

<....A second ad from Defend Missouri says that Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey "went easy on a violent career felon," who went on to "shoot two cops." The Missouri Fraternal Order of Police called on Defend Missouri - a state Super PAC affiliated with the Washington-based Club for Growth - to take down the ad.

Leo and his Concord Fund have donated $7.4 million to Defend Missouri and the Club for Growth Action's Missouri federal committee, the organizations backing Scharf. The Club for Growth committee received $2.1 million from billionaire hedge fund chief Paul Singer, a significant donor to Leo's network. Since July 25, Leo's network has donated $2.5 million to Defend Missouri, while Singer chipped in another $500,000.

State attorneys general are a key focus for Leo and his network, because they are well-positioned to bring lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In 2022, the court's conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated federal protections for abortion rights, in a case led by Mississippi's Republican attorney general. Since 2014, Leo's network has donated nearly $23 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association, according to a review of data compiled by ProPublica.

In Missouri, Leo and his network are boosting a lawyer who previously worked with him to paint the Supreme Court ruby red.

"Leonard Leo is a dear friend and mentor of mine, and I'm honored to have his support," Scharf tells Rolling Stone. The candidate says he has known Leo - who co-chairs the Federalist Society, the national conservative lawyers network - since he was in law school.

If Scharf doesn't win the AG race, he could have a solid plan B. Thanks to Scharf's role in helping secure Trump a presidential immunity blanket at the Supreme Court, Scharf's stock has shot up considerably among the MAGA political, legal, and policymaking elites in recent months. According to two sources familiar with the situation, a pair of Trump confidants - one an attorney, the other a media personality - have directly pitched the ex-president on the idea that Scharf would be a worthy choice for a senior Justice Department or White House role, if Trump wins in November.

Scharf was previously an aide to Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who resigned in 2018, and went to work for Leo's Judicial Crisis Network - now known as the Concord Fund, the Leo group boosting his AG bid. He reportedly focused on judicial nominations and confirmations, including Kavanaugh's to the Supreme Court.

According to his LinkedIn, Scharf worked for several months at Leo's consulting firm, CRC Advisors, in 2020, before joining the Trump Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. In fall of 2020, Scharf worked as a nominations counsel, supporting Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation - which secured a 6-3 supermajority for conservatives.

After Missouri's attorney general, Eric Schmitt, won his Senate seat, Leo's allies reportedly pressed Gov. Mike Parson to appoint Scharf. He chose Bailey instead - and Leo's network soon started funding Defend Missouri, the pro-Scharf Super PAC.

Bailey has been an ultra-conservative, partisan attorney general in his own right. He's made a show out of suing to investigate the liberal watchdog group Media Matters in response to its reporting on X, formerly known as Twitter. The organization managed to block a similar investigative effort by Texas; that decision has been appealed.

And while the pro-Scharf Super PAC is accusing Bailey of being soft on crime, he's attempted to block prisoners from being let out of jail after they were found innocent and exonerated, and judges ordered their release.

"You will not find someone harder on crime than me," Scharf told The New York Times. "That having been said, actual innocence claims should be taken very seriously.">

<Former President Donald Trump may have an albatross around his neck preventing him from reaching a core bloc of voters in the form of his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

In a recent interview with Fox News, journalist Jessica Reed Kraus — who runs the popular House Inhabit Substack newsletter — said that the Ohio senator's years-long history of making derogatory remarks about women and childless Americans could come back to haunt both him and former President Donald Trump when it comes to courting undecided women voters. Kraus added that while it's not too late for Vance to reclaim the narrative, he has nonetheless caused significant damage to the campaign's efforts to broaden its appeal.

"JD's phrasing is extremely off-putting to undecided women voters," she said. "He needs to fix his delivery to relay the messaging, or the Trump-Vance brand is doomed."

Another expert told the network that Vance's past remarks — like insisting that "childless cat ladies" are pushing a progressive agenda on Americans — will backfire with women voters. According to Rachel Dean Wilson, who is the managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a former advisor to Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), Vance's rhetoric could be a boon to America's "adversaries" overseas.

"Taking a step back from the campaign tit-for-tat, attempting to divide women along the lines of mothers vs. non-mothers is poisonous to our communities and political discourse," Wilson said. "I would encourage women of all political stripes to resist the tribalism these attack lines encourage on both sides. While this is an undoubtedly domestic conversation, I always like to remind people that deep domestic division and polarization benefits our adversaries abroad and weakens the United States on the world stage."

Vance has spent his first two weeks on the Republican ticket doing damage control amid the ongoing fallout over his past statements. His wife, Usha, described the Hillbilly Elegy author's "childless cat ladies" remark as a "quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive."

"I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase," she said.

The Ohio senator has made numerous comments denigrating childless women. In one 2022 interview with an Australian podcaster, Vance suggested that billionaire Democratic donor George Soros would eventually pay for 747 jets to fly predominantly Black women to California to obtain abortions in the event Roe v. Wade was overturned (which the Supreme Court did in June of that year).

Vance's rhetoric isn't just damaging to women, independents or Democratic-leaning voters. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy — who backed Trump in 2015, interviewed him at the White House in 2020 and endorsed his 2024 campaign — called the 2024 GOP vice presidential nominee's past proposal to tax childless Americans at a higher rate "f—ing idiotic."

"You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people's kids? We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron," Portnoy tweeted in July. "If you can't afford a big family don't have a ton of kids.">

<Donald Trump was often accused of putting political pressure on the US Federal Reserve during his time as president and there are many who expect he’ll go further if he wins November’s election.

Towards the end of his administration, as the Covid pandemic shook the global economy, Trump frequently made it clear he was “not happy with the Fed” because it was “following” when “we should be leading”. He also dropped dark hints about his power to fire Jerome Powell, the boss of the supposedly independent central bank.

Democrats will never say it out loud, and Mr Powell’s job is safe, but many must be harbouring similarly dark thoughts about the Fed chief round about now. Markets around the world are being rocked by the kind of brutal sell-off usually reserved for a financial crisis amid fears the Fed has once again been caught napping.

Japanese stocks suffered their worst day since 1987 on Monday with shares plummeting by 12pc. European shares followed suit, falling to six-month lows, while Britain’s FTSE 100 suffered its worst drop in more than a year.

The trigger was weak jobs data on Friday, which suggested the US is heading for a recession. It follows the Fed’s decision to sit tight on its hands even though most of its counterparts around the world are busy cutting interest rates. The US added fewer jobs than expected. But, more worryingly, the unemployment rate rose to a three-year high of 4.3pc.

Labour market data are critical to assessing recession risks. As Neil Shearing, the chief economist at Capital Economics, says: “Weaker demand leads to less hiring and more firing, which feeds back into weaker demand, creating a vicious cycle that is only broken with policy support.”

At the moment that policy support is conspicuous by its absence. Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, tweeted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the Fed was too slow to raise interest rates when inflation started to take hold following the pandemic and is now being too slow to lower them as the economy stutters.

The central bank appears to have backed itself into a corner with no good choices. Sit tight and it will compound the impression it’s dawdling; move and it will be admitting to an error. It’s hard at this point to know which might spook the markets more. The fact that there was some chatter on Monday about an emergency rate, the worst of all worlds, highlights quite how strung-out some nerves have become.

It’s hard to see how any of this bodes well for Kamala Harris. There’s still a debate to be had about the merits of Bidenomics, but it’s clear that many Americans blame the president for the high cost of living. The last thing Ms Harris needs ahead of November is the rising threat of a recession and every major index in the US flashing red.

For the time being, the vice-president has momentum. But the race for the White House is still incredibly tight. If things don’t settle down, she’s going to find it incredibly difficult to distance herself from the economic inheritance of the man whose endorsement sealed her place at the top of the ticket....>

<....As always with the markets, there are lots of moving parts so it’s hard to parse definitive conclusions in real time. There are at least two reasons to suppose that the broader economic outlook is nowhere near as dire as the bloodcurdling falls would suggest.

The first is related to those particularly shocking movements in Japan. In a bid to prop up the yen, the Bank of Japan has started hiking interest rates. This has undermined the hugely popular carry trade, where investors borrow in the low-interest Japanese currency to make bets in higher-yielding currencies, especially the dollar.

With the yen now strengthening, the cost of maintaining these trades is becoming prohibitive. This has resulted in lots of investors selling off their holdings in US equities in order to repay yen-denominated debts.

That sell-off has been exacerbated by the fact that an enormous portion of recent gains has been concentrated in such a small handful of AI-focussed stocks. The total market capitalisation of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” rose from $12.3 trillion (£9.6 trillion) at the turn of the year to $16 trillion at the end of June.

This vast concentration of gains in so few stocks has made the stock market — both on the way up and now on the way down — an even worse gauge than normal of the real economy. Certainly, there’s plenty of real-time economic indicators that suggest the US remains in reasonable fettle.

Economists at Goldman Sachs raised their odds on a US downturn within the next year from 15pc to 25pc following the weak jobs data. In other words, the risk of a hard landing has increased, but there is still only a one-in-four chance of the US tumbling into a recession.

But what are the chances of Trump paying the slightest heed to any of these nuances? After all, the US wouldn’t actually need to be in a recession for him to make the argument that the outlook is worsening.

Brave is the person prepared to make a call on November’s election. In the past month alone we’ve had Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the assassination attempt on Trump, and the Democrats changing horses mid race.

There has been a big reversal in sentiment in the past couple of weeks with Ms Harris overtaking Trump in the polls as voters breathed a sigh of relief that November won’t be the planned battle between a late septo- and early octogenarian.

But the Fed’s tardiness could now very easily flip sentiment back the other way. Buckle up, because there’s even more resting on this market correction than usual.>

<Georgia’s state board of elections adopted new rules for local election boards that permit them to withhold the certification of a vote in the face of unspecified discrepancies – a Republican-led move that could cause uncertainty and confusion after future election days.

The five-person board passed the measure in a 3-2 vote. The three board members who voted for it – Dr Janice Johnson, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King – were praised by name three days ago by Donald Trump at an Atlanta campaign rally.

The rule was proposed by Michael Heekin, a Republican-appointee to the Fulton election board who refused to certify the presidential primary earlier this year. The rule requires local boards to initiate a “reasonable inquiry” when discrepancies emerge at a poll, and gives the power to withhold certification until that inquiry was completed. It does not define the term reasonable inquiry, nor does it establish strict limitations on the breadth of an inquiry.

The new rule essentially makes the certification of election results discretionary, said Democratic state representative Sam Park at a press conference outside of the hearing room at the Georgia capitol.

“These are Maga certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law, which states in multiple places that local elections board officials shall perform their duties, meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary,” Park said.

Debate on the rule centered on how much power state law and court precedent grants to the state board of elections to set rules for local boards. Georgia supreme court case law describes the role of elections supervisors as ministerial with little discretion to declare a vote valid or invalid, said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington DC.

“It is contrary to settled Georgia law and would exceed this court’s rule making authority,” Sus said. The law requires disputes about a vote to be resolved with investigations by district attorneys, courts and other bodies, he said.

Board members in support of the rule say that local elections supervisors are required to sign an affidavit declaring that the results of an election are accurate and correct, and that rules should permit elections boards the power to determine the truth of that statement for themselves.

The rule is likely to draw an immediate legal challenge so close to an election.

“By supporting this rule, we are saying that 90 days before the election is not insufficient time,” said Democratic board member Sara Tindall Ghazal.

“I think by supporting this rule, what we’re saying is that we stand with those who have to sign legal documents stating that this information is accurate, and ensuring that they have what’s necessary to stand by that legal document,” replied King, a Republican board member.>

<At the recent Bitcoin 2024 conference, former President Donald Trump made headlines with his promises to "make Bitcoin great again" by ensuring the federal government HODLs bitcoin and fires Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on day one. The crowd lapped it up. The reality, though, is that politicians often make sweeping promises to secure campaign contributions and votes—but, when it comes to firing Gensler on day one, that's a promise that Trump cannot keep.

Here's why. While many in the blockchain world would find it deeply satisfying to see the crypto-hating Gensler tossed from his office on Trump's first day in office, there are a series of obstacles that make that impossible.

For starters, the SEC is an independent federal agency, and its commissioners, including the Chair, enjoy certain protections from arbitrary removal to maintain the agency's independence from political influence. Therefore, the President does not have the authority to remove the SEC Chair without cause. This protection ensures that the regulatory actions and decisions of the SEC are based on law and policy considerations rather than political pressures.

If you want to get into the legal weeds, there are both acts of Congress and legal rulings setting all this out—notably the landmark 1935 Supreme Court case Humphrey's Executor v. United States that limit the President's ability to remove commissioners of independent agencies without cause.

There are also political considerations. While the President appoints the SEC Chair with the advice and consent of the Senate, removal typically does not require Senate approval. Nonetheless, Congress would likely regard any move by Trump to abruptly throw Gensler out on his ear as a dangerous precedent and push back strongly.

This doesn't mean, of course, that there is no way for the President to remove an agency head like Gensler if there are legitimate reasons to do so. The catch is that there is a specific process for firing an official "for cause"—and that process entails more than Trump, as he did during the time of his reality TV show The Apprentice, simply bellowing "you're fired!"

First, the President must justify the decision to remove an agency official on the basis of something like inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. If Trump can point to such behavior, this would be the first step in giving Gensler the boot—otherwise, the SEC Chair could ask a federal judge to reinstate him under the process known as judicial review.

That said, there is no shortage of people making the case that Gensler is not doing his job and that there are legitimate grounds to fire him. These include not only notable crypto industry figures but senior politicians. Senator Warren Davidson (R-OH), for instance, has repeatedly called for Gensler to resign in part due to the SEC's legal struggles, such as its big setback in the Ripple case, as well as the decision by a federal judge in Utah to sanction the agency's lawyers for lying to the court in a crypto case.

If such behavior does meet the standards to remove Gensler "for cause," then Trump could indeed go about seeking to remove him on his first day. But the process for removal is not something that can happen in a single day. Here is the sequence of steps set out by law, and how a push to remove Gensler would play out:

Initial Intent and Announcement (1 Day): The President announces the intention to remove Gary Gensler.

Establishing Cause (1-3 Months): An investigation is conducted to gather evidence of inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.

Providing Notice and Opportunity to Respond (2-3 Weeks): Formal notice is given to Gensler, who is then provided with a period to respond.

Review and Decision (1-2 Months): An internal review and potentially a hearing are conducted, leading to a decision on the removal.

Legal Challenges and Judicial Review (6-18 Months): If contested, the case goes through the judicial system, potentially reaching higher courts.

Administrative Transition (Immediate to 1 Month): An interim Chair is appointed, and the transition is managed.

Bottom line? The removal process could outlast a commissioner's five-year term.

<It was just a few days after President Joe Biden ended his re-election bid when former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan did something unusual: He became the first Republican to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 candidacy. This did not go unnoticed by the state GOP.

On the contrary, the Georgia Republican Party responded to the news by launching an effort to expel Duncan from the party and ban him from ever again running as a GOP candidate. State party Chairman Josh McKoon added that Duncan will be “treated as a trespasser” if he seeks to attend any Georgia GOP event.

Donald Trump — the one Sen. JD Vance said is not a “vengeful guy” — celebrated the Georgia Republican Party’s moves against Duncan, adding in an online message, “We have to purge the Party of people that go against our Candidates, and make it harder for a popular Republican President to beat the Radical Left Lunatics. Geoff Duncan is a loser who is disintegrating on his own. Congratulations to Josh McKoon for purging our Party of Misfits and people that don’t want to see us succeed!” As it turns out, Duncan isn’t the only Republican that the former president is eager to “purge” from the party. Politico reported on one of today’s most notable congressional primaries:

Donald Trump and his allies have already purged eight of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The former president could add a ninth to the list on Tuesday. Rep. Dan Newhouse narrowly survived Trump’s attempt to take him out two years ago but faces perhaps a stiffer challenge this year.

Though Trump usually endorses his favorite candidate in a given race, in this instance, the former president endorsed both of Newhouse’s intraparty challengers: failed Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley and Jerrod Sessler, a former racecar driver. (Technically, he endorsed Sessler four months ago, then told his followers a few days ago that he supports Smiley, too.)

To be sure, Trump issues plenty of endorsements on a nearly daily basis, but this one stands out because of the motivation behind his campaign against the Washington incumbent.

Revisiting our earlier coverage, when Trump was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, it resulted in the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history. Against a backdrop in which Republicans seemed eager to move on from their failed, defeated president, 10 GOP House members voted with the Democratic majority in favor of the impeachment resolution, and they had every reason to believe they’d be vindicated by history.

History, however, doesn’t elect members of Congress. Voters do.

As the defeated, scandal-plagued, failed former president reclaimed control over the party, and party leaders such as former Speaker Kevin McCarthy scurried to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee, members of the Impeachment 10 came to realize that it didn’t matter that they were right. What mattered was that much of their radicalized political party wouldn’t tolerate their heresy, which would overshadow other parts of their careers in public service.

Some saw the direction in the prevailing winds and decided to avoid the indignity of defeat. It’s why four members of the contingent — Ohio’s Anthony Gonzalez, New York’s John Katko, Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger, and Michigan’s Fred Upton — announced their retirements before the 2022 primary season even began in earnest.

Four more thought they could maintain the trust of the voters who’d elected them in the first place:

In South Carolina, Rep. Tom Rice was crushed in a primary, losing by more than 26 points to a Republican primary rival who insisted that the 2020 election was “rigged.” (It was not rigged.)

In Michigan, Rep. Peter Meijer suffered a relatively narrow loss in a GOP primary to John Gibbs, perhaps best known for his “inflammatory, conspiratorial tweets.”

In the state of Washington, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler lost her primary race to Joe Kent, who, according to an Associated Press report, has “connections to right-wing extremists, including a campaign consultant who was a member of the Proud Boys.”

In Wyoming, Rep. Liz Cheney suffered a lopsided defeat to a Trump-backed lawyer who embraced the Big Lie.

It’s worth emphasizing for context that two of these four — Gibbs and Kent — ended up losing in the 2022 general elections, allowing Democrats to flip the seats from “red” to “blue.”

As for the other two members of the Impeachment 10, California’s David Valadao narrowly won his re-election bid in 2022, while Washington’s Dan Newhouse cruised to a landslide victory two years ago.

<The Republican Party’s media allies are yet again struggling to coalesce around a single attack on the Democratic ticket.

In the hours since Kamala Harris tapped Tim Walz as her running mate, top figures in right-wing media have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the Minnesota governor as they race to define him, seeking to tarnish the Midwesterner’s image with only 90 days to go before Election Day.

On Tuesday, Walz was portrayed in harsh light as a left-wing “radical” who is supposedly out of touch with everyday Americans; he was criticized as a governor who allowed Black Lives Matter protesters to riot, engage in violence, and burn Minnesota’s cities without consequence; and was accused of being “groomed by the Chinese” after he spent his honeymoon in China.

Fox News, naturally, led the charge, with the right-wing network devoting segment after segment to assailing Walz and his character.

Sean Hannity opened his program arguing that Harris’s choice of Walz — who he called the “most far-left governor in the United States” — revealed she was the most extreme Democratic presidential candidate in history. Hannity not only disparaged Walz with a wide range of negative descriptors, but he also criticized his personal demeanor, claiming he is “pretty weird.”

Meanwhile, other MAGA Media figures, without an ounce of self-reflection or evidence, tried to shame the Democratic ticket by claiming that Walz was selected over Josh Shapiro simply because the Pennsylvania governor is Jewish.

“He was denied this because he is a Jew,” Jeanine Pirro declared on Fox, citing his position on the war in Gaza. “And the problem right now is they are pleasing the Hamas end of the Democrat [sic] party.”

Never mind that it was Donald Trump who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the Adolf Hitler-loving rapper Kanye West, among other moments in which he has embraced White nationalism over the years.

The wide array of attacks on Walz highlighted the GOP’s ongoing difficulty in settling on a single, effective line of attack against the Harris campaign. Since she assumed the top spot on the Democratic ticket in July, right-wing media has been noticeably struggling to present a cohesive narrative against her. Instead, they have resorted to a range of disparaging remarks, branding Harris as a “DEI” candidate and mocking her laughter, among other offensive criticisms.

It remains to be seen whether the Trump campaign will eventually establish a clear and consistent strategy for defining Harris and Walz. While Trump previously fixated on President Joe Biden’s age and stamina, he has struggled to craft a compelling narrative against his new Democratic rival.

And if the disjointed coverage from right-wing media on Tuesday indicates anything, it suggests that Trump and his allies are facing a formidable challenge in rallying around a unified strategy as the clock ticks toward Election Day.>

<The Tone Police are back on a rampage. During his introductory speech on Tuesday, vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz threw out a wisecrack about his Republican counterpart, Senator J. Divan Vance, referring to a persistent Internet meme about JDV’s purported attraction to living-room furnishings. This immediately prompted the March of Pecksniffery, much of it from our newly arrived Republican allies, who have not yet realized that “all hands on deck” does not mean “all hands to the bridge.” Many of y’all are needed to scrape the rust and swab the decks. These are highly necessary tasks for the good operation of the enterprise. They are also conducive to contemplating how much you contributed down through the decades to the coarsening of the political climate that has driven them all to the fainting couches in the MSNBC greenrooms since 2016.

Tell your stories walking, gang. Tell them to Max Cleland, whom Karl Rove smeared. Tell them to Michael Dukakis, whom Lee Atwater smeared. Tell them to John Kerry, who had his military service slandered by people wearing Purple Heart Band-Aids. Tell them to Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were accused of multiple murders. Tell them to the family of Vince Foster, whose corpse was used as a bludgeon. Tell them to all the Democrats who were subjected to Newt Gingrich’s Dictionary of Slander. Tell them to all the victims of Roger Stone, whose career as a professional ratf***er did not begin with the arrival of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. Tell them to the memories of George McGovern, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh, good men all, slandered out of office by Terry Dolan in the NCPAC campaigns of the late 1970s. Tell them to the Black voters of Neshoba County, Mississippi, where St. Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign with a speech about the importance of “states rights.” Tell them to the families of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodwin, and James Chaney. Tell them to Jimmy Carter.

Do all that or f*** right off. Your choice.

Take, for example, Frank Church, who was once a senator from Idaho. It was Church who led the investigation into the half centuries [sic] of crimes, foreign and domestic, committed by the CIA. Through Church’s work, we learned about MKULTRA, the secret program to dose citizens with LSD just to see what would happen. Through Church’s work, we learned about COINTELPRO, the vast domestic spying operation so beloved by J. Edgar Hoover. Through Church’s work, we learned about Operation Mockingbird, the subornation of American journalists. For all of these contributions to government transparency, Church got a big old target painted on his back by the NCPAC hyenas. Their weapon of choice was a walking virus named Steve Symms.

In 1980, Symms, who was once honored by the John Birch Society as its favorite congresscritter, ran one of the most rancid campaigns in the history of American politics. He accused Church of accepting bribes to vote for returning control of the Canal Zone to Panama. He pilloried Church on abortion. (Church was personally opposed to it but adhered to the formulation drawn up in Roe v. Wade.) NCPAC poured a quarter of a million dollars into an eleventh-hour blitz. And, of course, on the dark night of the 1980 election, Steve Symms won by fewer than five thousand votes. Tell me again how elbows-out political rhetoric doesn’t work.

(Postscript: According to a memoir by Frank Church’s son, Forrester, when Church was dying of cancer at Sloan Kettering, Steve Symms called him on the phone the night before Church went into surgery to tell him that he was having a great time being a senator. What a guy.)

So, in sum, let us not interfere with the return of so many chickens to their proper roosts on the sofas of this campaign. And let our Republican allies take a large dose of their historical medicine. They will not die. It’s not poison.>

<Gov. Laura Kelly and her allies have unseated a fellow Democrat who consistently voted against her in the Kansas Legislature, while GOP voters ousted a lawmaker many Republicans blamed for Kelly's narrow reelection two years ago.

Democratic state Rep. Marvin Robinson, of Kansas City, and Republican state Sen. Dennis Pyle, of Hiawatha, lost in Tuesday's primary as their parties picked nominees for congressional and legislative seats and scores of offices in the state's 105 counties.

“I don’t take pleasure in ending somebody’s political career,” Kelly told reporters Wednesday. “I do take pleasure in the thought of a Legislature that will work together and work with me.”

Democrats simplify their goal in legislative races Robinson's loss could make it easier for Democrats to break the Republicans' supermajorities. There's no GOP candidate in Robinson's district, and had he won, Democrats would have had to pick up an extra House seat to offset his possible votes against Kelly.

His break with Kelly and his party's lawmakers became crucial to GOP efforts to enact new abortion restrictions and roll back LGBTQ+ rights over Kelly's vetoes. Republicans and GOP-aligned groups backed Robinson's reelection effort — one GOP-leaning PAC even produced a mailer favorably linking Robinson to former President Barack Obama to boost his primary chances, the Sunflower State Journal reported.

Many Democrats worried that Robinson's three primary challengers would split the vote enough for Robinson to win. Kelly's Middle of the Road PAC endorsed Wanda Brownlee Paige, a Kansas City, Kansas, school board member, and she won easily.

Neither Paige nor Robinson responded immediately Wednesday to text or phone messages seeking comment.

The governor's PAC endorsed three other candidates who won their contested Democratic legislative primaries: veteran state Sens. Marci Francisco, of Lawrence, and David Haley, of Kansas City, and Patrick Schmidt, a former Navy intelligence officer running in Topeka for an open Senate seat.

Schmidt's main opponent was House Minority Leader Vic Miller, who differed this year with Kelly on tax cuts and backed measures she vetoed. Schmidt raised more than $176,000, four times as much as Miller.

Kelly's break with Miller was telegraphed in May, when Kelly's chief of staff and the chief of staff for the Senate's Democratic leader met with Schmidt at a local chili parlor. They were observed leaving by an Associated Press correspondent and a Topeka Capital-Journal reporter having lunch there....>

<....Pyle angered Republican leaders in 2022 when he temporarily left the party to run for governor as an independent against Kelly and the GOP nominee, then-Attorney General Derek Schmidt.

Pyle's official total of about 20,000 votes was about 1,800 shy of the margin between Kelly and her Republican foe, but GOP leaders said Pyle changed the cast of the race. He said Republicans fielded a weak nominee.

Pyle already had lost committee assignments in the Senate in a clash with President Ty Masterson over redistricting in 2022, and he later found himself reassigned a tiny office in the Statehouse basement. He returned to the GOP but faced two primary opponents, state Rep. John Eplee, of Atchison, and Craig Bowser, a state information security officer with a farm in Holton. Bowser won, and there is no Democratic candidate for the seat.

Pyle declined to comment. Bowser said he thinks voters were ready for fresh ideas.

“We worked extremely hard and had meaningful conversations with voters about taxes, the border crisis, and healthcare in Kansas,” he said in an email.

Former U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, this year's Democratic nominee in the 2nd Congressional District of eastern Kansas, on Wednesday attributed her narrow victory to voters' desire for “an independent and moderate woman.” She was the last Democrat to hold the seat, in 2007 and 2008.

Boyda positioned herself to the political center, riling some party activists.

“That’s the only chance that we have, against a very viable opponent,” she said in an interview. The GOP nominee is Derek Schmidt, the former Kansas attorney general.

But Boyda praised her primary opponent, Matt Kleinmann, a community health advocate who was a member of the 2008 national champion University of Kansas men's basketball team. Boyda said Kleinmann's challenge helped her get her message out, and there wouldn't have been any candidate forums without it.

“He’s a very good candidate, and I really hope to see his name on some ballot soon,” Boyda said.

Kleinmann pledged his support for Boyda in a statement.

"Our work does not end here," he said. “We must continue to fight for affordable housing, better healthcare, and a fair economy that works for everyone.”

Kelly became chair of the Democratic Governors Association on Wednesday, elevated from vice president when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz stepped down to become Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential race.

As of Wednesday morning, 318,728 ballots had been counted, equal to 16.1% of the state's nearly 2 million registered voters, according to the Kansas secretary of state's office.>

<Four years after the pandemic-era housing boom, the real-estate market continues to face instability.

With ongoing affordability challenges exacerbated by high interest rates and inflated home values, housing is a major concern for Americans across the political spectrum.

In a Tuesday interview with Fox News, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance shared his perspective on the root causes of the nation's high home prices and rents.

"When I talk to Americans, one of the biggest concerns I hear is, 'Why are housing costs so high?' I'll give you two reasons: First, there are 20 million illegal aliens who shouldn't be here and who are competing with Americans for scarce homes," Vance told Fox News host Sean Hannity, adding, "Second, Kamala Harris has supported higher interest rates, which makes mortgages unaffordable for most people."

Property prices and mortgage rates fell after the worst quarter for home affordability since 1985.

Homebuyers are still facing stubbornly high borrowing costs and limited home supply. Here are 32 cities where single-family home prices fell in late 2023, according to a new report.

Home affordability improved slightly in the US late last year, but this housing market is still one of the unfriendliest for buyers in the past four decades.

Modest yet meaningful declines in home prices and mortgage rates gave aspiring homeowners some much-needed relief in the fourth quarter, according to recently released data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

The median price for US single-family homes was about $391,700 in the final quarter of 2023, the NAR announced in a February 8 report. That figure is below the going rate of $406,867 from July through September but was still up 3.5% from the year before.

Another small win for buyers is that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate is down from a peak of 7.8% in late October to 6.6%, which is roughly where it was in late 2022. However, that rate is still well above the 3% to 5% range it was in for the mid-2010s and early 2020s.

Although lower home prices and borrowing costs are welcome news for hopeful buyers, the drops so far certainly aren’t worth doing backflips over.

The third quarter of 2023 was the worst three-month stretch for home affordability in 38 years, according to data from the NAR’s housing affordability index. So while last quarter was a bit better for buyers, it was still the second-worst market since 1985.

A typical monthly mortgage payment on an existing single-family home with 20% down upfront was $2,163, according to the NAR’s fourth-quarter report. That was 1.2% lower than in the third quarter but a 10% increase from late 2022 — a difference of nearly $200 per month.

“Many homebuyers have been shocked at high housing costs, with a typical monthly mortgage payment rising from $1,000 three years ago to more than $2,000 last year,” said Lawrence Yun, the chief economist at the NAR, in a statement released with the report.

Yun continued: “This doubling in housing costs for recent home buyers is not included in the official consumer price index inflation calculations and contributes to the sense of dissatisfaction about the economy.”

Homeowners are spending just over a quarter of their take-home pay on their mortgage, which is in line with the rate from the prior quarter and the previous year. That’s a sizable chunk of income, but it pales in comparison to the 39.4% that first-time buyers are spending.

In nearly half of US markets, families bringing in less than $100,000 couldn’t afford to buy a standard home on a 10% down payment last quarter, according to the NAR.

However, there are a few silver linings in this grim market. Home inventory is expected to rise this year, and interest rates are projected to fall at least a few times, which would bring down mortgage rates. More supply, in particular, would put more downward pressure on home prices.

“Increased homebuilding, along with lower mortgage rates, will not only improve housing affordability but also help bring more homes onto the market in 2024,” Yun said in a statement.

Property value gains were widespread and significant in the fourth quarter. Single-family home prices climbed across all four regions of the country, led by a 7.3% jump in the Northeast. The NAR also noted that prices rose in 86% of the 221 markets it tracks, up from an 82% rate in the third quarter.

In fact, home values were more likely to rise by double digits — as was the case in 34 cities — than fall outright. Only 32 markets had houses that were cheaper in aggregate than in late 2022.>